Seventy-Sixth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS May 25: Variations on a Theme by Lewis . 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH. NEWS PHONE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the inidividual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 1966 NIGHT EDITOR: MEREDITH EIKER Two Studies of Campus Sex: Foolishness and Good Advice THERE ARE RARE OCCASIONS when the best and the worst thinkers on a particular topic present their views simul- taneously for public consideration. Yes- terday, however, two studies of sex and the college student appeared-one high- ly alarmed by current campus practices and urging stricter regulation, and the other soberly investigative and recom- mending greater understanding - and the contrast between the two is almost ridiculous. AN ARTICLE in yesterday's Daily, en- titled, "Women in Men's Dormitories Forces Love Nests," reports the findings of Dr. Graham Blaine, a Harvard psychia- trist. Blaine maintains that college stu- dents are not "psychologically mature enough for adult sexuality," but have been pressed into experimentation with sex by the permissiveness of college ad- ministrations. While supporting evidence for Dr. Blaine's assertions was not reported (es- pecially the definition of whatever "adult sexuality" may be) in this article, it did report the basis for Max Lerner's argu- ment that college girls are using sex as a means to "get through" to someone-a 54- page transcript of a "racy, repetitive, con- fused, honest, witty, pathetic, and hilar- ious" conversation between nine college girls. ONE PERHAPS can forgive Mr. Lerner's faulty sampling techniques, but it is impossible to forgive the flights of in- fancy that follow in his comments on what sex should be. These remarks might have been culled from a poor nineteenth century novel by a contemporary Sir Walter Scott. For example, "Instead of the happiness of the 'ad- justed,' sex can mean joy. Perhaps you are walking along the beach with someone you love, perhaps sitting with him at an outdoor concert, perhaps driving with him through the night along a dark stretch of road with the mountains looming in the distance - and you find yourself wanting to shout aloud with joy. DESPITE THE UNDOUBTEDLY good in- tentions of their analyses, the problem is that the conclusions that these men have reached, based on somewhat shaky evidence, are largely irrelevant to the college student experimenting and at- tempting to cope with sex. Both men have assumed a moralizing posture that first alienates their student audience (al- though it probably will not alienate col- lege administrators) and ultimately loses its attention. More important, they have assumed that their particular attitudes toward sex Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Mich. Pubished daily Tuesday through Saturday morning. and their concepts of the ideal sexual experience are valid for everyone. Con- 'sider Dr. Blaine's terminology, "adult sexuality" and Max Lerner's "exultation and defiance." Both are highly subjec- tive points of view on the whole topic, and an attempt to apply them to others can only be harmful. Lastly, any attempt that would be made by college administrators to seriously en- force or encourage some of the practices and attitudes advanced by these two men would, rightly, be met by resentment from students and the reply, again rightly, that it is none of their (the administra- tors) damned business. In the process, any possibility that students would go to their administration or health services for ad- vice on sexual matters is diminished, because of fear of reprisal or punish- ment by the college. T1HIS POINT brings us to the second re- port released recently, by the Commlt- tee on the College Student of the Group for . the Advancement of Psychiatry - "Sex and the College Student." This book, after a frank discussion of the sex- ual experiences and problems that the student may encounter, addresses itself to college administrators, and particular- ly to the role they should play in these matters. As a review of the book in The New Republic pointed out, "This book has been written to advocate a kind of civilized consideration, and it concludes with 'guidelines' aimed at 'preferable if not ideal' administrative attitudes." Most important, the book states unequivocably that sex, "when privately practiced with appropriate attention to the sensitivities of other people, should not be the direct concern of the administration." This is a far cry from the angry, and somewhat foolish outburst of Dr. Blaine, or the emotional ecstacy advocated by Max Lerner, and, while its hard-nosed recommendations may have little ap- peal to administrators who must deal with outraged parents and suspicious voters and state legislators, "Sex and the College Student" offers calm recommendations to remedy a long-neglected problem. IT WOULD BE NICE to think that the Blaine report will be read by adminis- trators with the skepticism it deserves and that "Sex and the College Student" and its sober recommendations will re- ceive the greatest share of their atten- tion, but considering past experience, this is unlikely. One can hope, however, that the good advice in this study, when com- pared with the other two, will have a moderating effect on the squeamishness of college administrators in dealing with matters of sex. -CHARLOTTE A. WOLTER Co-Editor By LEONARD PRATT SOME PEOPLE like to compare student government historically at the University to a Phoenix when it's really more like a chameleon: it hasn't come and gone so much as it has disguised itself from time to time. Current proposals for estab- lishing a system of advisory boards to the University's president and vice-presidents could, if handled correctly, turn out to be one of the best of these permutations. IN THE PAST there has usually been a difference between Student Government Council, the legiti- mate student representative body, and student government, those people who were really doing things on behalf of the students, Actual student government, dis- tinct from SGC, was carried on by ad hoc student groups or, often, by The Daily. These groups, though not a legitimate student government, had the information, intelligence and will necessary to take actions on behalf of the student body as a whole. Some- times these actions coincided with those taken with SGC, sometimes not. But in very few cases was SGC the real motivating force be- hind them, though it often ap- proved them after the fact. Though this is less true today than it has been in the past, largely because of the more realis- tic interests of SGC members and the better climate in which they are operating, it is still true to a surprising degree. . In a way, this informal student government is a good thing. It en- sures both that motivated students will have easy access to power and that student governments will be dominated by no one group or approach. It also provides the University community with more fresh ideas than it can handle. BUT IT ALSO has important drawbacks. There is very little continuity to this kind of student government; as soon as the orig- inators of the "movement" grad- uate, it dies. Moreover there is no legitimacy to it; there's nothing there that a Regent or a vice- president can easily distinguish from other, to them, distasteful and alarming, forms of activism. Hence there is little hope for such student government to be accept- ed as a formalized part of the University's power structure. The fact that Vice-President for Student Affairs Richard Cutler's housing advisory board changed all this is what makes it so important. It not only expressed, but actually was, the formal inclusion of stu- dents in a major University de- cision-making area, dormitory construction. The fact that the present pro- posal to create similar, permanent and nonspecific advisory boards to all the University's major execu- tives can change it even more is what makes it so important. PLANS FOR these boards are still hazy and, as one advocate put it, "they might just happen." But generally the plan calls for a group of students, who would have petitioned to and been ap- proved by SGC and Graduate Stu- dent Council, to work with each of the executives. They would be re- sponsible to SGC and GSC, which are themselves considering some sort of "assembly" to unify their work with the boards and in other areas. The plans certainly aren't spe- cific enough, but as first approxi- mations they don't sound bad. They would give both councils access to the information and per- sonalities the lack of which has prevented them from doing much previously. It would permit the union of power and legitimacy that student government . has often lacked in the past. And, for what it's worth, the hearts of the' students who are trying to set up the system are certainly in the right place. That may be worth a good deal. AS SECOND approximations, however, it should be recognized that there will be some good- sized managerial problems in mak- ing 'sure the system fulfills its promise. A major problem will certainly be the simple staffing of the ad- visory boards. Their members should be selected from the stu- dent body at large; there is no other way to ensure the free ac- cess which was one of the major benefits of the system that is now evidently passing. Yet they should also be provided with a two or three-week series of briefing ses- sions on just what they are sup- posed to be doing in their com- mittees and suggestions as to how they might go abput doing it; if there is anything that will kill the boards faster than an inbred nature, it is ignorance, The boards must never be al- lowed to become a sop to campus activists. If there's a large enough group of students mad about something, SOC should never ig- nore them in the blind belief that its advisory boards are taking care of things well enough. If there are that many people highly dis- turbed, it is probably a sign that the advisory boards are either not working properly or are out of their element with that particular problem. In either case, the boards existence must never be the excuse for stopping wide-spread campus participation in an issue. IT SHOULD also be recognized that the boards are not going to be an immediate answer to any- thing but the campus communica- tions problems, and will not even be a completely satisfactory an- swer to that. Their simple exist- ence will not change much. More- over, some boards will certainly be more successful in whatever activities they attempt than others. In both cases SGC and GSC may have 10 or 20 discour- aged people on their hands; a good personnel manager will be needed to keep the boards alive and functioning under such con- ditions. But perhaps the most basic problem is the one that no one has evidently noticed yet. Almost to a man, the students who have created the University climate and the specific ideas which have en- gendered the advisory board sys- tem will be graduating at the end of next year. When they leave, they must leave more behind than some agreeable vice-presidents. FOR IF THE current leaders of this advisory board "movement" do not find some good replace- ments during the coming fall semester, the University will lose an effective advisory board system when it loses them. New blood must be brought in and given some . experience and authority while the minds who created the system are here to tell them the name of the game. 4R A Lawyer's View of "In Loco Pare ntis" EDITOR'S NOTE: The fol- lowing is a condensed version of a-speech by Dr. William W. Van Alstyne of the Duke University Law faculty. Dr. Van Alstyne, an active member of the AAUP and the ACLU, is an authority on the legal rights of students and universities. Collegiate Press Service As COURTS have felt that they would be mistaken to interfere with the power of parents to punish their children for playing with matches, so they have felt that they would be mistaken to interfere with surrogate parents- colleges and universities - which deemed it wise to punish their students for playing with sex, to- bacco, alcohol, politics, race, or some other phenomenon the re- sponsible use of which presum- ably required greater maturity, ex- perience, and wisdom than reckless adolescents possessed .. . The student has been regarded as an infant, the college as an extension of his parent whose dis- cretion is virtually unlimited, and the legal rights of students have been defined by contracts which uniformly provide that continued attendance at a college or univer- sity is almost entirely a matter of sufferance or privilege revoc- able at will and without cause ... The heritage of college law has stressed the primary value of in loco parentis and the primary law of contract... IT HAS BEEN pointed out that vast numbers of college students are of ages to which even the traditional view of in loco par- entis has never applied in law .. . The law has never fixed a uni- form age of maturity in deter- mining the dependence of a per- son's actions upon the consent of his parents. In most jurisdictions, one may marry without his parents' con- sent by the age of 18. He may se- cure a driver's license, take a job, leave home, join political bod- ies, associate with religious as- semblies, and pursue a variety of other interests whether or not his parents consent. Similarly, he is often individually .responsible un- der general law well before he be- comes 21. In short, even were colleges pre- sumed to absorb the power of nonconsent of parents, we would be obliged to recognize that par- ental authority is not unlimited even with respect to teenagers. BUT THE PRINCIPAL failure of the analogy is not a failure in law. It is, rather, a failure in function. I would suggest that a university is not an automaton for the mechanical execution of pre- sumed parental desires. Indeed, if it is to merit the dignity of being considered a "university," it ought not determine either the neces- sity for rules or the appropriate- ness of not having certainrules simply by trying to reflect the consensus of parental desires .. . Parental opinion respecting non- academic matters such as styles of dress, degrees of social per- missiveness, and the natureeof places which students choose to attend ought not control univer- sity policy. A university is not the extension of the parent, but an institution committed to the pro- vision of educational opportunities and the value of critical inquiry. Unless a rule can be shown to be relevant to the conservation of thesehconcerns, it is questionable whether the rule is anything more than an act of supererogation. In short, the fact that a proposed rule might reflect or not reflect parental will is unpersuasive eith- er that the rule is therefore right or wrong, or-what is far more to the point--that it is therefore rel- evant or irrelevant to the college. NONE OF THIS is to assert, of course, that the student absorbs any special immunity from re- sponsibilities appropriately impos- ed upon him elsewhere or by oth- ers . . . The student who violates a valid law limiting sexual rela- tions or regulating the consump- tion of alcohol is not to be pre- ferred in court over a non-student pursuing an identical course of conduct. The question is, however, wheth- er such persons should addition- ally have to answer to their col- leges. The answer in each case depends, I believe, on whether the student had separately offended some distinct and independent in- terest of the college as an aca- demic enterprise. The question is not whether he may have offend- ed the interests of others, for a university is not properly the vas- sal or agent or policeman of other groups or associations who are amply represented through their own group influence and through general legislation equally applic- able to all. IT SEEME TO ME inappropriate, therefore, for a college to formu- late its standards purely and sim- ply to conform with an assumed consensus of the personal and widely differing values of par- ents. Correspondingly, it seems to me to be doubtful that it should attempt to justify its authority over students on the claim that it is acting as an agent of the par- ents, in loco parentis. The propriety of its rules is based, rather, on the reasonable- ness of its independent judgment that its standards are essential to the protection of its educational enterprise which otherwise could not go forward . . . There is, at heart, no one-to-one correlation either between the powers of par- ents and the powers of universi- ties, nor the legitimate interests of parents and the legitimate inter- ests of universities. The rationale of in loco parentis is neither a nec- essary nor sufficient justification of -college rules and collegiate au- thority. I would also suggest that we and the courts have not been fair in judging the proper scope of university authority by casual in- spection of "contracts" of matric- ulation, for these contracts lack nearly all of the essentials that entitle ordinary contracts to re- spect as the best basis for deter- mining the legitimate prerogatives of the contracting partiesg..is THE APPORTIONMENT of rights and powers by contract characterizes progressive societies, howeveD, only to the extent that individuals possess a bargaining power or the opportunity to ac- quire such power that their ne- gotiations with others may gen- erally operate under conditions of equality . . . It is a rare student who is properly advised of the rules he "agrees" to observe before he signs the "contract" in which he "consents" to those rules .... Since handbooks typically con- tain anhomnibus rule reserving to the college the right to suspend or dismiss the student for any reason satisfactory to the college alone, the contract is largely an illusory promise on the part of the college. More importantly, however, a student is generally in no position to "bargain" with a college: the contract he confronts is non-ne- gotiable, and he lacks sufficient influence to determine its terms ... Under these circumstances, it is really bordering on the inde- cent for colleges to chide stu- dents who oppose particular rules by lecturing to them that they freely accepted these rules and ought not to have matriculated if they did not agree with them. In any case, these circumstances do make clear why it is that a college may not justify the rules it main- tains by the circular persuasion that they are precisely the rules to which the students themselves subscribed by contract. THE LEGAL reconciliation of student prerogatives and univer- sity powers will involve, I believe, a frank reassessment of the dual status of students and the discrete interests of universities. It will acknowledge that those who are students are simultaneously indi- viduals entertaining an assortment of interests by no means wholly of an academic character. It will recognize that these individuals may pursue their non-academic interests subject only to the same restraints as society, peer groups, parents, and others customarily attempt to bring to bear through their own separate connections with individuals who offend them, without gratuitous university sup- port. It will also recognize that col- leges are primarily places of edu- cationaladvancement, and not the arbiters of general standards. When the student defaults on rea- sonable minimum educational op- portunities of others, he may be disciplined by the institutions whose business it is to conserve and to administer these things... RECOGNITION will obtain, in short, that a college is not a sur- rogate parent, a surrogate state, a surrogate draft board, or a sur- rogate anything else. -w ~1 Guaranteed Income: Answer to Poverty? 'I ' J I l' U t \ y',1, . . " ; 4, '" ' z ; :Y, . }F + hw3f " . '. r ' 1 ' '.. .,. By DAVID KNOKE Special To The Daily T'HE WAR ON POVERTY pro- gresses under a cross-fire of charges of mismanagement of funds, of who should represent the poor, of how the federal, state and local governments would go bankrupt if all persons entitled to welfare benefits submitted claims, and of how the poor might orga- nize into an effective political lob- by. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote "The Affluent Society," stating that the United States had reach- ed a technical level of production which would see the eradication of pockets of poverty within 20 years. Eight years since, the prob- lem of distribution of material abundance remains as large as ever; if anything, Galbraith un- derestimated the extent of margi- nal poverty cases, part-time em- . ployed and those no longer seek- ing employment. Estimates today range up to 34 million Americans whose income and standard of living fall below the $3000 anual "minimum main- tenance level" of income for a family of four set by the Presi- dent's Council of Economic Ad- visors. WELFARE in the United States Boulding's "post-civilized world" describes it better.) One approach to the re-ordering of society that is gaining serious consideration is the guaranteed in- come. The idea probably goes back to 1888 in Ralph Bellamy's uptopian- fantasy scheme in "Looking Back- ward," but its most recent formu- lator and advocator is Robert Theobald, a British socio-econom- ist formerly associated with the European Common Market. His proposal, set forth in "Free Men and Free Markets," is for a basic economic security level of income which an individual and his de- pendents should receive from the federal government if he is un- able to earn it himself. THE DIFFERENCE between the welfare check and the Federal Guaranteed Minimum Income would be its universal applica- tion, without prior conditions, and an irrevocability that would free it from the onus of gift. The FG- MI would make the assurance of a decent standard of living a con- stitutionally inalienable right. Nor would the income tax struc- ture remain such that a family earning $2000 would have that amount deducted from the $3000 FGMI; the tax structure would be revised to allow the wage earner to retain a certain percentage of Revolution, cybernization, or sim- ply the Age of Automation, its implications are frightening. Even now, with the level of un- employment at its lowest in years, the trend towards computerization and automation of factory and clerical work is in full swing. The employes hardest hit at first are those with insufficient education to find work beyond the menial level at which they have been re- placed by machines. The Negro, the high school dropout, the dis- gruntled middle-aged laborer stuck at an unsatisfactory occupation, the part-time employe who re- mains at his job because he has no security to seek a better pay- ing, more congenial one - these are the first to suffer from the technological explosion. But not even the highly educat- ed are immune: the postal system, the internal revenue system, many other agencies of the federal gov- ernment are automating and turn- ing over workers. Routine draft- ing skills in engineering and tool and die construction can be done To Help, Not Destroy UR COMMITMENT was to a more accurately and quickly by electronic hands than human. THE OUTLOOK is for more of the same. Computers, now on time-sharing, will splurge like. crabgrass, invading the law office, the retail store, the laboratory, and eventually the private home. Computer technicians, administra- tive personnel, people in service- rendering capacities will get to- morrow's jobs. However, the sub- stantial part of the work force will find itself either with unsat- isfactory make-work occupations or with vast amounts of leisure time on hand. The centralization of produc- tion into an ever-increasing num- ber of human hands will confront the federal government, commit- ted to economic welfare since, the post World War II Keynesian rev- olution, with the need for a re- definition of producer-consumer relationships. THE BASIC IDEA of guaran- teed income as a "right" is to permit the security of sustenance of life, which has previously been so precarious to the majority of people. Even insurance programs and Social Security do not benefit those for one reason or another live on the margins of society. With the security that a guaran-, teed income permits, persons would feel free to break away from for- manner in which these people are permitted to become recipients. THE MOBILITY and leisure time that a combination of aultomation and guaranteed income would provide, of course, present new, unforeseeable problems. In a world where the intelligent elite works and the uneducated can play, the sustaining of initia- tive and interest in these people would be a gigantic task. Perhaps the government could foster an in- terest in human and natural re- sources, similar to William James' proposed "moral equivalent to war" which would have channeled energy into constructive "conser- vation corps" to restore the natur- al beauty of the abused land. Be- side such immense efforts the Peace Corps and Job Corps would dwindle to insignificance of imag- ination. Patterns of consumption could be kept high by the demand and means of purchase that a gratui- tous income would provide the en- tire populace. The material abund- ance and social mobility would no doubt produce a cultural partici- pation and enrichment that would act as a vital feedback to rein- force the economic soundness of the country. TO BUILD the Great Society upon the framework of the tech- nological abundance of the cyber- fit s, 'v ?,, ,, ' , ; f;: , / .., ir/ // . r I q