Viewpoint
The Battalion
Texas A&M University
Thursday
June 29, 1978
Time for real affirmative action
The Supreme Court has finally made its decision on the Allan Bakke reverse
discrimination case. But it wasn’t the clear-cut decision for which both Bakke’s
allies and opponents hoped.
The Court’s 5-4 decision gave Bakke the admission he had sought to the
University of California at Davis medical school. But the court still defended
using race as a criteria for setting admissions standards and quotas the issue
that seems the crux of the Bakke case. It was hardly the life-or-death test for
the national push for racial equality over the last two decades, as it had been
depicted.
Bakke has sued UC Davis after being rejected for admission to the universi
ty’s medical school while less-qualified minority applicants were admitted to
fill the school’s 16-student quota for minority group members out of a total
admission of 100 students.
At best, the Court set a precedent protecting citizens’ civil rights against the
anonymous tyranny of quotas that only consider a man’s color. UC Davis
deprived Bakke of his civil rights by rejecting him solely on that basis,
according to the Court majority opinion.
But Bakke won that point only on the technicality that UC Davis could not
prove he would have been rejected for admission if the quota system had not
been in effect.
In the second part of their two-part decision the justices reversed the
California Supreme Court’s verdict and said UC Davis could use race as a
criteria for evaluating applicants for admission so long as race wasn’t the only
criteria used. That was the defect in the school’s original quota system.
The justices endorsed racial quotas to continue the affirmative action pro
grams which the federal government has championed for a decade as a means
of increasing racial equality.
“In light of the sorry history of discrimination and its devastating impact on
the lives of Negroes, bringing the Negro into the mainstream of American life
should be state interest of the highest order,” Justice Thurgood Marshall, the
court’s only black justice, said.
Certainly the civil rights movement of the last two decades has brought us
much closer to a truly equalitarian society. Those steps toward equality must
never be relinquished.
But in the zeal to guarantee equality for minorities, federal agencies have
often taken equality away from everyone else. That’s what happened to Allan
Bakke and it’s happening throughout the United States in the name of affirma
tive action.
Those federal agencies must take the Bakke decision as a directive to treat
every man and woman as an individual a unique combination of attributes and
defects to be judged on his own worth and not as a color fitting one quota or
another.
That’s affirmative action. That’s equality.
L.R.L.
Migration crushing Mexico City
By WILLIAM F. GENTILE
United Press International
MEXICO CITY — Rogelio Osorio, 30, a
native of Mexico’s Gulf State of Veracruz,
packed a few belongings in a cloth sack,
said goodbye to his wife and four children,
and boarded a bus for Mexico City.
He thus became one of the more than
1,000 Mexicans who pour into this met
ropolis every day — seeking work, a
chance to escape the stifling poverty of the
countryside, and a new life.
Partly as a result of this migration, this
capital is the most heavily-populated city
in the Western Hemisphere.
Of about 65 million Mexicans, 13 mil
lion live in Mexico City. Nearly half those
people were not born there, but like
Rogelio, migrated from the country in
search of a job.
“I worked another man’s land for 80
pesos (about $3.50).a day, Rogelio said.
“I might work fobr months a year,
maybe five. We lived on the boss’ land
because we had none of our own. The
house for myself, my wife and my four
children was made of cardboard and tin.
Unless the influx into Mexico City is
curtailed, by the year 2000 it will be the
world’s largest city, with a population of 25
to 30 million.
Even now the capital is overcrowded.
Housing is scarce. Public transportation is
strained. The water supply is inadequate.
An estimated 4 million people live in the
so-called “misery belts” on the city out
skirts, without proper plumbing or elec
tricity.
World News
Set in a valley 7,400 feet above sea level
and surrounded by a bowl of mountains,
the city is a natural trap for the toxic waste
from too much industry and too many au
tomobiles.
But despite the discomforts Mexico City
is a magnet for rural residents because of
the chronic shortage of jobs in rural areas.
Although the unemployment rate in the
capital is estimated to be close to 9 percent
(with another 40 percent of the work force
under-employed), jobs are still easier to
find here than in the provinces.
Gustavo Garza Villarreal, director of
urban studies at El Colegio de Mexico, re
ports that Mexico City houses 45 percent
of the nation’s industry, 45 percent of its
commerce and 55 percent of its social serv
ices.
It generates 45.6 percent of total na
tional production, 52.9 percent of personal
earnings and is home to 41.9 percent of all
salaried employees in the country.
But nearly half the population lives in
the countryside, where unemployment in
some areas runs at high as 40 percent.
Many farmers, like Rogelio, don’t own
their own land. And most live in grim con
ditions, barely able to eke out a livelihood.
do so year-round.
Rogelio lives with his older brother and
family of five, who have already been in
Mexico City for a year. At night he unrolls
a blanket and sleeps on the floor.
“Life in the city is hard,” he says. “But
it’s worse in the country.”
Responding to this situation, the gov
ernment has recently created a National
Urban Development Plan, designed to
limit growth of Mexico’s over-crowded
cities. A new National Employment
Commission aims to curb the exodus from
rural areas by fighting unemployment in
the countryside.
Economists are not hopeful this can be
done. This year more than 700,000 Mexi
cans will enter the work force. Over a mil
lion new jobs must be created each year if
Mexico is to eliminate unemployment.
Last year there was actually a net loss of
jobs. This year, fewer than 100,000 new
jobs will be created.
Meanwhile, Mexicans continue migrat-
children.
And after that, he says, Til send for
my two brothers and their families too. ”
‘T will never go back,” Rogelio vows. In
Mexico City’s southern district of Iz-
tacalco, Rogelio found a construction job
Amd ncAv, ean>'S:;aljbpt $4yJQ 4, day: JEe . ing to the city.
'works six days a week and-says he hopes to Rogelio, for example, hopes to have a
small home of his own by the end of the
year and be able to send for his wife and
The price of peace—and rhetoric
By RICHARD SISK
United Press International
UNITED NATIONS — The wages of
peace are running close to $3 million this
spring, with more than one-third of the
money devoted to putting all the rhetoric
into print for posterity.
< Budget people at the United Nations
say their revised cost estimate is
$2,839,200 for the General Assembly’s
current special session on disarmament.
That includes $1,199,000 for verbatim
and summary records of the meetings,
$879,000 for translation and interpreta
tion, $301,000 for reproduction and distri
bution of documents and $263,000 for
travel expenses.
It doesn’t include the $1,122,000 al
ready spent on the 42 meetings, over 18
months, of the 54 countries represented
on the conference’s preparatory commit
tee. Those meetings pumped out about
1,500 pages worth of agendas, rules of pro
cedure and the like.
The grand total comes close to $4 mil
lion, with the United States picking up
about 25 per cent of the tab as it does for
most U.N. expenses.
That figure is about as insignificant as $4
million ever can be when compared with to the delegations, the U.S. federal gov-
total U.N. expenditures of more than $2 ernment and New York City. These in
billion annually. It may well be a bargain if elude providing food, security, lodging
the session leads to curbs on an arms race and other necessities for the more than
in which more than $1 billion is spent 500 dignitaries attending the five-week
every day. session.
Apart from U.N. expenses for the spe- For instance, no figures for the current
cial session, there are the incidental costs session are available yet, but the U.N. As
sociation of the United States estimates it
costs the city and the federal government a
total of about $12 million annually for
police protection and diplomatic tax
exemptions.
This expenditure is a favorite target of
local politicians, who periodically call for
the federal government to assume all the
costs or even for the transfer of U.N.
headquarters out of the city.
But the U.N. Association points out that
the benefits of having the United Nations
in the United States far outweigh the
costs.
“Members of the U.N. Secretariat and
the U.N. diplomatic corps are estimated to
spend between $150 million and $180 mil
lion in this country for official and personal
expenses and $2 million more is spent by
the United Nations to rent extra office
space,” the association said in a recent
statement.
And actor Paul Newman, a U.S. disar
mament delegate, stresses that the bottom
line for the session is not financial, but
moral.
“What this whole thing is about is get
ting technology back in the control of
human beings,” Newman said. “If not,
well it’s bon voyage. ”
Vermont
‘open school’ bowing to noisy kids
By CANDACE PAGE
United Press International
EAST MONTPELIER, Vt. — When
five rural Vermont towns designed their
grand experiment in education 10 years
ago, they reckoned without the noise of
900 teenagers.
Now, Vermont’s first wall-less “open
classroom” school is about to spend
$15,000 putting up several floor-to-ceiling
partitions.
“The teachers said they couldn’t teach
things like poetry in all that noise. The
kids couldn’t concentrate,” said Mrs. Ruth
Towne, a member of the Union 32 High
School Board.
WHEN IT WAS BUILT, U-32 was in
the vanguard of educational innovation:
few interior walls, a flexible curriculum
aimed at meeting each student’s unique
needs and no bells, grades or study halls.
Now, walls are not the only concession
to traditional education at the school. Stu
dents spend more time in class, study halls
are back for some, and course offerings
have been narrowed.
In the process, school officials are heal
ing the deep community rift brought about
by a school which many taxpayers consid
ered radical.
The retreat typifies what some
educators describe as a general retreat
from the idea of “open education,” the
education philosophy to which Union 32
and other schools of its vintage were dedi
cated.
A rejection of traditional, more re
gimented schooling, open education em
phasizes the individual needs of the stu
dent and the “nourishing of the human po
tential,” as Robert Nash, professor of edu
cational philosophy at the University of
Vermont, puts it.
Education
BUT THE SCHOOL and the open
education process has its defenders.
“Our dropout rate is about 2 or 3 per
cent, half what it is in other Vermont high
schools. We must be doing something
right,” said Alan Weiss, the school princi
pal and a designer of the formula before
the school was built.
“U-32 has nothing to be ashamed of
academically,” Weiss said. College Board
examinations scores of its students rate in
the top 10 high schools in Vermont, and
graduates who go on to college “do very
well,” he said.
In the late 1960’s, open education ap
peared to be the wave of the future. A
Stanford University study estimated more
than half the schools built in 1967, 1968
and 1969 were built with an “open” de
sign.
Now, “open education is pretty much in
eclipse,” said Nash. “Open schools aren’t
being built anymore, in New England or
anywhere. The current movement is back
to basics, to emphasis on reading, writing
and computational skills. The thinking is
open schools went one step too far.”
TWO STEPS TOO FAR, some U-32
parents would say.
When the long, low brick school opened
in September, 1971, students began com
ing home with stories of hours of free time
to spend as they wished, the freedom to
cut classes, calling teachers by their first
names and free-wheeling class discussions
of radical politics.
Many parents in these rural com
munities of central Vermont were
shocked.
Within two months, a group of residents
appeared before the school board with a
list of 26 complaints that ranged from
charges two students had been stabbed in
the school library to accusations children
were being given Communist books. The
stabbing incident, it turned out, had not
occurred.
Their real complaint, however, was that
students were allowed to dress, talk and
behave with a freedom unusual in Ver
mont high schools, and that the “basics”
were being ignored at the school.
Some parents complained that many
students spent all their free time lying
around talking in U-32’s carpeted, furni
tureless corridors.
BUT OTHER PARENTS, students and
teachers fiercely defended U-32’s innova
tions, saying many students were learning
more eagerly at U-32 than at other
schools.
In the end, it was practicality that
brought changes at U-32.
T’m 10 years wiser now,” says principal
Weiss. “We found that seventh graders
needed more structure, that it didn’t work
to group them with older students. We’ve
changed that. I think you could say the
extremes have been modified. ”
The school’s ultimate critics — its stu
dents — generally give the school high
marks.
“It’s very free. You don’t feel chained
down all the time,” says senior Deborah
Davison. “The teachers are great, they
really help you out. They’re more like
your friends than your teachers.”
“Why, suddenly should U-32 change its
atmosphere by putting up $15,000 worth
of walls?” wrote school newspaper staffer
Judi Hudson recently. “What is the point
of having an experimental school if in a
matter of seven years we decided to
change it to a traditional school?”
Top of the News
State
Woman killed in fall off ledge
A Dayton, Texas woman plunged 10 stories to her death Wednes
day at a posh Houston night spot. Nancy Louise Lee, 21, a former
Lee College coed, coaxed her date into letting her step out on the
terrace ledge at Cody’s Restaurant and Club, said a Harris County
Medical Examiner’s office spokesman. Lee then slipped from her
date’s hold and fell to her death, the spokesman said. Witnesses said
that earlier in the evening Lee and her date had been out on the
club’s fire escape and returned inside, the spokesman said.
Strike deadline passes
A second strike deadline passed Wednesday without a walkout by
Communications Workers of America members at Wadley Hospital,
Texarkana’s largest health facility. The union — which represents an
estimated 5(X) licensed nurses, maids, orderlies, technicians, main-
tainence and cafeteria workers — set the deadline for 4:30 a.m. Wed
nesday in an attempt to pressure administrators to sign a contract
pending for almost a year. A deadline earlier set for 5 a.m. Sunday
also passed without a strike.
A&M grad named new director
Anson R. Bertrand, dean of the Texas Tech University College of
Agricultural Sciences, will become director July 10 of the newly
formed Science and Education Administration of the U.S. Agricul
ture Department. Bertrand, who has been dean since 1971, will
provide information to the agriculture secretary. Congress and the
White House on matters pertaining to agricultural research and edu
cation, the University said Wednesday. SEA coordinates government
and university research, and teaching and extension programs across
the country. Bertrand has degrees from Texas A&M University, the
University of Illinois and Purdue University.
Nation
Tower of frit os to ruin view
Residents of a rural lake resort near Killingly, Conn., are furious
because they claim Frito-Lay Inc. of Dallas plans to spoil their view
with a tower of corn chips. Frito-Lay said Tuesday it will build its first
New England plant near the shore of Alexander’s Lake in northeast
ern Connecticut. Plans include a 75 to 100-foot silo-type structure to
store finished Frito-Lay products, such as corn and potato chips.
About 60 lakeside property owners told the Killingly Planning and
Zoning Commission Monday night the $20 million manufacturing and
distribution plant will create "sight pollution.”
Tired Carter retreats
President Carter will follow Congress’ lead and take a full 10-day
holiday, stmting Friday at Camp David, the presidential retreat
where he plans to celebrate the Fourth of July. Aides say Carter is
tired. He’s also “pretty disgusted” that the Senate has handed him
another setback in his drive to get a comprehensive energy program.
The Senate voted Tuesday to block Carter’s power to increase import
fees on oil. The president had hoped to use the import fees as a
weapon to force action on his 14-month-old energy package.
SST exempt of noise regulations
Transportation Secretary Brock Adams has exempted the Con
corde supersonic transport from noise regulations applying to other
jet aircraft, but has restricted the times of day and the speed at which
it can fly over or near the United States. Adams also said Tuesday in
Washington that local airport authorities will be allowed to write their
own noise regulations as long as they apply to all aircraft and do not
discriminate against the SST. The final noise rules apply only to the
initial group of about 16 Concordes in operation or being built by the
British and French governments.
Actress Russell in jail
World
Princess Caroline married
Princess Caroline of Monaco, daughter of former American film
star Grace Kelly and Prince Rainier III, married French
businessman-playboy Philippe Junot Wednesday in the first round of
the jet set wedding of the year. The 21-year-old princess, whose
beauty, youth, wealth and lineage made her one of the most eligible
women of the world, became the wife of suave Junot, 17 years her
senior, in a brief civil ceremony in the gold and marble throne room
of the Monaco palace.
Vaccination campaigns begun
Authorities in the Gulf ports of Tampico and Ciudad Madero,
Mexico have mounted massive vaccination campaigns against polio.
Eight cases of the disease have been discovered in both cities and the
surrounding area, it was reported Tuesday. Dr. Luis Enrique San-
toyo, head of Tampico’s health center, said it was the first reported
case of polio in Tampico in several years.
Weather
Partly cloudy and hot today and tomorrow with a chance of
widely scattered thunder showers in the late afternoon. High
today mid-90s, low tonight mid-70s. High tomorrow low 90s.
Winds from the south at 5-10 mph becoming light and vari
able tonight. 20% chance of rain this afternoon & tonight,
increasing to 40% on Friday.
The Battalion
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Actress Jane Russell has been jailed in Santa Barbara, Calif, for
drunken driving. A Municipal Court Judge Tuesday ordered the 57-
year-old actress to spend four days in county jail for violating a condi
tion of her parole on another drunken driving conviction. Russell,
convicted two years ago for drunken driving, was arrested in April on
the same charges after a minor traffic accident. She was a 19-year-old
model in Hollywood when the late billionaire Howard Hughes
selected her to star - in his controversial film “Outlaw.
|pa
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