Page 4-Saturday, October 21, 1978-The Michigan Daily
Eightv-Nine Years of Editorial Freedorn
The presidential selection process
Editor's note: Since University President
Robben Fleming announced his
retirement
in December,
Vol. LIX, No. 39
News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
The unsuccessful Namibia talks,
I T IS APPARENT from the recent
actions of the South African
government that the regime of Peiter
Botha will further test the patience of
the West'over the question of free
elections in Namibia.
Namibia, also called South West
Africa, was made a South African
protectorate shortly after World War
II. Ever since, however, South Africa
has used its parent-country position to
put an economic and political
stranglehold over Namibia.
Namibia is currently in transition to,
majority rule. Under a United Nations
plan, free elections wilfbe held there in
April and a U.N. force of over 7,000
troops would be stationed there to.
supervise. As expected, the South
Africans have rejected that plan.
It was against that backdrop that the
leaders of the five Western states-
Canada, Britain, France, West
Germany and the U.S. - went to
South Africa last week to reach a
compromise 'with the Botha
government. What they left with was,
in effect, nothing.
In the so-called compromise, the
South Africans are allowed to hold
there own elections in Namibia in
December, and the number of U.N.
troops allowed was cut in half. And
what did Botha promise in return? He
would devote his "best effort" to
persuade the government elected in
December to hold the free elections in
April.
In essence, the west gave tacit
approval to the December election run,
by South Africa, and then left Namibia
without absolute .assurance the free
election would take place in April.
secretary of _ State Cyrus Vance
mitted even he was puzzled as to
the purpose of the December election.
British Foreign Secretary David Owen
said the free election was the only
election the West was interested in,
and yet the West left South Africa
without the assurance those April
elections would ever take place.
The eventual result of the
December election is not secret to
anyone. A coalition of moderate blacks
and the whites will elect. the South
African-backed Turnhalle Alliance
while ignoring the South West African
Peoples' Organization (SWAPO) - a
group identified by the United Nations
as the legitimate representative of
Namibia's black majority. The South
African government has refused to
allow SWAPO to become involved in
the elections, calling the group Marxist
and communist, and has therefore
ignored the majority of Namibians.
This situation bears a striking
resemblance to what has happened in
Zimbabwe, where a moderate
government was installed by Ian Smith
and a significant proportion of the
black population in Zimbabwe or
"Rhodesia" was ignored. But
apparently the West has not learned its
lesson from the Zimbabwe settlement.
Any agreement to govern a nation in
southern Africa without the just
representation of all people and
political views in the area will lead
only to a continuation of the guerilla
wars.
Mr. Botha's has promised to
dedicate his "best efforts" to convince
the Turnhalle Alliance to hold free
elections after the South African-
sponsored elections. But after the
South African-backed election is
completed, Botha could easily say his
"best efforts" were not good enough,
and that the resulting puppet
government is legitimate. And the
West has already approved the
election.
The negotiation attempts by the
West this week were a fiasco. South-
Africa gained concessions and offered
nothing in return except the promise of
a "best effort."' It would seem the West
could have gained more concessionsh
and that their attempts met with
defeat. Meanwhile, it is all the more
likely that the people of Namibia will
remain unrepresented in their own
country, giving those people all the
more unfortunate reason to resort to
guerilla warfare.
controversy has arisen over the process by
which his replacement will be chosen. The
Michigan Student assembly has glected to
not participate in the presidential
selection process until the Regents
guarantee adequate student
representation by providing:
* a consolidated committee consisting
of equal numbers of all groups involved
or formal lines of communications
between those groups;
" access to the Regents' complete list of
candidates to all groups involved (the only
,three groups involved now are faculty,
student and alumni);
* adequate personal access to the
candidates.
Yesterday, the Regents approved the
following:
Guidelines for Advisory
Committees
1. Each Advisory Committee may organize
itself and meet as often as it wishes.
2. There is no objection to any committees
meeting with each other.
3. Each committee is requested to prepare
a statement of recommended future needs of
the University and submit such statement by
November 10, 1978. 4
4. All groups in the entire university
community, including instructional staff,
organized labor, and the public, are also.
invited to submit in writing to the Regents
Selection Committee by november 10, 1978
what they consider to be the future needs of
the University.
5. On or before November 25, 1978, the
Regents Selection Committee will develop the
criteria and characteristics desired in a
university President, based upon the needs of
the University.
6. The criteria will be provided to each
Advisory Committee and madeavailable to
all other groups and organizations.
7. After the criteria have been established,
each Advisory Committee is requested to
submit names for preliminaryconsideration
to the Secretary who will prepare biographical
information in standard form (so as to treat
all names alike), and then the name shall be
sent to the committee of origin. That
committee would then decide whether to drop
the name or give.it further consideration. If
the particular committee decides to give a
name further consideration, it would be sent
to the Regents Selection committee, which
would then distribute the standard form
biography to the chairman of all committees,
but without designation as to the source of the
recommendation.
8. Besides the Advisory Committees, any
group, organization or person may suggest
names tothe Regents Selection Committee.
The Regents Selection Committee can then
decide whether or not they want to
recommend that name for further
consideration and if so, would then send it to
the other committee chairmen.
9. If a name is suggested by the Regents
Selection Committee, a biographical sketch
will be sent to the chairmen of the three
Advisory Committees. In this way, every
committee will know the Advisory
Committees would begin to have names to
study.
10. Procedures should be developed by each
Advisory Committee to insure a limited
distribution of biographical material.
Because the disclosure of a person under
consideration would injure the viability of°a'
candidate, a revelation of a name under
consideration will be considered a breach of
trust.
r11. The Advisory Committees are
encouraged to gather supporting evidence for
favored candidates and forward educational
articles to the Regents Selection Committee:
12. The Advisory Committees are not to
conduct any interviews. This is the
prerogative of the Regents Selection
Committee alone.
13. There shall be no rankings by the
Advisory Committees.
14. The three committees are advisory only
and the Board of Regents.alone has the power
to appoint and cannot share this power.
15. Nothing herein should be considered
acceptance of any pre-condition established
by any of the four Committees. No other
arrangement, agreement oreunderstanding
exists between the Regents Selection
Committee and the Faculty, Alumni or
Student Advisory Committees, other than
those listed herein.
16. The Regents reserve the right to modify,
alter, or amend any of these Guidelines,
should the Regents deem it necessary.
17. The Regents Selection Committee has
established an office at 4010 LSA Building,
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 (telephone 763-
3223 and 763-3224). Fred Wagman has been
appointed Secretary to the Regents Selection
Committee.
Hallucinogens offer new horizons
' By Rasa Gustaitis
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. - Pioneers in
scientific studies of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline
Iand other psychedelics met in San Francisco
this month to catalize further research,
virtually banned by government action for
more than a decade, on these forbidden
drugs.
"Insensible pharmacophobia .(fear of
drugs), which does not discriminate between
opiates and other drugs that might have
medical or therapeutic use, i1%tultifying
scientific research," complained Weston La
Barre, an -anthropology consultant and
former associate at the Menninger Clinic.
"The requirements for LSD are so
extraordinary that you wouldn't know what to
o witht -once-y.u got t" said Dr., Oscar
Janiger of Beverly Hills, who did early
research with the compound. "I haven't used
it since 1962 when the FDA came in and
confiscated all the stock."
HALLUCINOGENS are now unavailable to
medical practitioners and are no longer being
studied in any significant way, according to
the researchers.
In the 1950s and 1960s, up to 150
researchers in the United States
experimented clinically with LSD and other
hallucinogens, said Janiger, who is writing a
history of that work. Sandoz, Ltd., the
pharmaceutical house that held rights to the
LSD compound, described the drug as an
agent in psychotherapy and a means of
experiencing the psychotic state.
But supplies began to dry up in the late
1960s as Sandoz turned over its stock to the
National Institutes of Health. Since then, LSD
has been classified as a dangerous drug
available only through the National Institute
of Drug Abuse (NIDA). All research
proposals must be sponsored by a medical
institution and approved by the Food and
Drug Administration.
A NIDA spokesman said no LSD has been
dispensed to researchers since 1974.
THE OFFICIAL AND POPULAR attitude
toward LSD is so negative that "people
interested in beneficial use don't even try
anymore," said Dr, Andrew Weil, author of
"The Natural Mind" and a research associate
in ethnopharmacology at Harvard
University's Botanical Museum.
"People working in this area," said
Janiger, "havera kind of odiumaabout them.
Who needs that?" But he insisted that so
much has already been learned about the
drug that it could be used iin much more
sophisticvated ways if it were again made
available.
Dr. Stanislav Grof, who has conducted 2,000
sessions with LSD over the past 20 years at
Johns Hopkins Medical Center and
elsewhere, said he found the compound to be
"a powerful tool for deepening our
understanding of the human mind.'' LSD can
be a catalyst or amplifier, he said, that
"makes it possible to observe certain
phenomena that are there all the time, but in
hidden form."
Grof said he witnessed people on LSD
relieving experiences dating, back to their
astrophysics, Einstein's
and similar concepts that
previously not been able
ize-
relativity
they had
to visual-
knowledge could not emerge from a
consciousness where man is not separated
from the universe."
He cautioned that "LSD is. not a
medicament that will make insane people
healthy," but it is useful to "shift the wave
lengthsof the receiver. . . to allow new
pictures."
Participants at the San Francisco
conference, which also dealt with the use of
Albert Hofman, the Swiss pharmacologist
who discovered LSD, believes the substance
can provide a "new deepened reality
consciousness." Hofmann said the drug can
heal "the occidental neurosis - cleft
'What is needed today is the fundamental re-experience of
the oneness of all living things. A misuse of knowledge
could not emerge from a consciousness where man is not
separated from the universe.'
-Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD
consciousness - the view of man as separate
from other living things."
Such a healing is essential, he said, to
overcome the environmental problems that
plague us.
"What is needed today is the fundamental
re-experience of the oneness of all living
things," Hofmann said. "A misuse of
LSD: One case
history
By Rasa Gustaitis
LSD and other psycho-active substances
are, basically, catalysts for the mind, in the
view of Dr. Andrew Weil, who told this story:
In 1967, when she was two-months
pregnant, a 26-year-old psychologist
discovered a painless swelling in her neck and
learned she had an advanced stage of
Hodgin's disease, a form of lymph cancer.
Physicians recommended abortion and
radiation therapy. She instead chose surgery
and cobalt treatments so she might keep the
baby. She had had two previous
miscarriages.
But the woman's condition deteriorated.
Doctors said she might live until the baby
was born but not for much longer.
The woman was admitted to a hospital and
placed in a room with another cancer patient
who was in a state of rage because she was
dying. She herself felt no anger.
Then another physician took over the case.
He asked about her life and learned she was
unhappy in her work and her marriage.
Shortly after the roommate died. The new
physician did something no person
knowledgeable about LSD would now do: he
gave the drug to the pregnant woman. Under
its influence, he guided the woman's mind to
the life inside her and to the thought that she
was responsible for it.
hallucinogens among American Indians;
reported that experiments with mescaline
and plilocybin have yielded similar results.
La Barre said that psilocybin shows
considerable promise in psychotherapy. "For
people with heavily repressed emotions,
pilocybin , seems far superior to sodiun
amytal (a barbiturate sometimes used tO
break through emotional blocks). With
psilocybin, the patient remains conscious and
therefore participates in his treatment."
SIGMUNDFREUD, La Barre noted, gave
up hypnosis treatment with hysterics because
he believed the participation of the patient's
consciousness is necessary for a cure. "Yet
current experiments with psilocybin in
psychiatry are," according to La Barre,
"exactly nil, which I find deplorable." An
official at the Food and Drug Administratioh
said some psilocybin projects have been
approved, but he would not elaborate.
Dr. Norman Zinberg, a clinical professordf
psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and
author of the recent drug use report for tho
president's Commission on Mental Health,
told conference delegates that learning about
hallocinogens continues to be inhibited by
fear. "Research studies have frequently been
flawed by their boas against the drugs
themselves, their retrospective approadh,
their failure to account for intervenibg
variables, their lack of controls and their
focus on deleterious effects," Zinberg wrote
in the task force report.
Zinberg has called for the decriminalizati'n
of all drugs, including heroin, in the belief
that prohibition only aggravated a drug's
potential for abuse. He also supports nol-
medical, recreational use of psychedelic
substances. "Forces that are prohibitionistic,
moralistic," he warned, may lead to people: to
forget that "there is something useful in
changing consciousness now and then io, a
way people find felicitous and pleasant."
Participants at the conference, attended by
more than 200, agreed that the beneficial uses
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EDITORIAL STAFF
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