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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, April 17, 1962
The Dormitory Probe
The Civil Rights Council has moved again, and this time it has decided to attack by legal procedure what it considers to be a discriminatory policy by the university.
The university policy it is concerned with, according to informed sources, is the requirement that freshman women send their pictures to the Dean of Women prior to their acceptance.
The CRC maintains that these pictures are used in assigning Negro women to separate rooms in the freshman dormitories. Dean of Women Emily Taylor substantiated this when she said that although Negro and white freshman women are roomed separately, they may live together if they wish. She explained that the room assignments were made in this manner because of the initial difficulty freshman women have in adjusting to college life. (It probably should be explained at this point that dormitory residents will choose their own roommates after their freshman years.)
THE POSSIBILITY of legal action comes from a Kansas statute which reads in part:
"Denying civil rights on account of race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry; penalty. If any of the regents or trustees of any state university, college, or other school of public instruction, or the state superintendent . . . shall make any distinction on account of race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, the person so offending shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof in any court of competent jurisdiction shall be fined in any sum not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000)."
The NAACP has indicated that it may sponsor legal action, but not unless a thorough investigation shows that no other solution can be reached at KU. The CRC has indicated that it
What is basically in conflict is a university policy that attempts to avoid incidents and difficulties that might arise as a result of discriminatory feelings among freshman women and a demand by the CRC that an ideal procedure be established in which any discriminatory feelings among freshman women would be ignored because they are morally indefensible.
NOW IT IS obvious that the CRC has social justice on its side. The university, however, is necessarily concerned with practical matters (such as those that would result from inflamed discriminatory feelings in case a white freshman woman with feelings of racial prejudice was assigned to a room with a Negro freshman woman) and has made the mistake of compromising itself from a moral standpoint.
wishes to work with Chancellor Wescoe on the solution of the issue.
Obviously the university will have to continue to deal with any problems resulting from discrimination that might arise in university dormitories, although these problems seem to be few and minor at present. But it should do so without following a practice that is open to charges of discrimination.
Dormitory residents have the privilege of changing rooms. This privilege can be used to accommodate any freshman woman assigned a Negro roommate whose feelings of discrimination are such that she could not tolerate living with a Negro.
The university should therefore end the practice of deliberately placing Negro and white freshman women in different rooms. It is a practice which—however innocent or worthwhile its purpose might seem to be—only serves to perpetuate discrimination. William H. Mullins
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
THE MASTERS, by C. P. Snow (Doubleday Anchor, $1.45);
THE CONSCIENCE OF THE RICH, by C. P. Snow (Scribner Library, $1.45).
The saga of Lewis Eliot someday may take its place as one of the great literary sagas. It is a curious saga, too, one almost unrivaled for understatement, the slowly building drama, and the essential uninvolvement of the hero.
These are two brilliant novels. "The Masters" has a theme—a fight for power—which is becoming common to us, but the novel is far superior to others of the genre. "The Conscience of the Rich" is the warm story of a Jewish family in England—slow, deftly revealing, affectingly looking into the motivations of a lovable old tyrant and his children.
"THE MASTERS" IS SET in Cambridge, and it describes two factions, each trying to place a master of a college when it becomes known that the incumbent is dying of cancer. It is to the credit of Snow that nothing is over-simplified here. This reader, for example, unwillingly found himself pulling for what surely must have represented—to Snow—the opposition.
This is a compassionate and exciting story. It starts out with high drama. "The Conscience of the Rich" does not. One does not realize for some time that it is the story of the Marches and not the story of Lewis Eliot.
What does one want in a leader? Eliot resents the conservatism of the man for whom he is pulling, but he prefers his warmth and human dignity to those of the opponent, a liberal whose politics he shares.
The elder March finds it difficult to accept what some regard as progress. He resents his daughter's marriage to a Gentile, but ultimately it becomes obvious to all that the daughter chose better than did March's son, who married a wealthy Jewish girl who eventually—through her fiercely ideological communism (this was the idealistic 1930s)—helps to harm the family into which she has married.
Juggernaut: The Warfare State
(Editor's note: This is the second in a series of five excerpts from a special edition of The Nation by Fred J. Cook "Juggernaut: The Warfare State.")
The U.S. position, rigidly maintained for several years, was that there must be agreement on atomic control before there could be any discussion of other steps to limit or control armaments. But in 1949 Russia signaled her entrance into the nuclear club; she had the bomb and there was nothing we could do about it. This was followed by the outbreak of limited war in Korea.
Under the pressure of these twin developments, the American position finally was modified. In a speech in October, 1950, President Truman called upon the United Nations to form a new, unified Disarmament Commission to consider all types of arms limitations. This was done, and British, French and American delegates began to draft proposals for a strict numerical limitation of armed forces.
IN MAY, 1952, the three Allies proposed a formula that would restrict the U.S., China and the USSR to ground armies of 1 million to 1.5 million men each; Great Britain to 700,000; France to 800,000; and other countries to 1 per cent of their total populations. Two years later, in June, 1954, the British and French refined this proposal and set up a detailed schedule for arms control in four stages—creation of a control body, freezing of military manpower and expenditures at 1953 levels, reduction of conventional armaments and armed forces halfway to the eventual quotas; and, finally, the cessation of the manufacture of nuclear weapons and conversion of all nuclear materials to peaceful uses.
The initial Soviet reaction to all this was negative—the "nyet" the West had come to expect. But then, abruptly, without any previous indication of a possible change of attitude, the Russians on May 10, 1955, did a complete about-face. Jacob Malik, speaking for the Russian disarmament delegation in London, announced that the Soviet was prepared to accept virtually all of the West's proposals. Russia was willing to accept the West's suggested manpower ceilings, the reduction of conventional armaments and, most significantly, the West's proposals to abolish the use of nuclear weapons.
IN THIS LAST and vital category, the Soviet offer was far-reaching. Russia agreed to "the complete prohibition of the use and production both of nuclear and all other weapons of mass destruction, and the conversion of existing stocks of nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes"; and to "the establishment of a control organ with rights and powers and functions adequate to guarantee in the case of all states alike the effective observance of the agreed prohibitions and reductions."
Just what were "adequate" guarantees? This, of course, would be the crux of the case. Russia made specific suggestions. She proposed that the U.N. establish a permanent staff of inspectors in countries joining the disarmament pact, with access to all "objects of control"; control posts along reciprocal lines in big ports, railway junctions, motor roads and airdromes, to watch for any dangerous concentration of ground forces or air and naval forces; the right to demand necessary information from every nation on the carrying out of the agreed reduction of armaments and forces; unlimited access to national budgets showing appropriations and to legislative and executive decisions. Periodic reports would be submitted on the steps taken in implementation of the agreement.
With the Russians ready to bargain, with the Russians committed to what was essentially our position, it would seem that this should have been the moment to call all-
THE RUSSIANS, so long intrensigent, had made a truly astounding proposal—one that, it seemed at first glance, should go a long way toward making continued international disagreement impossible. Phillip Noel-Baker, a member of the British Parliament and winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1959, considers this Russian offer the crucial point in the long disarmament struggle. In his book, "The Arms Race and the Case for Disarmement," he discusses the proposal at length under the heading: "The Moment of Hope: May 10, 1955." He reports that the British delegate on the scene was elated at the Russian switch and exclaimed that the proposals of the West "have now been largely, and in some cases entirely, adopted by the Soviet Union."
night sessions, if necessary, to hammer out a pact for future security of the world. But what happened? The American delegation, instead of leaping to embrace opportunity, acted as if the Russians had just detonated a tactical atomic bomb in its midst. Instead of going ahead, we drew back. Bespeaching and obtaining a three-months adjournment of the disarmament conference, we went home.
THE DEVELOPMENTS of the next few months, studied in the cold light of reality instead of the glow of the moment's propaganda, do not make pleasant reading for Americans who like to be proud of their government, who like to believe it means the peace it professes. For in the summer of 1955 our actions can only, and charitably, be described as less than candid.
With the Summit conference at Geneva scheduled for July, Eisenhower named Harold E. Stassen as his special Secretary for Peace, with Cabinet rank, to handle all disarmament negotiations. Stassen had hardly begun his labors when,
at Geneva, Eisenhower made his dramatic "open skies" proposal, suggesting that each of the nuclear powers let the other's spy planes roam at will above its territories to guard against the possibility of surprise attack. This plan reportedly was urged on Eisenhower by Nelson Rockefeller and was looked upon with considerable skepticism by Stassen and by virtually all foreign diplomats.
NO ONE EVER questioned President Eisenhower's sincerity, which was completely moving and convincing; what was questioned was his logic. For the hard fact behind the headline hoopla with which the "open skies" proposal was greeted in America was that it was essentially a one-way street: we had everything to gain; Russia, everything to lose. In our more open society, nearly everyone, including the Russians, knew where our atomic plants and installations were located; but in the vast, walled-off interior of Russia, there existed huge areas of which we were in
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either partial or total ignorance. The "open skies" proposal, if only the Russians obligingly would agree to it, could almost be guaranteed to fill in these gaps in our knowledge.
This consideration, if both we and the Russians had been completely sincere, should have made no difference; but — and this was the point that seems never to have been adequately appreciated in America — there was an obvious flaw in Eisenhower's "open skies" proposal, one that called instantly into question our intentions and our good will. The clear fact was that the plan did not go nearly so far as the Russian proposals of May 10; indeed, once all the propaganda elements were washed out of it, the plan represented little more than a well-concealed drawback on our part.
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THE HARD nubbin of truth lay in the sudden limitation that we now, for the first time, put upon our proposals. The "open skies" plan provided only for nuclear control, not for the nuclear "disarmament" we had for years been advocating. As Jules Moch, the French representative on the U.N. Disarmament Commission, later wrote in The Reporter: ". . . My American friends will remember my skepticism at the time. The months that followed only strengthened it. Never have I believed that a formula for "control without disarmament" would receive the unanimous support of governments—any more than a formula for "disarmment without control."
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It is virtually certain that this basic shift in our policy was pressured by the Pentagon. The Pentagon's attitude toward the Russian disarmament proposals was described as one that ranged from skepticism to outright alarm. Disarmament is a word that can hardly be expected to exist in the Pentagon's lexicon of hope, and as the summer months of 1955 drifted past, American policy hardened into what was to become a rigidly military posture. The Russian proposals of May 10 lay neglected on the international bargaining table, and it is obvious now that we never had any intention of taking them up. The result was that the Russians were never put to the test, and left unanswered for all time was the question so important for all mankind: Did they really mean it?
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