Topping announces early retirement
By ANDY MILLER Editor
President Norman Topping has announced his resignation from the presidency of USC, to be effective when his successor is appointed.
“I have decided, in fairness to my wife, Helen, and to myself, that after nearly two decades in educational administration the time to retire is now while my health is still reasonably good,” the 62-year-old president said.
Topping’s announcement came at last weekend’s annual Board of Trustees’ meeting in Palm Springs, where he asked the board to formalize a request he made nearly a year ago to accept his early retirement.
Topping asked that a presidential search committee, representing all segments of the university family, be appointed soon. The selection process will likely take the better part of next year.
“The board accepted President Topping’s request with great reluctance,” Justin Dart, chairman of the board, said. “USC has flourished under Norman Topping these past 12 years. Men of his leadership and academic stature are most rare.
“We are sorry that the job has exacted its physical toll, but we are pleased at least that there will
be many ways that Norman Topping will continue to be able to serve USC.
“We will set about our search for his successor in an orderly manner. We are gratified that Dr. Topping will continue as president until a new leader is appointed.”
In other action the board officially approved the ambitious Master Plan for the ’70s, which undertakes to strengthen USC’s academic environment.
Topping, a physician, has been president of USC, his alma mater, since Sept. 1, 1958. He graduated from USC in 1933 with a Bachelor of Arts degree and in 1936 with the degree of Doctor of Medicine. He is the seventh president of USC since its founding in 1880.
His years at USC have seen the university’s Master Plan for enterprise and excellence in education evolve, take shape and move rapidly toward fulfillment.
Topping announced the $106 million Master Plan on May 17, 1961, and it was highlighted by the receipt of two Ford Foundation matching grants of $6.5 million and $7.5 million.
The more than $143 million received by USC so far at the rate of more than $1 million a month is the most ever raised by any institution of higher learning in Southern California.
DR. NORMAN TOPPING
Pickets demand new student teacher policy
By MARY ANN GALANTE
A group of students and teachers picketed Phillips Hall Friday in an attempt to persuade the School of Education to change its policy regarding student teachers in city schools.
George Wilson, assistant professor of teacher education, termed the picketing a misunderstanding.
“The teachers who picketed were assuming our students have been taking the role of teachers. We have checked into all complaints and this is not the case, he said.
Wilson said student teachers from USC have maintained their roles as students under nonstriking qualified master teachers.
“It’s my understanding that the School of Education instructed its student teachers to cross the picket lines and go to class,” said Bill Gordon, administrative board member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles.
Gordon said the student teachers who didn’t wish to scab picketed Friday. He added that the USC policy as he understood it was contrary to those for student teachers at UCLA and Cal State L.A.
John Stevens, a spokesman for the executive board of the UTLA, said the picketers requested three specific changes regarding student teacher policy from the school of education. They included:
—Providing student teachers with alternatives to classroom teaching requirements so that students would not be penalized for refusing to cross lines.
—Encouraging students to take alternate programs and thereby support the strike.
—Relaxing of pressure on students to cross picket lines.
“USC has provided no program that would allow students to fulfill the requirements for their teaching credentials without crossing the picket lines,” Stevens said.
Wilson responded to the UTLA representatives’ statements by saying that the School of Education has not pressured its student teachers to do anything.
“We’re concerned with keeping our students neutral,” Wilson
said.
Under state law, student teachers must put in 180 hours of student teaching in order to receive their credentials. Wilson said it was because of this that the School of Education is unable to provide alternative programs.
“Why should we penalize someone who may not graduate or qualify by saying ‘You can’t cross the lines?”
Student teachers are under state-credentialed instructors in classrooms. Wilson said student-teachers are taking lab sessions at state schools.
“The students are caught in a bind. They’ve paid $65 a unit for supervised student teaching. We have a contract with the LA school district for this experience. The supervisory teacher has a contract in turn with the district,” Wilson said.
Wilson said few teachers contracted with the USC program were out on strike. Consequently, student teachers are only observing in classrooms where licensed teachers are teaching.
“A principal could force our students to assume the role of classroom teacher, but this is in violation of state law,” Wilson said.
The ASSC Executive Council will meet today at 3 p.m. in the Student Activities Center.
This is the last regularly scheduled meeting of the present council. Newly elected council members will take office Friday.
Last meeting of current council set
University of Southern California
DAILY ® TROJAN
VOL. LXI.NO. 114
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA TUESDAY, APRIL 28,1970
SCLC official tells of
issues affecting blacks
Rev. Jesse Jackson, director of Operation Breadbasket of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said yesterday that black studies programs should put as much emphasis on the black’s future as it does on black history.
Speaking to an audience of 250 persons in the Student Activities Center, Jackson discussed the issues affecting blacks today, among them white male sex attitudes, the establishment and black history.
Jackson presented his concept of the system and his idea on what should be done to correct its faults by means of analogy.
“The system is like a car and all of us are in the car. We don’t have to feel guilty and responsible for making the car go down the wrong road because we were born in the car.
“It was already rolling when we were born. Most of us were born during World War II. The system was well on its way when we were born. We were born into it.
“So how can we feel guilty about determining the direction of it at that point in our lives.
“And the only question is in a runaway car, and that’s what this system is. The only question is, are we going to stay in the backseat talking about we ain’t making the system wrong, or run up into the back window somewhere arguing that we got us in a corner and that we are different because of what we believe in outside the car. Or are some of us going to have damn sense enough to get up somewhere around the steering wheel and the clutch and the brakes, because if it goes over the cliff, all of us is going to get killed.”
Jackson said that we need to discuss how the system should be redirected “so it won’t take us over the cliff and destroy all the little people in the roadway who will get run over by it.”
The absence of blacks in important places within the system and why they aren’t was one of Jackson’s major points.
Jackson, himself a football player in college, built many of his points around football and football players.
Speaking of USC, Jackson said. “For a long time Jimmy Jones and Simpson couldn't play here because coaches were concerned about their relationships with the white females in the stands; they dismissed the whole issue of football.”
“We have O. J. Simpson’s of medicine and science and physics and engineering. They’ve never
been given a chance to start out at the block because of the psychic hang-up of the white male.”
Jackson discussed the relationships between the white man and the black woman and the black man with the white woman and other causes of what keeps the black down in the system. Among these factors is brutality.
“I can understand under that brutality how we became niggers,” Jackson said, “but I can’t understand why the white man needed a nigger.” I can not understand the deficiency in his personality that made him have to define himself by the negation of me.
“This man (the white man) who will not relate to the black man, will only relate to the black woman in an illicit way and has frozen the white woman.”
Jackson also called for a new definition of man. “We’re really of the aristocratic military notion of what man is. A man is one who can kill, one who can choke, one who can suppress, one who can cause his muscles and run through people.
“If anything has happened good over the last 15 years, it is the urge now for us to redefine ourselves by our terms.
“Many of us who are black don’t have the internal urge and courage to confront whites intellectually, politically, and psychologicaly and spiritually. What we really should be saying is that we don’t want to be dealing with whitie because we feel we can’t deal with whitie.
“One great Negro made some peanuts, another great Negro helped make the light bulb, another great Negro helped make a telephone and we didn’t get credit for it.
“That don’t mean a damn thing.
“I’d be the last person to say black history was not significant, because it is significant. Psychologically, it’s good to say that I am somebody. Be able to say deep down that even when the world said, ‘we couldn’t’ there were some of us in spite of the odds who said, ‘Yes, we can.’
“But black history deals with the when of our existence, and psychologically it has a way of pushing us into the present, but the present is not going to ask the question, ‘When?’ It is going to ask ‘How?’ and ‘Why?’ and ‘What?’
“How do we survive? Where do we go? How do we get there. Why are we going there?”