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Show t y I Beat me, daddy, five to the bar ' Somehow, it just doesn't make any sense at all. Not life, necessarily, but the music department-jazz division controversy. Well, what's apparently done is done. The jazz program is out two instructors, the best of the jazz students are planning to pack up and leave, no replacements have been found yet for either instructors or talented students, and a search committee working to that end apparently ap-parently hasn't gone anywhere. On top of that, there are stories and rumors all over to the effect that jazz instructors on colleges across the country are purposefully not applying for the vacant positions, both in sympathy for the deposed and in fear of a bad situation. Indeed, the report in "Downbeat" magazine by editor Charles Suber probably did more damage to the University's Department of Music than they ever could have done to themselves. And damage they did. We wouldn't be surprised, in fact, if next year's jazz program folded entirely. At best, it can do nothing but putter quietly along a straight and insignificant course. There will be no winning of first place awards in jazz festivals. There will be no commissioning of works by University composers. There will be no invitations to perform in the great cities of this nation and the world. No, all of that is over; the cream has been skimmed off the top and, as it were, thrown away. It's ironic that the University's much-publicized and propagandized "quest for excellence" should, in this case, find excellence and then repudiate it. Would Dr. Henry Eyring (distinguished professor of chemistry) have been given his walking papers as the automatic consequence con-sequence of visiting professor status? Would Dr. William Kolff (head of the pioneering Division of Artificial Organs) have received the same treatment? We seriously, seriously doubt it. Yet has the same thing happened to Ladd Mcintosh and the jazz program? Time would have told, but it can't now. No sir, a great victory has been won for administrative authority. A student rebellion has been put down; order has been saved. (The student assembly, however, will probably consider freezing a $13,000 contribution to the department until some realistic thinking is done on the jazz program.) But this victory has cost two things, the first being the historical right of the student to choose what he will study and by whom he will be taught, at this University, anyway. But the worst is yet to come. The music department has resigned itself once again to the run of mediocrity and conformity that, for a short time, it had grown out of. But can't we get, as was brought up, Carmen Dragen or Stan Kenton to teach jazz? Sure, and while we're at it we'll hire Step 'n Fetchit to teach Black Power. |