4 0 420 M6yna (E4e £idlyiian Dath2 Eighty-one years of editorial freedom Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan rainbow bridge Towards a common Ann Arbor community, by john siinclair. '4 r rd St., Ann Arbor, Mich. 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. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 1971 NIGHT EDITOR: TAMMY JACOBS QO n up Regents meetings RECENT MOVES toward opening more of the Regents' monthly sessions' should be commended as a step toward increased involvement of the public in regental decision-making. However, these gestures should be viewed as but one step in what should be a process of mak- ing the meetings completely open to the public the board is supposed to serve. Two weeks ago, the Regents permitted a Daily reporter and photographer to at- tend their monthly Thursday night ses- sion. The two were allowed to listen to a discussion between the board and psy- chology Prof. Roger Heyns, former chan- cellor. of the University of Califoria at Berkeley. After a few minutes, however, Vice President for University Relations Michael Radock asked them to leave, saying the Regents would have to include other local media if the Daily was allow- ed to be present. Last. week, however, President Robben Fleming said he would suggest that the board open its Thursday night sessions to selected members of the public and press. If the Regents agree to include the press at- their Thursday night session, this change would be some improvement over the preseIt system. As it stands now, the Regents hold meetings here two days each mnonth. The press, and public are permitted to attend a sesion Friday morn- ing where, because decisions have already been nade, little discussion takes place, policies are approved virtualy unanimous- ly, and the agenda is run through at lightning speed. But the Regents are elected officials, chosen by the people of the state to make policy decisions on state-owned univer- sities. Their opinions, ,ideas, and policy positions. spould all be a matter of public record, noh only for the benefit of their constituents but also for those - students and faculty members - whose lives their decisions affect. THUS, THE REGENTS should move to open as much of their average 14 hours of closed meetings as possible. If only the Thursday session is opened, the Regents could continue to make import- ant decisions in closed sessions, while the Thursday night slot could be filled with forums such as the one with Heyns - discussions, which though potentially in- teresting, do not inform the public about the rationale behind regental decisions. Those who feel the Regents should be able to conduct their business out of the public eye should not worry about these proposals for opening meetings, for de- cision-making processes can never be en- tirely open. In the two days they are in Ann Arbor, the Regents discuss policies and programs during meals, in their free time, walking between meetings. It is highly improbable that the press could or would monitor their every waking hour at the University. And the press, in fact, should probably not be present at discussions on all poli- cy matters. The review of appointments, dismissals, and tenure is a highly sensi- tive and personal matter which should probably remain confidential between the Regents, the employer, and the employe. STILL, MANY REGENTAL decisions are of great interest to the public. Par- ents and students want to know why tuition must be increased year after year. Professors want to know why funds for their departments were cut. Some decisions, such as, those on a student-run bookstore and black admis- sions in the past, and the Regents' up- coming consideration of classified re- search are of particular interest to the University community. When groups in the University have taken a strong stand on issues and have worked for the imple- mentation of their goals, they should be able to know why and how the Regents made their ruling instead of sitting through a virtually staged vote in the' Regents' Friday morning open session. IN THE MEANTIME, other steps towards better communication can be. taken. One such step might be to make public the Regents' detailed agenda, which gives background information for and explana- tions of the items the Regents are to consider. Open hearings and forums should also be continued and expanded. Those on classified research, University investment practices, the Health Serv- ice, and pass-fail grading have admirably presented the Regents with varied stances on issues - positions they might not have become cognizant of during their short stay in Ann Arbor. Yet even these hearings do not solve the problem of understanding policy making, since the Regents rarely speak at the forums - either to ask questions or give their own opinions. Thus the proposals to open the Thurs- day night sessions ought to be extended to all Regent's meetings. It may be a difficult system for the Regents to adjust to at first, with some friction likely to result. But it is a necessary step to en- sure the board's responsibility to its con- stituents and to let members of the Uni- versity community observe the formula- tion of decisions which directly affect them. -SARA FITZGERALD BEFORE I GET into anything specific in this space - and I hope I'll be with you once a week or so in The Daily fromnnow on- I'd like to lay out a general pro- gram in this first column which might help to provide a context for anything I might say in the future. What I'd like to offer is a statement written by my partner and comrade Leni Sinclair, which says it better than I could do right now, and if you can get next to this then we can move on to deal with specific problems and specific solutions which concern all of us who have an interest in our common community here in Ann Arbor. When we first moved to Ann Arbor in 1968 this was a whole different place from what it is now. Our brothers, \with their beautiful long hair blowing in the wind, would constantly be hassled and called all kinds of names by straight short-haired college stu- dents. The sisters would get gawked and ogled at as we walked we all have in common as young people in America far outweigh our differences. The ruse about students being part of the commu- nity only temporarily, until they graduate, doesn't separate us any- more. Freaks are just as unstable as a class as students are, maybe even more unstable. We just have to work to take control over our own lives and control our own communities wherever we happen to live at the time. We cannot postpone the future and leave it up to other people to get it together here. The future is right now and it's up to as what we do with it, The isolation between the cam- pus and the community has to stop. The University after all is token, students will never make the revolution without the support and participation of their brothers and sisters in the community wno are already living the life-style of the future. There have been some em- bryonic' attempts at making the University serve the needs of the community, like the University Child Care Center, the Women's Crisis Center, the SGC Bail-Bond Fund. But there has to be a lot more than that. Students have to get involved in, and demand to get credit for, working on community projects like the new People's Community Center, Ozone House, the Free Health Clinic, Drug Help, the People's Food Co-op, etc. Students and freaks united in their demads and in their daily commitment to serving their own needs can make the Uni- versity responsible for imple- menting programs to take care of the needs of all the people in the community: food, housing, clothing, health care, advancing the people's culture and the peo- pe's technology. Since 18-year-olds have. gained full citizenship and students are no longer disenfranchised because of their status aststudents, we want to work together with other organizations to see to it that no person over 18 in this city and county remains unregistered. We want to work 'towards establishing relations between the Ann Arbor Tribal Council and corresponding student government organizations for the purpose of electing candi- dates to the city and county gov- ernments who are responsible to all young people, students and freaks, high school students and our little sisters and brothers who are still kept from voting. The time for the phony separa- tion between students and their brothers and sisters in the "sur- rounding community" is over. We have only to look around to see that we are ONE COMMUNITY, we are one beautiful Rainbow People, and we have to break down the separation between our- selves which has been promoted by the control addicts in busi- ness and government who depend on our isolation from each other in order to keep us in our place. We face the future together-a future we will create together through our unity and our work. * * * Our goal is to organize Our com- munity, including the University and its students, into a powerfully united organism which can serve as a model of the world of the future. As Huey Newton has taught us "a community is a comprehensive collection of in- stitutions that will deliver our whole lives, provided that we can reach most of our goals within it. It serves us and we create it in order to carry out our desires." All Power to the People! Rainbow Power to the People of the Future! The Editorial Page of The Michigan Daily is open to any one who wishes to submit articles. Generally speaking, all articles should be less than 1,000 words. John Sinclair is chairman of the Rainbow People's Party, a local connunal service-oriented group. He is presently in Jack- son State Prison, awaiting a decision on the appeal of his 9v2-10- Year sentence for possession of two marijuana cigarettes. This is the first of a series of weekly columns Sinclair will write for The Daily. I Building a community center Working with the Food Co-op down South U with no brassieres under our raggedy tee-shirts. It was more serious than just being called names, though. Sev- eral times we had our windows smashed in the middle of the win- ter when a bunch of drunk frat boys threw rocks and snowballs at our house. A lot of times,sit- ting here on Hill Street, Ann Ar- bor's Fraternity Row, we felt as though we were living in the mid- dle of enemy territory. But the animosity was by no means one-sided. Freaks had an equally contemptuous attitude to- wards students and toward intel- lectuals in general. Freaks mostly resented the fact that students always seemed to have money, while they never had any and lived from day to day, from crash pad to crash pad. Students generally didn't smoke dope then, but drank beer, they 'had short hair, and they listened to bogus low-energy music. And all we ever had to say to students in those days was: DROP OUT! That was back in 1968, though; now it's 1971 and everything is very different. Basically I think that students and freaks are be- ginning to realize that the things part of the community and has to become responsible to the commu- nity or else it's just a glorified General Motors or Rand Corpora- tion. In the past, that's exactly what we thought of the University. It was just anothercorporation that had to be smashed, or, unable to do that right now, it had at least to be dropped out of. But we were idealists then. We have l2arned that the University is simply a form, a structure, and that in it- self it is neither good nor bad. But a university cannot exist without its students and scholars, and it's up to them to give it the correct content: it can be either reactionary or revolutionary, de- pending on the uses people make of it. The new slogan has to be: Turn On, Tune In, and TAKE OVER! There is no way a revolution can take place in this country without all sectors of the population being involved in making it. There is no way freaks can make a revolution without the support and partici- pation of their sister and brother students and all the incredible re- sources that are available to them at the University. By the same Letters to The Daily To The Daily: workshops, how they can go back ONCE AGAIN, a Daily reporter, to their own states and work to in search of something to do, has get young people elected to the two decided to comment on and cri- national presidential conventions. ticize something he knows nothing The only assumption this confer- about. In his editorial called "Give ence is operating under is that it Youth a Chance" (Daily, Nov. 23) ts about time that American youth Chris Parks discussed the Emer- get into the American political gency Conference of New Voters process-be it in a radical, liberal, and my activities in relation to it. moderate or conservative manner It is odd that he should know -where the decisions that affect the details about my meeting with us all are made. a Daily reporter -since he was not It is about time that Parks, and there. The inevitable result was all others like him wake up to "the inaccurate and irresponsible re- harsh realities' of political power porting. The meeting with The -in this country." the decisions Daily was actually held a week be- are not made out on the streets fore the date ,he gave and it was by people waving signs and get- not an interyiew of me. I never ting beat up and killed by society's handed the Daily reporter a guest helmeted hired hands. The deci- editorial. I merely introduced Mike sions determining this nation's fu- Manning, Association of Student ture are made by th people who Governments Executive Vice Pres- involve themselves in the political ident, to the Daily reporter and process, the people who work to then listened as he was interview- get a seat at a national' convention ed. At the end ofthe interview, he so as to choose a candidate, and gave a prepared statement to the finally. at the ballot box in No- reporter. vember. The main danger, however, that IN 1968, American youth com- is created by such inaccurate re- plained that after the national con- porting as displayed by Parks, is vention, there was no choice. In- the damaging effect it can have stead of camplaining, it is time to on the worthy project which is be- get into the conventions and create ing made the object of uninformed a choice. Except for a lot of dem- criticism. In this case, Parks dem- onstrations, no one really knows onstrated that he did not have the for sure what the youth vote slightest idea of what this confer- nieans. What the Emergency Con- ence is all about. At no time did ference for New Voters proposes he seek to ask me about it to dis- to do is to help get American youth cover the purpose of the confer- into the convention so that we will ence. Instead, he sought to mould know what the youtli vote means. it in his mind to conform to the It is always easy to sit at a desk attack he decided to make. Be- and criticize something or the ef- cause of the number of people who forts of other people. Some Daily read a newspaper, a reporter has reporters have done too much of a responsibility to his readers to this in the past. It is about time investigate a matter and not just that reporters like Parks get off write off the top of his head. their cans and instead try to do CONTRARY to what Parks has something constructive. decided is the function of this con- The Emergency Conference for ference, the Emergency Confer- New Voters will be held at Loyola ence of New Voters does not as- University of Chicago Dec. 3-5. sume that "American- youthas a Housing will be provided. Further group have some common interest information is available at the substantial enough to weld them SGC office. together as a political unit," -Jerry Rosenblatt The purpose of this conference SGC Executive Vice is to instruct the young people who President come, with numerous and varied Nov. 24 Indian-Pakistani crisis AS PAKISTAN and India teeter on the brink of full-scale warfare, the great powers have publicly called for an. end to violence and a peaceful resolution of the'erisis in South Asia. But these cries of concern over need- less bloodshed from the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union are hollow and paper pleadings. Neither country's cold war strate- gists are willing to openly seek the inter- vention of the United Nations Security Council in the dispute. Rather, both are busy angling for diplomatic leverage and fear the charges of hypocrisy they would encounter should they encourage Secur- ity Council action. Hopes that conflicts, such as the one in the Indian subcontinent, could be solv- ed peacefully were incorporated in the founding of the UN, especially in the powers of the Security Council. But the great powers, since the UN's birth, have preferred to settle problems on their own, often militarily. Instead- of forcefully urging UN in- volvement, President Nixon has urged both India and Pakistan to pull back their forces and negotiate peacefully. THE NIXON administration, allied to the Pakistani regime through the South East Asia Treaty Organization, fears any international proceedings in the great powers, as the two Asian na- tions have continued their old propa- ganda battle over who should control the disputed Kashmir territory. The struggle for a Bangla Desh, inde- pendent of Pakistan, is supported by India which would welcome a friendly, peaceful, and militarily weak neighbor to the northeast. Consequently, the In- dian army is tying down the Pakistani forces along the tense border, while the Indian-armed Mukti Bahini rebels, al- r e a d y controlling the countryside, strengthen their position in East Pakis- tan's large cities. At the same time, Pakistani's Yahya Khan is not eager to cool off the crisis along the India-Pakistan border. Should his army fare badly in East Pakistan in the fight against the guerrillas, as it seems it may, he might appreciate an opportunity to blame the defeat on a brief, but bloody war with India. The Pakistani army could then slip out of an independent Bangla Desh without losing too much face - never mind the blood - retreating to West Pakistan to resist an Indian invasion. SHEEPISHLY, the great powers make pronouncements extolling peace, while all four nations' diplomatic maneuverings prevent any concrete action to avoid a costly war. I ~ deep greens a nd blues Correction: The war is not winding down, _________________________________________ lv larry IennErit 'p K r r u cs L Ii AL d u W uu u ^s v are u 461 RED BRANFMAN, who has interviewed F thousands of refugees from U. S. bombing in Laos, puts ituvery simply: "The war is not winding down." Peace groups across the country have been saying it for years. Frequent articles in leading newspapers and magazines sub- stantiate it, and a recent report by the. Center for International Studies at Cor- nell seems to confirm it. The troops are coming home - -they are no longer needed. A massive air war has replaced American ground action in Indochina and the air war has spread beyond Vietnam to include intense bomb- ing in Laos and Cambodia. This is no longer a matter of specula- tion-this is a matter of fact. And this matter-of-fact bombing is taking its larg- est toll on civilian life and property. "The bombing of Laos has doubled," Branfman writes in the Washington Monthly, "erasing whatever restrictions on striking civilian targets that formerly ex- isted. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of villages have been destroyed. "Ten of thousands of thousands of pea- American bombing strikes., But personal accounts by thousands of Laotian re- fugees contradict these assertions. IT'S EASY TO CONDEMN our own pi- lots. High above their targets, sheltered from knowing the results of their bomb- ing, they seem all too willing to kill. Branfman has interviewed pilots in Indochina. "War has progressed to a point where you're going to bomb civilian targets and 'that's it," said one. "I'll be frank. I'm trained to kill people. I don't like it particularly. But when the time comes, I'm prepared to do it." Another was even more blatantly prag- matic: "I'm not saying we were might. Let's face it, we just attacked the fuckers. But when we did decide to bomb them, we should have kicked the shit out of them." It's easy to condemn the atrocious ac- tions of pilots, officials and presidents. It's more difficult to condemn the people who, through their inaction, have allowed the atrocities to continue. At one time, we could have pleaded ig- norance; the government kept a tight lid the death or the 'suffering we cause. "What does it mean," Branfman asks, "when the strongest of the species is sys- tematically killing and maiming some of the weakest? . . . the most prosperous regilarly destroying the homes and be- longings of some of the poorest? . . . the most technically advanced using their most sophisticated weaponry against a people who pose the most marginal of challenge to their interests?"' WE TRIED TO DECEIVE ourselves once - we talked about sharing our love of freedom. But in Indochina, it's more like rape than love. For two decades, we've attempted to implant the seeds of freedom and democ- racy, as if our genes carried either char- acteristic. Our eyes glazed with a lust for God knows what, we've penetrated an unwilling womb, slowly but with increas- ing force. Like a rapist who lingers too long, we find complete withdrawal impossible. But the time for withdrawal is long overdue, a withdrawal not only of ground troops, REFUGEES CROWD a valley north of Vietiane, Laos. ground combat, there is more bombing and the rate of civilian deaths and casual-