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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 20, 1972)
Commentary Peter Jensen Anonymity and LINT Boy, you kids (an intentionally in sulting word from the arsenal of so-called adults) at the Emerald really don't care much for my safety! Get it together and think about this. You allowed yourselves editorial anonymity when you wrote about LINT harassing AUGUR photographers, and you actually dare to come out for absolute freedom of the press! Very heavy, but when I turned in an answering editorial from the AUGUR collective giving our position onf LINT and hard drugs, you have to sign my name, even though the copy was signed “the AUGUR collective.” This is plain dumb and reactionary! First, it makes me believe that you do not yet dig what a serious collective is—you still believe in individuals and are willing to endanger them, not understanding that individuals gain their identity by working collectively and need collectives to protect them. Human beings are only flesh and bones—they are getting squashed by the thousands every day. If you do not really believe in collectives, then, I’m thinking, do you believe in communities? And let’s not play freedom of the press games without the intention of victory. Don’t you believe in the reality of undercover agents, secret police, phone tapping, secret Grand Juries, secret indictments, prisons, the holes in prisons, and brutality and murder inside prisons? When you add my name to something I only rewrote, you expose me to all the real enemies of freedom of the press. Which leads into my second point—I have not been working with People Into Sabotaging Surveillance (P.I.S.S) in the past, so I’m very angry that you assume I speak for them or for the AUGUR. This is the first time I’ve rewritten their ideas—so I was only doing sh-tw-rk, putting a little kick into the style and carrying the news to the Emerald. People Into Sabotaging Surveillance are everywhere on campus and in the community—I don’t know who they are, and they do their work by con tacting the AUGUR office at 115 E. 11th, Room 207, Tel. 343-3613. I’m especially worried that this use of my name will lead to a very familiar media misrepresen tation—the leadership syndrome. Two years ago I was involved with SDS and the RAT Troupe guerrilla theater, and I asked the Emerald to stop printing my picture, because their extra heavy coverage was misrepresenting me. I know that ROTC and the DA and Gov. McCall believe in leadership theories because they work in such elitist, chauvanist, militarized in stitutions. They give orders and dictate, so they assume that grass roots struggles have to do the same. (Obviously, some movement people have been flattered by such attention in the past, not seeing that this leadership theory is simply a set-up for a bust.) I was falsely busted for felony riot along with 13 others in April 1970, I believe, simply because I was on a “must bust” leadership list. A cop saw someone blond attempting arson at night and said, “O, it must be him.” So I personally have felt the results of this bad media treatment and phoney police-kind of analysis. On top of that. I’ve been finding out that everyone is a “leader." Actually, collective living forced me to trash the whole leader follower American idea and find my way through to other people and myself. Please take this criticism into your lives, because it comes from a brother. 1 need you and you need me and we are forever. And don’t forget to consider the AUGUR's contention that grass busts by LINT bring hard drugs into town even faster than any syndicate can. Whatever its intentions, and even if the behavior of most of its undercover agents is legal, LINT is part of the problem. The solution to drug abuse lies within the reach of all our love. Alfred Ruhin Tutorial question raises problems Proposals for tutorial-type instruction or other arrangements for closer student faculty contact raise many problems that might cloud the expectations of those hoping for the sort of communication that grows out of the tutorial system in Oxford and Cambridge. First, in the English system the tutors (they are called “supervisors” in Cambridge, “tutors”in Oxford) are frequently graduate students just as much of the first and second year teaching load here rests on graduate students. The eminent people on the faculty have little time for students other than their large section lectures and a handful of graduate students or seminar sections in their specialties, just as is now the case here. Tutorials are frequently not on a one to-one basis, but in groups of three or four students in the elementary courses. Students are routinely required to write a thousand word essay each week for each of five tutors. The essay forms the basis for f discussion each week in each tutorial session. It has been found over the years (indeed, over the centuries) that unless the students are required to come to a teacher with some substantial evidence that he is prepared to discuss an assigned topic, he comes with nothing and the conversation either languishes to silence or becomes a lecture unsatisfactory to both the student and the teacher. Finally, the tutor, while he may create disciplinary problems for unprepared students and must report in a sentence or two on his impression of each of his students, has no responsibility for students’ grades, which are determined entirely on the basis of a set of com prehensive examinations at the end of each year. The informal friendliness made possible by the tutor’s not having responsibility for grading his students is bought by having the student subjected to a vicious examination system. In sum, those students who are already eager to do work on their own, who can withstand an examination system that does not permit any leniency, and who are willing to engage in the give and take of focused discussion with somebody farther ahead than they in their education profit greatly from the English tutorial system. Those tutors who enjoy direct contact with good students who are able to admit oc cational ignorance or misapprehensions on their own side, and who are strong enough to guide the discussion away from the seductive pattern of the less-than prepared student merely questioning the teacher about things the student should find out for himself, also enjoy the system. Lacking any of these factors the system fails. A further factor of special significance in Oregon is the ample library facilities that the Oxford and Cambridge Colleges (which are rather like dormitories) have. Undergraduate education in those in stitutions does not involve much use of the University library. I have some doubt that the library system at the University of Oregon could support more than a very few students writing a paper on a single topic at one time. At Cambridge, for example, in my day there were about eight thousand undergraduates divided into sixteen “Colleges”. Each college had a library adequate for normal un dergraduate needs. At Oregon, with about double the number of students, to be able to give similar service there would have to be at least thirty-two copies in the library of each book an undergraduate might be expected normally to need. Without adequate institutional support of that kind tutors would have to accept pleas in mitigation of the normal consequences of being unprepared and the tutorial system would soon prove disillusioning to all. Alfred P. Rubin Professor of I,aw Supervisor in International Law atCambnuge. i95a-1960. I AS A COLD-BLOODED MULTIPLE-RAPIST-MURDERER I WOULD LIKE TO VOICE MY STRONG OPPOSITION TO THE DEATH PENALTY . .
