Seventy-Fifth Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS Michigan MAD Hurtling to Doomsday By Robert Jolnston ere Opinions Are Free, 420 MAYNARD ST., ANN ARBOR, MICH. Truth Will Prevail NEws PHONE: 764-0552 Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. This must be noted in all reprints. THURSDAY, 15 APRIL 1965 NIGHT EDITOR: LEONARD PRATT FINEST CONTRALTO: Anderson Still Superb After 30 Years At HilltAuditorium LAST NIGHT, Marion Anderson gave the "penultimate recital of her farewell tour." For over 30 years this famous Negro contralto has thrilled audiences all over the world. She has earned praise from all over the world and from people from every walk of life. Toscanini, Sibelius and Eisenhower have been unceasing in their praise of her art. She has lost none of her communicative powers and she is still growing as an interpreter. Last night she truly lived up to her past praise. Miss Anderson was, as usual, accompanied by Franz Rupp, her accompanist for over 20 years. The rapport between these two artists is a joy, for they have blended their two personalities into one unified artist. Students Must Tale Initiative For Own Economic Welfare 1~ THAT THE HARD-EARNED University of Michigan Student Employes -Union wage increase should be followed so quickly by announcements that dorm rates will most likely rise seems to fit unfortunately well the economic situation surrounding the University campus. Each time students gain a little in the fight to better their academic situation, they lose somewhere else. In the past semester, both movies and haircuts went up in price, along with rents; now it is to be dorm fees. The fight to make things less expensive looms as big a task as ever. Part of the difficulty in struggling to better students 'economic position in Ann Arbor results from the fact that the is- sues are hot always as clear cut as they might wish them to be. Indeed, there are many factors involved that are often hard to accept because they seem to "cloud" the issues. FOR INSTANCEstudents must realize that when thy buy, they buy from "Big World" enterprises-enterprises that are selling to make a profit on the basis of capitalistic rationality. The American tradition says this is not wrong; indeed, this is the basis of our system. Thus students have to expect to pay booksellers, landlords, movie owners, clothes merchants and the rest a profit for keeping their products on the mar- ket. They provide goods and services; students subsidize their time and trou- ble. This is how the system works. But if those who sell to the students have a right to their profits, the stu- dents should be allowed their right to self-protection. They cannot say to the Ann Arbor merchants, "You are entitled to make so much a year, and if you make more, you are being unfair to us." This is ridiculous. Yet they can say, "We see that what we are forced to purchase in Ann Arbor is somewhat lower in stand- ard and somewhat higher in price than what we get in our home towns. Show us we can buy better and cheaper." AND STUDENTS have a gripe when they cannot find a fruitful alternative sell- er. The buying area open to the major- ity of student customers is indeed quite small. Price differentials within the campus area seem negligible, while few students have the time and the means to go to downtown establishments. Thus they cannot really effectively force prices down by patronizing one establishment over another-there just aren't enough nearby outlets in each line of trade. If al the competing firms on campus charge much the same prices for much the same quality products, what can students do? One very popular idea is to go to the University for help-to ask it to set up low cost competition to help force prices down. Yet the merchants can object, for the University would be using tax money from local businessmen to com- pete with them. Would this be fair? In 4his one sense, perhaps not. But the fact remains that students' economic welfare plays a large part in the stresses surrounding their education- al experience, and indeed the ability to get that education at all, and this is an area of concern for the entire commu- nity JHnY, INDEED, when the community as a whole puts tuition support and scholarship moneys into student pockets Sightseeing PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON yes- terday toured tornado-stricken areas of the midwest. As he surveyed the shat- tered rubble of human lives, observers said the President could only whisper- over and over-"How awful. How terri- ble." President Lyndon B. Johnson yesterday landed 3000 more Marines in Viet Nam. The President would do well to tour some Vietnamese villages. -LEONARD PRATT should it be expected not to have some voice in the economic surroundings into which so much of that money flows so profusely? The over large demand on campus is a product of the University sit- uation, and some responsibility to keep it in hand should justifiably lie within the hands of that institution. If the people of this state are willing to help finance our educations and low- er our tuition costs, then for a few to derive what seems to be unique benefits from an abnormal economic situation which can detract from the educational process is indeed beyond the realm of the "fair" and "justifiable" and should come under the protection of the University, if as nothing else than a protection of investment. Because of the capitalist nature of our entire economy, however, specific "rights" and "wrongs" are often hard to pin down, and maybe students often mis- direct their efforts. Yet Ann Arbor mer- chants must realize they are dealing with an essentially closed market, and as such they must expect to be asked for some accounting to customeras who must "buy or do without" and for whom "doing without" includes doing without an edu- cation. WHAT CAN ANN ARBOR bookmen ex- pect but cries of "monopoly" and "cartel" when they make so little appar- ent effort on their own toward' dispelling student resentment toward them? What can Ann Arbor landlords expect but bit- terness when they charge $65 per month for cheesecake apartments and then force Students to accept 12-month leases? When students work at $1 or even $1.25 an hour during valuable semester time only to see much of their earnings disappear when they have to pay from $30-$65 a month for four months of apartment space for which they have no use, is there any wonder the cry goes up for help? The character of the University seems to be changing, however - activism in Alabama, the election ,of part of an "ac- tivist" slate to SGC, UMSEU's efforts and the teach-in are all signs of a forward look. It's a shame the semester is end- ing in the midst of it: the fall after the long summer will be the test for the struggle towards administrative aid in economic welfare. So far, the laws of supply and de- mand in Ann Arbor have yielded the present situation. As such, students have no complaint against the system, as long as they keep supporting it and making it a profitable one. Nor can they really expect the administration, which has worries of its own, to act independently. S THE SEMESTER hurtles to a close and as late readings are piled on late papers are piled on early exams, classes -or at least their educational content- become increasingly irrelevant. The University's demands upon its students and faculty have been kept at bay for the better part of the semester, but the bills must now be paid up in the face of, at the very least, a summons to Window A. The student is forced to han- die a series of last-minute hour- lies, his final exams, some papers and a special project or two. The faculty are forced to keep up with their research, continue to prepare for classes, keep up with their panicking students and grade the last-minute deluge of student output. It is a trial by fire, and one wonders if it isn't becoming a built-in part of the system - if this isn't the students' baptism for his upcoming 40-year race through American life. The philosophy that the race goes to the strong has perhaps sneaked into the Uni- versity, and the student must react to the starting gun not at 21 but at 18. TRYING TO ABSORB, digest and write about half a semester's work inside of two weeks has be- come little more than excellent training and even selection for political maneuvering, academic ladder-climbing or cutting through the corporate jungle. Add activi- ties participation to the student's schedule and the situation be- comes ludicrous. Nonacademic commitments increase exponen- tially and classes, papers, projects, "directed reading" and exams cease to become merely irrelev- ant and instead become impossi- ble. Is it worth it? This is the task that has been set by an unholy alliance between the University and society. One can meet it head on and try to surmount it; one can ignore it and hope for the best; one can try to skirt around it-or perhaps the system can even be lived with and made use of. PROF. FUSFELD of Econ 101 fame once referred, in one of his less dogmatic lectures, to the American system as a high-pres- sure economy. The analogy can be made broader by referring to America as the high-pressure so- ciety. And the pressure-cooker university is all around us right now. Cooking. Unfortunately, the student's life is now being boiled down to an endless chaotic routine mixed un- der high pressure. The theory is that all the extraneous elements of education are being filtered out so that the real thing can be fed quickly, cheaply and unadulter- ated to the students. . I say unfortunately because there is absolutely no guarantee that what is passed off as educa- tion really is. The old brew that made up a now-extinct pattern of college living apparently worked in its day. But we don't know how it worked, and, in tinkering with the old pattern, in trying to preserve education without the extras because of a lack of time, money and interest, we may be eliminating the very elements of the old pattern that were most important to successful education. ACTUAL EDUCATION, center- ing around personal involvement, does seem to spring up by chance -through random, perceptive ac- quaintances, the unassigned book that explains everything one has not understood through six semes- ters of reading lists, the unex- pectedly delightful talk with a teacher, a random exploration of the many worlds within the Uni- versity. Those who pretend to be offer- ing the student the purified es- sences of education might be tak- ing away what is really most val- uable and offering instead the routine, the standard and the or- dinary. One can, in fact, define education as something that the student must acquire for himself. Once that, is admitted, it fol- lows that what is forced upon the student by the educational sys- tem takes up larger and larger hunks of time which he should be using in seeking that educa- tion which he alone can provide for himself. The University may be forbidding education to its stu- dents by the act of denying them the time to search for it in the random, personal manner that is essential to one's education. Great teachers speak of the one-to-one correspondence so nec- essary to great education. It can be between the student and teach- er, the student and an author he has just discovered or between him and a work of art, a book, a personal experience or an idle thought. A POSSIBLE explanation for the high-pressure University is that, as numbers have everywhere made it harder and harder to keep up the old methods of edu- cation, shortcuts have had to be introduced which have seriously weakened the educational process rather than intensifying it as was expected. As educators saw this weakening take place, they moved faster and faster and put more and more wood on the fire to re- vive the dying patient with the very methods that were already killing it. They impose more and more gimmicks and shortcuts and de- vices in an attempt to preserve the most vital parts of the edu- cational process, but instead they worsen the situation ,and we con- tinue round the vicious circle. LAST GLANCES TWO ARIAS BY with a feeling for the; Miss Anderson's gift HANDEL opened the program; they were done grand line. The following Haydn songs displayed for communicating'even the simplest message. ti ,4 V 4 But the four songs by Schubert which followed proved beyond a doubt that Miss Anderson is the finest contralto in the world, even today. The performance of "Liebesbotschaft" was a marvel of under- statement. "Der Doppelgaenger" was brought to a brooding climax as Miss Anderson utilized her beautiful chest voice, and the anguish of "Der Erlkoenig" was the height of the first part of the recital. Half speaking at times, Miss Anderson invested each person in this song with individuality. A performance of this difficult song with such intensity comes once in a generation: we are lucky to have heard it. Miss Anderson ended the first half of the program with four con- temporary American and British songs. Samuel Barber's "Nocturne" was sung with great emotion. The other songs were also well sung, and she invested each one with her own inimitable art. THE SECOND HALF of the concert consisted entirely of Negro spirituals and, as could be expected, brought some of the most moving moments of the entire evening. Miss Anderson has a rapport, a feeling for these pieces which few other Negroes have. She sings them with simplicity, warmth and reverence. For encores, Miss Anderson offered two Schubert pieces. Her per- formance of "Ave Maria" was worth waiting for, sung with a fine sense of line and unusually fine breath control. It was a beautiful finale to an inspiring recital. Miss Anderson has proved herself over the years to be one of the finest artists one can find in the world. Perhaps someday another contralto will come before the public with as beautiful a voice as hers, but not for many, many years will one come who has the artistry and the sensitivity which she showed last night. IT IS A SAD FACT that Miss Anderson is leaving the recital stage. One hopes she is not leaving music entirely, for she will certainly live in our minds for many years as we think about performances such as last night's. -RICHARD LeSUEUR 4 4 l 4 V C, V Getting Educated: the Image vs. the Reality 4 RATHER, STUDENTS are the campus area consumers, and the initiative must come from them. Students could have beaten the movie prices had they felt like sacrificing and working at it- they did not. They could have, in the past, beaten the Ann Arbor 50 per cent plus book markup had they felt like walking to the SAB basement and wait- ing a semester for their money. And they could even have had lower text book prices had they supported the USNSA co-op, hoping time would help eradicate its shortcomings. They did not. They have no right to complain when they re- fuse to work at fostering competition. It is the students' general attitude, not any administration verdict as such, that will decide the question. Administration decisions do not come to students cold- they do influence them. There seems little they can do on their own about housing-though UMSEU has been taking some good concrete steps to bring in apartment competition - without vast capital. Nor is there much they can do alone about a bookstore to handle new texts- that would require $100,000 and thus ad- ministration or other "outside" help. They must, however, support the SBX in the fall, and must repeatedly vocalize and organize economic desires where they are not allowed normal competitive expres- sion, until they can find the sources to allow substantial betterment of their sit- uation. By DEBORAH BEATTIE Associate Editorial Director, 1964-65 IF ONE of my classmates were to tell me now what I was told by President Hatcher at a freshman orientation convocation in the fall of 1961, I would wonder if he and I had really been attending the same university. In spite of all the positive in- doctrination of orientation week, it didn't require many semesters to discover that the University is not ideal-it's not even a Harvard, Midwestern or otherwise; that, though our class, like every class coming after it,. was the "most intelligent class ever to enter the University," few of its members would be either intellectually stim- ulating or intellectually stimulat- ed; that, even if the University is cosmopolitan in appearance, it is seldom so in attitude; that the boastful prediction, meant to be a challenge, that "it is difficult to do well at the University," is not true.. . But it takes much longer to dis- cover what makes the University an admirable institution in spite of its failures. This is something that can't be explained in an orientation session, because the value of an undergraduate educa- tion at the University can't be blanketly assessed for the student body as a whole; it is a very per- sonal value that must be discover- ed by each individual in terms of his own hopes, needs, frustrations and fulfillments at the University. I HAVE SPENT three years here. I lived in a dormitory and in a sorority. I sampled a variety of literary college disciplines, changing my intended major four times. I worked on The Daily, which gave me contact with a broad spectrum of administrators, faculty and students and their schemes and philosophies-or lack of them. Some of these confrontations were stimulating and rewarding, some just fun and many disap- pointing. I spent one of myunder- graduate years as a student in Paris, which gave me a chance to test by comparison the value of a University education. At the end of this, I understand the University only enough to say that it is neither excellent nor bad. I'm not sure that it can ever be excellent, but I know it can be better. I can't define an ideal Univer- sity for anyone but myself, because what I sought from the University may be totally unlike what the other 29,000 students here are seeking. I have wanted different thnca rrnth nivprcifv f-nm tured education here, too many unnecessary requirements. There isn't enough time to think and explore. Minds stay closed, dreams don't grow, partly because that kind of growth is rarely demand- ed here except on somebody else's terms. Many of the University's fail- ings are structural. An under- graduate degree is practically guaranteed to anyone who stays around for at least eight semes- ters. Consequently, just getting a degree and getting out has become the obvious and encouraged un- dergraduate goal. The formula for attaining it is a simple one: take 15 credit-hours per semester and get at least a C in every course. It doesn't matter if the whole course is forgotten the day after the final exam is completed and the final grade is in (unless it is a prerequisite, in which case you are expected to wait a year or so before forgetting it). After that the degree-granters only count points; knowledge isn't questioned again. All one has to do is show a specified (not to be confused with lasting) level of competence eight times in four years and he can pass Go and collect. THE UNIVERSITY attempts to make the game meaningful by building in guarantees that an undergraduate's "liberal educa- tion" will be well chosen and well earned-distribution requirements, counselors, final exams-but they don't assure a good education; in fact, they often make it more dif- ficult to attain one. Distribution requirements - mandatory insurance of broad aca- demic acquaintances-do more harm than good. Education should be personally defined; the Uni- versity cannot possibly know what academic approach will be best for each student. There is more value in discovering for oneself what will be the most meaningful area of intellectual effort, and to what degree, and from what direc- tions the major area or areas of study will be pursued. If a student comes to the Uni- versity undecided about his aca- demic- interests, then he will sample independently a variety of disciplines. If a student comes determined to bury himself in nothing but mathematics, then he should be able to start out just that way. Sessions with his co- horts in other disciplines probably will induce him to explore other fields. And, if not, he may dis- cover a vital mathematical prin- ciple that much sooner. I can't believe that a semester of watering geraniums in the bo- tnnienl -ardens advanced my Pdu. administrative red tape, rarely have time to be real academic aids. They often blunder, and the stu- dent is forced to suffer the con- sequences of their miscalculations. Once a freshman has been ini- tiated into the intricacies of the University's system of checks and balances, he should not again be forced to check in with a counselor unless he desires his advice. Freed from hours of required checking and signing, counselor-policemen could become counselor-teachers with more nearly sufficient time to give thorough academic advice to those who truly want and need it. Secretaries, not faculty, should be hired to deal with the unavoid- able bureaucratic procedures of pre-classification and registration. They undobutedly would be more efficient. FINAL EXAMS, in principle the ultimate check on the quality of academic efforts, have lost their meaning here due to trimester pressure. Finals have become hur- ried, unstimulating, hardly a means of demonstrating a serious, lasting learning effort. Indeed, the student who has only a superficial grasp of a subject has an advan- tage because he is better adapted to the once-over-lightly approach. In two hours such a tiny por- tion of the course material can be covered that students can't pos- sibly show what they have learned, and teachers can't evaluate what they have been able to teach. But even before the reign of the two-hour final, the Univer- sity's exam system was inadequate. A week-long reading period is es- sential if finals are to have any relevance to a learning process. This seems to be coming slowly and will be a big step forward. What I would like most to have incorporated into the examination structure is a system of compre- hensive examinations for seniors. Not only is this the best way to measure the total worth of the houm's put into obtaining a degree, but it would encourage students to retain learning and create intel- lectual correspondences as they pass from course to course. MY DEEPEST DISTRESS with the University, though, has not been with administrative failings but with the students' attitudes, my own certainly included. The University is extolled ad nauseum as a magnificently di- verse and cosmopolitan intellec- tual body. But this is true only on the surface. The value of a geo- graphic admissions policy and the imnrnsivo numbero f forpin nstu- the Union. A few have American "big brothers," but in general they are a group apart-not unwelcome, just unnoticed. In a sense it is not surprising that tight University circles don't open up to include foreign stu- dents. Even East and Midwest, U.S.A., often seem to mix un- easily here. Long Islanders want to recreate Long Island; Birming- ham, Michigan, reproduces itself on a smaller scale. Not until such groups realize that it is not par- ticularly beneficial to bring their city limits to the University, will it seem worthwhile to make more difficult acquaintances with for- eign students. AND, SPEAKING of tight little circles, I think first of the group whose circle is made secure with Greek symbols. Having spent a little more than a year in this system, I give whole-hearted ap- proval to Regent Sorenson's pro- posal to deny University recogni- tion to fraternities and sororities. There is a lot tobesaid for sorority life. It is gracious, com- fortable, easy and fun. And social security besides. I won't quibble about the mem- bership selection procedure, al- though I don't think it is par- ticularly admirable. I don't claim that a sorority or fraternity has no worthwhile function: I value the few close friendships I made in a sorority as highly as those I made outside of it. But I am con- vinced that the essence of the Greek system is anti-academic, and it doesn't merit the benefits of University recognition. Particularly in the sorority, but also in the dormitory, I encoun- tered another disappointment with University life: classroom discus- sions remain just that. Sometimes an interesting idea is kept alive long enough to get from Angell Hall to the Union, but it rarely survives a trip to a housing unit. Not that there aren't plenty of interesting discussions there; thoughts on sex and religion in- volve entire corridors for hours at a time. But ideas and questions raised in a classroom are rarely shared by housemates, except when someone makes a desperate attempt to find out about every- thing that might be asked in the next day's exam. Faculty dinners are approached with anxiety or alarm because academic dinner table discussions in housing units are such unnatural phenomena. GOING FROM a negative pic- ture of the University to the 4. - - - Li - 1- _n sn mr ful to find an occasional professor who was dull or did nothing but lecture from a, text, since that meant that I could stay home and read a book. On the whole, I haven't been disappointed with the teachers here. Too often they are hurried and busy. Rarely are they disin- terested. I have seldom confront- ed a professor who was unwilling to discuss and explain outside of class. And many of my negative stereotypes were dissolved by their efforts in the teach-in on Viet Nam. Aside from the obvious things like the teach-in, APA, cheap cough medicine at Health Service, intriguing lectures,. crossing a a deserted Diag, all-night philo- phizing, The Daily . . ., I find it difficult to describe what is "good" at the University. Not because it is so difficult to find, rather be- cause it seems to change as my ideas and dreams change. THE CLOSEST I can come is to say that the good at the Uni- versity is whatever stimulates per- sonal development. Most of the good that I found was outside the classroom. Not that classes are worthless in principle, but they often were so in fact. In class I took notes; outside I discovered what I wanted and needed to learn. I made most of my discoveries at The Daily. The gave me made it possible for me contacts and confrontations it to consider what the University ought to be and why it isn't that way. But I'm afraid that much of the good at the University is being lost. With trimester pressures haunting everyone, there isn't time to experience it anymore. A student here no longer has time to discover that the rest of the world relates to his classes. Time for The Daily had to be stolen. I missed classes, I didn't sleep. One should be free to be a bookworm and work on The Daily or demonstrate in Selma or write a novel or campaign for Gold- water, if he wants to. I am tempted to say that the latter are more important experiences than attending classes because most courses cL.n be learned from books, whereas the essence of student activities is first-hand ex- perience. Others have different answers - equally valuable for them. The University must become flexible enough to embrace and encourage all kinds of learning. I don't know what the best so- lution to preserving this flexibility '' 4 y 4, *0 I ,,,I