F7Iurday, June 4, 1977. THE MICHIGAN DAILY Page Sever WHEN JOHN FELDKAMP, the Univer- sity's campus housing director read the Fair Rental Housing Practices Committee recommendations, one proposal in particu- lar may have left his head swirling: "The University must accept a larger part of the responsibility for housing its students." After years of faithfully thrusting sopho- mores, still warm from their* dormitories, onto the city's private housing market, city realtors are lining up with tenant advocates to tell the University .that it should build more hosing. "It is the firsttime that public officials have encouraged the University to get into housing," Feldkamp remarked. "Their tra- ditional position was that they were opposed to the University building more housing because the University is not on the tax rolls and it would be taking something away from the business community." City officials and even some members of the business community are, however, com- ing to realize that encouraging the Univer- sity to build more housing might involve less local cost than any housing the city, state or private market would be able to provide. A new program available to universities through the federal bureau of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) offers mort- gage loans at an interest rate of only three per cent for the construction of dormitories and student-faculty housing. But despite the acute local housing shortage and the availability of HUD funds, Feldkamp says that the University does not intend to build new housing soon. "The HUD money," Feld- kamp said, "would only provide 30 per cent of the funds we need. And there are so many barriers which tell us not to take our resources and put them into new housing." If the University is unwilling to commit its resources to badly needed housing it. should be compelled to assume some share of the city's tax burden so as to provide some relief to city residents. Attempts to get more money from the 'U' have indeed been greatly intensified. Those efforts are currently being channeled into one bill, sponsored by State Senator Gilbert Bursley (R-Ann Arbor), which is being re-introduced HERE'S C.ot3SR\QUTION 7TO THE HOUSNy PROQLENA ! BcuE IYER5ITY OF micHI4AN a S1WENC OUSINy OFF cE Q KeQ lis are no longer forced to live a variety of alternative housing to city residents. :it and public must also pressure uns into revising their lending poli- that that renting housing rehabili- is ecouraged. Mortgage financing ler multiunit projects must become Ity at local savings and loan institu- uraged to develop public policies puraged to develop uublic policies courage lending to reputable land- ,nd not those who break housing or provide little maintenance. It never be forgotten that it is the lending policies which largely de- who has the money to buy into the using market. Local landlords should n finance preference over absentee Is who in effect hike rental prices 'paying off" management companies 71 their properties. into the State Senate this year. The bill, according to Bursley, would provide for an assessment of the University's property, and collect from them a percentage contribu- tion to the general fund budget based on the percentage value of property owned. According to Bursley the revenues could total up to a million dollars a year. While numerous creative housing reme- dies have been recommended by various involved parties, few have gotten beyond the talk stage. The Mayor's Housing Fair Rental Prac- tices Committee was unique in that it com- pelted tenants, landlords, bankers, city coun- cil people and private residents to sit down together and initiate policies to deal with the housing problem. It forced the city's special interest groups to take public action and be held accountable for it. Yet that committee has not made any proposals since the April elections. There are some who question whether the work of the committee can go any further. In committee member William Tyler's opinion, "The major work of the sturvey has been done. Given the. ability of what the committee caniaccom- See HOUSING, Page 10 Sartre at seventy: an intimate look Life/Situations Essays Written and Spoken by Jean-Paul Sartre, Pantheon Books, N.Y., 216 pp., $8.95 By CONSTANCE ENNIS AS A CHILD, Jean-Paul Sartre had two ambitions: to create a work of art and to be famous. Of course, there is no doubt among his readers that he has succeeded in both, but now at the age of seventy-two, Sartre sees it a bit dif- ferently. "All right," Sartre says, "I'm famous . . . All this is the whole life I dreamed of when I was a boy, so in a certain sense I have had that life. But that renresented something else, I'm not sure what. And I don't have that." In Life/Situations, a collection of four essays and three interviews written and spoken by Sartre, we get a chance to indulge in a more intimate picture of Sartre's pri- vate life and politics. Since 1945, Jean-Paul Sartre has been one of the most stimulating voices to be heard on the French Left. Although he emerged from the very midst of the bourgeosie he has always spoken with outrage against them. Ironically, because of his elegant use of language and su- perior intellect, his works are addressed to the bourgeoisie. Although Sartre is mown for being the people's writer, his works were always too esoteric for the workers so it was the middle-class radi- cals in France who devoutly soaked up everything he had to say. For more than twenty years he had no comparable rival in progressive thought and his political programs were usually extreme. As Sartre admits today, he had influence, but little power. It has always been some- what vague as to where Sartre stands in the political puzzle. Was he a M'arxist? No, not officially. He demanded a revo- lution and wanted to crush the bour- geoisie, but he never joined the com- munist party. Where is Sartre today? His four political essays satisfy some of our curiosity, but still, nowhere does Sartre plausibly demonstrate the validity of his pronouncements. The three intbrviews with Sartre are by far the most interesting part of Life/ Situations. In one interview concerning his study, Flaubert, which he has been working on for ten years, Sartre discuss- es the process, technique, and style he has been laboring with during this work. A large part of the study is based on the writings of Flaubert's youth and family. Sartre says it is "a story of an appren- ticeship that led to the failure of an en- tire life," Flaubert is "the way I imagine him to have been, but since I used what I think were rigorous m e t h o d s, this should also be Flaubert as he really is, as he really was. At each moment in this study I had to use my imagination." The first two volumes are currently be- ing published and he is working on two more. In another interview Sartre considers the womens' movement through questions addressed to his constant companion, Si- mone de Beauvoir. Sartre has expressed little on this issue'. This makes the inter- view as revealing as it is vague. He speaks of being surrounded by women since childhood and admits that he was not aware of the extent of their oppres- sion. Much of the discussion revolves around his intimate relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Here he redeems his past naivete with a new understand- ing in a series of beautiful answers de- scribing the equality between them. "I have always believed that there was some sort of woman inside me. I could have much better conversations with women . . . With men, the conversation always degenerates into discussions of professional matters." In a highly introspective discussion en- titled Self-Portrait at Seventy, Sartre ex- presses his frustrations with his loss of vision which is keeping him from writing. "My occupation as a writer is completely destroyed," Sartre says. "In a sense, it robs me of all reason for existing." But at the same time his words are encour- agingly peaceful and extremely content. "Who, or what should I be rebelling against? . . . things are the way they are and there is nothing I can do about it." IN THE FOUR essays by Sartre, which are- apparently his final writings, we get a strong view of his opposition to op- pression. The first essay discusses the case of Basque autonomy in Spain and the last years of Franco through an an- alysis of the Burgos trial. He speaks with bitterness toward instances of political oppression, most effectively against the attempted cultural genocide of the Bas- ques of Franco-Spain. Another essay dis- cusses the M a o i s t s as affecting the French in particular, yet clearly sug- gesting international significance, Of the French Maoists, he says, "They realized that the old bourgeois society was doom- ed and was only protecting itself from death with the clubs of policemen, (and that) had shown that the only relation- ship between the ruling class and the masses is a violent one." A third essay discusses the two types of justice in a bourgeois democracy. Here Sartre points out that justice originates not in the state, but among the leople. There are two types of justice, Sartre explains: one is bureaucratic justice which binds the proletariat to its condition, and the other is primitive justice, which is the people asserting their freedom against prole- tariatization. TN THE LAST essay cntitled Elections; A Trap for Fools, Sartre discusses the failure of traditional electoral politics. He calls universal suffrage an institution which "atomizes and serializes individual men." By the end of the essay we are left with the question, why vote? The interviews in particular reveal an agile mind, one that is critical of society and one that is ready to accept new ven- tures. Despite his loss of vision, it is apparent that Sartre's intellectual activ- ity remains constant and his deep sensi- bility remains the same. Sartre is cur- rently preparing a series of broadcasts for television where he will speak about the last seventy-five years of this cen- tury. As was written in Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs, since 1957 Sartre has been working with a "feeling of extreme ur- gency . . . an exhausting race against time, against death." But today, Sartre no longer feels pursued by time. "I have decided-I say it loud and clear-that I have said everything I had to say." How- ever, says Sartre, "If I last another ten years, that would be very good; that wouldn't be bad at all." Cons/ance Eunisis as InS&A srnior majoring in English.