Newspapers / Daily Tar Heel (Chapel … / Oct. 17, 1977, edition 1 / Page 10
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10 The Daily Tar Heel Mond.-iy. October 17, 1977 Greg Porter Editor Ben Cornelius, Managing Editor Ed Rankin, Associate Editor Lou Biuonis, Associate Editor Laura Scism, University Editor Elliott Potter, City Editor Chuck Alston, State and National Editor Sara Bullard, Features Editor Chh Ensslin, Arts Editor Of.ne UPCHURCH, Sports Editor Allfn Iernigan. Photography Editoi EatUj .85th year of editorial freedom letters to the editor Code: Read fine print It has been apparent for some time that UNC's 102-year-old honor code is not working. Now, after months of study, the Committee on Student Conduct has come up with a set of modifications the members of the committee think will make the system workable. There are four major revisions suggested. First, attacking the offensive "rat" clause of the traditional honor code, the committee proposes abolition of the requirement that students turn offenders in to the honor court. Second, to put some teeth in the code, the committee recommends faculty proctoring. Third, for purposes of deterrence, the committee recommends tougher penalties for honor code violations. And finally, an Honor Code Counselor is suggested to advise those on probation. These revisions are quite a radical departure from the spirit of the honor code. Because their potential effect on the University community is so great, the complete text of the revisions is printed on page 5 of the Daily Tar Heel today. If these proposals are enacted by the Campus Governing Council and the Faculty Council, then we all will have entered into an important and binding contract. So please, read the fine print. Everyone should know exactly where we are headed. Taxi service needs help The shared-ride taxi system faces a Catch-22 proposition: statistics reveal a definite problem with ridership, but because so few students have complained, Student Government officials must assume the taxi system is acceptable. The shared-ride system is not meeting the required average of 100 persons per evening. The taxis are averaging only 65 persons per evening as compared to the 170-person average of the fixed-route buses last fall. Modifications are definitely in order, but Paul S. Arne, Student Government's director of transportation, does not know where to begin. Though 100 more persons used the service per evening last fall, students have not complained to Arne or suggested any improvement for the system. Improvement of the taxi service cannot be the sole responsibility of Student Government and town officials. Modification of the shared-ride system will occur in November. Any suggestions by those students who use (or don't use) the taxi service will play a valuable part in the final decision. The Daily Tar Heel News: Tony Gunn, assistant editor; Mark Andrews, Mike Coyne, Meredith Crews, Shelley Droescher, Bruce Ellis, Betsy Flagler, Grant Hamill, Lou Harned, Stephen Harris, Kathy Hart, Nancy Hartis, Chip Highsmith, Keith Hollar, Steve Huettel, J aci Hughes, Jay Jennings, George Jeter, Ramona Jones, Will Jones, Julie Knight, Eddie Marks, Amy McRary, Elizabeth Messick, Beverly Mills, Beth Parson, Chip Pearsall, Bernie Ransbottom, Evelyn Sahr, George Shadroui, Vanessa Siddle, Barry Smith, David Stacks, Melinda Stovall, Robert Thomason, Howard Troxler, Mike Wade, Martha Waggoner, David Walters and Ed Williams. ' New Desk: Reid Tuvim, assistant managing editor. Copy chief: Keith Hollar. Copy editors: Richard Barron, Amy Colgan, Kathy Curry, Dinita James, Carol Lee, Michele Mecke, Lisa Nieman, Dan Nobles, Melanie Sill, Melinda Stovall, Melanie Topp and Larry Tupler. Sports: Lee Pace, assistant editor; Evan Appel, Dede Biles, Bill Fields, Skip Foreman, Tod Hughes, Dinita James, Dave McNeill, Pete Mitchell, David Poole, Ken Roberts, Rick Scoppe, Frank Snyder, Will Wilson and Isabel Worthy. Features: Pam Belding, Jeff Brady, Zap Brueckner, Amy Colgan, David Craft, Peter H apkc, Etta Lee, Nell Lee, Kimberly McGuire, Debbie Moose, Dan Nobles, Stuart Phillips, Ken Roberts, Tim Smith and Lynn Williford. Arts and Entertainment: Melanie Modlin, assistant editor; Hank Baker, Becky Burcham, Pat Green, Marianne Hansen, Libby Lewis and Valerie Van Arsdale. Graphic Arts: Artists: Dan Brady, Allen Edwards, Cliff Marley, Jocelyn Pettibone, Lee Poole and John Tomlinson. Photographers: Fred Barbour, Sam Fulwood, Michael Sneed and Joseph Thomas. Business: Verna Taylor, business manager. Claire Bagley, assistant business manager. Michele Mitchell, Secretary-Receptionist. Liz Huskey, Mike Neville, Kim Painter, David Squires and Howard Troxler. Circulation manager: Bill Bagley. Advertising: Dan Collins, manager; Carol Bedsole, assistant sales manager; Steve Crowell, classifieds manager; Julie Coston, Neal Kimball, Cynthia Lesley, Anne Sherril and Melanie Stokes. Ad layout: Evelyn Sahr. Composition Editors: Frank Moore and Nancy Oliver. Composition and Makeup: UNC Printing Dept. Robert Jasinkiewic?, supervisor; Robert Streeter, Geanie McMillan, Rusty Barath, Judy Dunn, Carolyn Kuhn, David Parker, Joni Peters, Steve Quakenbush and Duke Sullivan. Faculty Council should consider variable credit To the editor: I wish to express my opinion on the editorial in the Oct. 13 issue of the DTH ("Impetus for reform needed"). I feel that variable credit courses should be instituted atUNC-CH.Theinstitution which I attended as an undergraduate had variable credit courses and I graduated on time, so there must not be anything wrong with that system. For instance, all elementary and intermediate languages were worth five credit hours, and the courses met five times a week. 1 know that many students would loathe going to a foreign language class so much, but three hours a week plus a lab is just not enough time to learn a foreign language. Other more difficult courses such as chemistry or freshman history should also have more credit value and should meet longer. When I took history as a freshman, five hours was not enough time to absorb all that information thrown out to me. I think that graduate courses could be worth more than three credit hours. I'm sure that the grad student feels that some of his courses should meet more often to be able to understand and learn all that is expected of him. I think that variable credit courses are valuable and the Faculty Council should give them considerable study. Robert Allen Grad Student in Slavic Languages Pseudo pyramid power To the editor: Three cheers for Prof. Dietrich Schroeer and his experiment on pyramid power. It is amazing that UNC students can be unsophisticated as to take such pseudoscientific ideas seriously. 1 eagerly await the results and hope that they will be published in that distinguished scientific journal, Playboy. With regard to Mr. Craft's credibility as a journalist, he doesn't need to tell us that he is no scientist: his journalism makes it perfectly obvious. Elliot M. Cramer P.O. Box 428 Succession a 'Hunt' bill To the editor: The letter in Wednesday's DTH ("Succession in focus," Oct. 12) regarding succession will benefit the Republican Party." The writer, Dean Hobbs, is an active Democrat. Republicans are quite capable of speaking for ourselves. At the April state convenion, the North Carolina Republican Party adopted the following resolution: 'Vhereas J im H unt has refused to exclude himseu from his succession proposal in the provisions of N.C. Senate Bill No. 293, And whereas past bills have made changes in the terms of governors apply only to future officeholders, Now therefore be it resolved, the North Carolina Republican Party urges the defeat of this legislation of Jim Hunt, pushed by Jim Hunt, for Jim Hunt. Martha Broadfoot, Chairman UNC College Republicans Omission costly To the editor: I now know why some of the letters to the editor in this paper are incoherent in some places. It is because of the staff of the Daily Tar Heel. In my letter to the editor, ("Treating the symptoms," Oct. 1 3) the meaning of a whole paragraph was changed by the omission of part of the paragraph as I wrote it. Lancaster, ("Bakke victory would be loss for all minorities," Oct. 7) stated that the 2.7 percent student black minority is in no position to apply reverse discrimination against the white majority. I replied that "it is not the student black minority that discriminates against minority admissions. . .white students have no control either. It is the admissions officials that have the control while the government holds the withdrawal of federal funds over their heads." It is the government that is ordering the discrimination. I consider that highly inconsistent. I'm sure the Daily Tar Heel regrets the error. David Shuford 2225 Granville Tip' no help To the editor: Concerning the "Dialing tip" letter "by Chris K ueny of eighth floor M orrison (Oct. 14): Do you believe the intelligence of this guy? How long do you think it will take Ma Bell to start asking for telephone numbers on the "long-distance directory assistance" number? I'd just like to thank you for telling all the students and all the employees of Mother Bell about the cute service that we had. I'm sure they are all happy now. It would have been better to spread something like this by word-of-mouth throughout the dorms, but now you've ruined it. Thank you. Paul O. Matthews 304 Morrison Wrong reflection To the editor: I offer a rebuttal to the remarks of Black Student Movement President Byron Horton, who said, "20 to 25 percent of the student population would better reflect the fact that blacks comprise 30 percent of the population in North Carolina ("Horton: UNC should be 20 to 25 percent black," Oct. 14). The University's racial percentages should only reflect the number of blacks and whites wishing to pursue their education, not the mere population percentages of the two races in North Carolina. Likewise, the percentages should not reflect the herding of minority groups into Chapel Hill to meet a quota imposed by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Reverse admissions discrimination is not the answer. There's no call for vindictiveness. .Two wrongs don't make a right, Mr. Horton! S. G. Benton Jr. 114 S.Columbia St. Tar Heel editorials based on insufficient analyses By MARK WILSON Two disturbing staff editorials appeared in Die Daily Tar 7fW during the last week of August concerning University desegregation and Andrew Young's concern , for the Wilmington Ten. Thus, I submitted a one-page letter critical of the two editorials to editor Greg Porter. At that time I learned that Mr. Porter wrote one of the editorials, entitled, "HEW desegregation goals: easier said than done." Needless to say, 1 never saw my letter printed in the Tar Heel although I did observe a needless amount of trivia both on and off the "editorial page." I could only conclude that my letter was too laconic, critical or serious. But 1 simply claimed that Mr. Porter's editorial of Aug. 29 "supported the level of University desegregation." Jn his unsigned editorial Mr. Porter said, "Increased black enrollment is a laudable goal..." but he also claimed that, "The University system worked in good faith to recruit blacks from 1973 to 1976 and could only muster a 40 percent increase." Furthermore, Mr. Porter asserted, "...the chances are the HEW bureaucrats don't really know what goes on in college recruitment." Mr. Porter's point was that". ..HEW has not bothered to tell the University how to effect the change (of increasing black enrollment by 150 percent in five years) so drastically." Therefore, 1 concluded that Mr. Porter's editorial supported the Board of Governors' 30 percent range of increase in black enrollment instead of the HEW maximum level of 150 percent. Mr. Porter's claim that the U niversity had worked in "good faith" to increase black enrollment between 1973 and 1976 and could only achieve a 40 percent increase was certainly unwarranted. First, Mr. Porter did not state that the University had attempted to remove ethnocentric admission standards or that more money and resources were devoted to financial aid or recruitment directed to black students. Second, after talking to Mr. Porter it seems that he does not like "reverse discrimination." Some students are understandably concerned that they might be excluded from a university. The answer to exclusion of black and white students is not interracial struggle but a concerted student effort to obtain substantial increases in total enrollment. This is also the answer to the Bakke case. Arguments feigning concern for the quality of college education in face of increased enrollment derive their inspiration from a Carnegie Commission report, unemployment and the comparatively low demand for college graduates. Blacks deserve a greater opportunity to attend the North Carolina university system simply because past discrimination has resulted in a comparatively small proportion of the state Afro-American population enrolled in the university system. Resistance to significant increases in black enrollment only perpetuates discrimination. Nonetheless, according to some black observers, President Friday and HEW are collaborating in fanning the flames of racism by pretending that HEW is forcing the University to desegregate. But again, according to informed observers, HEW has only set an increase of 1 50 percent in black enrollment as a maximum, not a minimum. Furthermore, initial university desegregation was prompted by NAACP Legal Defense Fund suits against HEW or universities. The the Tar Heel's continued support of the University's feigned attack from HEW is unjustifiable. Similarly, on Aug. 31 a Tar Heel staff editorial condemned involvement by the federal government in the form of a statement made by Andrew Young to the effect that the Wilmington Ten were framed. But the Tar Heel did not elaborate upon the trial of the Wilmington Ten or the recantations by all three state witnesses. The staff editorials on University desegregation and the Wilmington Ten were both based upon insufficient analyses of salient issues. However, the Tar Heel does devote considerable energy into discovering how to mix booze and smoke dope. Mark Wilson is a third-year law student from Durham, N.C. Psychology professor's unorthodox concept of the university: It's alia hype Sometime between the second summer session and the first fall midterm of your senior year, or just after the first home football weekend of the season when you're lying in bed w ith a hangover, feeling guilty for cutting your Monday classes, the question inevitably creeps up: What am I doing here? The answer was never easy, but with the recent controversy about the value of a college education, it seems to come even harder these days. Whether college is used as a place to hide out until the employment situation looks brighter, or as an avenue to social status or better jobs, most people would agree the university has one main goal to teach students. Dr. David Eckerman, learning theorist and associate professor of psychology, has some doubts about the validity of that goal. "The university is an odd institution of society," he says. "It's not really meant to teach." Eckerman says the main function of the university ought to be to advance research in specific fields and to further academic knowledge. "1 think of the university as kind of a monastery, where learning is kept within high walls and preserved for thinking and research. Incidental to that, some people hang around and sometimes they learn. That is the appropriate function of the university not to teach." Eckerman holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Columbia. He has spent most of his 11 years at UNC conducting research in animal learning and teaching introductory and advanced psychology courses. He also works with patients at Umstcad Hospital and counsels prisoners and ex-prisoners at Troy House, a hallw ay house in Durham. "In between these things," he says, "I have an interest in how university students learn." Eckerman's unorthodox views on the (unction of universities stem partly from his own frustrations, he says. "I published nine articles last summer on animal learning that had been sitting on my shelf just because I couldn't Imd the time to put them together." Teaching competes with Eckerman's concept of the university, he says, because it robs professors of time to conduct research and publish. "I'm pro-publish or perish," he said. "For 90 percent of the faculty it's a matter of 'How can I preserve enough time to devote to my discipline?' And the way to do that is to publish to communicate your knowledge." Besides the conflict between teaching and research, Eckerman also sees conflict betw een evaluating students and education. Evaluation, including letter grades, he says, can show motivation or persistence, but it not really an adequate measure of what is learned. "IN QUOTES" By SARA BULLARD What society wants most out of its universities," he says, "is a way to filter and categorize citizens. But if you succeed in actually educating, then evaluation is meaningless," he says. "If everyone gets an A, you've succeeded in teaching but you're not fulfilling the function of filtering and evaluating." Because the university depends on public funding, "We have to continually justify our existence to society, and that means fulfilling its demands for evalution." "If those demands aren't met," he says, "society w ill kick us out." Current concepts of the university as an aid to career choice and job training are also inadequate. Eckerman says. "We know from learning theory that most knowledge seeps out pretty quick. What keeps it going is continued use of it. What that implies is that on-the-job training is the best way to learn for a particular job, and that university instruction is an inefficient method for that sort of thing." The inefficient teaching methods of the university demonstrate that the institution is not set up for teaching, Eckerman says. To eliminate the lecture, which he calls "a terrible way of communicating information," Eckerman devised the experimental sections of Psychology 10 and 22, where students are given a packet of materials, clearly outlined, to study at their own pace within a semester's time. Eckerman says he found that the students learned the material better than other sections of the same courses which included exactly the same material. H is conclusion was"If your goal is to get students to know that material, then that's a better way of teaching it." The problem with the self-paced method, he says, is that not all courses can be packaged and categorized so precisely. It results in a certain body of knowledge being defined as "essential" or "true" when those definitions may be debatable. "It means that some things get set up as the things you have to learn to be a psychology expert, for instance. It's an enormous effort to freeze the subject matter at a particular moment when that moment may not be that important," Eckerman says. The method results in the student having more control over the pace at which he learns, but less control over the content of what he learns, he says. For these reasons, Eckerman says, it is not necessarily good that the university gear itself to teaching. Eckerman admits that his interpretation of the functions of the university is unorthodox. "This is a real deviant view, but I think it's an honest one. But I'm not sure we should be honest about it. Society may not be ready to know this." "Universities are not being used for what they were intended and are essentially inadequate at performing the role society imposes on them," Eckerman concludes. "This whole university thing is a hype." Sara Bullard, t senior journalism major from Charlotte, N.C, is features editor for the Dailv Tar Heel. v iiiiiiiiii I ! ' 1 If : 1 f i. Dr. David Eckerman Stafi photo by L. C. ttarwxM
Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Oct. 17, 1977, edition 1
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