Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / May 12, 1962, edition 1 / Page 2
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i ffifyz Jiatlp Mat In its sixty -Tiinth year of editorial freedom, unhampered by restrictions from either the administration or the student body. The Daily Tar Heel is the official student publication of the Publications Board of the University of North Carolina. All editorials appearing in The Daily Tar Heel are the personal expressions of the editor, unless otherwise credited; they are not. necessarily representative of feeling on the staff. May 12, 19G2 Tel. 942-235G Vol. XLIX, No. 157 Patrick May Patrick May is not the t5pe of boy that runs around stealing tires, he is not -the type of boy that one would even suspect of trying to steal anything. He is quiet, clean cut, and apparently -intelligent. He may suffer from a bit of conformity, or ,from ( being overly polite but not from. kleptomania. Yet, in a case swamped in con fusion, May -has been charged with larceny, specifically with attempt ing to steal a tire from the side of a home on Rosemary Street. This is rather interesting in light of the fact that May neither owns a car, nor collects used tires. However, May readily admits to picking up the tire? Why He could find nothing else handy with which to accost a prowler that he had frightened away from the home of James Bowman. He apparently made the mistake of getting involv ed in problems not his own. For his trouble he was shot in the ileg. Mr. -Bowman, who does not want to press charges, or involve May in any .scandal, accidently shot May in the legs with a shotgun, while attempting to frighten away the prowler that apparently both May and gowman's daughter had seen. The .rapidity with which warped versions of ?the story have. spread about points out two deplorable sit uations. First is the overly eager manner in which people jump to conclusions. Ir a story is confused or complicat ed, then the facts don't seem to be too important. What we all want to hear is the juicy bit of gossip that floats on the top ; we enjoy the mis informed hypotheses that permeate ignorant speculation. We want to hear the "story," then we may lis ten to the facts. But first, the "story." Also deplorable is the way in which the great American Press will pick up a case of this sort and run the comments, without waiting to hear the verdict. Papers must sell, and confused accounts g "prowling" incidents no doubt sell quite a few; public taste being what it is. If a student is involved in an incident, it may be news worthy, but then again, so are the facts. It would seem that several pap ers have printed stories, relayed to them by a stringer operating in this .area, that do not make over ly clear all the facts, but that do make for interesting "public-taste-type" journalism. - So let us be aware of all the facts, let us be conscious of the persons .involved, Jet's give Patrick .May . a . break . , (cw) Sincere Interest? Legislature's Thursday night vote not to appropriate $5,000 out of the surplus 'to set up a DTH-press-fund appears to have been. another case of overzealous hair-splitting by the legislators. They didn't want to set up a fund because it was "unnecessary," a partly-valid charge. It is true that new legislation would have to be introduced if the money were to be .used, rlt 4s .true :that the approp riation would serve no major pur pose i except .psychological. iBut .. . . Jf Legislature is afraid to set aside $500 ithis year, will -it : i 11 H M jr. 5 EDITORIAL STAFF JIM CLOTFELTER CHUCK WRYE Co-Editors Wayne King Managing Editor Bill Wuamett, Dow Sheppard News Editors Ed Dupree Sports Editor Carry Kirkpatrick . . Asst. Spts Ed. .Bill nobbs Night Editor Matt Weisman Feature Editor Harry DeLung, John Medlin Assts. to the Editor Jim Wallace .. Photography Editor Mike Robinson, Garry Blanchard Joe Masi Contributing Editors TIM BURNETT Business Manager Mike Mathers .. Advertising Mgr. Tm Bast TasHssl. is pobllshod C$&y Keep Monday, examination periods .and vacations. It la entered s aeeond , fjf sa matter In the post office in Chapel 'tmi. N. pursuant -with the act of : March 8. 1570. Subscription rates i gl0 Prrnester, $3 per year. tfcTffl JSmb, Is aubacrtfcer to Jbe United Press International and "utilises the services of the News Bu .reau of the .University of North Caro- Una Published by tba.FabUcatioBs Board w the University of North Carolina. . Chapel Hill. N- :-::..-:: :s::; ;-:r.:::.:.-:-A:-'-:;-. .-x.-; "Wliere JBd This Bam Stcs3 Come From?" m I be any less reluctant to appropriate $10,000 next year, if the committee decides a press should be bought? Legislature was hesitant to take too positive, a step into a new area, understandably. But passage of the appropriation part of the bill would have shown a much more sincere interest in the possibilities of a press, and would have shown that Legislature's daring sometimes goes 'beyond setting up ;yet another com mittee. (jo) Mme Confusion Chapter ttwo of iRoberts-Ilules-tRaped: .members -of the ..Student Legislature Thursday might over whelmingly .defeated .a motion tto bring the DTH ;press ibill to an im- ; mediate vote. The -$5,000 appropria tion ..part of the ibill jhad -just .been j defeated, ,and a vote was moved I on ithe ,portion of ithe ibill which sets up a ;press4nvestj.gatory committee . . . ithe motion was defeated. I Then silence. ; Apparently ithe (legislators didn't j know what ithey were voting on ... i a not too unusual situation. After a minute of embarrassed ; noiselessness, ;Speaker Mike Law- '. ler advised .the body that it "has i defeated its own purpose," since ob viously no one wanted to speak on the ibill. Eventually the legislators managed their way out of their self-imposed parliamentary confu sion. Perhaps in the future they will be more mindful of what leg islation they're blithely passing and defeating, (jc) fl' HK' ' v -5kl.V W Tide f,4MMi'' , Robinson's Raml3lings 4 j PROF. WALTER BERNS rotessors What is the state of press freedom at Carolina? If the DTII eo-editors were to an swer this question, they'd . probably say they have almost complete free dom to .print anything they chose. Within the bounds of good taste and not so subtle pressure from South Buildings not to print the names of UNC students who get arrested, the DTII is free to print or to OMIT whatever news it pleases. As a newspaper operating in the student interest, the DTII uses its discretion in picking particular news stories the same as any commercial news paper does. Put there is a big difference. Com mercial papers print as much "hard" local -news, as they, find. The DTII does also, yet a curse hangs over its head that goads the edi tor(s) into delaying news stories un til "convenient." This was the case of the Students for a Democratic Society who met on campus last weekend. The DTH "hosted" the group, which included the Catholic-Socialist Mike .Harring ton and many freedom riders, yet the DTH first mentioned it on Tues day after the conference was over. The leaders of the group had ask ed Clotfelter and Wrye not to print anything in the , DTII until the con ference was over and they agreed. It is beside the point that their secrecy smacks of the same mys tery as their most deadly foes the KKK, the White Citizens Councils and the Birchers. If militant inte grationists expect to gain support, their meetings must be free and open, or at least they should permit responsible reporters to gather news of the meetings unhampered. With the co-editors help this out-of-state group used UNC facilities but nobody was supposed to know what or who they were. 'Many people, including this writ er' will not take issue with h..w worthwhile and valuable is this group's work toward the pro-tv , of the South. Cut the DTII has 2 definite obligation to the studr-r body and faculty. This suppression of news was extremely ill-advised from the standpoint of the Society s public image, but more important it has further impaired student confi dence in the DTH. The DTH can help repair the dam age by showing in the future thai it will not show favortism to mtegra tionists or anyone else. A newspaper should be impartial, objective and accurate amom; ot la things. If the DTII wants to rela.n its status as a newspaper it miut unequivically adopt these tenets. I'll step down from my soap-lo-now, but before I go. might I sug gest that Journalism 191 could lv very helpful to:future DTH editors, or even to . the present editors. Yf-. that's J 191 Functions and Respon sibilities of Contemporary .Tourn i ism. On the lighter side, there is n self-help article in national maga zine that gives answers for those cliche questions people keep askir.. each other: Q. How are you? A. A .poor insurance risk. Q. Think it'll rain? A. Where? Q. How was the parly last nipht? A. Why ask? You weren't invited. Q. Do you love me darling? A. Only on Sundays. Q. Think you can handle this prob lem, George? A. No, prof, you've got the Ph.D.; you tackle it. MIKE ROBINSON P Must Be Ihvo Ived In Politics (Prof. Bernes, known as the "out spoken individualist" of the Depart ment of Government at Cornell Uni versity, recently wrote this article for the Cornell Daily Sun, student newspaper.) OUPv PROFESSORS MUST ADVOCATE DEFENSE OF CIVILIZATION The purpose of the university places it in a position of uneasy ten sion with the community, and the tension is likely to increase with the extent to which this purpose is ful filled. Devoted to the discovery of truth, it is likely to be unmindful of what passes for truth in the com munity, of those opinions that, nevertheless, form the very basis of the community. The notion of the absent-minded professor and the contemptuous reference to "ivory tower thinkers" are merely peculiar ly modern expressions of a tension that originated many years ago in the relation between Socrates and Athens, a relation that may be characterized as the tension, and sometimes the deadly hostility, be tween philosophy and the polis, or politics. According to the thought of classical antiquity, this tension might be reduced, but it cannot be overcome: what is good for the polis let us say, obedience to the law and the customary is not good for philosophy, or science, as we would say; what is good for philosophy let us say, a question ing of the law and the customary is not good for the polis. FREE INQUIRY (What is good for philosophy or science is free inquiry, but out of free inquiry came the Bomb, and the Bomb is quite evidently not good. for the polis; and if the Bomb were ; the only consequence, it would 1 be difficult if not impossible, to make a case for free inquiry, for science, for philosophy as it was once understood. Fortunately for ; those who are devoted to it, ithe iBomb ;is not the only consequence. ,To say nothing of the material bene fits that have come from .modern science, one can say that it is from the tradition of free inquiry that originated with Socrates and is to day institutionalized in the univer sities that civilization has come: one can say that the university civ ilized the polis. To know this is also to know the existence of the ever present danger of re-barbarization, and that it is one of the continuing purposes of the universities to pre vent this from happening. Just as it is the duty of the mili tary to defend the civilized polis against the hostile strength of the barbarian (fortunately there seems to be no lack of willingness on the part of the American military to do this), it is the duty primarily of the American universities to remind the country of what is at stake in our struggle to survive in the same world with the Soviet Union and Communist China, and thereby to foster the will to survive as a civ ilized country, even at the price of considerable material , sacrifice and of living with a very clear and al ways present danger .of death. To survive as individuals (within the measure of our mortality) is easy: we need only succumb to Mr. Khru shchev' threats and disarm; to sur vive as a civilized country requires a fortitude that can arise onjy from the knowledge that, where as life can be sweet and , death terrible, the death of the country that makes it possible for life to be sweet is worse than the death of any of its citizens. So to survive in our time requires a knowledge of the difference between civilization and barbarism. No more than Socrates indeed .considering the alternative that faces us, even less than Socrates can the uni versities afford to ignore the politi cal world. ACTIVE fPROFS. Our university professors cannot be accused of neglecting political affairs; indeed, since the Cuban invasion of a year ago the professors have intervened in politics with such frequency that they may now con stitute one of the most , active politi cal groups in the country. Indivi dual citizens in large numbers wrote the President after the Cuban fiasco expressing their sympathy with him and . their willingness to support the resort to arms against Castro, but the professors, apparently somewhat shocked by ithe behavior of a Presi dent whom they had come to regard almost as one of their number, com bined to denounce the ill-fated in vasion, and the policy . embodied in the invasion, in; full-page advertise ments in the national press. When the President proposed an expanded civil defense program, some 175 pro fessors from the several, universities in the Boston area pooled their funds and the authority attached to the names of their institutions to buy newspaper space for another "Open Letter to jPresident Kennedy," in which they reminded the President and the rest of us of the horrors that would attend thermonuclear war and denounced the idea of a shelter program because, they said, not al together convincingly, it would in crease the probability of such a war. Then, even more recently, it has been the professors and their stu dents who have marched in protest against the imminent resumption of nuclear testing by the United States. SURVIVAL? The theme of this .professorial in tervention in politics is survival but not, unfortunately, asurvival as a civilized nation. -,In fact, in many cases it is survival by means of sur render. In ; their "Open 1 Letter to President Kennedy," , the 175 Boston area professors said: "By. buying a shelter program which does not shelter, and thereby believing that we can survive a thermonuclear war, we are .increasing the, proba bility of war. .This probability , in creases . . . because .we may be more willing to 'go to ; the brink if .we thinJi survival is possible ..." What iJfe means is that without the "sense of security" (whether justi fied or not) that a shelter program would bring, we would be less will ing "to go to the brink" ri.e., less willing to stand up to our ; enemies, less willing to resist the constant pressures, less willing to say to them, this far but no farther. The argument of the 175 'Boston 4 prof es . sors is a disguised version of uni lateral disarmament. Whether out of ignorance of the probable consequences of i thermo nuclear war or because of a greater willingness to accept that risk in order to survive as a free and civ ilized nation, the American people as . a whole have ; thus far displayed a greater resistance to the easy-way-out than has the university com munity. How long. they willbe able to maintain this resistance depends, in part, on their ability to ignore the now massed voices of these profes sors who are 1 united to deprive the nation of its will to accept .the risk of war. (Voters in the 33rd New York Congressional District will be put to the test this :fall, for although the Voters for Peaceful 'Alternatives do not as a group advocate unilateral disarmament, their candidate ifor Congress, .Professor Harrop Free man, does or did before he was nominated.) Considering what is at stake, this is a strange reversal of the respective roles of university and community. Two factors may account for it. The professors, for reasons that are not readily appar ent to anyone familiar with, the Soviet Union, have managed to per suade themselves that "peaceful alternatives" and a ''positive pro gram for peace" will. somehow at tract the support of Mr. Khrushchev. (It is worth commenting that no member of the Department of Gov ernment at Cornell is associated with the Voters for Peaceful Alterna tives, and of the 175 Boston area professors only one, a Miss Betty Burch of Tufts, teaches government or political science.) The other .fac tor has 1 to do with the professors' alleged greater concern for. the fu ture of mankind, or ''humanity." "HUMANENESS" Whether they do speak out of a greater concern for humanity .de pends on how one defines the word, whether it is understood in the sense of "the suffering masses" or in the sense of "humaneness," of .human excellence, that is, of those unique qualities that distinguish man.Lrom beasts and civilized men from sav ages. With, respect. to our . policy : to ward the Soviet Union and 1 Com munist China, it makes all: the dif ference in the world how we - under stand 'the humanity we are morally obliged to defend. The so-called humanitarian argument against nu clear arms and shelters sometimes .takes the form that morally and politically .nothing .matters .except the survival of . human life itself (as if we -in this , country , bad no exper ience of 1 humanly imposed, conditions under which :it Js daetter j to be dead than-alive), and that every cation -is obliged to avoid any act that "is likely to threaten mere existence, especially the existence of the world's innocent "masses." In a letter to the Ithaca Journal last November, one of Cornell's most distinguished professors concluded a protest against the shelter pro gram with -these words: 'JIfsWe.are willing to contemplate living in", a world in which millions of our in nocent friends and neighbors have been horribly and -senselessly mur dered (in .a nuclear war brought on in part by a shelter program that "encourages us to think of nuclear was as a tolerable possibility . . . "), we -have already committed moral suicide." (Addressed to the British -and French in JL939, the same argu ment would .have gone as follows: "If you are willing to go to the de fense, of Poland, you will bring on : a -war in .which millions of your in nocent .Belgian, Dutch, Norwegian, ,etc. 1 friends and neighbors will be senselessly murdered. If you are .willing t to do this , you have . already ..committed moral suicide.") Surely .a i thermonuclear war and its after math -are terrible to contemplate, -especially in our state of unpre paredness, but it is emphatically not senseless -to prepare for such a war if one has every reason to , believe that only preparedness will .deter Mr. Khrushchev and if one has every rason to believe that while .human life will continue under So viet Title, humanity in the only meaningful sense will not. For if nothing matters except the survival of human life, human life itself does not matter. MUST PREPARE Was it senseless to die on the beaches of Normandy or in Bas togne or in Guadacanal or in the unspeakable conditions of Iwo Jima? Many of today's professors did not so regard it at the time. What then was changed? Surejy the replace ment of Nazi Germany by the Soviet Union has not altered the funda mental situation. Can we not say that humanity or ; civilization, which in practice .means civilized men, would have ceased to exist had it not been for the willingness of mil lions .of men to risk their lives in some cases willingly .to .give up their lives in order to .defend it against Nazi Germany? Their lives were not lost "senselessly"; they were lost unnecessarily. They were lost through the stupidity of the men who governed Britain and France in the 'thirties. They were lost because these men refused to arm: their countries against Nazi Germany; because, these men relied on economic sanctions and disarma ment .conference under the aegis of the League of Nations, the "peace ful alternatives" i of thirty years ago. No sane man .can want war, and it may , be a paradox that the way to a .civilized peace :begins with the .opening of our minds to the possibili ty of war, but our experience con firms the sense an .which .this is true. One has. a right to expect uni versity.prefessors to -know these things. ' " In conclusion, one can say that the role of the university has in no way been changed by the threat of thermonuclear war. It is still the duty of the university specifically, the duty of its faculty of the libera! (or liberating) arts to promote the truly humane studies, or, one might say, to promote 1 humanity truly un derstood. The university can best perform its duty, and thereby justify its position in the community, not by reminding its students of the nu clear peril (I know of no Cornell student who had to be reminded of that), but by continuing to be what it has traditionally been, the home of ; the scholarship that, as someone has said, is "meant to be a bulwark of civilization against barbarL-m." Gettysburg Address-New To the Editors: Fourscore and seven days ago our big brother brught forth in this country a personal vendetta, con ceived in mordacity and dedicated to the proposition that some men are more equal than others. 'Now he is engaged in a great civil var, testing whether this firm or that company can long endure. We saw the great. battlefield of that war. We saw him desecrate a portion of those .firms to their final resting place so that his bombastic ego might live. It was altogether foolish and pompous that he did this. For, in a larger sense, he should not desecrate, he should not masti cate these firms. Those brave new world men, Marx and Engels, are masticating them far above his poor power to add or to detract. The people will little note, nor Ion.-' remember what big and little bro ther said then, but they will never forget what he DID then. It is for those of us still living rather, to be dedicated to the ta.-k remaining before us bounce bu' (and little, and littlest) brother; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that the people of the government, by the government, and for the gov ernment, shall not perish in spite of everything. (With apologies to A. Lincoln). About Letters The Daily Tar Heel Invite readers to use It for expres sions cf opinion n current topics regardless of viewpclnt. Letters .mast be signed, con tain a verifiable address, d be free of libelous material. Brevity and legibility la crease the chance of public ittoa. Xengthy letters may fc incited er .omitted. Absolutely
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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May 12, 1962, edition 1
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