University interests tied to South Africa
By David Wharton
Staff Writer
University administrators have recently come under attack from student groups for investing university funds in South Africa, a country whose government practices racially discriminatory policies.
“We will not pay for your investments in South Africa,” said Mike Matsuda, a member of the Asian-Pacific student organization, as he spoke to students at Wednesday’s tuition rally.
Members of the Students for Economic Democracy approached the Daily Trojan last week with their concerns that tuition money was being invested in companies located in the apartheid country.
“It is conceivable that some (tuition money) might be in commercial papers of corporations doing business in South Africa,” said Jon Strauss, vice president of Administration. But he said that use of tuition funds for South African investments is “very unlikely.”
The vice president explained that money collected by the university from tuition and student fees is spent gradually as the semester progresses. Tuition funds are placed in short-term investments until the money. is needed to pay university costs.
Some endowment funds, which are donated to the university for the purpose of investment, are placed in South African interests, Strauss said. The vice president of endowment money should be based on purely financial consideration.
“My personal opinion, and this may not be the institutional opinion, is that institutions like universities should not limit their investment returns by trying to dictate to social goals,” the vice president said as he expressed his belief that professional organizations should remain separate from social issues.
“I don’t think it is that big
of a problem. We do not give our investment managers (Western Asset Management Co.) the restriction that they cannot invest in South Africa,” he said.
Administrators have tried to restrict university investments to South African companies that observe the Sullivan principle, Strauss said. This principle asks American businesses to invest in only those South African companies that support racial equality.
Several members of the university’s Board of Trustees, who oversee university investments, have large investments in South Africa. The most notable is J. Robert Fluor, the former chairman of the board, whose Fluor Corp. received a $4.9' bilion contract from the South African government in 1975 to build a petrochemical plant
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Volume XCi Number
University of Southern California Friday, November 20, 1981
Bradbury predicts immortality
No doomsday, more space travel
By Ruben Castaneda
Staff Writer
Not only is the world not going to end, but this generation is going to be “immortal” and distinguished as having lived in the greatest age because of space travel, Ray Bradbury told a crowd at Bovard Auditorium Thursday.
In an hour-long treatise on philosophy, movie endings and, of course, space travel, an animated Bradbury, the renowned science-fiction writer, charmed and entertained the audience with his wit and una-
RAY BRADBURY
Grad student shot in attempted robbery
By Alan Grossman
Staff Writer
The investigation continues into the attempted robbery of two university graduate students in Westwood early Wednesday, which left one with a chest wound after the suspect, who is still at large, fired on the pair.
Nayef Zubi and another individual, Faris Ammaren, both 26, had just parked their car on the 1900 block of Selby Avenue at about 1 a.m. when they were approached by a man who attempted to rob them, said Detective Steve Austin of the LAPD West Los Angeles Division.
Austin said the suspect told Ammaren and Zubi, "Don’t move, or I’ll blow your head off.” Ammaren said he and Zubi then began to run from the robber in opposite directions.
According to Austin, the suspect then fired shots at Ammaren and Zufi; the latter was hit in the upper chest.
“I think it was a through-and-through wound (a bullet which enters and then passes through the body),” Austin said. “There were two wounds in the body, and I believe they were made with one shot.”
Zufi was taken to the UCLA Medical Center where he was first listed in critical condition, and admitted to the intensive care ward.
A hospital spokesperson said Thursday morning that Zufi had improved and that his condition was satisfactory. “He had a good night and should be fine,” she added.
Austin said he was continuing the investigation, but as of early Thursday, no leads were uncovered.
“There were no witnesses to the crime except for the victims, and Ammaren did not see if the suspect had a vehicle,” Austin said.
bashed optimism.
“This is the greatest time in the history of mankind. You are privileged to be here. Man is doing all his worst and best things now ... You know all about the bad things, you’re inundated with them, but the exciting thing is the next 20 years,” Bradbury said.
He predicted that other planets will be colonized. “All those people (on colonized planets) will look back and ask, ‘What was the greatest age?’ and they’ll answer. ‘The 20th century, when man first reached out to the universe.’ When we get to the other planets, we’ll be immortal,” he said.”
He said space travel could be the answer to the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“We seem to want to destroy each other, and it’s only the men. The women are the better sex because of this, and they have to put up with us. But we can make space a substitute for war.
“We can get together and say, ‘Here’s a war we can both fight,’ a war against disease, a war against poverty, a war against the overheating of the sun, the cooling of the sun. We don't know how long the sun’s going to last . . . let’s die in space for a cause,” the author said.
Bradbury’s topic as part of the University Speaker Series was supposed to be “1984: What To Do When The End Doesn’t Come,” but he only briefly touched on the idea of c doomsday at the beginning of his speech.
“I learned years ago, as a kid, that the world is not going to end,” Bradbury said.
EXPLORING IDEAS
He launched into an anecdote by recalling when he and his brother saw an item in a newspaper saying the world was going to end.
“My brother and I were very excited. My brother said it would end in a fireball. I was leaning toward a flood, or maybe a comet or an earthquake,” Bradbury said.
As Bradbury told it, he and his brother next had a picnic in a park in hopes of having a good view of the world’s etid.
“By five in the afternoon, I was thoroughly sick and I was disgruntled with God, and we went home. Since then, I never believed anyone who said the world was going to end,” Bradbury said.
The writer displayed a sharp wit in relating alternative endings he conjures up for movies.
One of these was for the horror film Rosemary’s Baby, which ends with a knife-bran dishing Rosemary (portrayed by Mia Farrow) walking in on a group of witches who have kidnapped her infant.
“They tell her to come in and rock her baby, and she does. Come on, that doesn’t work. If you walked in on a bunch of witches who had your kid, what would you do? You’d grab the kid, hold them off with the knife and get the hell out of there.
“Then you run out of the building, amid not too much rain, not too much lightning — you want to keep this subtle — and get to a cathedral or syn agogue.
“At the altar, you hold up the child and say, ‘God, take back your baby,’ the camera moves away and you have your ending. The idea being (Continued on page 6)
Writer turns passions into art
By Gary Geipel
Assistant News Editor
“The other morning I got up, went to my typewriter, and next thing you know, finished a story, ‘Besides Dinosaurs, What do You Want to be When You Grow Up?’ It’s about a little boy who wants to be a dinosaur— that’s me.”
The start of a typical day for Ray Bradbury? Undoubtedly.
In fact, that particular morning reveals much about what makes one of America’s best loved writers tick.
For one thing, Bradbury begins every day at the typewriter, committing to words whichever of his myriad ideas has him most enthusiastic. In his 40-year writing career, those ideas have spawned countless poems, short stories, screen and stage plays, along with such classic novels as The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451.
Although his name is most readily associated with science fiction, Bradbury said, “That’s
just one of those labels — I’m actually a fantasy writer.
“I got my start wr'ng for Weird Tales, scaring the hell out of myself and other people.”
Bradbury’s fascination with spine-tinglers dates back to 1926, when, at the age of five, he was taken to see Lon Chaney’s Phantom of the Opera and had his fear of the dark reinforced.
Childhood fascinations and his ability to build upon rather than leave them behind, are the seeds of much of Bradbury’s work.
“I would never have written the screenplay for Moby Dick if I hadn’t been in love with dinosaurs. That love caused me to write The Beast from
20,000	Fathoms, a short story (also called The Fog Horn). Director John Huston read it and saw the ghost of Herman Melville (the author of Moby Dick).
“By expressing the mystery of the night and the sea and the dinosaur,” Bradbury said,
“all of a sudden I’m being offered this job. That came out of romancing my own soul.” And his novel Dandelion Wine, a musical version of which is currently being presented at the Studio Theatre Playhouse in Los Angeles, is a collection of “sense memories I word-associated into being,” he said.
“I have to be excited, I have to be passionate before I can do anything,” Bradbury said recently at the Cheviot Hills home he shares with his wife, Marguerite, a French instructor at the university. -
Fortunately, his passions are easily aroused and his scope of interest seems boundless — Bradbury knows how to nourish himself: “I’ve lived in and out of libraries and bookstores all my life. When you’ve read as much as I’ve read, you have a hell of a lot of junk in your head.
“All this junk, picked up over the years, collides with itself. The more collisions, the (Continued on page 2)