Letter to the Editor
Dear Sir:
Members of the faculty have been urged by the promoters of the forthcoming Moratorium to cancel their classes on October 15th. I think that this is a most unwise proposal for the following reasons
The objective which this moratorium is intended to further is a matter of honest controversy within, no less than outside, the University community. Some students and faculty favor an immediate and total American troop withdrawal from Vietnam. Othes take the opposite view. Both sides feel strongly about the matter, and base their views on deeply felt ethical grounds. And others have no view at all.
The cancellation of a class by an instructor has the following effects:
It deprives all members of the class of the instruction to which they are entitled.
It makes those students who oppose the policies favored by the moratorium involuntary participants in an action which goes against their convictions, since it denies them the opportunity to demonstrate their contrary views by attending class as usual.
It prevents those students who favor the objectives of the moratorium from stating their positions as individuals by cutting classes individually, and it denies them the opportunity to demonstrate the sincerity of their convictions, in the manner of Thoreau, by accepting whatever costs may be involved in missing their classes.
Finally, it denies the public an opportunity to make an accurate assessment of the extent of genuine student support for this cause.
In short, by presuming to cast a bloc vote in behalf of his unconsenting students,the instructor perverts democratic procedure and distorts its outcome.
I think the proposed course of action sets a dangerous precedent. Does this not mean that in the future faculty members wishing to demonstrate their support for any cause can bring the University to a grinding halt?
Carl H. Lande
Political Science
Associate Professor
BOOKS
THE BANKER, by Leslie Waller (Dell, 95 cents)—another big novel (my, but they're long these days) about life in the world of high finance, and big operator named Woods Palmer. It's intriguing and it makes you feel that you're in on all the inside stuff of banking.
CROSSWORDS FOR KIDS, by Leo White (Gold Medal, 50 cents)—Now really. For the great student generation of the University of Kansas, saviors of the world?
KANSAN REVIEWS
Isadora: Something's missing
By RICHARD GEARY Kansan Reviewer
By now, I suppose, most people know how $^{4}$ The Loves of Isadora” has finally reached a theatre screens. It was released in 1968, three hours long and simply titled “Isadora,” but distributors figured its length would discourage ticket sales, and it was shortened to two and one half hours. This still did not satisfy them, so it was cut even more and its title was changed to “The Loves of Isadora” (for fear modern-day moviegoers wouldn't even know who Isadora Duncan was).
As it stands, this is an ungainly mess of a movie, which nevertheless, has enough good elements to make it worth seeing, the best of which is Vanessa Redgrave's marvelous portrait of Isadora. Karel Reisz is a clever director (He made "Morgan!" the picture which made Miss Redgrave a star) and he keeps things moving along pretty well, but thematically he commits one glaringly unforgivable sin. This is a biography of a great American dancer—an artist—but, like the average Hollywood biography on an artist, it never shows her art.
Of course she dances, but what about the long hours, the years of exhausting work that went into it? How did she revolutionize the dance; how did she become such a controversial figure? All of this is crucially important, but it is missing.
Instead, the film-makers take the easy way out and treat her life as an expose. Each important segment of her story is represented by a separate love affair with a "beautiful" man, and the script rarely lets up in its scandal-mongering and seeking-out of every juicy tidbit of her private life. There is a tasteless business between Isadora and a funny pianist, which, even though it did happen, is wretched in conception and execution.
Vanessa tries her very best to overcome all of this and most of the time she succeeds. Her Isadora is an intelligent, warm, entirely likable woman, not the distant, unthinking eccentric one might expect from the role. She is perhaps the finest actress working in films today, and she makes us respect her character even though the film-makers do not.
"The Loves of Isadora" begins in the nineteen-twenties, with
Learn Tonight & Sat.
11:30 p.m. Only
THE Hillcrest 2
Oct. 10
1969 KANSAN 5
Isadora a cackling, man-chasing old ostrich, living on the Riviera. writing her memoirs.
Her life is then shown in a series of flashbacks. It is here, though, serving as a chirping chorus to her earlier adventures and laughing at what a cliche she has become, that she has her best moments and suggests the depths of feeling and experience not present in the rest of the story. In these scenes, Isadora is her film's best critic.