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FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 1955 ;ace TWO THE DAILY TAR HEEL The University's Ragged Orphan- This .morning, .by your leave, we will take the part of that building with . columns in the northeast corner of the campus the one you see from the distance while cutting be hind liVP on your way to Harry's. It is called (iraham Memorial. It -.has been there longer than any of us like to remem ber. It is the student union building. Some day, an enterprising graduate stu dent will write a 'master's thesis on why Gra ham Memorial has never grown jnto its full stature. We haven't the room to do more than dash off a quick list of reasons: 1. It isn't big enough to serve more than an inconsequential' 'number of students; it was crowded from the day it was built. 2. It is in a bad location, away from stu dent living quarters. 3. It has a poor architectural plan. 4. It doesn't have enough money. The first three shortcomings of our stu dent union clearly point to the need for a new building like those at State and W.C. in a central location and constructed to ac commodate Carolina's large student popu I -e. ' - Hut the telling complaint is the fourth. Inadequate as CiM is, it has found new life in the past two years and is now operating at something approaching peak efficiency for the money it lias. It does not have en ough. More nioney would mean an expansion both internal and external for Graham Me morial. It could set up its services dances, concerts, lectures, exhibits and its game fa cilities' and so forth; and it could expand these services to the more densely populated areas of the campus. What's "more and most important it could hire a professional director. GM, as you likely don't know, has hired graduate students ;ind interested, untalented friends on two-year hitches for many years. Some times, as In the last two years, it has been lucky with this slap-dash brand of selection. Sometimes, well . . . like we say, we could use a professional director. We should have had one .in 19.0, 1: we certainly should not put off getting one beyond U)"r. Whatever it takes to -elevate Graham Me morial to proper prominence as the student union of A university of 6.000 students should be done. And what it takes is money. The student Legislature can raise fees an other two dollars per year without red tape; that should be done, as a bare minimum. From there, an attempt should be made by student referendum, administration and trustee action to raise the fee still further. Our S i$8 activities fee is among the lowest in the nation. :Tlie six dollars-GM gets from that sum puts the student union near the bottom of the list among national unions. We're being hog-tied just three or four dol lars a year short of an effective student pro grain the sort of program that can put vi tality in a dragging student government, lift intellectual tone, and inject a few cc's of morale into these wherealxmts. There are those who dream of a mighty" structure in the center of the campus; that building will be a reality some day, but don't hold your Veatlr. We are still' many years away from a sparkling new student un ion. - But that doesn't lessen at all Graham Me morial's present, need. Carolina Front 'I Don't Know, Fella I'm A Stranger Here Myself The official student publication of the Publi cations Board of the University of North Carolina, where it is published daily except Sunday, Monday and examina tion and vacation per iods and summer terms. Entered .s second class matter at the post office in Chapel Hill, N. C, tin ier the Act of March 8, 1879. Subscription rates:, mailed, $4 per fear, $2.50 a semester; delivered, $6 a year, $3.50 a semester. " - , v . NirjJ Carotin, WwW-fl rt (touf in .riutrv ' . ICS .. "-'J! Editor CHARLES KURALT Managing Editor Associate Editors Business Manager Sports Editor . BERNIE WEISS News Editor Advertising Manager--i Circulation Manager Subscription Manager Assistant Business Manager Assistant Sports Editor Photographer r. Society Editor . Ray Harris,; TheArts & The Philistines Louis Kraar THINKERS HAVE been con cerned about the position of the liberal arts 1 1 o n g ' before Business Ad n i n i s t r a t! i Oj n schools vere envision ed. That's one of ith p rpasnns I '.A; that letter biaMaffi-amAitfa-. .'.vfeianS' writer Roy Harris' contention that the lib eral arts people have a course called Business Administration Criticism is so ridiculous. If Mr. Harris would unruffle his fin ancial feathers a bit,, along with some of his BA contemporaries, he would see the real point be hind so much talk about the lib eral arts. t What has concerned liberal arts proponents is not the rise of the Business Administration School in all its shining glory, but the neglect of the liberal arts. "SO WHAT?" BA backer Har ris may shout. And this brings me down to the purpose of this piece. Obviously the humane letters liberal arts are of great val ue or they wouldn't have at tained the place they hold in our University. But why? Writing in 1867, Matthew Arr nold concerned himself with this same problem and came up with a lucid answer.. "Now the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfec tion, to regard wealth as but machinery, and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so," Arnold wrote. "If it were not for this purg ing , effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably be long to the Philistines. "The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to, becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines. FRED POWLEDGE LOUIS KRAAR, ED YODER TOM SHORES Jackie Goodman Dick Sirkin Jim Kiley Jack Godley Bill Bob Peel . Ray Linker Boyden Henley Susan Andes I awiiJistratiwi fly' f-Q$fl s;-;V- poucy on i -. &P&: : rVA qoEMOY and J C-WY: i t ' ' . I .j r J, r ' 1 w i r . - sfY-- - tpSr TB wtUMiCre" POST- Cat Humanities: An End In Themselves T7 e Mirrors Of Genius NEWS STAFF Neil Bass, Ed Peggy Ballard, Lois Owen. Myers, Ebba Freund, Night editor for this issue .Eddie Crutchfield "CULTURE SAYS: 'Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, the'ir man ners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make up the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth, having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?' - "And thus culture begats a dissatisfaction which is of tha highest possible value in stem ming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and in dustrial community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarized, ev en if it cannot save the present." ALTHOUGH I took the liber ty of paragraphing Arnold, whose writing is not always easy to read but whose ideas are ex citing, let me put for Mr. Har ris' sake the explanation into his vernacular. There is .nsore to this life than making . sales, having a Cadallic, and i watching televi sion. If one spends his time learning how I to make money taking mostly j BA courses it is going to be difficult for him to be exposed i to these other things. This is' not 'to say that all BA majors are Philistines, or that there is anything wrong with studying to bje a business man. But if one .'spends the amount o time' on business courses cur rently required by the Univers ity, it is going to be increasing ly difficult fr him to see these other things. j Neal W. Klausner (Dr. Klausner is Miller Pro fessor of Philosophy and chair man of the department of phil osophy and religion at Grinnell College. This article is excerpt ed from The American Scholar. Editor.) x The major interest we have in the liberal arts is with man and his achievement. But it is not the abstraction "man" that con cerns us. For it was not man that wrote Hamlet, but Shakes pears; not man that composed Don Giovanni, but Mozart; not man that painted the "View of Toledo," but El Greco; not man that completed the Summa The ologica, but Thomas Acquinas. It is the human being together . with his creation that draws and compels our admiration and study. The humanities, a general name for such studies, describe a sensitive, imaginative, reflec tive being, who is puzzled by his own existence, by its prom ises and frustrations; who reach es out for friendship and love; who is eager to try the powers which he feels moving within him. HE IS WHAT HE IS It is in the humanities we dis cover that a man can never be adequately understood merely by an examination of what he is at any given moment in history. He is what he was and what he wills to be. He is a being able to take the requisite action need ed to transform the actual by t reference to the ideal. His his tory can never be written per ceptively, in physical, physiolo gical or sociological terms alone. Without the pertinent vocabu lary of aspiration he is minimiz ed,, distorted and misconceived. There is a. tendency among the teachers of the humanities to be greatly encouraged when business exacutives express their approval of the liberal arts edu cation. When a director or man ager of some vast enterprise says he needs men of character, with broad training, able to super vise peop'le and to think effec tively, and in possession of va solidly based sense of values, and that these ends are achieved primarily by a study of the hu manities, then we thing our work has . received its oltimate justification. ENDS IN THEMSELVES But has it? Suppose' none of . these ends were achieved by the humanities, or no more so than those studies which have voca tionalized our education. Would this" mean that the humanities had 'failed? Certainly in part. But I wish to defend the idea that the humanities are best thought of as ends in themselv es, rather than means; man has the capanity for sheer personal enjoyment and satisfaction, and finds this deeply in th'e arts, literature, philosophy, history and any other subject that ex presses man" by telling of his birth, struggle, achievements, decay and death. THE SILVER CORD I do not mean that the jus tification of the humanities lies only in a psychological state called enjoyment, which may be induced by almost any slight tit illation .of the senses. If this were so, our culture would have reached its culmination in the comic book, the juke box, and the "art calendar. But we know there is a dif ference between a surface man ifestation of sorrow and mutual grief; between minor irritation and mutual hatred; between momentary attraction and mu tual love; between effervescent gaiety and mutual joy. And this gives us the clue. A prolonged and comprehending study of the humanities may bring about an experience of mutuality between creator and perceiver so that the agony and joy of the crea tion is repeated again and again whenever the two meet in un derstanding.. Here is the silver cord that unites man with man, nation with nation, past with present. This is why Plato is no longer an aristocratic Greek ; philoso pher, nor Jesus a humble Jew ish prophet, nor Dante an exiled poet. --; ; HOBBY SUBJECTS? When I suggest that the hu manities may lead to an experi ence of re-creation between one mind and another, or between one age and another, it may be thought that the necessary re lation between knowledge and preparation is minimized in fa vor of a leisurely, passive ab sorption. This curious and utterly mis taken view that the humanities are simply ways of appreciation, which one can postpone or avoid until there is nothing better to do, is based on the false pre mise that the humanities are the hobby subjects of the curri culum, which calls for no rigor ous preparation but only per sonal interest and a distaste for exactness. This seems to be the attitude of many of the educationists in our day, who are responsible for sending into the schools of the nation teachers almost totally blind to what is human in the human situation. The results are sadly evident In the first year at college. No, the humanities cannot be passively absorbed. Their, knowl edge must be earned by effort, their truths mastered by . the critical intellect. NO CYCLOTRONS It is true that we do not have glass tubing and Bunsen burn- Formosa Strait-Jacket: j he Enemy Power Superiority ers, or microscopes and slides, or cyclotrons and spectroscopes; nor do we find very useful sta tistical tables and correlation coefficients, all of which are designed to give a rigor and trustworthiness to the claims to knowledge of the social and na tural sciences. But one may be extraordinar ily facile with all of the appara tus of the humanities and still be shallow or empty of either knowledge or understanding of humane learning. We must look to the humanities to free us from methodolatry and prepare us for the great gifts of genius. For the humanities live on in the geniuses of the 'race. It is not their function to perpetuate mediocrity. The legions tol the dead past are sifted exceedingly fine by the criticism of time, and we may become intimate with only the best a privilege not open to their contemporar ies. The point is that art lives on art, literature on literature, and philosophy on philosophy. The humanities do not depend upon the spirit of inquiry as do the social and natural sciences. This is the spirit that has domi nated the intellectual world sinve the Renaissance, fed from the sprigs of curiosity in the human psyche and the need for guiding principles of action. When this spirit is in the as cendant, man's first question is, "What is there?" and his last question is, "What is there in it for me?" But the humanities cannot live at the level of curiosity and practice. Their interrogations probe the deeper passages of .anxious and perplexed man, not to inventory his skills, but to affirm his character. Here man's first question is, "Who is there?" and his last is, "Am -I there too?" MIRRORS OF GENIUS The answers to these ques tions are sought in philosophy, literature, history, language and the arts, and in some of the sci ences. That is why the human ists must constantly protest the increasing vocationalization of college curricula and why they are distressed by any attempt to eliminate language require ments. For somehow these seem to be ways of lowering stand ards not merely standards of academic achievement, but the standards necessary to make man realize his deepest poten tialities. The humanities are not medi cine for a sick race, nor amuse ment for a bored people, no ve hicles to prestige for the intel lectually ambitious, nor exercis es designed to mold a character out of the morally shapeless. The humanities are the mirrors of genius in which we may see ourselves. Joseph Alsop HONG KONG Probably the worst danger of the Formosa crisis is the dan ger of drifting into the same mistake that was made when we intervened in Korea. President Truman and his advisers wrongly believed that the Korean aggres sors could be halted without using Amer ican ground troops. They gave the order to intervene on the false assumption that our Nayy and Air Force could do the whole ' job. But within forty-eight hours these planned "limits" on the war had to be hastily cast aside. A repetition of this pattern now seems entirely possible, judging by the authoritativjr picture of Chinese mili tary preparations that you get here in Hong Kong. This picture, which shows the enemy much stronger than seems to be supposed in Washington, broadly falls into three parts. Part one concerns the Matsu Islands. The necessary enemy ground forces for an attack on the Matsus have been in position for a good many months. On the nearest point of the mainland the enemy is also emplacing very long range Rus sian heavy cannon. These will be able to cover the islands with artillery fire. But the real drama of an attack on the Matsus will be the air battle, which is always crucial in a major amphibious, operation. It is precisely the enemy's prepara tions for the air battle which are the most menacing element in the picture. Jet and rotary engined bombers can reach the Matsus comfortably from the great airbase complex that the Commu nists have built in Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces. From the most southerly of these airflields, the shorter ranged Mig 15's can also fly high cover as far as the Matsus. Hence all units in the Chekiang Kiangsi airbase complex will count in an air battle for the Matsu Islands. This means that the enemy will enter the battle with a minimum force of consid erably more than 450 Mig 15's plus a couple of hundred assorted rotary en gined bombers well suited for close sup port missions, plus at least one squad ron of their jet bombers, the Ilyushin 28s. The confirmed presence of a squad ron of IL-28's at Shanghai is a new and most disturbing element in the picture. It means tht the enemy is ready to use these bombers which are the greatest single threat to our naval carriers which have indeed almost the same speed as our carrier borne fighters. It can also be revealed, moreover, that the Chinese Communists have ap proximately doubjied their strength of IL-28s in the past year. They now have no less than 250 of these formidable air craft. And although the main body is still in North China at present, they can be redeployed southwards at very short notice. In addition, there are reports, thus far unconfirmed, that the enemy recently, brought a division of Mig 15s into the Chekiang-Kiangsi airbase complex. These planes, represent a substantial improve ment on the Mig 15. They can be a ser ious challenge to our F86s, the best American fighters on this side of the Pacific ington may be thinking of "limiting" thh these bleak statistics is extremely simple. In the main, an air battle over the Mat sus is going to be a battle between our naval air and a massive land-based enemy air force. This is not the kind of contest -that should be entered with. a light heart and one hand tied behind your back. Wash ington may be thinking of "limiting';, this air battle, but it looks very much as though the Chinese Communists are thinking of winning it. ' The hope of such a victory in the air is the best explanation, in truth, of the apparent Communist decision to 'make the Matsus their first target. In all other ways, the Matsus are harder to attack than Quemoy. But the Matsus can be . covered from the airbases where the main enemy air strength is concentrated. Quemoy, of course, is the second 'part of the picture. If American air strength has already been impaired, and, if the fighting is stil "limited," the defense of Quemoy will be a pretty hopeless proposition. The place is ringed by enemy heavy guns. A landing there is no jnore than a river crossing.' And the enemy will be able to give some air support to an assault on Quemoy with the bomber squadrons and the hundred or so Mig 15s that are based around Canton. - As for the third part of this picture of enemy power, it is still in the future. Supply is always the key to every Chi nese military problem. The enemy is pre paring to support operations against the Matsus and Quemoy from air fields in conveniently distant to the North and to the South, because supply problems : dic tate this plan. The big tonnages of fuel needed to sustain jet air operations just cannot be laid down on the much nearer airfields n Fukien Province over the mountainous roads that are Fukien's only links with the rest of China. But when and if the Matsus and Quemoy fall to the enemy, the coastal shipping route will no longer be blocked. The Fukien airfields can thea be supplied by sea. That is the real importance of the off shore islands. Once the enemy can sup ply and occupy the Fukien airfields, he can bid for air supremacy over the For mosa Strait, we shall hear no more vain glorious talk about an attack on For mosa and Pescadores being "out of thj question." Ezra (A Pretty Boy) Ate The Tulips Petal By Petal Ed Yoder The Bingham Hall conference room and some twenty of the Bingham staff had a distinguished Mew England visitor Thursday morning. The distinguished isitor, of course, was 1 Robert Frost, looking .hipper and reminis ing over his eighty )dd years as an Ameri can and a poet. Mr. Frost is an un mistakable New Englander by appear ance, by "accent, by mannerism, and by what he says and the most striking thing about him is that you would" al most expect him to be a character from his own poems; some poets aren't like that. But he dislikes having his poetry associated totally with the New England climate and people as much as he likes them. "I'm always annoyed," he told his rapt audience, "when some one says: 'I like your poetry my grandmother came from New England, too'." If Mr. Frost is not a New Englander (poetically speaking) neither is he an Englander. Answering a battery of ques tions from the students (and perhaps as piring poets) in the conference room, he advised against an early attachment to Europe. England, where Mr. Frost himself went at 38 with a wife and four children, and where his first publication came, offers what the poet called "a peasant life" a rock-bottom standard of living for those who have no money which proves favorable to the poet. There, he said, to buy a farm with lots of countryside around it and he quoted Walt Whit man "invite one's soul" is not difficult But, at the same time, he pronounces a warning: He thinks aliens in other lands Americans in Europe and Europeans in America contract a strange malady and worry about their own native lands. "I've seen it in 'the German students who come to America the ones I've fol lowed and I've seen it in Rhodes schol ars," he said. His final comment on the question: "Go as an exporter, not an im- porter."' " As Mr. Frost talked about his early visit to English shores, his recollection's seemed to drift magnetically to talk" about Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot two Ameri can poets of somewhat later generation than his own and two American poets who've spent a good deal of time on, for eign soil. "Ezra," Frost said, "was al ways trying to tell me how to dress." But he recalled that Pound was not a particularly natty dresser himself. Pound, invited to the home of the venerable edi tor of the Everyman Book Library, "came in his sweater." Nor was "Ezra's" man ner anything to write Emily Post about, recalled Mr. Frost. Not only did Pound appear for dinner and conversation jn his sweater; when he sat down at the table which had a bouquet of tulips as its centerpiece, "he leaned forward, and ate the tulips, petal by petal." "Ezra always was a sort of pretty-boy," he said. Turing to a serious comment on Pound's poetry, Mr. Frost told the story of the careless sea captain who ,let ev erything go perilously wrong and then saved his ship anyway; the captain's su periors gave him a medal for saving the ship, then shot him for carelessne,-:. Mr. Pound, suggested Mr. Frost, should "be given some medals for his poetry. But his treasonable activity, Mr. Frost con siders, put him in the same category with Tokyo Rose. On T. S. Eliot, Mr. Frost remembered a conversation he'd had with that author of "The Wasteland" and Nobel prize winner about income-tax forms: It seem Frost and Eliot have hesitated -to lis', their occupations as "poet." Eliot, Mr. Frost said, has gotten around that by listing himself as a publisher with the British Firm, Faber and Faber) and justified that title by the fact that he writes book jackets for the publishing house. Frost himself, who is not pub lisher, didn't have Eliot's out.. He's thought about putting "farmer" on his income tax form, "but you don't like to call yourself a farmer people think vou are putting on airs."
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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March 18, 1955, edition 1
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