Happy Hour runs until 9 at American Tap. Forty-cent drafts. Cheerleader tryouts are underway. Members wanted for the Tae Kwan Do-Hapkido Club. And the Concert Choir.
The SIU Democrats are registering voters. Allen I dorm floor meeting tonight. Attendance mandatory.
Cubs vs. Cards Sept. 11 at Busch Stadium. Bus trip is $15 round trip.
The Greeks are rushing.
Tuition is up. Again.
Quatros joint has 99-cent pitchers.
Rock-climbing classes now starting inside the Rec Center. Check out a tent and a canoe while you`re there. Giant City. Devil`s Kitchen. The Squeeze. Shawnee National Forest.
The Black American Studies program is still shut down. Reports of a kegger crackdown are sweeping Greek Row. Some frats are threatening to pull out of the Blood Drive. No beer, no blood.
(No one has yet collected the $50 reward for consummating a relationship, with verification, in the mauve-cushioned, curvilinear Pit in the front hall of the Alpha Tau Omega house. The Pit originally was placed in the hall to discourage fraternal brothers from parking their cars indoors after festive evenings.)
The air-conditioning isn`t working in some of the East Campus dormitories. Kids are sleeping outside under trees.
”You eat in the cafeteria yet?”
”Nope.”
”Yer smart.”
Morris Library is closed. Asbestos removal, or something.
”A Fish Called Wanda” now playing at the Varsity. There`s a Robert Cray concert coming. New Poetry review is seeking writers. Catfish Carter is at the Hangar. Three beers for a buck.
Jim Hart named new athletic director. Football Salukis picked to finish sixth in Gateway Conference. Women`s cross-country team opened Saturday against Murray State.
Free International Luncheon for all international students at the Baptist Student Center.
Sticks is the hot new bar.
There are reports that for the first time in years, women freshmen may outnumber men.
Wishful thinking, guys, says Admissions and Records.
Low-impact aerobics classes. Adult aerobics classes. Noon aerobics classes. Getting fit for aerobics classes. Spandex flash fires imperil SIU campus.
Egyptian Divers meet tonight. Tatoos by Ozzy and John. Walk-ins or by appointment.
Oh, classes? They start Monday. Don`t they?
10 a.m. Lawson Hall, Room 161.
”`Scuse me, do you know what class this is?”
”American government, I hope.”
GEB 114: Introduction to American Government and Politics, Dr. Barbara L. Brown B.A., M.A., Ph.D.. Two teaching assistants have the syllabuses. Pass them down.
Two hundred-and-eighty students. Eighty-sheet, spiral-bound, rule-lined notebooks at the ready.
Ground rules: ”I`ve been teaching this course seven years. I have a bachelor`s, a master`s and a Ph.D., which is why I`m up here and you`re down there.”
Four major exams. Three hourlies and a cumulative final. Two thought papers, two-three pages in length.
Questions?
”So, will there be eight exams?”
”No, four.”
”Will they all be cumulative?”
”No, only the final.”
Ground rules, continued: ”We don`t take attendance, but one thing is for certain (weighty pause) . . . those of you who are here will do better than those who are not.”
Text: Fred H. Harris: ”America`s Democracy: The Ideal & The Reality.”
3rd ed.
Hold aloft for all to see. ”It is strongly suggested that you purchase this book.”
With emphasis in staccato: ”This (weighty pause) is your textbook. . . . Make . . . sure . . . you . . . get . . . THIS . . . textbook . . . for . . . THIS . . . particular . . . class . . . We . . . will . . . use . . . NO . . . OTHER . . . textbook . . . just . . . this . . . one.”
Addendum: ”The author, a former U.S. senator from Oklahoma, ran for the presidency back in 1976, in ancient history, and he didn`t do very well, so he went back to teaching . . .”
–
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Student Center. University Bookstore.
”Excuse me, suh! Do ya`ll know where we can find `Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance`?”
Somewhere. Maybe alongside ”Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogeu (Philosophy 475, Sect. 1; $15.95). Or just above the shelf holding
”Computer-Aided Analysis of Electronic Circuits: Algorithms and Computational Techniques. (Electrical Engineering 457; $64).
”I need a book for my gym class, I don`t believe it.”
At the Book Trade-In counter. Melissa Wiseman of Oswego. She is a junior majoring in early-childhood education, but not born yesterday.
”I refused to trade my books in. One book cost me $35. I never even used it for the class because they tested off the lectures. They wanted to give me $4 for it and then they would have resold it for $25 or $30. . . .”
–
Old Main Room. Student Center. Lunch.
It slipped out from a university official`s mouth somewhere between the Monte Cristo sandwich and the coffee afterburner. He tried to grease it as a joke when he realized it might not sit all that well with the stuffed shirts on campus.
The typical graduate of Southern Illinois University?
Dennis Franz of Maywood, Class of `68. Also known as Buntz. Detective Norm Buntz. ”Hill Street Blues” and ”Beverly Hills Buntz.”
A Bleacher Bum goes to college. Regular Guy U.
”I came down and got involved in a three-day party, and I said this is the place for me. It turned out to be a two-and-a-half-year party,” said the actor from his new home in lower Bel-Air, Calif.
”It lived up to its reputation,” he said of SIU.
The Reputation. It goes like this:
”Where you go to school?”
”Southern, in Carbondale.”
”Oh, yeah? The party school huh? Heyyy, heyyyy!”
If SIU ever hopes to add density to its chronically sparse football and basketball crowds, officials should offer a six-pack with each ticket. This is a place where, historically, people come to party, and sometimes take diplomas with their hangovers.
They drape from the streetlights on Halloween weekend on the Carbondale strip. The city shuts down its main street to allow room for the party and the media coverage as Mardi Gras meets the Bud Man.
University officials and the occasional serious student claim that SIU is no more a party capital than any other place packed with 20,000 unsupervised people carrying ID`s, some of them legitimate. And they hasten to point out that more than half of those arrested at the annual Halloween beer bath are not SIU students, but Outside Agitators. Brothers and sisters and friends of SIU students maybe, but not Salukis themselves.
That`s another problem for SIU students.
”Saluki? What the heck is a Saluki?”
Our school mascot. It`s an Egyptian hunting dog.
”A what?”
Forget it.
Carbondale sits in a region at the southern tip of the state known as
”Little Egypt.” The nickname is said to stem from a drought in central Illinois in the 1880s. Farmers from the drought-stricken areas came south to buy grain in this region near the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, much as they went, in biblical times, to the breadbasket region of the Nile in Egypt.
In the Vietnam and post-Vietnam eras, Southern Illinois University was also known as the Berkeley of the Midwest. Radical came to almost-Kentucky. The fast-growing university in a small coal-mining town had attracted a highly charged population of more than 20,000 students.
The idyllic, woodsy campus with its own 30-acre lake provided fertile ground for an activist student body that included one of the nation`s largest contingents of Vietnam War veterans and members of both the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panthers.
There were violent episodes, particularly from 1968 through 1970, when buildings were bombed, administrative offices were stormed and rocks were thrown at campus and city police. Dynamite turned up in the strangest places. The 82-year-old Old Main building was burned down by arsonists in the summer of `69. And the campus was shut down a week before summer vacation because of unrest and demonstrations in 1970.
Until last winter, the ”Ho Chi Minh Trail” was a lingering symbol of that era. Named by students after a major supply line for the Viet Cong in Vietnam, Carbondale`s version was a rutted clay path that led from the Southern Hills residence halls on East Campus down to the Illinois Central tracks and to the edge of U.S. Hwy. 51 at the border of the Central Campus.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran to mud in even a light drizzle and sent its trekkers spilling down the steep incline toward traffic. But its anarchic course fit the mood and the inclination of those days.
Now it is shut off by university fencing, and students use a new, concrete official overpass to reach their classes. The alumni magazine announced without mourning, ”The Ho Chi Minh Trail has been blocked by a fence. Sic transit gloria muddy sneakers.”
–
Fall Semester, 1988.
With CD players, VCRs and the increasingly prevalent portable PCs in tow courtesy of U-Haul, they marched 24,000 strong to SIU-Regular Guy U, for the Fall Semester, 1988. One-third of them funneled down I-57, or piled on Amtrak`s No. 391 (”The Illini”) or No. 59 (”The City of New Orleans”) for $77 round trip from Chicago.
They are, for the most part, the sons and daughters of the working man and woman. The average family income is $21,000. A high percentage are the first in their families to go beyond high school.
Carbondale, 350 miles south of Chicago, is the farthest many of them can get from home while still qualifying for the residency rate. (Tuition is $556 per semester plus $272.95 in student fees.)
Eight percent of them are on some sort of financial aid. Most of that group toils for the money on campus in civil service, swabbing catsup from cafeteria floors, carrying campus mail, punching the clock before hitting the books.
Southern has a med school and a law school and all the departments that earn the kiss of certification and academic legitimacy. But the school`s biggest draw is the College of Technical Careers, which offers two- and four- year degree programs in aviation, automotive mechanics, mortuary and funeral sciences, computer programming and other pragmatic arts and crafts. Regular guy stuff.
Traditionally, SIU in Carbondale has been a bootstrap school, the escape route for the children of coal miners, apple-harvesters and sharecroppers. It has always lured the mavericks, the hardscrabble kids. More Berwyn than Winnetka. More Centralia than that.
University officials say that if they can lure the city and suburban kids down for one look at their woodsy campus, or even get them to sit through a slide or film presentation, they`ll hook them for good, winning them away from the urban gridlocked campuses of Chicago, Normal and Champaign-Urbana.
This campus doesn`t need a lot of hard sell and lip gloss. Thompson Woods, the unpruned 20-acre forest in the heart of it, muffles sound and dissipates stress with its thick undergrowth and high canopy. Students emerge from the cold concrete of Faner Hall, a fortress of classrooms, into the sheltering sleeves of the woods. Asphalt footpaths follow undisciplined courses through a natural woodland that has been exoticized by university botanists, biologists and other strange birds.
The campus, the brochures claim, is a living museum of sweetgum, dogwood, white pine, poplar, Northern catalpa, butternut, wild black cherry, magnolia, bald cypress, ginkgo, elm, hedge maple and dawn redwood as well as paw-paw, sassafras, persimmon, white ash, box elder, winged elm, basswood, sycamore, mulberry, osage orange, red cedar and hackberry.
But marijuana once was the predominant plant in this woods, mostly in the rolled-and-pinched-at-both-ends variety.
Campus Lake, more than 30 acres of it, wraps around Greek Row and the Thompson Point dormitories, offering a beach, canoeing, fishing and dunking opportunities for initiates of all sorts.
The vast Shawnee National Forest and Giant City State Park lie just a few miles from campus, tolerant of keggers and cruisers but occasionally swallowing a student here and there for days at a time.
Norm Buntz might get the yank-at-the-collar sweats at the U. of I. But at Carbondale, he`d be a regular camper. (”Ripping” on the U. of I. has always been an intramural sport at SIU, although aerobics is now slightly more popular.)
”I felt right at home there because I didn`t feel like I was below or above anybody. We were all kind of on a par, and that was kind of what we were proud of,” said Buntz, a.k.a. Franz, whose real last name is Schlacta.
”We all fit together and had a good time. We didn`t worry about trying to keep up with an image. We were just working-class.”
Not that Carbondale is everyman`s Utopia. Black students have always been welcomed on the Carbondale campus but discouraged from leaving it to mingle in the town.
Ugly reports of bars on the Strip charging admission to blacks but not to whites surfaced again last year. Black fraternities and sororities are strong but do not share space on Greek Row with the white Greeks, who have never taken a strong hold at SIU. Blacks feel their parties get shut down more often than whites`.
Until recently, campus housing was poorly integrated. A transfer of Black American Studies classes from the general education curriculum to social studies also has caused a heated controversy.
”I think 1988 could potentially bring a hotbed of unrest,” said Larvester Gaither, vice president of the Undergraduate Student Government.
–
10:30 p.m. Monday. The Strip. American Tap.
The kid gives it a try at the bar. But the bartender has a Ph.D. in freshmen with phony ID`s.
”When`s your birthday? What`s your middle name? What`s your zodiac sign? Outta here, now!”
Freshmen still do freshmen things.
”Wait,” the kid pleads, ”Let me get my friends.”
An entire table rises and shuffles out.
(Only a freshman would finger his buddies, too.)
–
Daily Egyptian campus newspaper. Monday. Aug. 22, 1988.
Headline: Students survive heat.
Temperatures in dorm rooms on East Campus are as high as 100 degrees because air-conditioning units were turned on just before the students arrived.
A DE reporter found one newcomer immune to it all.
”The heat didn`t really bother me because I was so excited about everything,” a student was quoted.
Her name, the newspaper reported, was Tammy True. She was a freshman. Her major was ”Undecided.”
–
Said Franz, the ”typical SIU grad”:
”I made the right choice. When you run into people familiar with the Salukis, they know what to expect from you. You don`t have to say a whole lot. We have sort of created our own sort of fraternity, an image.
”I make jest of the school, as everybody does, but it is true that a lot of people go down there to party, like me, and they accidentally stumble upon a good education. Whether you wanted to be part of it or not, you fall into it. I am grateful to them.”
