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Show have the privilege of speaking out and having something to do with setting up the courses and how the courses are taught, and having something to do with evaluating teachers, so that we know the kind of teachers we have. I feel very strongly about this. I'm glad to see our department moving in this direction. Dr. Adamson: Well. I would hooe. Brig, that you wouldn't go so far as to condone violence to the point where freedom then becomes a victim of the radicals. Dr. Madsen: No, I would not, Jack. Dr. Dodd: I guess I might have to be the radical of the bunch. I don't know. I probably agree with you for the most part but I think that there may be occasions on which it becomes necessary to take extra legal action in order to have some effect. It turns out that that's what the administration seems to respond to. I mean that's what our whole society responds to; students can be involved in committees and no one pays any attention to them. That happens, or else they make their complaints and are simply ignored; they have reached the point which they have to do something- simply to get attention and we seem to reinforce that sort of thing. This is what happened with the blacks, and it's what's happened with the students. It's unfortunate we can't respond before that point is reached but that seems to be the way social systems operate. Dr. Adamson: What Dr. Dodd is saying is, I suppose, that there comes a point which frustration is so intense that violence is the only way it has out, and I suppose that if that's so, that all one can do is regret the whole situation. But when you come to a point that students stand outside classrooms and throw bricks through windows where girls are sitting who have not done anything to them, it just seems to me, that this is violence beyond what most of us can condone. If it goes to the point that "then I think we've lost the whole show and we may as well become counter violent." then they prescirbe who shall lecture and what they shall lecture on, then I think we've lost the whole show and we may as well become counter violent. I don't know what else to do. Dr. Dodd: Well, I'm not being that radical, and I'm not saying I approve of that sort of thing. I'm just saying there are times at which it takes a little more than being students who meekly send a petition to the president. .. Mrs. Williams: Ideally there just must be an interchange, and this is ideally, but the faculty and the administration has to be ready to respond. I think that our students come with a certain worldliness that perhaps students haven't had in the past due to their exposure to the media and everything that is going on. They deserve to be listened to because they do have ideas and experiences and I think that we have to respond to this. It's unfortuante that we haven't, again, it's unfortunate... UTONIAN: Another type of student action concerns constructive extracurricular and community activity. Do you feel this is an important part of a university education? Dr. Madsen: I kind of like the program of Antioch College and some other colleges. The student goes through the sophomore year, and "students just get tired of school somewhere during the middle of the college ca- reer. takes the junior year off to work in government, business, in many ways, and them comes back for the senior year and then majors in the subject in which he's been working. It seems to me the students just get tired of school somewhere during the middle of the college career. They've just had enough of it. We've put so much pressure on grades and the competition is so stiff, that I have a lot of students who just want to get out of it and just get away from it. If it weren't for Vietnam there'd be more of them, but they stay because they don't want to be drafted. It seems to me if we could work out, if even it weren't a whole year, if it were half a year or something--in which they'd have this experience, and then come back, it would be a refreshing thing for them. It would meet some of the complaints of our business people that we don't prepare them so that they are realistic and practical. Let them go see what the world is like then let them come back and spend their five or six years which many of them spend in graduate school and so on. Dr. Dodd: I was recently, last week, in Washington for some NSF meetings that had to do with undergraduate education and so on. There are several things that came out of that. One of them is that the California Institute of Technology had the Student Union, or the Associated Students or whatever they call it, essentially submit a completely student devised, student run proposal for funds to support a number of different research projects having to do with departmental problems. They were awarded enough money to support six or eight different projects during a summer. The director of NSF also essentially argued that every student in a science should have some kind of direct research experience, and by that he doesn't mean that every chemistry student is in the lab just doing conventional mixing chemicals together, but that they ought to get out for instance and test the rivers and see what's going on there, you know, or that every biology student ought to perhaps have his own little area in which he studies the entire ecology of a particular section. It might be the floor of his room; it might be his own desk; there are all kinds of little organisms that he doesn't know about. That seems like an interesting concept to me, too, that every student ought to be involved directly in experiencing with research that which has some bearing on what's going on in the world. 315 |