Q41ic RuD Eailyg Seventy-Sixth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS i FEIFFER 4 Where Opinions Are Free, 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH. Truth Will Prevail 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. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1967 NIGHT EDITOR: WALLACE IMMEN i 'U' Football Prices: The Sky's the Limit 11* THE 3RUS OF A MW WHO k6APT- II NARM 9t't'PA- ThT(C.N MAWM0 LOVE;' Ow F&Z THE oUyT- LIk)X. TZY3 HUHOPIED. THE~ FACE OF A MAO) TO Hr- F67.LoL COUNTY- p ! VQX, THE FORTH -N PYM1tAMIC. THE M05U OFAt HAM W ~~Y A COI3MEe. THATS TH1E ( 6Uir 'TALIW 4 Alp, t1 N HE UNIVERSITY athletic department should take a lesson from the sad ex- perience of former Detroit Lion football Coach Harry Gilmer. When the much- maligned Gilmer was booed, cursed, taunted and pelted with snowballs by his own fans, he shrugged it off, explaining that spectators who paid their way into the stadium had a right to behave any way they wanted.- It might not be long before Michigan coaches are forced to use the same ra- tionalization. The reason is the new two dollar hike in football coupons. Admittedly, the increase from $12 to $14 is a financial drop-in-the-bucket to students paying hundreds of dollars for tuition, room and board. The thing that grates on people is the principle involved. H. 0 (Fritz) Crisler, the sponsor of the two dollar addition, has been a ferv- ent supporter of true amateurism in col- lege sports throughout his career. Yet he now asks the student body to pay for the University's athletic program in the same way fans must support a professional team. T E TREND toward professionalism in college athletics is not new. But until now it has been focused on the partici- pants. Emphasis on winning at all costs, high pressure recruiting, and the big give- away have been around for several years despite protests of people like Crisler. Now, however, Crisler is initiating a trend toward professional spectatorism. Only five years ago, a University student paid a one dollar service fee which en- titled him to attend all home football games. That has now ballooned to $14 for football alone; while the price for home contests in sports is up to $42. In essence the students are being asked to foot their share of the bill-a situation which has never been tolerated here be- fore, and which exists at no other school in the Big Ten. At Michigan State, for example, the total cost for student spec- tators is less than $7. University students have always been expected to support the athletic teams, but they have never been used to insure athletic department solvency. THE FEE HIKE is also unfortunate be- cause it may damage the basis of loyal support for a football team having a bad year. The higher price gives spectators new rights to demand a winning team. Indeed, the increase has disturbing im- plications for the future. If the Wolverine football team is not winning next year, head Coach Bump Elliott might have to start getting used to hisses and snowballs. -CHUCK VETZNER Sports Editor A' m - ii -j 1nAUTN. OFA MAID WHfO TELL5 IT IK 0T IT' i i 4 elk L~. ----r A 4 Letters: Student Power and the Freshman :j Northwestern Probe To the Editor: AT FIRST, the student move- ment last semester promised hope for a new student role in the University. Students rose up and demonstrated their discon- tent and frustration with the pres- ent University system. I, too, rose up. I went to the teach-ins. I sat- . in. But the movement foundered, and after the initial outburst, it just petered out. In the final analysis, it was just so much noise. The students did not achieve any student power, if anything, in the break between SGC and the administration, the student lost power. From the brief fiasco I came to realize that until there arises some effective, unified leadership, the student power movement cannot succeed. The student power move- ment last semester seemed to be divided between SGC. Voice, Mike Zweig, and perhaps, other factions. There was no sustained, unified leadership. Without such leader- ship, how can one expect success? MR. IMMEN'S editorial (Feb. 14) places the blame for the fail- ure of the student power move- ment for freshman apathy. Real- ly! The fault lies with the fresh- men, new to the University, most who don't fully understand the issue of student power!? It seems to me if freshmen support were vital to the success 'of a student power movement, then the student power leaders would solicit the freshmen. Yet during the entire commotion last semester no one came to my quad to explain what was at stake in the drive for stu- dent power or to recruit support. A teach-in is fine, but it does nothing to combat apathy, because the apathetic don't come. To arouse the apathetic one must go to them. -James Lucas, '70 D.O.B. To the Editor: ALL I KNOW is what I read in the paper, but I fervently hope that The Daily will be allowed to serve as a newspaper and won't be turned into an adjunct of the D.O.B. -John Neufeld Good Flicks To the Editor: WE WISH to express our feelings about the Cinema Guild. We have always felt that it is perhaps the best film society in the nation. Unlike most groups it has had a continuity of leadership which has made possible a comprehensive study of the film exceeded only- by the showings conducted by the Museums of Modern Art. In Chicago we have, normally been jealous of the wide variety of films shown at Ann Arbor, which have not been seen here. It is possible to see films by Chap- lin, Jean Cocteau, D.W. Griffith, Satyajit Ray, and Buster Keaton, which have not been shown com- mercially in Chicago or Detroit. Many University groups are only now discovering the value of film in the teaching of art and human understanding. Michigan has been doing this for fifteen years. While most University programs differ litle from the fare run in the reg- ular theatres-to the extent that the theatre often takes action against unfair competition-the Cinema Guild has constantly brought films to the students that would be otherwise unavailable- unavailable, because of theatre operators indifference, rather than because of content. THE CINEMA Guild shows more films every year than are available by the combined efforts of all groups at most Universities. The Guild has never advertised these films as other than the true ar- tistic values of the films indicate. These films are a vital and neces- sary part of the experience of the University student. -Charles Boos Manager, Midwest Office Contemporary Films, Inc. Looking Backward To the Editor: I WAS HORRIFIED to read in our Evening Tribune about ten days ago an article titled "School's -Age Questioned in Michigan." At once I knew you were wrong, but I could not believe that The Mich- igan Daily would perpetrate such stupid and ignorant piece of re- porting. Also your research, if there was such a thing, was awfully weak. Even when I was on the Daily over 60 years ago I was familiar with the history of the University of Michigan. We all had to know that to get a position on the paper. If you had read any of the many histories beautifully written by, eminent historians in the Univer- sity, you would have known how wrong you are. Not only wrong but stupid, and I would add mean and destructive. The Daily used to stand for the truth and for things that would add to the reputation of the college. There are a lot of words I could use to describe your action in this respect, but the paper would burn up. LET ME inform you that the State Supreme Court held in 1856 that the corporate existence of the University began with the Act of the 26th of August, 1817, and has been continuous throughout all the subsequent changes of the organic law. I will not say more, but feel that the Michigan Daily of today has besmirched its reputation. What did you possibly think could be gained by this despiceable act of yours? Especially at this time of our great celebration. Your action was stupid, ignorant and under- handed, to say the least. -Thurlow E. Coon, AB '03 Weather To the Editor: CONGRATULATIONS to The Daiily on Mr. Wasserman's editorial on the weather (Feb. 9). I did not think that there was a member of the Daily staff left who had enough sense of humor to write such a telling satire upon The Daily's substitute of crusaders for reporters. I hope that it indicates a trend back to the time when the Daily used to win honors as a student "news" paper, and the advocacy was limited to succinct (and therefore readable) editorials, columnists, and "letters." -William P. Halstead Department of Speech LETTERS All letters must be typed, double-spaced and should be no longer than 300 words. All let- ters are subject to editing; those over 300 words will gen- erally be shortened. I A1 IN THE LATEST development of a dis- turbing nationwide trend, professors and administrators of Northwestern Uni- versity have called for an investigation of the school newspaper. Associate Dean J. Lyndon Shanley of the college of arts and sciences justified the probe on the grounds that the Daily Northwestern has failed to print many important announcements from the fac- ulty. Ostensibly, dissatisfaction was arous- ed when an announcement concerning a Far Eastern Language Institute failed to reach print. The paper, a tabloid, is published four times a week and faces a chronic shortage of space. It must necessarily choose news stories carefully, with regard to im- portance and appeal. This fact should have been apparent to those raising ob- jections, and some arrangement that would have compensated for these limi- tations could have been reached private- ly between the parties. Numerous alter- natives seem available. The university could allot more funds to the paper, buy space in the newspaper, or print its own announcements for circulation. But it appears that this is not the cen- tral issue at all. S IT ONLY a coincidence that the fac- ulty resolution, the idea for the in- vestigation, the chairman of the probe and those who moved the resolution dur- ing the meeting were all administrative deans or assistants? The paper has re- cently printed some poignant editorials criticizing the administration. Perhaps the editors of the Daily Northwestern are justified in their fears that this may be a move to indirectly censor the paper. If this is the case, the Northwestern administration has lowered itself below the standards for debate and dissension and should immediately withdraw its in- vestigation. -JIM HECK I1 I4 . ...*. .................................................... . . . . *.....*...............:.,.:.:::''..l....*..l1:.'.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Y"."...,.!'!4.. . . ..,.. .r.."M ........ .... .. . r. . .. ................"............................................ .... .... . .. l: r:::N:~. r l.A ",.." ~... ..!:L ... Drf efemn ytmAdequate Escaping the Ghetto PRESIDENT JOHNSON asked Congress to enact the open housing measure that was filibustered to death in the Senate last year. The provisions were modified slightly to overcome resistance expected from Congress. The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and Collegiate Press Service. Subscription rate: $4.50 semester by carrier ($5 by mail; $8 yearly by carrier ($9 by mail). Published at 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Mich., 48104. Owner-Board in Control of Student Publications, Bond or Stockholders-None. Average press run-10,000. Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor. Michigan. 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, Michigan, 48104. Editorial Staff MARK R. KILLINGSWORTH, Editor BRUCE WASSERSTEIN, Executive Editor CLARENCE FANTO HARVEY WASSERMAN Managing Editor Editorial Director JOHN MEREDIITH ...... Associate Managing Editor LEONARD PRATT ........Associate Managing Editor CHARLOTTE WOLTER ... Associate Editorial Director ROBERT CARNEY ...... Associate Editorial Director BABETTE COHN ................Personnel Director ROBERT MOORE .................... Magazine Editor CHARLES VETZNER................Sports Editor JAMES TINDALL ..........Associate Sports Editor JAMES LaSOVAGE.......... Associate Sports Editor GIL SAMBERO............. Associate Sports Editor THOMAS R. COPTI............. Photography Editor NIGHT EDITORS-Meredith Eiker, Michael Heifer, Robert Kllvans. Laurence Medow Roger Rappoport, Susan Schnepp, Neil Shister. DAY EDITORS-Robert Bendelow, Neal Bruss, Wallace Immen, David Knoke, Mark Levin, Patricia O'Dono- hue, Stephen Wildstromn. ASSISTANT NIGHT ,EDITORS-David Duboff, Ronald Klempner, Dan Okrent, Deborah Reaven, Jennifer Rhea, Betsy Turner. ASSISTANT DAY EDITORS-Michael Dover, Steve The major change would forbid discrim- ination in the sale or rental of housing in stages, over the next two years, in- stead of immediately. Despite the President's guarantee that the measure would not be aimed at "the privacy of the home"; despite the need to give the Negro access to apartments in clean, attractive neighborhoods; de- spite flagrant "block-busting" carried on by unscrupulous real estate brokers, Con- gress is in no mood to treat this bill dif- ferently than the previous one. Senator Dirksen, a man who usually gets-his way, vented his disapproval of open housing last year, when he termed it, "a bill whose time has not come." Also, several weeks ago the Senate defeated attempts to modify Rule 22 that requires a two-thirds vote to cut off debate. Con- gress has rarely been able to muster this number and filibusters have continued as a threat to legislation. MANY CONGRESSMEN are convinced that the open housing bill is political dynamite, because public opposition is widespread. They might, however, also weigh the consequences of shutting Ne- groes in the ghetto without giving them any hopes for escape. -STEPHEN FIRSHEIN No Comnment This is the last of a three- part series by Prof. E. Lowell Kelly, Department of Psychol- ogy. After noting in Part II (in yesterday's Daily) that any stu- dent may provide his local draft board with a copy of his full academic transcript, Prof. Kelly concludes with an analysis of the pros and cons of alternative forms for reporting scholastic standing, and alternative chan- nels for transmitting academic records to local draft boards. Part III ALTHOUGH it is obvious that lo- cal draft boards can obtain ex- tensive information regarding stu- dents requesting deferment with- out any cooperation, collaboration or complicity on the part of the University, this situation leads to another issue about which there are wide differences of opinion among both students and faculty. While local boards can obtain (for those students who provide them with transcripts) extremely detail- ed information about the student's academic performance and prog- ress toward a degree, the transcript provides much more information than is wanted. So much, in fact, that many board members feel they cannot interpret it fairly! Each local board is likely to have registrants attending many different colleges, and hence if forced to evaluate academicper- formance from transcripts, it would need to consider some in which academic credit was record- ed in semester hours, and others in quarter hours. Grades are bas- ed on very different marking sys- tems: (a) A, B, C, D, and E, (b) E(excellent), G(good). A (average), P(pass), and F(fail), (c) Honors, High Pass, Pass, Low Pass, and Fail, and (d) "absolute" percentage scales on which 100 is "perfect" but the failing grade may be 75, 70, or 60. Primarily for these reasons, lo- cal boards nrefer much less in- -In the upper two-thirds of male sophomores in his class in his college? -In the upper three-fourths of male juniors in his class in his college? -In the upper one-fourth of male seniors in his class in his college? This brings us to the specific question of "ranking." Because I have taught statistics for many years, I tend to think of ranking as the process of ordering objects or persons on some continuum from high to low and assigning each an ordinal position, e.g., 1st, 2nd, 3rd. .. nth. However, on look- ing up the verb "to rank" in an unabridged dictionary, I learned that it has many other defini- tions, including "to grade," "to classify," and "to estimate." Thus, in effect, it may be said that local boards ask only that reports on scholastic status be provided in terms of a simple two category grading system based on the grade distribution of male students in each class in each col- lege. Persons who object to ranking, i.e., the grading of students on such a simple two-point scale do so for different reasons. Four of these are: ® It is argued that the academ- ic performance of each student should be graded entirely on the basis of his work: in other words, grades should reflect an absolute level of accomplishment rather than performance relative to that of other students in a course, a class, or the college as a whole. Although I am sure that most teachers would gladly endorse this proposition as an ideal, I doubt that any of us has found it possi- ble to achieve it in our own grad- ing practices. Instead, all grades tend to be based on the perform- ance of each student relative to that of the other students in the course. In reality, we grade stu- A-++ 1- - rbi - -+Ihrn n fi the transcript), but I object to the University doing anything dif- ferent or additional just in order to comply with the regulations of the Selective Service System." Since this objection raises ques- tions regarding the past and pres- ent practices of the University, Dr. E. R. Zimmerman of the office of the vice-president for University affairs was asked several ques- tions. In brief, he replied that "ranking" in one form or anoth- er has been going on in the Uni- versity for a very long time-at least 25 years. In most cases it is done by the registrar's office, but also by individual schools or col- leges. In general, it has been the prac- tice of the registrar to sort and order student record cards con- taining GPA's in many different ways, each ranking being done for a particular purpose. Examples in- clude separate GPA distributions by college, by class, by sex, and by living units (dormitories, fra- ternities, sororities, etc.). Selection for Honors Convocations and for honor societies involve first sort- ing the cards for gross eligibility (college, major, sex, etc.), rank- ing those eligible by GPA, and providing the names of the top "x" per cent. " A third often heard argu- ment against the practice of rank- ing is that ranks are not mean- ingful from one institution to an- other because of marked differ- ences in the average' level of stu- dent ability and/or different grad- ing standards. Admittedly, rank- ing provides only an index of rel- ative rather than absolute per- formance. Furthermore, it is prob- ably true that most of the Univer- sity students whosehGPA places them in the lower half of their freshman class would rank in the upper half of their class in cer- tain other unnamed institutions. (As we have seen, however, most of this group would still score differences in measured scholastic aptitude. It is thus clear that if University students were to rely only on tran- scripts, i.e., their grades, to sup- port their requests for deferment, some will be seriously handicapped because they are registered in College X, others will be signifi- cantly advantaged because they are in College Y, even though all are from the same University. Only if, in fact, our grades were based on an absolute scale of per- formance, would it be reasonable to expect local boards to arrive at an equitable evaluation of tran- scripts. Since this assumption is far from justified, permitting or forcing local boards to evaluate academic performance on the bas- is of transcripts alone cannot but lead to frequent and sometimes gross inequities in decisions about individual students. * It is argued that the current practice sometimes results in mak- ing distinctions that are not real, e.g., the lowest GPA in the upper two-thirds of a distribution will not be very much higher than the highest GPA in the lowest one-third. Admittedly, for those few students whose GPA falls very close to the cutting point in their class GPA distribution, the report of "above" or "below" in- volves elements of chance. I suggest that this is in no sense a novel situation. The least promising freshman admitted to this University last year was cer- tainly not very much above the best applicant not admitted. Fur- thermore, every time a teacher as- signs course grades, some students will fall close to the critical points demarcating the letter grades. For- tunately, GPA's, based on many course grades, are more stable, i.e., more consistent from semes- ter to semester than are letter grades from course to course. Whether a student supports his- request for deferment on the basis of a certified transcript or a cer- tifa -- +-afoc o iccrnair.a Of the three above alternatives, the second involves by far the least clerical work for the Uni- versity. The Office of Records need only sort the cards by local boards (using the code numbers provid- ed by students on the form used to request that the University re- port their scholastic standing), and ship the entire set of some 6000 cards to the state headquarters of the Selective Service in Lansing. That office then assumes respon- sibility for forwarding each pack- age of cards to local boards, not only in Michigan but throughout the United States. The chief ar- gument against this, the present procedure, is that, in the opinion of some persons, it makes the Uni- versity appear to be a willing and even active collaborator in the operation of the Selective Service System. The first alternative above, while feasible, is obviously far less effi- cient and seems to have no ar- guments in its favor. It would re- quire the University to sort the cards as above but to mail or ship the subsets of cards to hundreds of different local boards through- out the U.G. The third alternative above would eliminate any direct com- munication or contact between the University and either the State Selective Service System or local boards, but it would involve mail- ing over 6000 individual documents each year, hopefully to each stu- dent's correct current mailing ad- dress. It would then be the re- sponsibility of each student to forward the document to his local board. In my judgment, the practices currently followed by the Univer- sity are completely defensible both rationally and ethically. They are certainly more efficient than oth- er available -alternatives. Finally, any major changes in practice such as advocated by certain crit- ics of present practice would nec- essitate extremely basic changes in 1nnm.Pc+nhlich Tnrit.v+ nnl 4