Gramm will continue to fight
FEC subpoena for records
— Page 3
r
School board members seek
end to busing in Fort Worth
— Page 4
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Last minute negotiations fail;
Baseball players' union strikes
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mmmm^ Texas asm — — •mm m
The Battalion
Serving the University community
Vol. 80 No. 186 CISPS 045360 6 pages
College Station, Texas
utu stops potentially violent
Associated Press
■ DAVEYTON, South Africa —
Standing alone between white police
and hundreds of angry young blacks
Tuesday, Bishop Desmond T utu de
mised an explosive confrontation
Huring a funeral for a young girl in
ithis black township. But violence
continued elsewhere.
I In the township of Brandfort, po
lice fired rubber bullets and tear gas
into the home of Winnie Mandela,
pvite of the imprisoned leader of
iSouth Africa’s outlawed African Na
tional Congress. Seven gasoline
bombs were found in the home, po
lice said.
Mandela was visiting Johannes
burg at the time. Her lawyer, Ish-
mail Ayob, reported that her 20-
month-old grandchild had been in
the house and could not immedi
ately be found after the raid. Police
said later that they had established
that the child had not been in the
house, but the lawyer couldn’t be
reached for comment on that.
A statement from police head
quarters in Pretoria, the capital, said
officers pursuing a crowd that had
stoned police and hurled a fire
bomb, attacked the Mandela home.
Police said they arrested 19 men and
11 women who were in Mandela’s
home.
Police reported widespread un
rest in townships near the Indian
Ocean port of Durban, where a lead
ing black woman civil rights lawyer
was slain by unknown attackers on
Thursday. In one incident, a black
policeman fired on a crowd attack
ing his home in Kwamashu township
and shot to death one man, police
said.
In Daveyton, Tutu, winner of the
1984 Nobel Peace Prize, persuaded a
crowd of about 1,000 not to embark
on a banned march to the graveside
of a teen-age girl who had been
killed by police. And he negotiated
with police chiefs to provide buses
for mourners to attend the burial.
The diminutive black Anglican
Runway at Rudder
Cindy Hood, a mechanical engineering major, sits in the cockpit of a
miniature F-16 fighter plane. The Air Force designed the plane for
parades and recruiting drives like the one held at Rudder Tower
Tuesday. Hood is participating in the Air Force College Senior En-
Photo by SCOTT SUTHERLAND
ginenng Program. As an incentive, the program helps seniors pay tu
ition in exchange for a promise to serve after graduation. The minia
ture plane won’t quite reach the speeds of the real thing, it’s powered
by a lawn mower engine.
Funeral directors argue over bodies
Storm didn’t appear to faze pi lot
Associated Press
GRAPEVINE — The pilot of
| Delta Air Lines Flight 191 appeared
lunconcerned about a thunderstorm
he passed through just before the
ijumbo jet crashed short of a landing
;at Dallas-Fort Worth International
Airport, a federal investigator said
Tuesday.
, “We’re in the rain; it feels good,”
the pilot was heard to say on tapes
from the cockpit voice recorder re
covered from the demolished air
craft, said Patrick Bursley, a member
of the National Transportation
Safety Board.
Investigators have said they be
lieved that wind shear, a violent blast
of air from a thunderstorm, may
have contributed to the crash.
Bursley said the NTSB’s opera
tions group would reconvene in At
lanta next week to review Delta’s pi
lot training program, which he said
was routine.
Investigators Tuesday continued
examining recordings and wreckage
as Dallas-area funeral home owners
squabbled over division of the
corpses from the crash.
The investigator said the pilot was
told to cut speed to 150 knots on his
approach. Bursley said the order to
cut speed was “not a crisis maneu
ver” and was merely precautionary.
A group of about 20 business
owners charged racism and favor
itism in the distribution of bodies to
area funeral homes.
“We’re not demanding anything,”
said Nat Clark, a Dallas funeral
home owner. “ We just Want our
share. It’s greed on the part of a few
owners, flat greed.”
The group says the president of a
mostly white funeral home associa
tion deliberately left them off a list
of homes authorized to prepare and
transport the bodies of crash victims.
Wednesday August 7, 1985
confrontation
bishop argued with police.
Dozens of army and police ar
mored personnel carriers rolled into
Daveyton, 40 miles from Johannes
burg, early Tuesday. Troops ringed
the township and blocked off nearly
every main street leading to the dead
girl’s home.
Last week the white-minority gov
ernment banned mass funerals,
marches, and political speeches and
banners. The new restrictions tight
ened the state of emergency pro
claimed July 21.
An initial crowd of 150 gathered
in a tattered tent near the home of
16-year-old Elizabeth Kumalo, shot
to death by police along with two
other girls and a young man after
another victim’s funeral July 24.
As mourners pressed round the
wooden coffin. Tutu lived up to his
pledge to ignore the ban on political
preaching, and declared, “Know
that God will lead us all out of this
bondage and this land will be free!”
Shuttle returns
with treasure
for researchers
Associated Press
Towards air force base,
Calif. — Challenger sailed smoothly
back to Earth on Tuesday, its seven
astronauts bearing a scientific trea
sure trove gathered during a voyage
that began precariously but ended in
triumph.
The 100-ton shuttle streaked
across the California coastline,
passed over Los Angeles with win
dow-rattling sonic booms, spiraled
down to Edwards Air Force Base
and landed in a cloud of dust on the
Mojave Desert lake bed runway.
Technicians stood by to remove
the heat sensors from Challenger’s
main rocket engines as soon as possi
ble after landing.
Jess Moore, NASA’s associate ad
ministrator for spaceflight, said the
sensors will be analyzed to deter
mine if they were responsible, as be
lieved, for the premature shutdown
of a rocket engine during last Mon
day’s launch, an event that created
the shuttle’s first launch crisis.
“We’ll be looking very hard at the
sensors,” Moore said. “As we learn,
we’ll phase it back into the program
and try to avoid this sort of thing
from happening.”
Despite the problems, said Moore,
Challenger’s mission “returned a
wealth of information.
“In fact,” he said, “this may be the
most important scienific mission that
the shuttle has flown.”
Challenger’s $75 million array of
13 science instruments focused on
the sun, the stars and on the Earth’s
ionosphere to collect 1.25 trillion bits
of data.
The astronauts collected thou
sands of photographs and 45 hours
of video tape and filled 230 miles of
data tape as they worked around the
clock in two 12-hour shifts.
The crew included five scientists
— geophysicist Tony England, astro
nomer Karl Henize, solar physicist
Loran Acton, physician Story Mus-
grave and astrophysicist John-David
Bartoe. Helping Mission Com
mander Gordon Fullerton fly the
craft was pilot Roy Bridges.
Engineers pinned the launch
problem on the sensors rather than
the engines themselves and National
Aeronautics and Space Adminstra-
tion officials were eager to verify
that analysis, so. the shuttle Discovery
can be launched Aug. 24 as planned.
NASA is so confident that Chal
lenger’s launch problem was caused
by the sensors that Discovery was
rolled out to the launch pad Monday
night. Its engines are equipped with
new, redesigned sensors.
The mission’s collection of science
data will give scientists unique views
of the universe and may shape fun
damental theories on its formation.
A solar instrument measured he
lium and hydrogen ratios on the
sun. Scientists said the data could
help prove some elements of the
“big bang” theory, which proposes
that the universe began with a mas
sive explosion.
Other solar instruments studied
sunspots, the surface eruptions that
can disrupt communications and
electric power transmission on
Earth.
A free-flying satellite gathered
data on the ionosphere, the radio
wave-reflecting layer of the atmo
sphere formed of charged particles,
or plasma.
Two telescopes studied distant
star fields, gathering information in
the infrared and x-ray spectrum.
The infrared instrument also discov
ered a cloud of heat radiation that
seemed to follow Challenger around
in orbit.
IRS asked to help collect
defaulted student loans
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Faced with
billions of dollars in defaults on
student loans, the government
said Tuesday it is resorting to
“the ultimate trump card” to col
lect— the Internal Revenue Serv
ice.
Education Secretary William J.
Bennett said his department is
asking the IRS to withhold tax re
funds for 1 million defaulters on
federal student loans unless they
start paying their debts.
Another 1 million borrowers
will get notices from state agen
cies warning that they will be den
ied federal tax refunds next year
unless they make good on their
debts.
“I think it’s going to be without
a doubt the most successful thing
we’ve ever done to recover de
faulted loans,” said Richard Has
tings, director of debt collection
for the department.
Department officials say for
mer undergraduate and graduate
students have defaulted on $3 bil
lion in low-interest loans subsi
dized by the federal government
under the Guaranteed Student
Loan program. Another $1.1 bil
lion has been defaulted in the Na
tional Direct Student Loan pro
gram of low-interest loans to
students through their schools.
All those in default are now out
of school, and while some may
not be working, most are earning
money and “basically are making
economic decisions” not to repay
the low-interest loans, Hastings
said.
Bennett said in a statement
that notices will be mailed to
those in default beginning this
Saturday. Defaulters will have 60
days to begin repayment or to
work out a plan for payment.
Federal GSL default rate could go up
By JERRY OSLIN
Staff Writer
The default rate for federally
sponsored guaranteed student loans
is a relatively low 4.4 percent but will
probably get higher in the next five
years, says Texas A&M’s assistant di
rector of student financial aid.
A1 Bormann, who has been with
A&M’s financial aid office for 19
years, says the expected passing of a
more restrictive loan policy by the
federal government will force the
default rate to go up.
“There has been talk that the poli
cies of the program will be changed
by 1986-87 and if they are, it will be
a more restrictive type of program,’
he says. “If the new loan qualifica
tions are based on a strong, need-
based system, then the lower-to-mid-
dle income families are the main re
cipients. If the student from these
families can’t meet his obligation,
then he will probably default be
cause chances are his parents don’t
have the resources either.”
Bormann says the current na
tional default rate is mainly the re
sult of the generous loan policy dur
ing the Carter administration.
“The loans that are in payout
right now are those people who re
ceived their loans during the Carter
administration,” he says. “At that
time it was open ended and it didn’t
make any difference as to what the
family income was. A student would
receive a government-subsidized
student loan.
“The low default figures you are
seeing now is probably because the
majority of the borrowers that are
paying off their loans now are prob
ably out of the middle to upper in
come families. If the student can’t
pay off the obligation, then mother
and dad will because they have the
liquidity.”
Bormann says students from mid
dle and upper income families ap
plied for GSL’s so their families
could keep their money in high-in-
terest investments.
“Some middle and upper income
families would use GSL’s to pay for
their kid’s school so they would not
have to liquidate their CD’s or other
investments,” he says. “They would
let the commercial lender loan them
the money at a low interest rate and
then pay off the obligation when the
student graduated. I think a lot of
these obligations were paid off by
middle and upper income families
and not the student.”
Bormann says the federal crack
down on defaulted borrowers has
contributed to the current low de
fault rate, but the rate would go up
despite that.
“Regardless of the collection ef
fort, you will probably see a rising
default rate because the makeup of
the clientele is different,” he says.
He says the national default rate
of 18 to 20 percent several years ago
was a result of a loan policy that
helped the very needy and excluded
higher income families.
Bormann says the government
might decide to change GSL policy
by basing its interest rate on the in
terest the federal government offers
on treasury bills.
“Either the loan policy will be
based completely on a needs test or
they may decide to use a program
similar to that in the health profes-
ssions area,” he says, “where the in
terest would be based on T-bill rates
plus 3.5 percent added on.”
The interest rate on T-bills was 21
percent several years ago, Bormann
says. The current interest rate on
GSL’s is 8 percent, he says.
If the interst rate on GSL’s was
tied to the T-bill rate, Bormann says,
the total educational debt owed by
graduating students would be enor
mous.
“With a 15 year payout on a loan
of $13,000 at 12.5 percent, the pay
back at the end of that 15 years
would be $144,000,” he says. “So if
you borrowed $50,000 to $60,000,
you would end up paying almost
half a million dollars in educational
loans.”
Bormann says he is especially con
cerned with the cost of medical care
in the future.
“There are a lot of medical
schools in the country, though Texas
A&M isn’t one, where the students
are graduating with $60,000 to
$80,000 debts,” he says. “What if the
average doctor owed $80,000 right
out of medical school? The con
sumer would end up paying for it.
Your doctor bills and insurance bills
and health care bills would be enor
mous.