Hubbard affirms authority over university Middle East Center
By Marsha Johnston
Assistant City Editor
President John R. Hubbard issued a “memorandum of understanding" Thursday between the university and the Middle East Center Foundation. The memorandum explicitly stated the university will have "full control of the academic, fiscal and other activities of the center.''
Legal sources indicate there are questions as to how legally binding the document is.
Vance Peterson, director of academic relations, told a Los Angeles Times reporter the document must be approved by the Board of Trustees. The next board meeting is Dec. 6.
lhe official statement (complete text on page 6 ) was made in response to expressions of disapproval from various university groups about the method used to finalize the agreement.
The Coalition for Academic Integrity, a student organization, met Thursday to discuss what kind of input students should give.
At the meeting students questioned whether the development of the Middle East Center agreement deviated from the usual guidelines followed for developing university contracts.
Peterson said no such guidelines are written university rules.
dMfy trojan
University of Southern California Volume LXXV, Number 28_Friday, October 27,1978
PAC weakens faculty influence, survey says
By John Frith
Staff Writer
Faculty members at the university believe they do not have enough influence in policy-making decisions, a survey of the Office of Institutional Studies said.
About half of the respondents thought the President's Advisory Council weakened the faculty's influence. The council was established in 1972 as the primary mechanism for faculty participation.
The faculty believes the council has impaired the committee structure, that it hasn't been effective in developing a consensus on policy matters and that it hasn't increased cooperation among faculty, staff and students.
Only 23% felt students have significantly influenced council recommendations.
The survey, which was conducted during the spring semester, was made for the Faculty Senate.
The office mailed 495 questionnaires to full, associate and assistant professors, of which 271 responded.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported only 7% of the nation's universities still operate on the traditional September to June two-semester schedule, while 48% operate under the early semester schedule, which generally begins in late August.
Forty-six percent of the respondents strongly agree with the early semester idea, and an additional 24%tend to approve, with some reservations. Less than 10% expressed strong disapproval.
The survey found faculty to be most interested in teaching and research. On a graduated scale of 1 through 7, with 7 being great interest, teaching drew a rating of 6.3. Research ranked a 6.2 rating. Faculty was least interested in administration, which drew only a 4.3 response.
Only 28% of the respondents had any interest in becoming a university president. A majority (67%) would like to become a department chairman, however.
A majority believed teaching ability has about the right weight in determining rank and salary in their own departments, but more than a third believe it receives too little emphasis.
(continued on page 6)
By Andrea Ignatowski
Staff Writer
Faculty, administrators and clergy are forming an on-campus coalition against Proposition 6.
The Campus Committee Against Proposition 6 is being organized by Rabbi Laura Geller, director of the Hillel House.
Proposition 6 provides for the filing of charges against schoolteachers, teachers' aides, school administrators or counselors for advocating, soliciting or encouraging private or public homosexual acts.
Geller describes the committee as a "grass roots kind of organization effort." The committee's main goal is "to educate people about Proposition 6 so they can defeat it," she said.
The committee is currently involved in soliciting donations from students, faculty and staff in order to place a full page ad asserting their view in the Daily Trojan the week before the election.
In the committee's petition for donations and support, the initiative is described as a "dangerous piece of legislation." It said the proposed law would prohibit homosexuals and their heterosexual supporters from teaching, counseling and holding administrative positions in the California public school system. It claims the initiative is "a threat to the human and civil rights of all people" and that it represents "a reawakening of the McCarthy era."
The petition points out that the voters are not being asked whether or not they approve of homosexuality, but whether they are "willing to give up the Constitutional understanding that prejudices, taboos and theological differences do not constitute grounds for social or civil discrimination or the denial of freedom of speech."
Geller noted the significance of having members of the clergy on the committee.
"When we chose the commit-
tee, we symbolically got a range of personalities and disciplines, including representatives from all the major faiths on campus. We are after the antihomosexuals, who often argue from a religious point of view. By having clergy on our committee, we want to show that such opponents really have a misunderstanding of the intentions of religion and its commitments."
A student committee, the ''No on 6 Coalition," has joined forces with the Campus Committee Against Proposition 6. The group, which originated within the Gay Student Union, is now open to any students actively opposing the initiative. While the staff committee approaches primarily individual faculty and students, the coalition's function is to solicit support and money from the various student organizations on campus.
A debate between a supporter of Sen. John Briggs (R-Fullerton)
(continued on page 6)
"We (university groups) deplore the fact that it (the agreement) wasn't grass roots like everything else has been, said Suzanne Nora, chairman of the Student Senate.
Nora referred to the proposals for the establishment of the Annenberg School of Communications.
Those proposals, she said, began in representative com-mitees that formulated that school's policy from "the ground up."
"Anyone who knows anything about the politics at this university knows that it (the center) was established because of special interests — such as corporations and Arab interests."
Administration officials have said the procedure followed was the same used for the Annenberg school.
One of the groups neglected in the process of finalizing the Middle East Center agreement was the Faculty Senate.
The concerns of the Faculty Senate, as outlined in the 1974-75 Faculty Handbook, are with "the processes by which major university decisions about personnel and academic policy are made with a view to obtaining and disseminating information about such decision-making."
(continued on page 6)
OT photo by Martha Traaflar
QUIET MAN — Hayward Coleman, internationally acclaimed mime, finds himself speechless during performance Thursday in Hancock Auditorium.
RABBI ORGANIZES GBQUE
Coalition formed against Proposition 6
Scientists continue research of human body pressures in university centrifuge
By David Watson
Associate News Editor
Water doesn't fall out of a bucket when you swing it around your head.
The water stays in place because centripetal force is creating a pressure outward from the rotating axis.
As man has learned to hurl himself through space at increased speeds or submerge himself to greater ocean depths, he has also been subjecting his body to ever-increasing pressures.
At the university, scientists have been studying the effects of these new accelerations and increased pressures on the human body in a building called the Human Centrifuge, located at 815 W. 37th St.
Paul Meehan, the centrifuge director, has been working with the machine for 31 years. It was built during World War
II	and was originally used to study the
sharp drops and turns of fighter aircraft pilots.
Meehan said the force of acceleration in the planes had been causing the pilots to lose consciousness due to a drop in blood pressure at the base of the brain.
Studies at the centrifuge duplicated the conditions the pilots were experiencing. The scientists discovered that tolerance to pressure was greatest when the pilots were in a horizontal position and an optimal seating position was obtained for them.
In the 1960s, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration used the centrifuge to determine the effects of blastoff pressure on astronauts. Meehan said the seating position in which the astronauts are seen on television is the result of experiments conducted at the university.
(continued on page 2)