Iyr £irdigan Ba4l Seventy-eight years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students of the University of Michigan College: Whitey only? 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, MAY,28, 1969 NIGHT EDITOR: JOEL BLOCK 1OST AMERICAN public col- leges North and South may justifiably be charged with racism by omission or apathy, if not with conscious discrimination. A recent nation-wide survey of 80 public universities reveals black enrollment at predominantly white colleges averages a whopping 1.93 per cent. The same survey reveals 60 per cent of all black college student are segregated in black schools. This poor performance is little better than the record of primary and secondary education in the South, where 80 per cent of black youth attend segregated schools, Yet most public colleges, unlike Southern schools, have avoided both the issue of desegregation and the stigma of racism. To, most people, American public univer- sities are just too liberal to dis- criminate. MANY ADMISSIONS officers contend low black enrollment re- flects a drastic shortage of quali- fied black students. But the pres- ence of 250.000 students at black colleges testifies that more blacks are qualified for work at predomi- nantly white schools than the ad- missions officers would like to ad- mit_ Besides, some exclusive Ivy League schools have already rec- ognized a responsibility, a moral responsibility if you will, to give remedial instruction to black stu- dents who need it. These black have potential for colleges but i-- 4 The Budget: Total disregard for quality Tobe Lev DURING TIMES of austerity it becomes everyone's responsibility to seek equi- table means of distributing the little money that is available. A situation of austerity exists throughout the nation and is manifesting itself in federal and state cut-backs in funds f o r necessary public programs. The University, recognizing this respon- sibility, drafted an austerity budget for fiscal 1970 that was not one cent above its request for' fiscal 1969. This request was tempered with tedious study and me- ticulous shaving. It was a budget of max- imum austerity and was presented in such a fashion. The governor received the $75.9 million request and reduced it $8.5 million. , AND NOW the state senate appropria- tions committee has mercilessly slash- ed $2 Million more off the governor's re- quest. Their rationale for doing so is silly and highly immature. The committee resorted to t h e arbi- trary analysis of headcounts. Completely ignoring qualitative factors, the commit- tee, for example, appropriated more mon- ey to Michigan State than the University because Michigan State has more people. But it costs more to educate a doctor than a hotel manager, and more to edu- cate a graduate student than an under- Editorial Staff' MARCIA ABRAMSON ................r..... Co-Editor JIM HECK............ .................. Co-Editor MARTIN HIRSCHMAN .. Summer Supplement Editor JIM FORRESTER .. .. ........ Summer Sports Editor PHIL HERTZ....... Associate Summer Sports Editor ERIC PERGEAUX, JAY CASSIDY ......Photo Editor NIGHT EDITORS: Joel Block, Nadine Cohodas, Harold Rosenthal, Judy Sarasohn. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS: Lorna Cherot, Erika Hoff, Scott Mixer, Sharon Weiner. Sports Staff JOEL BLOCK, Sports Editor ANDY BARBAS, Executive Sports'Editor BILL CUSUMANO............ Associate Sports Editor JIM FORRESTER ........... Associate Sports Editor ROBIN WRIGHT ..:.......: Associate Sports Editor JOE MARKER..................Contributing Editor graduate. And the University supplies 70 per cent of the graduate and professional degree of all public institutions in t h e state, but will get only 10 per cent of the proposed budget's higher-education allo- cation. [N THE END, naturally, the legislature will be cutting its own throat as well as purse strings. By forcing the Univer- sity into a tuition hike to raise the $2 million necessary" for even basic opera- tions next' year, our out-of-state tuition may become the highest of a n y state- supported college in the- country. It was a tight race this year, but Ver- mont barely beat us out with, the highest tuition for out-of-state students. N e x t year, with an anticipated substantial hike, we may well become the leader. No doubt this will deter many students from coming here. A self-perpetuating region- alism will develop, as indeed it has begun already. And regionalism is certainly not conductive to quality education. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 'Unite to fight the repression' To the Editor:v AND THEN THERE ARE 100 faculty members, whose salaries are not pro- vided for in the budget. The members, as in past practice, have already been hired. What does t h e state legislature expect the University to do now - face a breach of contract suit? Traditionally, the House has added some funds. Certainly they will not pand- er to the arbitrary prejudices of the Sen- ate. It will be difficult- for them to repair all the damage that has been done, but we can hope their efforts will not be to- tally uisuccessful. Vice President Smith has said this kind of financial malnutrition is guaranteed to drive the University down the road to- ward mediocrity. We're getting there; and the committee is behind us all the way. -SHARON WEINER -JIM HECK i 1 I WONDER HOW many of you who are reading these lines were at the West Park concert, this past Sunday? Did you all groove the scene and have a really great high? - good. I was there, too, and I want to tell you some of my impressions. First of all, I'd like to know whether you felt just a tiny, bit guilty over there in the sun? No? Well, that's funny. Did those of you who wore your $30 (or is it $35) African shirts know that there are poorhungry black 'kids less than five miles away (extremely well-hidden from the road so that you would never see them by chance) in Willow Run Village? And you)cats with -your $35 (or is it $45) genuine leather boots, did you give five minutes of thought to the fact that a full battle dress armed company of troops attacked the dorms at Greensboro, N.C.? And you c4te little sexy chicks with your mini skirts and $30 tinted granny glasses- do you give one good "god damn about the fact that U.S. Army helicopters drop- ped "chemical irritants developed against the. NLF in Vietnam" on the center of the Berkeley cam- pus? AND YOU GRAD students whose. secure futures are virtually assured, are you jaded by the Vietnam death reports (430 this week)? I know that it disturbs most of you ia bit) when you think of it, but why even bother to think of it when you can watch the MC-5 screaming about "revo- lution." After all, you "agree" with what they are saying, don't you? Well, kiddies, that's all a lot of gibberish! The MC-5 is nothing but a bunch of middle class kids talking to middle class kids. It ain't revolution baby, and it's, never gonna be revolution. Sure these guys are better then anything that we had before. Sure the hippy movement is a good thing. Sure they're both for more freedom and that's a great thing. But one should never lose sight of the really important things. Don't be misled into diverting your attention and energy to secondary issues. UNIVERSITY students fell for it hook line and sinker last year: student power in order to abolish the language requirementsa(no- body seemed to pay much atten- tion to the fact that on north campus they're conducting real war research). And all of you chicks with your woman's libera- tion movement (which is not to be ignored) -but really-isn't it kind of irrelevant? As Tom Hay- den said last year, all of these things are at best diversionary, and at worst, counter-revolution- ary. They are just giving more leisure time to middle class kids, and not at all helping the poor and oppressed people of the world. COME ON YOU bourgeois SDS and others, put your money whtere your mouth is. Protest--demon- strate-do something-anything to show your sympathy with the black students at Ferris State and Greensboro, the people at Berke- ley, the troops in Vietnam, the wretched of the earth. Unite and build a strong organization now -so that we can all fight the coming repression. -Prof. Joel Smoller Mathematics department May 27 Letters to the Editor should be mailed to the Editorial Di- rector or delivered to Mary Rafferty in. the Student Pub- lications business office in the Michigan Daily building. Let- ters should be typed,. double- spaced and normally should not exceed 250 words. The Editorial Directors reserve the right to edit all letters submitted. have gotten poor preparation in ghetto high schools. Black enrollment at Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth and Cornell is rapidly approaching or has al- ready reached ten to fifteen per cent of the total student popula- tion. The exclusive Seven Sisters schools in the East expect to have a freshman class which is 13 per cent black. THE UNIVERSITY is' lagging far behind these pacesetters. As of last year, black enrollment at the University was 4.5 per cent, well below the percentage of blacks of the population of the state. Yet Clyde Vromam, admissions director, says, "We're not like some schools which have just be- gun recently to admit students from disadvantaged groups-pull- ing hundreds of people off the streets in late August for Sep- tember enrollment." But the Uni- versity is still far behind some others; we obviously have little room to talk. PERHAPS ITS this approach and the attitude behind it which scares many blacks from applying to predominantlywhite schools in the first place. And the colleges have not sought out talented blacks to reassure them they would be treated like students and no* curiousities. This University and others have sucessfully ignored accusations of racism in the past by vaunting their liberal images and empha- sizing they keep no admissions records by race. NORTHERN LIBERAL univer- sities watched the fight for In- tegration in the South with rapt attention for fifteen years. Finally black militants have demonstrated the twin issues of school desegre- gation and institutional racism di- rectly concern them too. If American institutions of high- er learning are truly "liberal" they will respond quickly and energetic- ally to the challenge of the black militants. It's about time. Y, Warring to secure a soccer field; to destroy a Peoples' Park (Editor's note: The following article writ- ten by Mr. DeWitt is reprinted with his permission. Mr. DeWitt is a lecturer of physics at therBerkeley campus.) By HUGH DeWITT Daily Guest Writer BERKELEY FOR MORE THAN a week the Uni- versity campus and parts of the city of Berkeley have b e e n under military occupation by police and the National Guard. Several times t h e trouble in Berkeley has been on the level of open warfare. Under these circumstances research in theoretical physics no matter how interesting, my own and that of my students, seems remote and irrelevant- Besides it is damned hard to think about physics with the noise of heli- copters overhead and with tear gas coming in through the windows. As a concerned and worried citizen I am trying to participate in activities in Berkeley to help'bring the trouble to an end. However in addition to what- ever I can do here, it occurs to me that it may be useful to tell my view of what is happening here to people around the country. The reporting in newspapers and by the wire services is never complete and is often dis- torted. Furthermore the moods and feelings of p e o p 1 e involved in the troubles are often lost in short news stories. " THE PRESENT TROUBLES began with a controversy over the use of a" city block of University land just east of Telegraph Avenue and three blocks .south of the campus. The ,land was acquired by the university two years ago. At that time the land was filled \with rooming houses t h a t provided cheap housing for students and resi- dents of the south campus area. These people were evicted and t h e houses torn down last summer. Since then the land has stood ugly and em- pty, and became a vast mud flat this past winter. According to some uni- versity master plan, this piece of land was to h a v e an intramural soccer field built on it at some unspecified time in the future. While a soccer field is certainly in- nocuous it is important to understand that the university already has sev- eral playing fields, an d no student group has expressed any need for an- other one. On the other hand there is a great need for some kind of a park in the south campus area, and b o t h the City of Berkeley and the univer- sity have been very slow to acknow- ledge this need. The residents of the south campus area include ordinary working peo- ple, students, student drop-outs, a n d all varieties of kids commonly called 'hippies'. Among these people th'e r e are drug addicts, Trotskyites, Mao- ists, anarchists, tionar es, artists,] self-styled revolu- poets, and even kids who hold regular jobs. Some of these 'street people' or 'dissidents' are very much alienated from normal straight society. A short stretch of Telegraph Avenue is their gathering area; this street has cafes, hippie stores, some good restaurants, some elegant stores, and some excellent bookstores. Gen- erally we find it a charming area to walk through day or evening, though the Berkeley police regard it as a den of iniquity. Some of the 'residents of the area are 1 o n g haired and unwashed, some are disreputable and obnoxious, but most seem harmless to me regardless of the wild political ideas that a r e commonly heard. The Berkeley po- lice and some people in the City gov- ernment regard these 'street people' as a grave threat to established so- ciety. SEVERAL WEEKS AGO after the heaviest of the winter rains were ov- er some of these 'street people' got the idea that it would be nice to plant grass in the empty university block of land. The area was unfenced, un- posted, and there was no indication of when t h e promised soccer field would be constructed. The idea rap- idly caught on and soon there was a spontaneous movement to convert part of the mud flat into a little park. They did a nice job in a short time. Grass, flowers and shrubs were plant- ed; walk ways were constructed; and swings were put up for children. The area became known as Peoples' Park. For some of the kids who worked on the park this work may have been the first constructive activity t h e y had engaged in for months. The question is often asked: why did the-kids take over land that did, hot belong to them without asking permission of the proper authorities, i.e. the University Administration that owned the land? That question may never have occurred to the rath- er disorganized street people, and if it had they could remember a bad precedent in dealing with authorities. Last summer a group of them had formally and politely asked the City of Berkeley for permission to close Telegraph Ave. on July 4 and hold a street carnival. Although there is precedent for this kind of activity in Berkeley the request at that time had been ridiculed and denied. The resulting trouble last summer led to severe repression by the Berk- eley police. Peace was only restored after a group of churches and syna- gogues convinced the City Council to grant permission for the street carn- ival, keep the police away, and let civilian monitors f r o m the church groups supervise the carnival. I was one of the monitors at that July 4 party, and I can testify as to how well behaved these south campus people were when the police stayed far away. IN ANY CASE this spring an un- used mudflat was turned into a very useful and pretty park by residents of the area - but without permis- sion. It should have been regarded as a golden opportunity by the univer- sity to do something useful for itself and the community. Faculty members in landscape arch- itecture wanted to help the kids de- velop the land, sociologists wanted to study this apparently spontaneous enterprise on the part of the kids, One suspects that Chancellor Heyns acted under' pressure to prove to the iRegents that he was being firm. It was a stupid undiplomatic move on the part of Heyns, and brought out the very predictable protests and demonstrations from the street peo- ple. ON MAY 15 some of the street kids tore down the newly erected No Tres- passing signs, and tried to obstruct the construction of the fence around Roughly wounded; from bird a hundred people , were most of the wounds were shot, and were not too ser- ious. Several people received much more serious from buck shot. O n e man was blinded, and one man died four days later. IN 12 YEARS of living in Berkeley this episode was the worst that I had seen. I believe that there was no jus- tification whatever for the shooting, despite the claim of Sheriff Madigan X.. . . . . ... . "The police chased any groups of demonstrators they could find, clubbing them as hard as they could. .. police started shooting with shot guns ... eyewitnesses report that the police shot indiscrimi- nately in all directions . . .................. "On Wednesday afternoon the land. At noon a large number of mothers and children tried to have a demonstration there in support of the park. Large numbers of people gathered and large numbers of police w e r e brought in from Oakland to supple- ment the Berkeley police. In my opinion the police around here are singularly unqualified for crowd con- trol work. (They rapidly turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot situation, and before the afternoon was over the trouble became a war. At first only tear gas was used, and it was strewn around liberally over several blocks. Next the police chased any groups of demonstrators they could f i n d, clubbing them as hard as they could. Usually, the long-haired kids got the worst beatings, but in short order the police were clubbing anybody t'h a t was in' front of them. Some of the demonstrators or dissidents threw bottles and stones at the police, par- ticularly the Alameda Sheriff's Dep- uties, who have proved themselves to be particularly vicious SOON THE POLICE started shoot- ing with shot guns. Once the order and Governor Reagan that it started as a matter of self-defense. The po- lice can hardly be blamed for being ordered to defend the University land, but their escalation of violence was stupid and disgusting. ON SATURDAY morning the Na- tional Guard appeared in force all over Berkeley, concentrated around the campus. Generally the National Guard soldiers just stand guard, and appear bored and unhappy. They don't provoke incidents the way the police so often do.Theone case of a soldier bayonneting a boy walking away appears to have been an anom- aly. Throwing tear gas into any group of people has become a daily occur- rence; usually it is the police who do it. Governor Reagan has declared a State of Emergency a n d says that troops will stay until order is restor- ed. He is apparently unable to reco- gnize that the continued presence of masses of outside p oli c e and the troops contribute to and often incite the disorder. On Tuesday after a victim of Thursday's shooting died, a group of students and other people wanted to something like mustard gas; it caus- ed skin blisters as well as severe eye irritation. This cloud of gas swept in- to several university buildings, dis- trubed a number of classes, sa m e went into the windows of the student hospital on campus, and then t h e wind carried a cloud of it into the Strawberry Canyon Recreational Ar- ea. It was a warm day and a 1 a r g e number of students, wives, and child- ren were around the swimming pool. The children started to scream with pain, and the area had to be evacu- ated fast. One person with an asth- matic condition was near death for a short time. This result of the gas at- tack was not reported in local papers as far as I know. IT HAS BECOME very difficult for any academic activity to function on the University campus. Several de- partments and about 200 individual professors have said that they will not teach until the police and the Guard leaves. I concur with this stand complete- ly. In the City of Berkeley it is get- ting to be dangerous to come down town during the day because of gas an danger of being arrested, 497 people on one street were swept up yesterday by the Guard, arrested, and taken to the Santa Rita Prison Farm (our local concentration camp). Bail was set at $800 on a charge of illegal assembly. Anybody on the street was arrested whether demonstrating or not. IN MY OPINION the responsibility for the war in Berkeley must be shared by the University Administra- tion and Governor Reagan. With a little flexibility on the part of Chan- cellor Heyns several days ago I think the original Peoples' Park issue could have been resolved to the satisfaction of most people. (Incidentially the university students yesterday voted overwhelmingly in favor of the park; if the university ever builds its soc- cer field now, it is likely to be boy- cotted. Ai l Art National Guard helicopter sprayed gas all over the Sproul Plaza ... it causes skin blisters . ..the. cloud swept into the buildings, the hos- pital, and then the wind carried a cloud of it into the ,Strawberry Canyon Recreational Area. "It was a warm day and a large number of students, wives and children were around the swirm.