Page 2 THE BATTALION
THURSDAY, MARCH 3, 1977
Opinion/Commentary/Letters
Numerical grades offer advantages to students
Editor:
Grading students differs little
from grading meat, eggs, fruit and
vegetables at Texas A&M Universi
ty. Broad letter grades label indi
viduals like standardized products.
Report cards only outline a stu
dent’s achievement under the pres
ent grading system. But numerical
grades offer many advantages to the
hard-working student.
Blanket letter grades cover each
student’s ability. In the same
course, for instance, one student
may receive a 70 average, while
another gets a 79. Yet both are rated
as C students. Employers and
graduate school officials also cannot
evaluate an 89 average and a 90
fairly now.
Students, meeting course re
quirements, should be given the
raw score they have earned. Or
else, their efforts become insignifi
cant .
They are discouraged, as a result,
to strive toward their potential. If
indeed students know they cannot
raise their grade through a final,
they will allow their point average
to drop to a border grade. (Their
time will be devoted to other finals.)
But they might maintain (or try to
raise) their average if a numerical
grade showed how close they were
to the next letter. Competition then
would be in every raw score itself.
Many universities nationwide use
numerical grades. Moreover, I have
overheard many students speaking
in its favor on campus.
Isn’t the extra administrative
work, which is required for a change
to numerical grades, worth serving
the students who want A&M to rank
high academically?
The grading system should serve
to the advantage of the hard
working student.
— Phylis West
How far
can we go?
Editor:
In light of the recent request and
subsequent law suit demanding
recognition of the Gay Student
Services Organization (GSSO), we
the members of the Sheep Sodo-
mists Organization (SSO) also de
mand equal representation at Texas
A&M.
We are aware of the legal sanc
tions and penalties in Texas regard
ing sodomy. However, we do not
feel that what we go to the barn with
should be considered in evaluating
our position as a recognized student
organization or the resulting ram
ifications to AIM.
The SSO feels that A&M is dis
criminating against us and that we
are being fleeced of our civil rights
guaranteed us by the founders of
this great nation.
SSO is currently comprised of
four members but we feel assured
that if the wool is lifted from dis
criminating eyes, many students
will flock to our cause.
—L.F., ’77
—S.T., ’78
—B.K., ’77
—W.W., ’78
Do gays want
support or help?
Editor:
I am sure that the article in Tues
day’s Battalion concerning the court
case of the Gay Student Services
Organization (GSSO) vs. Texas
A&M University aroused many dif
ferent feelings among the student
body. I consider it my duty as a stu
dent to express those emotions
which I felt.
I feel that the education of the
problem of homosexuality is proper
and necessary. However, homosex
uality is a problem that needs to be
dealt with properly. Convincing a
homosexual that homosexuality is
purely a socially oriented problem
and is not a situation requiring cor
rection within the individual is an
atrocity. Problems are solved not by
the aforementioned, but by locating
their causes and correcting them.
Sometimes this method is tedious
and frustrating, but it is the only
manner in which a solution may be
derived.
If the objective of the GSSO is
counseling to correct the problem of
homosexuality I would suggest sup
port for it. If it is to condone
homosexuality I recommend that
the student body of this university
organize and support this institu
tion’s stand against the GSSO.
— James A. Holley, ’76
Baseball team
needs attention
Editor:
I would like to know why The
Battalion repeatedly refuses to ac
knowledge the Aggie baseball team.
In the issue of Tuesday, February
22, 1977, a picture on the front page
told about the Aggie victories over
McNeese State, but where was the
follow-up story? In other issues the
baseball team is stuck on the last
page or completely ignored. The
baseball team deserves as much rec
ognition as any athletic sport on
campus.
The Battalion
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LETTERS POLICY EdiU ’ r •••••, J err y Needham
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ANNOUNCEMENT
WHAT: Combat Ball
WHEN: Friday, March 4, right after Town Hall
BAND: “Dennis Ivey and the Waymen”
FOR WHO: Free Admission for All Army, Navy and
Marine Cadets in the Corps and their dates
WHERE: Duncan Dining Hall
We have a good team, but with
this kind of coverage no one knows
about it.
Also, I have never seen Reveille
IV at a baseball game, yet our mas
cot appears at all football and bas
ketball games. Isn’t she
everybodies’ mascot? Or just a
“chosen few?”
Please show a little consideration
for the guys on the baseball team
who work hard and represent their
school well.
—Charlotte Wagner
Grades do not
gauge knowledge
Editor:
The test scores and resulting let
ter grades that some professors
issue are not, in my opinion, a fair
representation of students’ knowl
edge.
I refer to courses in which profes
sors give exams, not to evaluate a
student’s knowledge of the particu
lar topic, but rather to get a “desir
able” distribution of final scores.
Questions on such exams are typ
ically based on insignificant bits of
information that the professor did
not cover, but are fair game because
Readers' forum
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Submit articles to Reed
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they can be found in some remote
part of the text — or are so ambigu
ous that the best of several correct
answers must be chosen.
The scores, naturally, turn out to
be very low, and the “desirable”
distribution of grades can then be
achieved with the professor’s appli
cation of his bell curve.
Ultimately, 75% of the class will
receive a C, and the rest will be
evenly distributed over As, B’s,
D’s, and F s.
Quoting one professor who used
this technique, “Most of you are av
erage students, and average stu
dents should receive an average
grade. Only the exceptional will
achieve higher in this course.”
I fail to understand the logic, for
are we not at A&M to learn to be
come more than average citizens? I
hardly think that the professors I
describe are giving us a chance.
— Jeanne Graham, ’79
“IT’S JUST LIKE HE WRITES HOME — HE
EVERY NIGHT WITH HIS FACE IN A BOOK!’
Unfinished agenda for an idealistic generatio
An interview with Carl Oglesby, past president of Students for a Democratic Society
Carl Oglesby has been called “a
man both troubled and profound”
by Phillip Luce, author of a 1971
book entitled “The New Left Today:
America’s Trojan Horse.”
Oglesby’s profundity is apparent
upon meeting him, and his troubled
nature stems from his unceasing
campaign to introduce more demo
cratic and egalitarian principles into
the United States’ governmental sys
tem.
Oglesby, along with Jim
Kastman, have been on the Texas
A&M University campus for the
past three days presenting a
lecture-seminar series on “The Poli
tics of Conspiracy” sponsored by
Political Forum.
The three-day program will be
wrapped up tonight at 8 in Rudder
601 with a lecture by Oglesby on the
“Yankee/Cowboy Theory of Ameri
can Politics.”
Oglesby is the author of a recently
released book entitled “The Yankee
Cowboy War; Conspiracies from
Dallas to Watergate” in which he
speaks of competing power elites
and points to the importance of the
Howard Hughes empire and the as
sassinations of the 1960s in the de
termination of our domestic and
foreign policies.
His writings have appeared in
“Life,” “Nation,” and elsewhere. He
is also the author of “Containment
in Change.” He has traveled exten
sively for the past three years with
the “Who Killed JFK?” program.
Oglesby served as the national
president of the Students for a
Democratic Society in 1965. He was
a member of the SDS long enough
after that to witness the disintegra
tion of the group.
The following is a partial tran
script of an interview of Oglesby
conducted yesterday by Battalion
editor Jerry Needham in which Og
lesby offers some insights and com
ments about some of his experi
ences.
Battalion: Is America any more
democratic now than it was in 1960?
Oglesby: Yes. There’s a spirit of
curiosity and skepticism now —
basic to a healthy democratic life
that I think one didn’t find in the
country in 1960. It was about to
wake up. But, remember in 1960,
we were just coming off the ’50s —
the silent generation — gray flannel
suit, everybody looking out for
themselves, trying to be organiza
tion people.
So you can’t say that things were
very hot or turbulent or excited or
that people were passionate about
government in 1960. But that was
also the period of Kennedy and his
campaign and the whole thing about
the Peace Corps — the develop
ment of a new idea that you could
actually play a role, that you could
get involved, that government was
something that belonged to ordi
nary people.
And that’s a very democratic
spirit. That was the spirit of the
early SDS — the early New Left.
Then that fell off towards the end
of the ’60s with the coming of the
Weathermen and these awful fights
between the Weathermen and pro
gressive labor where a lot of us just
got out of it because we couldn’t
deal with what was happening and it
was breaking our hearts and there
wasn’t any power left to it.
Then I think there was a period of
a couple of years of decline and sor
row and recrimination but then
comes Watergate and so many of
the complaints that SDS people had
been making to deaf ears during the
latter years of the ’60s about big
brotherism in the government, total
surveillance and the use of the fed
eral police powers to pursue politi
cal purposes at the expense of polit
ical adversaries of those who had
power were proved true.
I mean all that stuff that’s come
out after Watergate, we were saying
before Watergate but nobody be
lieved it. They thought that we
were exaggerating, telling stories.
But now we can backdate. We
can go look at J. Edgar Hoover sign
ing his name to the counterintelli
gence program memoranda in May
of ’68 which set out to destroy the
left, not for any particular reason
except for ideological reasons.
So, it’s fluctuating up and down.
Sometimes the spirit is high and
sometimes the spirit is weak. Some
times it 1 seems there are real open-
‘People come out to
do things when they
think there are things
they can do/
ings for democracy to reassert itself,
and then other times it seems like
every crisis we go through shows
that power is just more and more
locked away from ordinary people
and in the hands of specialized
elites.
Battalion: What about the wide
spread political apathy apparent in
America today?
Oglesby: I think there’s a real
question about apathy now. I have
been trying to resist the theory that
people are apathetic.
Battalion: Well, the percentage
of people voting in national elec
tions keeps dropping.
Oglesby: Yes, but that doesn’t
seem to me a proof of apathy. That,
on the contrary, could be an indica
tion that people are actually con
cerned about government and that
they are not going to play games.
They’re not going to make choices
that are unreal. They’re not going to
vote for politicians who don’t really
discuss the issues, who try as hard
as they can to look like one another
and not be different from one
another, who disagree about small
points.
Ultimately, the people are going
to have to find more direct ways to
express themselves than by just
OGLESBY
staying home. I’m not sure that just
staying home in the bicentennial
elections was necessarily a sign of
not caring. It might have been a
sign of broken heart — feeling that
democracy had already been so
badly subverted and corrupted and
kicked around and abused by every
thing that had been happening from
Watergate on back to the assassina
tion of Kennedy.
Battalion: Do you think that the
SDS was a victim of media and gov
ernment propaganda? If so, to what
extent and in what ways?
Oglesby: We did very well with
the media. I think that on the whole
until the last couple of years — ’69
to ’71 say — after which I don’t
really think there is a New Left
anymore, we were successful in br
inging people around to our point of
view. Remember, more and more
people turned against the war. The
arguments that the anti-war people
had been making gained more sup
port as the war went on.
And that happened in the media
as well as generally in the society.
So I think that we were doing all
right in that respect. I think that we
were doing quite well, and if we had
not been frightened and enraged by
the kind of intimidations that were
coming down, maybe we would
have been able to hold to that
course and stay loyal to a democratic
movement.
But you know what happened.
Around the close of the decade,
especially with the election of Ni
xon, a new generation of people in
SDS came up, the Weathermen,
who said look, this guy Nixon is not
going to open any doors.
Kennedy had been assassinated,
King had been assassinated, Fred
Hampton in Chicago in 1969 was as
sassinated — now it turns out it was
by the FBI and Chicago police.
If you were on the outside of
those things, you would maybe hear
a leftist shrieking on the street
corner one day that the FBI had
killed Martin Luther King or Bobby
Kennedy or Jack Kennedy or Fred
Hampton or whoever. People just
dismiss it out-of-hand as crazy.
So people who were being called
crazy for saying what they damn
well knew was true decided that
they had just as well not go around
trying to say this anymore to people
because they weren’t ready to be
lieve it. They would have to be edu
cated to the reality of American
politics by their own suffering.
And for their parts, these young
organizers in SDS decided that the
only way to continue politics was to
transform politics from a democratic
practice into a very anti-democratic
practice — a nondemocratic prac
tice with elite groups making deci
sions for the fellowship, the mem
bership, without including the
membership even in on the dis
cussions in the first place, and in the
second place, making the decisions
take up physical terror — start set
ting bombs off in bathrooms in the
Pentagon and so on.
So I think we partly did it to our
selves, partly it was done to us,
partly we wore out, partly the prob
lems that we faced in 1970 were so
much bigger than the problems of
1960 that you could no longer be
lieve there was any use in trying
democratic methods of reform.
People got very discouraged and
embittered and angry and
frightened and since all that was
happening to a base which was very
inexperienced because it was made
up of very young people, the deci
sion to undertake violent forms of
political remonstration just sort of
seemed to drift out.
Battalion: Did student activism in
the ’60s, in your opinion, have any
lasting effects on the university and
its students and our society in gen
eral?
Oglesby: When you come back to
the university structure, it’s really
‘If you thought the
sun was going to blow
up tomorrow, it would
not do any good to
stage a demonstration.
The sun doesnt give a
damn/
hard to see a lot of change. People
got reformed here and there.
There’s still places where teachers
try harder to relate to students in a
human way, but I’m not so sure that
that’s lasting.
It may be that it just sort of went
under the surface, and that it’s
about to come back again, maybe
next decade. Who can tell about
these things?
I think that people come out to do
things when they think there are
things they can do. But when they
get convinced that there’s nothing
they can do, no amount of criticism
of the system is going to produce a
lot of activity. Because you not only
have to think things are bad in order
to go into action, you have to be
lieve there’s something you can do
to make things better.
If you thought the sun was
to blow up tomorrow, it wouldr
any good to stage a demonstaS
The sun doesn’t give a damn,
blow up or not, depending
own laws and if the governme
no closer to you, no moresubj#
your power as a citizen
foreign and fosiaiYi 'naVuT^jii
enon, then there’s no way (hi
are going to get people exen
about its shortfallings.
I think that if there’s
it probably comes more from
feeling that there isn’t anything
can do. And then that leads
self-protectively to a kind of
ference, like the same indfien
that we have toward nail
phenomena. There isn’t any!
you can do, so why worry abot
That’s a dangerous stated
for a population to be in espi
it has democratic hopes
have to believe that you can
your world by acting in it wit!
fellow creatures. And if you
believe in other people and
don’t believe in yourself
don’t believe in the possil
political action, first comes
ing, indifference, then apa
hostility even to those whodo
make a difference.
Battalion: In short, whatwi
original goals of the SDS?
Oglesby: As the Port
Statement says, what we were
ing to do, in general, waste
cratize politics — in specific
to the rise of a military-indi
complex that seemed to be
all of the important decisions
by itself with no connection
kind of democratic or repi
constitutional politics.
Battalion: Were these
modified during the ’60s?
Oglesby: I think that thatgi
objective finally got lost, ex<
some very long-term sense
people would think ‘Well, we
to fight this thing that’s hap]
right now, and a certain ti|
cretive form of organizati
necessary for doing that. But
end when the people win altq
by making total revolution, th
can have democracy again.’
The Weatherpeople tui
headon against democracy
nadine Dorhn would go around
nouncing the idea of partici]
democracy, which is worked
the Port Huron Statement,
bourgeois she would say. Ai
course by that time, everything]
was bourgeois was awful in
eyes. They thought all
were proletarian and anything
looked middle-class, they
down on.
And they thought this thing
civil rights and civil liberties
democratic process and the
law were just fetishes of a
middle-class that had outlasti
time, historically speaking
longer understood what happi
to it, didn’t have control
(See OGLESBY, Page 6,1
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