Page 14

The Cardinal: Down. And Out?
AT least once a year, when the news is slow, feature editors on southern
Wisconsin
     newspapers browse through their morgues, rework the yellowed clippings,
and
come up with a nostalgic feature they can call "The Daily Cardinal-Its
Life and
Colorful Times." Highlights of Cardinal history make great hammock reading.
They
recall seven decades of lively, scrappy young writers leading Wisconsin students,
in
skirmishes against the System, often using humor as their most effective
weapon.
The Cardinal crusaded traditionally for a range of issues, some of which
really
were as vital as they were thought to be, and its years were laced with names
of
staffers who would go on to celebrity in many fields.
  But future Sunday editors may be short on such material: The Daily Cardinal
may be on its way out.
   Early this month a group of students began fund-raising attempts toward
starting
a new campus paper, The Badger Herald. If it gets off the ground it will
do so as
a weekly, which normally would offer no serious competition to a good college
daily. But its prospectus offers something which students seldom see in The
Cardinal
these days, "fair, wide-ranging news coverage, with copywriting that
avoids a slant
to one side or the other." Such objectivity in a competitor could be
a final blow to
the financially desperate and deadly dreary Cardinal.
  What was once one of the most sprightly student voices in college publishing
is
no longer a news medium, it is a message: a solidly radical one. So all-pervading
is its left-wing petulance, so limited its scope, so feverish is its pitch
that typical
student reaction is to ignore it as a low-comedy brat. Only the dedicated
pro-left
minority find meat in its hard-news columns. Editorials are a choleric rundown
of
Oppressions. Any day's issue offers these, plus good sports coverage, verbose
re-
views of movies that closed last week, letters of the kind Max Shulman used
to sell
for parody-and nothing more.
   Unfortunately for The Cardinal, among its remaining steady readers are
the
Regents. To prove it, the Board has cut off more than $9,000 in vital annual
sub-
sidy (in free rent and staff-faculty subscriptions) in reprisal for finding
dirty words
among the angst. If this action proves fatal to The Cardinal, there is a
suicidal
element to it: the editors were requested to discuss their vocabulary, present
and
future, with the Regents (many of whom shied away from anything smacking
of
official censorship), and could probably have gotten off the hook by extending
that
courtesy. But they refused loudly, ran Regent-baiting editorials and nyaa-nyaa'd
the
offending words over again. After that, neither side could back down, and
for the
first time in years The Cardinal will now have to support itself come autumn.
   The Herald, if it appears next fall, is planned as a give-away, with a
beginning
circulation of $8,000-10,000. Its Journalism, student founders say they will
provide
campus-wide coverage provided by correspondents from each college of the
Uni-
versity, and will join a national college news network "to avoid the
propaganda
style of writing," and because "we do not believe that (relevant
campus news) must
always come from Berkeley, Columbia or the University of Chicago."
   The paper will seek subsidy and advertising support, and the latter may
come at
great cost to The Cardinal from local merchants who suffer from the student
demonstrations which the paper supports.
   If advertisers jump to the new paper, and without the University's financial
sup-
port, The Cardinal may go under. Unhappily for a Wisconsin tradition, most
stu-
dents probably won't know it until they read it in The Herald.
14
John Guy Fowlkes,
Retiring, Honored
at Three-Day Seminar
   Prof. John Guy Fowlkes, one of
the titans of education, retires in
June. He was honored last month
with a three-day symposium which
drew educators from all parts of the
Americas.
   Prof. Fowlkes, 70, has been a
member of the faculty since 1922.
His first written work, Evaluating
School Textbooks, was published a
year later and he has remained one
of the more prolific authors in edu-
cational administration.
   He served as director of the
Wisconsin Improvement Program,
dean of the School of Education,
first Charles J. Anderson professor
of education, and director of the
Summer Sessions.
   At the close of the seminar in his
honor, Prof. Fowlkes was presented
with a special commendation of
merit from the State of Wisconsin.
Faculty Group
Works in Support
of Administration
   The gathering of more than 1,400
faculty signatures in support of the
University administration during the
student strike (Wisconsin Alumnus,
March) was the work of an anony-
mous group of some 35 senior
faculty members. There is nothing
                 Wisconsin Alumnus