University of Iowa - Hawkeye Yearbook (Iowa City, IA)

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They should know what they're doing U of I students could learn about the effects of drugs in a new course this year that was prepared and given by graduate students in the Department of Pharmacology. The drugs under scrutiny ranged from aspirin to oral contraceptives to marijuana and the hallucino- gens. The course, Drugs: Their Nature, Action and Use, was offered by the College of Medicine's De- parment of Pharmacology for two undergraduate credit hours. The course was first given in 1969-70 under the U of I Action Studies Program to about 60 students. This year the campus grapevine was busy and the obscure listing in the University's schedule of courses resulted in approximately 400 registrants. Because of lack of facilities, 50 had to be turned away and another class time was added to take care of the un- expected excess of150 students. Concerning the material used in the course, Gerald Gebhart, coordinator of the course explained, We not only talk about drugs of abuse, we talk about oral contraceptives, antibiotics, and other drug classes and emphasize pharmacologic principles common to all of them. There really is no other place in the University or any educational system where the student can learn about drugs. Thus, he can be easily duped by TV commercials and magazine advertisements. We want to give the student information to make him a better informed drug consumer. Although the course deals with the effects of mar- ijuana, alcohol, stimulants and hallucinogens, there is a determined effort by the instructors to remain objective and give the students an unbiased evalua- tion. We want to give the students a source of reliable 206 Drugs Course

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writers - sometimes the only ones. At Iowa they, find themselves dropped into a ready-made peer group, forced to compete for the praise and recogni- tion that they had before come to expect as their due. Some fold. But in time the real writers learn to cope with an atmosphere described by one of the students as positively Byzantine with its intrigues and all. And how do they cope? They do their work. As early as the 1920's the university catalog indi- cated that creative work would be acceptable as the- sis material, and in 1932 Paul Engle submitted his book of poems, Worn Earth, as his Master of Arts thesis. Eleven years later the same Paul Engle took over the first Iowa Writers Workshop and gradually established it as an entity separate from the univer- sity's English department. During the war there were as few as 12 in the program. Today, by accepting about one applicant in four, registration is held down to about 160. That's quantity. What about quality? Very good indeed. The late Flannery O'Connor, novelist and short-storywriter, is probably the most eminent of the workshop's graduates. Tennessee Williams was a student here too, when the program was combined with the university's Playwrights Workshop, and the story they tell is that he submitted an early draft of The Glass Menagerie as his MFA thesis - only to have it rejected. Other notable workshop graduates would include novelist R. V. Cassill, who for years taught in the Paul Engle workshop and recently moved on to teach a similar program at Brown, National Book Award winner Richard Kim, and prize-winning poets W. D. Snod- grass and William Stafford. But name-dropping does not give an accurate pic- ture of the program's achievement and is probably unfair to those left off the list. Paul Engle emphasizes that what the workshop does best is get people to write and continue writing. They're always asking about results, he says. I remember dropping a three-foot stack of books on a dean's desk just to show him some results. I could have shown him more if I could have carried more. I've got three full shelves 'pf books by former workshop students at home. Anyone who doesn't write here then, it's his own fault, a young workshop poet says. They don't really 'teach' you to write, but they do give you the opportunity. Ultimately, all they can do is make it possible to learn - and that's alot. Although none quite comes up to this student's accolade, the Iowa Program in Creative Writing has received plenty of plaudits in the past. One of its most enthusiastic boosters is Rust Hills, fiction editor of Esquire, who has said that in the literary world, Iowa means the university's Writer's Work- shop. As for the question of whether or not creative writing can be taught, the easy answer is, 'Yes, of course it can. They've been doing it at Iowa for 25 years' SZ freprinted from The National Observerj I I I Writers Workshop 205

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information on drugs. We're not moralizing. We're not saying you should or shouldn't. The information we give them is truthful and reliable. We have an optional section on another night for those who want to discuss the other aspects of drugs of abuse - their legality and their morality. .. If the interest in the class holds up, Gebhart continued, then we'll know that this is one of the ways to discuss drugs. When people know more about drugs, they're bound to be a little more rational about them, and not just accept hearsay from their friends. We'd like to offer the course to all 20,000 students on campus, but we just don'thave the room. Members of the Department of Pharmacology fac- ulty are pleased with the new course and the students response. Dr. Iohn P. Long, professor and head of pharmacol- ogy, said,' I know of only one other university in the nation - the University of Chicago - now of- fering an undergraduate course on drug use and abuse. We are very pleased to see the interest on this campus. I think it is extremely important for non- health-related people to learn about drugs. Teachers, counselors, journalists, all need to have a working knowledge of drugs and their effects. Dr. Michael Brody, professor of pharmacology and adviser to the graduate student group, thinks the course is a tremendous undertaking. It fills a void in the offerings of this University, in providing a general course on what drugs are, and how they are used. People everyday take sedatives or stimulants, put salves on their skin, take many non-prescriptive drugs. They should know what they're doing. S2 i33:5 5-wg, fri-'is'ttR',ffvgftm. . I 'll it 'n A 9? ,gl It Drugs Course 207