University of Virginia Library

Letters To The Editor

Government Dept. Declining

The content of Mr. Williams
letter entitled "Faculty Defense"
points up all too clearly the fact
that the caliber of entering graduate
students in the Department of
Government and Foreign Affairs is,
indeed, declining.

Aside from shaking my faith in
the ability of the Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship people to judge graduate
student material, Mr. Williams'
letter strikes me as woefully uninformed
as to the machinations of
the Department. Further, as he so
readily admits, Mr. Williams really
doesn't give a damn what's going
on.

As a fourth year grad student,
and one who has survived three
departmental chairmen, two graduate
advisors, and the comings and
goings of innumerable disgusted
faculty members and graduate students,
I feel immeasurably better
qualified to comment on the
disastrous situation within the Department.
Indeed, the state of
affairs is such that should there be
no improvement in the current
student-faculty deadlock, it may be
necessary for myself and other
students who are concerned with
the present and future Department
to take the matter before more
nationally recognized forums.

But to return to Mr. Williams'
letter, I find his lack of intellectual
awareness and curiosity profoundly
disturbing qualities in one who
professes to want to teach. There
are two possible explanations for
Mr. Williams' opinions. Either he is
naive and/or uninterested in the
welfare of our Department, or, he is
fiendishly clever in playing up to
those who will be paying out his
fellowship money over the next few
years. If the latter is the case, he
should go far in this Department,
and perhaps obtain one of those
all-too-common "quickie" M.A.s
and even a more meaningless
three-year Ph.D. One only need
toady to the right people to make
these dreams come true.

The dull, unquestioning student
can certainly reach his goal of a
ticky-tack house in the ticky-tack
suburbia of contemporary Silent
Majority America. Such standards
may be tolerated in the business
community or in American society
in general, but should be brought
into serious question in an academic
community, theoretically
dedicated to the pursuit of Truth
and Learning. Unfortunately, Mr.
Williams' attitude toward graduate
education and the role of the
student therein is all too coincidental
with that of the men who
have in effect been running this
Department for the last twenty
years — an outlook so out of touch
with reality as to defy rational
response.

Last Tuesday evening, graduate
students in the Department of
Government and Foreign Affairs
learned the meaning of the "politics
of confrontation."

The meeting with Mr. Jordan
proved to be a distressing and
offensive affair as those students
with hardened hearts and attitudes
went far to destroy the manly
bonds of affection, sentiment, and
mutual respect for their teachers
and among themselves.

One felt that the issues of
support and understanding for Mr.
Ritter were of little importance to
those who would rather have no
meeting if it would not be wholly
on their own terms. The hydras of
Power and Polarization raised their
ugly heads and threatened to
devour the magic spirit of respectful
discourse that had entered the
room with the students. The
strident tones of the students and
the unseemly disrespect shown to
Mr. Jordan demonstrated, perhaps,
that the real issue was a kind of
combat, a vicarious guerrilla, a
bull-headed resistance against men
who came with hopes of hearing
the students' grievances. Perhaps
the root of the problem lies in a
Mithranistic view of student-faculty
relations; students are the forces of
light, teachers the powers of evil.
How far is this view from that
which sees all men caught up in
common weakness and a common
suffering.

One can only hope that the
baser appetites in that group were
sated. For the kind of unholy
juices generated by such scenes too
often ferment into the stronger
liquor of mutual hate and absolute
alienation.

Finally, we conclude with a note
of sadness for those graduate
students who were pure of motive
but short on good sense. They did
not see, as all the timid but
well-meaning do not, that the
masses of men are, in our own time,
seldom led to causes by their own
volition. Rather, to borrow a phrase
from the language of revolutionary
warfare, they are "maneuvered."
This in no way is meant to discredit
the very fine, modest and good
efforts of our student-faculty liaison,
Mr. Brian Hampton, and other
like-minded students.