Jim Becker
The last lap before Erelimg
niom
lath
UNC9 Leo and.
.his med school
One of former Gov. Bob Scott's
political favors is rearing its head
again today to threaten the
University of North Carolina
system. The future of the East
Carolina University Medical School,
now a one-year program, comes
before the UNC Board of
Governors at their meeting here this
morning.
Scott promised ECU President
Leo Jenkins his medical school
during Scott's 1968 campaign for
the state's top office and Scott
made good on his promise.
The shortage of doctors in
Eastern North Carolina -particularly
black doctors was
one reason given for the med school
in Greenville. But studies have
shown that where a physician goes
to school is not as important in
determining where he practices as
where he does his internship.
As this year's ECU Med School
class5 - the first one with 20
members has 19 whites and one
Chinese.
At the end of their one year at
ECU, these students will transfer to
the medical school here, a clearly
M. Dor ley
Will his
". . .When he left office. . .he had put
an indelible imprint of greatness on both
the Presidency and the history of his
time." Those words, written by a
biographer of Harry Truman in 1966,
have been echoed and re-echoed in
countless encomiums in the weeks since
the former President passed away, as
innumerable observers of the political
scene, from Jimmy Carter to Mary
McCrory, Jim Holshouser to Lyndon
Johnson, have suggested that Harry
Truman will be remembered as one of our
"great'? ; Presidents. We think they may
have spoken too soon.
It's not that we have any quarrel with
Harry Trumarf, Indeed, we respect his
courage and decisiveness and
acknowledge that he "done his
damnedest" (a Boot Hill epitaph which
Truman always admired). Sadly, however,
those qualities may not be enough to
ensure the Missourian a place beside
,
V V J rnali
. Evans Witt, Editor
Friday, January 12, 1973
poor way to break up the
educational experienct.
A committee on the Board of
Governors has been studying this
situation and will ask the board this
morning to continue the one-year
program as it stands.
This won't please opponents of
the school, who see the program as
wasteful and unjustified.
But the board will probably
accept the committee's
recommendation to try to avoid a
legislative attack on the new UNC
system. The system, only seven
months old, is vulnerable to
disruption by state legislators now
as the complex process of melting
16 campuses into one centralized
state system continues.
Political considerations dictated
the establishment of the ECU Med
School. The school is clearly not
justified by objective educational
criteria.
The new UNC system was
designed to eliminate political
factors from decisions that should
be based on professional
educational judgement. In this
situation, this intention has been
thwarted.
Washington, Lincoln, and Theodore
Roosevelt. If we may take liberties with
one of Voltaire's quips, history seems to
be in the process of playing a pack of
tricks on the dead Harry Truman.
Truman made his many major
decisions on the basis of the best
intelligence and advice available at the
time. They were probably the correct,
even inevitable, decisions for that period,
yet many of the programs and policies
initiated by Truman have come to haunt
this country as it enters the last quarter
of the twentieth century. The decision to
drop the atomic bomb on Japan is
perhaps the best example of this historical
irony. The President himself felt no
compunctions about using any weapon of
war if it would save American lives, yet
that decision, probably the correct one in
1945, has left America with the onus of
being the only nation in history to resort
to atomic warfare. Similarly, Truman's
ttory
You notice the pain immediately.
After jogging fifty yards or so it hits you,
maybe in the chest first, or the legs. It
keeps up as long as you push yourself.
Sooner or later, every muscle in your
body feels the strain.
You may start jogging because you
have heart trouble. Even people in their
twenties have heart attacks. The heart,
after all, is just a specialized muscle, and
jogging exercises every muscle you have.
You may jog because you're getting
chubby, or. because when you climb to
the third floor you get out of breath.
The P.E. teachers were right. You
thought they were just dumb jocks, but it
turns out regular exercise really does
make you live better, feel better, think
better. Your muscles are firmer and your
nerves more steady. You begin to
discover a sense of internal discipline and
order.
Studying for Prelims means a lot of
play tricks
support of the United Nations an
organization which he deemed "a great
instrument for peace and security and
human progress in the world" has left
the United States with that costly,
impotent, and irrelevant millstone around
its neck. Another millstone, the war in
Viet Nam, can be traced in great part, to
the Truman-Acheson decision to increase
aid to the French in Southeast Asia after
North Korea invaded its southern
counterpart in 1950.
The contemporary impact of other
Truman decisions is perhaps more subtle
but nevertheless equally ironic. The
Marshall Plan, for instance, seemed to be
the only alternative to a Europe of
poverty, despair, and perhaps Communist
totalitarianism. Leftist historians have
long seen this program as a spur to the
Cold War, since it helped to increase
Soviet suspicions of Western political
Kathy Lenski 0
Hope 61 peace ends in mghtaiare
It is almost beyond belief.
On the morning of October 26, 19.72,
Henry Kissinger said, "Peace is at hand.
We believe that an agreement is within
sight that is just to all parties . , . What
remains to be done can be settled. In jone
more negotiating session . . . We . have
undertaken, and I repeat , it here
publicly ... to remain at that meeting for
as long as is necessary to complete this
agreement . . We stand by what we have
agreed to."
How Americans rejoiced at these
words! Most of us deplored the fact that
during the first three and a half years of
Nixon's administration an estimated $ 1 00
billion of our tax money had been used
to support a dictatorship whose jails hold
an estimated 200,000 to 300,000
"political" prisoners. During this time, at
least 165,000 South Vietnamese civilians
were killed, 400,000 wounded, and
almost two million of them as well as
two million Cambodians and nearly a
million Laotians made refugees. (So far,
there are no reliable casualty figures for
North Vietnamese civilians.) Despite the
fact that Nixon had proved a poor
peace-maker in the first three years and
nine months of his Administration, we
could not prevent the stirring of hope -within
our hearts when we, heard
Kissinger's words. We hoped, wished,
prayed for an end to all the sorrow and
suffering.
But somehow, once Nixon was
re-elected, the negotiations "fell
through." And then.-the week before
Christmas, the nightmare began.
pain. Much of your personal psychic
energy is invested in the prospect of this
awesome set of exams. The Ph.D exams
are a test of professional competence, the
final major hurdle after eight or ten years
of higher education. If you pass, for the
first time you will begin to think of
yourself as belonging to the academic
community. If you fail, you fear
everyone will think you are intellectually
inferior.
The pain of Prelims isn't entirely
psychological. When you study, the
light in the library carrels hurts your eyes.
You have to change the prescription of
your glasses. Your back hurts, and your
fingers cramp from taking notes. In some
disciplines, the mechanical process of
taking the exam is itself a physical strain.
You may have to spend up to ten hours
doing nothing but writing. The exams
may go on for a week. Your arm hurts
from writing or your fingers get sore from
typing.
on 'dead
motivations. In the era of Nixonian
detente, however, this argument has
become more and more academic. More
important today from a practical'
standpoint is the economic challenge
posed to the United States by a
revitalized and relatively unified Europe.
History may show that the Marshall Plan
was ,in no small way responsible for
creating a Continental Frankenstein
which could well prove an economic and
political horror for future Americans.
Another problem confronting Harry
Truman was that of Palestine. Faced with
both a global outpouring of sympathy for
European Jewry after the War and a
deteriorating political situation at home,
Truman pushed the British hard for a
more lenient policy towards Zionism.
Later, when Israel finally declared itself
independent, it took the President only
eleven minutes to grant the new state
recognition. Again, while this pro-Zionist
Early reports from Saigon indicated
that on December 18 and 19, our
President ordered 20,000 tons of bombs
dropped on a small nation that has done
. us no harm, has never threatened our
security. This was the explosive
equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped
on Hiroshima. And then, December
20-24, 20,000 tons more fell. The
President offered no explanation for this,
the worst bombing in the history of the
world. He remained isolated, remote from
the nation he is supposed to lead.
And Americans went about their
Christmas ritual, buying, wrapping, giving
and getting presents. Christmas Eve
services were held as usual; we sang
carols, thanked God for the birth of the
Prince of Peace, greeted one another. No
one wept, no one grieved, no one begged
God to forgive us for the new slaughter
committed in our names. All we had to
do in order to enjoy the Christmas season
this year was avoid turning on the TV at
newstime, refuse to open the daily paper,
steer our minds down a narrow way not
allowing the screams, the tears, the
moaning, the mourning,, the faceless, the
limbless, the dying, the dead (oh the
horror, the horror of it all!) to penetrate
our consciousness. It is such a simple
thing to do: to blot out the suffering of
those people so very far away from us.
But we must not, because we are all
responsible for it.
The saturation, around-the-clock
bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong ended
December 30th. But heavy bombing
The economics of graduate education
hurt as well. If you are married or have
children, the stipend from the
department isn't enough. The cost of
books alone becomes a major strain. You
may have to get ten dollar textbooks or
twenty dollar reference books. Only some
of these books are in the library, and the
rest you have to borrow or buy.
The overriding quality of studying for
Prelims is psychological. Your actual
contact with the faculty is rare enough
that the major psychological pressure
comes from your peers. Some people fear
failure so much that they keep deferring
the exams. Everybody fears failure for
one reason or another. You spend all
these years hoping you are - "good
enough" for the academic profession,
almost as if there were a moral
superiority about the intellectual
community. The pressure becomes so
great that you spend more time worrying
than studying. When you actually take
the exam, you discover you can't even
Marry
T
policy was probably correct in the
context of the time, it committed the
United States to the defense of an
economic and political nonentity and
severely damaged our relations with most
of the strategic and economically vital
Middle Eastern nations. As Arnold
Toynbee, a British historian who tends to
take a long-term view of world affairs,
observed recently, Truman's bullying of
the British Foreign Office on this matter
may well have been his greatest mistake.
In other areas, too, this country only
today is feeling the full impact of
decisions made over two decades ago.
There are many politicians on Capitol
Hill, for instance, who feel that the
balance of power has shifted too far from
the legislature to the executive. Much of
this can be traced to the New Deal, of
course, but Harry Truman must also share
a considerable portion of the blame. It
was Truman, not Congress, who decided
continues south of the 20th parallel in
North Vietnam, and in South Vietnam,
Laos, and. Cambodia.. Negotiations
resumed Monday But. they will sign the
original Octobert6i agreement.
Meanwhile, they "hay-been feverishly
evacuating all of their 'cities ; north of the
20th parallel in nticipatidri of renewed
bombing. " KC0ir'-
Increasing numbers 6f 'Americans are
joining the North Vietnamese in their
distrust of our government's
peace-making ability. But what can we
do? First of all,' we can write our
Congressmen, demanding that ' they cut
off all funds for the war. Recent reports
Satlg
Evans Witt, Editor
79 Years
of
Editorial Freedom
The Daily Tar Heel strives to provide meaningful news interpretations and
opinions in its editorial page. Unsigned editorials are the opinions of the editor,
while letters and columns represent only the views of individual contributors.
answer some of the easy questions. . ,
The worst part of studying is the fear
of losing. All of us failed someplace along
the line. You didn't get into Harvard.
Your first term-paper grade was a C. You
flunked i Biology test. You started your
senior year in college with a 3.4 average,
but couldn't get into Phi Beta Kappa
because you needed a 3.5. In my case, it
was first semester freshman year. I had
two Cs one D, and an F. The Dean of
Men added insult to injury by sending me
a letter warning me that if I didn't,
improve I would flunk out. The letter
almost persuaded me to quit.
Some people shouldn't go to graduate
school, just as some people shouldn't go
to college. It isn't a quality of intellect,
however, that distinguishes those who
should be here from those who shouldn't,
but rather questions of will, patience, and
personal security. The people who don't
make it are those who decide they don't
want to pay the price in pain.
Pain may not be the best way to teach
graduate students how to teach college
students. Not everyone reacts the same
way to pain. Some people like it and
some don't. Probably all of the pain of
education cannot be eliminated, even if
the faculty unanimously agreed that it
should be eliminated. What do students
really learn from the pain, however?
Some graduate students seem to learn
that pain should be passed along to their
own students.
The first couple of laps are a little
slow. It hurts to run today, maybe
because you missed a couple of days over
the Christmas break. You better use the
indoor track tomorrow if it stays cold.
Your mind is free, and even your eyes
relax.
They ask you why you jog. You really
don't know, except for the sense of
self-mastery and self-control it gives you.
You know they think you think you are
somehow superior to those who don't
jog. All it really is is that it makes you
more aware of yourself. You understand
a little better your own psychic roots.
Try to kick the last lap of the mile!
You shouldn't have had that hamburger
for lunch. This afternoon you have to get
back to the library. Not a bad time for
the mile today alter all. Walk a utile and
then run some more. The whole idea is to
be tired when you go inside. Somehow
this kind of pain is creative. It hurts, but
you know it is good for you.
99
raman
to intervene in Korea; it was Truman who
vetoed v more bills than any other
two-termer in history ; it was Truman who
created the National Security Councilafjd
the Central Intelligence Agency; and it
was Truman who based an entire
Presidential campaign on a smear of
Congressional abilities. Democratic
politicians who are quick to criticize the
Nixon Administration for its supposed
usurpation of power might do well to
check the skeletons in their own political
closet. ,',,
But we don't mean to sound
querulous, only skeptical. As much as we
admire Harry Truman, we don't foV'a
moment believe his reputation as a
"great" President is "indelible". 6f
course, our opinion matters not a jot it
will be up to future generations of
Americans, to those who will have to live
with the Truman legacy, to pass final
judgement. ' ;
indicate that Congress is finally planning
to seriously discuss this. They need out
support. Incidentally, when we mail these
letters, we should put them in the
Out-of-Town slot at the Post Office. That
way, they get a "U.S. Postal Service!
N.C." postmark rather than a Chapel Hill
one. Similarly, use your home, not your
campus,' address. (Student voices tend to
be ignored.) If you voted for the person
to whom you write, let him know. And if
you are a veteran, mention that fa'ctj
Beyond this, join in local peace activities;
watch for mention of them in this paper
And encourage your friends and family tq
get involved. .
(Jar iforf
David Woodall, Managing Editor !
Mary Newsom, News Editor
Howie Carr, Associate Editor L
Lynn Lloyd, Associate Editor
Winston Cavin, Sports Editor
Bruce Mann, Feature Editor
Scott Stewart, Head Photographer