pig. Two

SCARLET AND BLACK

 

Guaranteed Fees

On the agenda for this weekend’s meeting of the
Board of Trustees is consideration of a student fee in-
crease for next year.

We would like to say some things about fees and
Ihe tendency of college administrators to raise them.

, Average tuition at 99 selected private institutions,
according to the American Council on Education's Fact
Book, is somewhat over $1,200 (Grinnell’s is $1,640).
The U.S. Office of Education reports that the average
‘cost of room and board is $700 (Grinnell’s is $850),
The USOE also notes that incidental costs of transpor-
tation, clothing, textbooks, and recreation run between
$500 and $1,000. (Grinnell’s official incidental fees —
health, activities, and admissions fees —« run to $110;
you can make your own estimate on personal expenses.)
Grinnell’s trustees have pushed the comprehensive
fee to its present $2,600 level by small jumps since 1957,
when the fee was $1,550. These increases, which have
become an annual autumn tradition at Grinnell, have
the effect of making the four-year cost of a Grinnell
education about $1,000 more than could be anticipated
in a student‘s college-planning days.
' Fee increases are unpleasant but necessary, the
dministrators tells us. ”Institutions of higher learn-
ing are subject to three principle forces making for
l necessary increase in operating cost. Increasing en-
tollments, the need for higher faculty salaries, and
necessary instructional improvements are demands
.which cannot be ignored," an Ohio university adminis-
trator pointed out earlier this year at the National Con-
ference on Higher Education.

But the problems of yearly fee increases can’t be
ignored, either. One trouble with fee increases is that
fcholarships aren’t raised commensurately. And even
f that $100 or $150 increase can be absorbed by more
money from home, it just isn’t good public relations.

So we would like to suggest that the trustees seri-
ously consider the plan, now in effect at St. Olaf Col-

ege, whereby students contract with the college on
.What their tuition will be for four years. This plan al-
lows students to estimate their college expenses ac-
curately and protects the school against large numbers
of transferring students in the final two years.

We might further suggest that Grinnell students
be allowed to contract for their entire comprehensive
fee to guard against room, board, and incidental fee in-
creases which would make a guaranteed tuition an
empty sales feature,

A guaranteed comprehensive fee is, very simply,‘

a good idea.

 

Response to Response in Poetic Form

To the Editor:
In response to the response to “Lyric Doggeral (sic) Number
One" (1 just renamed it):
Dear George Eastman (Education):
1 surrender, boldly and deliberately.
To paraphrase:
it ain‘t what you say, it's the way that you say it.
i crave not the old familiar ideas.
But that there he posted,
Along the railroad track,
A sign
heading 7 train 1m to right —
English Spoken Here. A St. Louisan
inarentl

Scarlet and Black

GIINNELI. COLLEGE

Grinnell. town

A weekly ‘wsp oi published eacll siiiluy ol me ~
legu yeal’ by melt coniiniiiec on Student Pub
(ions. acprcscnicn 1m national advertising by National Ad-
\‘L‘l'KIsmg Service. inn, colegc publishers Representative,
is lziisi ioih succi, New York 21, N.r, Second cuss posi-
igo paid ii cnnncll, Iowa Subscription mo 55.00 per
school \caf “500 paid subscriptions.

ciinyiigni was Si is: and such

 

RDHOR .
lusmcss MANAGER
AonUClAIL EDH'OR ,
scouis CDIIOR
iuiuouu LDH‘OR
ClucuLAuoN MANA . w.
u or LlllCAGO BUREAU . , . . SHE Taylor
[limits in 51 zls, on nmsn. Steve Sllender
s , , Aiiin Axelrnd, Juulze Bah], Sue Buqulht, Marlhl uerkey,
Pull Hunky, Pim clay. Anne rum, Jeff Nerf.
uni lone, .loiincno Moll, Muy Mllcom, sue Mozslue,
I women .v-iici round, :lexnoi Plln, Judy Scan.
simun lVllyne Menu], Sue Banner. chk Chad!
, , xelvy limoii, minor. wzuml
umn Summers, Susan wm

.iolin won

leokl rum-a

. lob Homem-
sim cum
cynihl- anisl
Chindler Muniuiun

STAD‘F
ss si'ur

 

and place lyrically

Wilbur lenks

Friday, November I. IN!

Jenks' Journal

This is my first entry, I have been keeping this
journal, as i suppose almost everyone has, without
ever having written anything, permitting instead
the cellular matter of perception and reflection to
collect itself and settle into the back of my brain as

a kind of intuitional embryo. I might wait for this
child to develop unconsciously and of itself and be
born, someday, into wisdom of word or deed or both.
but I fear delusion: the hidden transformation of
that waiting into a vain remembering, into a subtly
consuming attempt to ﬁx the point in time that the
pregnancy was absorbed. For perhaps that cellular
matter, unexpressed, is only that — cerebral waste,
Rather than allow the issue of my experience to he
liom an orphan or in die through my own careless-
ness or cowardice, I have resolVEd to work feeling
into thought, to parent the infant, if he exists, by
communicating him.

Our genius escapes us. oenuis is that thought
which goes on continuously and by itself, like diges-
tion, and is exposed only in those fleeting moments
when we are not thinking: while we are brushing
our teeth, for example, or tying our shoes, or falling
asleep in the shower. It is then that we least expect.
the phenomenon of insight, so that it darts back
into the thicket before we realize that we are hunt-
ers. We are left vaguely troubled, feeling that some-
thing has eluded us, that we have been visited by a
certainty which we cannot identity. A remnant oi
last night’s forgotten dream, we might think. A: the
noise or the sub-vocal soliloquy called thinking is re-
sumed, the event seems to lose significance; the in-
sight is obscured the instant we engage our minds
in its pursuit.

The genius is able to think Wlthout talking to him-
self. His utterances annihilate themselves, exposing
the profound silence that was their source. We can-
not discover the knowledge available to him either
by “sitting down" or “going out" to search for it,
because we are ourselves that knowledge, and in<
separable from it. it clings to us like the ocean to
the hull of a boat that ﬂoats upon it. It cannot be
grasped, as a hand cannot grasp itself; it cannot be
expressed, as a word cannot define itself. Yet it re~
aides and operates in us at every moment, determin-

David Lighlbourne

ing that we do what we heed to do, whether or not
we know what those needs are. We can communicate
these elaborate instincts only by demonstrating
them, by responding spontaneously and authentically
to their impulses. But we are only ordinary mortals:
our utterances confound our intuition and corrupt
our responses. Thus our communication will be, at
best, imperfect

Inspired by'a solitary ten minutes in a halfv
darkened Scarlet and Black office, a nostalgia for
the rolledvup shirtsleeve and green visor, and a de-
sire to participate in the potent disorder of reporting
these evanescent days, this journal will be an im—
perfect attempt to iii-rest and surround the occasion-
a1 insights that visit me. It may be necessary for me
to do a lot or tooth-brushing and shoe-tying and
shower-sleeping in order to gel material; but I urge
the reader to make inferences. to consider its execu-
tion and the implications of its existence as well as
its subject matter. If the journal fails as s piece at
writing, it will yet unwittingly demonstrate certain
facts about its author, who claims to represent a (ll-
mension of the student mind that is somewhat
neglected in these pages. l begin with the assump»
tlon that the intellectual and spiritual matters which
concern me cannot be drastically unlike those which
concern all of us; we are, after all, members of the
same generation and of the same community.

New I am writing it all down, and it seems that
whatever is written ought to be read, When it ap-
pears in print, 1 shall certainly read it, with the
vanity of one who cannot take his eyes from a
photograph of himself. But I shall not be the artless
impersonator that we encounter in our own photo-
graphs, hut simply anonymous, to those who know
me and even, maybe, to myself. For this journal
will not record those external features that dis»
tinguish me from other individuals, but will receive
reflections and beliefs, the internal features that are
hidden in the particular silence of each of us, It is
perhaps this silence that I wish to penetrate, to over-
come by example the isolation of appearmces. I am
satisfying ii special need and doing, I feel, what
many people would like lo do. Maybe everyone
should have ii newspaper column.

WILBUR JENKS

trains and rivers

I've been asked to say something by way of in»
trlxluction about Son House, the Negro blues singer,
prior to his performance here tomorrow nighl, and
don't know exactly where to begin.

For one thing, Son House is one of an older gen-
eratioll oi Negro country blues artists who were born
in the Mississippi ”Delta" region. recorded a few
“race records" in the 20's and 30's, and then disap—
peared back into the bleak obscurity oi the nonhem
Mississippi Countryside. And unlike many of the re-
discovered country performers currently singing [0
the college folk “revival,” Son House is “pure Delta,"
which means he helped invent and develop some of
[he most haunting, driven, bitter and psychologically-
lnlense music in Western culture. From Charlie
Patton, Son House and Willie Brown through Robert
Johnson to Muddy Waters, and John Lee Hooker,
the Delta Style is the "mainstream" in country
blues, the central point of influence for every other
kind of “blues" muSlC from hillbilly to sophisticated
jazz to rock-and-roll. IL is also, according to News~
week, “our finest native-born music,”

The original Negro blues were conceived —
somewhere, at some time ~ as an extension of group
music into 3 [arm in which the individual Singer
could improvise freely around some introspective,
personal theme. The metaphor “the blues” has come
to be associated with many things, but it originally
meant die total injection and alienation from society
is» by the rural Southern Negro, experienced in the
harsh, practical terms of his daily existence. An i
tense environment was bound lo produce intense i
dividuals, and it was the illiterate artists in this out-
cast spoiely, the singers and untrained country
gnilanplayeis, ivliu capiuml Lhis intensity in its most
brilliant and hallucinatory furm.

The creative blues artist had to have the poet’s
outlook — “the ab' ' m state the truths of his time
he mum of, Son House is thus

the music of poverty, exhausting labor, the fears oi
the Mississippi Negro under the lynch-law govern
ment of the 20's and 30's, as well as the loves and
yearnings of an intellect sensitive to a Dostoyevskian
predicament. On another level it is the music of a
tragic vision trying to cope with the particular: or its
destiny.

There are, of Course, many factors which make
this kind of cultural event inaccessible to a white
audience. Country blues performers were otien shy,
iiniovened poet-guitar players, and regardless or
individual personalities the country blues are most
often intimate soliloquies, painful admissions in a
private dialogue between the artist's emotional and
artistic sensibilities. The best blues performances
are always improvised and spontaneous, the singer
choosing his theme and actually putting the song 10‘
gether on the spot, relying on his own inventive
abilities and falling back if necessary on the thou-
sands oi stanzas and phrases which are “common-
places" in blues lyrics. Then too, harsh voice, thick
accent, and a primitive and unpolished musical style
add to the problems bl a iai-mal presentation.

All too often there is a tendency to dismiss this
Negro music as an inevitable, but nevertheless un-
pleasant reminder of what this country has done to
its colored Citilens. This kind of attitude is doubly
gratuitous in that it ignores the artistic excellence
of these Negro singers at the same time that. it
crosses them off in hlswry us the unfortunate Vic—
tims of a regrettable cultural lag. The truth of the
matter is that the American South created the cir-
cumstances (or a remarkable variety at man, of
man driven to the physical and psychological hor-
ders of human endurance, and that from this re-
markable, historical voyage this manner of man
brought back a new version of human experience,
and was forced to invent — out of lllltel'acy Ind lg:
norance ——a new kind oi human art. that mu,
capable of telling about me terror of that trip.

 

