The Hillsdale Affair

...President Roche's first assumption, as explained to HEW Secretary David Mathews, was that it was all the "result of a bureaucratic oversight...

...John Nollson The Sorrow, the Pity, the Injustice o/Justice A preview ofMarcel Offals' next film...

...His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth and she drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire..his eyes thrust into her vet 3 ' being...he had made of her body a bush of roses of Sharon, exfoliating pollen, each prepared for delight...

...It has no business coming between the individual and his government...

...So our system, which once really exalted voluntarism, defers to the bureaucrats who come bearing manacles...

...But in any event, Hillsdale and HEW have been playing a catand-mouse game ever since, in November of 1975, the college found itself reclassified as a "recipient of federal funds...

...The biggies in business put up with the most flagrant idiocies of Ralph Nader...

...Bill Barlow, a smalltime electrical contractor and plumber in Pocatello, Idaho, invoked the Fourth Amendment guarantee against warrantless searches, and, after an agonizing wait of six months, a three-man court justified his refusal to let OSHA inspectors conduct a fishing expedition in his back shop...

...Naturally, it wasn't easy to recognize Daoud in the crowd...

...Brooklyn College, in direct violation of New York State law, twice asked its faculty to fill out detailed questionnaires dealing with their ethnic and racial backgrounds...

...And in education George Roche, the President of little Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan (1,010 students), informed Mr...

...A family getting food stamps doesn't make the grocery store in which the stamps are used a "recipient institution...

...Hillsdale isn't responsible for the laws that entitle individuals as citizens to government help...

...Hillsdale's position is that it would be unfairly discriminating if the college were to refuse a veteran who has GI money coming to him as a matter of right...

...It raises cindma veritd to new heights, new heights, Marcel...

...Nor does a man buying gasoline with money received from a welfare check mean that the service station is necessarily compelled to hire a Hindu gas pumper or a Chicano secretary to make it "affirmatively" acceptable to Washington...

...The besequinned verbiage can out-Durrell Laurence Durrell and reach confession-magazine levels...

...statutes...

...Thus, it is proper to characterize those institutions as :eceiving Federal financial assistance' in the direct and immedite sense of that term...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: I am not paid to make politkal decisions, monsieur...

...So it was naturally left for Elie Abel, dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, to complain that he couldn't give an "in-house" promotion to any of his faculty members without first combing the country for a Chicano-Polish woman with a degree in copy editing or a black ex-city editor just to prove "compliance" with Affirmative Action requirements...

...It's simply not mv business...

...Since George Roche has been absolutely scrupulous about rejecting even the most innocent-sounding governmental aid, HEW had to go all around Robin Hood's barn to make it appear that Hillsdale was "subject to the requirements of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and other civil rights John Chamberlain, author of The Enterprising Americans and many other books, writes a regular column for the King Features Syndicate...

...That is one thing that is wrong with our country...

...What a sense of the moral dilemmas of the age...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: You know, of course, that metropolitan France has been overrun with Arabs of every description-from the Maghreb, from the Levant, from everywhere...

...Called The Balancing Act: Quota Hiring in Higher Education," George Roche's book showed how the imposition of minority "goals" in student and faculty recruitment led definitely to quotas, which, in effect, sanctioned reverse discrimination...

...you know how the exhibitors complain about the length, about the turnaround time, about the declining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . John No//son z-~ vLvzting professor of aTa/ectics at l'[nstitut des ttautes Etudes Cin~malographiques z)e Part...

...I am a genius after all...

...HEW's assumption was that "presently ssisted students" would not, in the absence of federal programs, e replaced by "other, self-sufficient students...

...So far the Moscow Communists have been able to price their wheat, steel, and vodka by noting the exchange rates that will result in practical cross-border trade...

...Mises proved fifty-odd years ago that socialism, in practice, would founder because, without a free market, it would never be able to solve its pricing problem...

...Not too many years ago George Roche wrote a brilliant essay on the social effects of extending centralized State power...

...George Roche's Board of Trustees, unlike other boards we could mention, has passed an astounding miracle...

...The fact is that practically everybody in America is forced to take government money indirectly...

...Following Pierre van den Berghe's formula for a "proper sociological caucus," Hillsdale will be compelled to hire two blacks (one man, one woman), one Chicano, (or Chicana in alternate choice), one person to be Amerindian, Asian, or Eskimo, and sixteen white Anglos...

...HEW officials are not used to dealing with people of gumption...

...Eight will be juvenile, four mature, and four senile...

...Naturally, I expected that we would shoot him then and there, and that the only controversy would be where to bur)' him, and that the government--in order to restore friendly relations with our Arab friends--would finalIy agree to bury him in the Invalides, next to Napoleon...

...The students at Michigan State University were not to be hornswoggled...

...President Roche replied promptly that he had "not felt it appropriate for the college to judge the sources of student funding, since those sources should be primarily a concern of the individual involved...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: He was very upset...

...I want you to look at the film of these interviews, for I need your opinions on further editing...

...Only a hundred of the present student body low depend on federal assistance...

...He said that he was a personal friend of Kim I1 Sung, his personal supplier he called him...

...The heads of big universities tumble over each other to attract federal funds --and, some ten years after the "affirmative" acceptance of poorly qualified minority students has become part of the campus way of life, President Kingman Brewster of Yale is pained when the federal quid pro quo for medical school grants turns out to be a requirement that transfers from foreign schools be accepted without questions about academic competence...

...O D I D . . . . . . . . . I I J @ O . . . . . . . . . 4 ~ Q U ~ m . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 J . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I I . . . . Q . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . @ . . . . . . . . . ~@@ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I . . . . . ~ . . . . . . . . . . John Chamberlain The Hillsdale Affair A little college in Michigan is fig hting one of HE IV's most preposterous abuses of authority...

...But that is beside the point...

...If, so Dr...

...In the first place, the college had never asked or support...

...A dictatorship dedicated to "planning" would have no data on which to plan...

...What makes the whole HEW-Hillsdale imbroglio doubly ironic s that the college has had its own "affirmative action" program ~om the very beginnings of its existence as a Free Will Baptist :ollege back in 1844...

...There are other reasons than offended amourpropre for HEW, as a defender of the faith in Big Government, to try to crush little Hillsdale under Goliath's heel...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: But of course...

...Not easy at all...

...The "quoal," defined by Professor Paul Seabury of the University of California as "a slow-moving quota-goal," and the "gota" (a "supple, fast-moving goal-quota"), have yet to achieve a lexicographer's blessing...

...Hillsdale happens to be one of a small number of colleges that have refused, out of philosophical conviction, to take federal money...

...Of the Anglos, eight will necessarily be women, fourteen will be heterosexual, and two homosexual (one a lesbian), one Jewish, ten Protestant, and four Roman Catholic, and one either a Buddhist, a Mormon, or a Muslim...

...So, if Hillsdale is devoted to perpetuating Mises' voluntarist philosophy, Hillsdale must go...

...Blacks and women have always been present )n campus...

...Well, mort ami, what did you expect...

...OEFALS: Yes...

...He said his arrest was an outrage...

...OFFALS: And he said...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: But of course...

...President Robben Fleming of the University of Michigan, with government money riding on his decision, caved in to demands for a ten percent black enrollment (a "quoal" or a "gota" or just a plain quota...

...A joke...

...He quoted Shakespeare: "Then everything includes itself in power,/ Power into will, will into appetite;/ And appetite, an universal wolf.../ Must make perforce a universal prey,/ And last eat up himself...

...When HEW came snooping, it resolved "that Hillsdale College will hold to its traditional philosophy of equal opportunity without discrimination by reason of race, religion or sex, but such non-discrimination will be voluntary, thus preserving equality with dignity and encouraging friendship based on recognition of equal worth and mutual respect...

...Columbia President William McGill, acquiescing to HEW's snoopers, remarked that "no one likes to be in the position of negotiating for his survival with Uncle Sam sitting at the other end of the table...

...There are plenty of answers to the sophistical reasoning of HEW s regards ttillsdale...

...sales of popcorn, and all that...

...Livonia Benedict, of the -ollege's first graduating class, was Michigan's first woman 3achelor of Arts...

...Women Ph.D.'s are still comparatively unavailable when a small college is looking to enlarge its faculty...

...In picking on Hillsdale College, the Health, Education and Welfare bureaucrats are really reaching for it...

...But when the whole world is Communist, the dictators will choke on strawberries while the proletariat scratches in the black market for potatoes...

...If the government were to leprive the hundred affected students of aid (which, incidentally, night be a violation of the equal protection clause of the Constituion) because of Hillsdale's refusal to accept HEW as its overlord, he students might be able to get scholarship support elsewhere...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: So I walked up ~o him and said, "vous 6tes Daoud...

...Martin Gerry, the Acting Director of HEW's Office for Civil Rights, that his school has no intention of kowtowing to Washington by submitting an Affirmative Action program for HEW approval...

...The bureaucrats did this by claiming that veterans' benefits and other government-supported grants or loans to students who happened to choose Hillsdale made the college a "recipient institution" subject to federal control...

...It took Henry Ford II twenty-five years to discover that the Ford Foundation, set up by his grandfather in 1936, was more often than not anti-business...

...Roche played up the ludicrous and the horrible about "quoals" (quota-goals) and "gotas" (goal-quotas) with dead-pan impartiality...

...Colette would never do that, and neither would Virginia Woolf...

...Since Mises' logic is irrefutable, socialists of all breeds have hated him as Christians hate the Anti-Christ...

...In the second place, it was not at all apparent that the ollege could not reach its 1,010 enrollment capacity without .ccepting the beneficiaries of government grants, loans, and 'eterans' benefits...

...The biggies are never much help...

...Nor with people who will throw Shakespeare at them...

...And, to give President Roche the sinews of war necessary to send HEW packing, the trustees authorized raising a Freedom Fund of $29,000,000, dividends from which could be used to provide a scholarship for any poor student who happened to be deprived of a federal grant or loan because of his criminal choice of Hillsdale as a prospective Alma Mater...

...HEW waited four months before reasserting its claims...

...Nobody can prove motivation, but it is a tenable assumption that somebody in HEW may have been stung by George Roche's delightful sarcasms, and so swore a mighty oath to get Hitlsdale College even if it involved fracturing not only the Constitution of the United States but also Webster's Collegiate Dictionary...

...After a second lapse of four months, HEW tried to be "helpful in explaining" its own tortuous reasoning for assuming jurisdiction over Hillsdale's hiring practices, particularly as they affected women...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: But then I remembered something about the way Palestinians seem to be in need of a shave...

...The President of Harvard, Derek Bok, is positively slavish in his obeisance to HEW's snoopers...

...It so happens that, without HEW prodding, Hillsdale already employs 122 women to 103 men...

...Replying to a racial and ethnic questionnaire submitted for use in the local university computer, 150 students listed themselves as American Indians, others described themselves as "50th Generation Hun," or "Texan," or "Super Jew...

...Says George Roche, there shal be no Alma Martyrs as long as the Hillsdale trustees remain in fighting--and money-raising--trim...

...OFFALS: Yes...

...They wish to hurx a Bedouh, in the tnvalJdes...

...But 139 white male teachers, if they had superior credentials, might be suing the University of Michigan for reverse disThe Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 19 crimination from now to doomsday if the Fleming promise holds...

...IEW's imputation that Hillsdale necessarily depends on grashington is wholly unwarranted...

...And when a lieutenant from the South tried to .-xclude a black student from the Hillsdale Students Army training Corps in World War I times, a stern instruction went )ut from President Joseph Mauck's office to "follow the asual practice of the institution regarding the acceptance of :olored students...

...So, you can begin with my interview of the arresting officer...

...President Roche could easily have come up with a satisfactory Affirmative Action blueprint, but he has refused to do so because it would acknowledge an acceptance of federal control that neither he nor his board of trustees is willing to agree to in principle...

...Roche noted the pusillanimities of some of his educational colleagues, and the ironical reflections of others...

...But the biggies, fortunately, don't happen to be everybody...

...Admitting the ambiguity of the law, it said that "one of the unmistakable purposes of these student aid programs is to make educational opportunities readily available by supporting the financial stability of educational institutions...

...One is tempted to say, as one Peter deVries character said of another, "Down deep, she's shallow...

...HEW, at the moment of writing, hasn't tried to close in on Hillsdale College for the kill...

...that is of course their business, the busines-~ of tim politicians and the diplomats...

...We are all "recipient institutions" whether we want to be or not...

...Maybe the bureaucracy is waiting to see how the Carter Administration will react to the ridiculous claim that when an individual spends a federal benefit, it automatically makes the secondary recipient of the cash a ward of the government...

...These films of mine...

...One of HEW's demands is that President George Roche must now come through with an Affirmative Action plan for hiring women...

...Yes, as soon as I read of the release of the eminent Palestinian, I immediately saw the filmed interviews unfolding before me--with Giscard, Rabin, and Ararat, with the Pope, Billy Carter, and Clay Felker...

...And the aforementioned President Fleming of the University of Michigan agreed to engage female professors for 139 out of the next 148 vacancies on the faculty...

...ARRESTING OFFICER: Frankly, m~m ami, the_-,e Semites are nothing but a 20 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977...

...For 18 The Alternative: An American Spectator March 1977 lost institutions, if not all, the necessary impact of reductions in ederal student aid programs would be reduced financial .'sources...

...Others in this group include Rockford, Wabash, and Pepperdine among the " l i t t l e s , " and Utah's Brigham Young University whose 25,000 students can count on financial support from the Church of Latter Day Saints...

...Raphael Riverson, of the Westchester County Federation of Italian American Organizations, seriously announced to the New York State Human Rights Division that, since the population of Westchester is 40 to 50 percent Italian, the new State University College at Purchase, N.Y., should be compelled to hire qualified Italians up to "forty percent of its supervisory, teaching and administrative staff...

...Who knows...

...If HEW is indeed singling out George Roche for punishment for having indulged in the crime of wit, one can predict the ultimate Affirmative Action plan that will be inflicted on Hillsdate if the new HEW director, Mr...

...Our instincts in such circumstances were to promise almost anything in order to get the government off Columbia's back...

...A rare honor you have given me, Marcel...

...There's no jail in France big enough to hold me," he said menacingly...

...Califano, happens to be vindictive...

...In the case of George Roche, they had caught a most unusual Tartar, a college President who, in 1974, had written a cannily considered attack on the whole idea of applying "affirmative" action to educational institutions...

...But to produce, direct, edit, and reduce to a mere four and a quarter hours a new film about the release of Abu Daoud, this, Marcel, is your greatest triumph...

...It so happens that Hillsdale is the repository of the late Ludwig von Mises' personal library of some 5,000 volumes...

...OFFALS: So you are disappointed...

...Ah, Marcel, I knew we could leave it to you...

...The first President, Daniel Graham, was part of the mti-slavery movement and, from his pulpit, condemned "African 51avery as a national sin and a curse...

...Since the U.S...

...The fireworks were mounted on wire bodies waving amorous arms, tiptoeing on the purple tongues of the Holy Ghost, leaping out of captivity, Mercury's wings of orange on pointed torches hurled like javelins into space spearing through the clouds, the purple vulvas of the night...

...OFFALS: So you are resigned...

...Roche said, the "expansions of federal authority under Title IX are now to use such individual funding as a means of assaulting the independence of Hillsdale College as a whole, we reserve the right to re-evaluate the programs involved...

...The fact that the faculty consists of fifty-one men and seventeen women has no discriminatory connotations...

...OFFALS: You are morally equidistant...

...When OSHA agents invade properties without search warrants and slap on fines without a semblance of willingness to accept court procedure, the large corporations say nothing...

...OFFALS: He was right of course...

...two will be intelligent, ten mediocre, and four stupid...

...Constitution guarantees equal treatment of people as individuals under the law, a government enforcement of "affirmative" practices favoring special groups meant that the State itself was breaking its own basic charter...

...Nothing like it had been seen in the world since the Nazis had promulgated the Nuremberg laws...