Seventy-Seven Years of Editorial Freedom EDITED .AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS TwO views of the Columbia protest On inhibitions Columbia never learned -, Where Opinions Are Free. 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH. Truth Will Prevail NEWS PHONE: 764-05521 .Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or t L editors. This must be noted in all reprints.- SATURDAY, MAY 4, 1968 NIGHT EDITOR: JOHN GRAY . ,...+.w_.. The war isn't over yet THE APPARENT agreement by Wash- ington and Hanoi on .Paris as a site for preliminary peace negotiations, of-' fers, after many disappointments, a glimmer of hope that an end to the Viet- nam bloodbath may be in sight. No one, however, should be deceived into thinking that the war is now over- as so many apparently were when Presi- dent Johnson made his March 31 offer to Hanoi. Regardless of what is happening on the diplomatic scene, the war in South- east Asia has continued unabated. The original promised bombing halt has proved to be a cruel deception, for U.S. planes are now dropping more explosives south of the 20th parallel than they for- merly dropped on all of North Vietnam.' Within a week of Hanoi's initial agree- ment to preliminary peace talks, the U.S.- South Vietnamese command launched two, massive search - and - destroy missions" named "Determine to Win" and "Total Victory" in what was hardly a concilia- tory gesture. THE RECORD on the Commnist side has not been altogether. commend- able. While the North Vietnamese did' lift the siege of Khe Sanh shortly after By MURRAY KEMPTON I HAVE hated it as long as I can remember and I am no fair judge of its agony: After all, an institution which has had on Its Board of Trustees at the same time the publisher of the New York Times and the District At-' torney of New York County can get away with pretty much any- thing in the way of lies and swindles in this town. These things are really not Columbia's fault, since it has'never learned those inhibitions - public opinion and the force of law. So I am a man whose dream for Columbia is that it fall into ruin like the Roman Forum, in the 18th century, with the Church putting a cross over it, the grass growing, the peasants tethering their goats and, an occasional traveler musing over the vanity of worldly pride. Still it does have inhabitants. And what must it be like to teach political science at Columbia? Your theme is presumed to in- clude the normal means by which citizens impress their will on the agencies of government. And you teach against the background of your university's decision to build a gymnasium in Morningside Park. That is hardly as bad an example of Columbia's attitude toward its neighbors as was the outright contempt expressed for them by Jacques Barzun when he was Columbia's Provost three years ago; still it is a fair sample of its normal indifference. Harlem's pol- iticans protested; Mayor Lindsay had doubts; Columbia went ahead. SO THEN a few hundred stu- dents went on a sitdown strike; and, as one of the fantasies which afflict institutions with the garri- son mentality, there arose the ru- mor that Harlem might invade the campus. Then and only then, Columbia decided to halt con- struction of,' the gymnasium. Peaceful objections failed; direct action and the rumor of riot may have succeeded. It is difficult to envy the political scientist who, after that experience, has to go on explaining the resources of the orderly processes of democratic debate our system,offers the poor and powerless. Yet you commence after a day or so to feel a curious affection the bombing halt; that action has not been followed up and in fact, attacks on the south seem to have intensified in re- cent days. However, the Communist pos- tion is understandalge in the light of in- tensified American attacks. So while diplomats pirouette about a time and place' for the talks, men, Amer- ican and Vietnamese, soldiers and civil- ians continue to die and the physical and psychological destruction of Vietnam goes on. The first order of business when talks 'begin next week must be an uncondition- al halt to the bombing and an immediate bilateral cease fire. Neither side can al- low the fighting to continue while talks drag on, as was the case in Korea; the human cost outweighs ,any possible ben- efit. IN VIEW of this, requests by some politi- cal figures, including formertVice Pres- i'dent :RichardM. Nixon, that there be a' moratorium on any debate about Viet.- nam while peace talks are conducted is clearly out of place. Every sort of political pressure must be brought to bear to force a speedy and unconditional cease fire. The war is not over yet. -STEVE WILDSTROM for the faculty. What President Kirk abandoned, these men in their poor confused way have de- fended. They are faintly ridiculous, of course. You have to look and sound ridiculous when the repre- sentatives of order have scuttled and you are brave enough to step in and try to do their job, with no loftier credential than is encom- passed by the phrase ad hoc. On the one side you have student rebels whose prime demand was that they be guaranteed immuni- ty from any punishment for what they had done and thus recog- nized as still members of our great untorturable middle class. On the other you have anti-rebel students whose only demand was for pun- ishment. Across from you is Mathematics Hall where Tom Hayden com- mands a college repertory com- pany doing Marat-Sade; behind you is Hamilton Hall, now Mal- colm X University; Stokeley Car- michael declared president. Be- fore you is the terrible muddle around the Low Library, where students punched one another yes- terday and where the motorcycle cops waited to be unchained. The faculty did not meet the occasion with very impressive rhetoric. Its conversation sound- ed too much like the cartoons of Jules Feiffer or letters in the New York Review of Books. ITS MEMBERS do not always conduct themselves with a proper sense of their own dignity. Since Friday theyhad cordoned off Low Library, because anti-rebel stu- dents threatened to riot unless the demonstrators were stopped] from going in and out of there. Yesterday afternoon, the dem- onstrators outside began throwing food at the demonstrators inside. Every now and then, they would- fire too low-Columbia has a de- plorable record for completing passes-and a broken piece of cit- rus would fall on some professor with tenure. Still they stood, with accepted loss of dignity, and tried to uphold the honor of their uni- versity. Nowhere, in these melan- choly scenes, was president Gray- son Kirk visible. Whether by fair means or foul, this poor man will do nothing for his honor. His suit will be free of stain and his rec- ord free of nobility to the end. Copyrigh,t 1968 New York Post Corporation . 4 ,i Poverty DID YOU KNOW "the conduct of the vital ffunctions of the U.S. govern- ment in the nation's capital is being se- riously threatened by the actions of a handful of self-annointed 'feaders of the poor?'" Sen. Long (D-La.) does. And he had the. spunk to say so from the senate floor of the nation's capital last week. '"These disciples of lawlessness and civil disorder are in the process of hoodwink- ing thousands of the poor and downtrod- den in our society that the way to get what they want is to stage a mass 'camp- in' or 'sit-in' in our nation's capital-the object being to disrupt the work of our government and thus blackmail Con- gress, and the President into acceding to any and all of their demands no matter how outrageous or unjust some of them may be." Luckily, Sen. Long "will never bow to threats, intimidation or blackmail." Rev. Abernathy, one such self-annointed lead- er of the poor requested in sugar coated" words to see the senator, but the senator knew what the disciple of deception was really after. "I WOULD be glad to go to see the pa- rade," he said. "However, if they think they can intimidate .;the junior senator from Louisiana into voting to bankrupt this government by paying people to be more worthless than they are, or by pay- ing people who refuse to work, they are. making a mistake." We must really understand, as Sen. Long does, that despite our liberal inten- tions and leanings, we must not succumb, to the seductive lure. of Rev. Abernathy and the handful of poor people who fol- low him. Even some well-intentioned senators, like Sens. Hart (D-Mich), and Percy (R- 111.) have fallen into Abernathy's at- tractive trap. But we must beware the dangerous; rallying cry of the poor. "We're not going. to have white power or black power," harangued Abernathy in Memphis Thursday before the begin- ning of the Poor People's March which will end in our nation's capital. "We're going to have poor power." Sen. Long anticipates that these poor people will'riot and burn, not because they always have, but because he has seen them do it of late. And Sen. Long knows a fad when he sees one. But the senator 'knows where this sort of thing should stop. "AS FAR AS I am concerned, when that bunch of marchers comes here, if they want to do so, before I would yield to that kind of demand ('paying people to be more worthless tha nthey are'), whether done through riots, demonstra- tions or intimidation, they can just burn down the whole place and we will move the national capital somewhere else where we have someone who has cour- age enough to enforce the law and put those rioters in jail." "We don't want to lose a man like the senator, or a city like Washington. Surely our American traditions should not be sacrificed for the sake of human life. Poor folk were really always lazy and not very likeable anyway. While Sen. Long recommends "censure" or expulsion of any public official who would tolerate law violation, you really can't help but feel sorry for them. They are misguided. At the same time, we must pity the senator whose old-fashioned words ci wisdom too often are dismissed by those who heed what they read. Poor Sens. Hart, Percy. Poor Sens. Long, Stennis and Byrd. Poor people. -HENRY GRIX ". .:::::.....::.::.:::..r......::.:........:,::....:......... :.:...:............:.:.... . .. ...... : r: ........::^ ,..... ., ;...^ .; a....". v ::.:.:::: ::':.. .. ...;"":: :d :...::."~~"::t; 5 Beekman Street By RICHARD ANTHONY College Press Service NEW YORK-The elevators in the building at Five Beekman Street in Lower Manhattan don't run all the way to the top. They stop at the ninth floor, which is sufficient for the lawyers, architects,'and other professional men who have offices there, but not for the people who work on the tenth floor, who must climb a narrow flight of stairs to get to work. The steps on the staircase are rundown; the walls beside them are grimy and flakey, all of which is in sharp contrast with the demure paneling and sparkling mosaics that line the interior of the elevators. The contrast is appropriate be- cause the stairs lead into New York's "Peace Pentagon," a con- glomeration of groups and non- groups, organizations and publica- tions, peace professionals and amateurs, all of them working one way or another to end the war and all of them, without excep- tion, poor. Every office has its posters. sometimes rising all the way up the walls and spilling over onto the ceiling. A visitor can identify, some of the offices simply by looking at their posters. The Resistance, for example, has familiar ones with legends such as "Make love, not war," "Support the troops, bring them home," and "Where have all the young men gone?" It also has do-it-yourself posters which includes a clipping of Bobby Kennedy with his hand outstretched. Just beyond his hand someone has pasted in a photo of Eugene McCarthy's head. "Bouncy, bouncy McCarthy," Kennedy is, saying and someone has given Mc- Carthy the label "co-opter." The CatholichPeace Fellowship, right next to the Resistance, has some of the same posters but also many that aren't found anywhere else on the tenth floor-colorful message posters by Sister Mary Ceritea, a friend of the CPF, and a large poster with the words "no more war. War never again," a quote from Pope Paul. THE RESISTANCE and CPF of- fices are \the first ones a visitor sees when entering by the main door. Beyond them are the of- fices of the War Resisters League, the oldest of the tenth floor group. Since its founding in 1923, the WRL has become a well-establish- ed pacifist organization with a more or less dependable middle class membership (which is now in Non-Violence; the WRL's New York Action Branch; Liberation magazine, which is edited by David Delinger, who is also a co-chair- man of the October 21 Pentagon march; and WIN magazine, a bi- weekly that has recently become the official organ of /the WRL., In addition, there are traces of organizations now defunct. Most notably, the Committee for Non- Violent Action, which merged with the WRL last fall. In the office once occupied by the CNVA are large, round signs made of wood and attached to long staffs which bear the legend "Walk for peace- San Francisco to Moscow." Above one of them is a large map of the United States with the walk route across the country carefully mark- ed on it. Near the Resistance offices is the office of the Teachers Com- mittee on Vietnam. The commit- tee has just placed the largest pro- test ad in history in the April 15 New York Times-three full pages, more than 9,300 names of college, elementary and secondary teach- ers. Yet it now rarely uses its of- fice at Five Beekman. Most of the time the office is used by the Re- sistance for draft counseling. The WRL is clearly the central organization at Five Beekman. It has been there the longest. It lends its space to less established groups like the Resistance rent-free. Its officersare active in several of the other organizations at Five Beekman. For example, until his death last year, A. J. Mustie; the well-known pacifist, was chairman of the editorial board of Liberation magazine in addition to being head of the WRL. THERE ARE obvious advantages to all of the organizations at Five Beekman to being there together. Besides participating in each oth- er's activities, they can share equipment, exchange contacts, and discuss strategies with each other. More important, having a variety of peace groups together in one place gives those who work there a sense of community that is really important for them. Although the groups are sub- jected to little harrassment, aside from hate mail and an occasional visit from an FBI agent, there is one threat that is constantly pre- sent for many of the young peace workers-the threat of prison. Ed Fields, a former Cornell stu- dent who has been with the Re- sistance since early last fall, says the fact that most of them expect girl friends of some staff members have broken up with them on the issue of prison. But he says that the presence of men who have served prison terms and who can offer advice on how to deal with the problems that prison creates has been a great help to the younger peace work- ers. He adds that in'order to make this advice on a much broader scale, the WRL has prepared a tape recording of a discussion about prison life by four men who have been in. The next issue of WIN will be devoted largely to ar- ticles by former prisoners. If prison is one problem for the groups at Five Beekman, another is the political situation in the country now and prospect of peace negotiations between the United States and North Vietnam. It isn't difficult to hear evidence of recent successes by one or more of the groups. Tom Cornell of the Catholic Peace Fellowship recently helped to organize a protest ad by Catho- lic writers against the subsidizing of South Vietnamese militia units by Catholic Relief Services, a huge Catholic Welfare organization which has since decided to end the project. Nevertheless, the changed polit- ical situation has had.its impact. "McCarthy is definitely having an effect, particularly on the money," said Maris Cakers, head of the WRL's tax resistance project. Ac- cording to Cakers, the group that has been the most heavily hit so far is the Fifth Avenue Peace Par- ade Committee, an amorphous coalition of New York peace or- ganizations that sponsored an- other mass peace parade April 27. Cakers expects that organiza- tions like theParade Committee and the. National Mobilization, which are ad hoc groups speci- fically asociated with Vietnam, Will disappear if serious peace nego- tiations begin but that pacifist organizations with longer range goals like the WRL will have no difficulty surviving. The Resistance is somewhere be- tween the ad hoc groups and the WRL in its orientation, which or- ganized around the two issues of Vietnam and the draft. Chris Ro- binson, a former actor who now does a good deal of draft counsel- ing for the Resistance, believes that the issue of the draft will be a live one for some time to come, even if there is peace in Vietnam. "The next outbreak could come in Rni v i a. n-, ndx 0,-a nI e nd "Columbia tvilnever be the same" By JAMES A. WECHSLER (Columbia '35) THESE REMARKS about Columbia's nightmare must be rather personal; I have sentimental involvements in the matter. Many of us who care about its future will remain haunted by uncertainty as to whether the final collision was inevitable. My reluctant con- clusion is that it was-and that the final tragedy was the performance of some police officers who arrogantly defied Chief Inspector Garelik's warnings against rough-stuff. But this was the climatic misadventure in a sequence from which few men can derive any pride or glory. For what has happened is a triumph only for those who were resolved to transform the campus into a shambles. Students for a Democratic Society is not monolith movement; it includes many young men and women who do not believe in raising hell for its own sake, and are earnestly groping for niew values.,But it would be a romantic'innocence to assume that many of the key .figures in the guerilla war that began last week were disposed to seek a ra- tional settlement or to accept any penalty for avowed civil disobedience. SHORTLY AFTER, MIDNIGHT yesterday, following a two-hour visit to the tense campus, I came home and listened to the remarkably expert, unhysterical coverage on Columbia's WKCR. There I heard the voice of SDS leader Mark Rudd, who seemingly views himself as the hybrid offspring of Lenin and Che Guevara. Columbia, he explained gravely, was not yet in a "revolutionary situation"; its condition was more analogous to France in 1848, when a "bourgeois" unheaval occurred. He voiced fear that a compromise solution, involving a tripartite administration-faculty-student structure, could only "legitimatize" the status quo and defer the coming struggle for power.'" Hearing his out-of-this world address, it seemed plain that those who were trying to "negotiate" with him and his counterparts were deluding themselves. Columbia had become a miniature battleground in which chaos was the vital pre-condition for truly "revolutionary" developments. This was the university's entrapment; the basic challenge came from those who cherished conflict at any price, and held strategic command posts in the occupied territory. But obviously Rudd's disciples were a small fragment of the rebel- lion they had initiated. There were. numerous other students wholly lacking in esoteric revolutionary commitments who opposed the new gym or favored severance of all university ties with the defense esta- blishment. Most important, there were many students and faculty mem- bers whose only concern was the avoidance of a massive police invasion of the campus. * * * DISASTROUS AS WERE the long night and its aftermath, the danger that had loomed largest was averted. That was the prospect of a racial battle, extending beyond the borders of campus, over the eviction of the 100 Negro students who occupied Hamilton Hall in a "separatist venture obsequiously ratified by SDS. On thi front the university exhibited sensitivity and thoughtful- nes; so did the police. The Negroes, primarily stirred by the gym argument, refused to act out the incendiary role assigned to them in the leftist manuals. They held their ranks with dignity as painstaking, continuing contacts were maintained with Truman and others;' they shunned capricious vandalism. They also solemnly reached agreement among themselves that, if the police refrained from pushing them around, they would eventually leave without staging any battle scenes. One unheralded hero of these events was Sydney Von Luther, a graduate student and an official of Local 1199 of the Drug and Hospital Workers Union. A militant Negro, he had the perceptiveness to recognize that the young men in Hamilton Hall would suffer -most if they for- feited all academic standing in a futile brawl while disciplined whites found refuge in other colleges. Thus what had been viewed- as the greatest peril point became one of the few islands of sanity and hope for the future. Sadly, I stil wonder whether Harlem will be a better place because the gym-with extensive facilities for Negroes-has apparently been blocked. But the symbolism of the dispute had transcended the sub- stance many days earlier. COLUMBIA WILL NEVER be quite the same again; it confronts a long period of soul-searching. But neither, I suspect, will SDS. While some of its super-strategists revel in the debris, there will come a time when some adherents will ask whether the battle of Morningside Heights can be authentically equated with the noble struggles for free- dom being waged by students in Fascist and Communist despotisms- and whether Columbia, while hardly the gem of the city, is the major enemy of peace and progress. Copyright 1968 New York Post Corporation Humanzinag who M? The Rocky road GOV. NELSON A. ROCKEFELLER cele- brated the announcement of his can- didacy for the Republican presidential nomination Tuesday by making his first definitive statement on the Vietnam war in well over two years. For those despairing anti-war Repub- licans who have kept hoping that Rocky's' long silence meant that he was secretly nurturing dovish sentiments, the gov- ernor's denunciation of the "American- ization" of the war must have come as something of a disappointment. Because what Rockefeller has in fact come up with is "why-are-American- boys-fighting-a-war-which-should - be - fought-by-Asian-boys" kind of approach which has become a sort of traditional tentative 'entrance ramp unto the rocky road from Hawk to Dove. Politicians in the process of becoming doves have developed a series of steps pearing too foolish. First they ask why the Vietnamese aren't doing more to help themselves. Then they decry corruption in the Saigon regime and threaten to take our toy soldiers and go home if Thieu and his friends don't play 'nicely. Next they admit perhaps negotiations just might not be such a bad idea, reiterating all the time that the U.S. will not yield to force or subversion and will continue to protect the world - especially Asia --. from ' the evils of communism. Finally in high gear, they tell the Chamber of Commerce (or perhaps the National Council of Advertisers) that the war is economically unsound, bad for American- business, and as such threatening to our entire way of life. After that, anything goes: negotiations with the NLF, unilateral withdrawal, anything. T-TAT'S THE attern And Roekefeler. By MARCIA ABRAMSON THE reputedly conservative en- gineering school has jumped ahead of the literary college with a more extensive and enlightened pass-fail program that should also greatly increase the summess of the move to "humanize" the engineer. The value of a partial pass- fail program consists in allowing the student to become acquainted with areas of study outside his field of concentration without fail to all free electives and elec- tives in the humanities and social sciences, except for a 12-hour English requirement that is com- mendable in itself for its project- ed inclusion of both great books and modern culture sequences. The engineering program will even include some technical elec- tives, although these are limited to one per term. This may re- flect a commendable move to- ward extension of the no-grad- ing principle beyond the realm of non-major subject areas. 01