ustxtxb_obs_1969_11_07_50_00002-00000_000.pdf

There has been very little student disturbance at the University of Texas at Austin, for which most professors have been heartily thankful, even though they are aware that a campus without its doves and hawks tends to be a campus of parrots. But no professor wants the educational process interrupted or perverted, whether through the private distractions of drink and drugs or through the more organized public disruptions caused by student sit-ins, Round-Up weekend, or college football. And academics will do as much as they can to prevent such disruptions. President Hutchins abolished football at the University of Chicago; the University of Pennsylvania recently shed its defense contracts involving chemical and biological warfare; and some university professors have even tried to cure the social disorders that have prompted student protest. Violence and NonViolence To judge from the vote last year barring the national Students for a Democratic Society from using campus facilities, the general faculty are solidly behind the university administration, apart from a few dissidents in arts and sciences. The rest would prefer to get on with their petroleum engineering, accounting, business administration, and what not in peace. However, the phenomenon of instructors and professors actually siding with the student demonstrators and Incorporating the State Observer and the East Texas Democrat, which in turn incorporated the State Week and Austin Forum-Advocate. 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 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. Editor, Greg Olds. Associate Editor, Kaye Northcott. Editor-at-large, Ronnie Dugger. Business Manager, C. R. Olofson. Business Manager Emeritus, Sarah Payne. Contributing Editors, Elroy Bode, Winston Bode, Bill Brammer, Lee Clark, Larry Goodwyn, Harris Green, Bill Hamilton, Bill Helmer, Dave Hickey, Franklin Jones, Lyman Jones, Larry L. King, Georgia Earnest Klipple, Larry Lee, Dave McNeely, Al Melinger, Robert L. Montgomery, Willie Morris, James Presley, Charles Ramsdell, John Rogers, Mary Beth Rogers, Roger Shattuck, Robert Sherrill, Dan Strawn, John P. Sullivan, Tom Sutherland, Charles Alan Wright. The editor has exclusive control over the editorial policies and contents of the Observer. None of the other people who are associated with the enterprise shares this responsibility with him. Writers are responsible for their own work, but not for anything they have not themselves written, and in publishing them the editor does not necessarily imply that he protesters on other campuses has naturally caused a good deal of alarm among the regents. Recently the following clause was added to the Regents Rules for the U.T. system: 6.5 Any employee of any component institution of The University of Texas System, including any members of the faculty or administration, who, acting either singly or in concert with others, obstructs or disrupts, by force or violence, any teaching, research, administrative, disciplinary, public service, or other activity authorized to be held on the campus of a component institution of The University of Texas System, shall be subject to dismissal as an employee. As used in this subsection, the words “force or violence” include such acts as “stand-ins,” “sit-ins,” and “lie-ins,” when such acts are in fact obstructive or disruptive of any of the authorized activities listed above. There are a number of points to be made about this clause as well as a number of similar clauses recently inserted in the regents’ rules. Firstly, there has been little public discussion or criticism, as far as I am aware, of such rules by faculty or administration. And it might be well here to bear in mind recent events in the University of California at Los Angeles, where regents of the system had arrogated to themselves veto power over faculty appointments; of course, they also pledged that “no political test shall ever be considered” in the hiring and firing of teachers. Less than three months later, the regents discharged Angela Davis, assistant professor of philosophy at the Los Angeles campus, for her membership in that anachronistic institution, the American agrees with them, because this is a journal of free voices. The Observer is published by Texas Observer Publishing Co., biweekly from Austin, Texas. Entered as second-class matter April 26, 1937, at the Post Office at Austin, Texas, under the Act of March 3, 1879. Second class postage paid at Austin, Texas. Single copy, 25c. One year, $7.00; two years, $13.00; three years, $18.00; plus, for Texas addressees, 4 1/4% sales tax. Foreign, except APO/FPO, 50c additional per year. Air-mail, bulk orders, and group rates on request. Editorial and Business Offices: The Texas Observer, 504 West 24th St., Austin, Texas 78705. Telephone 477-0746. Editor’s residence phone, 472-3631. Change of Address: Please give old and new address and allow three weeks. Form 3579 regarding undelivered copies: Send to Texas Observer, 504 W. 24th, Austin,.Texas 78705. Subscription Representatives: Arlington, George N. Green, 1202 S. Pecan, 277-0080; Austin, Mrs. Helen C. Spear, 2615 Pecos, 451-1805; Beaumont, Betty Brink, 2255 Harrison, 835-5278; Corpus Christi, Penny Dudley, 1224 1/2 Second St., ,884-1460; Dallas, Mrs. Cordye Hall, 5835 Ellsworth, 821-1205; El Paso, Philip Himelstein, 331 Rainbow Circle, 584-3238; Ft. Worth, Dolores Jacobsen, 3025 Greene Ave., 924-9655; Houston, Mrs. Kitty Peacock, PO Box 13059, 523-0685; Lubbock, Doris Blaisdell, 2515 24th St.; Midland, Eva Dennis, 3523 Seaboard, 694-2825; Snyder, Enid Turner, 2210 30th St., 443-9497 or 443-6061; San Antonio, Mrs. Mae B. Tuggle, 204 Terrell Road, 826-3583; Wichita Falls, Jerry Lewis. 2910 Sneedway. 766-0409. Communist Party. The philosophy department had attested her philosophical competence; therefore it is clear that the regents were applying a “political test.” There is, however, a difference between the major California campuses and the Austin campus. In California, perhaps because of the presence there of Nobel Prize winners, whose absence from the UT system has been deplored by regents Chairman Frank C. Erwin, Jr. \(mistakenly, faculty senates and the administrations fight regential actions such as this, instead of leaving it to the students. The UCLA chancellor firmly stated his disagreement and the faculty senate there is contesting the legality of the regents’ actions in the courts. As The New York Times \(October freedom and all this is “reminiscent of the shameful days of the early 1950’s when professors were threatened with dismissal for refusal to sign loyalty oaths.” But when, may one ask, since the days of President Rainey, have administration officials at UT spoken out against regential policies, rules, and actions? Secondly, however sympathetic one may be with the regents’ laudable aim of preventing Texas’ becoming like Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, or Brandeis, one must protest a little about the distortion of language involved here. Of course, like Humpty-Dumpty, regents Chairman Erwin might reply: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.” Still, this unhistorical distortion of language is bound to offend teaching assistants in English when they have to discuss that archrebel, Henry Thoreau. “Stand-ins,” “sit-ins,” and so forth are part of a laboriously evolved pattern of activity aimed precisely at preventing violence in the assertion of minority or majority rights. They stem immediately from Mahatma Ghandi’s Satyagraha, which was so instrumental in securing Indian independence from Britain some years ago. America achieved its independence with revolutionary armies; more recently, Kenya achieved the same objective with Mau Mau terrorism; but Satyagraha, literally truth-force with its connotations of the solid confrontation of unarmed bodies against military or police units, is quite different from these methods. Whether it is anglicized as “civil disobedience,” “passive resistance,” or “militant non-violence” \(as Martin Luther classify it as “violence,” they are going to be hard-pressed for words to describe Czech students throwing Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks, French or West German students throwing cobblestones at riot police, or the behavior of students in Tokyo. A sense of proportion needs to be exercised in more ways than this. In pleading for a pragmatic and flexible response to student non-violent disruption, THE TEXAS OBSERVER The Texas Observer Publishing Co. 1969 A Journal of Free Voices 63rd YEARESTABLISHED 1906 A Window to the South Vol. LXI, No. 21 7c 42> November 7, 1969 -;”