OPINION



Page 4

Thursday, December 6, 1984

The Michigan Daily


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Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan

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Holiday Bowl: Bad timing

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By

Steve Shindler

Vol. XCV, No.75

420 Maynard St.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109

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Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board
Miles don't guarantee
diversity

I've always been under the impression that
the University is one of the finest academic
institutions in the nation. Last week, after
four years at this prestigious schdol, I began
to doubt the validity of that belief. Why?
Because Michigan has decided to place foot-
ball first and foremost above academics.
The Holiday Bowl is played on Friday, Dec.
21-the last day of finals in Ann Arbor. Don
Canham, the University's athletic director,
has said in the past, and firmly repeated this,
year, that Michigan wouldnever play a bowl
game during final exams. This is a sound
policy, and certainly makes the University
look good. But the truth is that this is the first
time this policy has been tested and Michigan
has failed to uphold it. Why then, Mr.
Canham, did we have the policy to begin
with?
FOR THOSE students who don't think our
acceptence of the Holiday Bowl bid has any
negative effects, take into consideration an

article that appeared in last week's New York
Times. The article stated that beginning next
year, the Holiday Bowl will be played after
Christmas. The reason:. Seven schools that
the Holiday Bowl was considering told the
bowl committee in advance that they were not
even to be considered for the bowl game due
to final exams. These schools included:
Oklahoma, Oklahoma State, Nebraska,
Wisconsin, Penn State, Notre Dame, and
Purdue. These schools told the Holiday Bowl
committee they would not accept the bowl bid
because at their schools academics is more
important than athletics. And the bowl of-
ficials, in an effort to make the bowl more
prestigious, moved back the date of next
year's game so as not to compete with final
exams.
How does all this make the University of
Michigan appear to the rest of the nation?
How does it make you feel that you attend a
school where football is the most important
thing? Who does this effect the most? Well,
in addition to the 80 or 90 football players and

the 225 band members who have to reschedule
their finals in order to go to San Diego, it ef-
fects each and every one of us a great deal;
An event like this hurts the reputation of the
University. When the image of this institution
is hurt, your chances of getting a job when
competing with others of different schools is
significantly decreased.
I am outraged that Michigan accepted thg
bowl bid to play in the Holiday Bowl. Yes, it
was an honor to receive a bid to play against
the nation's number one team, but it was an
even greater dishonor to the students of the
University to go against our policy, and
lowering our image in the process. Othe
schools (which up to now I thought were less
academically oriented than Michigan) were
able to turn down the bowl game when it ii-
terfered with finals, why didn't we? Next
time Mr. Canham, consider the reputation of
the students before you think of the athletes.

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IT IS TIME to dispel the notion that an
increased enrollment of out-of-state
students adds to the diversity of the
University.
An LSA Steering Committee on ad-
missions has recommended that the
University increase the number of
students from other states in response
to a declining number of applications
from in-state students. The committee
justified its recommendations by poin-
ting out that increasing the number of
out-of-state students will bring in more
tuition revenue and improve the com-
position of the student body. They are
correct on the first count.
But when Residential College Prof.
Carl Cohen says that "People who
come from different parts of the coun-
try have different perspectives" and a
"different view of the world" it
becomes necessary to define "diver-
sity." The only difference between
University students from New York
and University students from Chicago
is that one group likes the Mets and the
other one likes the Cubs. The fact is

that the out-of-state students attending
the University are amazingly
homogenous. They are suburban and
upper middle class and it's not too dif-
ficult to understand why: out-of-state
tuition alone comes to roughly $7,000 a
year. Diversity is not encouraged by
that kind of a tuition bill.
The University could more effec-
tively encourage a diversity of thought
and background by actively recruiting
students from inner city Detroit or
other areas of Michigan not adequately
represented in the student body.
Minorities and students from
economically disadvantaged
backgrounds would add a needed depth
to the composition of the student body.
Diversity is not guaranteed by Texas
chili lovers mixing with Chicago-style
pizza addicts, especially when it costs
both of them $10,000 a year to be here.
Unless the University is willing to
step up its efforts to recruit minorities
and the economically disadvantaged,
diversity at the University will never
be achieved.

Schindler is an LSA senior.

h

Outlook for peace improved-

An outdatedrelationship
with the Pentagon

By Franz Schurmann
Though wars rage throughout the world, the
outlook for peace between the superpowers
ironically is better than it has been for many
years. The main reason is the absence of
proxy wars involving clashes of superpower
interests.
The idea of proxy conflicts arose shortly af-
ter World War II when the Western powers
chose to interpret leftist insurgencies as
covert Soviet moves against the West.
THE TERM "cold war," which Winston
Churchill introduced in 1946, came to
designate prolonged war between the West
and the Soviet Union fought out through such
proxy conflicts.
As both sides repeatedly stepped to the
brink of direct war between themselves
through unlimited backing of their proxy par-
thers, a tacit understanding arose among
superpower statesmen that such wars had to
be "limited" to prevent nuclear war. Also,
the ability to settle such conflicts short of out-
and-out victory for either side was seen as a
test of peace between the superpowers.
In the late 1940s, Washington interpreted a
communist insurgency in Greece as a Soviet
move against the West. Later, it interpreted
the Korean war and the Viet Minh uprising
against the French as Sino-Soviet expan-
sionism.
IN THE MID-1950s proxy wars briefly
abated and we had the first superpower
"Thaw."
Then came the Vietnam troubles, which
Washington saw as Chinese expansionism. In
the 1970s, Washington viewed wars in
Ethiopia, Angola, and Afghanistan as proxy
U.S.-Soviet confrontations. The Soviets and
the Chinese had their own proxy conflicts in
Indochina. And in the 1980s, the Reagan ad-
ministration at times has chosen to portray
the Central American conflicts in Soviet and
Cuban proxy terms.
But the evolution of the Reagan ad-
ministration's rhetoric on Nicaragua shows a
shift away from laying the blame on Moscow

and Havana. The recent uproar over MiG
shipments was really a warning to the Soviets
to stay out of Central America. And all in-
dications are that the Soviets have no inten-
tion of seriously committing themselves in
Nicaragua as in Cuba.
IN FACT, just as Moscow tacitly accepts
the Nicaraguan conflict as an American af-
fair, so Washington, to the dismay of conser-
vatives, has accepted Afghanistan as a Soviet
affair. Neither wants any proxy conflict in its
own or the other's back yard.
Elsehwere in the world, the superpowers
either are redefining erstwhile proxy conflic-
'... the Reagan ad-
ministration at times has
chosen to portray the Cen-
tral American conflicts in
Soviet and Cuban proxy
terms. But the evolution
of the Reagan ad-
ministration's rhetoric on
Nicaragua shows a shift
away from laying the
blame on Moscow and
Havana.'
ts in regional terms or making efforts to settle
them. A decade ago, the United States saw a
Soviet hand in Ethiopia, Angola, and Mozam-
bique. Now both superpowers are
cooperating in famine relief in Ethiopia. In
Mozambique, where famine also rages, the
Soviets have quietly accepted their total loss
of influence. And in Angola all sides, save
perhaps Jonas Savimbi's forces, are anxious
for an eventual settlement.
Lebanon easily could have been interpreted
as a proxy U.S.-Soviet conflict, with Syria as
the Soviet proxy and Israel as the United
States'. And with U.S. Marines in Beirut, the

U.S. 6th Fleet off shore and some 7,000 Soviet
"advisers" in Syria, a direct superpower con-
frontation was possible.
BUT PRESIDENT Reagan pulled out tho
troops and allowed Syria to take the lead in
trying to put Lebanon together again.
In the Persian Gulf, the long Iran-Iraq war
easily could have turned into a proxy war. In-
stead, both the United States and the Soviets
now back Iraq. The Cambodian conflict no#
is regarded by all three superpowers as sim-
ply a regional war. And even the tense Sind-
Vietnamese border has relaxed.
In a recent Wall Street Journal interview,
former President Nixon said, "There is top
much of a tendency... to say if we have arms
control, we will have peace. It's the other
way around."'
HIS OBSERVATIONS, obviously based on
experience, suggest that the current
brightened prospects for arms accords bet-
ween the superpowers may derive not from
more benign diplomacy but from just this
vanishing of superpower proxy conflicts.
Right-wingers would retort that nothing has
changed the Soviet determination to control
the world, and leftists would make the samie
allegation about 'imperialism.''0
But the fact is that all three superpower~s
are finding it difficult to exercise much powor
beyond their borders, and internally all face
great problems which cannot be solved kiy
getting involved in foreign conflicts.
We had our Vietnam. The Soviets have
their Afghanistan.. And the Chinese have hid
their own Vietnam-once as close to them as
"the lips and the teeth" as they used to say.
The waning of proxy conflicts could mean
an opportunity to go beyond thaw or detente
to some real efforts at peace and arms reduc-
tion. And real peace between the three giant
superpowers could mean real hope for rolling
back the tide of violence that seems to be
rising in other parts of the world.

a

T HROUGHOUT THE last four
years, the Reagan administration
has shown a desire to build up what it
considers to be a faltering defense
program. Increased military expen-
ditures to improve and upgrade our
military capabilities have been the
rule in the minds of Reagan budget
writers and as the second-term ad-
ministration faces a national deficit of
historic proportions, Reagan aides are
grappling with what many view to be
inevitable cuts in this year's defense
budget.
In addition to cuts in federal finan-
cial aid spending, the University
community now faces a different type
of threat as a result of Reagan's
budgetary priorities. Last month,
Reagan's science advisor, George
Keyworth, asked top Pentagon officials
to find ways to substantially increase
their support to university scientists
and engineers. White House science
policy official James Ling has said
that, in lieu of Keyworth's proposal, his
office already has begun developing
programs to provide more oppor-
tunities for graduate students entering
research fields of importance to the
defense department. Ling said that
Keyworth intends "to rebuild the kind
of relationship between the Defense
Department and universities that
existed before 1970."
For the University, the rebuilding of
such a relationship could mean a
return to the inappropriate research
activities of the '70s. It could mean
return to the type of Pentagon-Univer-
sity relationships that provided for
electronic warfare techniques classes
open only to military personnel with
high security clearances. It could

mean a return to classified research to
determine battlefield conditions, to
track enemy troop movements, and to
allow bombers to evade enemy radar
and complete strafing missions. These
are all examples of applied weapons
research done at the University before
the initiation of the 1972 classified
research guidelines.
The 1972 guidelines were a step in the
right direction, a step away from
research ". . . any specific purpose of
which is to destroy human life or in-
capacitate human beings." But since
that time, the University has not been
willing to commit any further con-
sideration to developing more ethically
sound research guidelines.
Restriction of an individual's right to
research is a very serious charge, but
more severe are the restrictions of in-
formation and potential harm inherent
in University research for the Depar-
tment of Defense. Applied weapons
research, such as the projects under-
taken in past years, helps no one.
Students and professors alike would
better serve the advancement of their
respective professions by concen-
trating on basic research that can be
applied to more positive social ends.
It is time to end the standstill on this
issue. As the Reagan administration
becomes increasingly committed to
the importance of a technologically
advanced defense effort, the university
must become increasingly committed
to holding its research efforts in check.
It is time for the University to stop
using Pentagon money to buy off
academic researchers and institutions
for the development of technology that
supposedly suits the interest of a
"strong" national defense.

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Schurmann teaches history and
sociology at the University of California,
Berkeley. He wrote this article for the
Pacific News Service.



LETTERS TO THE DAILY
Not allN.

K

Campus bus drivers are bad*.

To the Daily:
As a sophomore returning to
Bursley Hall, I am naturally
familiar with the vagarities of the
precarious bus connection bet-
ween the North and Central
Campuses. When the petition
calling for improvements of vir-
tually all aspects of the service
appeared at Bursley's main desk,
I signed it quickly and with little
reservation.
While I still agree that the buses
are late or simply not running of-
ten enough, and that there are
certain drivers who drive
recklessly and show little respect
for their passengers, I am still
unable to say that the system is a
total loss.
I was riding a bus back to Bur-
sley Hall from Central Campus
around 12:30 p.m. on Dec. 3 when
the driver made the routine stop
outside the North Campus Com-
mons. Much to my annoyance, he
immediately left the bus. "Now
what," I wondered, "is he going
to make us all wait while he
smokes a cigarette or
something?" No sooner had I
thought that than I saw a young
lady struggle onto the bus,

worse." Now, I no more defend
the system on the basis of a single
driver, than I condemn it on the
basis of others. Yes, I still agree
that changes, and drastic ones,
need to be made before the Cen-

tral Campus-North Campus bus
service is strfficient and efficient.
I do, however, urge the
recognition of the system's
strong areas, so that, at the risk
of sounding cliche, we do not

"throw the baby out with the
bathwater" in our desires to
correct the system's faults.
-Dave Nicolaou
December 1

Others suffer from

closet kleptos'

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e
w

To the Daily:
I read with interest and con-
cern your news story, "Campus
crawls with closet kleptos"
(Daily, November 29). I would
like to point out that restaurants
are not the only victims of "klep-
tos." Over the past year, Consider
has had over 25 racks stolen from
various classroom buildings and
dormitories. Most will not be
replaced; it does not make sense
to buy more racks only to see
them disappear again. At fifteen
dollars a rack it is an expense
that Consider can ill afford each
year.
You quote one student as
saying that the bars get "used to"
having their property stolen.
BLOOM COUNTY

While I cannot speak for the bar
owners, I can say that the Con-
sider staff has not gotten "used
to" having its property stolen.
The racks are there to distribute
Consider to everyone: students,
faculty, and staff. When a rack is
stolen, everyone loses.
You indicated in your article

that many students steal items
just to have them. They should
know thatvstealing is nothing to
be proud of and, as a result -of
their theft, some people do indeed
suffer. -Jeff Spinner
December 3
Spinner is editor-in-chief of
Consider.


EVOLUTIoN OF EPO TO SETTLE WMPUT[ OF HONOR
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Unsigned editorials ap-
pearing on the left side
of this page represent a
majority opinion of the
Daily 's Editorial Board.

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