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f AGE TWO THE DAILY TA HEEV THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1957 Students And Their Crisis: South Building Guilty, Too "Students must face the value of integrity if (hey are to over come the current a isis in student initiative." 'Director of Student Activities Samuel Magill, speaking to University Party this week. i The crisis Director Magill mentioned was created not only by the students. The administration is helping a great deal, too. In very many of the tense situations that have faced student govern ment in recent years, the administration has taken away student gov ernment's freedom and integrity. Student government, Magill told the University Party, is in a "de pression." In the same breath he talked about increasing violations o . " the honor code, increased drink THE LIVESPIKE: ing and unwillingness of students to discipline themselves. Let us examine how the students and the administration have handled themselves in crises in the past: 1. Increasing violations of the honor code: Not too long ago, two Carolina students traveled to Wo man's College and did something very nasty. They returned to the Carolina campus. Woman's College officials dis covered the crime, identified the two students and called South Building. The students were tried through student judicial channels here. Thev were given sentences one, probation: the other, a stern warn ing. Woman's College officials, who wanted to wring the most possible punishment out of the case, and South Building, which disagreed with the honor council's decision, effected the "appeal" of the case to a faciiltv-administratioii court. given The two students were much harder sentences. One, we rerall, was suspended from the University. ' t. Increased drinking: Just how Director Magill got his statistics on increased drinking, we do not know. But we will wager there is no more drinking here this year than there was two, three or five years ago, when the increased en rollment is taken into considera tion. Rather, Magill has just stalled to look around him and notice that students beverages. are drinking intoxicating The University has a ride which The Daily Tar Heel The official student publication of tbe Publications Board of the University of North Carolina, where it is published daily except Monday and examination and vacation periods and summer terms Entered as second class matter in the Dost office in Chapel Hill, N. C, undei the Act of March 8, 1870. Subscription rates: mailed, $4 per year, $2.50 a semes ter; delivered. $6 a year, $3.50 a lemet ter. Editor FRED POWLEDGE Managing Editor CHARLIE SLOAN News Editor . NANCY HILL Business Manager BILL BOB PEEL Sports Editor LARRY CHEEK EDITORIAL STAFF Woody Sear, Frank Crowther, Barry Winston, David Mundy, George Pfingst, Ingrid Clay, Cortland Edwards, Paul McCauley, Bobbi Smith. . . SEWS STAFF Clarke Jones, Ray Link er, Joan Moore. Pringle Pipkin, Ann Drake, Edith MacKinnon, Wally Kuralt, Mary Alys Voorhees, Graham Snyder, Billy Barnes, Neil Bass, Gary Nichols, Page Bernstein, Peg Humphrey, Phyllis Maultsby Ben Taylor BUSINESS STAFF Rosa Moore. Johnny Whitaker, Dick Leavitt, Dick Slrkin. SPORTS STAFF; Bill King, Jim Purks, Jimmy Harper, Dave Wible; Charley Howson. Staff Photographer Librarian Norman Kantor Sue Gishner Subscription Martager Advertising Manager Circulation Manager . Dale Staley . Fred Katzin Charlie Holt Night Editor . , Proof Reader Night News Editor Larry Check Manley Springs Clarke Jones it does not enforce. The rule pro hibits drinking on the campus. Other rules outlaw drinking,'-In fraternity houses when there are coed guests present. Both rules are farces, lip-serviced by the University because the. Uni versity knows the trustees would blow- their tops if the rules were not on the books. It is illegal to possess alcoholic beverages in dormitory rooms, just as it is illegal to possess food, there and to stick cellophane tape on the walls and woodwork. But any stu dent who wants to keep his bottle in his room has no more trouble that the student who cooks coffee there or tapes Marilyn Monroe Hiller in front of his desk. The funny thing is, South Build ing knows that. Up until this week South Building had not admitted it, however. It was a sort of silent compact between the student af fairs office and the students. The rule was there, and it could be broken at will. We admire Director Magill for noting that students are drinking alcoholic beverages. We would ad mire him even more if he would either enforce the rules or cam paign for their repeal. l. Unwillingness of students to discipline themselves: Consider the case of a coed who came into her dormitory a little bit tight one night. She was turned in to the proper student judiciary group. The judiciary group felt the girl needed counsel, since she obvious ly was not the type of coed who was incorrigible. So the judiciary group asked the dean of women's office for help. ! The dean of womens' office helped, all right. The coed was im mediately punished, and punished severely. Justice had been, dealt. Why should student groups at temp to discipline themselves if they know they will get little help from the administration? It is true that student initiative has been very slack during the past academic year. But when student government has attempted to exer cise its inherent (we feel; obvious ly South Building doesn't) powers of self-government, and when at the same time South Building has disagreed with the students, there has been only one answer: South Building's answer. Magill's statement this week can and should be interpreted as an ill omen for student government. It means South Building is thinking seriously about limiting student freedom probably, starting with the student courts. Once South Building has con trol of the student courts, freedom will be a day-to-day thing tf . The University of NortK Caro lina will not be worth attending. But while student leaders and students in general are consider ing Magills' policy statement, Ma-" gill and the others employed in the Division of Student Affairs might well consider what they have clone in past months to meet the crisis. If they would perhaps encourage student initiative instead of cut ting it to pieces whenever they don't agree with the students, the "crisis" might not be a crisis af ter all. Until then, South Building is guilty of hipocrisy. - . he Menace Of The Video Screen And The Downfall Of Newspapers Fred Powledge Television, which was a baby industry not too long ago, still is. Even worse, it appears to have hurt the American mind far more than it has helped. When it started, it was exper imental of necessity. Polls and the obnoxious rating companies often held the industry's pulse in . their hands, because the com panies honestly didn't know what would make a hit with the view ing public and what "would go undigested. But the television industry has had enough time since its incep tion tq( decide what is a good product and what isn't. What, is being seen, now is definitely a bad product. Most, of. the, television, shows now be ing produced during the "good" evening hours are pure trash, seldom better than comic books. The product consists of money giveaway shows, putrid dramas which have little plots and no acting, a few semi-decent talent shows and spectaculars which are spectacular only because of their lack of quality. Television does not inform as it should. It satisfies wants, and most of the wants are merely sensual. Compare The New York Daily News with The New York Times. That's the difference between what television is, in my opin ion, and what it should be. How has TV hurt the Ameri can mind? Welt, think what would hap pen if everybody in the United States started reading only The New York Daily News. Pretty soon, everybody would be thinking about murders, rapes, incest, gambling scan dals, sordid affairs in cafe so ciety and a smattering of the more glittering world and na tional news. They would be thinking about these things because they would be deprived of information about the important things: The Amer ican government (which would be a wonderful subject for a television documentary series), other nations' governments, meet ings of the caliber of the Geneva Summit Conference, ; tense world situations, documentary stories in pictures of the situations in our very own states. In the last category, think of the television shows that have gone unproduced segregation, the dust bowl, crop failures, f Loods, local government, munic ipal improvement and plain old small-town life which is, after all, at the core of America. Instead television brings into the American home visions of pure magic the magic of win ning $64,000, the magic of a movie star marrying a prince the magic of a hastily- and sloppily written love story that could never happen in real life, the magic of countless hours of puns and punch lines that are bound to have an ill effect on the American mind. Television does not cover the real human emotions, the real L'i! Abner human actions, that make the weuld turn. Instead it covers the glossy,, fake' emotions of a formula writer and it injects sickening blasts of hot air about hand creams, soap suds and mouthwash that are supposed to keep people from being reject ed by society. Every once in a while, televis isn does something right. The Columbia Broadcasting System does this once a year when it pre sents "World in Crisis," an af ternoon interpretation, by com petent interpreters, of the world situation. , But it happens only once a year. , One of the most pitiful reac tions to the continuing infant hood of television has been that of American newspapers. When publishers started read- Publishers started offering the public recipes and shallow feat ure stories instead of news. They starting adding a "Daily Maga zine" to their newspapers, and they shoved the news right off their front pages. They put puzzles and circulation-building contests in place of the front-page news. And on the inside they added more col umns of stories about television personalities and movie people. The . pull-out weekly television guide became a standard part of the Sunday paper. The news got smaller and smaller. It is pres ently continuing its shrinkage. It is now so small that one northern newspaper (neither The Times nor The Daily News) last week had its entire front page covered with: V, A feature story, very en tertaining, about a Protestant le-column inches (as long as a column-and-a-half in The Daily Tar Heel). " The northern newspaper just mentioned is not alone. Most of its sisters behave the same way. Publishers are certain that they can compete with television by offering the same tripe tele vision offers. They are spiting their own faces. Right now, the newspapers of this country are the only organs of objective reporting of infor mation. Radio and television and the "news" magazines are cer tainly not doing this job. Only the newspapers are left The newspapers showed a long time ago that . they are capable of efficiently and ob jectively selecting the real, significant information from a 'Wo W.int To Look At This Very Carefully' ill r-. JvA v ' Kf :u l (Li l$Mw ing indexes of television view ers, they started getting worried. The advertisers were pushing more of their ad budgets toward television, where a larger and more imprisoned audience could be had. So the publishers decided to try to beat television at its own game: Entertainment. They started forgetting about infor mation, something that , televi sion forgot altogether. girl who posed as a Jew to see if people were prejudiced. 2. A banner headline, very sensual, about airplane crashes. With long story. 3. A story about nude women. I forget the details. 4. A huge picture of the win ner of the latest Tangle-Towns puzzle. The world news, I found, was on Page 10. It ran about 15 doub- day's events and placing it in ccld type. A few good papers still show it. But their ranks are thinning. I have an idea that television, which is a young and flexible in dustry, will someday realize what is going on. If, when this time comes, the newspapers have thrown away their right to gath er and publish significant news, television will have a perfect right to take over the license. it By Al Capp ' ATALL. HAN'SOME,' J ' ANFO MAH CHILE'S TZL W Sh6E 7,.,, . rc:,Q,7 V SliM ONEL-. NOT NO S V SAKE-Ari'S PREPARED ) . JxJr, A, WOULD. TH SELECTION O POSSIBLE ) f HOOMIW RALLCON" ) TO Ctl DT rV WANTED, W-WOULD 'Tn' PAPPVS IN DOGPATCH S V HUUMIN WALLOON.. J QTO ---- YO' FLIRT BACK - V MIGHTY PORE SO AH PvX - mm&- 7" X nEVAm" VVlF MATRIMONY Ay " Pogo By Wa' Kelly A GZlSLEmOZQUS, 1 ' TH SIMPLE UH4 VAr) ,p 5 Ol' If ?OAf?f TH2 eooHOO P . yr O? CLASSIC CSANJC A TrVIZU-Y PR, FULL- !5fSa X k CLASS. 10 U5VB TO UBAZ TWOATE. SAVAGE K lfiSi V X Ami . o TWE THVMt& I TONS. Of- OWqW Students I aught Elders To Die Gunnar D. Kumlien The Commonweal In streams of blood and unspeakable agony something new has been born in Hungary, and is so new that it does not even have a name. Like hundreds of other Westerners, mostly uip lomats and journalists, I was caught in the mid.t of the fighting in Budapest and witnessed the few days of freedom, until it was submerged but not killed by a tempest of steel and fire. Communism seems to be terrified by what it has been breeding and it is unable to kill it. The whole Eastern bloc is shaken by it and for the West it appears to be too new to be understood. But everything indicates that what has happened now in Hungary will later on be called a turning point in history.. I do not think that ever before has an uprising been more "pure" in spite of its horrors and in a way more absolute. It was not prepared and was as great a surprise for the Hungarian freedom-fighters themselves as for the rest -of the world. No matcrml or political interests had had time to infiltrate, in order to push the uprising in this direction or the other. It just erupted like a volcano.. For Communism the most ghastly meaning of the revolt is that precisely those who were .sup posed to be the new humanity, trained and formed to build up the radiant CommunL-t world of to morrow, the youth and the workers of the brain and of the hand, took the initiative and fought with a super human spirit although without hope. I will never forget all those faces of high school boys and girls, with the heat of the battle reflected in' them, and their smiles which were not of this world any more. It was simply imperishable beauty. They taught their elders how to die. At the same time, it was not all senseless sac rifice, and the youngsters had a surprising sense for realities. Their great overwhelming desire, right from the first day was for bazookas. I re member them swarming around me in a backyard, where we were protected from the gunfire, push ing and asking for bazookas. Most of these youths have, no recollection of the capitalist world and therefore cannot look back to it. For them the only reality is the Communist world, which they reject with passion. They reject all of it the study of Russian, the textbooks of Marxism-LeninL-m, the Marxist "'revaluation"' of history, of geography, of economics, of everything. For years they had given passive resistance to all this and now, finally, they had a chance to hit back. They were sick of the lies more than of any thing else. PITY And when the Russians turned up. looking for "Fascists" and "white terrorists-,' obviously expect ing an American- attack from Austrian territory at any moment, these Hungarian youngsters could not even hate the Russians any more, but could only pity them. There was something ghostlike about these Rus sians, prisoners of their own terminology. Don't they have an uneasy feeling of what they are head ing for? A strange thing happened when the Russians had struck for the second time and curbed the up rising. They discovered that infantry plus armor was not enough, if there were not enough inhabi tants ready to act as quislings. The Communists had seen the sign on the wall and those of their leaders who were not killed either did not dare to take any responsibility or were most reluctant to do so. The Russians meas ured the basic impotence of sheer might. The desperate Communist attempt to stop the landslide halfway seems doomed to failure all over the satellite countries. When the uprising had reached its peak and the Russians at first did not seem to react, many Hungarian refugees, having lived in Western Eu rope ever since the war, returned to Hungary. It was easy for them for the border was practical'' open several days. Many of thec?e returnees had belonged to the old ruling class of land-owners or had been owners of big industrial enterprises. But in the middle of the general chaos only two things seemed to In firm for those who made the uprising: no Com munism and no return to things as they were before. The farmers, killing off their Communist bos.-e-as if they were animals, starting to break up the collective farms with a sort of silent fury, showed themselves at the same time hostile and even mena cing to the returning big landowners or to their representatives. The farmers, too, proved to be the hard core in the pas-sive resistance after the second Russian onslaught. One night in Budapest just before the Russians struck for the second time, somebody knocked at the door of my hotel room. It was an engineer from Eastern Germany. It was a night full of evil fore bodings for the heavy Russian tanks were moving without interruption around the center of town. The German engineer settled down and opened hu heart. He was not a Communist. In a low,cven voice he told me about the plight of Eastern Ger many and that the general feeling there was that "things simply cannot go on as they are now." When he spoke about the young Hungarian fighters for freedom his eyes filled with tears. "They and only they keep me from despairing." he said. "Did you see what dignity and pride and courage they have? What an example they are for us reasonable cowards! It is not only in Hun gary that the youth is like this. It i- the same in all the other satellite countries. "Very many of us, their elders, have been crush ed. .Many of us could not stand it, but yielded for the sake of our families, for the sake of bread and shelter. Our bones and our muscles were not strong enough, for we were brought up under other circumstances. But their bones and their muscles are strong enough. I can see it in my own children. And this fills me with joy and fear, a joy and fer you probably cannot even imagine. . ." He stopped for a while and we listened again to the sinister noises of all that steel, which some times made the walls tremble.
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Feb. 7, 1957, edition 1
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