Florida State University - Renegade / Tally Ho Yearbook (Tallahassee, FL)

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aulz In terms of the day-to-day administration, only the president can have day-to-day control. In terms of policy, it should be the Board of Regents. The problem then becomes what is policy and what is administration, and this is the age-old conundrum. approval and we ought to have some kind of process in which we regulate the use of university facilities, in which we regulate the methods by which money collected through the university process can be given to students and spent. The kind of social activities conducted by students off campus has to be more or less a matter for each student. I can ' t see that we can have much concern for that, whether we should have or shouldn ' t have. POWER TO THE STUDENTS I have essentially a democratic orientation and I believe that decisions are best made, in fact the wisest decisions are made, when you involve the people who are going to be affected by the decisions. The trouble with that in this complex a society is that it is very hard to implement. A decision that FSU will be one of the top graduate research centers in the state is the determination of some of the things we can and cannot do and that decision is made by the board, not by FSU, nor did the students have any vote in this, and you can ' t give them a vote on that because that ' s a broad policy that assigns a broad role to a university. On the question of the kinds of living accommodations you should have, I think this is totally a matter that students should have a major part in. ' With the increasing legal recognition of the rights of human beings, students will have more and more voice in those things which have an immediate impact on them. But I think the way we ' re going, they ' ll still have probably the same voice they have now in the major policy decisions of the system. TUITION HIKE expected $200 a quarter. This bill was accompanied by a reorganization of scholarship aid and I have mixed reactions to it. The cost of education has increased more rapidly than the charges to students for their tuition. I paid more when I was a student, relatively speaking, than you ' re going to pay with $190. I can ' t become excited about the $190, I ' m sorry. I can become excited about a trend which would price students out of the university, and if this trend continues, then I think we have to have some massive scholarship aid along with it. All states are having this same problem. The unit cost of education is higher, it ' s almost irreduceable. The demand for education is great. Given that irreduceable minimum cost and increasing demand, you have an increasing percentage of the gross national product, of society ' s efforts, in education, an d tuition is one way of controlling it. The difficulty is that it is a fiscally elitist way and not consonant with the democratic society. So that if you begin to move much beyond where we are, except on a sort of annual keeping up with costs, I think you ' re beginning then to price people out of the market. AUTONOMY VS STATE CONTROL I like our present system. It ' s very obvious that you cannot give to a university an increasing amount of money without having some voice in how it ' s divided. It ' s also obvious that the legislature can ' t make those decisions. Someone has to make decisions about which university is going to be what, about which university is going to have graduate programs and what graduate programs. I don ' t think you can let each university make those decisions. I think the system we have is one that allows each university to have a measure of autonomy in how it will spend its money within a broad policy grounding set by a group that has spent some time studying the total implications. Show me a better system. FSU ' S PLACE IN THE SYSTEM FSU , along with the University of Florida, is to be one of the graduate research centers in the state. That means our graduate programs will be concentrated in those schools and there will be fewer and fewer master ' s degrees and more and more PhDs relatively. The percentage of freshmen would decrease— the number will stay the same. More and more of the people who come here will be the ones who are headed eventually for graduate or professional programs. That ' s its role. I think it ' s going to do very well in that. It ' s done very well already. OPINION OF MARSHALL I think President Marshall is one of the outstanding university administrators in the country. He ' s a very strong, fair-minded man and has done a fine job under very difficult circumstances. 31

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Chancelor A T I he university is the creator of knowledge, which can be phrased in many ways— the seeker of truth, the creator of knowledge, however you want to put it. I think it has a second role, which is equipping citizens to take their place in society; that is, the transmission of knowledge and the training of minds. In essence I would say you combine the imparting of the knowledge to enjoy life and to place yourself in the context of man ' s existence so far on this planet, the ability to appreciate the pleasure of creativeness, with the imparting of skills which equip you to be an economic and competitive creature and to function not only from the standpoint of appreciation of life, but from the standpoint of being competitive and contributing as an economic man to that life. If you sit back and take the broad perspective that I ' ve just taken, I think the answer to the question of whether the function of the university is changing has to be no. You change your knowledge art and you may change the kinds of skills you impart, but you ' re still in the business of imparting that knowledge and creating knowledge and making those skills. At one point, the universities had only about ten percent of the college age population. They obviously were training an elite. Now we have about 50 percent of the college age population. There still is a need for college education, but it ' s obvious that now we need systems analysts and computer programmers. We need to upgrade the criminology people; we need to upgrade the law enforcement, the corrections people. Nursing is more complicated. We have whole new knowledge areas in which to train people and so far as anyone wants to say, if this is a new function of the university, then we have changed functions. I don ' t view it that way. I think it is doing the same basic thing, but doing it in different areas. THE PLACE OF RESEARCH Obviously if the university is the place which creates knowledge, then you must have people around making it; creating it. You need the Mike Kashas in life to have an understanding of life, and, I suppose, eventual mastery of it and the ability to direct it. I think that there is more time wasted in so-called research, however, by people who have no particular abilities in this area, who are diverting time from areas where they do have abilities, such as teaching. Because the name of the game these days seems to be research. If you can put the word ' research ' after what you ' re doing, then you ' re in the in group. You have to have it, but the degree of it is open to question. PUBLISH OR PERISH Wi hen you are operating at the highest intellectual level in society, which is the university, I think that a man has an obligation to be scholarly, to do some writing. I think it forces him to organize his thoughts; it forces him to keep abreast of new developments. It forces him to expose his ideas to his peers instead of to students who must accept what he says in order to obtain a grade. I therefore think that some publication is not only desirable, but essential. I think that publication for the sake of publication, or promotion on the basis of the number of words produced, is just the antithesis of the kind of publication which I ' m talking about, and I think it ' s the antithesis, really, of what the research and scholarly activity should be. TENURE I am very impressed by a publication by Yale, the Yale Humanities Group, in which they said no one ' s ever been able to define good teaching to the satisfaction of anyone else, but because you can ' t do it perfectly doesn ' t mean you shouldn ' t attempt to, and they proceeded to set down some criteria for promotion. Among them is an occasional publication so that you ' re exposing yourself to your colleagues. I think student evaluation is another way to determine good teaching. I also think in a pyramid series of courses that the man who receives students from another professor knows pretty well how well those students are prepared and what kind of a job that faculty member did. I think there are ways of getting at this; I just think we ' ve been reluctant to spell them out. Many universities, such as Yale, have done so for the betterment of that university. RECOGNITION OF RADICAL GROUPS I 30 don ' t see any likelihood of change in the policy (not to recognize SDS or YSA). I think it is a sort of head-in-the-sand policy. The problem really is that recognition carries with it the connotation of

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There ' s a bill in front of the legislature right now to set up a censorship board for the State of Florida. I would hope that the students who go away from my [communications] classes have some kind of attitude about that, whether they support it or are against it, but that they have some reason, they have some factual data. That ' s teaching undergraduates. It ' s not pontificating. It ' s not torturing. It ' s not giving them grades. It ' s not setting yourself up as some sort of a prophet. Undergraduate teaching should be an opportunity to provide young people with new perspectives. And that ' s really corny, but that ' s true. The problem with trying to function as an undergraduate teacher at many universities is that you ' re not rewarded for that. You get rewarded for other things. There should be some systematic way that teaching is emphasized in preference to other things. I think that a guy who is primarily an undergraduate teacher should do research in the areas he is teaching in. In other words, if I am teaching undergraduates a course in effects, then I should be trying to do my research in that area. Whether it gets published or not may not be the critical factor. What ' s important is that you ' re staying intellectually alive. For example, we did a study of public attitudes toward censorship in Tallahassee. The undergraduates did that research. All the kids who made the phone calls for that survey were undergraduates. There needs to be a way to integrate research in teaching. I think it ' s being done by more and more faculty members. Research is important. Teaching is important. And it ' s not how many hours you spend in the classroom, it ' s the product you turn out at the end. It ' s difficult for me to go out and search out people and say, hey, come and study with me, because there are so many people clamoring to get in. So I just don ' t think about it in that way. Maybe I should. Who knows. How do you reach out? You hear about somebody who says, hey, so and so ' s groovy, take that course, or GAHHAH, I don ' t want to take this! You are also caught in classes closing out, you know, do I close out the film course, or do I let in anybody that wants in? My attitude about that has been if you want in, you get in. Last quarter the film section had 360 kids, including the art majors. There ' s a lot of talk about small enrollments being an important way to teach, I don ' t know. I ' m not sure that you need a few people to make it a good course. Everybody operates differently. If I knew what a good teacher is I wouldn ' t be what I am. He imparts data, attitudes, leaves room for every student to function to the best of his ability. He raises intellectual hell with students. He antagonizes them. He takes and shakes their minds and forces them to do intellectual combat with him. He purposefully role-plays the devil ' s advocate sometimes. He should be a catalyst in the learning process. You don ' t teach people things, they learn them. I force my students to read a great deal of material, thousands of pages, three or four movies a week, I work them as hard as I can. I force them to do as much as I can. I make the exams real bears. And when they get done, I hope they go away saying ' I ' ve learned something! ' Education is kind of like Alice in Wonderland — what ' s real and what ' s unreal. Students don ' t reward good teaching. Like anything else, some students are involved, some students are not involved, some could care less. There are some professors who are involved and there are some that care less. It ' s just people. In our department, for example, I think there is a real opportunity for students to participate in what ' s going on .. if they make the effort. There are students on every committee in the department except promotion and tenure. What ' s scary is that there are so many people involved in a young person ' s education that it makes you wonder what kind of effect you have on them. How many great teachers have you had since you ' ve been to this university? I ' m great in class. I ' m a star. But that ' s not teaching. Teaching is the hours I put in on those horrible exams. Hours and hours and hours. It ' s the reading I do. It ' s the research I do. Maybe that ' s a better way to approach it. Research is teaching. The research you should do should be an integral part of what you teach. It should help you and it should help the kid in the classroom. Maybe you ' re doing some very, very advanced research that may not be specifically applicable to that kid, but it keeps you intellectually alive so that you can keep him intellectually alive. It provides you with new perspectives. Teaching is research, research is teaching. You should be doing both. You just can ' t do one or the other. And the professors that sit around and say, ' Oh, Lord, I ' m a great teacher and I never do any research. ' That may be true, but ... you doubt it. dr. d.f. ungurait 32