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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 8, 1973)
Spiro would be proud' AD rhetoric is no Commentary- 1 11 ■ ■ substitute for the facts By DARRELL MURRAY On Oct. 3 the Emerald printed a commentary by Sean O’Halloran dealing with the current issue of athletic department funding. If this issue were to be decided by who could be more convincingly “cute,” I am sure that Mr.- O’Halloran would overawe his opponents substantially. However, for one that protests a lack of logic, numbers and facts Mr. O’Halloran seems to be quftte the rhetoritician. Spiro would be proud. As you may gather I do not fully agree with the wholesale chastisement Mr. O’Halloran deems befitting the “Quasi-Quacker Backers.’’ I have* a number of reasons. First, I think it is very interesting that Mr. O’Halbran, a law student, should be the one to carry the flag for the status quo simply because law students (who registered in August) had first crack at making the purchase of athletic tickets. There remained in the neighborhood of 3600 tickets after the law school registration (a depletion of approximately 400). If you take the number of tickets sold and divide that by the number of law students you will come out with a figure of roughly 80 percent of the law students purchasing tickets. Compare that percentage with the percentage available to the student body as a whole (somewhere near 20-25 percent) and a somewhat striking inequity becomes apparent. One must wonder how Mr. O'Halloran would feel if he had paid his $10 per year in incidental fees for AD support only to find that he was unable to purchase an athletic ticket, thus forfeiting the “right” to see the Harter Miracle in person. Secondly, Mr. O’Halloran’s com parison of the Day Care and OSPIRG budgets with that of the AD is patently absurd. When ASUO negotiates the budget proposal for the AD it plays only a limited role in the ultimate decision making process (as witness the overriding of the IFC veto by President Clark last spring) even though it is entirely student money (the $150,000). The students, in other words, had no choice but to increase their gift to the AD. To me this carries with it the stench of the Newberry amendment and rule by dictatorship. I would feel the same way about any program which was force-fed down the throat of the ASUO and I feel that there is indeed legitimate (granted, it is controversial) grounds for complaint. Day Care, on the other hand (as well as OSPIRG) is a program over which the ASUO carries the complete right to fund or not fund. To me the two methods of decision making are as different as day and night and I certainly prefer self determination. I would certainly hope that a future part of the American legal system would be perceptive enough to see the distinciton. It is apparent that the U.S. has enough John Mitchells already. Another thing kind of strikes me as something less than rational about the comparison of Day Care, OSPIRG and AD funding. Mr. O’Halloran typifies a frame of mind common to many capitalistic, power conscious Americans in his statement; “In cidentally speaking, as it were, out of the total annual fee less than $10 a year goes to the athletic dept.” “Incidentally speaking” he says with a somewhat arrogant tone. What the hell is so damned incidental about 16.8 percent of the entire ASUO budget? Mr. O’Halloran’s commentary often reads like senate testimony on the defense budget. Talk about a bureaucratic attitude toward spending the taxpayers money! And we haven’t even talked about the $92,000 put out for cards! And whatever happened to the govern mental breakthrough of priority systems. How can it be said that 16.8 percent of the budget is incidental when well over 50 percent of the students had a rough time finding a place to live this year when they came to Eugene due to a housing shortage which ASUO cannot or will not try to alleviate. How can it be said that AD funding is on (in contestable ground when the entire mental health of even one child’s life'fs at stake, 90 kids notwithstanding. I always thought that basic necessities came before luxuries and that the best way to make any organization of people produce the largest amount of freedom and happiness (as well as tangible goods) was to give and take. I always thought it was better to give up a little of the extra I had to someone who needed it on the presumption that they would do the same for me if the situation were reversed. It’s a simple formula but I think a little more of it would do wonders for human relations in general. Basketball, football and the lot are a luxury. As such,they are always subject to legitimate criticism whether you or I agree with the criticism or not. When we forget such arrangements of compatability, our social cohesiveness begins to break down and we become alienated from the state and each other. Is it really good to reinforce the authoritarian method of funding the AD by continuously submitting without stern examination? I think not, regardless of the eventual outcome. Even the vague, most misinformed public criticism is a start on something that can, with time, become a very articulate and useful critical tool. We should not discard such tools. I do not want to give the impression that I am down on UO athletics. I am not. I’ve been a staunch Duck fan (out in the rain with the best of them) since I watched Bob Berry, Mel Renfro, Lou Bain, and Larry Hill walk all over Stanford in Portland (age 7). I struggled through 9 years without the taste of leaver blood and became an even stronger Feather advocate. I am not one to exclude the fact that the athletic department does bring money to the university in either direct or indirect forms. I don’t forget that athletics at this point is an important plus in terms of public relations for the university. But I do demand that we always examine the effects of any program ASUO subsidizes. Some of the perverted pressure applied by wealthy alumns on the administration are causes for the distortion of purpose in an educational institution. If student scrutiny could put an end to such legal corruption, wouldn’t it be worth it? I think we have that ability and should use it “by rights.” Let us stop talking of nebulous and irrational terms such as “school pride” and “school prestige.” Let’s get back to the basics and shore up that end first. Then and only then will we be able to legitimately claim that! $150,000 is only incidental and need not be contested. Note: Darrell Murray is a junior in political science. On the riqht: Buchanan's contribution By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR. For years now it has been accepted that Robert Welch’s sudden and startling ac cusation—“Have you no sense of decency, sir”—of Senator Joe McCarthy turned the situation around to the senator’s psychological disadvantage. In due course it will be recognized, I should think, that what Welch did to the McCarthy in vestigation, Patrick Buchanan did to the Watergate investigation. Suddenly a perspective was restored, and it is questionable whether ever again Senator Ervin can with quite the old confidence engage in the old moralistic drolleries, comparing his mission with that of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed it is altogether possible that Senator Weicker will not be awestruck again perhaps for a month. Everyone recognizes the singular poise of Patrick Buchanan, and his enormous forensic ingenuity. In the last analysis the so’s-your-old-man argument isn’t, in a relativist universe, irrelevant. It is true that evil is evil irrespective of the universality of its practice, or of its in dulgence. But as Mr. Buchanan pain stakingly insisted, the line between that which is unethical and that which brushes up against it is elusive, and the best way for archeological explorers to situate it is precisely by asking what are the norms a culture has settled upon. If there is a disparity between these norms and those that commend themselves under the aspect of the heavens, why that is the responsibility of the lords spiritual of America to discourse upon. Not Buchanan, not Ervin, not even Weicker. I do not suggest that these are men indifferent to eternal norms, merely that those in search of them do not naturally look to them for guidance as, say, one might look to Father John Courtnay Murray, or Harvey Con, or, well me. That’ then, was the burden of Buchanan’s points. But first he had to dispel some of the superstitious accretions that had formed around the Watergate investigation. Among them is the perverse notion that Nixon’s dirty tricksters cheated Muskie out of the nomination, or secured it for McGovern. This he did easily. The New York Times, in high hysteria over the devastating per formance of Buchanan, excreted an editorial called “Anatomy of a Smear,” in which they denounced Mr. Buchanan’s “contemptible diversionary tactics.” The reference was to his saying that the foundations in this country are, for the most part, left-minded, and tend to favor left-minded people and enterprises. Buchanan then named the Ford Foun dation, its support for the Institute for Policy Studies, and the IPS’s support of an underground-type radical paper called the Quicksilver Times. Well, it transpires that the Ford Foundation only gave a few thousand dollars to IPS, back in 1964, and that IPS hasn’t given any money to Quicksilver Times. But the Times’ indignation over the use by Buchanan of this “diversionary tactic’’ is substantially dissipated by what happened. Buchanan was called with little if any notice. And he was not even aware that the Committee had got hold of a memorandum he had written three and one half years ago about the “imbalance in resources with regard to the foundations.” Buchanan, then, didn’t bring up the foundations—the Committee did. And Buchanan had to rely on his memory. It was not all that fallible. A recent issue of the Washingtonian magazine in fact reported that IPS had helped the “Quicksilver Times.” And the Ford Foundation’s political liberalism is about as inconspicuous as Sally Rand’s fan. Buchanan did not fail to make the necessary qualifications, namely that some of the Nixon people committed bare crimes, and for these some of them have already gone to jail, and others un doubtedly will go to jail. What he did was to shake up the cozy little tribune of the people whose mandate to investigate and come up with proposed reforms had become so thoroughly diluted by nar cissism and meandering moralistic soliloquies that the mind boggled over the diffuseness of it all. There is nothing like a hard-liner to call attention to all that dopey, mephitic irrelevance. Buchanan did that, and did it brilliantly. 'DID YOU KNOW THAT IN 1970-71 I PAID THE SAMI AMOUNT IN TAXIS AS THE PRESIDENT?'
