i
6The Daily Tar HeelTuesdav. Octobe 19. 1982
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90th year of editorial freedom
John D rescuer, bum
Ann Peters, Maru Editor
KERRY DE ROCHI, Associate Editor
Rachel Perry, Vmvmity Editor
ALAN CH APPLE. City Editor
JlM WRINN, State and National Editor
Linda Robertson, Spom Editor
Laura Seifert. n Editor
KEN MlNGBMiKwfrto
Elaine McClatchey, pms Editor
Susan Hudson, Fra Editor
LEAH T ALLEY, Arts Editor
Teresa Curry, We&mimtor
AL STEELE, Photography Editor
Revamped review
Students pickingup a copy of the new Carolina Course Review may
notice the changes in the document's format. Detailed charts of computer
statistics have replaced the ambiguous and often misleading information
of the old review. Now, specific questions and an easy-to-read format
should establish the review as a valuable source of student evaluation of
courses and professors. '
Student evaluation of professors is not a new idea. In the past, the
Carolina Course Review has provided beneficial information to both
faculty members and students: Professors can use specific information to
judge their classroom performance and students can decide which classes
they wish to sign up for during pre-registration.
However, problems in management and administration of evaluation
forms once created a review that was statistically invalid. Faculty
members and students in the past also have had problems deciphering the
results from ambiguous qustions.
This year's review has changed all that. A Student Government com
mittee, working with faculty advisers, has revamped the review's for
mat. Students now evaluate a course by answering specific questions on a
professor's performance, the quality of the books assigned and the
overall value of the course. Norm groups within the Uniersity would be
established; a professor teaching a freshman class with 300 students could
compare his ratings with another professor in the same situation.
In the past, professors have used the poorly-run review as justification
for not having a comprehensive student evaluation. The Campus
Governing Council used the past problems for not funding any new pro
ject. The new review has solved most of these problems. For it to be an
effective student review, both faculty members and students should com
mit themselves to its surveying and tabulation. A student evaluation of
professors can only be as good as the amount of student and faculty
involvement. :.
Aiming high
Interpreting Scholastic Aptitude Test scores can be as mysterious as
late-night seances or the Bermuda Triangle. For nearly 20 years, SAT
scores dropped and the "experts" sought the reasons why. "Experts
will give 200 reasons why test scores have gone down, including every
thing from television to sunspots," said one educator. . '
They can forget sunspots. This year those experts have a more pleasant
dilemma: for the first year since 1963, SAT scores improved nationwide.
The main reason: a significant improvement in the SAT scores of blacks.
Though the experts are still deciding why, the gains by blacks on the SAT
seem to point to an increase on basics, and perhaps more importantly, a
general heightening of educational goals by blacks. r
Blacks' scores rose by an average of 9 points on the verbal part of the
1982 SAT and by 4 points on the math section, compared with the 1981
results. Whites gained 2 points on the verbal test and nothing in math.
Educators are especially pleased with the increase in blacks' SAT scores
because since 1976, more black students have been taking the test. :
As a group, however, black students still trail their white classmates by
an average of 220 points on the combined totals. This gap often can be
attributed to environmental differences like family income and parents'
level of education. ,
Why the increase in black test scores? One possibly reason is that the
trend toward emphasizing basics is showing results. Reading and math
skills are most important in taking the SAT, and those are two skills em
phasized in the return to basics. North Carolina has greatly increased its
emphasis on basics, and minorities and low-income students now are
scoring higher on state competency tests.
Those are good signs, but as much as educators are stressing the basics,
it's even harder to teach ambition and desire. Another reason for the in
crease in black SAT scores may be that more blacks are aiming for higher
educational goals. Financial aid programs over the last 15 years have
enabled more low-income blacks to think about attending college; con
sequently, more blacks are feeling pressure to do well on the SAT and are
preparing better for it. That preparation includes studying more for the
SAT itself and studying harder in high school. i
It may be some time before the experts determine exactly why blacks'
' SAT scores increased this year, and continued improvement is important.
If blacks' SAT scores improved because of an emphasis on the basics,
that's worth noting and remembering. But if blacks' SAT scores improv
ed because of heightened aspirations, that's even better.
The Bottom Line
Oddball ailments
Even the simple pleasures have
. their hazards.
Take mowing the lawn and eating
an ice cream cone, for example. The
New England Journal of Medicine,
which has a letters section that is a
forum for the ailments of modern liv
ing, last week reported .two oddball
ills: lawn mower arm and French
vanilla frostbite.
Dr. Franz von Lichtenburg of
Brigham and Women's" Hospital in
Boston brought lawn mower arm to
the attention of the medical world.
He's an authority on the pain in
volved, since he got it himself.
The injury occurs when the starter
cord on the mower suddenly seizes up
in mid-pull, von Lichtenburg wrote,
explaining the ailment in florid
medical gobbledygook.
"As the full pulling force of the
motion is transferred from the start
ing gizmo to the victim's flexor
digitorum superficialis," he wrote,
"something inside rips, instantly set
ting off a burning pain centered on a
point 8 cm proximal to the carpal skin
fold and 1 cm ulnar from the volar
midline of the forearm."
It hurts. And the pain lasts for a
week or so. The only treatment von
Lichtenburg recommends is avoiding
medical consultation and continued
exercise of the affected limb.
The first case of French vanilla
frostbite was documented by Drs.
Lance R. Peterson of the. Veterans
Administration Medical Center and
LoAnn C. Peterson of the Hennepin
County Medical Center, both in Min
neapolis. The victim was an 18-month-old
girl who ate her first ice cream cone
French vanilla, of course. She con
sumed the treat for 30 minutes, never .
removing her mouth.
When she got home, her lips began
to swell. Blisters developed over the
next two days, but they eventually
healed.
The child's babysitter thought she
had cold sores but the doctors
diagnosed it as frostbite.
The two physicians' search of
medical literature revealed French
vanilla frostbite did have a precedent.
Twelve years ago in the New England
Journal, another team of physicians
reported something called "Popsicle
panniculitis."
And that's the bottom line.
Anti-American sentiment in Spain not unjustifiable
By LUCY HOOD
"Yankees go home" read posters glued to the sides
of buildings, trees and sign posts. "OTAN NO"
(NATO NO) was printed in large letters at the top of
billboards. Below the message was a skull and
crossbones.
Words such as these were used to tell Americans
that Spain did not want to become part of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization. Such an alliance would
put Spain in the middle of a confrontation between the
United States and Russia.
Frequently someone would walk by in a bar, on the,
street, or on the steps in the philosophy and letter!
department at the University of Seville, and say
"Yankees go home" in broken English.
The posters, the billboards and the comments
reflected the anti-American sentiment that ran, and
still runs, not only through Seville, but through all of
Europe.
The posters and comments were indicators of the
mood in Spain when the Falkland Islands crisis began.
With Argentina's invasion of the Falklands, the anti
American attitude intensified. The United States sup
ported England. Spain sided with Argentina. Tension
increased.
A column in Spain's most widely-distributed
newspaper, El Pais, accused the United States of
breaking the Monroe Doctrine. The United States had
jeopardized the relations with most South American
countries that resented the American imperialistic
policy anyway, it said.
I began to think about those signs "Yankees go
home."
Soon after that, one of the few university dormitory
quads held a party. For the evening, one of the
Spanish people's favorite topics of conversation
politics was set aside. Instead, people chose to fill
conversations with small talk.
Amid the festive mood of the evening, three
students approached me. I had met them earlier but
had spoken with them only briefly. Without greetings
or salutations, they said, "The Falklands belong to
Argentina." The tone of their voices and the looks in
their eyes said more than the words. The islands
belonged to Argentina. There was no other explana
tion, and how could I even dare to show my face as an
American?
" Yankees go home" began to appear in my dreams.
, Last June, at the end of the Falkland Islands crisis,
the World Soccer Cup began in Spain. People from all
parts of the world from Russia to Africa to South
America to New Zealand poured into Spain to sup
port their teams.
I was returning to Spain from France by train and
met six university students from England who were
traveling to Northern Spain for the first rounds of the
soccer tournament. They traveled with the spirit that a
Carolina student would have had traveling to New
Orleans last spring for the NCAA final. They had their
. cooler of beer, their cigarettes, their radicncassette
players and their favorite tapes. Their only goal was to
be in the stadium when the games began.
To pass the time, we talked football, but the conver
sation drifted from the proficiency of the English soc
cer team to the Falkland Islands crisis. By this time, I
had become a Spanish patriot and defended the
Argentinians. I spoke my mind, feeling confident on
Spanish soil, and they spoke their's feeling just as con
fident in numbers.
Once again the message on that poster nagged me
- "Yankees go home."
My reaction to the Falkland Islands crisis was much
different in Seville, where politics are discussed more
frequently than they would have been in the conser
vative, environment of my home in Richmond, Va.
Rather than recognizing that the Argentinians invaded
British land, Spanish friends chose to emphasize the
extent of England's retaliation. Their rigid stance
brought fears that the British could stop negotiations
with Spain on Gibraltar by using their military force as
leverage. And in response to the argument that the
residents of the islands preferred British rule, the
Spanish claimed that since the islands originally
belonged to Argentina, the Argentinians were in the
right.
Meanwhile, a cover story on the European version
of Time reported the economic crisis plaguing the
United States. The unemployment rate had reached a
post-World War II high of 9 percent and continuedjo
climb. To me, that was just one of many statistics
printed on paper. The poverty in Spain was real.
Everyone from a bank president to the owner of a
small grocery store saw the poor begging when they
walked down the street or stopped for a drink in a bar.
,-. Last spring, 14 percent of the Spanish population
was unemployed. Unemployment was a problem that
had plagued the country since the democracy was
established in 1976.
Part of those statistics roamed the streets daily, beg
ging for money, food or" whatever anybody had to
give. The beggars sat on the sidewalks and held their
palms out to passersby. Others held signs that usually
read something like this, "I' have eight children, my
husband is dead and I cannot find work. Pleaserhe!p
me feed my children!" While these beggars stuck to
the streets, gypsy women wandered through bars and
restaurants asking for money while their half-naked,
unbathed children followed behind.
And there were those signs on bank doors that
posted the exchange rate from Spanish pesetas to
foreign currencies. Throughout the year, the dollar
rose steadily. Next to this, how bad could the
American economy be?
I did not realize the impact of the economic crisis
and a 9 percent unemployment rate until I returned to
the United States last June and talked to friends who
couldn't find jobs or who had just lost their jobs.
Little by little I began to understand that the
American interpretation of the way things should be
may be good for America but not necessarily for every
other country. A distance of 5,000 miles and a world
of difference between cultures significantly changes
the way one reacts to major political crises, economic
crises and even a poster.
Lucy Hood, a senior Spanish and journalism major
from Richmond, Va., is editorial assistant for The
Daily Tar Heel. She spent her junior year studying in
Seville, Spain. '
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
e should question draft sign up
To the editor:
The editorial on draft registration titled
"Register now" (DTH, Oct. 14) fails to ad
dress a number of key points on the sub
ject. It presents a badly-reasoned defense
of registration and, as if the editorial writer
recognized the shallowness of the argu
ment, evaded the issue by pointing out that
the law is the law and must be obeyed.
The most shallow point in the editorial
is the distinction between registration and
the draft itself. Any fool can see that no
one has been thrown into the military by
any force other than double-digit
unemployment. But ; I . wonder if the
editorial writer believes that the govern
ment would spend millions of dollars, en
dure protests from millions of Americans,
threaten hundreds of thousands of young
men with jail and prosecute what will be
hundreds if not thousands of them if it did
not intend at some point to use the draft.
The argument that registration reduces the
amount of time needed to raise an army in
an emergency is bogus because the amount
of time saved is so slight and the condi
tions under which that time might be need
ed so unlikely, tha the financial and social
costs far outweigh its savings.
When Jimmy Carter ordered draft
registration he told us it was a way of send
ing a message. He was right. . Draft
registration scarcely sent a message to the
Soviets who , doubtless knew that the
American government could get the names
andaddresses of its 19-year-olds anytime it
wanted. But it did send a message to the
dictators of the world that the United
States was preparing to defend them. It
sent a message to the American people to
get ready for a business-as-usual attitude
on foreign interventions. Despite the
debacle in Vietnam, the American govern
ment was going to conscript young men to
defend an imperialistic foreign policy; the
sooner the Americans accepted it the bet
ter. Finally, it sent a message to the men
obligated to register. It told them that their
lives are ultimately not their own.
Whenever the government decides that an
nihilation meets, its policy needs, they
.. should be ready to drop whatever they are
doing and join in.
The argument that one man's political
views do not entitle him to violate a
criminal statute ignores the entire moral
issue. Simply because a government action
is legal does not make it right; it does not
mean that there is a moral obligation to
obey it. The Germans' mass murder of the
Jews of Europe was done under the law
does that mean that everyone should have
obeyed the laws that made it possible? The
Americans' enslavement, of and
discrimination against millions of black
people was legal should those people
who took illegal steps against those acts
have been satisfied with remaining within
the laws? Surely allowing everyone to
choose for himself or herself which laws to
obey will lead to chaos. But to deny the
moral necessity of violating an essentially
immoral law is to put a love of order above,
a love of justice, which is what the law is
supposed to defend.
The decision , whether to register is a
decision that each person must make for
himself. It is scarcely the province of those
people like myself who are too old to be
affected by the law to tell other young men
to risk five years in jail and $10,000 in
fines. But let's not pretend that registering
for the draft is on the same moral level as
stopping for a red light. If the government
wants to register men to go into an institu
tion whose function is to slaughter people
to defend certain policies, we have a right
to demand why. We have a right to a
much better answer than "because we say
so." .
Bill Cecil-Fronsman
Member, Democratic Socialists
' of America
; : Chapel Hill
Rush discrimination
To the editor:
The fact that a black woman par
ticipated in UNC sorority rush this fall has
been of considerable and justifiable in
terest to much of our campus. During the
two weeks following the end of rush, The
Daily Tar Heel editorial page included
several letters from students expressing
UDW ASK THEM IF THEY HAVE EVER BEEN, AND VrfHV ARE TWEV WcW,BWAUNI$r. PlNKO.SUEERSVES,
concern about racial discrimination within
the sorority system. Regardless of whether
or not this woman was indeed
discriminated against, this incident once
again raised the real issue of concern,
which is the fact that the sorority system
and the student body as a whole resists ge
nuine interaction between the races. ,.
We, as a group of sorority wprnen, are
very much aware of and concerned about
the segregation that exists. Unfortunately,
our rush system tends to perpetuate such
segregation and making any changes
within this system is difficult. We'are com
mitted to changing our system and pro
moting the ideal of equality within the
Greek system.
The Campus Y invited our group to
take positive action and to explore ways to
correct the inconsistencies within our
system; as a result, a series of weekly
meetings has been held. We intend to pro
vide' all Greek women with similar oppor
tunities by creating forums for thoughtful
discussion within each house. We are plan
ning a series of lectures and other inform
ative presentations designed to challenge
negative feelings, to exchange ideas and to
promote open-mindedness. By initiating
these discussions now, we hope to prepare
Greek women for next fall's rush, and to
fulfill the goal of sororities, which is to en
courage personal growth.
Andrews not fiscal liberal
To the editor;
In your editorial titled "Rum and politics," (DTH, Oct. 13)
you stated that Rep. Ike Andrews has "used specifics in
defending his votes against a balanced federal budget."
True, he has used specifics in defending his voting record, in
particular, his votes against a'proposed constitutional amend
ment to require a balanced federal budget. This has been an
extensively debated issue of late, and votes by Democrats
against the proposal are being used against them by
Republicans.
Without debating the issue at hand, I would like to point
out that his vote against this proposed amendment does not
necessarily indicate that Andrews is against the ideal of a
balanced budget. It just means that he doesn't see that par-'
ticular solution as a means to an end. His voting record as a
fiscal conservative lends doubt to your statement.
By making this assumption in your editorial, you are
legitimizing the National Congressional Club's allegations
against the congressman picturing him as a free-spending
liberal, all of which are misleading, untrue and worst of all,
unfair.
-. . Brame P. Morrison Jr.
18 Old East
Unmlstsksbls imprint
To the editor:
Although I am not a resident of the 4th District, I have had
the opportunity to see a number of the television ads that Bill
Cobey is using against Rep. Ike Andrews.
These ads bear the unmistakable imprint of the National
Congressional Gub, which has stooped to these kinds of tac
tics in every election in which it has been involved.
These ads are designed to mislead and deceive the voters. It
is apparent that Go bey does not even know what they are
based on. I am greatly disappointed that he has allowed
himself to become a simple pawn of the extreme right-wing
and the big oil money that is financing his campaign.
Why won't Cobey answer the $64 billion question? I suspect
the reason is that he can't. His support of radical, unrealistic
budget resolutions shows just how inexperienced and
unknowledgeable he really is.
Andrews is not perfect, but he has an outstanding record in
fighting for Social Security, for education, for veterans, for
Tar Heel farmers and for other programs that are important to
the people of North Carolina.
I'm sticking by Ike Andrews and-encouraging my friends in
the 4th District to do the same.
Henry Randolph Willis
Farmville
Don't forget Libertarian :
To the editor:
The way your article, "4th District Congressional race
heating up," (DTH, Oct. 12) was written, one would think that
were only two candidates for the 4th District seat.
If you resent the federal government taxing your income
and spending it for you without your consent, if you resent the
. government telling you how to run your personal life, deciding
what's right for you, and if you resent draft registration, vote
Libertarian.
' The Libertarian candidate on November's ballot is Fritz
Prochnow, 52, of Apex.
For more information on this candidate, you can contact his
campaign at Rt. 3 Box 192E, Apex, N.C., 27502. This will give
you a more informed vote.
Tom Alciere
Chapel Hill
' We welcome the opportunity for the in
creased awareness on an individual level
and look forward to the subsequent im
proved attitude of our system as a whole.
We encourage other organizations and in
dividuals to join us in working toward our
goal of a truly integrated campus.
Leigh Leutze
Vicki Dodson
Sorority Women Against
Discrimination
Chapel Hill
Conscience unrewarded
To the editor:
On Oct. 7, political activist Alex Charns
received notice from the Board of Law
Examiners that he has been found unfit to
practice law in North Carolina. Why?
Ostensibly, it is because of his arrest last
March 27, which stemmed from a peaceful
protest staged at Fort Bragg. Charged with
"standing, sitting, or lying in the street in
such a manner as to impede traffic," a
misdemeanor offense, Charns was
motivated by the knowledge that troops
from El Salvador were being trained there
at our government's expense, meaning our
expense, to return to El Salvador and
perpetuate the wanton acts of violence for
which the Salvadoran army was already
renowned.
The raping and killing of nuns,
assassination of missionaries, assassination
of journalists, and rampant killing of
innocent civilians are acts Charns could
not let his government support without
voicing his opinion. Because he also felt a
duty to inform the public of the need to
look at what is happening in El Salvador,
he chose to act in a way which would reach
many people. Writing his congressman
would only add to the number of form let
ters mailed out of Washington. Reports
from Catholic missionaries who have had
the good fortune to return from D
Salvador are full of gruesome tales so hor
rifying as to be reminiscent of Nazi Ger
many. , '
So Charnes spoke out. His moral con
science and sense of responsibility: com
pelled him to act. His reward for being
braver than most of us is to be found not
to be "of such good moral character as to
be entitled to the high regard and con
fidence of the public."
The situation smacks of McCarthyism,
a disease many thought had passed. Fortu
nately, there is an appeal pending. There is
a chance that someone will decide that in
deed it is good to have practicing attorneys
who feel responsible for their
government's acts. It is no wonder lawyers
have such a poor public image. Those who
stand for justice are stifled. Personally, I
find this to be an insult to the profession to
which I aspire. I want to be proud when I
say, "1 am an attorney." At this moment,
all I feel is shame.
Polly Passonncau
Chapel Hill