Thursday, Sept. 3, 1970
University Daily Kansan
9
Students Have Been Known To Cut Class, But Have Desks?
... Teaching is hard enough without having to contend with an unfurnished classroom
Class Can't Get Off Ground
Graphic design students have found their classes rather bleak this week, because the classrooms contain no desks.
Classes, some of them for freshmen, are held in bare rooms in Lindley Annex. Some of these classes are freshman classes. There are no desks, and no lockers in which to store equipment. One water color class has no access to water.
"I will not teach under these conditions," says Frank M. Reiber, assistant professor of design. "There is no excuse for this. Lindley Annex is bad enough for
offices, but for classrooms it is degrading.
"I think that the University has a responsibility to at least furnish us with classrooms. It is possible that the graphic design classes may have to stop meeting this semester."
Reiber says that the art department has been "make do" for the six years he has taught here.
"There is a terrible communication breakdown because the department is spread all over the campus in ten or twelve different buildings," he said. "Some professors have taught here for twenty years with the false hopes
that we may get an art building. I don't see that."
According to Reiber, the only "halfway decent" rooms for art classes are on third floor of Strong Hall. But he says these rooms are already in use all day long. Reiber says he is not optimistic about the future of the art department.
"With all of this, enrollment will go down and the budget will decrease even more next year," he says.
The idea for a graphic design department in the School of Fine Arts was proposed last spring by Jerry Moore, assistant professor of design, and Reiber. It was then voted into the department by the faculty. When the budget for this year was prepared, the graphic design department requested enough money to get started, but received none.
Schools Admit Blacks As Whites Move Out
LINDEN, Ala. (UPI) — Gene Hester, a white man who works at a paper mill, parked his car Wednesday in front of Linden High, which used to be all white. He and his three children watched it comply with a federal desegregation order.
"I'm waiting to see how many blacks show up," he explained. "I won't put them in there with no 100 to 1 odds. If I did, they wouldn't get any education. They would just get picked on."
Within an hour it was clear that Linden High had become nearly all black. Only a few white children trickled into the old red brick building. Hester started his ignition.
Before driving away he swept his hand toward the youngsters in the back seat. "They won't be here tomorrow," he said.
He added that he didn't have the money to put them in Linden's new private school where most of the 750 whites who had been in the public system are going. He moved from another county last year to escape integration, he said, and it appears he may move again.
Linden was one of two Alabama school systems that became almost solidly black Wednesday. Only about 50 whites showed up for the first day of classes with
3. 000 blacks in Marengo County. Most of the other 700 Marengo whites fled to private schools.
A similar report came from Hollandale in Mississippi's cotton growing Delta country.
Gloomy Period Hangs Over Berkeley Campus
They were climaxed during the past academic year with disorders in which Telegraph Avenue outside the Berkeley campus was virtually sacked, a Bank of America branch was burned to the ground near the Santa Barbara campus, and a student was shot to death by police gunfire.
Since the "Free Speech Movement" burst on the world at Berkeley in 1964, ushering in the era of U.S. campus dissent, increasingly violent disorders have rocked the U. of C. system almost every year.
Assemblyman Don Mulford of Berkeley, a bitter critic of the university administration, believes there is a real danger the university may not be able to recover "as we have known it."
"If present trends continue," said Chairman Albert S. Rodds of the California Senate's education committee, "the university will become a second-rate institution."
The university system of nine campuses around the state now has 7,500 faculty members, slightly more than Harvard. But the Cal faculty boasts 14 Nobel Prize winners, six more than Harvard. In the National Academy of Sciences, Cal outnumbers Harvard almost two to one.
The last time the American Council on Education assessed graduate programs of U.S. universities was in 1966.
"Unless the faculty realizes and heeds the extent of public displeasure with the university, a severe damage could result—through drastic inadequacy of support, through loss of personnel, and through loss of autonomy."
At a meeting of the statewide faculty Academic Senate June 15, president Charles Hitch warned that public displeasure was so intense the university could suffer "severe damage."
In the minutes of a closed June 15 Academic Senate meeting, President Hitch was summarized as warning:
BERKELEY, Calif.-Five years of campus disorder and fiscal backlash have brought the University of California, once the wonder of the academic world, to one of the gloomiest periods in its history.
California's new state budget contains raises for virtually all employees on the state payroll except university and college teachers.
The university's requested appropriation for new construction was cut by the legislature by nearly 99 per cent, and officials are thinking of such measures as eliminating freshmen and sophomores, or using temporary buildings like the quansets of World War II.
"My quarrel with Gov. Reagan is his failure to inspire people to do what they ought to do, to make higher education greater," Rodda said.
"Let's harass them if you want to call it that," DeBenis said. "Let's arrest them everyday and get them out of Berkeley."
"If I was a policeman on duty, I'd shoot them," said John DeBonis, a conservative Berkeley city councilman, of the student riots.
The people of California, who built the university through decades of heavy tax investment into a system rivaling the best private institutions in the world, have reacted with increasing bewilderment and bitterness.
Rodda blames political leaders like Gov. Ronald Reagan for telling the public "we can't afford" to maintain educational quality in a time of affluence.