Seventy-Third Year EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN UNDER AUTHORITY OF BOARD IN CONTROL OF STUDENT PUBLICATIONS "Where Opinions Are Free STUDENT PUBLICATIONS BLDG., ANN ARBOR, MIcH., PHONE NO 2-3241 Truth Will Prevail"' Editorials printed in The Michigan Daily express the individual opinions of staff writers or the editors. Thi must be noted in all reprints. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1962 NIGHT EDITOR: ELLEN SILVERMAN The Power To Appropriate The Sacred Cow L = l FROM NEW YORK: Musket-Style Musicals Still Going Strong IS THE POWER to appropriate the power to destroy? This, the central issue in the relation be- tween state universities and the legislatures on which they depend for financial support, has reared its head again. In the latest case, the Michigan Legislature is trying to use its power to appropriate as a weapon to destroy the Michigan State University Labor and In- dustrial Relations Center. To its MSU appropriation, passed this sum- mer, the Legislature attached a string: MSU must close down the LIRC, which the legisla- tors felt had become "little more than a pro- paganda organ" for labor, as one representa- tive put it. MSU, citing its autonomy under that state constitution, refused. Hoping for support for their position, the school's leaders asked state Attorney-General Frank Kelley, in effect, "Can we get away with this?" Kelley said yes, legally, they could, and friends of university autonomy cheered. But whether or not this is. a meaningful victory depends, as usual, on the attitude of the Legislature. If, when next year's MSU appropriation comes up, they decide to be vindictive about the school's defiance of their extra-legal ultimatum, MSU may find itself with a curiously stingy appropriation. There need be no accompanying mention of the nasty business about LIRC-the neager funds would be an adequate reminder. Thialido-mide A BELGIAN COURT last week found a 24- year-old woman not guilty of murdering her baby which was born deformed because the mother ha dtaken thalidomide during preg- nancy. There was no doubt that the woman was guilty of the death of the child. Horrified by its deformity, she had fed it a fatal dose of barbituates mixed with its honey-sweetened formula. In admitting that she herself had killed the baby, the mother argued in her defense only that killing the child "was better than letting it live.'? The physician who signed the death certificate testified that if he had been the only person to know of the killing he would have indicated that the child died of natural causes. TIlE COURT in acquitting the woman has set a horrifying precedent. It has said in effect not only that a 24-year-old woman is tech- nically and morally competent to decide wheth- er a helpless human child shall be allowed to live, but has also, in effect, faced the almost insoluble problem of the thalidomide effects by simply washing its hands of its legal respon- sibility. Blinking at admitted murder and intended complicity is a grotesque mockery of the duty of a law court. Once this type of excuse for murder is expected, it is impossible to predict where it will stop. Responsibility for taking human life is not a privilege to be' granted whenever, a difficult situation arises. The sac- redness of human life is not to be trusted to the hope that the thalidomide nightmare will not occur again. -J. OPPENHEIM IS THIS CRICKET? Does the Legislature have the right to use such methods to influence the internal affairs of a supposedly autonomous institution? This is the basic question in the LIRC squabble, in the controversy over campus speaker policies, and, in fact, in any issue over which school and government clash. It is a complex question which cannot be fully resolved by crying "academic freedom!" at every dispute. What we have here are two publicly-elected bodies-the Legislature and a University's gov- erning board. Neither, theoretically, legally or ideally, has power over the other; neither is subordinate to the other: they are both directly responsible to the voters of Michigan. Simple enough: the governing board runs its univer- sity; the Legislature minds its own business. Simple enough until apropriations time. At this point, each legislator, whether he likes it or not, whether he has an axe to grind or not, must make a value judgement about the work of the governing board. How much is this university worth? Are its programs worth the money requested for them? Is it accomp- lishing the things a university should ac- complish?. When a legislator considers such questions, it isn't necessarily a power grab-it is an es- sential part of the appropriating process. The Legislature cannot be expected to pass out scarce funds indiscriminately whenever a uni- versity asks, without some idea of how wisely this money will be used. To do so would be as irresponsible as to go to the other extreme. T HUS,we have a problem of men, not laws. In the final analysis, no one but the legis- lators themselves can keep the Legislature from abusing its power., We can ask that the legislators recognize the necessity of exercising their power, while recog- nizing the drawbacks of going too far. They should avoid enlarging the area of school- government coonflict, which is what happens when they pass ominous resolutions against Communist speakers, as they did this summer, or when they add extra-legal threats to MSU appropriations packages, or when they attempt to exploit this power for any reason except the good of the school concerned. We can hope that they will remember that university governing boards - ill-informed, though they often are-are in a better position to run their schools than a group of men in Lansing, lacking the time (and often the interest) to gain a real understanding of the problems of education. The school governing boards can help in this respect, by asserting their determination and ability to run the best possible institution, and by dealing with the Legislature on this basis, openly and honestly, rather than periodically conpromising their rightful powers in fear of some retaliation from Lansing. We can remind a conservative Legislature that,'it is hypocritical to condemn government interference on the federal level while prac- ticing it on the state level. In short, all that can be asked is that each legislator exercise honesty and integrity in making the difficult decisions of the ap-. propriating proocess. If, as it is said, power corrupts, this conflict can only become more damaging. -KENNETH WINTER 1 'GENERATION PRECISION: The Virtue of Clarity THE CURRENT issue of "Gen- eration," the "university inter- arts magazine," is, noteworthy for its clarity and precision. From the 18th Century Hogarth reproduc- tions (though his first name was William rather than John, unless I've neglected a less well-known artist by. the same name) that distinguish the covers to a force- ful and precise eight-line poem by Ann Robbins, almost all the ma- terial is sharp and well-focused. The writers and the artists seem to know what they're getting at and to be trying to get at it as simply and clearly as they can, happily avoiding the kind of pre- tentious and needlessly arrogant obscurity that can bury any form of art. Yet clarity is not the only cri- terior for judging art, and, within the area of my general approval, distinctions need to be made. Among the poets, for example, Trim Bissell seems clearly the best. Both of his poems are marked by a sharp sense of diction and a genuine skill with descriptive imagery. His work, particularly "Sea's Edge," suggests far, more than it states without resorting to vague posturing or trite appeals to standard symbols for emotion. * * * BOTH MARTHA MacNeal and Alvin Fritz use tight, sharp lyrics with dramatic impact. Miss Mac- Neal works the antithesis of the floral and the mechanistic skill- fully, although I wish she'd cut the slick and derivative sixth stan- za from "This Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dog's Back." Mr. Fritz manages to in- ject intelligent qualification into his moving stream of sensuous emotion. I also liked the casual grotesque quality and the sheer skill with sound in Tom Clark's "When I Went to the Zoo." Somewhat less successful is the poetry of Joan Golomb and John Allen. Miss Golomb seems to de- velop her poem almost too care- fully, to rely on a crescendo of rhetorical structure that almost swamps the perception. Mr. Allen has some ideas and good images, but he sometimes seems almost to abandon them for the consistency of a sing-song rhythm (his shorter poem, "Apology to Several," is the better). Unfortunately the editors have devoted most space to the poet I liked least: Penelope Schott. Her work has a technical ease, but I find the reminiscences of child- hood too arch and cute, the his- torical references more decorative than essential, and the poetry al- together too slick and easy to generate either emotion or ad- miration. * * * AS IN A NUMBER of other is- sues of "Generation" in the past several years, the fiction seems less accomplished than the poetry. Perhaps students devote more in- tricate care to the shorter form. Yet, despite their unfinished qual- ity, I find two of the stories both venturesome and interesting. George White's "Grasping Some- where In Between" tries to portray a young man discovering mean- ing and value through a relation- ship with a girl, a fellow-counselor at a summer day camp. The style is lively and contem- porary, a perspective that both establishes the character and pro- vides the point of view. But the style becomes excessively thick (too much involuted iconoclasm and "all that jazz"), so much so that it seems to block off the cen- tral issues of the story and forces the author to state his theme in a climactic essay. The relation- ship between boy and girl, in more ways than one, never gets off the ground. I admire Joan Golomb's attempt at a series of different comic per- spectives in describing a Bohem- ian blast in "Thirteen Cantos to a Final Party." Miss Golomb shows a rich sense of comedy and some fine lines, but I feel that her prose, like her poetry, relies too much on repetitious rhetorical ef- fects and tends to draw the com- edy out in the direction oftedium. What should be barbed and ma- licious becomes a rather labored ."Walpurgisnacht." The third story, "Checkers," is a deftly told ac- count of the familiar young farm boy who learns about life and death simultaneously. * * * GENERATION IS, however, an "inter-arts" magazine," and the pages contain a number of attrac- tive illustrations and wood-cuts. I most enjoy an illustrative drawing by Lahti and the photographs of "Seated Figure" by Rene Salz- man. The latter, depicting a heavy, pendulous human figure, is,photo- graphed from three different angles. On the other hand, I find Mi- chael .Wentworth's drawings of Victorian children graceless and too heavily concerned with clothes; Stephen Sumner's photo- graphs of a young girl strike me as too posed and precious. Paul C. Yin's plan for an elementary school is luxuriously spacious and airy, although it seems enormously lavish for a building housing only seven classrooms. More funda- mentally, I question the short essay which he uses to explain his design. Although I welcome the large amount of space provided for books, films, and demonstra- tions, calling it "the information- materials center" seems far more constricting than the "library." The whole short essay assumes that the process of education is necessarily connected to the phys- ical use of the space in which the education takes place. I won- der. Some of my best classes have been in spite of cramped rooms on the fourth floor of Angell Hall on sultry spring afternoons. The whole relationship between the human being, his learning, and his environment seems to me a good deal more subtle than that allowed for by spacious regularity constructed to satisfy the "whole child." ABOUT HALF the issue is taken up by the complete script of "Bar- tholomew Fair," the current Mus- ket production written by Jack O'Brien and Robert James. I am in no position to make any judg- ment on Mr. James' score, but Mr. O'Brien's script, adapted from Jonson's seventeenth century com- edy of various forms of low life at a London fair, is sprightly and well-written. An appended ex- planatory essay is intelligent and helpful. The editors have chosen wisely in printing the whole script, as they have chosen wisely, I/ feel certain, in printing some of the clearest, the most interesting, and the most genuine literary work now on campus. -James Gindin By MARK SLOBIN Daily Correspondent IF YOU KNOW "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," or if you've ever hear "Men of the Maize and Blue" at the stadium, you know Jay Gorney; both songs, and many, many more, are the pro- ducts of his long andsuccessful career as a writer for the Ameri- can musical stage. It was in Ann Arbor that Gor- ney's first successes, five Michigan Union Operas, were produced for what is now Musket. From a start at the piano in the pit of a silent movie theater in Detroit, he has since gone on to New York and Hollywood, as producer of stage shows and movies, song writer, screen play writer for movies and television, and composer of ballet music, all for the musical theater. The winner of a "Tony" Award from the American Theatre Wing this year, Gorney recently gained new international stature when several hundredrRussian school children sang "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" on a coast-to-coast television show on Russian educa- tion. This is a far cry from Bialy- stok, back in Russia, where he was born, and where his father in- vented the machine that made fil- ter tips. "The musical theater is one of the great contributions America has made to world culture," Gor- ney says, and he has had a hand in shaping the musical theater since the 1920's, when he gave up the practice of law, after graduat- ing from the University, to write songs on Broadway. ** * HIS FIRST SHOW .was called "Top Hole." By 1929, he was al- ready working for Paramount stu- dios, and was soon a member of the editorial board, in charge of musical motion pictures. It was then that Gorney became the Columbus of the musical show, discovering talent of great promise from the vast store of human re- sources that was Hollywood. Well aware of the trends of the musical, and interested, as his many discoveries show, in the de- velopment of youth for the musi- cal stage, Gorney takes particular pride in his role of a teacher. In- vited by the New School for So- cial Research to create a musical play department in 1948, he began his teaching career, and has ex- pandedhis activities to theAmeri- can Theatre Wing's professional training program. Along with his wife, who has worked with him on many shows, Gorney feels that there is much talent "lying fallow" in America, and it is time that new methods were instituted to find it and save it. IN THE OLD DAYS, of course, talent came out of vaudeville, and emerged from night clubs; nowa- days, the musical has become ser- ious theater (witness "West Side Story'), while what was serious theater has taken over much of the sex (and other) allure that musicals used to have for that standard patron, the Tired Busi- ness Man. It is obvious on Broad- way today that musicals h/ive achieved dominance through the simple law that states that a suc- cessful musical will outdraw, and therefore out-earn, almost %ny and every serious play. Under these circumstances, it seems necessary to look at the musical in a new light. Gorney sees great promise in the new extension of theater to the college campuses; Ann Arbor's APA is of course a prime example of this trend. "The university is a good place for theater to devel- op," he says: "theater people need to be educated too." This feeling would seem to be substantiated by Howard Taubman's recent en- counter with an APA member in Ann Arbor, who was up at the unlikely hour of 8 a.m.-to take a course. Though it is an expanding field, theater is still a very difficult field: "I advise my students to have another job ready for be- tween shows" says Gorney, and he feels generally that it may have been easier to crack into the musi- cal theater world in years gone by. However, there are compen- sations; today, once one is able to break into this highly specializ- ed field, the rewards are greater. through the establishment of unions as a protective device. * * * SINCE JOHN GAY first set down "The Beggar's Opera" in 1728, culled from Scottish and English folk tunes, the musical play has changed considerably. Gradually, over the course of many years, the writer of the music, anonymous in Gay's production, has come to have greater and greater significance. Now, since, the many Rodgers- Hart, Rodgers-Hammerstein, et al., works it is possible for a show to succeed on little more than the names of its co-workers (e.g. Ler- ner and Loewe since their one colossal, hit). the acme of this concept of the musical play is summed up in Hammerstein's words: "the . . . composer and lyrist . . . weld their two crafts and two kinds of talent into a single expression. This is the great secret of the well-integrated musi- cal play. It is not so much a method as a state of mind, or rather a state of two minds, an attitude of unity," which may seem somewhat of a paradox, but which certainly seems to work. Jay Gorney found two of his lyrists through reading the light verse in Franklin P. Adams in the 1930's, namely Howard Dietz and E. Y. Harburg. The sum total of observation and discussion of the New York theater seems to be that the musi- cal is "busting out all over," to use one of the medium's own phrases. Musket, keep at it. LETTERS to the EDITOR To the Editor: LAST WEEK I read in the letters coi mn, a statement by a coed senior complaining of personal thefts. She seemed biting mad, disillusioned by people, and I felt sorry for her-but that was all. The story never strikes home un- til it happens to you. Yesterday afternoon, while I was ushering for the NY City Opera Co. production of "Rigolet- to," my forms of identification (I.D. card, social security, library card, insurance card), keys and pictures, was "lifted" from my purse in the ushers' cloak room at Hill Auditorium. I'm toldit's the first time anything has ever been taken from thatroom. One as- sumes people who attend such functions there are too refined for such illicit indulgences. I was al- ways under the impression that anyone who attended this uni- versity was too intelligent, too re- fined for such practices. Slowly, I'm learning I was wrong. Thieves come in all sizes, all dress-yes, even in the dress of a music lover. * * * SUCH AN INCIDENT only leads me to ask what kind of insensi- tive, unfeeling people attend this university'and are there a major- ity of them?'Considering the enor- mous number of petty robberies lately, one should ask what kind of institution should we label our- selves-one of higher learning or that of a penal institution? Should the walls be ivy-covered or slate- gray with bars across the win- dows? May the person who so desper- ately wants my ID. card, although it will not buy him or her a beer at the Pretzel Bell, rest well in the pleasure of taking out several books from the library and never returning them. May she or he also claim my social security in another forty-three years. Then may she or he rest in pieces! I can only hope that for as many insensitive people here, there are a few idealistic, sensitive ones. So I rest my hopes, should the wallet be thrown away on the street, one of those rare people will return it. Until then, I'm also pretty disillusioned. -Ceil Ackerman, '64 Rum Runners and Gestapo WELL, THOSE CHAMPIONS of free enter- prise have done it again. This time the State of Michigan has revealed that it will actively pursue and apprehend those evil crooks who live in Michigan, yet dare to slip across the state line and buy their con- sumer goods in Indiana and Ohio. Like the Gestapo, the Michigan State Police will lurk at the main portals to the state, wreathed in those steel arches which proclaim "Welcome to Michigan-Water Wonderland," and they will pounce upon each and every Michigan auto which dares to venture home from Indiana. The unsuspecting citizen will then be grilled to ascertain whether he is smuggling some tax- free purchase back into Michigan without pay- ing the state's four per cent sales tax. Should he be found guilty of this crime, the ransom will be exacted from him. No interstate thief will escape. IF NOTHING ELSE, this arrangement should be highly amusing. It all came about when the money-grubbing merchants of Southwestern Michigan, long noted for their obstinacy when it comes to adjusting prices to meet the rigors of competition, complained to the state treas- urer about all those horrid little ingrates who run over to Indiana to buy their goods. Seems that these fickle little people objected to pay- ing the higher prices that Michigan merchants offer. So the merchants voiced their obection. there, with no way of knowing whether they buy or not.) MEANWHILE, the citizenry, faced with hav- ing the escape route shut off, is irate. One lady in Cassopolis suggested that the state con- struct a Berlin Wall, so that rural folk couldn't sneak back and forth on country roads. A farmer in Galien wants to know how the Gestapo will check to see what you ate while you- were in South Bend. In short, the controversy has degenerated from the sublime to the ridiculous. The idea of the State of Michigan attempting to exact the sales tax on out-of-state goods is so impracti- cal, so hit-and-miss, and so discriminatory that it can only be viewed as ridiculous. But what is more frightening is that the state even feels any obligation to take action. Just because a handful of border line merchants are too greedy to meet the rigors of competition is no reason to call out the militia and penalize the consumer. MICHIGAN'S SALES TAX, in fact, is not the only lure that draws buyers to Indiana. The truth is that Southwestern Michigan merchants have long maintained an unrealistically rigid price schedule and at last are feeling the reac- tion to it. This is the merchants' fault and they alone should take steps to remedy it. 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