Campus Communique: Between Moratoriums

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Most U.S. campuses reported a lull on the peace front last week. Combat was light and scattered; it was a time for R & R between Viet Nam protests. While some participants in the Oct. 15 Moratorium concentrated on classwork, others planned for the Nov. 15 march on Washington. Even so, a few campuses had troubles that seemed big to them if not to headline writers. Items: >At Vassar College, about 30 black women students seized part of the administration building at 3:20 a.m., locked themselves inside and vowed to "stop the school" until their demands for a black-studies program and separate black housing were met. At week's end the militants, having mobilized half of Vassar's 59 black students, ended their sit-in, saying they had won tentative agreement to their demands. > Langston University was roiled by the firing of President William H. Hale. About 450 students from the Oklahoma school, a predominantly black public campus, invaded the capitol and shouted "Pig!" at Governor Dewey Bartlett when he refused to explain the dismissal. The state regents later said Hale had been fired for "excessive drinking in public," a charge Hale denied. >At the University of Houston, an S.D.S. statement that it would "no longer tolerate" military recruiting on campus backfired. A small S.D.S. group that tried to approach an Army recruiting table on Thursday ran into hundreds of right-wing students chanting "S.D.S., go to hell." The rightists hustled the radicals off campus in a melee that ended with S.D.S. Organizers Douglas Bernhardt and Barti Haile, both nonstudents, being treated at Ben Taub Hospital for cuts and bruises. > Stanford activists published a 31-page collection of university documents that were "liberated" (stolen) during a sit-in last May. Among them: a detailed list of faculty salaries, plus strong evidence that Stanford values researchers far more than teachers. According to the filched papers, a political scientist admired by students for undergraduate teaching gets $6,500 less a year than professors known best for research. One memo from a department chairman ridiculed an able teacher for publishing little besides a revision of his doctoral dissertation and vetoed, despite inflation, his salary raise on the ground that he is not sufficiently "productive."