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We’re number one, again The Gazette’s lead story this week is symbolic of the power trip little old Uniwat’s been on ever since it became little old Uniwat. Get the students first, then worry about buildings and faculty and education. The advantages of this game are many. Even before formula grants, the more students one had, the more provincial money the university automatically got. And with money and numbers come power. Why be an administrator with five people under you when you can be boss over twenty? Administration costs even grow
Committed
proportionally more t,han the enrolment. Faculty members like a growing institution because they can continue to expand their own researchand promotion. Not only that, if the institution expands fast enough, new and exciting programs can be added without cramping on anyone else’s, established style. This helps to keep the image dynamic. Such greedy aims are not the entire motivation of the university, but the Gazette’s breathless, chauvinistic (and exaggerated) boast that we might have 11,000 students tends to add credibility to bignessfor-bigness sake line of thought.
will cut classes
The proposal for a one-day moratorium from classes is a good idea. Not because it will do anything tangible to stop the war, but because it will show which side people are on. First of all, it must not be treated in the manner of national Christianity day, where administration president Howard Petch proclaims a dav off for us all to go home and pray: Rather it should be a good chance to see whether faculty and students (there’s not much hope for administration) even believe in love, peace, due process and democratic expression. Those who won’t take a day off from business as usual to discuss and refocus on the dreary issue of the Vietnam war should be exposed for what they are-selfcentered and amoral.
Once people have sat down to ,discuss what is for most a wellworn issue, it can be analysed, and lessons learned from it. People can also discuss the role Canada could play and hasn’t. After all, has anyone heard lately from the international control commission in Vietnam, of which Canada is a member. Perhaps Canada should even be sending aid to the national liberation front and North Vietnam. The main point is, however, that the war has been denounced in every way possible as inhumanbut it still goes on. It’s time the university stopped its covert and overt consent. A moratorium is only a day. But it’s a start and it should force the silent majority to show which side it’s on.
Some cops deserve credit A policeman’s lot is not a happy one. Sometimes they deserve it, sometimes in varying degrees. Uniwat’s kampus kops probably get far more criticism than they deserve. Having to enforce rules for a living, in the middle of the bureaucratic ineptitude on this campus, together with the abominablydesigned facilities-particularly roads and parking-is no easy task. There have been instances of unnecessary hassling-but what can be done when the administration complains about greasers and teenyboppers on campus, but makes no policy on how to deal with them? And what does a security director do when the vicepresident he reports to has an entirely different discipline perspective than he does? In the president’s advisory committee on student discipline and regulations (PACSuniversity DUR) ,- security director Al Romenco argued in favor of the position the committee adopted-that
the university does not have any disciplinary dealings in areas covered by the criminal code. His boss, operations vicepresident Al Adlington, a member of the same committee, argued for the archaic in loco parentis concept where the university would take the offender to the woodshed after the city cops were done with him. Romenco is not everybody’s best friend-that’s really’ asking too much from a campus police chief-but he has tried hard to follow an enlightened policy. s
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The security department’s enlightened policy will be taken backward one step today, through no fault of its own. One of Romenco’s best men, security supervisor Les Cunningham, is leaving for England. His father is not well and Cunningham hopes to return to police work back home. Better than anyone could expect . under the circumstances, Cunningham managed to put some of the enlightened policy into action while he was here.
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The expertise
myth -exposed
If facul*ty members were no longer “experts” in their chosen fields, the hierarchical, authoritarian teacher-student relationship would break down. A student’s ideas would be as valid as the professor’s, and the “academic” would revert to the role of a resource person in a free exchange of human experiences. But the faculty supposedly are experts, and the students like lambs at the feet of the shepherdapprentices in the trade of education (really training). For that’s the role universities play in the economy-instilling a certain amount of knowledge, a little more expertise and a lot more subservience into the fodder for business. But that’s also the way most faculty members want it. Being an academic has progressed from a stage of relishing free inquiry in a labor of love to being a professional expounding his expertise and demanding higher wages. While it is harder to prove in the pure sciences, the myth of academic expertise shows up in areas involving the environment. The example of expertise in english literature is developed in this issue’s centerspread. The english department is not the only collection of mystical experts-it just happens to be the field of interest of the article’s author. This is not to say that all the members of Uniwat’s english department are phony experts, for there are some, especially younger members of the department,
who decry the avoidance of dealing with the environment. The expertise game is symptomatic of the “end-of-ideology” ideology. Since the framework ‘of our society is accepted as correct and final, the problems must all exist within it. This theory, in its rhetoric anyway, sees the researcher in the university solving the society’s ills by dissecting, extrapolating and cataloging the whole thing. It confirms the professor as dispenser of knowledge in the classroom, and relegates the student to knowing his place until he acquires the necessary expertise. Another example is the irrelevant concern of the women’s bureau director of the federal department of labor (see page 8). She wants to figure a way of including the unpaid work of housewives in the gross national product. One can picture the average housewife’s reaction when she discovers, for instance, that after a three-year five-million-dollar study, the society is really 75 percent richer in theory because of her thanMess, alienating life. Proponents of the status-quo often ask “radicals” what they would put in the place of the ills in society they want to smash. Well one of the biggest problems is that the best resources to solve the ills of society are engaged in meaningless, vested-interest-serving research and it may just be necessary to smash the statusquo to put those vast resources to constructive work.
Canadian
University Press (CUP) member, Underground Syndicate (UPS) member, Liberation News Service (LNS) and Chevron international News Service (GINS) subscribers. The Chevron is published tuesdays and fridays by the publications board of the Federation of Students (inc,), University of Waterloo. Content is independent of the publications board, the student council and the university administration. Offices in the campus center, phone (519) 578-7070 or university local 3443; telex 0295-748: circulation 12,500; editor-inchief - Bob Verdun.
Whatever happened to midnight deadlines? Losing sleep over this issue: Phil Eisworthy, Tom Purdy, Andy Tamas, Alien Class who just lost a friend, Bruce Meharg, Steve izma, Jim Kiinck, Bob Epp, John Stegman, Bill Webb, dumdum jones, Rich Lloyd, David X Stephnson, Martin Noval, Nigel Burnett, Jim Dunlop, Ken Dickson, Robert Alexander C. Smith, Eleanor Hyodo, Larry Burko isn’t a myth, brave Una O’Caiiaghan, Jeff Bennett, Andre Beianger, Henry mathprof and Betsy nothing. John Munro dropped in to groove over the campus center, and one of our female reporters has been kidnapped by six jocks in short skirts and bulky sweaters. And a special hello to our friend in the hotseat-howiepetch.
friday
3 October
1969 (10.~0)
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