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University Daily Kansan Monday. February 13, 1961
An End to Sit-Ins
Support for resolutions and a referendum on integration at KU is dying. Developments in the last week which have made this evident are:
only two persons attended the All Student Council meeting Tuesday to discuss the racial discrimination resolution when campus fervor for the resolution was at a supposedly all-time high.
—only 1,000 of the necessary 2,000 signatures have been obtained in a month's campaigning by the Civil Rights Council which would force a student referendum on the first ASC resolution.
—not one official campus organization has actively endorsed or backed the drive for signatures.
Desegregation is the greatest domestic difficulty today. The Daily Kansan has editorially supported and urged that a referendum be called to learn the student body's feeling. In an area where segregation and discrimination is not part of the way of life and thought of the community, as in Lawrence, the most that that area can do is express its clear desire and support of desegregation throughout the nation. The ASC resolution condemning discrimination did this.
Any sit-ins that may occur in Lawrence now must be thoroughly organized and then will have only limited support. The ASC strongly urges that action be diverted in the direction of influencing state legislation to make any diserimil-
nation in the state illegal. The Daily Kansan believes that the ASC has acted wisely.
Through recent developments, the University student body representatives have made it known that they wholeheartedly back integration. The ASC has passed a resolution condemning discrimination and urging that legislation be enacted to eliminate discrimination. A sit-in has been held which was successful in a limited sense and let the nation know that certain elements at KU oppose segregation. Students have discussed segregation and the problem has been spelled out anew to many who did not previously recognize its complexities.
For the present, let these measures suffice. As has been proved in the South, force only serves to further hard feelings and strengthen prejudices. What must be realized is that any action taken must aid the Negro; if it does not, it should not be considered. KU stands for integration. The ASC made it so by unanimous ballot. At present there is no need for sit-ins in Lawrence. Let there be none. Mayor John Weatherwax has started to organize a Human Rights Council which it is hoped will become operational in the immediate future. This is the ideal body through which integration groups can channel their efforts.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
Reason and not emotion should prevail.
— The Editors.
Editorial Review
The Rule by Committee
This is the age of the committee. In all phases of our society, individual responsibility and creativity are being submerged beneath the group — and the individual is slowly learning not only to accept this subordination, but like it and believe in it.
By Bill Blundell
Nowhere is this more apparent than in business, which now more than ever sets the tone for society. The former classification of society as a complex of groups embracing the loyalties of many men, and of many men at the same time dividing their loyalties between many groups, is breaking down. In its place has arisen a new monolith which demands the ultimate loyalty from its worshippers—the Organization.
America has been traditionally a pluralistic society in which the individual could move freely from group to group as his desires and goals led him. This is true no longer. Now the Organization is the final home and mother to him, with all the obligations on his part that that relationship implies.
William H. Whyte Jr., in his brilliant study of the Organization and the people who serve it, makes a strong case for the thesis that rootlessness in the middle class, and the strong urge for belongingness that must accompany this rootlessness, is destroying creativity and building an agreeable, comfortable world for the Organization Man—a world without fresh thought, a world without conflict of ideas. He says:
"There is always the common thread that a man must belong and belong rather completely, or he will certainly be unhappy. The idea that common or conflicting allegiances safeguard him as well as abrade him is sloughed over, and for the people who must endure the tensions of independence there is no condolence; only the message that the tensions are
sickness either in themselves or in society. It does not make any difference whether the Good Society is to be represented by a union or by a corporation or by a church; it is to be a society unified and purged of conflict."
The common denominator of organization life is unity through the committee; the subordination of individual effort and initiative to the interests of the group. The rule by committee has become such a cherished appertence of the organization way that the individual counts only as a piece in a massive jigsaw puzzle—unimportant in himself and only necessary to the completion of the Big Picture.
This team or committee idea has led to the evasion of primary responsibility, or rather to the belief that such responsibility cannot exist. Because the group mind makes decisions, it is impossible to single out any individual within the group and assign to him praise or blame for a job well done or poorly done. The individual within in the group finds this a comfortable setup; he no longer stands alone, and he is safe. If he feels chafed by the lack of individual opportunity that such a situation inevitably breeds, he does not show it or he will not last long in the Organization.
From the sanctification of group work as opposed to individual effort has risen a host of allied developments which we may call the Organization syndrome. The first of these is the tendency of the organization to perpetuate itself. The men that are brought into the Organization must be men who think like the established Organization men. To cut out subjective judgment on the part of recruiters and executives who must pass on a candidate for promotion or an applicant for the Organization, the personality test, in all its variations, is being wielded like a club.
Whyte decries the use of tests that can never truly be measures of personality by saying:
"How much more must a man testify against himself? The Bill of Rights should not step at Organization's edge. In return for the salary that the Organization gives the individual, it can ask superlative work from him, but it should not ask for his psyche as well. If it does, he must withhold. Sensibly the bureaucratic way is too much with us that he can flatly refuse to take tests without hurt to himself. But he can cheat. He must. Let him respect himself."
Whyte dramatizes his thesis too much when he attacks the armed services and the literature of today as being organization-oriented. The Army is a peculiar organization. It has many of the symptoms of the disease that Whyte has chronicled, but it has always had those symptoms—even in the days of the rugged individualist.
In the military, the junior officer conforms, but only in the interest of discipline. In the true Organization, the individual conforms to group thought. This would be unheard of in the military, where even the most junior officers have direct responsibility for property and the conduct of the men under them. Such responsibility is unknown in the Organization. Whyte decries.
Popular fiction does not display organization thought in its development. The most widely read and most influential works are not the trashy stories that fill our mass magazines; they are the stories of individual heroism and stories of conflict on many levels that have been produced by authors who have gained fame and honor because they wrote them. Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" is a monument to the innate dignity and worth of the individual.
"I AM AFRAID WELL HAVE TO MOVE WILLOY BACK TO TEACHING THE ADVANCED GROUP."
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If Whyte does overstate his case in spots, it is for emphasis. The development of the Organization is still basically what he says it is; the trend toward organization thought and behavior is very real and very menacing.
In removing conflict from American life, the Organization is slowly strangling initiative and creativity. When Whyte says that the Organization must be fought from the inside, he is advocating a Holy War between individualism and the Organization. If this nation is to remain the focus of the new Western Civilization, the individual must win this war.
IT IS AT THIS point that we come upon what I consider can be a serious failure in a Harvard education. It is not that you will not know enough; nor that you will have failed to gain sufficient intellectual acumen from attending Harvard. It is rather that at the end of your experience here you may believe too faintly and care less.
From the Podium
Cult of the Care Less
To many, not just the colleges, but the whole Western World has for some time seemed to be adrift with little sense of purposeful direction, lacking deeply held conviction, wandering along with no more stirring thought in the minds of most men than desire for diversion, personal comfort, and safety.
What we desperately want is a great new stirring of conviction. Our enormous need is to be able to act promptly and generously from a sense of potential in life and of concern for others. Toward this end we need leaders to kindle and focus in us constructive purpose, leaders motivated by deep awareness, activated by lively sympathy and profound conviction who have found the trust and hope which will enable them to act and, acting, quicken concern in others and provoke them to endeavor.
There has been a deficiency of passion and of concern. Barricades have had little appeal. Few have been eager to participate actively in good works. We have preferred to remain quiet and inconspicuous, perhaps to emerge for a moment now and then for a jovial or supercilious sally, but as a rule never to stray very far from benign detachment.
A DEEP WANT of our time is revealed by this state of affairs. It can be put something like this: Purposeful action of the kind whose absence many have long lamented depends first of all upon caring—upon caring passionately. But caring in its turn, to persist and become a creative force, ultimately demands belief and conviction. It is from these that hope, which can alone give energy to caring, derives. This seems to me a truism; and if it is, then it is belief and conviction, not their subsequent manifestations, which are the serious desiderata of our time.
The falling off in conviction and in will in the Western world in our time is a very general and pervasive affair. We are all victims of it, rather than its active instigators or fomentors. What seems to be lacking, at bottom, is the kind of faith we can only speak of as religious, the kind of faith we know we need, and for the most part wish we had. There are few people in our world who do not want to believe in God as the ground of our being. The atheist is not necessarily a happy person. The tragedy of our time in this matter of belief is not that many in the intellectual world do not believe in God; it is, rather, that there are many who want to and can't.
IT IS AT THIS point above all that I pray your experience here will have served you well. Harvard cannot give anyone religious faith, but surely it should not prevent its attainment. Wherefore it is my prayer, in this traditional service of worship in which we come together today, at the end of your careers in Harvard College, that you gentlemen of the Class of 1960, who brought so much promise when you came, will have found in Harvard the antithesis of indifference, disillusionment, cynicism, and disdain. This community abounds in deep concern, profound belief, and quiet religious faith despite some appearances and many reports to the contrary. It will be a great loss for you and for society if you have not found it so, if it has not conveyed to you its basic conviction.
(Excerpted from the June, 1960, baccalaureate address of President Nathan Pusey of Harvard.)