Newspaper Page Text
April, 1967
THE MAROON TIGER
Page 7
East of How
Standing on the corner
pockets in holy prayer
face in consternation
preoccupied lips
diamond eyes
child’s heart
crying Dylan’s
lying
on his sofa
under LSD cloud
star spangled banners
of LBJ’s sonless
comfort
Lady Be Good is a
big
beaked bird
Viet
Congs
spew over
South East Asia’s
belly
China
orgasms to the time
of
Russian commie hipsters
on Siberia’s
cyclotron
of
uranium marchers
driving
’gainst
GI
guys reading
letters from
home
as blood makes its way across
Eastern dawn
the West
in darkness
hates its
imbeciles who
slept through
the eclipse ....
WALTER DANCY
A Day in the Life
of a Merrill Scholar
There is no limit to the heights to
which a poor boy can climb in our day
and time. Six months ago I was happily
pouring water down the halls of Mays
Hall and now I am immersed in a totally
different culture (where there’s no place
to throw water). As a kind of first in the
history of Merrill Scholarship, I’ve de
cided to share with the less priviledged
men of Morehouse a typical day in Nan
tes, France.
Today I have classes at 10:00 a.m.
at the Medical School here in Nantes. I
live about three miles from the Med
School, so it is necessary to get up
pretty early to make it on time. Now,
before I left Atlanta, I heard a rumor
that many French homes were poorly
heated. Not true. They ain’t heated at
all! All this is in spite of the fact that,
when it’s not raining (not very often
here), it’s pretty cold at 8:00 in the
morning.
After carefully removing any stray
splinters of ice, I painfully dress myself
and stagger down stairs for breakfast.
Anybody who has never sat down to a
French breakfast has not lived. You’re
given one gigantic bowl of coffee and
some French bread (with butter if you’re
lucky). Now French bread resembles
nothing living or dead that I have ever
seen before. It comes in one gigantic
loaf that resembles a deformed baseball
bat and has the amazing property of be
ing almost impossible to eat. It cuts
your gums to shreds and crumbles all
over the place if you try to bite it.
After that appetizing, I’m now
ready (?) to face the world. I run out to
the garage and hop on my Mohylette (a
motorized bicycle that everybody regard
less of age, sex, or physical condition
rides here) and start out for class (it’s
raining of course).
Now, French drivers are all dis
placed Kamikaze pilots on their daily
suicide run. Thus you can imagine how
much fun it is trying to reach the Med
School in one piece. Finally, my nerves
in tatters, I arrive at the School of Med
icine.
Class is not especially interesting,
so I’ll take you from there to the high
point of my day, lunch at the University
restaurant. There are 12,00 0 students
here at the University and three restau
rants to feed them. Food is served “fam
ily style” at the main restaurant and
it’s really quite a spectacle. Today,
we’re having a fairly typical meal. First,
there is a bowl of little bitty crawly
things (I have yet to find out what they
are). They’re about an inch long, have
antennae, beady little eyes and about
eight pairs of legs. People around me
are eating them! Next you get a main
course. Today, we’re having “tranche
de cheval” and boiled celery. Now for
the benefit of my less learned brethren,
“trauche de cheval” is French for
horse steaks, and horse is English for
quadruped that pulls carts and runs at
race tracks. Unfortunately, boiled celery
is English for boiled celery. People
around me are eating it.
Now anything else that I might say
would be anti-climactic. After that
splendid meal, I retire to some quiet
spot to get sick privately. All too slow
ly it gets to be. 9:00 p.m. and I retire to
the deep-freeze” to try to sleep it off.
I hope that you have enjoyed a
touch of France in Atlanta, and reading
this report from your Merrill Scholar in
the street.
A la Rrochaine,
Frederic Ransom
College Cheating
Editor’s note: The following is the con
cluding article of an interview with Wil
liam J. Boivers, director of Stearns Re
search at Northeastern University. Re
printed from the July 13 "Christian Sci
ence Monitor," the interview explains
results of a study made by Boivers in
1963 while on his doctorate at Colum
bia University.
Q. Is cheating symptomatic of a basic
character weakness?
A. In principle, those who are willing
to violate rules about academic integrity
are more likely to take shortcuts that
violate other rules. I am inclined to say
that cheating, per se, can’t have much of
a positive effect for later life. It’s not
a very good training experience for a
student who will be a responsible citi
zen. But I think the negative effect can
be exaggerated.
There is an image of the person with
the demon and the person who has the
clear view of things. But cheating is
not a question of moral fiber so much as
social environment. I think there will be
people willing to cheat in a self righteous
way. At schools where cheating goes on
pretty extensively, a student who cheats
is viewed as trying to eliminate an un
fair advantage he is exposed to other
wise.
Q. What produces a campus climate of
disapproval of cheating?
A. High-quality schools find it easier to
maintain such a climate. By high-quality
I mean schools with good faculty, low
faculty-student ratio, small schools
which are largely residential, schools
where the college experience is more in
tensive for the students.
It turns out that larger schools have
a larger portion of students reporting in
cidents of cheating.
Perhaps the intimate social en
vironment that residential schools are
able to provide allows students to es
tablish relationships where these val
ues come to the surface, and in some
sense are reinforced.
On other campuses, where the social
relationships are less close, the per
haps strongly felt personal values don’t
play as important a part.
Q. How does a student get started cheat-
ing?
A. We know, for instance, that fraternity
people have a tendency to cheat more
than those outside. I think that such
students begin to think that cheating is
the appropriate way to deal with aca
demic requirements — not so much out of
pressure but more because other people
define it as a legitimate way of coping
with a system that is fundamentally
amoral. In other words, professors aren’t
treating you with a great deal of regard.
It goes along with all large-city,
anonymous problems. The student views
the mechanistic, bureaucratic world as
amoral to his personal world so he de
vises schemes which he knows are im
moral. But he employs them because he
sees others doing it and because others
reflect these feelings too.
The pressures impinge on the group,
in a way, and the group changes its def
inition of the situation. Each individual
in turn is that much more released from
his informal social control group, which
would otherwise keep him from doing
some of these things.
Then it doesn’t take much. It only
takes a little bit of an opportunity to
oversee something. It only takes one bad
grade and the threat of a failing mark,
because these other things have all been
loosened up. Then he succumbs quite
easily.
But the last link in the chain —
which is the opportunity to cheat, or the
pressure from home, or something which
appears to the person very near that in
dividual to be the casual factor — really
is quite minor in the long sequences of
causes. That’s really the way I think it
needs to be viewed.
The final precipitating event really
should not be thought of as a funda
mental cause, but part of a large process.
Q. How much of cheating is an objection
to the system, or a case of outwitting
the professor?
A. Some students will feel that they are
proud of their ability to use the professor
along with any of their peers to demon
strate their ability to outwit people.
There’s also the very morally indignant
student who cheats because he is being
cheated in the educational process, as
he sees it.
Put both those students in one
school where they are both cheating for
their own reasons, and then in another
school with a very different climate of
disapproval. They will probably both
have areas of outwitting others and
moral indignation. But cheating won’t
be one of the areas where they manifest
these inclinations.
(CONTINUED ON PAGE 8-COLUMN 1)