ustxtxb_obs_1970_01_23_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

,40440.01*T4,”40,L–ti*tOotonifooico , iwoot….4 constant snide remarks about Senator Fulbright and intended to give his unsolicited opinion of NEP but got sacked when the word got out. For others, the route to protest is prankish. Just prior to the opening of one annual Freedom Forum, enterprising student rebels pilfered a supply of red-dye tracing tablets from the chemistry labs and tossed them in the 30-foot, oval-shaped lily pond in front of the administration building. Arriving Freedom Forum participants were greeted by a gaudy, splashing fountain of the forbidden red. Some of the business executives were amused; others wondered if Harding was what it was cracked up to be. On another occasion, thoroughly acquainted with Harding’s sexual hang-ups, a puckish Harding social club borrowed a statue of Venus de Milo and used it, in all its au naturel splendor, as a backdrop for its annual banquet photographs. Predictably, a mortified dorm mother draped the lady in a sheet the instant the photographer was done. Harding students have a favorite song “The Party Makes the World Go Round” and an irreverent yell. “Here comes the American Eagle,” an interlocutor will shout. . “Boo!” the group replies. “He’s got a left-wing!” “Yea!” is the response, and on and on it goes, the calculated nonsense of inventive young minds who know the ridiculous when they see it. Harding’s students can’t date in a car without permission. They have continually attacked this rule as an absurd hardship \(even, according to a former student engaged couples supposed to do in the winter when there is no place to make personal plans?” a panelist asked Harding’s dean of students last year. The dean’s answer has to be a Victorian classic. “I sympathize with them,” he said. “The winter is hard on everybody.” Some of Harding’s rigid rules have implications beyond their mere inconvenience. White students who date one of the three dozen or so blacks on campus are aware and were publicly reassured last spring by President Ganus that their parents will be promptly notified. HARDING College is not 1970 in the twentieth century, so it is best explained in terms of a pristine past. Its politics are a superficial block-letter blend of Hamiltonian democracy, uncut 19th-century capitalism, and a frontier theology that acknowledges no flaws and tolerates a few diversions in the interest of justice or equality. In like manner, Harding’s educational philosophy and views of student life display the same essential father’s distrust in the judgment of the son and insist, dehumanizingly, in substituting indoctrination for instruction. But despite its fixation on antecedents, Harding finds itself increasingly beseiged by modern youth, techonology, and communications, and shows a few signs of mellowing the surprisingly strong faculty support for beleaguered Dr. James overhaul of its student regulations; an almost imperceptible \(and perhaps crusades. Dr. Benson, the shrewd, indefatigable promoter who made Harding what it is, has passed retirement age, and no one equally talented has emerged to replace him. One wonders, too, if today’s ever younger corporation executives, looking for public service outlets, are going to be as naively infatuated with Harding’s one-verse, one-sermon anti-communist solutions for the ills of man and country as were their counterparts of the last decade. These are only questions. At the moment, America’s leading right-wing propaganda center, from all appearances, is alive and well in Searcy. 0 Young Chicanos’ Unrest Spreads to Lamesa Lamesa Lamesa is a windscraped cotton-dirty town that cowers close to the plowed earth as if it were trying to avoid being seen. It was here that the evils so prevalent in the deep South have so openly bared their teeth. Since July 23, 1965, the local school board has submitted plans to the US Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the desegregation of the Lamesa schools. But none of these plans have been implemented. Local chicanos have patiently been waiting for the fulfillment of the yearly promises made by the school superintendent, Alvin R. Cannady, and the school board. The chicanos are particularly discontented since they are the group most affected by the district’s segregation practices. As just one instance, the V. Z. Rogers Elementary School attendance zone is ingeniously gerrymandered to take in 275 chicanos, 48 Negroes, and not one Mr. De Leon, the editor of La Voz de los Llanos at Lubbock, reported in an earlier Observer about chicano student unrest at Abilene. 6 The Texas Observer Anglo. But there is not a single Mexican-American teacher at the Rogers school. There is only one brown teacher in the entire Lamesa system this in a district that has 1,477 Mexican-American students. It is for this and other reasons that Father Pat Hoffman sounded the cry for Nephtali De Leon social justice, and the people have flocked to the cause. Last month a large group of chicanos from different state and national Mexican-American organizations as well as many local citizens, led by Father Hoffman, confronted the school board while more than 300 persons \(mostly awaited the outcome just outside the meeting place. The demand: total and immediate integration. Father Hoffman at one point stated, “We are tired of your promises; you have not done any of the things you said you would do. Why have you betrayed your words?” “Hopefully we will get good answers tonight,” Father Hoffman said. “For we will be unrelenting until we have immediate integration. We are only asking what the law requires and the Constitution guarantees. The superintendent told me some seven weeks ago that something would be done about integrating the school after we made another complaint. Why hasn’t this been done? “I don’t mean to be attacking you now,” Hoffman said to the board members, “maybe later . . . but there is reason to doubt you.” At this, Bill Reed, president of the board, interrupted by saying, “This is being taped.” “Yes, I know,” Hoffman replied, “I see the mike and the cord.” Hoffman continued: “We have only one Mexican-American teacher in the school system. We got an extra teacher when we pushed. When we put some more pressure we got a coffee break, and when we really pressed, we get parking tickets at church.” Hoffman was referring to an incident that happened on a Sunday during masses. After chicanos had begun to put pressure on the school board, they discovered one day that a great number of cars had been