Volume XCIII, Number 31
University of Southern California
Plan implemented despite protests
By Jeffrey Tylicki
Staff Writer
The student senate amended its constitution following an emotional debate Wednesday evening with a reapportionment plan that will give all four undergraduate constituencies four senators and will drop the graduate assembly from 17 to 16 members.
The vote was 24-7, which senators said was the exact two-thirds majority needed to pass the amendment. Results of the new plan change the structure of the senate from a body that represents the various student communities based on their population to one that gives an equal voice to the residence hall, row, student community and commuter constituencies.
It also puts the graduate and undergraduate assemblies on an equal footing with 16 senators each.
The commuter senators, who as a result of the new plan have their representation drop from five to four senators, fought against the program all the way, arguing that it was not fair for the 6,000 commuters to have the same number of representatives as the 2,200 students in residence halls.
"When the original constitution was formed, it was based on population," Richard Scotti, a commuter senator, told the group. Two other commuters echoed concerns that the plan was not just changing the number of senators but changing the entire structure of the senate by not taking population into account as a means of determining undergraduate representation.
In support of the plan, Peyton Fisher, former undergraduate vice president, argued that by dividing the undergraduate body into four equal units, the work could be divided more effectively.
"It's very difficult for the dorm senators to manage their constituencies with only three people," Fisher said. "The dorm constituency gained an extra seat in the new plan."
The commuters also argued that their constituency is difficult to work with. They said the Trojan Commuter Alliance, the governing bodv for commuters, needed more cohesiveness and more representation — not less.
Fisher responded that the commuters' problems should be addressed through better organization of the TCA. A number of senators who supported the amendment suggested that perhaps the commuters could use better representation — not more.
Julie Spezia. also a commuter senator, said the arguments for the plan had no rationale, and she accused it of being drawn up without much foresight.
"The senate is being threatened by an attempt to quash diversity," she said. "Diversity is what we value (in the senate)."
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Standardized test for TAs sought
By Mark Lowe
Staff Writer
Despite many complaints and a student senate resolution, the controversy over the English proficiency of international teaching assistants will not end soon, reported members of a university committee that is studying the issue.
"We are sympathetic with the problem," said Dr. Douglas Kelly, chairman of the Committee on the Rights, Welfare and Responsibilities of Graduate Assistants. "But this is not something that will resolve very quickly."
Kelly said it will take time to solve the problem because any solution will affect each academic unit differently, since each department has its own way of financing graduate students.
"This university is truly a universal organization," he said. "When you try' to provide a rule that will embrace its entirety, it will be extremely advantageous to one unit but not be useful to another."
The committee was formed last semester at the request of
Cornelius Pings, senior vice president of academic affairs, to study the problems graduate students face and to make suggestions to him about what can be done to solve them.
Last week, the committee began discussing the language proficiency of international teaching assistants, which was coincidentally the subject of a senate resolution passed last Monday.
That resolution asked that the profidencv test given by the American Language Institute (ALI) be the standard used by all departments in deciding whether teaching assistants have an adequate command of English.
"The committee wants to examine that in some depth," Kelly said. "We regarded that as a constructive suggestion, and we want to see if it's an appropriate solution or part of a solution."
But Kelly, along with other committee members, said that the senate's resolution may not be "the most effective route to take."
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Irwin Lieb, vice president and dean of the college of letters, arts and sciences (left) and Michael Melnick, a university associate professor of basic sciences, speak to an audience in the Davis Auditorium in the Andrus Gerontology’ Center about their recent trip to the Soviet Union where they delivered invitations for professorships to seven distinguished Soviet scientists.
Former Soviet professor recounts a perilous exodus
By Laura Castaneda
Assistant City Editor
When Gregory Freiman told the Soviet authorities early last year that he wanted to leave the country, he knew it would mean the end of his life as he had known it.
"I kept thinking about my previous life and thinking about what it would be in the future," said Freiman, a native Russian. "You lose your life."
His life did change but, unlike other Soviet Jews who try to emigrate, Freiman was lucky — he was eventually allowed to go to Israel.
Freiman, 57, is a former professor of mathematics at Kalinin State University in the Soviet Union who lost his job after publishing an essay in the Samizdat, or underground press. He applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union, and after several denials, he was granted his request three months ago.
Freiman chronicled his experiences Thursday before a large audience at the Davis Auditorium in the Andrus Gerontology Center. His discussion was of spedal interest because of the university's recent dedsion of offering jobs to seven Soviet sdentists who have been harassed and professionally discredited because they asked permission to leave the country.
Irwin Lieb, vice president and dean of the college of letters, arts and sdences, also read a brief and considerably dated statement after the speech that officially announced the university's offer to the sdentists.
Freiman said in a heavy accent that the offer was "an important step — a real help indeed."
"I only wish to see more steps of such nature. Onlv the sympathy and help of the Western com-
munity, espedallv the community of sdentists, can help," he said.
Freiman described the first 50 years of his life as very quiet — he worked in mathematics, wrote papers on mathematics and lectured on mathematics. But when he dedded to leave the country, his life became "full of adventures" until he was allowed to emigrate three months ago.
When he finally got his visa, he was told he had to leave in five days and could only take five kilograms of his belongings with him.
Freiman said he dedded to leave the country for the same reasons that most people of science, culture and art leave — he found it impossible to proceed with his work because of the restraints that the Soviet government puts on Jewish researchers.
He said talented Jewish students often cannot enter good universities to continue their education because of their ethnic background and that young Jewish sdentists are not allowed to receive doctoral degrees.
"For American people it doesn't seem real that a young talented man can't go to a university," Freiman said. "But you can't suppose (because of the oppression) that people in Russia are less good than in America. The majority of sdentists in Russia are decent and good people. You have to understand the feeling of plenty of people that it is simply impossible to leave.
"The people of the West don't understand," he said. "If you want to go to France, will you be called a traitor? You can go and even come back.
"W'hen we declare our wish to leave the Soviet Union, it is the end 'f all previous life," he said.
Freiman's lecture tour in Los Angeles was sponsored by the Committee of Concerned Sdentists, a group of about 4,000 sdentists dedicated to the human rights of their colleagues all over the world.
Ignorance cause of war, retired Vietnam general says
By Scott Howard-Cooper
As it turned out, the recently completed "Vietnam Reconsidered" conference was, as some anticipated, divided into three factions: the handful of journalists who made a name for themselves by covering the action in Southeast Asia, the veterans who pleaded to get their thoughts across and the centerpiece of it all, the military'.
W'inant Sidle, the retired Army' major general who served under Gen. W'illiam Westmoreland in Saigon and later with Gen. Creighton Abrams as the chief of informa-
tion, had little question regarding his role.
The way Sidle saw it, he was at the university for the conference to play warmonger. He was cast in the role of the 30-vear veteran who made one mistake after another in Vietnam and only clouded the real situation. Sidle was called on to be the hawk in a gathering of doves.
"I was asked to come and give some balance," he said in the conference's final days. "Most of the people here can generally be categorized as anti-war in one way or another ... I know the sponsors wanted to get some feelings
opposite of that.
"I feel they had to have somebody like me and like Gen. (W'illiam) Peers and Barry Zorthian and Doug Pike, people who were either pro (war) without having thought about it a great deal, or at least who would try and be objective about it now."
But Sidle, now 66 and eight years removed from the military, is an espedally unusual case.
Like many others who already evaluated the United States' role in the Vietnam con flict. Sidle began to disagree with much of the military pol-
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Staff photo by Dan Canales