Ninety-seven years of editorial freedom VOLUME XCVII - NO. 109 ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN - WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 1987 COPYRIGHT 1987 THE MICHIGAN DAILY Lack offaculty diversity hurts 'U' By ERIC MATTSON Third in afive-part series As United Coalition Against Racism member James McGee sees it, the University's apparent inability to recruit black faculty members stems from two factors: priorities and money. "As far as not having enough money to go around, I believe the Business School Library was built with money from donations. The Law Library was built with money from alumni," said McGee, a senior in music theory. "There has to be enough money." Like many other members of the University community, McGee believes that the extremely low number of black faculty members here - less than 3 percent of the total faculty - helps perpetuate the University's standing as a homogeneous, "one-sided" community. McGee says that if the University belieyed that recruiting black faculty members was important enough, it would push harder and commit more resources to reaching that goal. "The University of Michigan has this foolish idea that having state-of-the-art equipment makes it a great University. It doesn't," he said. "If you have a one- sided person operating state-of-the-art equipment, what do you have?" McGee acknowledged that the University does make some efforts to diversify its faculty. Since the early 1970s, the University has operated an Affirmative Action office to increase the number of black staff and faculty members here. The office also oversees University compliance with laws prohibiting race and sex discrimination, and it operates the anti- sexual harassment "Tell Someone" program. So far, the office seems to have made little progress in the area of black faculty members. In 1975, there were 77 black faculty members here. Today there are 67. One obstacle the Affirmative Action office faces is that because power at the University is decentralized, some departments work harder than others to recruit minorities. In addition, because faculty positions turn over very slowly, there are fewer positions open for See STUDENTS, Page 2 Shapiro can Punish suspect University President Harold Shapiro has the authority to impose further punishment on the freshman evicted from Couzens Hall for circulating a racist flyer, according to a University attorney. University Counsel John Ketelhut said Shapiro has the authority to act on whatever sanctions a committee assembled to investigate racist incidents recom- mends. Shapiro's authority is laid out in the "Presidential Power" regental bylaw and the "Racial" bylaw, according to Ketelhut. The investigating panel, con- sisting of University Vice President for Government Relations Richard Kennedy, MSA. President Kurt Muenchow, and Law Prof. Sally- anne Payton, was created in Feb-, ruary to investigate a racist broad- See GROUP, Page 3 Degree.. change proposed, By STEPHEN GREGORY dela the award. The denial sparked a The regental advisory committee campus-wide outcry culminating in on the honorary degree policy a sit-in protest at the April 18 released its report last night in regents meeting. During that which the majority of the meeting the board decided to create committee recommended that re- the committee to review the Uni- gental bylaw 9.03 be changed. The versity's policy on awarding: the bylaw stipulates that only those degrees. who can attend commencement In the committee's 21-page ceremonies can receive honorary report, the majority opinion was degrees. that the University should be able The committee's decision needs to grant honorary degrees to people the approval of the University who are sick, have died, or are Board of Regents to become unable to attend the ceremony "by effective, reason of coercion." Mandela has Last year the regents cited the been held in a South African jail bylaw as a main reason for denying since 1962. Currently, bylaw 9.03 aniti-apartheid activist Nelson-Man- See PANEL, Page 3 Preparing for blood drive Daily Photo by DANA MENDELSSOHN Gertrude Wagner, a Red Cross volunteer, teaches Michelle Henderson, and LSA senior, how to label blood packs. Today's blood drive was sponsored by Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority and the NAACP._The next blood drive-will be held March 26 and 27 in the Michigan Union Ballroom. Scientist mixes space business with pleasure By STEVE KNOPPER The walls of George Carignan's North Campus office are adorned with photos of Italy, Colorado, and Detroit. But these tourist shots weren't taken by a Polaroid; they were taken by satellites. Each photo looks like a piece of modern art designed with colorful squares, lines, and amorphous blobs. Profile Carignan, a tall man with glasses, a straight gray moustache, and a deep, rough voice, spends a lot of time sending satellites in orbit around planets and comets. A future endeavor involves the 1992 launching of an unmanned U.S. spacecraft for The Comet Rendezvous Asteroid Flyby mis- sion. The mission, co-developed by Carignan and University professors Thomas Donahue and Sushil Atreya, will fly the spacecraft in tandem with a comet for three years and fire an instrumented probe into its nucleus. Carignan has been involved in space research since he came to the University in 1959. He was Director of the Space Physics Research Laboratory from 1963 to 1985. CURRENTLY, he is a Re- search Engineer at the laboratory, as well as an adjunct professor and Associate Chairman of the Depart- ment of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science in the College of En- gineering. "I've spent a lot of my energy in my profession," Carignan said at his Space Research Building office. "It's just something I like to do." In addition to the Flyby mission, Carignan helpeddevelop a neutral mass spectrometer for a mission which will measure the composition of Jupiter's atmo- sphere. The mission was originally planned to take off this May, but last year's Challenger explosion "set it back tremendously." Carignan estimated that the mission will not get to Jupiter until 1994 or 1995. "Space science has definitely been in the doldrums the last few years," Carignan said. "NASA had decided to put all of its eggs into the shuttle... and Challenger blew up." But Carignan said the "reve- lations" of the Voyager flights past Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus, and the high-resolution photos of the planets' atmospheres, are payoffs for work done in early 1970s space research. According to Carignan, the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory VI, developed at the University, spurred his success in the space research field. Carignan said the OGO VI was the first instrument orbiting the earth that measured atmospheric composition. The Observatory's 1970 launch "put us - me and the (Space Physics) Laboratory - on the map," he said. THE OGO VI, Carignan explained, observed the atmosphere like it was "skimming cream off of a big bucket of milk that no one had ever seen before. One of the most controversial parts of Carignan's career is heading the Research Policies Committee, a University committee of faculty, administrators, and students which discusses research-related issues. Carignan has chaired the committee, which reports its findings to Vice President for Re- search Linda Wilson and the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs, for six years. Members of the RPC drafted a version of the Majority Report in December suggesting new guidelines for such research. Last term, Carignan presided over thetRPC meetings in which four students resigned from the committee in protest of research at the University which has the po- tential to harm life. As chairman, he said, he has "tried to maintain as detached a view as I can... I'm sure the students who resigned felt that I didn't steer it the way they wanted it steered." Carignan believes "The Uni- versity has to be very careful about letting the Defense Department get too large control of the funding of research. That worries me." "Carignan has unquestionable integrity. I have total respect for him," said Eric Caplan, a graduate history student and one of those who resigned from the committee. "In his eyes, students were not second class at all." CAPLAN SAID that while Carignan runs meetings strictly, he "was much more concerned with the process itself than what the process determined." Carignan said he spends half of his time working on his own research projects, while devoting the other half to chairing the atmospheric and oceanic science de- partment. The chairmanship in- volves recruiting graduate students. "He is always upbeat," said Research Secretary Martha Moon, Carignan's secretary while he was See RESEARCHER, Page 3 Daily Photo by KAREN HANDELMAN George Carignan, a University Space Researcher, has developed a mission that will study a comet in the 1990s. * Students sign postcards to protest aid cuts FLASH seeks more student awareness By STEPHEN GREGORY Members of the Michigan Student Assembly yesterday urged University students to sign post- cards protesting President Ronald Reagan's proposed financial aid to work against the proposed cuts. Perlman, an LSA senior, said the drive achieved its goal of one thousand signatures in four hours. He said other institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania have recently conducted similar By PAMELA FRANKLIN According to Michigan Student Assembly presidential candidate David Sternlicht, MSA's effect- iveness depends on how well its representatives increase awareness requiring each representative to go to at least five of their school's student government meetings per semester. An LSA junior and non-voting MSA member, Sternlicht hopes representatives will act as liaisons wit teir. eminne oad MCA NP se INSIDE Is Project Democracy, created by President Reagan, really demo - cratic? OPINION, PAGE 4 Australian power-rockers the Hoodoo Gurus will have their concert tonight at the Nectarine Ballroom broadcast nationwide. ARTS, PAGE 5