-Editorial —-——
A chance to get together
The ASUO Senate must soon deal with
the hot-potato question of its own abolition.
The body has ceased to be a viable student
legislative assembly and should be
replaced as soon as possible with
something more workable.
It is entirely possible the general
faculty meeting will deal with a similar
question sometime in the near future.
Faculty meetings are viewed with sacred
cow respect at the University. Ideally all
faculty members have their say in
University governance through regular
monthly meetings.
Analogies between ASUO Senate and
monthly faculty meetings are difficult. But
both bodies, despite their different design
and purpose, are losing credibility for
similar reasons.
Attendance at faculty meetings has
been dropping steadily. The bulk of
legislative work is done by the Faculty
Senate, a more exclusive and definitely
more manageable institution.
The ASUO Senate has also lost
credibility as its membership has become
concerned more with image than sub
stance. The real work of the ASUO is done
by a few senators.
It would be easy for both faculty and
students to work independently at creating
new representative institutions.
In fact remarks at Wednesday’s
Faculty Senate meeting indicated changes
from that direction will involve little or no
student input.
And efforts to revise the ASUO Senate
have not as yet addressed the issue of
combined student-faculty representation.
The Emerald feels current
dissatisfaction with representative in
stitutions presents an ideal chance for
students and faculty to get together.
Why shouldn’t University governance
be a shared student-faculty function?
Why not replace faculty meetings, the
Faculty Senate and the ASUO Senate with
a University Senate?
If such a metamorphosis is going to
occur it should occur now when all factions
seem to be dissatisfied with the status quo.
»
Letters
High Prices
It’s too bad that an “old-fashioned” play
like Oklahoma doesn’t have the same kind
of admission fee. Perhaps it’s because I’m
from the state of Washington that I have
never seen or paid such outrageous
charges.
I was always under the assumption that
when the University sponsored a play, it
was for the students first. Apparently, this
is a misconception.
I know few students who can shell-out
$2.50 and $3.50 for a ticket to anything. I
can only hope the Eugene community will
support the production because most of the
students that are going are in it.
Jack E. Thomas
Fair Compromise
Bravo for Bill Wyatt and whoever else'
may be responsible for the S.B. 47
amendment proposal. I, for one, have no
awareness of why all students should have
to patronize our excellent athletes. The
spectator sports folks who like to watch
them should be doing that.
I’d rather see more of the budget helping
support nurseries for the children of needy
students. Or maybe more free movies and
concerts. Another nice idea might be to
give some of the money back to students
when they voted, so every student would
have a chance to say how some of it gets
spent.
$900,000 will pay for a lot of trips, if we’re
careful we could do almost anything. If the
amendment is in fact enacted, it really will
be interesting to see if we can handle all
that power. Will we discover we are in fact
the “Diversity” of Oregon?
Whatever each of us may be into, I only
hope we possess the wisdom and tolerance
to want a fair compromise more than
anything else.
Gregory G. Howard
Geography
Leave precision
Thanks to the Emerald for that rarity of
rarities, a literate review: I refer to
Regina O’Neil on Molly Bloom, the
Joycean soliloquy adapted by Randi
Douglas into a one-act play, and per
formed at Scarborough Faire. O’Neil
clearly has read Ulysses, whence cometh
Molly, plus Wm. James and I don’t know
who-all else on the subjects of con
sciousness and literature.
Bid therein lies her weakness: so great
is O’Neil’s love and respect for Joyce’s
novel that despite Randi’s virtuoso acting,
despite the tightness of the production,
despite the clear-cut enjoyment of the play
by the audience—despite all these, she
presumes to criticize Randi’s adaptation
on the preposterous grounds that it is not,
in fact, Ulysses itself.
O’Neil might better have compared
Molly with Joyce’s sole extant play,
Exiles. Exiles was a flop in every sense
dull, unplayable, boring even as literature.
To Joyce, the failure of Exiles was a
blow—and his belief that the dramatic is
the highest form of literature, besting the
forms “lyric” and “epic”, makes clear
that while he respected drama, he knew
not how to produce it.
What Joyce needed was an editor, as
Randi Douglas has remarked, someone to
focus Joyce’s encyclopedic energies, to
impose what O’Neil calls “temporal
coherence, a reasonable sequence” on the
chaos of Ulysses.
I am, then, making the preposterous
claim that Randi’s adaptation does not
narrow, but rather focusses, the energy of
Ulysses, which is after all, a simple comic'
piece, whatever its epic pretensions. For
me, Molly is larger than Ulysses, in that it
heightens the drama that Joyce felt,
wanted, sweated after, but failed to
produce. Ulysses is about as dramatic as a
biology book—in fact, Ulysses is a biology
book. Molly is a PLAY: dramatic, human,
actable. The problem is more challenging.
O’Neil hits her peak in describing Randi
the actress, and in comprehending that
Joyce’s Ulysses cannot have been other
than a man’s view of woman. She ought to
have further grasped that to stage the
soliloquy as Joyce wrote it would have
been as foolish as to film Lady Sings the
Blues complete with three husbands,
dubbed-on soundtrack, the narks at Billie’s
deathbed ... let us leave precision to
Volkswagen and Xerox, dramatic adap
tation to Randi Douglas.
Eric Park
GTF, English
More than duty
Some people think that they have to
criticize the actions of the Nixon Ad
ministration simply on basis of their
presumption that “that man can not do
anything good anyway.’ I hope, that your
editor does not belong to that category.
Although I also had very serious doubts
about some of the actions of this ad
ministration with regard to a settlement of
the conflict in South East Asia, I thank God
that at least an end did come to the war in
Vietnam. Now, after the cease-fire
agreement has been signed, it is not more
than the administration’s duty toward the
families of the POW’s, MIA’s and deaths
to get all the information possible about
their fate.
You agree.
We also agree that there is no reason to
believe that Hanoi is deliberately holding
back its lists. For me this does not mean
though that the Pentagon just has to ‘wait
and see’ what is going to happen. For there
is also no reason to believe that Hanoi does
not make mistakes like the Pentagon did.
Also, your editor could know that efforts to
get a full accounting of the POW’s, MIA’s
and deaths are given on a low diplomatic
level just in order to prevent, I assume,
that they can be considered an ‘emotional
attack’. Or did the national press inform
me wrong?
Albert Wesselink
555 E. 14th apt. 1
Eugene, Oregon 97401
Misconceptions
The misconceptions of the “middle-aged
Portland housewife” concerning the Equal
Rights Amendment (as reported in the
Emerald today) are unfortunately all too
widespread. Perhaps some replies will set
the record straight:
1. The ERA will of course make women
■III. II. ———-—J
equally eligible for the draft. But if I had
an 18 year old son (which I don’t) I
wouldn’t want him to be drafted and “sent
into combat to run the risk of mutilation
and capture” any more than I want my
daughters (which I do have) to be drafted.
(Assuming the draft will even be revived
in the future.)
2. The ERA will have no effect mi
women’s—or men’s—right to privacy. It
specifies “equality” erf treatment, not
“identity.” And while separate schools for
blacks and whites were held to be
inherently unequal as expressing a notion
of superior-inferior races, no one is
seriously suggesting that the separation of
bathrooms for men and women has such
sociological implications.
3. The ERA will not turn sex criminals
loose on the public—rather it will extend to
men the same protection rape laws now
supposedly give women.
4. Neither will the ERA strip women of
protective labor legislation. Rather it will
force legislatures to decide that if working
conditions are to be safe and healthy, they
are to be safe and healthy for all em
ployees, not just a “favored” class.
5. The ERA will not destroy a husband’s
obligation to support his family. As a
matter of fact it will have no effect in this
area on Oregon law, under which already
both husband and wife are jointly
responsible for support and care of their
family. (Oregon Revised Statutes 106.040)
Hopefully this will help to do away with
some of the more prevalent “horror
stories” circulating about the Equal
Rights Amendment.
Gretchen Morris
3rd year, Law
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'I LIKED IT BETTER WHEN WE COULD SIT AT HOME AND CRITICIZE THE BUNGLING AMERICANS!'