Education A 'Meal Ticket'

By Douglas White

Earlier this year I participated in a ten week Student Leader Project in the United States sponsored by the United States Department of State and programmed by a private organisation called the Experiment in International Living. Nine students representing different Asian and Pacific countries participated in this particular project and I was fortunate to have been selected as the New Zealand representative.

During our ten weeks in the United States the group visited some seven or eight different universities and met well over a hundred students. It has been said that students fall into four broad, sometimes overlapping, categories: academic, vocational, social and activist. I found students at the universities we visited no exception. The percentage at any one university falling into one category varies, but it is possible to say that it is normally "an active minority" who sit-in and march.

In the United States, of course, "an active minority" may consist of several thousand students at a large university whereas their counterparts in New Zealand may total only a few hundred. A great number, like New Zealand students, seemed to be at university to obtain a meal-ticket and enjoying themselves in the process. This was brought home to me, if I needed reminding, at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania when we dined in Fraternity and Sorority Houses which are students hostels where we met students who talked of the day's exam and the next ball game.

One word, however, would make them think about things beyond the academic university world- "draft". With the threat of military service in a war zone hanging over their heads and with graduate deferments removed, the draft was something no student could or indeed did take lightly. I received the impression that it was the Vietnam draft which stirred the normally inactive student to voice his views on international matters, something which was relatively new in American university life.

The "active minority" who have always been concerned with United States foreign policy found their numbers swollen by students who for genuinely moral reasons or purely selfish ones felt that a visit to Vietnam was not their dearest wish. Opposition to the Vietnam War on the campuses we visited was undoubtedly strong and widespread. Harvard Law School has even set up a committee for Legal Research on the Draft which, I was told, advises anyone except those interested in deserting on matters of law relating to the draft.

As many of the students we met were actively interested in matters political not only on the international or national level but also on the university level, we were able to obtain a fairly good impression of student government and its relationship with university administration at the universities we visited. Student governments, as in New Zealand, seemed to be the concern of the few who were involved in the usual 'crises' and pontificating to an uninterested student body. There were not surprisingly also those who entered student politics to advance their views on international affairs as representing a campus of 20,000 or 30,000!

It was interesting for me to observe the varying contacts and relationships between students and administration. At the end of a lecture on South East Asian geography we attended at the University of Hawaii. Honolulu, the class filled in a computerised questionnaire on that particular course and the standard of the instruction. The instructor, a Chinese professor, did not object and in fact he finished his lecture early so as to leave time to explain instructions on the questionnaire. This course and staff evaluation scheme organised by the equivalent to the Students' Association at the University of Hawaii turned out to be a common feature at several of the Universities we visited. Perhaps the most developed was that arranged annually at the University of Pennsylvania where the results of the questionnaire were printed in booklet form by the student newspaper and published for the benefit of students who were trying to decide which courses to take.

The evaluation also had the commendable effects of providing information on the value of particular courses and the ability or otherwise of the instructor In each case the instructor would be asked if he consented to the questionnaire being distributed to his class and if he declined the offer that fact would be noted.

Examples of comments on courses and staff taken from the Daily Pennsylvanian Guide to Courses, 1963-1964, are revealing:

"Dr Boll is considered very poor by his students because of the irrelevance of his lectures to the readings and his stifling of any interpretation of the reading matter, other than his own."

"Both Dr. Hornberger and Mrs. Leach received good ratings from their students. They both keep the classes lively and keep the students on their toes."

It scenied to me that this type of evaluation. properly carried out, was an extremely valuable means of communicating the views of the student body on the most vital subjects at the University? their courses and their teachers? to the University authorities. On other levels the relationships between official student representatives and the University Administration varied widely: from an apparent lack of understanding at Berkeley, where the Administration had confiscated the entire Students Association income, to the very close contact at the University of Pennsylvania where there were student representatives on practically every academic and administrative committee.

The success or otherwise of "student power" movements varied tremendously. At the Universities of Hawaii, Berkeley. Brandeis and Hampton student leaders were pressing for more participation in the running of their universities. While their efforts are labelled as "student power", I think in reality this is no more than a useful newspaper headline. It is often thought that the slogan "student power" means that students in some way want to take over the runnings of the university. I am sure most student leaders would be horrified at the thought, The slogan arises in the situation where students have little or no say in the running of their University and they feel that they should be able to participate in all decisionmaking which vitally affects their future. In other words where students have no "power" or influence, they want some.

The most advanced university which we visited in this line was undoubtedly the University of Pennsylvania. With close liaison between official student representatives and administration, they "worked through the system" some years ago, their student president told us, and they now have representation on their equivalent of our University Council and most administrative and academic committees. This is in vivid contrast to all the other universities we visited where there were no student representatives on the governing body of the university and little more than token contact.

A crisis was reached at the world famous University of California at Berkeley when a student sit-in and strike took place in November 1966, As a direct result the Berkeley Academic Senate and the Senate of the Students' Association set up a student-faculty Study Commission on University Governance.

On the day our group visited Berkeley in January this year, the student newspaper published along with its daily paper the ninety page Report of the Study Commission entitled "The Culture of the University: Governance and Education." Amongst other matters the Commission made recommendations for decentralization at the University and for considerably more student participation at all levels of university government.

While overseas I heard rumours of a certain Salient editorial and it may be that the recent establishment of a Joint Committee at Victoria was a Berkeley inspired answer to a student power movement. The Report shows that co-operation between staff and students was the first step in a constructive re-appraisal of university administration at Berkeley.

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