(
editorial
"1
To hire, or not to...
Check one of the following:
—The Housing Office is replacing the resident managers at Amazon and
Miscellaneous Housing with a professional apartment manager, equipping him
with a car and an answering service, in order to provide better service to the
tenants.
—The Housing Office is hiring the new professional manager to save
money.
—The Housing Office is hiring a professional manager whether or not the
change will mean better service or money saved.
—If the Housing Office does not hire the new professional manager (in order
to provide better service, not to save money), and retains the resident managers
at Amazon and Miscellaneous, rents there will have to be increased by six per
cent.
—The Housing Office is not hiring a professional manager.
—The Housing Office is too busy interviewing applicants for the position of
professional manager to take time off to decide whether or not they really want to
hire one.
Saying the issue is clouded understates the case. It is sometimes unclear
what the issues are. Problems of communication underlie the tenants grie
vances: they were informed of, rather than consulted about, the decision to hire
the new manager, and individual members of the Housing Office give conflicting
accounts of the motives behind the planned change in management.
(All this in spite of the fact that Married Student Housing created a position for
an assistant director for communications and managerial supervision in January.
Que pasa?)
The tenants have legitimate concerns about the proposed changes. The
new manager would replace two 30-hours-per-week managers who live at the
projects. Emergency calls received by his answering service after hours would be
referred to the student night manager at Westmoreland. Tenants would have at
their disposal for 20, rather than 30, hours per week per housing project, the
services of a manager who is not available after normal school and working
hours.
The tenants can also be justifiably concerned that their rents will be in
creased if a new manager is hired at $11,000 annually, and a car and answering
service are provided him.
It sounds like increased cost for decreased service, and a lot of contradictory
bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo to try to explain it.
Letters
Racism disillusioning
The incoherent letter by Mike Sylwester
(July 15) which begins with free ASUO
movies after a disjointed ramble descends
to the snide and male chauvinist
claim—contrary to the observations of
others—that there is prostitution in China,
seems the expression of one afraid and
insecure.
Fear and insecurity are common traits of
the racist. Afraid to accept or to try to under
stand what is new or strange, the racist
must either mock it as Sylwester does the
Chinese language or refuse to believe good
of it ("Satire” is Sylwester s term for the
cancelled lecture “Why no hunger in
China?”)
As a corollary to his lashing out in fear at
the unfamiliar, the racist clings to illusions of
security. For Sylwester one of these seems
to be his baseless faith in the superiority of
the Indo-Europeans (Sylwester's
euphemism for the Nazis' “aryans? )
Sylwester should face it. Shanghai is no
longer the brothel of the Orient—to the re
gret perhaps of GTF's “old China hand
(racist) mentality, but China, whose “ludicr
ous" language many Westerners have
mastered, continues as the focal point of an
increasing number of Western statemen,
scholars and students. Inevitably, the
grantsmanship game will reflect this in
terest. Fortunately, Peking is not disposed
to a simply formal granting of visas so that
swarms of political scientists, sociologists,
and psychologists can descend on the
Chinese people to study and analyze them
as they would so many mice or guinea pigs.
Nor has China succumbed to the tempta
tions offered by the tourist trade as, for ex
ample, Italy did shortly after World War II,
thus ruining the country for the Italians.
It is disillusioning to see Sino-Soviet dif
ferences brought to the University of
Oregon campus in such blatantly racist
terms by one who is presumably a student
of the humanities.
Guido Palandri
Library
Wonderful surprise
Open letter to Student Government:
I wanted to take this opportunity to ex
press my appreciation for the much needed
$13 50 additional increase in tuition for the
coming year What a wonderful surprise
It's good to know you are looking for ways to
dip still further into the students pocket I
guess it s your way of making food stamps
available to still more students
Kent Anderson
Liberal Arts
Run for your life
Whyizzit that buildings on this campus
which are so prone to having only men s (or
only women s) rooms—with facilities for the
opposite gender nowhere in sight—do not
then post directions to the nearest john for
women (or men)? This information should
a!!■,<*'.( >e included in building directories, if
not posted on the doors of the "wrong’’ rest
rooms
r'-*v«ng the runs" is not synonymous
with wanting to "run around," looking for a
bathroom.
J. Adnil
-—-opinion-—
Author of ‘The Making of the President’
bitter one year after Nixon’s resignation
By NICHOLAS VON HOFFMAN
WASHINGTON (KFS)—Tom Snyder has made
a large name for himself on television interviewing
the three ends of two-headed calfs and other freaks
of nature. From time to time, though, he deviates
from Believe-lt-or-Not-Ripley-type guests and puts a
non-curiosity on his NBC Tomorrow show.
The other night it was Theodore H. (“The Mak
ing of the President'’ series) White. The occasion
was the publication of Mr. White’s newest book on
the un-making of President Nixon, but for the audi
ence it was also a chance to see how a successful,
well-connected, establishmentarian journalist thinks
and looks at the part of the world he reports on. As
such he can be allowed to stand as a representative
of a number of others who once had many flattering
things to write about Mr. Nixon and now must occa
sionally wonder how they could have been so badly
had.
“There are no saints and no villains in history,’’
he says, thereby making the conventional obeisance
to upper-class notions of complexity, but for Mr.
White, Mr. Nixon is Milton’s devil in “Paradise Lost,’’
the best and the most gifted of angels who went sour.
After mentioning detente and China with ap
proval, he says, “(Nixon) got the young men out of
the draft. He did a spectacular environment program,
the best of any industrial nation in the world...you
have to understand that this man did so much good in
his years in office, and then you say to yourself, ‘How
could he be so stupid, so cheap, so mean...so feroci
ous, so cruel?’...I will do my best to understand, but
there are certain things which are unforgivable ”
To White the men President Nixon chose to
surround himself with are “real, swinish brutes and
“hustlers” rotten with “squirming ambition.”
This is the kind of language that those who op
posed Nixon when he was in office used but would
probably qualify now. Yet here is White, a man in
such good favor in the time of the Nixon White House
that he could get a private interview with the Presi
dent, saying yes sir, there are too villains and none
more wicked than this fallen angel.
White is so angry because he takes it so per
sonally. Can you conceive of the most unregenerate
anti-Nixon leftist saying: “What I hold against
Richard Nixon is he almost shattered my confidence
in our country's ability to run itself...I was disap
pointed in Johnson (but) disappointed, deceived and
hurt by Richard Nixon.”
Blurting something like that out transcends the
embarrassment of looking like a jackass because
one once wrote complimentary sentences about
Nixon. This comes closer to a child's lashing out at
being told Santa Claus is a guy on Macy's payroll.
White has been doing his reporting of Presidents with
the critical eye of a Peruvian monk freshly come to
Rome to look on the face of his Pope:
“The people anoint and elect the President. The
people express the will of God, (if) such there be. And
thus, the President, whether he knows it or not, is a
high priestly figure, he is a sacerdotal
figure...Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt were really
ennobled by the off ice... Men went to die because
Lincoln said they must and because Franklin
Roosevelt said they must.”
The grandeur and the brilliance of the office is so
great that White says he is mentally incapacitated
when in the same room with a President: “I've been
in the White House, in and out, now under five Presi
dents, and I’m always scared when I speak to a
President. Some people go in there and they freeze
up and they forget what they're going to ask the
President...! always have had that sense of awe, so
that normally, if I do want to speak to a President, I
will send a note in advance saying, ‘I want to talk to
you about this and this and this .”
There must be tourists waiting in line with their
Kodaks who re in better emotional shape to observe
what's going on in the Presidential Mansion than the
ga-ga White: “The White House is an eerie place. It's
so quiet and it's so hushed and it's so
beautiful...There are buttons there that run every
where. They can drop bombs or build hospitals or
whatever you want."
White wants to worship. As he says: “I suffer
incumbentitis.J'm not going to be a spitbal! jour
nalist." He also says: “We have a larger percentage
of decent politicians in this country than in any other
I’ve covered, and I respect most politicians (but)
when I find a crook, I’ll burn him. When I find a liar, I’ll
call him a liar."
With the eyes through which White sees, one
wonders how he will ever catch a crook or discern a
liar. By his own description, he is not the most sus
picious of men, but crook catching isn't the primary
business of journalists.
Their primary business is, regardless of their
ideology, understanding the world intelligently
enough to be able to distinguish what might conceiv
ably be thought of as news from official diapasons of
glory. White couldn't, nor did most of the other re
nowned names in journalism and, while you might
say that the last time out the crooks were caught, it
wasn't by journalists but by police reporters, and that
may be why the people in our business are the first to
know and the last to understand.
Copyright, 1975, The Washington Post-King Fea
tures Syndicate