4A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, February 19, 2004 OPINION 420 MAYNARD STREET U0 ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 opinion. michigandaily.com tothedaily@michigandaily.com N, ,4. r EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE I am watching very carefully, but I am troubled by what I've seen. -President Bush, expressing concern that homosexuals are committing their love for one another by marrying in San Francisco, as reported yesterday by The Associated Press. TWO MEN AN b W MARRYINc woULt w HIAT ABOUT Do THE T" E SNCT ITY C~OOK I NC * , 4 -F COLIN DALY THE MICHIGAN DALY .1 a. HO IG? el Aia ' Street fighting man - who needs cops anyway? STEVE COTNER My BACK PAGES . ' y «f y now it's obvious, but it needs to be said: The members of the Ann Arbor Police .V Department and the Department of Public Safety should all be arrest- ed for impersonating offi- cers. They drive around in cruisers and wear blue uni- forms. They stick white envelopes on the hood of your car. They'll even drag you off the side- walk if you're carrying a cup at night. But when it comes to keeping the peace - and that is their real title, peace officers - they're just show- cops: They show up and then they cop out. In my years at the University, I've seen offi- cers harass homeless people, tell a harmless nonstudent to leave University property immedi- ately and interrogate a guy named Silver because he had a "street" appearance. I've seen them stalk parties for young drinkers, empty wallets looking for fake IDs, enter houses unan- nounced. I've seen the inside of a cop car, with its computer dashboard and its plastic partition - I know how many seconds it takes for a court-date to print from their machine and how many months it takes to clear your record. And I've seen them ruin Ann Arbor tradi- tions, breaking up block parties before they even started and ducking the heads of naked, cuffed runners into cop cars - police pres- sure took the Naked Mile down from 800 participants to a couple dozen in two years' time. I don't know what it is, but there is something about a peaceful student celebra- tion that a cop just can't stand. And sadly, those are the good points, because those are the times when the cops were around, as unwanted as they were. At other times, like the frat brawl earlier this week, students have called officers for help and found that no one really cares. They've discov- ered that the one time we do want to see a cop, the cops don't want to see us. The past week's happenings weren't just a fluke. AAPD Sgt. Tom Seyfried's statement that the fight was "childish nonsense" wasn't just one man shooting his mouth off. It is part of a policy to ignore students' pleas for help, to regard serious callers as tattlers with no backbone. Noise complaints, drinkers under 21 - those call for immediate action. But a fight? It will blow over. I had a run-in like this in the early fall, when my house had an open-house party. Some wrestlers from down the street had stolen food from our pantry, and when one of my friends confronted them, five or six guys dragged him into the driveway, punching and kicking him. They all split, but the biggest of them returned a few minutes later with a friend, and then the fight really started. The big guy could take on anybody. He had been kicked off the team, so he didn't need to stay below any weight class. He head-butted. Hon- estly, who head-butts? A Native American neighbor - a nonviolent type who owns his grandfather's peace pipe - asked, "What are you guys fighting about?" and was thrown onto a car's hood, his nose broken and blood- ied. A few black neighbors came to our back and were promptly greeted by a word the wrestler must have learned from his parents. More punches, biting, etc. It went on like this forever. After forever, there were hospital vis- its. It was, in general, not a good night. Somewhere along the line, the girls next door called the cops, but they only showed up after it was done. A cop car had been stalking the house all night during the party, prowling for MIPs. At times, two or three were parked on the street. But during the fight they were in stealth mode, lest anyone know they exist. The cops said they couldn't bring charges unless we gave them names, and when we gave them names, they gave some other excuse. Later, a cop at the hospital had to ask for the whole story again and again - the earlier cops hadn't told him anything. Eventually, a report was filed, but nothing came of it. Of course, it's not manly to rely on cops when you should be able to bust someone's head yourself. That is the ethos that prevails among students at 3 a.m. But strangely, it's the police's attitude too. I don't like the idea of police keep- ing everything under lockdown - in fact I don't like police at all. But if they only did one thing, shouldn't it be to solve violent conflicts? Michi- gan students comprise a transient urban popula- tion with hardly any social bonds. On top of that, there are people like the wrestler who are mentally deficient, inherently violent and here on scholarship - it only takes one scholarship revocation to make Friday night turn ugly. Ultimately this is more than just a criti- cism of the police. It's about all the enabling parties who keep assholes around at this university. I admit, sometimes I have the romantic notion of violence against institutions in order to save the individual. It's a fairly harmless idea, much more artis- tic and literary than it is practical. But there are certain types - the frat brawlers, the drunken wrestlers - who use our institu- tions as cover for violence against individu- als. If the police don't want to stop them, then they shouldn't fake it. People ought to understand that they're on their own. Cotner can be reached at cotners@umich.edu. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Vietnam War key point in student activism of 1960s To THE DAILY: I appreciated the Friday Focus article last week, (Birth of a Student Movement, 02/13/04) on the early years of Students for a Democratic Society at the University. For the sake of histori- cal accuracy, I would like to emphasize a point inadvertently left out in the comments attributed to me. My argument that political activism on campus today is more widespread than "in the days of SDS" should have included this qualifi- cation: before the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s. In the Port Huron Statement of 1962, SDS observed that "we are a minority ... we ourselves are imbued with urgency, yet the message of our society is that there is no viable alternative to the present." The organiza- tion then included fewer than 1,000 members, but the Vietnam War turned SDS into a mass movement. By 1968 membership reached near- ly 100,000, and about 10 percent of all college students defined themselves as "political radi- cals." Recognizing the centrality of the Vietnam War is essential to understanding the outpouring of campus activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I believe that the failure to empha- size this context often leads to problematic and distorted comparisons between a "politicized" '60s generation and an "apathetic" current youth generation. MAT LAssiTER Assistant history professor City officials need to re-think anti-pedestrian outlooks To THE DAILY: I was disappointed to read the anti-pedestri- an bias of University and city officials in the Daily story Jaywalking causes greater concern since student deaths (02/17/04). In a city where many residents choose not to drive or own a car, it is not only fundamentally unfair but degrading to expect pedestrians to scurry squirrel-like across heavily-trafficked streets to get to the Union, class, the supermar- ket or to their church, temple or mosque. Autos and pedestrians should share the road, and city officials should install well-marked, raised and lit crosswalks at places where many pedestrians cross the street: on South University, on Madison Street in front of South Quad and on Plymouth Road, among others. When there is a glut of automobile traffic, city officials seem to jump to rectify the situa- tion. When there is a glut of pedestrian traffic, city officials frequently blame the pedestrians for not walking far out of their way to get to their destination, something rarely expected of automobile drivers. Yes, Ann Arbor Police Department Lt. Mike Logghe is correct: Impatient pedestrians jay- walking are a problem. However, in my view impatient motorists are a more serious problem, whether running red or yellow lights or, in an incident last week, pulling over to slap a fellow motorist who was driving "too slowly." City officials should understand they can minimize jaywalking by installing more crosswalks and increasing the crossing time on "walk" lights. ROB GOODSPEED LSA senior The letter writer is a former Daily staff writer *I VIEWPOINT Non-tenured faculty unite! LEO rising BY IAN ROBINSON In the past 30 years, the share of faculty appointments that are "nontenure-track," and the share of undergraduate teaching provided by such faculty, has increased dramatically, at the University and across the country. Nationally, 96 percent of all new faculty appointments were tenure-track in 1969; by the 1990s, only 50 per- cent were tenure-track, and only half of these positions were full-time. The declining share of tenure appointments in U.S. colleges and universities is mirrored by the growing share of nontenure-track (NTT) appointments. Many of us in this category have part-time appointments, but adding all such teaching into the equivalent of full-time posi- tions, there were less than 500 NTT "full-time equivalents" at the University in 1991; by the winter 2001 term, the number had doubled. There are now close to 2,000 NTT faculty on the three campuses of the University. We do about half of all undergrad teaching on the Flint Over the last two years, NTT faculty at the University have formed a vibrant, democratic union called the Lecturer Employees' Organiza- tion. A top priority in this, our first round of col- lective bargaining, is real job security for NTT faculty who demonstrate their skill at, and com- mitment to, teaching. At present, we do not even have the kind of continuous employment enjoyed by most University staff, who have an ongoing job unless they are fired or laid off due to insufficient demand. Instead, we are hired for fixed periods - often no more than a single term, though it can be for as much as five years. Even after years of service, we can be terminat- ed by the simple expedient of failing to renew our contracts. No reasons need be given for such a decision, even if the person in question has served the University with distinction for many years. This is not a far-fetched "nightmare scenario." In the last year, LEO members with many years of experience at the University have lost their jobs in this way in the English Depart- ments of Ann Arbor and Flint and in the School of Art and Design. Tl .TT .....:i ,.,-.. ..F..i . o ~ 4,, commensurate with our contribution. Despite the weakness of its arguments, the administration is refusing to move very far from the existing short-term contract system. There is a lot at stake. Not only justice for our own members, but also the fate of academic freedom is at issue. Tenure was created in this country decades ago to enable faculty to "speak truth" as they understand it to their students and to the powerful, without fearing that they will be deprived of their jobs. Today, at a time when our social problems are deepening and our policies more than ever need intelligent, critical scrutiny, the scope of real academic freedom is narrow- ing as the share of the faculty that has any real job security falls below half. Our students and citizens deserve better than this, particularly from a public university that derives a large share of its funding from the tuition paid by those students and the taxes paid by Michigan residents. We intend to do what it takes to ensure that the University sets a positive national example in this aspect of its operations, as it has done with respect to affirmative action. 0 a t