Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / Sept. 15, 1983, edition 1 / Page 8
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8The Daily Tar HeelThursday, September 15. 1983 t latlu Sar 1-lr-rl The mind and the heart .year 0 editorial freedom Kerry DeRochi. Editor Alison Davis, Managing Editor LISA PULLEN, University Editor CHRISTINE MANUEL, State and National Editor MlKEDESlSn. Sports Editor BILL RlEDY, News Editor JEFF HlDAY, Associate Editor John Conway, aty Editor KAREN FISHER, Features Editor Jeff Grove. Am Editor CHARLES W. LEDFORD, Photography Editor Fit for a King It's not very often that a bill enters Congress designed to pay tribute to a past leader, the goals he strived for and the ideals he had. But it's on these occasions that one has a chance to measure society's progress, see which goals were realized, which ones forgotten. These past months have been such an occasion. In August the House overwhelmingly approved a bill that would make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. And just this week, a group of senators led by North Carolina's own Jesse Helms vowed they'd defeat it on the Senate floor. For Helms, it will be the second shot at killing the bill; the first was when he stopped its passage last month by threatening a filibuster. The senator says he'll keeping fighting because of the cost to the taxpayers about $18 million in extra pay will go to federal employees who have to work on public holidays. And, if the money argument doesn't work, Helms says he's ready to load the bill with enough amendments to send it to committee tables for a long time. Among these amendments, he said, are proposals which would make the birthdays of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy national holidays. No, Helms does not have a par ticular affinity with the well-known liberals. He just wants to see Democrats forced to vote against them. In this case, Helms' politics are matched in their tediousness only by their predictability. In his usual dogmatic style, he's refused to acknowledge that public holidays are reserved to commemorate great traditions, high ideals and leaders who shape destiny. He's forgotten that no man fits these standards better than King. In an era of injustice, King was able to call for passive resistance. He believed that in this country gains could be made without violence. The ignorant used weapons and threats; the others aspired for more. . King inspired a drive for "Jobs, Peace and Freedom" through speeches remembered today. "Yet, when the years have passed . . . men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization," he said in 1964, when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize. "Because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness' sake." King was a national hero like Washington and like Lincoln. He should be remembered as such. A holiday celebrating his birthday should be recognized by all, not torn down by a group of lawmakers who were never quite able to envision his dream. The Bottom Line A few weeks ago, 51-year-old Gus Econopoulos spent about an hour pushing $100 worth of coins into a slot machine in Carson City, Nev., before the contraption rang up three bars. It was wen worth the effort. The retired warehouseman came away with a world record $1.7 million jackpot. But apparent ly he didn't have enough warehouse space to store all his dough, so Econopoulos cashed only $200,000 worth of his win nings. That turned out to be a lucky move for employees of Harrah's Tahoe Casino; Nevada Gambling Control Board investi gators determined that the slot machine was electronically manipulated by "very sophisticated" methods when Econo poulos won his fortune. They took out a warrant for his arrest. But Econopoulos, no dummy, has taken what money he's got and run: He's outa here, on the lam; he's history. The best bet is that Econopoulos 200 grand will provide enough fat to live off the cholesterol of the land. And that's the bottom line. THE Daily Crossword By Louis Sabin ACROSS 1 Epistolary sign-off 5 Throaty sound 9 Exercises 13 Scena 14 Cowboy's rival 15 Iris layer 16 Mailman's game? 13 Capp's hyena 19 Ms. Merkel 20 Wrongs, in law 21 One who gazes 23 Philate list's concern 26 Haggard novel 27 Greeting the dawn 30 Browning's " Passes" 33 Drunkard 35 San Diego highlight 36 Biblical patriarch 37 Mythical outcasts 38 Honor 39 Fleur de 40 Hesitate 41 Gold bug? 42 Soap smeared 44 Reign, in Calcutta Yesterday' 1 Puzzle Solved: nygHftitrftftQiL m g in nrxn ir e p la zi TJl H T T E r 0" U IN ET I P RlG " A C E2S"K IN i TT A WG C EAliL E T T E FRN"Co"NTENT A"Ff V E R"T 0.N TTZT iTf I E r H f 0" R g eTrTsL hh "ttr r ATjE'-rrnrpI T H D 0TT0 0 uTe I o.kE TTXTrsr gt jl 1 iii aTX"lIsT""in a c i e d tf I N A R E T if FTJT 0.1 Y DCUISltlsfrl jplElAlRlsn 91S83 45 Marks on23A 51 Meager 53 First class 54 Ta ta 55 Young salmon 56 Stationery printing 59 "The King - 60 Typewriter type 61 Afr.fox 62 Hardy girl 63 Be a con sumer 64 Leap DOWN 1 Enjoy thoroughly 2 U. of Maine site 3 Documents of passage 4 Dig in 5 Pillage 6 Pen name? 7 Min. part 8 Gets in shape 9 Kentucky specialties 10 Some envelopes 11 DN A factor 12 European river 14 Adult 17 WWII beachhead 22 Arab chief 24 Cook's abbr. 25 Rhino's cousin 28 bene 29 Pursues 30 -mell 31 Amazon cetacean 32 Certain mail 33 Zero Mostel role 34 Digger's find 37 Packaged 38 Pacific island group 40 Old English runes 41 Mother Lat. 43 Joel C. 44 Hindu princess 46 Old lan guage 47 Ms. Lenya 48 Bloated 49 Af r. lake 50 Passover feast 51 Argument 52 Glass sheet 57 Hebrew priest 58 Fodder I?" 7 p I 3 15 16 7 p """"""'J 10 111 112 73 IT"" 75 75 77 71 77" "" " 20""" " IT" IT" """" " 17" VT "ff irtiTrir" """"" irrsr" " ir mmmm " , jp - " - """"" ir" mmmm --" 39 Ti 43 " 44 """"" 45 46 j'47 """" 48 j4rnsr" i 51T52" 53 " 54 55 56 TT" 58 15 " 60 61 62 m 63 """"" 64 """" 1983 Tribune Company Syndicate, Inc. All Rights Reserved 91583 Walter Spearman, editor of The Daily Tar Heel in 1928 and retired professor of journalism, first gave this ad dress at the 1978 Phi Beta Kappa induction ceremony. Spearman's is a message worth repeating, and the DTH felt it would be appropriate to reprint it as the new semester gets under way. Spearman retired in 1980, but he has left his mark on the University as an exemplary student and teacher. By WALTER SPEARMAN If I have a theme tonight, I'd like to call it "The Mind and the Heart." Obviously, you are the minds of the University. You have made Phi Beta Kappa. You have achieved academic distinction and you deserve to be proud. Your parents deserve to be proud of you. Your professors deserve to be proud of you and what they have helped you accomplish. But tonight I want to ask you one other question: Where are your hearts? Back in the 1960s, student hearts were all hanging out. Students were concerned with the world about them: war and peace, racial justice, the rights of labor and the welfare of the underprivileged, the plight of the poor and the desperation of the doomed. I had students who lay down in the streets of Chapel Hill, obstructing traffic and leading demonstrations to open theaters and eating places and hotels to blacks. I had a student an A stu dent at that who spent three months in a N.C. jail for seeking rights for those discriminated against. Tom Wolfe, a brilliant writer and the founder of our so-called "New Journalism," calls the 1970s the "Me Decade." Encounter groups, meditation groups, therapy sessions, Zen and Yoga, primal therapy, sexual swinging, they all scream "Let's talk about ME! That's what is im portant. Never mind the other fellow. Let's talk about me and forget the rest of the world. What grade will I get? What graduate school will I be admitted to? What job can I get? What sex partner can I find? What kind of retirement benefits will my job bring me? Let's think about me!" Where are we now? Last year I read an editorial in The Daily Tar Heel, my old alma mater, entitled "Stu dents seek status quo." The editorial quoted the director of the London School of Economics as saying self confident students of the 1960s have been replaced by the fearful and defensive students of the 1970s who de mand a defense of the status quo, of existing privileges. And the studentwriter concluded: "The student of the '70s has his hands full simply worrying about his own future. The idealism of the student of the '60s, striking out for Utopia, has fallen by the wayside only to be re placed by a world of the survival of the fittest." Several years ago, The New York Times made a survey of college editors on eight campuses, from coast to coast, asking what students were most interested in. One editor reported, "This campus' 13,000 students want a place of security in an anxious world more than an opportunity to make the world more secure." And the UNC editor wrote: "Two-fifths of the students are preoccupied with trivia, about two-fifths of us sway back from concern to unconcern and about one-fifth are involved in something significant, something larger than ourselves." One advantage of teaching here for more than 40 years is that or e sees so many college generations come and go, usually in like freshman lambs and out like senior lions. What do they do while they are here? Is it a four year rest period or coffee break or beer blast be tween high school graduation and a lifetime job? Or is it a period of growth, of maturing, of new ideas and ex panding horizons, of trying out intellectual wings, of dedication and service? Are they parasites who sap the University of its stored up strength? Do they take away without replenishing? Or do they revitalize a University that may be growing tired and add their own new ideas to the University's accumulation of wisdom? Students seem more concerned with grades today and with getting into graduate school or medical school or law school than with other people and the world outside. No one is willing to accept a C even if it is a well deserved C for too little work or too sloppy work. For the first time in my 43 years of teaching at Carolina, students call me up at home at night to explain why they may have to cut my class the next day or why then have not been able to finish a paper on time. Don't mistake me. It is good to be concerned about grades. How else can you get an education? How else can you make Phi Beta Kappa? But let's not sacrifice the heart to the mind. Let's not forget concern and compas sion from the 1960s. If the 1970s is really the "ME De cade,"as writer Tom Wolfe says it is, let us try to temper the personal concerns for ourselves and for our future with great outreach to others. "ME! ME! ME!" can become a selfish scream if one constantly ignores the needs and aspirations of others. Let's not cry "Wolfe" even Tom Wolfe too often. We might keep the - ' ' f I ' ' v . X 'J I C r $ f i I I , 1 nMi'fltifinirtimiirtr'innrrrTriffTrr -crT-rr r",nnmiliiiiiiriirnrnnirnnrr,nWiif:n"iYfirrrrirr(ifflrnMiiffl Walter Spearman chiding Wolfe from our personal door by looking outside to see the world around us. Can we use our Phi Beta Kappa minds and our human hearts to make that a bet ter world? In one or two college generations, the pendulum swings from apathy to activism, from callousness to concern, from selfishness to unselfishness, from the scheming mind to the roving heart. To illustrate thai swinging pendulum, let me take you over to two of my classes in journalism. I teach a class in book, movie and play reviewing. We read Judith Crist's movie reviews and hear her call The Sound of Music the "sound of marshmallows." We recall the small boy who said: "This book tells me more about penguins than I want to know." We remember George Bernard Shaw's classic remark: "A critic is a man who leaves no turn un stoned." We quote that infamous line: "An amateur quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost." . Then I teach a course in editorial writing, and my stu dents write about very serious subjects: the purpose of education, registration, drop-add, students' rights to vote, the Honor System, abortions, freedom of the press, conditions in prison, capital punishment, Watergate, the nuclear bomb, ERA and discrimination against blacks and women. One day I asked my students to list five topics they were sufficiently concerned about to try to persuade others to their own convictions. Most of them busily jot ted down something. But one girl a very pretty girl looked bewilderedly out the window. After class she turned in a blank paper. "But, Mr. Spearman," she said. "I'm just not concerned about anything. I think everything is just fine." Remember the "new commandment": "Thou shalt not commit thyself? She didn't, and she hadn't. But I see commitment on every hand. Sometimes I even see a student committed to an academic course, to a term paper that excites him all through the night before he has to turn it in, to a new subject that gives him ideas he never had before, to a particular professor who may open up challenging new areas of study that had never interested him before. Not all commitments are to great public causes. They may be to a superior basketball team. They may be com mitments to a girl, but commitments that belie the old Playboy philosophy that girls, like any good accessory, are detachable and disposable. They may be commit ments to become the best doctor or lawyer or nuclear physicist you are capable of being. They may be commit ments to open your sorority or your fraternity to all in dividuals, regardless of race, creed or color. Commitments come in various sizes. What is a small commitment to one person may be a large and meaning ful one to another: the refusal to go along with popular stereotypes, the determination to think for yourself, the courage to be a non-conformist in the midst of confor mity. The student who comes to Chapel Hill and gets a new idea, a new commitment, may puzzle his family back home or even frighten the state but he may well be building a progressive, enlightened future for his state. The "hippies" used to say: "Do your thing," but I would add: "Have a thing to do." "Butfd, baby, build" was always a better slogan than "Burn, baby, burn." Oh, there was apathy back in the '60s as well as de dicated commitment. And there is commitment today as well as a tendency to "look out for No. 1." Our task as "thinking students," as men and women with Phi Beta Kappa minds, is to use our minds in conjunction with our hearts to create the full man, the complete woman, the felicitous combination of mind and heart. If this were to be a "Last Lecture," I'd like to wrap it all in a box, and, like the boxes we used to send abroad for the starving, write CARE on it in large letters CARE. Care about your academic work. (You obviously do or you wouldn't be here tonight.) Care about the University that tries to nurture you. Care about your fel low students. Care about the world in which you live and the people who live in it with you, even those you have never, seen. If you need a motto for tomorrow, change it from "Thou shalt not commit thyself to the one word: care. Neither the faculty nor the administration nor your parents should ask you to avoid controversy. Rather, we should ask you and eternally encourage you to care about something and to care enough to become involved. Now even a Last Lecture has its last paragraph: I want to pass on to you the words of the two professors who meant the most to me back in the '20s when I was a stu , dent, when I, too, was under 30. Their commitment shone round their heads like halos and to me they were, and are, Chapel Hill and the University. We all need our heroes and these were mine. Let them be yours, too, or find new heroes of your own. Playwright Paul Green once said: "Life is like a tree forever growing." So may it prove to you. And University President Frank Graham once wrote: "Where and when men are free, the way of progress is not subversion, the respect for the past is not reaction and the hope of the future is not revolution: where ma jority is without tyranny, the minority without fear, and all people have hope of building together a nobler America in a freer and fairer world." When I was a student, Paul Green gave me a volume of his plays. On the flyleaf he wrote: "To Walter Spear man, with a belief in his ultimate triumph." My last word to you as a teacher is this: "I have a belief in your ultimate triumph." And I care. Develop and cultivate and use your mind but don't sacrifice your heart. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Hiday, Simmons both off-base To the editor: I was appalled at the columns collective ly titled "Crime and Punishment" (DTH, Sept. 8) that dealt with a news article con cerning the court-ordered chemical castra tion of a San Antonio rapist. Both columns, which expressed conflict ing viewpoints of the appropriateness of the sentence, ignored once basic fact about rape: that rape is usually a crime of vio lence, rarely of passion. Consequently, both columns, and the news article they concerned, were completely off-target in their presentation of viewpoints and could do nothing but misinform the public about rape. Perhaps the common belief that rapists rape out of some sort of a masculine per verted physical need stems from the fact that rapists themselves believe that they have physical needs that should not go un filled. This is completely erroneous (but for the very small percentage of males who rape out of physical need), and the public should learn the truth about rape before agreeing with such a sentence as castra tion. Rapists, in fact, rape out of a psycho logical need the desire to feel like a man. Rape gives the perfect opportunity for this: the female is made to be submissive and humiliated, and the male can deceive himself into believing that he acted out of a false need that society has conditioned him into believing he has or should have. No man rapes if he is confident of his masculinity. Only those who are unsure, who feel inadequate and unappreciated by females or who have strong homosexual tendencies end up being rapists. Even men in areas where there is a strong women's movement, though physically and mental ly sound otherwise, end up being rapists because they have grown up to believe men should be dominant and women submis sive. Kelly Simmons, who agrees with the Texas judge's decision, says the sentence is "in agreement with the crime." I can say definitely that, if the rapist is not one of the few who rape out of sexual reasons (that is, one of those with a serious defect in his hormonal balance), then an entirely suitable punishment could not have been given. And Jeff Hiday, who disagrees with the decision, does so for many good reasons, yet does not refute the belief that rapists rape for sexual reasons and offers a possi ble punishment for rapists that portrays them as being entirely responsible for their actions, when in faci society plays an im portant role in the formation of rapists. Calling the judge's decision "barbaric" and "sadistic," he describes perfectly the attentions given to rapists by the misin formed public. 1 agree with Hiday when he says that chemical castration is "only vengeance, pure, mean and simple." But rape is a spe cial crime, one in which the perfect punish ment (forcing a man to assume feminine roles) is directly opposed to the perfect cure (giving him the opportunity of prov ing his masculinity in other, nondestructive ways). Though I cannot sympathize much at all with rapists and potential rapists, I can understand, being male myself, the effect that our society and its conditioning effects has on some men. That is why I feel that the general public, and especially all fe males (you are all attractive to rapists), should become knowledgeable about rape like I did. A very close friend of mine was raped not once, but several times. I felt it my duty to educate myself about it. I feel you should also. J. Michael Brown Avery A bad tradition mm QFHANft nSTUAEI AWRES . THEWOWEHS PROBLEM.. Am. 4 I VmQmtLmki, ) 4 agsaafqgQaife To the editor: 1 would like to respond to the article concerning the Honor Court in the Sept. , 12 issue of the DTH ("Honor Court has longstanding tradition.") Having haa a longstanding affiliation with the Honor Court, I feel qualified to address several issues concerning its judi cial procedures. First, the accused is often not adequate ly prepared for the trial by his counsel or the attorney general with regards to the ac cusation, the probable sanctions, the court proceedings or even his rights under The Instrument. Often as not, the accused is virtually left on his own to prepare a de fense. This brings into serious question the professionalism cited in the article. How many defense attorneys leave their clients to prepare their own case by themselves without aid? Second, often mitigating circumstances are not fully taken into consideration or not addressed at all unless, of course, the University has "something to lose" by suspending the accused. Character wit nesses are frequently overlooked, except when asked about the accused's participa tion in extracurricular activities. Note that the questioning about such activities is often paired with questions concerning the accused's character. Furthermore, char acter as shown by club or sport participa tion is used as a determining factor in the severity of the sanction. I fail to see what such participation has to do with what is called character. Third, unfortunately, The Instrument is not based on the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights. It is much more like a military court. Under the restrictions of this Instru ment, a student had more rights in the first grade than he does while attending this university. The accused is not always given a speedy trial cases often drag on literal ly for months. The black and white of The Instrument is reflected in the fact that an accused student can either plead guilty or not guilty there is no middle ground. In . addition, there is absolutely no provision given for intent; and without such provi sion, how can a decision be made by the standards of "beyond a reasonable doubt"? In conclusion, it should be clear that drastic changes need to be made in The In strument, the procedures of the Honor Court and the attitudes of those serving on the court. Before such changes take place, this university cannot truly take pride in what the DTH respectfully considers a "longstanding tradition." Sarah McGuire Chapel Hill
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Sept. 15, 1983, edition 1
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