£ick1an Bali4 Seventy-Sixth Year t - EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS Where Opinions Are Free. 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN APBOR, MICH. NEWS PHONE: 764-0552 truth Wil Prevail Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1965 NIGHT EDITOR: JOHN MEREDITH stribution Changes: Inadequate, Ineffective Getti nQg IN FISCAL YEAR 1963-64 (the "FY" is simply a term used to confuse laymen by changing the beginning of the year from Jan. 1 to July 1, a compromise, I suppose with the Jewish New Year), the University received $14.6 million in student fees, $38.2 million in general funds from the state, $42.3 million from the federal govern- ment and $7.4 million in gifts and grants. These are the funds which pay for. most of the instructional and research activities of the Univer- sity. The fact that there is such di- versity among the sources of rev- enue for the University has been used to great advantage by ad- ministrators here and is one of the reasons for the strengths of the University. Groups in competition for the University's services can be bal- anced and counter balanced and, with judicious use of pleas, ex- hortations, stirring orations and subtle hints, the University is able to stay on the thin line that spells strong financial backing for what the University-not those handing out the money-want to do. When you get right down to it, you won't find much support' in Lansing for the scholar-l'esearch-, er-sometimes-teacher in humani- ties of even in many social or natural sciences. Nevertheless these faculty, and they are pretty well supported, are the heart of the University. THE REGENTS last Friday approved a new system of distribution require- ments, proposed by the faculty curriculum committee, which will go into effect at the end of the present academic year. The new setup was hailed as "liberaliz- ed" from all quarters. But it is not sig- nificantly more liberal than the old sys- tem. The curriculum committee insisted on maintaining an extreme aura of secrecy while discussing distribution requirements in the fall of 1964 and offered vague intimations that the lofty task of study- ing "the whole philosophy behind distri- bution requirements" was being under- taken. With all this, one would have expected some terribly radical plan for curricu- lum reform to have been unveiled this fall. What a disappointment! Via a few simple structural adjust- ments, students are granted some small ,addition to their freedom of choice over courses. However, the committee certain- ly failed to really alter the philosophy behind requirements, ignoring the truly experimental curriculums which are prov- ing very successful at progressive univer- sities across the nation - Swarthmore, Rice, Columbia, Wayne. THE THREE AREAS of curriculum most often attacked - freshman composi- tion, language and natural sciences- were given practically no consideration. Instead of requiring the freshman to take a one-semester composition course in which he writes on abstract topics us- ually unrelated to the rest of his studies, why not abolish the requirement and have professors submit written evalua- tions of each freshman student's writing, based on the papers he has submitted for each class, to be attached to his tran- script? Students are- still required to achieve a fourth-semester proficiency in one for- eign language. The utility of such a re- quirement is dubious. In fact, the lan- guage requirement ought to be complete- ly abolished. The most cogent arguments advanced for a language requirement are: -Graduate schools require the knowl- edge of two foreign languages., -Students learn the culture of a for- eign people through the study of litera- ture and even the study of syntax and speech patterns. -With the increasing number of stu- dents traveling in Europe, study of an- guages will enable them to communicate with the natives more effectively. BUT THESE THREE arguments can be effectively rebutted: -By the time one is ready to demon- strate his proficiency in a foreign 'lan- guage for his doctorate, no sooner than five years after his undergraduate lan- guage training, he very likely has forgot- ten much of what he learned as a fresh- man or sophomore and must be tutored or at least study independently a con- siderable deal. Editorial Staff ROBERT .OHNSTON. Editor LAURENCE KIRSHBAUM ROBERT HIPPLER Managing Editor Acting Editorial Director JUDITH FIET.D ............s...Personnel Director LAUREN BAHR .... Assoate Managing Editor JUDITH WARREN Assistant Managing Editor GAIL BLTTMBERG .............. Magazine Editor PETER SARASOHN ..............Contributing Editor LLOYD RAFF ..... .... .... Acting Sports Editor SHELDON DAVIS...............Acting Photo Editor NIGHT EDITORS: Robert Carney Clarence Fanto, Mark R. Kilingsworth, John Meredith, Leonard Pratt, Bruce Wasserstein. DAY EDITORS : Merle Jacob, Carole Kaplan, Lynn Metzger, Roger Rapoport, Harvey Wasserman, Dick Wingfield, Charlotte Wolter. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS : Alice Bloch, Deborah Blum Babette Cohn, Gail Jorgenson, Robert Kliv- ans, Lawrence Medow, Neil Shister, Joyce Winslow. SPORTS NIGHT EDITORS: Rick Feferman, Jim La- Sovage, Bob McFarland, GilSamberg, Dale Sielaff, Rick Stern, Jim Tindall, Chuck Vetzner. Business Staff CY WELLMAN, Business Manager ALAN GLUECKMAN............Advertising Manager SUSAN CRAWFORD ... . Associate Business Manager JOYCE FEINBERG............Finance Manager MANAGERS: Harry Bloch, BruceHillman, Marline Kuelthau, Jeffrey Leeds, Gail Levin, Susan Perl- stadt. Vic Ptasznik, Elizabeth Rhein, Ruth Segall, Jill Tozer, Elizabeth WV-4man. Some graduate disciplines, such as so- ciology, are now waiving language re- quirements in lieu of training in mathe- matics. And then, not everyone goes on to graduate school. -Unless a student plans to continue study of foreign language, he probably won't acquire a great deal of knowledge about a foreign culture. In the required four semesters, too much time must be devoted to learning grammar rules and attaining an elemen- tary-level vocabulary to permit a stu- dent to delve into the culture very deeply. Courses in English on foreign litera- ture, philosophy, history and philology can be more useful. -To suggest that the University should force all students to suffer through the language requirement because some of them may be going to Europe is absurd. And even many of those who have trav- eled in Europe have found that their uni- versity training in language really doesn't pe'rmit them to communicate with the people, even about things like room and board arrangements. It takes a program of actually living with and constantly conversing with a foreign people to attain much of a degree of proficiency in their language. The curriculum committee did, how- ever, make one change in the language requirement 'that it felt would be miti- gating. A student can now "get the lan- guage requirement out of the way" by electing a concentrated one-year pro- gram. So a freshman can now waste one-half of his year in the profound study of gram- mar rules when he should be learning to think critically. IN THE AREA of natural sciences, the committee has relieved some burden by requiring only one lab course instead of the previously required two-semester lab sequence. This still does not signifi- cantly help the liberal-arts oriented stu- dent who is forced to elect science courses designed to transmit specialized, techni- cal knowledge to prospective science ma- jors. A program of philosophy or history of science courses would certainly be more relevant for liberal-arts majors. The curriculum committee feels that the areas of social science and humanities have been liberalized with the option of students to choose any three courses they desire from each of these areas. Yet, this program still does not allow the student to obtain the "broad" sam- pling that educators encourage him to seek. It is impossible for him to obtain a general knowledge of a significant num- ber of the disciplines in each area. Nor can he compare and synthesize the knowledge from diverse courses: Perhaps one solution would be that in- stead of devoting each course to an iso- lated study of a given discipline, the University could develop a series of in- terdisciplinary courses to study and com- pare systems. For instance, students could investi- gate the techniques of the sciences of history, psychology, sociology and philos- ophy for studying social phenomena as racial segregation, nationalism or protest movements. In the area of humanities, useful cours- es might compare Eastern and Western art forms or study the relationship of the artist to the intellectual community as a whole. BUT SUGGESTIONS like the above for curriculum reform at the University need the organized backing of faculty and students. The two bodies now organized to study curriculum are the faculty curriculum committee and the student literary col- lege steering committee. The problems of the faculty committee have been men- tioned. The students of the literary college .committee, which advises the faculty committee, do not show indications of be- ing innovative either. If anything, they are even more wary of an advanced educational reform program. Last fall, in their discussion of distri- bution requiirements. they actulallV made LOOK, FOR INSTANCE, at the University's approach to faculty recruiting. Hypothetical Dean says to Hot Prospect at Number One, Two or Three department in such and such a field (no one from anywhere else would be consider- ed): "We'd like to see you at the University, and we know you'd really like to come. Your research would really prosper and expand with our great library system and research and administrative fa- cilities and some of the best people in your field to help you with advice and moral support. But this is still a teaching university, and if you come you will have to do some teaching, and that means undergraduate teaching.' Hot Prospect groans and bar- gains a little to get that teaching requirement lowered, but finally gives in with visions of the great research he will be able to do. However, Hot Prospect, though hooked, still has to be supported. His research and publications in- come will be healthy but not enough. Hypothetical Dean goes to hypo- thetical administrator across the street (administrators are always "across the street," even if they aren't) and cries out for money- the more the better-thus: "This department is a shambles. Every- one is leaving or doing too much research or too much administer- ing or too much consulting. Hot Prospect is just what we need to Michigan MAD By ROBERT JOHNSTON act as a catalyst for better teach- ing, spectacular research and new, improved morale. But HP wants money, and so does everybody else." HYPOTHETICAL Administrator smiles and rubs his chin and says he'll see what he can do, though he "can't promise anything," and he begins to look about for money- saving expedients and money- making schemes. He goes to see Vice-President One and says, "We'll have to let Hot Prospect do a little more research and less teaching than usual; That way we can pay him less." But Vice-President Two im- mediately wails, "And what will HP do all this research in? We have no more space. And who will pay the indirect costs of admin- istering and supporting his re- search?" Hypothetical Administrator smiles and rubs his chin and says he'll see what he can do. "We'll have to go to the stu- dents," he says, "Maybe even add a few thousand of them. That should bring in some money." "But who is going to teach all Those Millions ($$): Strategy those students?" wails Vice- President Three. "More teaching fellows, larger classes, longer lines, a longer sum- mer." replies Hypothetical Ad- mini-trator to Vice-President Three at the same time that he says to Hypothetical Dean, "We've got to do more recruiting." In chorus they reply, "But we need money!" Hypothetical Adminis- trator smiles and rubs his chin, for now the plot is beginning to -thicken. HE GOES up to Lansing. "Here are all these fine Michigan youth, your sons and daughters, that have a right to be educated. You don't want us to do an inferior job do you? It takes money, and costs are rising astronomically." Hypothetical Administrator begs and cajoles, and innundates the legislators with figures and cost compilations and finally comes home with the money. "It's not enough," is the chorus loud and long. He smiles and rubs his chin and says he'll see what he can do. The next plane to Washington sees him abroad. There are in- numerable foundations and gov- ernment agencies with money to spare. He lobbies and cajoles. A little money starts flowing. Some of it is for research. That's all right. The University can even ease a little of this money into other and more important areas. And while he's at it he can funnel some money into other kinds of research in and around Ann Arbor. That's all right too. Where there is money there are jobs, and jobs are the most power- ful incentive of all in state and local politics. Hypothetical Administrator comes home, is greeted with cheers and congratulations publicly and with banner headlines, but in the conference room the chorus is the same: "Money!" He smiles and 'ubs his chin and says he'll see what he can do. THE UNIVERSITY has many rich graduates. Many of them love the University, many love the foot- ball and basketball team, many just need something to do with their money. So the great fund drive is organized. Hypothetical Administrator sends representa- tives and vice-presidents and foot- ball and basketball teams and public relations men scampering across the land to tell great tales of the University. The money starts coming in. Buildings are built and properly dedicated with fanfare and hoopla and are quickly filled with re- searchers and medical patients, even students. Hypothetical Ad- ministrator smiles and rubs his chin and has another Manhattan. And he deserves it-occasionally -$9.1 million for 13,000 students in 1939, $137 million for 27,000 in 1964. from Russia With Love ~U \1 -r /" J USS- U. S. Strategy for Peace? By ROGER RAPOPORT SINCE THE U.S. government ad- mitted last week that it turned down a Hanoi offer for peace talks in the fall of 1964 there has been a lot of speculation about its good intentions. Eric Sevareid's story on the peace offer came after President Johnson had been claiming for months that Hanoi had ignored all our peace offers. This suggests that the United States is really not interested in any sort of peace talks on Viet Nam. The truth is that such talks would be inconsistent with our foreign policy of peaceless co- existence. FEW AMERICANS realize that in recent years peaceless coexist- ence has been the fundamental precept of American foreign policy. It is based on the assumption that peace is helltand war really isn't so bad after all. The policy was implemented af- ter military officials explained to the State Department that the United States has oftenlost at the conference table but has never lost an inch on the battlefield. The basic precept of peaceless coexistence is that Communism is bad. Hence our country backs such upright non-Communist na- tions as Spain and Formosa while opposing such totalitarian Com- munist concentration camps as Yugoslavia and Russia. ON A MOMENT'S notice our nation will oppose Communism anywhere it rears its ugly head. Sometimes the United States gives allies like Turkey, India and Paki- stan weapons to defend their bor- ders against Communist aggres- sion. While the Communists cannot be depended on to violate the borders, still peaceless coexistence is maintained anyway. Turkey, for example used its American arms to bombard Cyprus while India and Pakistan took on each other. Sometimes the United States is not able to get a war off the ground. The Bay of Pigs incident in Cuba illustrated that. However the United States was much more successful in its ef- forts to start a war against Viet Nam. We began by backing the Diem government, which called off free elections stipulated by the Geneva treaty. (Diem would have lost to Ho Chi Minh 4 to 1 ac- cording to President Eisenhower. We stayed on to provide military advice to ten different South Viet- namese governments. Critics of the United States claim that the country has no right to be in Viet Nam because the 1954 Geneva agreement stipu- lated that foreign troops must stay out of the country. This criticism is unjustified, however, because the United States never signed the Geneva agreement. THE MOST RECENT imple- mentation of peaceless coexistence was in the Dominican Republic where it took some 30,000 Marines to handle the 57 Communists who were sparking the revolution there. Where the mighty arm of the U.S. government will next strike a blow against some poor insigni- ficant little country is open to conjecture. But farsighted military planners are now hard at work on a C-5 superjet transport fleet that can put 15,000 troops, their tanks, trucks, and 'guns anyhere in the world in less than a day. The C-5 will be used to stop brushfire wars. HENCE it is plain to see that the State Department planners from their office in the foggy bot- tom section of Washington are on top of the situation. It makes you proud to be an American. I 96.._ _ j Letters: Did Johnson Lie About Viet Nam? To the Editor: IN FRIDAY'S DAILY I suggested that the lies of our President are difficult for minds raised to trust and respect our leaders to accept. We may have a strong tendency to simply refuse to be- lieve that our President could lie, could say Hanoi was unwilling to negotiate and lead us to believe that there was no alternative to his sending young Americans and Vietnamese to their death. Jim Martin's letter in Satur- day's Daily is an impressive mani- festation of just such a tendency. Indeed, Mr. Martin takes heroical- ly upon himself the onus of at- tempting what not even the most brazen of the administration's apologists has tried-to convince us that the President has not actually lied after all. His argu- ment is extraordinary. Although Mr. Martin claims that I have not demonstrated that President Johnson lied, he does not dispute the New York Times story I referred to (revealing se- cret testimony of high govern- ment officials at secret hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee) which does clearly demonstrate that our and his administration to us about the Santo intervention. Thus his without foundation. President have lied Domingo claim is MR. MARTIN CLAIMS that I have not demonstrated President Johnson lied at his press con- ference on July 13th, 1965 when he said, "I must say that candor compels me to tell you that there has not been the slightest indica- tion that the other side is interest- ed in negotiation or unconditional discussions, although the United States has made some dozen at- tempts to bring 'that about." What does he give us to sub- stantiate this claim? He finds great significance in what he takes to be the present tense (marking its occurrence with an exclamation point!) of the sentence as in- dicated by "is" in the phrase "the other side is interested in nego- tiations or unconditional discus- sions." Astonishingly, he seems to be- lieve this shows that the President was thus speaking of willingness "at or about" the time that he spoke, and thus previous willing- ness -on Hanoi's part "is irrele- vant." But in order for our President to avail himself of the defense Mr. Martin 'proffers, he would have to have said "there is not the slightest indication that the other side is interested." The President, however, must be denied Mr. Martin's succor. Not only did he say "there has not been the slightest indication," but he also spoke of some dozen at- tempts at such talks which the United States "has made." If the President actually meant the sentence in the implausible way Martin says he did (meant only willingness "at or about" the time he spoke, so that previous willingness was irrelevant), why is it that Johnson himself regards these previous attempts as rele- vant enough to include them in the very same sentence? MR. MARTIN also refers to a question I asked about the war. Suppose, as Jack Langguth of the New York Times and others sug- gest, we can win the war by con- tinuing to use our bombers on the South Vietnamese countryside if we are prepared to kill 2 or 3 civilians for every enemy soldier: what considerations could justify this slaughter? It is disconcerting, though most revealing, to find that Mr. Martain claims that this is merely a rhetorical question. In answer to it he presents us with a situation containing a fron- tier family, attacking Indians, and hostage children, which he says he thinks is analogous to the situ- ation I describe. There is precious little to com- pensate us for the mental feat of taking this distressingly simplistic and wildly disanalogous construc- tion seriously. Such nonsense re- quires, if anything, forebearance. H o w e v e r, after negotiating through it we are shortly amazed to find Mr. Martin drawing upon it to ask (with a negative answer waiting coyly in the wings) "Who can condemn South Viet Nam and the United States for defending the South Vietnamese even though it entails the loss of large num- bers of South Vietnamese?" SUCH "ARGUMENTS" are bad enough in their own right, but they become all the more appal- ling when used to justify the killing by our government of thousands of helpless and inno- cent Vietnamese men, women and children who have never asked us there to so "defend" them. We are killing civilians not at the invitation of the countless thousands of present and potential victims of our policy of mass slaughter, but at the "request" of the succession of generals whose unpopular regimes stay in power only with the backing and ap- proval of the United States. Lastly, and incredibly, Mr. Mar- tin says that I apparently believe that Communism is not so bad as slavery. Unless he is also laying claim to clairvoyance, his assertion is exemplary for its lack of foun- dation, since I do not discuss (or even mention) slavery or Com- munism, nor a fortiori, do I com- pare the latter favorably with the former. But perhaps having such beliefs so groundlessly attributed to one is today's price for speaking out against the war. -Frederic Korn Dept. of Philosophy Joseph Alsop: The Coming Boost in Defense Funds EDITOR'S NOTE: Joseph Al- sop is substituting for Walter Lippmann for the three weeks of Lippmann's vacation. WASHINGTON - Despite the widespread excitement about the successful government pres- sure on aluminum and copper prices, the key argument for the government's intervention has not yet been publicly revealed. The President and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were in fact persuaded that it was urgent to secure price rollbacks simply because they knew they worn an,-.. ftohn',n fn n'Rk fnr. n fense spending then rose rather rapidly to over $50 billion per annum; and this happened, more- over, when the American gross national product was about $350 billion per annum. Today, in sharp contrast, our GNP is at the $700 billion level; and last year's defense budget was above $50 billion. Hence the coming increase, massive though it will certainly be, should have nothing like the economically de- forming effects of the Korea-time defense increases. The President, his economic ad- visers and Secretary McNamara usual, President Johnson has bat- tened every hatch, laid his black- snake whip on every official back and taken every other imaginable precaution to make sure the coun- try does not get the facts until he chooses to announce them. AS USUAL, all these character- istic Presidential goings on are quite illogical; for a whopping in- crease in defense outlays is much less likely to cause alarm and confusion if there has been enough advance discussion of the problem to cause people to discount the official news in the President's vv.D.,.,PCa at. summer's supplemental defense appropriation of $1.7 billion main- ly to "buy capacity," as he has put it. If the capacity is used to the full, as Secretary McNamara must suppose it may have to be, huge hardware orders are plainly going to be placed. The final size of these orders will, in turn, depend on whether Gen. Westmoreland has correctly calculated his supply requirements for the next 12 months. THERE IS some feeling in the Pentagon that the members of Pentagon will have to be increased by about $10 billion. Much less would be rather surprising, and an increase above $10 billion-say of 12 or 13 billion-is perhaps not unlikely. For the reasons already pointed out, there is the widest difference between this defense increase arising from the Vietnamese War and the much bigger increase that arose from the Korean War. The real thing to fear, in truth, is probably not resulting superheat- ing of the economy; which the ad- ministration is already working to prevent.