. OPINION Page 4 Sunday, September 21, 1980 The Michigan Dily - I Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Vol. XCI, No. 16 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of The Daily's Editorial Board Housing foreign students Feiffer 7 I ~ CAE OF MRG~tl H ' t 6k.~Fr~1~ W~ VXFMVFROP A(6 NMIAG 1 - MAE 'XOFAIRE A curve . IMAGINE YOURSELF arriving for the first time in India, or Japan, or France, prepared to begin a year of foreign, study. You don't speak much Hindi, or Japanese, or French, and you haven't arranged for any place to stay-but you're not worried. Several weeks before you left the United States, you received a flyer from your foreign university indicating that "temporary low-cost, on-campus housing will be available during the arrival period." Try to imagine the shock you would feel if you found out, just hours after. debarking from your plane, that you would have only a one-in-five chance of getting that low-cost, on-campus housing-housing which actually con- sisted of 20 bunk beds crammed into a converted study lounge. You would probably be confused, frustrated, and perhaps even a little frightened. You would be in the position of several hundred foreign students who came to the University of Michigan for the first time this term. Of the 354 foreign students who came to the University this year, only 70 were provided with the low-cost, tem- porary housing they had thought they were assured-and those 70 lived in a South Quad lounge, for which privilege they paid $5 per night. Most of -the rest had to rent hotel rooms until they could find a place to live in the impossibly tight Ann Arbor housing market.. All the foreign students are now set- tled. But the issue is not. The problem of finding ,temporary housing for foreign students seems to recur each year. It is difficult to assess blame for the situation. The Housing office simply does not have enough space to tem- porarily house several hundred foreign students each year. As Housing Direc- tor Robert Hughes warned recently, guaranteed housing for the foreign students would mean further cutbacks in . dormitory space for returning students. But the foreign students would ap- pear to deserve special consideration from the University. Often, they are the sons and daughters of foreign dignitaries-if not foreign envoys themselves. Further, and more impor- tant, foreigners experience special ad- justment problems in a strange coun- try; to compound that culture shock with the trauma of searching for housing seems particularly cruel. The answer, then, lies precisely in Hughes' observation. Guarantee enough spaces in University housing for the foreign students and cut back on space for returning (American) students. It is of course nice that there is often space in the dorms for those sophomores and juniors who choose to live there. But at a University where the vast majority of students must live off-campus because University housing is in short supply, those sophomores and (especially) juniors care enjoying a privilege that can be sacrificed for the foreign students. The University ought to set aside space-at least on a temporary basis-for new foreign students each fall. It may mean inconveniencing some returning students. But it is cer- tainly easier for them to search for off- campus housing than it is for an Indian or a Japanese. WkM R= Rxt ' , r o t Repairing the 'U' campus, whether it needs it or not Something very mysterious is going on at the University. Bits and pieces of the campus' physical plant are being torn up, left in their' newly-primitive condition for weeks or even months, and then put back in very much the same condition. Other areas are being ravaged by bulldozers and jackhammers through no fault of their own and then transmogrified into something altogether different and far less useful. I FIRST NOTICED the Sisyphean effort when 12 square feet of sidewalk leading up to the rear of the Student Publications Building Obliquity By Joshua Peck Israel 'S ener VIDENTLY NOT content with his recent merger agreement with Libya, President Hafaz al-Assad of Syria has now joined hands with the Palestine Liberation Organization in a "holy war" planned against the United States and Israel. In a communique issued to a gathering of ministers of Islamic nations, Syria and the PLO urged the other leaders to impose an oil embargo on the U.S. and to establish branch recruiting offices for the PLO in their respective homelands. That way, the PLO can more quickly go about its business of exterminating Jewish f , - - ries press on residents of Israel. Islamic news sources at the ministers' conference have indicated there is little chance the suggestion will be heeded; most of the oil- producing countries rely on American purchases to keep their economies solvent. But the radical forces in the Mideast can bring pressure in more sublte ways, and that pressure must be resisted as long as the destruction of the Zionist state remains on the PLO's agenda. Until then, U.S. concessions to the terrorists ought to be kept few and far between. vanished during the summer, which forced us* aspiring Woodsteins to march bravely; through yards of sodden muck to reach our workplace. I naturally assumed that some important renovation was about to be worked on our precious pavement, perhaps the in- clusion of a ramp for the handicapped, or a canopy for clandestine meetings of star- crossed lovers. Nope. The sidewalk returned in good time, looking very much as it had before, except for a few new handprints impressed by posterity- hungry artisans. Next to be attacked by the University's secretive laborers were the front steps of the Union. I had big hopes when they first vanished. I walked past the moonscape left in their stead through June and July, an- ticipating a moat perhaps, with a covered bridge. Or maybe a large retaining wall behind which the most obnoxious members of Sigma Waffle Moo could be kept until they had mastered, the rudiments of civilized behavior. Or-yes, yes, this would have been perfect-a bed of steel spikes to satisfy the suicidal whims of the recently-expelled. NO DICE. FROM steps she came, unto steps the Union did return. I cursed quietly to myself *hen I first saw the finished product. The University had lost yet another chance at fame for its architectural innovation. Ingalls Street, a central artery of the Main Campus, was the next to come under the per- fidious moles' attack. In deference to the stately Michigan League, the east half of the street was left alone. But the western half was mercilessly stripped, replaced with bricks and grass, and left to sit sublimely in the sun, unaffected by the traffic congestion its con- version had caused. The construction mystery was compounded by the economic hardships that all could ob- serve in virtually every facet of campus life: Dormitory room closets appropriated as sleeping space; North Campus residents stranded on Geddes Ave. for lack of a late bus; bushy-tailed freshpersons torn from their studies of The Peloponnesian Wars to accommodate the UGLI's earlier closing hours; vastly overcrowded lectures and recitations; football players forced to survive on but a singlemeasly pound of filet mignon per day. The situation grew increasingly inhuman, and yet the construction projects went on. THE QUESTIONS ALTERNATELY throb- bed through my brain and burned behind my eyes. The heated blood coursed through my capillaries and reddened my retinas. I could tolerate my ignorance no more. And then the mystery was revealed. The devil pulling the purse strings tight for needed improvements while squandering shekels on cosmetics resides not in the un- derworld below, but above us-northwest of us, in fact, in Lansing. You see,'the state government is willing to give the University money, but doesn't want it going just anywhere. If tax moneys were simply handed over carte blanche to Harold and his merry men, who knows what foolish expenditures they would make? You know how impetuous those Regents are. THE CLEVER SAGES in the State House save us from regental blunders by ear- marking various funds for specific purposes. And thus, we end up with a pittance for professors' salaries, a farthing for facilities, and a fortune for physical improvements-if indeed what's happening to Ingalls Street can be classified as an improvement. Yet the University administrators dare not complain; to do so would mean risking being labelled ingrates. Nor do they dare to leave the funds for capital "improvements" un- touched; to do so would persuade some mean- spirited Republican in Lansing that the "U" must be rolling in money. Our budget would almost certainly be cut. So on we squander, righting rights when we run out of wrongs, like miscreants giving Mona Lisa a facelift or Hamlet a sixth act. Yet still a danger lurks. AS EVIDENCED BY the absurd construc- tion projects and renovations (rean- tiquations?) already cited, the University may be'running out of ideas for tossing about its wealth. If Michigan is to survive, studen- ts may have to join the effort to find problem* areas on which the University could justifiably waste a grand or two. Squads of scholars could take to the streets and to the Diag, finding shurbs in need of assistance, sidewalks in need of repair, and benches in need of masonry. With a long list of capital improvement projects, we who love the University could rest assured in the knowledge that no bank account will be left with so much as an unspent penny. Unless.... . 0 Supposing every hole in every University- owned sidewalk has been mended, every cement-paved street been restored to cob- blestone and re-restored back again, and still tens of thousands of dollars, sit in tax coffers, dangerously neglected. AGAIN, A GRAVE responsibility would fall, upon the student body. Where no site existed- for construction or renovation, students would have to create one.' Under cloak of night, quaddies and Greeks alike would emerge from the steam tunnels, implements, of destruction in hand. Flower gardens could be ravaged, pavement cracked, buildings defaced. The, civil engineering department could hold clandestine seminars in instantaneous pothole generation. 'Poor teenagers from New York could apply their graffiti skills to the UGLI,. simultaneously rendering the building's reputation. obsolete and earning their wqy through school on a work-study grant. IN THE ADMINISTRATION Building, ad- ministrators would publicly issue statements of anger, while privately rubbing their hands in glee at the expenditures the "hoodlums" were necessitating. Creative vandalism would replace football as the University's favorite outdoor sport. A spirit of unity never before seen would emerge among the students, and a call to ar- ms would rise among those who had already seen the light, beckoning those whose superegos dictated outmoded lawful behavior: "Every little chip helps." Joshua Peck is the co-editor of The Daily 's Opinion page. His column appears every Sunday. ( I, N L, \ .4 ' w1 r" .A 6. The Grad swallowed me -4 'fir f e o ' i .1 . ', ~, , tt: .:. 3 ) , , r ", y:' ' .Y r 4 4 6 C ' ' 4 The Graduate Library swal- lowed me whole the other day, books and all. For the numerous hours I have spent in the Reference Room, or bent over the microfilm reader, or flipped through the card catalog only to be cross-referenced to another drawer; as a senior who opts for the choice of a term paper over taking the final, the Graduate Library had to be my friend. But no longer. I was suspicious and annoyed from the beginning of my jour- ney. Only the elevator on-the left could take me to the North Building stacks. After waiting several minutes, I boarded it on the second floor. MY DESTINATION was floor 4A, but the elevator was going down. After a stop on the first would elevators: Angie Dickin- son proved that in Dressed to Kill which, unfortunately, I saw. With these thoughts, I boarded the empty elevator. The ride lasted only a few seconds before the elevator stop- ped on the fourth floor, which is below 4A. Neither the front nor rear doors opened. I PUSHED ALL the buttons but nothing moved. The emergency telephone in the box above the control panel was missing. As I was new to such predicaments, I stood for a few minutes doing nothing, thinking. "So this is what it's like to be trapped in an elevator." Then the adrenaline started flowing and I pushed the red button marked "emergency alarm." It rang loudly second set of doors, I saw two people. The elevator had stopped about eight feet above floor 3A, where a woman was attempting to pry the doors open with a black metal tool. "Look for a lever at the top of the doors," she told me, as a man looked on. I put the Harper's volume between the elevator doors to keep them apart while I checked the outside doors, but could find no lever. "DOES THIS ELEVATOR get stuck often?" I asked, as the woman seemed quite accustomed to prying open the doors. Her af- firmative answer didn't lighten my spirits. If the outside doors could be opened part way, I would be able to iumn through the 1 x 3 font By Nancy Rucker swering that I was indeed stil* stuck. I imagined being trapped for days with my volumes of Har- per's and Motion Picture Classic from 1923. I formed a checklist: My stomach was full from lunch, I had written to my Mom-that af- ternoon and had been home the previous weekend, I had seen all my friends recently, and no assignments were due until Tuesday. My absence could go unnoticed, I thought. Sweating more as my ner- vousness increased, I turned my efforts to getting out on my own. The instructing voices were silent; I heard no one working for my rescue. In desperation' I clawed at the front doors, and pushed them apart. I did the same with the outside doors, and . o - ML