The Deadly Halls of Ivy
'Hired Education': 60 Indictments
In 1517. Martin Luther nailed his “Ninety five
Theses” to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, plac
ing before the public the concept of a religious revolu
tion which had been brewing in the minds of many of
the theologians of the day. and a number of the laymen
as well. What followed was the religious, social and
political revolution known as the Protestant Reforma
tion. which has deeply affected Western culture to the
present.
And what, you ask, is this bit of information doing
in the Emerald and not in a history text? Let me ex
plain. There is another revolution beginning in this
country. It’s being headed by students, and it covers
the whole spectrum of our society. You've heard of stu
dent power, free universities, and experimental courses;
you take advantage of pass-no-pass and course evalua
tion. But there are deeper things, and there„is.^philoso
phy behind it all.
So the Emerald is beginning to cover the revolution—
in depth. To kick off this column. I am offering an
article similar to Luther's theses, titled "Hired Educa
tion: 60 Indictments.” by NSA official Mike Vozick. who
spends his time creating experimental colleges.
My idea fo ' this column, to be printed periodically,
is to collect a hodgepodge of fact and comment focused
on educational reform. What will follow will be reports
on what's happening here and other places in experi
mental curriculum, plus articles by students and teach
ers at the University, reviews of other commentary
from books and periodicals, and maybe even a little
history. After all. the idea of student power isn't new:
the first university of the Western world, the University
of Bologna, was completely run by students.
In the article below, some of the questions are not
relev ent at the University, some are being asked now.
many others should be asked. In asking these questions,
you can tell what’s right and wrong with this school.
And you are asking, “Am I learning'.’” which is really
what it’s all about. Thus. 60 indictments:
1. Admissions: Are the right people getting in'* The
poor, the black? The other kind?
2. Advising: Are students helping each other to use
the university?
3. Orientation: Does it tell how it really is?
4. Departments: Are students asked? Are they ad
mitted to a discipline or indoctrinated into it?
5. Social Action: Does it get the breaks the govern
ment gets?
6. Buildings: Who plans them? Who has to learn in
them?
7. Community Government: Who decides? What do
students decide about their place of learning?
8. Student workers: $1.25 an hour? Ever hear of
unions?
9. Supplementary Courses: What about the things
you want to learn, and can’t?
10 Cultural Affairs Does your campus build the arts
you dig?
11. Institutional Research: Who does it? What do
they ask? What answers do they give?
12. Community Research: Is knowledge being applied
for or against the people in the city or state? The
underprivileged!?
13. Media: Are they improving in your part?
14. Public Relatiow: Arc you in the picture? Is the
picture honest?
15. Student Press: Does it ever get to the commit
nity? Is it learning to rah-rah?
16. Catalog: Who writes it? Is it English or jargon?
Is it honest?
17. Personnel anil Hiring: Are students consulted?
Who decides?
18. Classes: Can students decide how to learn to
gether? Are students encouraged to teach each other?
19. Administrators: Do they teach’’ On how the col
lege works? Do they teach truth?
20. Seminars to big lectures: Do they explore the
instructor’s bias? Do students discover the problems
of learning"
21. Parallel Structures: Are there any student-run
alternatives to ordinary' modes?
22. Independence of Freshmen: Do they get a chance
to decide what to learn"
23. Enfranchised living. Can students run dorms,
coops, learning quarters, etc." Do they?
24. Rent strikes: Look, if there are rats in the
dorms . . .
25. Co-op housing in the community: The college is
in the world; why live in seclusion unless you are pre
paring for a life of privilege"
26. Fraternity: How about a non exclusionary brother
hood in the 1960’s?
27. The world: You're going to live there, why not
learn there? Start small and move out to where life
is being lived.
28. Semesters, quarters, and stuff: Whose convenience
writes the calendar" Whose is the education anyhow"
29 W’eekends, retreats, advances: Surround the
president. Tell him how it is. Train some core to push
a little. Or learn to meet and love others.
30. Negative fees: A sliding tuition scale by family
income. No "scholarships"!
31. Problem learning: Deal with real questions, real
needs, relevancies, not disciplinary boxes.
32. Administration, again: Why don't students run
the place, or help, or learn at it?
33. Student Governments: Why are they ugly, ir
relevant, and undemocratic as hell’ What's wrong with
checks and balances instead of caricatures?
34. The Draft: How did a “grade” ever get to be a
question of victim or executioner? Why don't educators
refuse to participate in the rape of higher education?
35. Athletics: Is it possible that colleges may be
ready to outgrow the circuses?
36 Privacy: Are students intruded upon" Can it be
halted?
37. Grades, Degrees, Credits: Can they become relics
of the past?
38. Examinations Why not train for self-evaluation?
Do we need multiple choice? What do they tell about
learning?
39. Rules for Conduct: Why are they almost invari
ably hypocritical and contradicted? What does a two
faced authority teach?
40. Mediation: Why is there no neutral desk where
students, faculty and administration can improve learn
ing together?
41. Hierarchy: Why do we trust the experience of
teaching and deny any experience in learning? Teaching
doesn't ever happen unless learning does, so why don't
teachers simply talk to their students?
42 Why don't students sit in on decisions, as staff or
for credit? Is there nothing to learn there?
43. Why aren't students trained to run tomorrow’s
universities, instead of learning to promote yesterday's
disciplines?
44. Why don’t teachers teach each other how te
learn about teaching? Think they could ask the stu
dents?
45. Why are the faculty so jpalous about their few
vestiges of power? Why not share and conquer?
46. Democracy: Where is it? When will administra
tors act as they preach?
47. Self starters. Why isn’t this resource tapped1 to
teach? to start new programs?
48 Interns: Why not interns everywhere, instead, of
just pre-med? Can they challenge?
49. Summer Sessions: Why not make them experi
ments in different learning1
50 I.ohbying: Ever hear of it? For education? Got
a state capitol?
51. Co-optation—The Great Bugaboo: Want to please
Daddy? How about some self-reliance?
52. Ignorance: How about faculty and students learn
ing something together?
53. People: Why can't students be people? Why do
classrooms often have all the intimacy of municipal
busses’’ A group of somebodies going someplace, apart,
most of them not even heading where they want to
go? Why don't people meet each other while learning?
54 Professions: What about the whys and the where
fores in the midst of all the whats and the hows? And
that doesn’t mean indoctrination into today’s mores.
55. General Education: Why does it equal a general
atrocity, with departments slavering over each other
for the spoils1 How about informing students about
what there is to learn in the various disciplines? How
about answering questions instead of super high school
surveys? Why don’t students run the GE courses with
faculty as advisors?
56. The Freshman Year: Maybe it should be almost
totally unstructured, small group discussions of what
the students care about, and what and how to learn?
57. Primary or Reference Groups: Should a student
belong to an encounter group to help him check out
his own feelings while he is being educated1
58. The New: So suited as a teaching tool, why is
education afraid of being relevant?
59. Evaluation: Why not give students credit for
learning how to evaluate teaching?
60. Ghettos: Why not mine then) as funds of relevant
experience in every human discipline? Who's going to
lose?
The university is going to become a conversation
again, not a recording. Maybe only because some peo
ple tried to listen to each other Maybe only because
some people had the simple guts to ask.
Copyright October 1967 by Moderator Publishing
Company Inc. 1738 Pine St., Philadelphia, 19103; re
printed by permission of MODERATOR magazine.
Schools' Quality Denied in Speech
By Associated Press
Students aren’t getting the
educational background they
need to be effective workers in
business, a Portland business
man told a group of school prin
cipals Friday.
John Mathews, vice-president
of the OK Delivery Service of
Portland and member of the
State Advisory Council which
guides Portland's community
college programs, spoke at the
winter conference of the Ore
gon Association of Secondary
School Principals in Eugene.
$200
Up to
2 Years
To Pay
HARRY RITCHIE
i Willamette, Eugene
Schools still aren’t “produc
ing a good product,” Mathews
asserted. Industry, he said, ex
pects three things from educa
tion:
1. Students who, as workers,
are what they say they are—
not, for example, a cartoonist,
who claims to be a commercial
artist.
2. Students with a “viable
work attitude” who will go be
yond the minimum expected of
them.
3. Students “with some kind
of elementary understanding of
capital economics” who see how
they fit into the “workaday
scheme of things.”
Public education isn’t provid
ing these, he said. “We’re not
getting our money’s worth.”
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