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University Daily Kansan
Friday. Dec. 8, 1961
Plan for Understanding
The process of going to class, reading textbooks and taking examinations is just a part of the educational opportunities offered by a university.
ASSOCIATIONS WITH OTHER INDividuals and various activities outside the class room can often provide the best educational experience. Most universities have scores of forum groups, discussion groups and professional organizations. Activities such as these provide opportunity for the individual to broaden his scope of knowledge to include things outside his major field.
As increasing population forces closer contact between individuals it is becoming more important for everyone to increase their knowledge of people. A university attracts all kinds of people, each with something to offer the other.
FOREIGN STUDENTS, UNTIL RECENTLY have long been a much neglected segment of the student population. The initial activities of People-to-People indicate that a valuable exchange can take place between American and foreign students.
People-to-People recognized this and attempted to draw American and foreign students together through forums in which issues of international importance were discussed.
For some reason this did not work. Although the forums have generally been interesting and informative, attendance at them has never been encouraging. It would appear that KU students are not concerned with the great national and international problems that affect us all.
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IF KU STUDENTS REFUSE TO SUPPORT these discussions by their presence perhaps the
A program which would provide after dinner speakers for all KU living groups could make it easier for a large percentage of KU's students to expose themselves to interesting discussions on the problems of the day.
discussions should go to them. Some living groups already have a policy of inviting faculty members or administrators to give short talks after "dress dinners."
A large number of faculty members have traveled to foreign lands and have opinions or observations they would like to express. Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe and assistant to the Dean of Men, Clark Coan, have said that such a plan, if properly organized, could be extremely valuable in aiding international understanding.
SURELY MOST STUDENTS could find time to participate in a discussion if it were held in his own dining room. Thus people who would not attend a forum or lecture at the union could possibly be reached at the dinner table.
IT WOULD REQUIRE a tremendous amount of work to interest living groups and schedule speakers to initiate the plan. A new All Student Council committee would have to be created or possibly the work could be undertaken by an existing organization.
The speakers would be the heart of a program such as this. The topics would have to be well chosen and the speaker well suited to talk on his subject.
If a group of dedicated individuals can be assembled their work could lead to a significant improvement in the level of international understanding at KU.
—Ron Gallagher
On Academic Freedom
By Fred M. Hechinger
A series of edicts by the City University of New York against campus speakers of unpopular views have reopened the academic freedom debate.
The first incident was the ban of Benjamin Davis, secretary of the Communist party, from appearing on the Queens College campus. At about the same time, Hunter College denied the use of its auditorium to a forum sponsored by The National Review, a Right-wing publication. Then, the Queens College administration barred a speech by Malcolm X, leader of the black-supremacy Muslim movement. Later Brooklyn College delayed permission for a speech by Assemblyman Mark Lane, who had earlier been arrested as a Freedom Rider in Mississippi and thus was feared to be under a legal cloud.
THE CONFLICT was clearly caused by pressure on the college presidents. In the case of the Communist speaker, the pressure came from the surrounding community, largely the conservative factions of Queens and Brooklyn.
Interestingly, the pressures against the National Review appear to have come from within the Hunter administration or faculty—an indication of liberals violating their own ideals. But in both cases the college presidents and the university's chancellor tried to find a way to give in to the pressures without appearing to abandon the principle of academic freedom.
In attempting to justify the stand against the National Review, the college said that it would not make the hall available to organizations "whose character would give reasonable grounds for the assumption that the college favors a particular group or movement having a distinct point of view over other groups or movements opposed to their point of view or position." This, in practice, would not render many groups eligible.
IN TRYING to justify its stand on the Communist speaker, the university's Administrative Council tried to draw a distinction between the question of academic freedom and observance of the law. Since it had to admit that there has been no specific law passed either
nationally or in the state to bar Communist speakers from the campus, it asked "competent attorneys" a series of questions on the status of Communists.
The attorneys agreed that there was no specific law to make it illegal for the colleges to let Communists speak. But (apparently in order to provide the answer that was hoped for in order to make surrender to outside pressures a legal requirement) they added that since Communists are agents of a foreign power, it would be unlawful to provide them with a "place of assembly" on the campus.
THE DEBATE was promptly and inevitably opened on all the various technicalities used to camouflage the real issue. Six of the university's faculty members, three of their department chairmen and all teachers of constitutional law, said that they differed with the opinion of the unidentified attorneys.
This theme was re-inforced by Dr. Harold W. Stoke, president of Queens College in his "comments on policies governing the invitation of speakers." He said "prize fights, burlesque shows and propagandizing are not proper college activities" and he rejected the "notion that colleges are forums from which everyone has a right to advance his ideas."
Finally, again stressing the idea of selectivity, Dr John R. Everett, the chancellor, justified the ban on Malcolm X by saying that he had spoken on campus last year and had nothing to add.
The university administration, after re-stating the general importance of academic freedom, added a serious limitation of such freedom. It said that while there must be freedom of ideas, the college administration must "choose among the welter of ideas . . . which present themselves for consideration" and must "make certain that the time of the students is properly spent."
By stating that no legal bar to Communist speakers exists, they said that they had now deliberately created "a conflict of legal opinion" and that they invited the word of "distinguished authority" to resolve the impasse.
It remains to be seen whether
a "legal memorandum" by the Academic Freedom Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union, submitted almost simultaneously with the professors' statement last week, will be considered such an authority. It bluntly calls the university's attorneys in error.
THE A. C. L. U. furthermore rejected the attempt by the university to treat the various instances of restricted academic freedom as separate or separable issues. It said it spoke for the right of Mr. Davis, Malcolm X, the National Review and arrested Freedom Riders to be heard, and it made such freedom the absolute condition for the proper academic atmosphere.
The academic freedom confusion has been compounded by Dr. Stoke's statement that the college purpose must be reflected in "the selection of its faculty, the construction of its curriculum, the organizations and activities it permits, the visitors it invites."
If all these ingredients are placed on an equal level, a very tightly controlled, high-school-type college organization is the result. In fact, however, while faculty and curriculum selection are clearly the business of the Administration, the other ingredients are part of the atmosphere of learning. To rule out a speaker on the ground that he has been heard before might reduce all American public speaking by more than 90 per cent.
The favorite argument in support of urban colleges is that the city provides students with unlimited (and presumably unchaperoned) access to independent inquiry and study. This is in direct conflict with any attempt to prescribe the students' time allocation between the educationally approved and the administratively "off limits." The administration charters and approves student organizations and holds them responsible for good taste and integrity. They, outside the curriculum, invite people and ideas, to be heard and tested. This is what the A. C. L. U. considers the atmosphere of learning.
(From the Nov. 26 New York Times.)
EATON'S FRIDAY CARTOON
"You can certainly tell it's basketball season."
By Carol Berry
CONVERSATIONS WITH ARTISTS, by Selden Rodman. Capricorn Books, New York. 1961. $1.45.
Selden Rodman surveys the secret world of modern art and artists in a book of conversations with 35 American painters, sculptors, and architects.
In his introduction to the book, Rodman gives the reader a feeling of the heightened tempo of current creativity which has shifted from Paris to New York.
"ONLY TIME WILL TELL whether America in mid-century is experiencing one of the great periods in Western art, or even the beginning of one. But two things are fairly certain about it. At no time in American history were so many original talents working in so wide a variety of personal styles," he says.
Rodman, a noted art critic, poet and anthologist, explores a wide variety of styles, ranging from the abstract expressionism of the late Jackson Pollock to the realism of Andrew Wyeth. He does not attempt a dispassionate survey, but includes conversations with artists whose work especially interests him. "I have approached each of the artists included with sympathy," he says.
THE CONVERSATIONS IN THE BOOK are entertaining and informative in a way that a more formal presentation could not be. Rodman begins with the premise that artists are articulate and eager to talk about their work; the dialogues fulfill this promise.
In a conversation with Mark Rothko, Rothko says, "I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicated those basic human emotions."
ADOLPH GOTTLIEB ON THE OTHER HAND, says, "It's the social-realist subject matter that disturbs me, inevitably sentimentalized by the tortured line."
And so it goes. The book documents the kind of controversy that inevitably arises when artists talk about each other and art
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
THE YEARLING. by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Scribner, $1.45
WARDING, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Scribner, $14.05. "The Yearling" seems to have been consigned to the children's shelf, along with most of Mark Twain's books and most of Booth Tarkington's. That is all right, of course. But it shouldn't be thought of as only a children's book.
Its story of Jody Baxter and his mother and father, growing up in the Florida wilds, of Jody and his beautiful pet fawn "Flag," of the rough and rowdy neighbors and of the changing of the seasons in the wilderness, is a familiar one by now. Though a bit sugary in its sentimentality at times, "The Yearling" still is a fine novel.
THERE IS REMARKABLE INSIGHT INTO THE MIND OF a child and his responses to nature, into the process of growing up. There is good dialect, and there are believable people. Mrs. Rawlings, who knew the Florida country well and was a kind of expert on the folklore of the region, presented some lovely scenes—a hunting expedition, the coming of spring, a storm, and always the boy and his pet deer.