OpiiMon
Page 8 Thrdy a 1 91The Michigan Daily
The ichigan Daily
Vol. XCI, No. 12-S
Ninety Years of Editorial Freedom
Edited and managed by students
at the University of Michigan
End the alliance
THOUGH POLITICS makes for strange
bedfellows, such marriages tend to be
mercifully short.
The awesome margin of Tuesday's defeat of
the Proposal A tax reform plan was the product
of an improbable alliance of ultra-right tax-cut
forces of Robert Tisch and a minority of
liberals such as Ann Arbor Rep. Perry Bullard.
Both groups found themselves united in op-
position to Proposal A, for quite divergent
reasons. Tisch & Co. condemned the plan as a
swindle providing no genuine property tax
relief, and, more fundamentally, obstructing
the Shiawassee County drain commissioner's
own grand designs for dismantling Michigan's
entire tax structure. -
Liberals like Bullard correctly rejected
Proposal A as a conservative, stop-gap
measure which would dry up funds for vital
state services while imposing an even greater
tax burden on those who could least afford it.
This strange alliance was beneficial in
defeating a bad bill conceived in political panic.
Now it is time for progressive thinkers to
hastily sever all ties to Robert Tisch and his
autocratic schemes.
Tisch's meatcleaver approach to tax reform
is maliciously bankrupt in philosophy and im-
plementation: If enacted, it would cut property
taxes in half with no provision for making up
the resulting loss in state revenue-effectively
destroying state services plus our entire higher
education system.
The enormity of ;Tuesday's rejection in-
dicates an electorate ripe for rebellion.
Proposal A was a poor alternative to Tisch; we
must now work to produce something better.
°PO:SNT SEEMi ST6E A LETANPRl6HT MOVEMENV"
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ThP u; C a P
I sit with the working press at
Hillsdale College, awaiting
Alexander Haig's commen-
cement address. The whole affair
seems glorious and incongruous.
Perhaps the second most
powerful man in American
government is speaking at this
tiny college I once attended.
Rumor has it the president him-
Coming
Apart
lBt ( ritopher Potter ,
self would have delivered the ad-
dress had he not een
recuperating from his wounds. I
sit and reflect on just how far
Hillsdale has risen in its deter-
mined quest for fame and
respect.
It's what they always wanted, of
course. Rarely has an American
college or university displayed
such righteous self-'
consciousness, such studied ob-
session in presenting a certain
kind of face to the world.
The school's credorand game
plan has remained the same for
decades: We at Hillsdale are
guardians of a conservative
citidel amidst the liberal jungle
of academia. Let the oracles of
socialist dogma come and go, let
the advocates of Washington in-
trusion have their day -
Hillsdale will survive. Our
college will endure and thrive as
a beacon of economic sanity and
moral serenity. We are higher
education's last great hope.
The martyr pitch has suc-
ceeded gloriously. Conservatives
of all stripes flock to Hillsdale;
corporate executives from all
walks of life sendtheir sons and
daughters to matriculate there,
while faithfully lining the college
coffers with generous donations.
Hillsdale used to struggle each,
year to stay alive; it now basks
solidly in the black.
The ideological Right has wor-
shipped the school for years.
From William F. Buckley to
Jesse Helms to Ronald Reagan;
the paragons of conservatism
have for years made regular,
ritual pilgrimages to southern
Michigan to celebrate at the
shrine of intellectual decency.
Like Hilldale, they bided their
time for years, planning and
blueprinting for the inevitable
day they would rise to power.
And now their time has come,
and Hillsdale is about to become
a very famous place.
But does it deserve its sudden
luster? My own recollections of
the place are rather different.
For all its pious puffery about
enlightenment, Hillsdale was
never any great shakes
academically. During my own
stay there, the school's faculty
was largely composed of non-
Ph.D.'s or semi-retired over-
65'ers, types who would likely
have had difficulty obtaining em-
ployment at other universities.
Inquisitive study was never en-
couraged; the college curriculum
included more Mickey Mouse
courses than you could shake a
stick at. It took extraordinary
feats of non-scholarship to flunk
out at anything.
The current scarcity of
teaching jobs has doubtless
shoved many more doctoral
types into the Hillsdale orbit, yet
it's difficult to believe that an
academic format so entrenched
in mediocrity could have im-
proved to any significant degree.
One has long suspected - and
still suspnets - that-the schon's
ALEXANDER HAIG with
Hillsdale president George
Roche.
political stridency is as much a
camouflage of its educational
deficiencies as it is a product of
driven idealism.
No less depressing during my
Hillsdale stay were the
demographics of- the student
body. Less than 40 percent of
Hillsdale's students came from
Michigan; the great perepon-
derance of -enrollment consisted
of rich Easterners and
Southeasterners weaned in the
tradition of economic im-
perialism and social intolerance.
It was' almost as if a
subliminal, unspoken
arrangement existed between
administration and students: If
you kids'll conform, join a Greek
house, ktelch it up but keep it to
yourselves, we'll ease you through
the four years with no sweat.
Then you can head back East to
your office in Daddy's cor-
poration. Just don't question
anything - don't protest
anything-or you'll be out on
your ass before you know what
hit you. And while you're at it, get
a haircut.
So everyone played the game.
It was easy to learn the sport of
cruelty at Hilsdale - in a college
of only a thousand students, one
lacked - utterly - the sweet
luxury of anonymity. One swiftly
acclimated oneself to the tren-
chent snobbery of the majority,
to the ravenous intolerance
toward anyone who was remotely
different. One student was
literally laughed off campus sim-
ply because her homespun
clothes were a little out of date.
Hillsdale President Genrg:
Game
Roche brags about his school's
fight to "preserve the in-
dividual's . . . right to be. dif-
ferent, to make choices, to follow
the honest and moral dictates of
his or her own heart." That's
not quite the way it worked at
Hillsdale. Anyone who didn't join
a Greek House was deemed a
malcontent and avoided like the
plague - or jeered loudly from
the assorted doorways and por-
ches along Fraternity Row.
Boys will be boys. Yet Hillsdale
doesn't like to mention that the
majority of its fraternities and all
of its sororities carried - and
probably still carry - "white
Christian" clauses in their house
constitutions; folks of the wrong
color or religion simply don't
belong with decent people. Yet
Greek house business was their
own business - the ad-
ministration would never have
dreamed of interfering with
private policy.
No less overt was the college's
lack of black female students. If
Hillsdale's black males - largely
imported for athletics -
hungered for female companion-
ship, they would have to find it
elsewhere; try to date a white-
woman in Hillsdale and you
risked the fury of the tar brush.
But all that is of course buried
now. I sit with the others,
awaiting the secretary of state,
and I think back on those strange
years. You remember Hillsdale
as an odd and lonely haven-a
hatchery for the mean of spirit
and silent of mind, extending far
beyond any specifice political
coloration. It was not a place
where one could expand and
grow; it was a spawning ground
for retrenchment, for self-
compromise,forcarving sout
one's small niche in an otherwise
brutal world.
Most adapted. accordingly.
Shortly before the Haig commen-
cement, Ispot an old professor of
mine. I haven't seen him in
years; he looks tired - his hair
has turned gray, his girth has ex-
panded alarmingly. He was one
of the better teachers - bright,
articulate, open-minded. I
always suspected he would leave
Hillsdale someday.
I re-introduce myself, and we
reminisce a little about days gone
by. I winkingly mention the
college's politics, and suggest
that its day in the sun has now
arrived. He winces visibly, then
says he smply doesn't pay atten-
tion to it anymore.
Obviously he has found his
niche, as have countless other
Hillsdalians of like mind. Sooner
or later you learn how to play the
school game.
Perhaps the rest of America is
about to learn, too.
Christopher Potter is the
Summer Daily editorial direc-
tor.
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