-aftai eSr, When you a~tSlet W", oebels bein sn, It's more im butouderstand why ~IggerU. i we follow that Ius sough, it wiln UN pt the aone of academic bulhhit, where dedicated teachers pass their knowledge on to a new ge0WAtion, and into the nitty gritty of human needs and hang dpe. And from there we can go on to consider whether it might ever be possible for students to come up rom slavery. First, let's see what's happening now. Let's look at the role students play In what we like to call education. At Cal State, L. A., where I teach, the students have separate and unequal dining facilities. If I take them into the faculty dining room, my colleagues get un comfortable, as though there were ...he smiles and shuffles the professor's office waiti The faculty tell him whai a bad smell. If I eat in the student cafeteria, I become known as the educational equivalent of a niggerlover. In at least one building, there are even rest rooms which students may not use. At Cal State, also, there is an unwritten law barring student-faculty lovemaking. Portunately, this anti miscegenation law, like its Southern counterpart, is not 100 per cent effective. Students at Cal State are politically disenfranchised. They are in an academic Lowndes County. Most of them can vote in national elections - their average age is about 26 - but they have no voice in the decisions which affect their academic lives. The students are, it is true, allowed to have a toy government of their own. It is a government run for the most part by Uncle Toms and concerned principally with trivia. The faculty and administration decide which courses will be offered; the students get to choose their own Homecoming Queen. Occasionally, when student leaders get upity and rebellious, they're either ignored, put off with trivial concessions, or maneuvered e xpertly out of position. A student at Cal State is ex pected to know his place. He calls a faculty member 'Sir' or 'Doctor' or 'Professor' - and he smiles and shuffles some as he stands outside the professor's office waiting for per-mission to enter. The faculty tell him what courses to take (in my department, English, even electives have to be approved by a faculty member); they tell him what to read, what to write, and frequently, where to set the margins on his typewriter. They tell him what's true and what isn't. Some teachers insist that they encourage dissent but they're almost always jiving and every student knows it. Tell the man V.'oi. 1x. N.. S7 Founded Jan. 30. 136014 with Robert Eliilot (< published triweekly during the fail and sprin periods and l:niversity hoiida'y%. Although TilE and published by the Lniversity. the opinions ex| of the administration, the faculty or the studen delivera ble copies, subscription requests and ot C'olumbia. s.C. 21236. Subscription rates are I G.i ECo('K are In Rooms a0os and 310 of the Rui are 777.x11701 (news and sports). 777-4249 t editol G.if ECvM'K Is represented nationally by Nati publication is a member of the Associated Association. A pplication to mail at second class E:ditor-in-.chief Jim Wannamaker Itusiness manager .oEW kiley .lfanaging editor F-red ifonk Advertising manager Wooids liinki, AssocIate edItors C'arl Stepp liike Krechmaln'. sports editor .Jim 11ane, Ansst. managing editor MuI%an 11t%' K NEW ZIGZAG SEWING M GUARANTEE. Nationally adve MONTHLY PAYMENTS AVAIl. INSPECTrED IN WAREHIOUSF 'DELUXE SOLID STA' STEREOPHONIC HIGH FilME HAND) RUBBED FINISH. U CHANGER AND) 4-SPEAKER ser EACH. MONTHLY PAYM SPECTED IN WAREHOUSE A 4' ELECTROLUX VACUUM CL TO BE SOLD FOR $39.95 E AVAILABILE. 9 A.M. - 6 P.M. M Phom4 UNCLAIMI 1225 Br * ~(H t as nigger ident what he wants tohear or he'll fail your ass out of the course, When a teacher says 'jump', students jump. I know of one professor who refused to take up class time for exams and required students to show up for tests at 6:30 in the morning. And they did, by God! Another, at exam time, provides answer cards to be filled out - each one enclosed in a 0aper bag wit a hole cut in the top to see through. Students stick their writing hands in the bags while taking the test. The teacher isn't a provo; I wish he were. He does it to prevent cheating. Another colleague once caught a student reading during one of his lectures and threw her book against the wall. Still another lectures his students into a stupor and then screams at them in a rage when they fall asleep. Just last week, during the first meeting of a class, one girl got up to leave after about ten minutes some as he stands outside ng for permission to enter. courses to take... had gone by. The teacher rushed over, grabbed her by the arm, saying, 'This class is NOT dismissed'and led her back to her seat. On the same day another teacher began by informing his class that he does not like beards, mustaches, long hair on boys, or capri pants on girls, and will not tolerate any of that in his class. That class incidentally, consisted mostly of high school teachers. Even more discouraging than this Auschwitz approach to education is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They're hopelessly vague about chemistry and physics. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders! Freshmen come up to me with an essay and ask if I want it folded and whether their name should be in the upper right hand corner. And I want to cry and kiss them and caress their poor tortured heads. Students don't ask that orders make sense. They give up ex pecting things to make sense long before they leave elementary school. Things are true because the tea,cher says they're true. At a very early age we all learn to accept 'two truths', as did certain medieval churchmen. Outside of class, things are true to your tongue, your fingers, your stomach, your heart. Inside class, things are true by reason of authority. And that's just fine because you don't care anyway. Miss Wiedemeyer tells you a noun is a person, place, or thing. So let it be. You don't give a rat's ass; she doesn't give a rat's ass. The important thing is to please Wednesday. February I8. 1976 maales as the firsat editor. THE GAMECOC'K is g semeaters with the exception of examination G.AMECOCK is managed by and for the studenta pressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views I body as a whole. Change of addresa forma, UN. her mail items should be sent to Drawer A. L'SC, 6 per year or 63 per aemester. Offices of THE isell House on the University campus. Telephones 9. and 77-42201 ducts of the future- (]Mca 3 Du Pont people are []Enq(' [J] Accoun career opportunities, I dvance through many :Name~' ir Du Pont Recruiter. UmesI Degree - *Address es for better livinn. L..... w his security of a teaching job attracts timid persons and, furthermore, that teaching, like police work, pulls in persons who are unsure of themselves and need weapons and the other external trappings of authority. At any rate teachers ARE short on balls. And, as Judy Eisenstein has eloquently pointed out, the 'classroom offers an artificial and protected environment in which they can exercise their will to power. Your neighbors may drive a better car; gas station at tendants may intimidate you; your wife may dominatp you; the State Legislature may shit on you; but in the classroom, by God, students do what you say - or else. The grade is a hell of a weapon. It may not rest on your hip, potent and riqid like a cop's gun, but in the long run it's more powerful. At your per sonal whim - any time you choose - you can keep 35 students up for nights and have the pleasure of seeing them Y;alk into the classroom pasty-faced and red eyed carrying a sheaf of typewritten pages, with title page, k people, the hardest battle what Mr. Charlie has done MLA footnotes and margins set at 15 and 91. The general timidity which causes teachers to make niggers of their students usually includes a more specific fear - fear of the students themselves. After all, students are different, just like black people. You stand exposed in front of them, knowing that their interests, their values, and their language are different from yours. To make matters worse, you may suspect that you yourself are not the most engaging of persons. What then can protect you from their ridicule and scorn? Respect for Authority. That's what. It's the policeman's gun again. The white bwana's pith helmet. So you flaunt that authority. You wither whisperers with a murderous glance. You crush objectors with erudition and heavy irony. And, worst of all, you make your own attainments seem not accessible but awesomely remote. You conceal your massive ignorance - and piarRde a slender learning. 4 --y om783 imnto,D 99 d me he bokles chckedbelo. a..Eginers.t.DuPon cal Eginees at u Pon sj atD Pn 2mpay oom789, WlmiGration DaE 99 at Enier SatePn An Equal Opportunity Employer (M/F) place The teacher's fear is mixed withr an understandable need to be admired and to feel superior, a need which also makes him cling to his 'white supremacy'. Ideally a teacher should minimize the distance between himself and his students. He should encourage them not to need him - eventually or even immediately. But this is rarely the case. Teachers make themselves high priests of arcane mysteries. They become masters of mumbo-jumbo. Even a more or less conscientious teacher may be torn between the desire to give and the desire to hold them in bondage. There is a kind of castration that goes on in schools. It begins, before school years, with parents' first encroachments on their children's free unashamed sexuality and continues right to the day when they hand you your doctoral diploma with a bleeding, shrivled pair of testicles stapled to the parchment. It's not that sexuality has no place in the classroom. You'll find it there but only in certain perverted and vitiated forms. How does sex show up in school? First of all, there's the sado- 4 masochistic relationship between te4chers and students. That's plenty sexual, although the price of enjoying it is to be unaware of what's happening. In walks the student in his Ivy League equivalent of a motorcycle jacket. In walks the teacher - a kind of intellectual rough trade - and flogs his students with trades, tests, sarcasm and snotty superiority until their very brains are bleeding. In Swinburne's England, the whipped school boy frequently grew up to be a flagellant. With us, the perversion is intellectual but it's no less perverse. So you can add sexual repression to the list of causes, along with vanity, fear, and will to power, that turn the teacher into Mi. Charlie. You might also want to keep in mind that he was a nigger once himself and has never really gotten over it. And there are more causes, some of which are better described in sociological than in psychological terms. Work them out, it's not hard. But in the meantime what we've got on our hands is a whole lot of niggers. And (Continued on Pa e 'IiA