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SUMMER NEBRASKAN
TUESDAY, JULY 22, 1969
On chancellor search
On the Howell stage . .
The Summer Nebraskan pre
dicts that the next chancellor will
be someone over 30. But that does
not mean students will not be able
to trust this person.
The three student representa
tives, one from each campus in
Lincoln, in Omaha and the medi
cal school give the students a
voice at meetings of the Chancel
lor's Search Committee.
Those students who have an
opinion on what kind of person
would make a good chancellor and
those who make their opinions
known will be heard.
Here, John Moseman, the stu
dent representing the two Lincoln
campuses, reports on the activities
of the search committee.
Another student, John Dvorak,
outlines some of the problems
which will be facing the new
chancellor when he assumes the
position.
Az report
earch group discusses
list of possible candidates
By John Moseman
- Since the initial meeting with the Board of
" Regents on June 23, the Chancellor Search Com.
mittee has had one meeting on July 8 at
Omaha.
It is my feeling that the July 8th meeting
was profitable in the sense that the committee
reviewed and discussed a lengthy list of pro
spective candidates. On this list there were sug
gestions from nearly every committee mem
v ber.
The names which have been submitted for
review thus far include Individuals from within
the University community, but the majority of
suggestions are men from outside this state.
It is impossible for me to disclose particular
names, since the committee's ability to function
successfully depends in part on confidentiality.
The committee has also been concerned with
discussing various criteria and abilities which
will, be needed in a chancellor.
The committee feels that a chancellor must
be administratively competent to deal with such
things as budgetary matters and with the ad
ministrative scaffs of the campus. Also, the
qualifications for chancellor must include com
municative abilities with faculty (including the
area of academic freedom), and with the student
body (in areas such as black student feelings).
The chancellor also must possess a sense
A student's view . . .
. of positive, progressive direction for furthering
University expansion, and he must be able to
relay this sense of direction to the University
community.
These qualifications and criteria are
generalized. Yet in evaluating the various can
didates, the committee relates these concepts
to the particular individual. Each candidate will
be discussed on the basis of his personality
(sincerity, genuiness, rationality, etc.) and on
the basis of his past performance in,his field.
The committee is open to any suggestions.
The search is not limited to geography, nor
to fields of work inside an academic, setting.
As the student representative from Lincoln,
I am writing to the National Student Association
for suggestions, and I have submitted a list
of candidates which was compiled at another
university for a similar search. 1 am also writing
to three individuals in government and founda
tion work, who, hopefully, will supply names.
It is necessary, though, that I have suggestions
from the Lincoln students. Although students
generally do not have contacts with prospective
chancellor candidates, I believe that the students
should verbalize their views regarding the
qualifications, ability and philosophy of an ac
ceptable chancellor.
I ask that students contact me if they have
either names or ideas concerning the chancellor.
Super chancellor is needed
for handling NU problems
by John Dvorak
The University's new chancellor had better
be a remarkable man. In fact, he ought to
be superhuman.
He won't have to worry about being
physically accosted in his office for the time
being. But in some ways NU's problems are
enough to defeat even the finest of educators.
Even before the new chancellor can move
into his mansion in the Knolls, he will discover
that he is faced with an unparalleled and almost
Inoperable administrative bureaucracy.
He will have to deal with about 61 different
levels, all doing their best to block decision
making. Interwoven in the bureaucracy are the
famous and well talked about committees for
which NU is so famous.
The new chancellor must try to manage
hundreds of so-called administrators on each
of the three campuses from the Supervisors
for Water Fountains on the Omaha campus to
the Director of Tractor Research on the Ag
Campus.
Personalities
Worse yet will be the personalities.
The new chancellor will enjoy working with
some reliable and sound administrators people
like JocSoshnik and Peter Magrath.
But then he will encounter other ad
ministrators people in the highest of places
at one campus or another who don't understand
what is happening, never did, never will and
don't try. And what will he do with the deans
and administrators who are so far out of touch
with reality that they don't know SDS from
ROTC?
Then the new chancellor will have to play
politics politics of the crummiest and most
amateurish kind.
He will learn that the University is only
a rubber ball to be bounced between the noses
of petty Nebraska politlcans. Trying to get a
budget through the Unicameral Is worse than
guiding the income tax surcharge through Con
gress. The new chancellor must deal with 49
different legislators who fancy themselves as
some kind of educators.
Flowery phrases
Of course the new chancellor will drown
In ti'e flowery phrases about the merger of
Omaha University and NU.
Then he will discover that the merger was
Eobably the biggest political ploy in Nebraska
story. Omaha panned off their nearly bankrupt
school on all the taxpayers of the state under
the guise of improving higher education.
The new chancellor will learn that in reality
the Omaha campus goes its own sweet merry
way no matter how haphazardly, no matter how
poorly planned, no matter how stupidly. But
there is nothing stupid about the millions and
millions of dollars it sucks from the state coffers.
The new chancellor will soon see that Omaha
and only Omaha benefits from (he merger. They
will accept guidance or orders from no one.
If the new chancellor doesn't watch out, he
will soon be living In Omaha, not In, Lincoln.
Don't forget that the new chancellor must
deal with members of the Board of Regent's
who would rather hide under their desks than
come out and meet the students, faculty and
other citizens.
Be patient
The new chancellor will probably wonder
why the Board of Regents made this or that
decision. He may never find out. Few ever do.
;J The new chancellor had better be patient
T . or he will have to deal with Regents who want
to do well but don't, Regents who want to keep
the University shackled to the middle ages,
Regents who talk out of all four sides of their
mouths and Regents who just don't give a damn.
What, oh what will the new chancellor do
with Terry Carpenter?
He will wonder what makes Terrible Terry
click, but no one knows. The new chancellor
had better be prepared for a lot of scathing,
back-knifing, ambiguous, unintelligible bull from
the Scottsbluff senator, who seems to think he
knows something about universities.
Unfortunately the new chancellor will find
that he has the least time for his most important
duty the students.
Without the thousands of students paying
tuition and fees, the politicians would be unable
to play their little games and the administrators
would have no power.
For 100 years the students paid their money
and closed their mouths. And then last year
a handful of black students finally had the gut's
to do something about a couple of the hundreds
of student-related problems on campus.
They could have taken over the administra
tion building, but Chey settled for far less. This
fall could be different. Perhaps a few hundred
white students will forget beer and girls for
a while and do something too.
Student problems
The new chancellor will be faced with every
conceivable type of student problem.
Segregated dormitories operating on 1948
standards. The rape of student automobile
operators who pay a week's salary each semester
for a parking place halfway across town. The
football ticket scandal, where the students who
are supposed to be the essence of the game
are seated on the four-yard line and the end
zone corners. The sly hiking of tuition and fee
without prior warning while students are away
for the summer.
More Importantly there is the outmoded eir
rlculum. which should be burned.
The new chancellor will have to deal with
the mammoth lecture sections that turn off
freshmen and sophomores, perhaps cooling them
on college forever. He should deal with pro.
fessors who would rather do research than learn
the name of a student. What about the up
perclassmen and graduate students who are
teaching classes for a pittance?
The new chancellor ought to do something
about the long-time adage that professors must
write a million words of nothing for this journal
or that review if they want to be promoted.
It would be nice If the new chancellor could
really promote some educational experiments
like pass-fall.
Watch out
The new chancellor probably won't face any
mass student unrest for a while. But watch
out.
If the new chancellor is a doer and sl.ows
Initiative and concern for the students, he will
succeed. In fact' he is in a position to become
a great man. Otherwise, he will be existing
on borrowed time.
Worst of all. the above difficulties are only
a fraction of the problems that the new chan
cellor must face. Space precludes mentioning
more of them. Lack of knowledge precludes
mentioning all of them.
Oh somewhere, someplace, there must be
a Super-Chancellor. Where are you Mr. Super
Chancellor? We need you.
Half of twin-bill succeeds
by Kenneth Pellow
Instructor in English
Admittedly, the middle of its season is a
strange time to be reviewing a play; owing,
however, to many circumstances better forgot
ten, I was not able to see anything in this
summer's repertory season at University Theatre
until this last weekend.
The production in question is the two-part
entertainment being billed as "An Evening of
Comedy," and consisting of two plays written
by Joe Baldwin of the University's Department
of Speech and Theatre: The Chekhov List a
one-act play, and The House Within the House
Within, which is in two acts.
In my judgment and, I thought, in that of
most of the audience last Saturday night, one
of these plays makes it, the other does not.
The Chekhov List is sometimes insane, trite
and tedious. In this case, that's excellent, as
it is supposed to be, at times, inane, trite and
tedious. When it gets tiresome, it gets tiresome
in the same way that Chekhov is apt to: being
preachy, platitudinously optimistic, and trivial.
There are times when this short play
becomes overworked. Some of the gimmicks that
are delightful like Chekhov( or Russian drama
generally) the first time around, start to lose
a little of their delight by the third or fourth
time we've seen them.
But the characters are all there. Right out
of Uncle Vanya dr The Cherry Orchard comes
the 85-year-old maid with an artificial leg; the
once-promising Doctor who has deteriorated in
the "stifling" atmosphere of rural Russian life;
the actress who just missed the opportunity to
be Russia's "greatest ever;" and the
Schoolmaster who was once on his way to "the
University at Moscow" where he would certainly
have won honors.
Now, the Schoolmaster has to content himself
with sitting around finding "deep" sociological
cause-and-effect relationships which he never
explains. An example Is the fact that this whole
town's future was determined years ago by the
placing of the railroad station five miles outside
of town.
And the action, when it does not involve
praising that great Russian institution, the
samovar, or chatting "secretly" in half-hearted
seduction attempts, consists mainly of rushing
to the window the inevitable, huge, center
stage window to look out upon the "new
day dawning" for Russia.
But Instead of a cherry orchard outside,
there is a bog, which keeps swallowing workers,
peasants, soldiers, machinery, and finally the
Czar himself. It is all very Chekhovlan, including
the large painting of a sea gull on the rear
wall.
And the actors obviously love it or at
least so it seemed.
One of the most Chekhovian things about
this parody is that it is a field-day for scene
stealers! In fact, like many parodies, it is a
great vehicle for the ham that lurks In most
actors. (Do not linger, please, upon the metaphor
it won't take it.)
Consequently, each actor has a "bit" or two
which Is great fun, even if it does cover someone
else's line. Who cares, anyway? After the first
speech by each character, the lines are predict
able. One of the best scene-stealing sequences is
the byplay, over a piece of crocheting, that
takes place between Denny Calandra and Susan
Vosik.
Dana Mills gets ; lot of mileage out of
a newspaper. The night I saw the play. I suspect
he got at least one laugh with It that was
unplanned, when the paper tore off neatly, and
maybe a bit unexpectedly. Put it into the script!
It's that kind of a play.
But if the actors have fun with this piece
of fluff, it's a different story with the second
half of the twin-bill.
In The House Within the House Within,
nobody, audience included, seems to enjoy
himself much. The plot is predictable, the
characters even more so.
The "message" is based upon a flimsy gim.
mick that takes more time to set up much
more than it is worth. Just the prelude to
the changes-of-identity upon which the play is
shakily built took about 35 minutes.
In that same amount of time, we had been
throughly entertained by the Chekhov parody,
and it had ended. Such, I guess, are the fortunes
of playwriting:.win some, lose some.
And when this play does settle into its "great
ideas" segments, one almost wishes it would
go back to some of its slapstick gangster
routines. Such pithy exchanges as the following
nsue:
HE: A man and woman coupled may ba
close to the essence of things.
SHE: Like a ram and a ewe I
HE: Yes, in that situation, one is necessarily
reminded of being part of the unity of all things.
That's a pretty poor paraphrase, but ob
viously it doesn't matter much: the lines had
little to lose.
There might be more to The House Within
the House Within, in terms of thematic content,
than I have implied. I admit to having been
too bored by the literal subject-matter to hava
given much concern to what it might have sym
bolized. There is one qualification to that: there are
some collages of various educational films, home
movies, old newsreels, travelogues, training
films, etc., which precede the scenes of the play.
These were poorly integrated with the play,
as far as production was concerned. The pauses
while the projector was turned off and the cur
tain lifted were too long. But the flicks
themselves were interesting, perhaps un
fortunately so. By-and-large, they were more
enjoyable than the play.
So, the "Evening of Comedy" is an evening
of two plays that are inane, tnte, and tedious:
the one deliberately so, the other I presume
not. Fortunately, however, the Checkhov
parody is funny enough and polished enough
that it makes the evening worthwhile, in spite
of its companion piece.
alia
In Washington, D.C . . .
All of slag settled in Capital,
and it shifts every foiu
By Kent Cockson
if New York is the "melting pot"
of the nation, then Washington, D.C.
must be made of the, slag.
It's one big metropolis. But there
is no simple way to describe all of
the different people who live here.
In fact, It's hard to find a Washington
"native," unless you go watch the
Redskins work out. Only a limited
number of people can call Washington
"home" for more than four years.
FOR THAT REASON alone, not
even considering the 160 million
tourists who yearly come to the na
tion's capital to play havoc with the
population turn-over rate, there really
isn't an average Washingtonian. The
best I can do is describe a few com
ponents among the multitudes.
To begin with, the District of Col
umbia is one of the few metronolitan
areas where you will not see "Please
Don't Sit On The Grass", signs
You can park your carcass on Just
about any lawn. For the White House
lawn, though, you either have to have
clearance or be able to Jump the 10
foot fence.
During the noon hour, hundreds of
bureaucrats cluster to brown-bag it
In the small, triangular parks created
by streets that converge on each other
from altdirectlons.
In spite of their $100 suits or chic
mini dresses, some government
employes prefer to eat Inexpensive
tack lunches while lounging on the
grass so they can buy more $100 suits
or mini dresses with the money they
save avoiding cafeterias. Some day
there will be a big market for the
designer who can create fashions
elegantly tailored with ready-made
grass stains.
AT NIGHT these same parks are
taken over by the opposite end of
Washington society the people you
never read about in. The Post.
The pigeons are the only friends
these bums and wlnos have besides
the tourists who part with 10 and 25
cent "coffee" money. I get tapped
by the same guy every morning as
I leave my apartment for work.
Even though I wear a suit and tie.
the fellow doesn't realize that I am
just as poor as he is. As a beggar,
he probably makes more money every
day than I do because he doesn't pay
income tax and he operates on a 100
per, cent commission.
Some of the people here are great
sign-makers. An example, ii the an
nouncement I see every day above
the city's trash baskets, "Pedestrian
Litter Only."
The message must have a hidden
meaning. How many other kinds of
litter are there besides the stuff that
humans throw? Unless of course the
signs are asking people not to take
it out on the streets and sidewalks
for the shortage of public restroom
facilities in the downtown area.
AM) THEN there is my neighbor.
Almost Immediately, and not of my
awn choosing, after I had arrived In
years
the land of the giants, I was Involved
in Uie Great Parking Place War.
To avoid driving to work and paying
22 bits a day to park in one of the
hot automobile jungles scattered
throughout downtown, I found an
apartment within walking distance of
the agency where I work. I thought
that I would leave my power-lax
lemon In the building's parking lot
fill wtck
Only after I had gotten settled did
I discover that the lots in the allay
behind the apartment building Were
not the property of the landlady who
owns my apartment house. Thus 1
was embittered in my own private
battle with one of my neighbors f
a single, off-street public parklnf
place in one corner of the alley.
1 have never seen my foe. We have
never spoken an ill word to acn
other.
In fact, the battle has really
developed into anunnegotlattd
gentleman's agreement. Whoever gets
home first on Saturday night lets M
place for the remainder of the week.
The first week of the summer, my
neighbor was first to get home. The
second week I was, the third week
he was again. And so it has progress
ed. I'm going to confront him at the
end of the summer before I return
to the University. I can't wait to se'
the expression on his fce when I
tell htm that although he's lost some
of the battles, he has at last won
the war.