4 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, March 30, 1994 ale]bzLrn iu 'The Michigan Daily would love to get ahold of information that would violate the privacy rights of others, and we must not let this happen.' -'U' President James J. Duderstadt, on why the University will not release records pertaining to the Statement of Student Rights and Responsibilities Notes 420 Maynard Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan JEssIE HALLADAY Editor in Chief SAM GooDsThN FLINT WAIESS Editorial Page Editors Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of a majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters, and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. The president'ial search Duderstadt was second choice, regents ignored input -.EVEN STRAtJDED' OW~ A DESERT TSLAND, IT FouNDHJt. t \ ( } 7" = t, Finally. After six years of contentious struggle between the Board of Regents and two news- papers, the embarrassing truth has been re- vealed concerning the search for president of the University: few minorities or women were "considered," the students' list of can- didates roundly ignored and the regents were left with a second-choice because one re- gent is alleged to have remarked, "The Uni- versity of Michigan would never hire a president with a foreign accent." Further- more, the "search" cost more than $90,000 to execute and another $375,000 to defend in court. In the end, the court ruled the regents had willfully violated the Open Meetings Act and had denied the public's critical right to know. U.. When the regents began the process of selecting a new president in May of 1987, the ground rules were essentially the same as the previous one in 1980. Keep the infor- mation as restricted as possible, set up quasi- advisory committees of faculty and students and don't give any - repeat - any infor- mation to the public or the press. When the public asks who is in the running and whether we are considering minorities or women for the position, refuse to comment. But they did not stop there. When Virginia Nordby, the director of the Office of Affirmative Action, formally requested information regarding the search nine months after it had begun - she re- ceived a one-page memo that listed a nu- merical breakdown and nothing else. And the numbers showed the University had virtually no women or minorities in mind for the top spot. At a time when they were publicly professing a new-found commit- ment to diversity and affirmative action, it is sadly ironic that no women were finalists and only one token minority finalist was named. The numbers speak for themselves: 25 of the top 27 candidates were men. No women were interviewed. Three were minorities. And no minority was seriously considered. Also revealed was the presidential search committee's decision-making style, namely the lack of attention payed to student input. Duderstadt was not even on the student list. He received the absolute lowest rating from students due to fears that he would be a technocrat, unsympathetic to needs of stu- dents. But most glaring about the search papers was the fact that a phone call from Regent Deane Baker (R-Ann Arbor) prevented the first choice, Vartan Gregorian, a dynamic educator and president of the New York City Public Library, from getting the job. The precedent set was a bad one. If the search process is allowed to go on in secret again, any regent could prevent a candidate from coming to the University by intimidat- ing them over the phone. And the regents actually rewarded Baker's actions, by rub- ber-stamping his de facto decision. And because the search process was so badly fractured and the finalists weren't really "finalists" - everyone beside Dud- erstadt had been eliminated - the regents were stuck with the in-house candidate the faculty had worried would end up being the only one left - and they were sadly right. In the end, the documents portray a group of regents out of touch with the public and out of focus with the main reason for con- ducting a search: finding the best candidate for the people not for themselves. They prided themselves on maintaining secrecy over diversity, ignoring student concerns and defending a badly broken search pro- cess for years after. What would the University be like with- out an irate phone call from an out-of- control regent? Sadly, we can only wonder. Art fair expansion City Council should give Kerrytown a chance Move forward and get the point To the Daly: On March 14, the Daily printed my concerns about Aryeh Caroline's Viewpoint (3/9/94). I took issue with Caroline, questioning his use of racist rhetoric and with intellectual confidence borne of one's environment. I emphasized moving beyond political posturing - through the exertions of thought, understanding and compromise - toward peace. Since then, Caroline retracted one of his insulting generalizations about Arabs. But what of moving forward? I just completed a fact filled, well supported paragraph backing a Palestinian point of view and exposing the single- mindedness of Caroline's assertions. But that paragraph is not here. I didn't challenge Caroline then, nor do I write this now, for the purpose of continuing an argument. On the contrary, my point is that representing one side of an issue is easy. "Since my youth, I have learned ... ," as Caroline wrote, will not do. From "South Pacific:" You've got to be taught Before it's too late Before you are six, or seven, or eight To hate all the people your relatives hate You've got to be carefully taught. We must demand more from ourselves through education. While remaining true to our values and ideals, whatever they may be, we must reject the trap of believing because 'it's always been that way.' I may accept Caroline's apology for his remarks about Arabs. The families of Akram Joulani (whose name I carried during the vigil for those killed at Hebron) or Arafat Mahmoud Bayid (whose name my Jewish roommate carried), in the face of ongoing institutionalized racism, may not. This is about having the moral courage to stand for what is just; about learning how deeply our words can cut and how significant a barrier to peace prejudiced attitudes are. I will continue to hope that beyond the bickering, we all - including Caroline - get the point. BRADY BUSTANY LSA senior What a joke! To the Daily: If someone had said, one ~i-..:a consider a comic-strip writer - given that their comic strip meant something to us students. Bill Waterson would have been great. Gary Larson, Charles Shultz, Berk Brethed or Gary Trudeau would all have been great. But CATHY? How did this happen? Is there some big CATHY fan club lobbying the administration so that its author will finally get the respect she deserves? I doubt it. The bottom line is that CATHY is a lame comic. And I don't mean lame in the way that the word is so overused as in "That's lame dude," but in the very real sense that the comic is stumbling around as if wounded and should be shot to put it out of its misery. At best, it is fluff. At worst, it is a pretty offensive portrait of a weight-obsessed, shallow career woman. Graduation speakers should be chosen not because they are alums, but because their work has meant something to the students. We might not all agree with Clinton or Bush, but at least they were significant people in our lives. In choosing CATHY, the administration has proven itself way out of touch with the student body. Indeed, I'm not sure yet if I shouldn't be a little insulted. I'm sure CATHY is a fine person, and she might even turn out to be a dynamic speaker with a great deal of wisdom to impart to us as we leave this, our ivory tower. She'd better be. GAVIN BARBOUR LSA senior Despite loss, Wolverines provide joy To the Daily: As I sit here on my computer in Angell Hall desperately trying to churn out a 12 page term paper, visions of a lost National Championship continually dance around in my head. Despite constantly reflecting on the errors of the team against Arkansas, such as Makhtar not keeping his hands off the ball in the cylinder, Jalen Rose missing an open layup to tie the game and Dugan Fife, nervous as a middle school child, missing every three point attempt, I can do nothing more than thank this team for all the thrills they provided every fan of Michigan basketball. There is no doubt in my mind that despite all its mistakes, the team willingly put all its heart into the game and was willing to do anything in order to win for its school. I doubt if anyone will ever forget Juwan would like to say that in my three years at the University I have been blessed with a brilliant basketball program. Despite all the failures, it has provided the student body with more heart, class and thrills than any other program in the country. Despite our sadness, only down the road will we really comprehend how great this team was, and how much joy it provided. CHRIS CAMEREM LSA junior Letter writer's logic faulty To the Daily: Ernesto Garcia claimed recently in a letter to the Daily that Albert Einstein felt it "essential" to be deeply concerned for "real meaning in life," and even for the "reality of God." He produced a quote that he felt illustrated this. I believe that while Mr. Garcia was correct about the first point, he is quite wrong about the second. Consider these quotes, taken from Albert Einstein: The Human Side (edited by Helen Dukas and Banesh Hoffman, published by Princeton University Press): "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." "I do not believe in immortality of the individual, and I consider ethics to be an exclusively human concern with no superhuman authority behind it." "What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of 'humility'. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism." Mr. Garcia claims that "scholars ... have become convinced that there must be more to reality than mere physical processes." I think that a single quote by a scientist and a 14-year-old article from Time are not enough to establish this as a widespread trend. In any case, a more subtle problem surrounds Garcia's use of "mere." As I think the above from El Salvador SAN SALVADOR - There's nothing about El Salvador that made me feel far from home. Nothing shocking. Nothing strange. In fact, the familiar-looking divided highway outside my guest house, lined with the neon signs from gas stations and McFood restaurants, could have been Washtenaw, or any other exit, off any other interstate. But the people I met in my few days there know an existence far from anything I could ever begin to comprehend. I've never stepped over a body on my way to class, and I've never learned to incorporate massacre into my daily experience. There was a minor protest at the International Fair Grounds in San Salvador when the polls closed March 20. It was the first election in this Central American nation since the 12-year civil war ended in 1992 and hundreds of people were still standing in the scorching hot sun, waiting for their chance to vote. If they got inside, and managed to push their way through the crowds to find their name on any one of 400 lists posted on walls in any one of the four fairground buildings, then they could vote. But the lists were incomplete at best, and ven if the majority of the population had been literate, getting a ballot would have been a difficult task. For those who did find their name on a list, and did find that their name had spelled correctly - a seemingly rare occurrence for the poor-some discovered that their ballots had been already marked for them, or that there was someone nearby to identify the "correct" box to draw an X through. The non-incumbent partieswere outraged, of course, because the inefficiency and confusion favored the mostly rich, educated supporters of the controlling National Republican Alliance party, which has been in power since 1988 and is expected to win again. But the general population seemed to be no more disturbed by the voting process than by anything else they'd come to know. There is nothing to fear in post- war El Salvador. People don't get shot very often any more - at least not as often as they do in the cities in the States. Torture is now practically unheard of, and as the Cold War has ended, the United States has stopped dumping money into the hands of military regimes at war with their own people. But the history of massacre and the size of the scars left by 12 years of agony are absolutely terrifying. The more I learned, the more I understood exactly how far away I was from a world where a figure skater getting whopped on the knee dominates the local news for amonth (at least), and outrage means the president might have been able to pocket a little extra cash when the rest of the nation didn't have that chance. The day before the election, I asked a taxi driver to take me downtown where I was meeting a friend for dinner. He, like every other taxi driver I met, would vote for the left coalition that included the former guerilla FMLN. He started telling me about the war, back when he used to drive at night. Back when the military enforced a 7 p.m. shoot-to-kill curfew, and when sunrise would find bodies scattered in the streets. "Did you ever see people killed," I asked. "Thousands," he said. Unphased. "Weren't you ever scared?" "No. God protects me." "But 75,000 people died. Why didn't God protect them?" He didn't know. It wasn't his job to question God. Maybe if I were more religious, I could better understand how this man had distanced himself from so much terror for so long. Or maybe I could lend some sense to the fact that his story was not isolated, nor an incredible aberration, but rather, the norm. Many people recounted their experiences to me with the same candor one would use to describe a soccer game.except in El p S 0 Last week, the Ann Arbor City Council decided against allowing Kerrytown, a downtown craft and farmers' market and shopping center, the street closing it desires to join the summer activities of the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. The city council presented their map of street closings at last week's meeting, a map that did not include the block of Detroit St. between Catherine and Fifth that Kerrytown had requested. The Kerrytown merchants requested the street closing because they want to get their hands into the multi-million dollar summer art fairs, which they propose to do by holding events such as live entertainment, children's activities, a pig roast and their usual farm and craft market vendors. Kerrytown mer- chants claim that their activities are not an attempt to steal business from the other fairs, but are an enhancement of the sched- ule already existing. Explaining the rationale behind the re- jection of Kerrytown's request, the city claims that the added activities and street closing will overly tax city personnel and equipment. Furthermore, city officials are afraid that having activities on Sunday - the last day Kerrytown plans to operate its events and a day later than the other fairs shut down - will interfere with the city's cleanup efforts. City Council members also claim the art fairs are big enough as it is, and point out that once the fairs start growing it will be hard to draw the line for where they should stop. Other complaints focused on the fact that the lives of Ann Arbor residents are disrupted to a nearly unbearable level during Art Fair as it is, and adding more Kerrytown's additional activities will take away from the other fairs. On the surface these seem like valid complaints. However, after deeper consid- eration, it is apparent that they do not hold much water. First, the city's grievance that it cannot afford to contribute any more equipment or personnel is at least a slight exaggeration. How taxing can two extra. barricades be? Kerrytown vendors already have the necessary booths from their weekly farmers' market, and they have not asked for setup or cleanup help from the city. Second, it is true that the art fairs greatly disrupt the lives of Ann Arbor residents. However, closing one short block of a mi- nor street - especially when compared to the closure of four major downtown thor- oughfares which already occurs -will clearly not have a large impact on traffic or congestion problems. Third, the merchants' proposed activi- ties will add to, not detract from, the exist- ing fairs. Their proposal focuses on enter- tainment, not art sales. Their hours will provide evening entertainment and they pro- pose activities for families and children, both of which are not adequately supplied by the existing fairs. Allowing Kerrytown to join the art fair should not be interpreted as the beginning of an uncontrollable spread of activities. Rather, it is a logical addition to an all- encompassing downtown summer festival. Kerrytown is a unique and important part of the downtown shopping area, and is conve- niently located to improve the fairs without further disrupting the city. The city made an S