Sev enty-Fifth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS THE END OF LEARNING .. . The Need for an Overall Philosophy Oiniot PreF ree, 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN AiBOR, MICH. NEWS PHONE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily ex press the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. TUESDAY, 30 MARCH 1965 NIGHT EDITOR: LEONARD PRATT Students Should Participate In Academic Policy-Making MUST A STUDENT'S desperate cry to be heard be an empty cry, a vain at- tempt to assert his influence in important decisions?, The course evaluation booklet is one such cry, and even if it is ultimately fu- tile, it .is perhaps enough for now that students have made an effort. Some- fow, they wanted to affect the quality of education they receive at the Univer- sity. Instead of being unnecessarily in- sulting, they have constructed a rational, mature means of telling their teachers and their colleagues what they think of existing courses. Hopefully, the booklet will influence future students in their selection of courses and those professors who receiv- ed poor ratings will find their 400-seat lecture rooms peopled with only 50 stu- dents-those who did not read the book- let. But most important, these professors might then change their .way of teach- ing or perhaps leave the University. If something like this does happen, the students can pride themselves on having influenced at least some decisions within the rank of the faculty and administra- tion. If something does not happen, it will be painfully clear that students have lit- tle or no influence in evaluating their professors. Yet some students do feel they have a right to take part in deciding what kind of teacher will lecture to them three times a week. In any case, there are no strong reasons why the recipients of education should not have some say in how they are educated. TODAY WE HAVE efficient machines which can make important decisions for us, answer questions and tell us what to do. If they were hard to develop, they are easy to depend on: everyone would sometimes like to be told what to do, would sometimes like to forget his sense of responsibility. The existence of decision-making ma- chines makes it easier for man to become irresponsible. Too often, administrators are like machines. And faculty-those who are sometimes unresponsive to the reactions and desires of their students-can also be machine-like. BUT IF MAN is going to function qua man, he must use his own resources, his own reason. He should not depend on despiritualized strategy-makers who treat SA cling Editorial Staff ROBER JOHNSTON, Editor LAUREN(E KIRStiBAIJM JEFFREY GOODMAN Managing Editor Editorial ]Director JUDITH WARREN ................Personnel Director THOMAS WENBERG .................. ports Editor LAUREN BARR.........Associate Managing Editor SCOTT BLECH ........... Assistant Managing Editor ROERTIPPLER.....Associate Editorial Director GAIL ,BLUtMERO ... ~.... ......... Magaiine Editor LLOYD (IRAP"............. Associate Sports Editor JAMES KESON..............Chief Photographer NIGHT EDITORS: w. Rexford Benoit, David Block, John Bryant, Michael Juliar, Leonard Pratt. ASSISTANT NIGHT EDITORS: Bruce Bigelow, Sue Collins Michael Dean, John Meredith. Peter Sara- sohn, Barbara Seyfried, Bruce Wasserstein. The Daily is a member of the Associated Press and Collegiate Press Service. Subscription rates: $4.50 semester by carrier ($5 by mail); $8 yearly by carrier ($9 by mail). Second class postage paid at Ann Arbor, Mich. Published daily Tuesday through Sunday mornig. others like x's in tic tac toe. For when he becomes dependent on these strategy makers, he does become the manipulated x. Eventually, subconsciously, he abro- gates his powers of being human. He does not learn responsibility be- cause he does not need responsibility in that kind of world. The University can provide excellent opportunities for the student to develop a sense of responsibility-if only he seizes those opportunities. The persisting trou- bles of a growing university affect the student, and because of this, the student should have a part in solving them. He must not allow others to solve problems which are in part his own. THE COURSE evaluation booklet-fol- lowing on the heels of the Student Action League and the Student Employes' Union-is the most recent manifestation of students' consciousness that they should be able to participate in Univer- sity affairs. One other vital issue in the area of academics is the "publish or perish" syn- drome. It is an issue with great relevance to students, for in part it determines whether they are taught by creative teachers or creative publishers. Should faculty be promoted by their output of academic papers, books, reports, disser- tations? Should faculty members perish from the University classroom if they don't produce reams of intellectual dia- logue? Most students would answer with an apathetic "no," but more than apathy is necessary. (One thinks back to the days when Robert Frost was on campus as poet-in- residence. When there was a change in Presidents in the '20's, the new President of the University asked Frost what he was doing here, what his function, what had he produced. Frost left Ann Arbor.) THE RECENT PROTESTS at Yale Uni- versity over the link between tenure policies and one professor's publishing record were an example of students at- tempting to Influence academic decisions -both through reasoned argument and positive action. The events at Yale were not an attempt to dictate policy; ac- cording to one student leader there, the students were merely demanding "com- munication with the administration." Yet even communication is a lot these days. Both at Yale and at the University the student does not have a clear definition of his authority in policy making. The stu- dents at Yale learned this lesson too late. The students at this University, realizing the need for such a definition, should help formulate it now. Such an opportunity for free- discus-E sion exists in the literary college steering committee's open forum this Friday Stu- dents and faculty members are invited to discuss the "Student Role in Evaluat- ing Individual Faculty." Hopefully, they will do more than discuss: hopefully, they will begin to establish a relationship with the decision makers. AT 3 P.M. IN ROOM 3B of the Union, anyone interested can begin to assert his sense of responsibility. --JUDY STONEHILL By JOHN J. MANNING, JR. TEACHING is the world's most exciting job. And, particularly for the young person, it had bet- ter be. If teaching, for the older professor, has somehow lost its savor arnd its fascination, perhaps vby default or from simple weari- ness, then that is merely sad. But sometimes the teaching fel- for' the young instructor, testing the first time his new spurs just awarded in the academic lists, will fail to see in teaching the rich and colorful zest it accords; already his Monday-Wednesday- Friday efforts have taken on the dull routine of mental calisthenics. This is fully tragic. Thank God not many persist. The young instructor, probably nearing the heady satisfaction of achieving his terminal graduate degree, has many irreplaceable qualities going for him. His youth- ful eagerness, his maturing in- tellectual curiosity and his close commitment to study, all contri- bute to the probability of his be- ing at once an angry young man and an interesting person. His particular and principal difficulty (if, hopefully, it occurs to him), given the drastically different kinds of responsibility he must meet, lies in accommodating him- self to a viable and mature phi- losophy of education. IT IS not enough to fructify and verify the often random principles and policies which have somehow managed to retain significance throughout his own education. Once he has committed himself, for the rest of hs life, to the business of educating young people, the young instructor finds him- self trying to integrate these ran- dom snatches of educational thought. He finds questions of curriculum and course loads and extracurricular activities are im- portant to his undergraduate stu- dents. He discovers at the same time that the resolution of such specific issues demands of hm a more thoroughly contemplated system of educational values if he is going to speak to such mat- ters with wisdom, rather than out of the surface habits of his own undergraduate attitudes. If he is at all a thoughtful person, he will realize early that some integrating principle or pos- tulate is absolutely necessary if he is going to view the problems of his college or his university through lenses other than those supplied as "general issue" by his own discipline or department. And so he looks about his college for some signals. Sitting in his Angell Hall win- dow, contemplating the character and values of the Harvard of the West as it plods along a State Street still muddied by the snows of 1965, he will probably realize his search for an integrating phi- losophy of education seems at once both fascinating and out of date. For he will realize the great university he sees about him of- fers nothing at all in the way of an integrated, well-stated set. of principles or values which he can perceive, let alone define with any precision. HE WILL NOT necessarily con- clude this is wrong, or nasty or unfair. If he is honest, he will merely realize this is a necessary corollary of the facts of life he sees about him.' He will find no clear enuncia- tion of corporate direction, no per- ceptible sense that the central educational thrust of the univer- sity is this or that. He will realize that what is good and important and educationally significant has grown like a Cape Cod farmhouse -by gradual accretion-in the face of real educational needs and circumstances. It is, in a sense, an eminent testimony to a century and a half of usually prudent decision-making. But to say all this says little to our worried young educator. If he has any sense at all, he will distinguish easily between the generalized attitudes carved above the portals of Angell Hall and a solidly effective educational phi- losophy. He is looking for a prin- ciple, a value which can inform and give meaning to his every- day experiences and problems. Just as a religion without a theol- ogy is quickly diluted to a pleasant hour's emotion on Sunday morn- ing, he realizes education with- out an interrelated, cohesive set of postulates, values and purposes must be weak, haphazard, vacil- lating and undirected. The Uni- versity is, of course, unprepared almost by definition to speak to this point, and so those eager for philosophical integrity must look elsewhere. LEST ALL THIS be considered as either grossly irreverent or unnecessarily cynical, let us con- sider a philosophically integrating principle of education, and try it out on Ann Arbor. Sir Philip Sid- ney, writing almost four hundred years ago, had something to say about educational philosophy. (I choose him merely for variety's sake. Aristotle, Plato and St. Thomas are to the avant garde such old hat that their names provoke philistinism, while for the conservatives they are almost em- barrassing.) "The ending end of all earth- 11 learning," wrote Sir Philip, "is virtuous action." Now that's educational philos- ophy. To preach it today, especial- ly that "virtuous" business, would probably tempt ragged pickets to your classroom door, demanding you be academically defrocked. It's a statement, nevertheless, that you can chew on without gagging on splinters. It implies volumes about man's mind and the part it plays in his overall personal development. It says something about the way knowledge operates and why knowledge is important, without merely insisting vaguely that it must be. It says something very relevant about the nature of edu- cation itself, without merely pre- suming education is an end in it- self. And it encompasses every dis- cipline going. It is humanistic, sensible and, if you insist, prac- tical. Old Sir Philip didn't intend it as a manifesto, of course; it mere- ly slipped out in the course of some remarks about the nature and value of literature. But it is the kind of concept which forces on you-once you've grappled with its assumptions and its implica- tions-an eminently well-organiz- ed and profound sense of what education is all about. It has the merit of avoiding pious things to say about education, while insist- ing that your own work, your own discipline, your own viewpoint be made to plug solidly into a larger philosophical whole. NOW I'M NOT suggesting we posture as sixteenth-century neo- platonists in order to function in Ann Arbor of the mid-sixties. I'm merely suggesting that Sir Philip's comment goes much farther to- ward saying something specific about the nature of education than our usual cliches about "de- veloping the mind" or "serving the people of Michigan." It also has something to say about the individual's place in the educa- tional process. The principal merit of Sir Philip's comment is that it does not try to enhance certain kinds of knowledge over other kinds, nor attempt to organize a myriad of disciplines within a quantita- tively structured pattern called either "hierarchy" or "distribu- tion." He is adressing himself solely to a level quite above (and central to) the institutional ques- tions of curricula, by the very fact that he is-commenting on the nature and purpose of knowledge in and for itself. It is ironically interesting to observe that such a view of knowl- edge was germane to an age in which the ova of scientific meth- odism were being fertilized. The rich and fertile womb of the 16th century labored on into the next like Horace's mountains, and the offspring were in many ways as disproportionate to that monu- mental childbirth. Method and procedural struc- ture (organization, program, sys- tem) have struggled to a vigorous adolescence. With the increasing accent on method, the vision of a centrally available philosophy of "all earthly learning" is no longer fashionable. Varied fields and approaches and disciplines contribute singly to the contrapun- tal clamor which has rendered the academic marketplace somehow reminiscent of the bazaar at Da- mascus. THE CONSEQUENCES of this are subtle but inescapable. Any effort to induce from the diversity of this University a sense of an integrating philosophy of edu- cation is either intellectually vain or practically myopic. Not only are we large, but we are method- ically and systematically frag- mented at the institutional level. A cursory glance at the vaguely stated fundamentalism of our catalogues, announcements and orientation handouts reveals a multiplicity of eminently sincere hopes, but not one belief. Another ingredient of this ne- cessarily generalized ambiguity of our educational posture is the in- creasing feeling that a university is constituted to reflect the chang- ing patterns of the society it serves. This may be democratic, but the university should be the last place on earth where democ- racy and the common denomina- tor should mean the same thing. All the pious clamorings in the name of "public monies" and 'service to the state" cannot con- vince one that a university can serve two masters, let alone two million. To the extent that a university reflects "the rapidly changing dy- namics of its social environment" more than it generates of itself the scholarly and quietly-consider- ed light which must be shed on that environment, to that extent that university is becoming an as- ... IS VIRTUOUS ACTION if he is to become a citizen of the world. To suggest today that The Mich- igan House Plan provides some frame of reference for the opera- tion of the university's residence halls is almost laughable. In per- haps no segment of the University have the economics of supply and demand effected such a wide- spread deviation from an original vision of purpose. Whatever the present merits and accomplishments of the halls (and there are still many), they are al- most exclusively the result of in- tense dedication, serious thought and long, hard hours of personal effort ongthe part of individuals. It is the Dave Van Looys, the Bill Connollys and the Jack Pypers of the system who are generating, of themselves, what otherwise would atrophy beneath the system's necessary interest in things other than educational. The residence halls' general headquarters, partly by default and partly for sound practical reasons, is a business office. Con- sidered as a system, the all-but- exclusive concerns of this cam- pus' dormitories are matters of monies, space for storing student bodies and food budgets. If any philosophy or attitude in- vests that system from the top, it concerns the need for making do logistically. One would wish even one good idea which had some- thing to do with the life of the mind originated in the course of a year from the center of that system. Such suggestions come instead from the fortunate imagination of those working daily in the halls themselves, and we are fortunate that, structurally, it is largely an OHN J. MANNING, JR., has his fingers in many pies: he is administrative assist- ant for junior-senior counselling in the literary college, an instructor in the English department, an unofficial mentor for num- erous students desiring academic and per- sonal advice and resident director of Fletcher Hall. In his third year here, he is also working for a PhD in 16th Century historiography and literature. sembly-line for other people's thinking. AS TENANTS on the soil of a large and publicly-owned univer- sity, we must admit there is an essential difference between the fundamental character of our in- stitution and that of other col- leges and universities within this nation. This is not to enforce the proposition that we are any worse, or inferior; it merely states that we are limited in a way that others are no. Thus, for example, the literary college must approach questions of curriculum in an a posteriori fashion. To suggest that there can be such a thing as an integrating discipline- such as philosophy (which, incidentally, provides an excellent one)-or a commonly acceptable approach-such as a "great books" curriculum (which is at least a good idea)-is neces- sarily condemned to heresy on this campus. The committee-room humor (a la Clark Kerr) about the univer- sity as a fragmented complex of varied interests held together by central heating or squabbles over parking spaces gains credence as we confront ourselves, coldly and without illusions. We can at least, gratefully, acknowledge that the University can assert that a gen- eralized commitment to excellence is making do in place of a more solidly specified philosophy. Considered broadly and within the universal scheme of things, all this does not convert us meanly into an educational also-ran. The next sunrise is not going to see us doomed to oblivion in the realm of higher education. And already I can hear dimly a grand "So What?" resounding from Markley Hall to the I-M Building. In response, I should like to point to some specific examples of the danger of operating vaguely, without a clear and integrated sense of what we're all about. Residence Halls No agency of the University constituted expressly to accom- modate the needs of students dem- onstrates so egregiously as its resi- dence halls the lack of a funda- mental thrust -of purpose, of edu- cational philosophy. Back in 1941, in his description of "The Michigan House Plan" then widely heralded and imitated as one of the most forthright and cohesive statements of what the University's dormitories were sup- posed to be all about, Professor Karl Litzenberg recorded that The Board of Regents has in- sisted . . . that the houses army of chiefs. Although the edu- cational niceties are trotted out at the beginning of each year, little is said from that point on to indicate a continuing conscious- ness of purpose of direction. As a result, the solid philosophical thrust of the original Michigan House Plan affords today no more than a quaint historical footnote to the present reality. The Greeks As that university-wide flatten- ing out of what is distinctive and integrating has muddled on, the fraternities and sororities have come 'to reflect the same trends. If the residence halls as a system have abdicated- any vested con- cern for the life of the mind, the greek houses have, to the extent that they have become a system, experienced a like dilution of qual- ity. Issues of discrimination and de- mocracy aside, a fraternity by def- inition ought to offer something distinctive, a quality of noblesse oblige, precisely because it pro- fesses to believe in something. Its very traditions and peculiar char- acteristic ought to invest in it a sense of quality and purpose which is at least quasi-philosophical. Instead, the economics of rush and the general fear of offending have made it impossible for a house to be special or distinctive in any way. "Advantages" are not at all the same things as "cri- teria." Because every student on campus is for some reason thought to have a "right" to join any of these fraternal clubs, the houses are constrained de facto from pro- fessing either a philosophy to which members might be expected to subscribe, or standards which go beyond gregariousness, weejuns and the badge (worn after six, yet!) of vests. What remains by default is merely a peculiar kind of living arrangement. The fraternities and sororities, which ought singly to present something clearly stated about their values, however di- vergent, can offer the student nothing more about the integra- tion of his educational attitudes than can the Tiffany Apartments. The Students Themselves And so it goes, especially with respect to the students themselves. Rare is the undergraduate who evidences some well-integrated vision of the purpose of his college or his curriculum. And sadly, those who approximate some clear, con- sistent view of what their under- graduate years are all about, have generally arrived at this them- these levels is very small; the col- lege, on the other hand, never has much to say to them on this point. Even Sir Philip would be a wel- come relief to many of these un- dergraduates, yearning as they ob- viously are as they daily sit across the desk from me. Not that we don't make an ef- fort to fill the philosophical vacuum. But too often we are ad- dressing either students at large or that non-existent abstraction, "the Michigan undergraduate." It is germane, I suppose, to the human animal's usual habits of thought, but far to often this campus reinforces our thinking in terms of structures, blocks, groups and interests. Our very vo- cabulary reflects the trend. The white-collar worker, the status- seekers and even the carpetbaggers have somehow melded into a lonely crowd, and individual persons stand out rarely. The students themselves tend to group their associates in sweepingly-generaliz- ed terms: faculty, administration, greeks, quaddies. Although normal, such conven- ient terminology betrays at heart merely a groping effort to invest with meaning the existential va- riety available (when no one seems to have any philosophy, it's damn- ably hard to generate your own). To this are linked the fashionable tags which substitute for think- ing: the college is amorphous,: monolithic, paternalistic, rigid, ar bitrary, impersonal and the like. It all amounts almost to a theorem: To the extent that, on the institutional level, a clear phi- losophy of purpose becomes im- possible, it becomes proportionate- ly more essential that each per- son who speaks for, to and within that level do his speaking from a clearly stated posture which re- flects a total integration of his viewpoints. ALL OF WHICH brings us back to our young instructor, eyes fo- cussed earerly on the PhD., but nonetheless vaguely disenchanted as he searches for some principle which can integrate it all. He knows instinctively that, like him- self, everyone else at the front of a classroom is contributing a fragment, one limited by subject matter and disciplinary viewpoint. And he knows as clearly that no one is really suggesting to these youngsters that an integrating dis- cipline, or concept or philosophy is available. As he daily aids in devising the cliches and "cepts" of the next generation, he will daily tend more and more toward Sir Philip, or Aristotle, or Plato, or St. Thomas, if only to guide his search toward even a highly per- sonalized amalgamation of prin- ciples which will be consonant with his vision of his life's work. The day he concedes that an in- tegrating philosophy is impossible, that day will also see his teaching stripped of any zest. For then his personal labors will have outgrown their final purpose. AS COROLLARY to all of this, perhaps I may be permitted a recommendation. The literary col- lege utilizes daily a huge block of such young people to carry on much of its teaching. Some de- partments find teaching fellows performing 85 per cent of their introductory-level teaching. De- partments like English, mathe- matics and the languages are ob- vious examples of the central role teaching fellows play in the in- struction of young people new to college thinking. These young teachers represent a fantastically potent resource up- on which the college could draw in an effort to impart to beginning students a sense of what the col- lege is all about and what it is trying to do. I do not recommend a change of title, a raise in pay or a voice in the decision-making processes of the college. The teaching fellow is, academically and professionally, neither fish nor flesh, and that is as it should be. But the college and the several departments should rethink ser- iously the use they are making of this young, eager and mentally agile personnel. Rare is the in- stance (except during the late- August amenities) when they are told anything about their function or their worth within the larger fabric of the college in which they teach. Rarely do they perceive they are teaching in a college at all; the limits of their professional world are the views and confines of their several departments. If only those departments would say something to them about in- teresting teaching, about the re- lation of their discipline to the various thrusts of the college, of the significance of their various classrooms to the overall business of undergraduate education, the results might well be astounding. SIXTY PER CENT of our fresh- FEIFFER FPo, V1RI I THA'F5 THE" 6$U Nt V6TAM(Its MT"I RC(-lI I SIRr 5VRRU&VER IN VIETPAM' AMP WC S URRMER I~REE ot-1 T5 AMOTHeIZ BE LIN/ FF VOP'1 $SACK