Clear and cold
Today will be clear with
a high of 43. The low
last night was about 1 5.
There is no chance of
rain today.
Recruiting at UNC
Staff writer Dede Biles
examines how Carolina
recruits football
players; page 5.
Serving the students and the University community since 1893
Wednesday, February 2, 1977, Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Volume No. 84, Issue No. 88
Please call us: 933-0245
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C
Students who want to increase their reading speed and
comprehension can enroll in two different speed-reading
courses. One, the Evelyn Wood course, is well publicized and
National speed-reading course has
For only $10, don't expect the red pencils
by Merton Vance
Staff Writer
I took a speed. reading course, learning to
read straight down the middle of the page,
and I was able to go through War and Peace
in 20 minutes. It's about Russia. Woody
Allen
That quote is at the beginning of an article
on speed reading which appeared in the
August 1972 issue of Psychology Today
magazine. The article is titled "Speed
Readers Don't Head; They Skim" and is
critical of speed reading courses.
The staff members of the UNC Reading
Program on the second floor of Phillips Hall
Annex keep a copy on hand to show people
who are interested in learning speed reading.
"We usually get a lot of questions about
speed reading every time the Evelyn Wood
people come to town," said Hank Powell, a
reading program instructor.
The Evelyn Wood people are in town
again.
They offered a free introductory lecture to
interested persons. At one of these
introductory sessions Monday night, 15
UNC students showed up to hear what the
Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics program is
all about.
They were told that the average American
reads between 200 and 350 words per minute
and retains about 60 to 65 per cent of the
information read.
Then they saw a film in which a nine-year-old
Australian boy, a graduate of the Evelyn
Wood course, says he is reading at a rate of
2,500 words per minute wih 80 per cent
comprehension.
The instructor tells the story of a 13-year-old
girl who appeared on Johhny Carson's
"The Tonight Show" and demonstrated her
ability to read 13,000 words per minute witji
90 per cent comprehension. She was reading
a book on bio-feedback, a subject she was
supposed to know nothing about, and was
able to answer correctly questions on the
material.
She apologized for reading only 13,000
words per minute. She normally read at
by Robin Clark
Staff Writer
David Ratley's bees didn't make any
blue honey last summer. Maybe they
weren't in the mood.
But some years, Ratley and his bees
make tons of blue honey more than 1 1
tons his best year and even scientists
who study bees at N.C. State don't know
how they do it.
Blue honey is unique to eastern North
Carolina, and even there it's rare. Of an
estimated 200,000 bee colonies in the
state, only a handful ever yield blue
honey.
But as bee-zarre as it may look to
people seeing it for the first time, Ratley
says his family has seen blue honey in
their hives down in- Bladen and
Cumberland counties for more than 45
years.
Ratley's bees made so much of the stuff
in 1969 and 1970 that he shipped several
thousand pounds each year to a buyer in
.Germany
"Of course, it got some publicity then,"
says Ratley, who at 60 is the world's only
1 exporter of blue honey. "I got letters from
people all over the country wanting to
buy a jar of blue honey.
n. a
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15,000 to 20,000 per minute but she slowed
down because she was nervous being on
national television.
Don't you feel dumb? That question
seemed to be written on some faces in the
group.
The instructor says Evelyn Wood
guarantees that graduates of the course can
triple their reading speed and says that many
people learn to read even faster than that.
Everything in the presentation is neatly
packaged, from the brochures about the
program to the red pencils on the tables in
front of the students..' .'.....
"Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics" read
the black letters on the pencil. Underneath,
in smaller letters, "Increase your reading
ability 3 to 10 times."
The brochure contains comments from
prominent people praising the program and
points out that President Kennedy had the
course taught to his White House Staff.
Richard Nixon did the same thing. "It's a
good thing, because now all of those people
have plenty of time to read," says instructor
Preston Cranford.
The group is told that more than 500,000
people have taken the course, devised by a
Utah school teacher named Evelyn Wood,,
who is now 70 and living in Salt Lake City.
After this interesting presentation, the
students want to know how they can take
this course.
It's simple. They take their red Evelyn
Wood pencils and register for a seven-week
course which costs $395.
A similar speed-reading program is
available to UNC students through the
Reading Program. The cost is $10 per
student.
"The techniques are about the same," said
Powell.
"Evelyn Wood people use a lot of their
own material. We use books that are
commercially available," he said.
"Their program is very well packaged,"
Powell said. There apparently are not any
red pencils which read, "UNC Reading
Program."
In addition to speed reading, the reading
program offers student help in study skills,
ue Hon
"Then somewhere out in the midwest,
somebody changed the blue to green in
the news accounts, and that started
something else people writing wanting
to buy green honey."
Ratley says the requests have slacked
off now, and he's. glad. He says blue
honey is not dependable enough to put on
the market. One year he gets tons, the
next year practically none at all.
"There was one year I made solid
supers of it, 30 pounds to the hive in 800
or 900 hives. Then other years there's just
a little dribble around the edge of the
other honey."
Ratley says some people who have
tried his blue honey say it tastes no
different from normal amber honey. .
Others liken its taste to pancake syrup,
with a hint of corn.
"If you were to look at it and taste it,
you'd swear there was some grape jelly in
it," Ratley says. You'd be influenced like
that by the color.
"But it you were to close your eyes and
taste it, you'd think it was just good
honey."
While people may disagree on the taste,
there's no confusing the color. It's dark
blue.
What makes it that way?
mm
Si
IP
iii
1
v I
Staff photos by Bill Russ
costs about $395. The Evelyn Wood course was recommended
by Kennedy to his staff. The other course is conducted here at
UNC in the Phillips Annex, and costs about $10.
vocabulary improvement and other study
techniques.
Students can register for the noncredit
course in Room 204 of the Phillips Annex.
But does speed reading work? The
question lingers in the sceptic's mind.
Powell reached into a desk drawer and
pulled out a copy of an article by a
psychologist which challenges the claims of
speed reading courses.
The article "Speed Readers Don't Read;
They Skim" appeared in the August, 1972
issue of Psychology Today magazine. It was
written by Ronald P,, Carver, an
experimental psychologist who has done
research on learning and reading.
Suing the University same as suing
UNC lawsuits usually employment disputes
by Tony Gunn
and Tom Watkins
Staff Writers
Editor's note: This is the second of a two
part series examining lawsuits against the
University. This part looks at several
important suits and their implications.
Besides being an institution of higher
education, the University of North Carolina
is also a state agency.
So when a person files a lawsuit against
the University, he is actually suing the state.
"The (N.C.) attorney general is really our
counsel," said Assistant to the President
Richard H. Robinson, counsel for the
consolidated University's General
Administration. "Whenever a problem
becomes a court proceeding, he is our
attorney for purposes of that litigation.
What we try to dc is supply support,
assistance and liaison."
Robinson said that while some cases
transcend the boundaries of a single campus,
the persons at that school are most familiar
with the facts and thus are most
"You get five' beekeepers together
discussing that and you'll get three or four
different answers," Ratley says with a
laugh.
Some people think the bees change the
color with special enzymes in the hive.
Others think the nectar turns blue in the
plants under certain soil conditions and
that the bees have nothing to do with it.
"For a long time I accepted my dad's
theory on blue honey," Ratley says. "He
said it came frpm the ripe berries in the
woods.
"But I've had bees where there's
hundreds of acres . of cultivated
blueberries that don't make a drop of blue
honey."
Ratley believes now that the blue
nectar is made by the sourwood tree for a
few weeks during the summer.
Blue honey isn't sold at the
supermarket yet, but scientists who study
bees at N.C. State say locating its source
could be a boon to the state honey
industry.
North Carolina ranked only 20th
among the states in honey production in
1976, and the state honey and bees wax
industry grossed less than $3 million.
Many beekeepers on the coastal plain lost
more than 90 per cent of their honey
eyit s
Be
Town charter am
to include fair housing
by Mary Anne Rhyne
Staff Writer
The Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
amended the. town charter Monday
night to include a fair housing rule.
The amendment will be sent to the
North Carolina General Assembly for
approval, and, if passed, will govern the
sale and leasing of all city and perhaps
University housing.
The rule will authorize the town to
adopt ordinances to make housing in
Chapel Hill "equally available to all
persons without regard to race, color,
religion, sex or national origin.'
Citing the 1974 Federal Housing Act,
Alderman .Gerry Cohen said the
University is in violation of such an act.
He said its housing rules discriminate on
the basis of sex.
Assistant to the President Richard H.
Robinson, counsel to the UNC General
Administration, said he was unfamiliar
with such an act banning policies like
those of the University which allow all
' male or all female dorms.
"Title IX does not prohibit the
maintenance of separate housing. If you
have separate housing it must be
University
After conducting experiments on groups
of readers and attending an Evelyn Wood
speed reading course, Carver concludes, "I
now feel that speed reading is about 5 per
cent sense and 95 per cent nonsense. They do
not increase your reading speed; they teach
you to skim and scan material and to sample
the ideas in an article or book."
Carver offers technical challenges to the
testing methods employed in speed reading
courses and emphasizes that there is a
difference between reading and absorbing
material, and skimming and selecting certain
key words or groups j?f wotds.- ,;, V:J
"Most reading researchers agree that
appropriately involved in preparing the case
for trial.
Robinson noted that most litigation
involving the University stems from
employment relationships. "That's the most
fertile field of litigation as far as our
experience goes," he said.
Two such cases are pending against UNC.
In the case of Mary Carroll Smith vs.
UNC, the plaintiff, an assistant professor in
the Department of Religion, contends she
was not retained because of her sex and
religion (Roman Catholic).
Smith, whose contract expired July 31, is
still receiving her salary because of an
injunction issued by the Durham Division of
the U.S. Middle District Court and upheld
by the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in
Richmond. The case is now in pretrial stages
before the Durham court.
The other employment suit was filed by
Moye W. Freymann, a professor in the
School of Public Health and former director
of the Carolina Population Center (CPC). I n
litigation brough against Cecil G. Sheps, vice
chancellor for health sciences until Jan. 1,
e -zarre
crops to a jate frost that killed the blooms
bees depend on for nectar.
"If we can find out where blue honey
comes from, we can actually charge more
for it than other honeys," says John
Ambrose, who operates the NCSU
apiculture lab on Varsity Drive in
Raleigh. "That's our goal.
"The trouble with marketing it now is
that the average shopper won't buy blue
honey unless he knows what makes it
blue."
A special research project this summer
'at State will try to isolate some of Ratley's
blue honey hives and monitor the bees as
they come and go.
"When blue honey starts showing up,
we'll catch bees as they're coming back
into the hive and we'll dissect them right
there and empty their stomach contents,"
Ambrose says.
"If we find the blue substance there, it
would prove that it's blue when they bring
it in, and they're not changing it in the
hive."
' After that, it's just a matter of tracking
the bees back to their source. Ambrose
says that sounds easy unless you've tried
it.
equivalent in quantity of space and
quality," Robinson said.
No other University housing officials
could be reached for comment.
Tom Carr, spokesperson for the
Carolina Gay Association (CGA),
asked the board to add sexual and
affectional preferences and marital
status to the list of discriminations.
Another UNC student, Alison
Canoles, asked the aldermen to include
age discrimination. She cited examples
of discrimination against
undergraduate students by apartment
complexes.
The Board denied both requests.
Alderman Robert Epting said the
additional areas of discrimination might
reduce the amount of housing available.
"The kind of discrimination we need
to outlaw is discrimination that is
historically based, based on superstition
and not on rational reasoning or fact,
Epting said.
Carr said he found the board's
decision unsatisfactory. "They're saying
they're for individual rights as long as
they're spelled hetero."
He said the CGA plans to keep up
with the board's action in this area and
counterpart
reading rates above 800 to 1,000 words per
minute are physiologically impossible,"
Carver writes.
But there are plenty of speed-reading
course graduates who claim that speed
reading works for them.
"If speed reading does work, it does not
work for the reasons that are put forth by its
supporters. Perhaps we should just accept it
as a benign mystery like aspirin and let it go
at that. . Carver writes in his article.
Perhaps the world will never really know
the truth or falsity of the grafGti which
appears . on library- study carrels: "Evelyn
Wood moves her lips wheri she reads." '
the state
Freymann contends he was fired from the
CPC post without due process.
UNC has filed a motion for dismissal and
is presently awaiting a decision by a District
Court judge in Durham. If the court finds in
Freymann's favor, it could affect the
dismissal of administrators at Freymann's
former level.
In another case, UNC vs. Dalton, the
University is claiming that a student
fraudulently obtained a master's degree on
the basis of a plagiarized thesis. Dalton has
moved to dismiss the case, said Susan H.
Ehringhaus, assistant to the chancellor, but
the hearing has not yet been held.
In a Jan. 5 decision, the U.S. 4th Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled that the allocation of
student fees to the Black Student Movement
was not unconstitutional.
What was ruled unconstitutional,
however, was the allocation of seats on the
Campus Governing Council (CGC) and the
honor courts.
Last Wednesday the N.C. attorney general
filed a petition in the case, Uzzell vs. UNC,
requesting that the court reconsider its
4JW;- ... ...
Bees a-buzzin' seem little more than a potentially painful nuisance. But bees also
produce honey, that, tongue-tickling treat that sweetens even the most sour
dispositions. Some bees even come from out of the blue yonder to produce, of all
things, blue honey.
ent
rule
nam
lobby for change.
Carr also cited the University as a
violator of equal housing standards. He
said it discriminates on the basis of
sexual preference and marital status.
The aldermen also made a change in
the town charter to permit the issuance
of special parking permits allowing
holders to park on specific residential
streets. ,
Furry shadow
foretells more
wintry days
Early today, members of the Lancaster
County, Penn., Slumbering Groundhog
Lodge will don their silk hats, take canes in
hand and trek out into the fields to find the
nearest burrow of a woodchuck.
As they gather expectantly around the
burrow, they will peer intently, awaiting the
moment when the furry fellow ventures out
into the February air.
They will then return to the village and
report to the local townspeople on whether
the woodchuck (or groundhog) saw his
shadow, and as a result, whether there will be
six more weeks of winter or the approach of
early spring.
The colonists along the eastern coast of
the U.S. brought the tradition of
Groundhog's Day from Great Britain and
Germany.
According to myth, if the groundhog
comes out of his burrow on Feb. 2 and sees
his shadow, he will retreat into the ground
for six more weeks of winter.
If, however, the animal comes out on a
cloudy day and does not see a shadow, he
will assume spring is coming and will not
retreat to his burrow.
Sketchy records kept by the Slumbering
Groundhog Lodge report that the
groundhog has been correct about the
weather eight times, indefinite five times and
wrong seven times.
Linda Morris
decision concerning the CGC and honor
courts seats.
"The court said that unless you can
demonstrate a compelling reason for it,
facially it violated the Fourteenth
Amendment and the Civil Rights Act: to
treat people differently because of their
race," Robinson said. "And that's what this
does.
"But we never had an opportunity to say
or to offer proof supportive of the
proposition that this was an instance of
compelling need or reasonable use of such a
thing. We'd like to have that opportunity."
In a case that could have far-reaching
implications, the Student Bar Association
(SBA) is trying to have the UNC School of
Law faculty meetings open to the public
under the state open meetings law. The SBA
won an order from the Orange County
Superior Court, but the case is now awaiting
decision by the N.C. Court of Appeals in
Raleigh.
Andrew A. Vanore Jr., senior deputy
Please turn to page 2.