notes from an undergraduate
ilwe Sfidigan Daily
Seventy-eight years of editorial freedom
Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan
A prescription for pessimism
4v
byv roitlaidiunlai
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich.
News Phone: 764-0552
Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers
or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints.
Wednesday, August 27, 1969
Summer Supplement Editor: Martin Hirschman
A liberal's blueprint
for U' student activism"
MANY SOBER-FACED faculty members
and earnest student radicals proclaim
that it will happen this year. Ann Arbor
has remained quiet for a devastatingly
long period of time and now sits precar-
iously with the only significant university
whose tranquility has not been disrupted
by violent confrontation.
No one quite understands why. SDS
organizers tell their regional bosses that
Ann Arbor is irredeemably calm because
of its select, bourgeois student body. Some
faculty members blame the trimester,
and the heavy workload that goes with it.
A team of Detroit Free Press reporters
investigating why Ann Arbor was "the
quiet campus" concluded that the Uni-
versity's responsive administration, under
the adept leadership of President Robben
Fleming, had kept things cool. But Flem-
ing always insists that a confrontation
might come at any time.
In any event, the street disturbances on
South University Avenue last June shat-
tered the notion that Ann Arbor was the
last university sanctuary around. And the
myth of the university as a sanctuary
from the law dies a welcome death. For
although most argue that laws should be
applied selectively on campus, it has long
been clear that building seizures and
vandalism will bring in the police.
AT THE SAME time, if trouble erupts at
the University this fall, it will be
because the University remains a refuge
of sorts for radicals who seek to begin
remaking society by shaping the campus
into a radical community.
While one must sympathize with their
intentions and the issues they raise, it is
clear that the campus is hardly the arena
for combatting and winning victories
over social injustice.
Although administrators - both Uni-
versity and city-may demonstrate that
they exercise power without conscience
and restraint, campus confrontations in
response to their actions reveal little and
only divert attention from the more
pressing problems of our society. While
campus controversies absorb the energies
of students, faculty members and admin-
istrators, the Vietnam War, racism and
poverty go unattended.
It is no news that the worst features of
our society manifest themselves at the
University and should be eradicated here
as elsewhere. But the protest of really
significant issues does not demand build-
ing seizures and violent confrontation.
INDEED, ONE of the most impressive
and admirable student demonstrations
last year was the non-violent sit-in in
the Washtenaw County Bldg. resulting
in over 200 trespass arrests, but also in a
badly needed increase in allocations to
the area's welfare mothers.
Meanwhile, violent confrontations were
urged by some to kick the Reserve Officer
Training Corps off campus, to alter ad-
missions policies and to abolish course
requirements -- issues which merit con-
sideration and action, but hardly warrant
the use of violence.
There can be, it seems,.only two pos-
sible explanations for the unrestricted
politics of confrontation preached now by
certain disciples of social change. One,
deplorable, but more easily correctable, is
that violence is provoked by a dissident
minority which is totally ignorant of the
political realities of effecting social
change. The other, more sinister explana-
tion is that violence is being used as an
end in itself because it is felt to be the
only way to salvage the nation from the
depths into which it has fallen. Violence
in this sense is merely a tactic in a total
war against society.
Indeed, it is an effective tactic. Vio-
lence, non-ideological by nature, cannot
be compromised. It allows police to ex-
ercise their perogatives unchecked, leaves
administrators languishing, and lures
liberals into the radical movement. Tle
power of this type of radical action is
simple: violence polarizes and fragments
a social system into irreconcilable camps.
VIOLENCE CREATES a dilemma for the
liberal, Civil libertarians committed to
working with dissident minorities through
the system are left without recourse to
their traditional tactics of compromise
and discussion by the introduction of vio-
lence. They are left without allies and are
unsure of which side to support.
It is unfortunate, indeed, that well-in-
tentioned administrators suffer most
from campus unrest because liberals fail
to rally to their aid. During last June's
disturbances on South University, for ex-
ample, liberal Democratic Mayor Robert
Harris was attacked by both right wing-
ers opposing his plea for police modera-
tion, and by a coalition of student liberals
and radicals protesting his use of the
police force.
MANY LIBERALS failed to recognize
that the mayor is an ally struggling
to check the unrestrained violence of
Washtenaw County Sheriff Douglas Har-
vey while, at the same time, trying to
assuage critics from the right and left.
This is not to suggest that Harris
should be exonerated of all blame for the
police and mob violence, but rather that
advocates of social change should learn
to recognize their allies and be willing to
support them in crisis.
With regard to the mayor's failure to
stymie the local sheriff, it must be noted
that radicals and revolutionaries took no
interest in the election last year of the
County Board of Supervisors which has
the power at least to pressure the sheriff
from acting as he does.
Indeed the disinterest of radicals and
liberals in political action is their most
disturbing fault. For the rhetoric that
revolution is imminent because of uni-
versal dissatisfaction is pure myth. "I
don't mean to tell you you never had it
so good, but that's true, isn't it," Lyndon
Johnson once proclaimed-and we must
squirm and admit he is right.
rTHE NATION is shifting right, not left,
and the revolution will come only to
enforce law and order. The mayoral cam-
paigns of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New
York and now Detroit only attest to this
phenomenon.
The notable and immediate exception
has been Ann Arbor, where Democrats
swept the city elections this spring, oust-
ing the Republicans who had ruled for 27
years. Liberals have won the city by a
slim margin and now have the respon-
sibility for coping with racial injustice,
police brutality, pollution and the prob-
lems of education.
The aim of those truly interested in
social change should be to seek the ear
of this city administration and try to
exert influence where the real power lies.
The motive should be to create a better
life for more people and to preserve the
peace, not provoke violence.
The student movement on this present-
ly quiet campus should, then, fit into this
scheme. The rent strike, led by a con-
scientious and dedicated group of stu-
dents, has had remarkable success in
involving students in a worthwhile effort
to drive rents down.
And commendably, the Tenants Union
does not intend to stop by organizing the
campus, but seeks to work to improve
housing all over the city, particularly in
the largely black North Central area.
Student Government Council should
continue its work in the areas of con-
sumer protection and academic reform.
Now largely stale and irrelevant, Univer-
sity academic life must, be enriched, not
to radicalize students, but to politicize
UNIVERSITIES ARE a nice target for
protest. They are pliable, they don't
hit back, and they are convenient for stu-
dents because they're so close.
But those obviously aren't good reasons
for protesting against universities, and
many of the reasons usually given simply
don't hold water.
On the other hand, American universities
are ugly institutions and they do need a
good deal of change. Their structure is
feudal, their independence from the com-
munity is illusory and their good intentions
are deceptive.
But from a wide angle, from the per-
spective of the entire country, the fight
now going on at universities is largely fu-
tile. And where it is not futile, it is woefully
misdirected.
The University, for example, went
through all kinds of contortions last year
in a fight over academic requirements. Stu-
dents petitioned and marched and sat-in.
The faculty got annoyed and finally made
some minor changes. They also approved a
new bachelor of general studies degree that
satisfied almost no one.
BUT WHAT THE FIGHT didn't achieve
was better education, which should have
been its goal. Few students will be more or
less educated because the new degree is
offered. They will just be educated a little
differently.
There is also a fight developing over con-
trol of tenure. Students are seeking to crack
the feudal structure that allows amazing
institutional and bureaucratic irrational-
ity in determining who shall teach here
permanently.
But students really don't offer much as
an alternative to the faculty in choosing
professors. Their standards do not promise
to be any more rational or intelligent, only
more democratic, if that's worth anything
in a decision of this nature.
The reasons such internal changes would
be futile is simple. Education and schools-
are the product of the society that sup-
ports them. This society demands produc-
tion, output, so universities-students, f a-
culties and administrations-for the most
part, produce.
THERE IS NOT, in education today, any
deep and pervasive desire for knowledge.
Instead, there is a strong desire for the
tools of success, for certification of compe-
tence in the form of grades and degrees
rather than the substance of competence.
In such surroundings, the minorities
that seek improvement are doomed to fail.
They cannot find relief in the stale insti-
tutions they seek to change, but only in
themselves.
One good indicator is the problem of
structuring academic classes and the solu-
tions which have been proposed. Students
have disliked lectures for some time now.
They are often dull, impersonal, usually
demeaning and hardly ever educational.
The obvious alternative is seminars.
There students could spar intellectually
with their instructors, and the needed give
and take of education could go on. So the
theory goes.
But a history professor here, one who'
cares very much about students, warns
that this is a myth. Before coming here, he
taught at Yale, where seminars of eight to
a dozen students were the rule, not the ex-
ception.
AND THE EDUCATIONAL setting in
New Haven, he reports, is just as stulti-
fying as in Ann Arbor. Almost every course
ends up like a lecture. Students have noth-
ing to say or don't feel like talking. The
instructors take over and Yale ends where
we are-no place.
The underlying problem lies in the per-
sonality, as opposed to impersonality, of
education. Education depends on the de-
sire of the student to be educated as well
as the desire of the instructor to teach.
With either factor larking, there is no hope
and there is no education.
Coercion in various forms works and can
replace desire. The draft keeps students in
school, grades make students study for
tests, and diplomas verify the four-year
internship. All tend to force education
along in small steps. What results is neith-
er inspired nor deeply felt, but it manages
to suffice.
STUDENTS ARE hampered by coming
from American high schools, the day care
centers for the middle class. Harassed,
browbeaten and generally discouraged, stu-
dents coining from high school who really
care about learning are indeed unique.
The problem is compounded by the po-
sition of college in a student's life. It is
the hiatus between high school and work,
sometimes only a place to stop over and
sometimes a way station to higher income
and top jobs.
But undergraduates, especially under-
classmen, really have no reason for attend-
ing college. If the coercion doesn't get to
them, the goals don't inspire them, or edu-
cation at the University is not really related
to those goals, what can a student do?
He has no place to go, so he stays. And
both heand the school suffer for it,
There is a solution for the uninspired
students, and that is inspiring teachers.
But there aren't many.
Good teaching is as rare as good politics.
And where there's a shortage in either-
and there always is-the solution is the
same: hacks, educational or political.
THE SITUATION at universities is abet-
ted by the academic structure. The only
iron standard for academic appointments
is professional competence. A professor
makes it not because he can teach, but be-
cause he knows his field.
Good academic work obviously should be,
a factor, but it may. also be a factor to
the detriment of good teaching. Incompe-
tence in teaching is acceptable and accept-
ed. Students lose,
The dichotomy between teaching and re-
search, the practice of a professional scho-
lar, lies in the nature of all universities. It
defines the function of universities-to
create and transmit knowledge. That was
acceptable when universities were purely
academic institutions, when future acade-
micians were the primary product of -uni-
versities.
But this is very much not the case to-
day. Everyone goes to college now, and
academicians are only a very small part of
the product of universities. But while the
functions of universities have changed,
the practices have not followed and are
not likely to.
The result is dislocation. The clash be-
tween goals and purposes of students and
those of their universities is great, and it
is behind much of the violence on campus-
es today, whatever reason is given.
THE PROBLEM is made worse by an un-
inspiring society like ours, which fails to
provide larger, long-range goals for stu-
dents. Fifty-four per cent of last year's
graduating class had not yet been able to
choose a profession. That is an astounding
statistic. It is the best measure of the
failure of society, the failure to assimilate
the young. It is punishment for a society
that deserves it.
But that doesn't help us, the students, at
all. We are not cared about, not in a help-
ful way, and so we must fend for ourselves.
This is not to ignore the really under-
privileged in our inequitably wealthy so-
ciety-the blacks, Mexican-Americans and
Indians. Rather, it is to note a sign for
the troubles of the future.
If and when the problems of inequity
are solved, and if this society continues
to be unable to supply anything more than
material satisfaction for its youth, we will
be the ultimate losers in an affluent so-
ciety.
The Graduate.
/ .,
d J
.
7 "r xx .J({
i r^ 'f
sieve anizalonie
Radicalism and "U'
iniquiet desperation
WHEN I RETURNED to Ann Arbor last fall, there was something in
the air that smelled of radicalism. A noticeable tension after a year
of frustration led me to believe that students here would swing over
to confrontation politics.
Everything pointed to agitation at the University. There was the
siege at Columbia in the spring, the Kennedy and King assassinations,
the police riot in Chicago, and two political conventions that turned
deaf ears to the cries for change by nominating losers. It had been it
very frustrating year.
Almost immediately, my prophecy was borne out, Two hundred of
the over 1500 students taking part in the welfare mothers demonstra-
tion at the County Building were willing to be arrested in defiance of
county officials. It looked like the passivity of the teach-in ethos that
had been spawned in Ann Arbor was dying under the weight of a blos-
soming radicalism.
By election time, Ann Arbor had settled down to sylvan tranquil-
ity. An SDS election strike attracted very few people into the streets to
protest the election. Violence flared up elsewhere but Ann Arbor was
quiet. That was the pattern for the rest of the year: Violence across the
country, peace in Ann Arbor usually concerning the same issues. And
it is funny, nobody is quite sure why.
AN OBVIOUS REASON for the inactivity in Ann Arbor was the
breakdown of leadership in the radical ranks. After the Eric Chester-
Bruce Levine forces left the Voice-SDS organization to regroup as the
Radical Caucus, SDS began to die on campus. The Ann Arbor SDS
chapter was not able to remain a significant student force on campus.
SDS lost its two most important leaders Bill Ayers and Jim Mellen, who
became regional SDS travelers and spent little time in Ann Arbor.
Leaderless, SDS was plunged into inactivity, only able to muster small
turnouts to harass military recruiters on campus.
The scene on other campuses was highlighted by the leadership of
cadres of militant black students-noticeably absent at the University.
The Black Student Union on campus showed themselves averse to mili-
tant action last year and found that they could be successful in pur-
suing their goals by working peacefully with the administration. No
coalition of white and black radicals was forged on this campus last
year-a telling point in keeping the campus quiet.
The radical leadership at the University has fallen to the Radical
Caucus, which built itself up last year around the issue of the literary
college foreign language and distribution requirements. Last spring,
Radical Caucus chairman Marty McLaughlin and member Marc Van
Der Hout captured the Student Government Council presidency and
vice presidency, respectively, Caucus member Shelly Kroll also won a
Council seat on the victorious Caucus slate.
THE PEACE-KEEPING forces of the administration have also
found an unexpected ally in the trimester schedule. Short semesters
make it difficult for power movements to gain thrust. The abortive
Student Power Movement of 1966 ended quickly as final exams ap-
proached in December. Also, most campus violence in the country has
come during the months of May and June when this University is deci-
u- mated for its summer session.
of The trimester has been an effective cooling device for the Admin-
ns istration. But as conditions on campuses become more volatile, con-
frontations can erupt and be carried on with very little momentum.
d The effects of the trimester may become irrelevant this year.
to And in any analysis of the campus calm, the role of President
Pt Robben Fleming must not be underestimated. Fleming has shown him-
rk self to be a shrewd damper of campus ferment. He has been able to
k convince most students that the door to his office is indeed open and
i coming in to see him is the way to solve problems.
c- The administration and the faculty have shown themselves to be
n- responsive to student demands without force. An end to such things as
t- women's hours and driving regulations was adopted with comparatively
- little student pressure. Similarly, a literary college Afro-American con-
rs centration program was adopted without student agitation. Last year,
it 'was clear to students that ROTC would be handled by the faculty
1- without any student pressure. Now, the faculty seems to be dragging
he its feet on ROTC, and a real issue could develop
as
Filling a vacuum-
Afro-American Center
ct Editor
MIARCIA ARMO
PIIP BLOCK'K
'TEvE ANZAO
OHN GPA YI
ANDY SACKS
ANIE PPINCOT
MARY RADTKE
GRIX. Edito (r
RON LANOSMAN
Managing Editor
As-ocite Managing Editor
A ocit te Manr ;ging Editor
Editorial Page Editor
U itorial Page Editor
SArts Editor
Literary Editor
Photo Editor
Contributing Editor
..Contributing Editor
(EDITOR'S NOTE: The author is
president of the Black Student
Union at the University.)
By RONALD HARRIS
Daily Guest Writer
r'HERE IS A vacuum in Ameri-
can society, the lack of aware-
ness of the Black presence, which
has existed since the arrival of
Black folk in America. This vacu-
um must be filled and the racially
oriented problems it has created
must be expunged.
It is the purpose of Afro-Ameri-
can study centers to provide a
means of filling this vacuum and
solving the racially oriented prob-
lems it has created through edu-
cation, research, and the develop-
ment of constructive solutions.
This vacuum in American soci-
tween whites and Blacks. This syn-
drome has caused increasing pol-
arization within American society.
Providing positive educational ex-
perience concerning Black folk
would be a long step in the right
direction and would destroy the
myths and syndromes that plague
this society.
There is also a great need for
more research concerning the
Black experience. While it is true
that many of the fears polarizing
Blacks and whites resulting from
omission of facts, distortions and
misinformation can be erased by
research, this must not be its sole
concern.
An Afro-American study center
must concern itself with studying
the causes of the most pressing
problems in the Black community
ism. Paternalism creates the att
tude that Black folk are lesser hu
man beings and thus incapableo
defining and creating program
to deal with their own problems.
Everything which has occurre
in the civil rights movementt
date has been designed to co-op
a small minority of Black folk. TI
date the masses of Black fo
have been neglected by the Blac
middle class and white commun
ties. As a result, there is a wide
spread rebellion in the Black com
munity which has manifest i
self by the emergence of organ
zations like the Black Panthe
and the Republic of New Africa
The ultimate goal of an Afr(
American study center is to deve
up a Black perspective on th
needs of the Black communitya
NIGHT EDITORs; N' di Coodas, St uart Ganne s,
Martin n111n Bil L'ely, Jim Neubacher,
Da'.id Spurr, Chris Steele, Daniel Zwerdling.
COPY EDITORSM .m Beatte. Robert Kraftowitz,