ustxtxb_obs_1960_03_04_50_00004-00000_000.pdf

THE TEXAS OBSERVER LA 61;1221 ISCECIIIN, 7 Let those flatter who fear, it is not an American art. JEFFERSON Paooive ReJiotance “ff.. . On Civil Disobedience, by the American, Thoreau, inspired Gandhi to adopt his methods of nonviolent protest in South Africa and India, where they helped change the history of the world. Now they return to the South of the United States, where Negroesstudents, ministers and a, few courageous whitesboycott store counters where Negroes are not served, are expelled from colleges, march on state capitols ; and where the white priest of a racially integrated Episcopal c h u r c h in Lynchburg, Va., says he will no longer attend any public event which segregates or bars Negroes. May this tested method for the reform of intolerable but otherwise unbudgeable social injustices spread also into Texas, into the cities where Negroes stand to get their hamburgers, into East Texas where they cannot enter the cafes on the squares ! 1110,: . Zeta/ Among flationo Bartlett Appears Exclusively in the Texas Observer Senator Yarborough is correct that the United States should retain jurisdiction over domestic matters. He is wrong when he denies the International Court of Justice the right to decide which international cases involving the United States it shall consider. The Court has no power to enforce its decisions ; any intrusion into domestic U. S. affairs would simply be rejected out of hand by the United States. But what is the alternative to the growth of trust in a world court? The absence of law among nations. Disputes of a legal kind are settled by diplomacy, or’ not settled, and lead to wars. Are we members of the human race, or not? If we are not prepared to place American prestige on the side of the rule of law among nations, we are failing the future. Nationalism satisfies fanatics, but _so do wars, and they have become in Horace Busby, the once liberal editor of the Daily Texan at the University of Texas who now gives advice on conservative tactics in “Texas Businessman,” has a ready contempt for liberals who have not seen the light, as he has. For instance, in his current newsletter, Busby calls the liberals at the recent Democrats of Texas convention “the rear-rearguard” who; reflecting “the lower quality of native liberalism in Texas,” show “little originality, precious little thinking on Texas. problems … emptiness of big ideas.” One wishes he were among them, giving them his ; but they would not back his general sales tax. -Jlonter? We still have not recovered from our surprise that Homer Thornberry, congressman from the district including Austin, would vote with the die-har d Southerners against the very mild civil rights bill reported to the House. Has he forgotten that his home town has integrated the schools, without fanfare or dispute? Published by Texas Observer Co., Ltd. Entered as second-class matter, April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. MARCH 4, 1960 Ronnie Dugger Editor and General Manager Sarah Payne, Office Manager We will serve no group or party but will hew hard to the truth as we find it and the right as we see it. We are dedicated to the whole truth, to human values above all interests, to the rights of man finitely more unthinkable now than they were before Hiroshima. We sense, in Senator Yarborough’s statement, a desire to participate in the international idealism behind the Humphrey amendment, and he says, in fact, that “The Court’s jurisdiction could be assured without language giving up the United States’s exclusive jurisdiction over its internal affairs, but that isn’t done in the pending resolution, so I’m voting to save the . Connally Amendment.” Yarborough is a United States senator, too, and if he sees a way to assure the World Court’s jurisdiction while retaining exclusive U. S. jurisdiction over internal affairs, he should submit his own amendment to accomplish that purpose. It is hard to hold the ground against the superpatriots, but no other course is idealistic enough to be realistic in this frightening world. The liberals who have been there, and will be there, the winter weekday prayers of the democratic faith, met in February when snow was falling in the South and there was a coldness in the heart of the race to speak of justice in this country and, peace around the world. They were not visited by the pomp and stomp of power nor needed the blessing of the priest, success. We have seen them in halls, hotel rooms, caucuses, committees ; shouting at microphones and out from under signs ; altogether ‘when they’re marching for the Lord. We have seen them jeered by knowing poli ticians, we have heard the laughter rise around them, but there, in a public hall, the coliseum idealists have in times too mild for lions, they valued each other and wrote down their hopes. Those who also know the weaknesses of being human do not need to tell them they are guilty too, and frail, have given less than everything; but until the good world comes, they believe good will prevail. as the foundation of democracy; we will take orders from none but our own conscience, and never will we overlook or misrepresent the truth to serve the interests of the powerful or cater to the ignoble in the human spirit. Published once a week from Austin, Texas. Delivered postage prepaid $4 per annum. Advertising rates available on request. Extra copies 10c each. Quantity prices available on orders. EDITORIAL and BUSINESS OFFICE: 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas. Phone GReenwood 7-0746. HOUSTON OFFICE: 1010 Dennis, Mrs. R. D. Randolph. BOULDER, COLO. “If you want to know what has gone wrong at the University of Texas,” I was told the last time I was in Austin, “read Logan Wilson’s The Academic Man.” After reading this rather murky sociological tract, I do not know all that is wrong at the university, but I am convinced that Dr. Wilson’s ideas are those of the professional administrator and that the assumptions and conclusions in his book are symptomatic of the malaise of American education. Although Wilson, now president of the University of Texas, was professor of sociology at Tulane when he wrote The Academic Man in 1942, he viewed the university world with contempt and distrust. “Except in the humanities,” he said, “the regimen of becoming a professor may indeed so groove the social personality that it is left underdeveloped culturally and artistically outside the field of specialization. It may be that young men are recruited in disproportionate .numbers from the ‘greasy grinds’ who have eschewed or been denied full participation in such socializing forms of undergraduate life as fraternities and clubs, athletic activities, and other extra-curricular affairs.” Pity the modern college president About the Author AUSTIN This week’s guest columnist, Dr. George Hendricks, was a “greasy grind” at the University of Texas. He has .boorish manners, often wears a sweater when he teacher classes, and is uncouth. Now a member of the English faculty at the University of Colorado, he is editor of “Abstracts of English Studies,” an official publication of the National Council of Teachers of English. He has written articles on Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, Tolstoy, TennysOn, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King for the New England Quarterly, Whitman Review, Western Humanities Review, Emerson Society Quarterly, Thoreau Society Bulletin, and Gandhi Marg. He also contributes to the Texas Observer. He is currently working on a series of articles on the last years of ‘Whitman’s life. On Feb. 16, Hendricks accepted an appointment to the newly-created Chair of American Literature and Culture at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, Frank furt am Main. “I do not ‘regret that my Ph.D. is from Texas,” Hendricks remarks. brooding over his bevy of socially maladjusted “greasy grinds” who are obviously unfit to meet and mingle with regents. Wilson, embarrassed by his gauche academic colleagues, asserted, “individual instances of faculty speech, boorish manners, bad dress, and general uncouthness are primarily the results of a system of selection that stresses what a man knows rather than how he appears.” Unintentionally, perhaps, he plunged us into the world of appearance-reality. Why not a whole faculty of suave, personable, wealthy, socially-adjusted. conformers ? After all, are we professors not coached by our books and our footnotes ? Are we not actors ? Should not our reality and our ethics be those of Madison Avenue ? Wilson thought he had found us out : We are Yahoos pretending to be Houyhnhnms, but we refuse to admit our Yahooness, and the regents and businessmen can not see through our pose. He knew that we are primarily interested in promotions and social status. He knew we write because we are forced to : “The prevailing pragmatism forced upon the academic group,” he says, “is that one must write something and get it into print.” He ,knew that faculties are virtually powerless : “Many lesser and more autocratic universities \(a frequent faculty meeting merely as a democratic gesture on the part of the administration. No realist would hold that any important matters of policy are ever decided on such occasions.” \(At one Texas college where I taught, we were al lowe d, democratically enough, to vote on the awarding of an honorary doctorate to a politician, but we were instructed by the president to sign the “secret ballot” ! Five of WILSON’S cynical concept of academic freedom in The Academic Man is especially revealing \(if one can get to the meaning through the freedom it is important to modalize that not only are there in the objective situation pressures brought to bear on whoever has to make decisions concerning individual employees, but also that persons about whom such issues arise rather generally tend to be deviant individuals in their personal characteristics as well as their institutional behavior. In other words, they are more commonly than not ‘difficult’ The Academic Life -.7he Ready contempt k t N.4 \\\\,