SPAN: July 1977

FUSION WITH A LASER

Scientists are convinced that if there is an ultimate solution to the world's energy problem, it is in the harnessing of thermonuclear fusion power-the energy that powers the sun and the stars. The fuel for a fusion reactor would be deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen found in the oceans in virtually unlimited quantities.

In the KMS Fusion Laboratory in Ann

Arbor, Michigan, a brilliant red fireball (above) in a glass pellet reveals the presence of a tiny fusion reaction.

The reaction has been caused by a highenergy laser bea,m exerting enormous heat and pressureon.atoms of deuterium and tritium inside th{fpellet, which made the atoms "fuse,'\emitting energy in the form of neutrons and alpha particles: The KMS Fusion Lab is a private

company doing some of the world's most advanced research in using lasers to trigger controlled fusion reactions.

The article on page 40, "The Ultimat(} Solution: Harnessing Thermonuclear Fusion," explains in detail the research being done at 'many laboratories in America and India. The. photograph on page 41 depicts one of the very -latest in KMS experiments. .

A LEITER FROM THE PUBliSHER Much has been said these last few months about the concern of the American Government for human rights throughout the world, and how this concern will be woven into the fabric of U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, in President Carter's most recent foreign policy speech (see page 2), human rights is one of the basic themes. .

Many people, however, have been raising questions about this new emphasis. What actions will the U.S. take? What will be the criteria for acting?

In a recent speech at the University of Georgia, U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance answered some of these questions.

He pointed out that the philosophy of President Carter's human rights policy reflects America's origins and progressive values. He quoted poet Archibald MacLeish-"The cause of human liberty is now the one great revolutionary cause .... " In discussing what the U.S. would actually "do" to promote human rights throughout the world, Secretary Vance said that virtually every nation would have to be considered as a separate case: "A doctrinaire plan of action would be as damaging as indifference. We must be realistic.

Our country can only achieve our objectives if we shape what we do to the task at hand."

He pointed out that in each"specific case the U.S. would ask itself many questions: What kinds of violations or deprivations of human rights exist? Is there a pattern to the violations? If so, is the trend in a particular country-including the U.S.-toward concern for human rights or away from it? Is its government willing to permit independent, outside investigation? Will U.S. action be useful in promoting the over-all cause of human rights? Will U.S. action actually improve the specific conditions at hand or will it more likely make things worse? Will others work with us, including official and private international organizations dedicated to furthering human rights? Does America's sense of values and decency demand that we speak or take action in any case, even though there is only a remote chance of making our influence felt? Have we steered ourselves away from the self-righteous and the strident, remembering that our own record in civil rights is not unblemished? Have we been sensitive to genuine security interests, realizing that outbreak of armed conflict or terrorism could in itself pose a serious threat to human rights? Have we considered all the rights at stake? For example, if the U.S. reduces aid to a government that violates the political rights of its citizens, do we not risk penalizing the poor and hungry, who bear no responsibility for the abuses of that government?

Secretary Vance emphasized that "it is not our purpose to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries," but "no member of the United Nations can Claim that the violations of internationally protected human rights is solely its own affair." He stressed that "we will always try to act in concert with other countries, through international bodies."

Finally, he made it clear that the U.S. policy is to be applied within our own society as well as abroad. "Many here today have long been advocates of human rights within our own society. And throughout our nation that struggle ... continues. " In his book, Non- Violence in Peace and War, Mahatma Gandhi wrote: "The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. He frees himself and shows the way to others." This is a remark not very different from that of a Westerner who has been influenced by Gandhiji -Jimmy Carter. The President of the United States said in his inaugural address: "Because we are free, we can never be indifferent to the fate of freedom elsewhere.'· -J.W.G.

SPAN A Foreign Policy to Serve Mankind

by President Jimmy Carter

Mankind at the Turning Point A report on the "Futures Research Seminar" by S.R. Madhu

10

An Indian Scientist Looks at the Future

12

Do All American Women Want Equal Rights?

14

Durametallic Seals a Bond Between India and America by Ma/ini Seshadri

An interview with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan by Chidananda Dasgupta

by Penelope Lemov

18

22

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

28 34 38

The Uncertain Passage From College to Job

by Ellen Cohn

by Walter Guzzardi Jr.

40 44 45 49

On the Lighter Side A Speech to South African Businessmen

by Ambassador Andrew Young

Front cover: Judith Jamison (holding umbrella), the magnificent star of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, gives an uproarious performance in a jubilant baptismal scene that is part of Ailey's most famous composition, "Revelations." See page 22.

Back cover: A brilliant display of Fourth of July fireworks at Walt Disney World in Florida. The white building with blue spires is "Cinderella's Castle." See page 49 for more on Disney World, America's most popular tourist attraction.

STEPHEN

ESPIE, Editor; JAY W. GILDNER, Publisher.

Managing Editor: Chidananda Dasgupta. Assistant Managing Editor: S.R. Madhu.

Editorial Staff: Mohammed Reyazuddin, Avinash Pasricha, Nirmal Sharma, Krishan Gabrani, Murari Saha, Rocque Fernandes. Art Director: Nand Katyal. Art Staff: Gopi Gajwani, B. Roy Choudhury, Kanti Roy. Chief of Production: Awtar S. Marwaha.

Photographic Services: USIS Photo Lab. Published by the United States Information Service, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001, on behalf of the American Embassy, New Delhi. The opinions expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the United States Government. Printed by Aroon Purie at Thomson Press (India) Limited, Faridabad, Haryana.

Pbotograpbs: Front cover-James Dennis. Inside front cover-Henry Groskinsky, Fortune-Time, Inc. 2-Doug Bruce, Camera Five. 8, IO-Avinash Pasricha. 18-U.S. Travel Service. 19-Jug Suraiya. 34-© Thomas Victor.

35-Avinash Pasricha. 41-Tom Leonard, courtesy KMS Fusion Inc. 45-Y. Nagata, United Nations. 46-United Press International. 49 & hack cover - © Walt Disney Productions.

Use of SPAN articles in other publications is encouraged, except when copyrighted. For permission, write to the Editor. Price of magazine: one year's subscription (12 issues), 18 rupees; single copy, 2 rupees 50 paise. For change of address, send an old address from a recent SPAN envelope along with new address to A.K. Mitra, Circulation Manager, SPAN Magazine, 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi 110001. (See change of address form on page 48.)

A FOREIGN POLICY m SERVE MANKIND On May 22, President Carter, speaking at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, outlined a new foreign policy for the United States. He emphasized that it would be a policy 'based on a historical vision of America's role,' that it would be 'rooted in our moral values' and 'derived from a larger view of global change.' He stressed that it would be a foreign policy 'designed to serve mankind.' An abridgment of the President's speech follows.

In his 25 years as president of Notre Dame [University], Father Hesburgh has spoken more consistently and effectively in support of the rights of human beings than any American I know.

His interest in the Notre Dame Center for Civil Rights has never wavered and he played an important role in broadening the scope of the center's work to include all people-as shown in last month's conference here on Human Rights and American Foreign Policy.

That concern has been demonstrated again today by the selection of Bishop Donald Lamont, Paulo Cardinal Arns and Stephen Cardinal Kim to receive honorary degrees. In their fight for human freedoms in Rhodesia, Brazil and South Korea, these three religious leaders typify all that is best in their countries and in their church. I am honored to join you in recognizing their dedication and personal sacrifice.

Last week I spoke in California about the domestic agenda for our nation.

Our challenge in the next few years is to provide more efficiently for the needs of OUf people, to demonstrate-against the dark faith of the times-that our Government can be both competent and humane. . I want to speak today about the strands that connect our actions overseas with our essential character as a nation.

I believe we can have a foreign policy that is democratic, that is based on our fundamental values, and that uses power and influence for humane purposes. We can also have a foreign policy that the American people both support and understand.

I have a quiet confidence in our own political system. Because we know demo-

200 years are brief; and our rise to world cracy works, we can reject the arguments of those rulers who deny human rights eminence is briefer still. It dates from 1945, when Europe and the old international¡ to their people. order both lay in ruins. Before then, We are confident that democracy's example will be compelling, and so we America was largely on the periphery of seek to bring that example closer to world. affairs. Since then, we have inescapably been at the center. those from whom we have been separated We helped to build solid testaments to and who are not yet convinced. our faith and purpose-the United We are :confident that democratic methods are the most eff~tive, and so Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the Interwe are not tempted to employ improper national Monetary Fund and other tactics at home-or abroad.

We are confident of our own strength, institutions. This international system has so we can seek substantial mutual reduc- endured and worked well for a quarter of a century. tions in the nuclear arms race.

Our policy during this period was We are confident of the good sense of our own people, and so we let them guided by two principles: a belief that share the process of making foreign Soviet expansion must be contained, and policy decisions. We can thus speak the corresponding belief in the importance with the voices of 215 million, not just of an almost exclusive alliance among of a handful. noncommunist nations on both' sides of the Atlantic.

Democracy's great recent successesThat system could not last forever in India, Portugal, Greece, Spain-show unchanged.

Historical trends have that our confidence is not misplaced.

Being confident of our own future, weakened its foundation. The unifying' we are now free of that inordinate fear of threat of conflict with the Soviet Union communism which once led us to embrace has become less intensive-even though the competition has become more any dictator who joined us in our fear.

For too many years we have been extensive. willing to adopt the flawed principles The Vietnamese war produced a proand tactics of our adversaries, sometimes found moral crisis, sapping worldwide faith in our policy. The economic strains abandoning our values for theirs.

We fought fire with fire, never thinking of the 1970s have weakened public confidence in the capacity of industrial that fire is better fought withwater.

This approach failed-with Vietnam democracy to provide sustained well-being the best example of its intellectual and , for its citizens, a crisis of confidence made even more grave by the covert pessimism moral poverty.

But through failure we have found of some of our leaders.

It is a familiar truth that the world our way back to our own principles and values,' and we have regained our today is in the midst of the most profound and rapid transformation in. its entire lost confidence.

By the measure history, our nation's history. In less than a generation the

or

daily lives and the" aspirations of most human beings have been transformed.

Colonialism has nearly gone; a new sense of national identity exists in almost 100new countries; knowledge has become more widespread; aspirations are higher.

As more people have been freed from traditional constraints, more have become determined to achieve social justice.

The world is still divided by ideological disputes, dominated by regional conflicts, and threatened by the danger that we will not resolve the differences of race and wealth without violence or without drawing into combat the major military powers. We can no longer separate the traditional issues of war and peace from the new global questions of justice, equity, and human rights.

It is a new world-but America should not fear it. It is a new world-and we should help to shape it. It is a new world that calls for a new American foreign policy-a policy based on constant decency in its values, and on optimism in its historical vision.

We can no longer have a policy solely for the industrial nations as the foundation of global stability, but we must respond to the new reality of a politically awakening world.

We can no longer expect that the other 150 nations will follow the dictates of the powerful, but we must continueconfidently-our efforts to inspire and to persuade and to lead.

Our policy must reflect our belief that the world can hope for more than simple survival-and our belief that dignity and freedom are man's fundamental spiritual requirements.

Our policy must shape an international system that will last longer than secret deals.

We cannot make this kind of policy by manipulation. Our policy must be open and candid; it must be one of constructive global involvement, resting on these five cardinal premises: First, our policy should reflect our people's basic commitment to promote the cause of human rights. .

Next, our policy should be based on close cooperation among the industrial democracies of the world-because we share the same values and because together we can help to shape a more decent life for all.

Based on a ~trong defense capability, our policy must also seek to improve relations with the Soviet Union and with China in ways that are both more comprehensive and more reciprocal. Even if we cannot heal ideological divisions, we

must reach accommodations that reduce the risk of war.

Also, our policy must reach oui to the developing nations to alleviate suffering and to reduce the chasm between the world's rich and poor.

Finally, our policy must encourage all countries to rise above narrow national interests and work together to solve such formidable global problems as the threat of nuclear war, racial hatred, the arms race, environmental damage, hunger and disease.

'Because we know democracy works, we can reject the' arguments of those rulers who deny human rights to their people .... Democracy's great recent successesin India, Portugal, Greece, Spain-show that our confidence is not misplaced.'

Since last January we have begun to define and to set in motion a foreign policy based on these premises-and I have tried to make these premises clear to the American people. Let me review what we have been doing and discuss what we intend to do.

First, we have reaffirmed America's commitment to human rights as a fundamental tenet of our foreign policy. In ancestry, religion, color, place of origin and cultural background, we Americans are as diverse a nation as the world has ever known. No common mystique of blood or soil unites us. What draws us together, perhaps more than anything else, is a belief in human freedom. We want the world to know that our nation stands for more than financial prosperity.

This does not mean that we can conduct our foreign policy by rigid moral maxims.

We live in a world that is imperfect and will always be imperfect-a world that is complex and will always be complex.

I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. I have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our history that power has ranged from Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" to Martin LutMr King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream."

In the life of the human spirit, words are action-much more so than many of

us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian coun,-' tries understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.

Nonetheless, we can already see dramatic worldwide advances in the protection of the individual from the arbitrary power of the state. For us to ignore this trend would be to lose influence and moral authority in the world. To lead ft will be to regain the moral stature we once had.

All people will benefit from these advances. From free and open competi, tion comes creative change-in politics, commerce, science, and the arts. From control comes conformity and despair.

The great democracies are not free because they are strong and prosperous.

I believe they are strong and prosperous because they are free.

Second, we have moved deliberately to reinforce the bonds among o,ur democracies. In our recent meetings in London we agreed to widen our economic cooperation; to promote free trade; to strengthen the world's monetary system; to seek ways of avoiding nuclear proliferation; we prepared constructive proposals for the forthcoming meetings on North-South problems of poverty, development, and global well-being; and we agreed on joint efforts to reinforce and modernize our common defense.

Even more important, all of us reaffirmed our basic optimism in the future of the democratic system. Our spirit of confidence is spreading. Together, our democracies can help to shape the wider architecture of global cooperation-and the London meeting [the May 7 to May 8 meeting of the chiefs of state of Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.] was a successful step toward this goal.

Third, we have moved to engage the Soviet Union in a joint effort to halt the strategic arms race. That race is not only dangerous, it is morally deplorable. We must put an end to it.

I know it will not be easy to reach agreements. The issues are extraordinarily complex, and American and Soviet interests, perceptions and aspirations vary.

We need to be both patient and pndent.

Our goal is to be fair to both sides, to produce reciprocal stability, parity and security. We desire a freeze on further " ,motlernization and continuing substantial reductions of strategic weapons. We want a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing, a prohibition against chemical warfare,

no attack capability against space satellites, and arms limitations in the Indian Ocean.

I hope that we can take joint steps with all nations toward eliminating nuclear weapons completely from our arsenal. We will persist.

I believe in detente with the Soviet Union. To me it means progress toward peace. But that progress must be both comprehensive and reciprocal. We cannot have accommodation in one part of the world and the aggravation of conflicts in another.

Nor should the effects of detente be limited to our two countries alone. We hope the Soviet leaders will join us in efforts to stop the spread of nuclear explosives and to reduce sales of conventional arms. We hope to persuade the Soviet Union that one country cannot impose its own social system upon another, either through direct military intervention or through the use of a client state's military force-as with the Cuban intervention in Angola.

Cooperation also implies obligation.

We hope that the Soviet Union will join in playing a larger role in aiding the developing world, for common aid efforts will help us build a bridge of mutual confidence.

Fourth, we are taking deliberate steps to improve the chances of lasting peace in the Middle East.

Through wide-ranging consultations with the leaders of the countries involved, we have found some areas of agreement and some movement toward consensus.

The negotiations must continue.

Through my public comments, I have also tried to suggest a more flexible framework for the discussion of the three key issues which have so far been intractable: The nature of a comprehensive peace, the relationship between security and borders, and the issue of the Palestinian homeland.

The historic friendship between the United States and Israel is not dependent on domestic politics in either nation; it is derived from our common respect for human freedom and from our common search for permanent peace. We will continue to promote a settlement which all of us need. Our own policy will not be affected by changes in leadership in any of the countries in the Middle East. Therefore, we expect Israel and her neighbors to continue to be bound

by U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, which they have previously accepted.

This may be the most propitious time for a genuine settlement since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli confliet. To let this opportunity pass could mean disaster, not only for the Middle East, but perhaps for the international political and economic order as well.

Fifth, we are attempting, even at the risk of some friction with our friends, to reduce the danger of nuclear proliferation and the worldwide spread of conventional arms.

At the recent summit there was general agreement that proliferation of explosives from reprocessed nuclear wastes is a serious issue. We have now set in motion an international effort to determine the best ways of harnessing nuclear energy for peaceful use, while reducing the risks that its products will be diverted to the making of explosives.

'Our policy must encourage all countries to rise above narrow national interests and work together to solve such formidable global problems as the threat of nuclear war, racial hatred, the arms race, environmental damage, hunger and disease.'

We have also completed a comprehensive review of our own policy on arms transfers. Competition in arms sales is inimical to peace, and destructive of the economic development of the poorer countries. We will, as a matter of national policy, seek to reduce the annual dollar volume of arms sales, to restrict the transfer of advanced weaponry and to reduce the extent of our coproduction arrangements with foreign states. Just as important, we are trying to get other nations to join us in this effort.

All of this is just the beginning. But it is a beginning aimed toward a. clear goal: to create a wider framework of international cooperation suited to the new historical circumstances.

We will cooperate more closely with the newly influential countries. in Latin America, Africa and Asia. We need their friendship and cooperation in a common effort as the structure of world power changes.

More than 100 years ago, Abraham

Lincoln said that our nation could not exist half slave and half free. We know that a peaceful world cannot long exist one-third rich and two-thirds hungry.

Most nations share our faith that, in the long run, expanded and equitable trade will best help developing countries to help themselves. But the immediate problems of hunger, disease, illiteracy and repression are here now.

The Western deJ;I1ocracies, the OPEC nations, and the developed communist countries can cooperate through existing international institutions in providing more effective aid. This is an excellent alternative to war.

We have a special need for cooperation and consultation with other nations in this hemisphere. We do not need another slogan; although these are our close friends and neighbors, our links with them are the same links of equality that we forge with the rest of the world. We will be dealing with them as part of a new worldwide mosaic of global, regional and bilateral relations.

It is important that we make progress toward normalizing relations with the People's Republic of China. We see the American-Chinese relationship as a central element of our global policy, and China as a key force for global peace.

We wish to cooperate closely with the creative Chinese people on the problems that confront all mankind. We hope to find a formula which can bridge some of the difficulties that still separate us.

Finally, let me say that we are committed to a peaceful resolution of¡ the crisis in Southern Africa. The time has come for the principle of majority rule to be the basis for political order, recognizing that in a democratic system the rights of the minority must also be protected. To be peaceful, change must come promptly. The United States is determined to work together with our European allies and the concerned African states to shape a congenial international framework for the rapid and progressive transformation of southern African society and to help protect it from unwarranted outside interference.

Let me conclude: Our policy, is based on a historical vision of America's role.

It is derived from a larger view of global change.

It is rooted in our moral values.

It is reinforced by our material wealth and by our military power.

0 It is designed to serve mankind.

11111110 lTTBI

TUIIIIG POIIT Will we go ori polluting, overpopulating and recklessly exploiting the resources of this planet?

Or will we reorder our priorities to insure peace, harmony and a good life for all? The first course will lead to disaster; the second will call for balanced world growth based on scientific planning, a global conscience and, for many, a radical new lifestyle. This was the subject of a recent New Delhi seminar on futures research. In the article beginning on the following page, SP AN's Assistant Managing Editor, S.R. Madhu, reports on the seminar.

T

he most distressing thing that can happen to a prophet is to be proved wrong; the next most distressing thing is to be proved right," said Aldous Huxley, a quarter century after the publication of his Brave New World.

Huxley's remarks haven't deterred prophets; if anything, they have become more numerous and more venturesome. All over the world, colleges offer futurist courses, the computers of "think tanks" look at 2000 A.D. and beyond. Futurology is making headway in India too, where for millennia astrology has fascinated kings and commoners. In fact, if anything has a future, a wag said recently, it's futurology.

The futurology boom is timely. Battered by a multitude of crises-population, food, energy, environment-in a world so interdependent that everything depends upon everything else, man finds that old solutions to problems are either inept or irrelevant. He needs new perceptions, new ideas, new tools.

Without these, he will muddle along from problem to crisis to disaster.

This point was emphasized by two noted American futurologists, Mihajlo Mesarovic and Barry Hughes*, who recently visited India. They were key figures at a New Delhi seminar on "Futures Research and International Economic Decisionmaking," organized jointly by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the U.S. Information Service. Some 60 Indian scientists, planners, economists and futurologists attended the seminar.

In 1974, Mesarovic (along with Eduard Pestel) published the celebrated Club of Rome study, Mankind at the Turning Point, which argued that the bane of today is not growth but unplanned growth. They advocated a world of "organic growth" in which governments would make decisions for the universal good and not just for national interests. RiChcountries would transfer more of their resources to the poor, and each country would specialize in what it is best equipped to produce.

This vision of an altruistic world may seem Utopian, but Mesarovic and Pestel also designed a tool that is eminently practical: a computer model of the world divided into 12 regions with statistical data on more than 100,000 economic variables.

This model does not predict the future; rather, it helps policymakers design a better future. The model has been used by the United Nations to find out whether the goals of various U.N. agencies are consistent with one another. West Germany has used it to plan technological research in the most productive manner.

Mesarovic and Hughes aim to build better versions of the model with the cooperation of teams of economists around the world, so that every country derives the optimum benefit from it, and the era of organic world growth envisaged in Mankind at the Turning Point begins. "The future is in our hands," says Mesarovie, "if we act now." (A week later a similar message emerged from President Carter's address to the U.S. Congress on the energy crisis: "We must act now, together. .. to cope with a crisis that otherwise could overwhelm us.")

At the Delhi seminar, Mesarovic and Hughes showed how the model works, utilizing a live hook-up with a computer in Cleveland. Indian delegates asked questions about the South Asian ¡Mesarovic is director of the Systems Research Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.

Hughes is a professor of political science at the same university.

economy. These were fed into the Cleveland computer from a terminal in the seminar hall. Within 10 minutes, answers from Cleveland flashed across television monitor screens in the hall.

Commenting on this "computer magic," economist E.P.W. da Costa said: "If! hadn't seen it, I wouldn't have believed it."

Mesarovic and Hughes were closely questioned on the strengths and weaknesses of their model, on their thesis of organic growth and its meaning for India. What follows is a report of this unusual seminar, which dramatically demonstrated the expanding horizons of futures research, the world's interdependence and the positive potential of the North-South dialogue.

THE SEMINAR April 14, Ford Foundation building, New Delhi. In the spacious conference room, delegates sat on three sides, facing a dais, a white screen, and six closed-circuit television sets positioned within easy distance of all. Mysterious econometric charts hung on the walls. Beside the dais was a computer terminal-an orange-and-yellow "typewriter keyboard" fitted with a small television screen. Operating the terminal was a bushy-bearded American engineer, Thomas Shook, whom Mesarovic and Hughes referred to as "our computer guru."

How does a message go from the terminal to Cleveland?

Elementary, said the guru. "Signals we send go by telephone to New Delhi's Overseas Communications Service, from there by microwave link to the Dehra Dun earth station, then via satellite to London, then by transatlantic cable to New York, and finally via telephone to Cleveland." The Cleveland computer was "book-

'The world's crises are interwoven.

We don't have the luxury of dealing with one crisis at a time .... To ease the shortage of energy by measures that worsen the environment means to solve nothing at all. Real solutions are interdependent.'

ed" for the seminar for about an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening.

Mesarovic could be easily spotted-tall, bespectacled, professorial. By his side was the youngish, fast-talking Barry Hughes.

Prominent among Indian participants were P.N. Haksar, former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Dr. B.D. Nag Chaudhuri, Vice Chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University, E.P.W. da Costa, managing director of the Indian Institute for Public Opinion, and Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Welcoming the delegates, David T. Schneider, Charge d'Affaires of the American Embassy, said that most futurologists sat on the extremes of euphoria and gloom. Professor Mesarovie, however, posed a realistic view based on constantly updated mathematical models. Schneider quoted a passage from Mankind

at the Turning Point: "Mankind cannot afford to wait for change

to occur spontaneously and fortuitously. Man must initiate changes .... " Inaugurating the seminar, P.N. Haksar complimented the Club of Rome on making people think "in a large time frame" about man's destiny on earth. He also complimented Mesarovic and Pestel for "overcoming the pessimistic limitations of Limits to Growth," the Club of Rome's first study. Pointing out that the future, like sex, held endless fascination for man, Haksar said that man could divine the future better by using technological tools than by gazing at the stars. It was about time that scientific methodology influenced governmental decisionmaking.

However, Haksar urged caution and a spirit of humility on the part of technologists probing the future. Human behavior, he pointed out, is a mystery, and man's thought processes are not simple. History is replete with examples of intelligent, thoughtful people behaving in irrational ways. Technology cannot unearth every mystery, and the relevance of technological tools, however useful, should not be overstated. "Technologists should go about their tasks in a humble manner, as befits men of science, investigating reality and hoping to discover some laws, some data, which will brighten our future."

* * *

Ideas flowed fast and furious as Professor Mesarovic made the keynote speech of the seminar's first session on "Nature and Limits of Futures Research." "I come to share with you our experience in futures research and also to learn," Mesarovic said. He hoped the delegates together could develop "a new vision as to how we can improve the future of mankind."

Mesarovic's main points: e Today's problems challenge the comprehension of the most "perceptive and insightful leaders." They need help. "If we as scientists do not help them, what are we here for?" eThe world's crises are interwoven. "We do not have the luxury of dealing with one crisis at a time .... To ease the shortage of energy by measures that worsen the environment means to solve nothing at all. Real solutions are interdependent."

Moreover, the solutions have to be developed in a global context, since the world is no longer a "collection of l50-odd states." eTo clean up the present mess and to help shape a new world, every individual must develop a new ethic, a new global system of values. The components of this new value system: Every person should realize his role as a member of the world community, should cultivate thrift in using material resources, should seek harmony with rather than conquest of nature, should develop a sense of identification with future generations, and should be prepared to forego immediate benefits for the sake of posterity. • At the collective level, a comprehensive global strategy for survival is needed. Key elements of this strategy: (1) A new relationship with nature. (2) A narrowing of the economic gap between different regions of the world and the promotion of balanced growth. This can be accomplished by aid and technology transfer-and by social, economic and political arrangements to strengthen poorer regions of the world. (3) "Anticipatory mechanisms" should be set up to deal with crises. This is necessary because crises "gain momentum and reach terrifying proportions in less time than is needed for the design and implementation of political, social and technological remedies." (4) An instrument is

needed that can assess alternative plans for the future. The Mesarovic-Pestel computerized model is one such instrument. • A new attitude is needed toward the cost of finite resources.

Today the price of such a resource depends on the labor and the capital needed to extract it; the resource itself is free. The economic system should be altered so that the price of the resource reflects its scarcity. • The world's resources should be globally managed. Institutional arrangements can bring this about. Example: Extra funds accruing to one region from higher oil prices should be used to subsidize a minimum wage for labor all over the world.

If all these measures are taken, said Mesarovic, "organic" balanced world growth would become possible. The present crises can then be seen as blessings in disguise, as catalysts for necessary change.

Even as Mesarovic was explaining his thesis, "computer guru" Thomas Shook spoke in an undertone over the telephone, trying to finalize the Delhi-Cleveland computer hook-up. At 11:30 the

'Today's problems result partly from the fact that decisionmakers do not get specific inputs from scientists and professionals; . their decisions are therefore dictated by political or ideological considerations.'

"hook-up" was established, and Barry Hughes took the floor to show how the model works.

How is the model structured? Hughes explained that it is divided into 12 regions and contains statistical data on thousands of relationships-that between birthrate and population growth, between oil prices and fertilizer production, etc. The model is thus geared to tell policymakers how decisions concerning one sector of the economy will affect the whole economy. Said Hughes: "What we want to be able to do is go to a decisionmaker in any part of the world and let him tell us the things he wants to do.

We'll put them in the model and tell him the consequences of his decision. Thus, the model allows policymakers to explore policy options in an experimental fashion not possible in the world of reality."

Hughes spoke to Thomas Shook. Shook operated the computer terminal. Figures raced across the televison monitor screens -a table showing the expected economic growth of South Asia over the period 1975-2000, if present trends continued. According to this table, population would rise in 25 years from 775 million to 1,400 million, gross national product (GNP) from $140 billion to $ 551 billion. Said Hughes: "The model will now show you what happens to the economy if policymakers shift investment away from agriculture, into industry and other sectors."

Again, figures raced across the screens. Comparing these with the earlier ones, delegates realized that switching investment away from agriculture would reduce GNP and per capita income, increase trade deficits, increase food imports, create the possibility of starvation deaths. If investment in agriculture was increased,

Right: Professor Mesarovic addresses the New Delhi seminar on futures research. Below: Computer engineer Thomas Shook operates a terminal hooked to a computerized data bank in Cleveland, Ohio.

Below, center: P.N. Haksar, former Deputy Chairman of India's Planning Commission, who inaugurated the seminar.

Below right: "The future is in our hands," says Mesarovic.

At his side is the director of the USIS, Jay W. Gildner.

just the opposite happened: higher incomes and exports, lower trade deficits, improvement in all economic indicators.

Replying to a question, Mesarovic said: "The model we have here is not the final version either of the world or of any country, but it is capable of dealing precisely with specific questions relating to individual countries. It is merely a question of getting the data, putting it into the model structure and testing the model.

This will then allow us to analyze long-term developments of, say, India, in a world context."

* * *

The seminar's second session, on the application of futures research to international decisionmaking, was a fascinating exercise in computerized analysis. For the specialist, there were frank exchanges on concepts like hierarchical systems and linear programing. Dr. M.S. Swaminathan chaired the session.

Mesarovic conducted his controversial analysis (published earlier in Mankind at the Turning Point) on aid vis-a-vis the NorthSouth gap. He displayed computer projections showing that

if rich countries did not increase aid to the poor countries of South Asia, the rich will continue to be 20 times as well off as the poor (in terms of per capita income) even in 2025.

What should be done' to reduce this 20: 1 ratio to a more reasonable, say, 5: 1 ratio? Mesarovic showed three options.

Rich countries could step up aid and investment and maintain them at a high level-as much as $7,200 billion over the next 50 years. Another option was to provide increased aid only from 2000 A.D. In this case, the amount of aid required would be $10,700 billion. A third option was to provide massive amounts of aid during the next 25 years so that development in the poor countries became self-generating by 2000 A.D. In this case, the cumulative cost would be only $2,500 billion.

This analysis showed, said Mesarovic, that in the long run the most economical course would be immediate action. Delays would be enormously costly, even disastrous, both for poor countries and for the world as a whole.

Delegates at this stage suggested a couple of scenarios. What

would happen to South Asia if its mortality rate fell by 50 per cent by 1985? Or if an agricultural breakthrough doubled productivity? The mortality question was taken up first, and the "base scenario" on population-showing a table of such variables as birthrate per thousand, death rate and mortality rate-lit up television monitor screens. The delegate's question was fed into the Cleveland computer. The answer came 10 minutes later: If the mortality rate fell progressively, the total number of deaths during the first few years would also fall. By 1985, however, because of the higher population, the total number of deaths would be more than it is today. Other consequences: Imports would go up, so would the deficit in balance of payments.

The model was now asked a question on agricultural productivity. It revealed that if productivity was twice as high in 1985, grain yield would almost double itself (from 2.09 tons per hectare in the normal circumstances to four tons), food demand would rise, so would per capita income, and the balance of payments deficit would go down. Surprisingly enough, food would still have to be imported.

Rounding out the discussion, Mesarovic said that the planner combating national want and poverty is inhibited not by in~

'Today's problems challenge the comprehension of the most perceptive and insightful leaders. They need help. If we as scientists do not help them, what are we here for?'

adequate resources but by bad organization. The best prescription for the world's ills would be organic growth. In such a system, various countries would specialize in aspects of world production for which they were best endowed. "It's a rather complicated strategy, but one in which we're not talking about redistribution of wealth as a pie to be distributed in a better way; we're talking about everybody participating in the generation of new wealth, with a free¡flow of goods and capital between countries. That would mean more income for all."

One delegate pointed out that no country likes to be dependent on other countries; self-reliance is considered essential.

Mesarovic: "The most dependent nation in the world is Switzerland. It doesn't produce anything. Yet it has the world's highest standard ofliving. "

* * *

The seminar's concluding session, which was chaired by Dr. A.M. Khusro, Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, revealed that futures research has already gained a firm foothold in India.

P.D. Malgavkar of Poona, a Visiting Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, presented a paper on a 25-year industrial strategy for India. His strategy has five main goals: removal of poverty; self-reliance; national security; a high export capability to finance imports; a sound industrial base.

These goals could be achieved only by a consistent growth rate of 8 per cent-against the 3 per cent growth rate during the past 30 years.

Dr. M.S. Iyengar, a member of the National Council of Science and Technology's panel on futurology, said that technology is the driving force behind the world's explosive change. He urged developing countries not to opt for intermediate technology in the notion that it is best suited for them. What will benefit developing countries most is high-level technology; only that can ensure efficient and quick growth. He questioned the theory that all countries need to pass through the same cycle of evolution.

It is certainly possible for developing countries to bypass the entire stage of industrialization and "leapfrog into a higher stage."

The history of economic development has shown that it is often advantageous to be a latecomer, Dr. Iyengar said.

Britain has continually paid a price for being the first to undergo the Industrial Revolution. Developing countries have the advantage of learning from the mistakes and problems of developed countries. A new world can emerge from a critique of the old.

Dr. Nandini Joshi, director of economic research in the Birla Institute of Scientific Research, presented a paper that some delegates described as a bold speculative exercise. She said that for a developing country what is important is not predicting the future but changing it. This assumption had inspired the Birla Institute's recent publication, 2001 A.D., which had calculated that for India to attain a standard of living in 2001 A.D. comparable to that of several European countries in 1971, the growth rate in gross domestic product (aDP) would have to be 13.8 per cent, as against the present 5 per cent.

Dr. Joshi said that such a growth rate would imply rapid changes in the structure of the economy over the next 25 yearssuch as raising the rate of savings and investment from 6.5 per cent to 17 per cent, multiplying industrial output 50 times, ohanging the share of the industrial sector in the economy from 15 per cent to 37 per cent and that of the agricultural sector from 48 per cent to 10 per cent, reducing the share of agriculture in the total work force from 72 per cent to 15 per cent. "The required transformation would be indeed dramatic. The study in no way claims that this is likely to happen. It only indicates the imperatives of a legitimate objective."

Summing up the discussions, Mesarovic said he was pleased at how quickly his team was able to work together with Indian delegates. Responding to some of the comments made during the seminar, he said that futurology means looking at desirable plans for the future and selecting the most feasible ones. "There IS no point in saying that we need a 13 per cent or 15 per cent growth rate unless this is feasible."

Mesarovic earnestly appealed to scientists, economists and other professionals to evince a serious interest in the future.

Today's problems, he said, result partly from the fact that decisionmakers do not get specific inputs from scientists and. professionals; t~eir decisions are therefore dictated by political or ideological considerations.

Mesarovic hoped that the seminar would lead to a more permanent cooperation between professionals from India, the U.S. and other countries in designing a proper data base for the world's economies, and lead eventually to a more equitable society.

In other words: Futurologists of the world unite!

0

IlllDlll SCIllflSf

LOOISlf fIB rUfUBI In the interview below, SPAN Managing Editor Chidananda Dasgupta discusses issues arising out of the recent New Delhi seminar on 'futures research' with Dr. M.S. Swaminathan (above), Director General of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture. One of Swaminathan's conclusions: 'Unless we superimpose on the era of science and technology a new age of humanism, global action to meet man's need for food, energy and other basics will not be forthcoming.' tions based on a critical analysis of past trends, current realities and future possibilities. However, every term acquires a specific connotation over a period of time. Futures research is beginning to mean a highly sophisticated exercise in model-building using advanced computer techniques.

diverse than at present and may even lead to "Wars of Redistribution. " How is this problem to be solved?

SWAMINATHAN: To answer your question, it's necessary to understand the main differences between the agriculture of the developed and the developing countries.

There are a lot of issues involved. There are DASGUPT A: Do you think the Club of two main trends in agriculture in the world Rome's second report is as overoptimistic as today. In one kind of agriculture, larger and its first was overpessimistic? larger farms are being farmed by fewer and SW AMINATHAN: While the first report fewer cultivators. These farms are highly of the Club was certainly pessimistic, I don't automated and capital-intensive. Let me give think the second report is uniformly optimis- you an' example. A firm called Superior tic. For example, one of its projections Farming Company in California raises 26 indicates that the food crisis in Asia will different crops on about 6,000 hectares, worsen -and that by the year 2025 the with land and equipment worth about 30 protein deficit, in spite of all the advances crores of rupees. It has a computerized assumed, will be about 50 million tons per irrigation system called the "drip method," year. In fact it estimates that some 500 which brings individually piped water to million children will die of starvation or every fruit tree and regulates the flow to a near-starvation in the 50-year period ending trickle, supplying exactly what each tree 2025. So the second report does consider needs and no more. Under such systems of several problems with tragic potentials. farming, not only is the efficiency of use of inputs like water and fertilizer high, but DASGUPTA: Actually, Alexander King, one labor productivity is very high too. You DASGUPTA: Is futures research substan- of the founder-members of the Club of Rome, know, in one study made in the mid-fifties, tially different from the 25-year perspective cautions about this regional imbalance. He it was found. that in many countries of Asia points out that to feed double the present and Africa 2.5 to 10 workdays were needed to that India has been using?

SWAMINATHAN: The 25-year perspective number of people 30 years hence is feasible produce 10 quintals of grain. In parts of used in Indian. planning is also a form of on technical grounds, but the new populations France it took three hours to prodw:;e the futures research. Any form of perspective will be in the poor countries while the same amount of grain and in parts of the . planning falls within its scope. For instance, agricultural potentialities-at least in the United States, 6 to 12 minutes! the National Commission on Agriculture in short term-will be in the rich countries.

By contrast, in many of the developing India has given a medium-term (up to 1985) Others say that although world food calorie countries smaller and smaller farms are and a long-term (up to 2000 A.D.) perspec- production may be in balance in 1985 on a being cultivated by the same number of tive of the food needs and agricultural growth world basis, geographic distribution in supplies people or more. In 1971, 72.1 per cent of potential of India. It is in the form of projec- and demands is expected to become more India's work force was employed in farming.

Dr. Swaminathan, we both attended the recent New Delhi seminar on futurology- "futures research," as its practitioners increasingly like to call it [see preceding article]. As India's number one agricultural scientist, you're concerned with the present day as well as with future projections. Do you agree with one comment I heard at the seminar that futurology is an escape from the compulsions of present reality?

SWAMINATHAN: Actually the utility of futurology increases proportionately to an understanding of the compulsions of preserit reality. The present reality, in its turn, is based on past actions. Therefore, one could develop different scenarios for the future based either on a continuation of past activities and strategies or on modifications in the strategy and new breakthroughs. I think it is already clear from the pioneering work of Mihajlo Mesarovic and Barry Hughes [American participants in the Delhi seminar] that futures research is an invaluable input for planning and the determination of priorities for the utilization of scarce resources.

DASGUPTA:

Do you know that even in 1981 this percentage will remain practically the same?

processes- that areas like South Asia will be able to avert disaster, for themselves and perhaps for the world.

DASGUPT A: Does that mean that there is no way out of this doomsday for South Asia? DASGUPTA: It would appear that in the SWAMINATHAN: I am coming to that. field of energy, two of the major long-term You see, in assessing the future of agriculture .options before us will be nuclear and solar power. Preference for the second has naturally in this region, you must take two important differences into account. The relative produc- been expressed by many. But between the two, tivity of small farms varies widely in the which seems the more feasible to you, both world. As Robert McNamara, president of technically and otherwise, as an adequate the World Bank, has said that if Japan could source of the world's energy requirements at produce 6,729 kilos of grain per hectare on the beginning of the next century? small farms in 1970, then Africa with its 1,270 SWAMINATHAN: In my view, nuclear and. kilos, Asia with 1,750 kilos, and Latin Amer- solar energies are equally important. Purely ica with 2,060 kilos per hectare have enor- from the ecological standpoint, particularly in India, since we are blessed with abundant mous potential for expanding productivity.

Our own demonstrations in farmers' fields sunlight, solar energy is very important.

However, nuclear technologists are brilliant in India show that there is a vast untapped reservoir in rice, sorghum, millet and even people, and they should be able to solve the wheat, not only in irrigated but also in problems associated with breeder reactors unirrigated land. and the safe disposal of nuclear wastes. In There is another thing. In the developed India, more sophisticated use of solar energy countries, mechanized agriculture has be- is going to become an important issue. After come so productive by means of a high all, ours is predominantly an agricultural consumption of energy. And this energy is country, and agriculture is the world's biggest derived from the nonrenewable resources of enterprise in the harvesting of solar energy. the earth. In 1964, countries like India and Indonesia used 286 kilo-calories of energy to DASGUPTA: A great deal is being said today produce one kilogram of rice protein; the about the "global management of resources."

United States used 2,860 kilo-calories to But how will the immediate self-interest of produce one kilogram of wheat protein and different countries be subordinated to the more than 65,000 kilo-calories to produce one ultimate interests of mankind? kilogram of beef protein. Now, no finite SWAMINATHAN: The World Food Conresource can go on being used as though it is ference that met in Rome in 1974 resolved infinite, because someday or the other it will that by 1984 no child should go to bed hungry and no man should fear for his next day's get exhausted, and the growth pattern based on its use will come to grief. If the bread. Three years have gone by, but we do tools of modern agriculture-pesticides, ferti- not see any sign of concerted action on the part of the world community to make this relizers, power and water-are indiscriminately and excessively used and continue to be solution a reality. On the other hand, we see a based on nonrenewable sources, then. that rising price trend in fertilizers and other will lead to crisis situations-an energy crisis, essential inputs. To me it seems that the an ecological crisis, and so on. For example, temptation to make money out of poverty is 96 per cent of the energy input in the United still too great in the world as a whole. Unless States in 1970 came from oil, gas and coal. we superimpose on the era of science and In the same year 52 per cent ofIndia's energy technology a new age of humanism, global action to meet man's need for food, energy, needs were provided by noncommercial fuels like dung, firewood and wastes. The and other basics will not be forthcoming. world reserves of fossil fuels are expected to decline rapidly in the next 30 years. We are DASGUPTA: Suppose we do eventually get already running into shortages of the most to some form of world management of resources: Will it be possible to demarcate its desirable fuels. In South Asia, agricultural processes are still based mainly on the use of jurisdiction from that of nations? How would renewable sources, but our productivity is you draw that line of demarcation? very low. That is why both the developed SWAMINATHAN: Obviously, the problem and the developing world must find the cannot be tackled at the same time on all fronts. We will have to break it down to technologies for increasing the productivity of land by using recycling processes more simpler units and start a few exercises for effectively and with less dependence on joint management on a regional and global nonrenewable resources of energy. It is in basis. The starting point should be some of these two ways--increased yield from small the important nonrenewable resources on farms and better and better use of recycling which the future of the world depends so

much. For instance, there is the problem of the biosphere, where action on the part of one countrY.9an have repercussions on many others.

DASGUPTA: In Canada there is the Canadian Associationfor the Club of Rome. In the Netherlands,' Switzerland and Japan, there are similar groups in constant touch with the Club. Do you think India could profit from some such permanent link with centers of futures research? Is there apla~efor collaborative research on an international scale? Has the futures research seminar stimulated thinking in that direction in India?

SWAMINATHAN: Developing countries need to buy time in mani areas of growth.

They have the opportunity to benefit from the mistakes of the developed nations and to avoid repeating them in their own development programs. Some of the technology associated with futures research is highly expensive and need not be produced everywhere, so collaboration with advanced centers of research would be very useful. There is another reason too. One great danger in model-building, particularly ifit's for helping political leaders in decisionmaking, is that generalizations can be misleading. Global generalizations can lead to global mistakes.

So interaction between institutions in developing and developed countries could help in formulating world scenarios based on valid assumptions. As far as collaboration between India and the group headed by Professor Mesarovic is concerned, perhaps the IndoU.S. Joint Commission could develop an appropriate method of interaction beneficial to both sides. The Mesarovic seminar certainly stimulated a great deal of interest in this area of futures research. It was quite an experience to see answers to complex questions appearing on a television screen within minutes, radioed in froin the Computer Center of Cleveland, Ohio, 10,000miles away.

No wonder this is called the age of science and technology. But I wonder when we will enter the age of humanism in which science will become an instrument of universal human happiness. I feel that age will come only irwe subject all development of technology and all planning for the future to the one test prescribed by Mahatma Gandhi: Will this benefit the poorest man?

0 Dr. M.S. Swaminathan, one of India's foremost scientists, is well known internationally for his pioneering contribution to applied genetics and biology. Among the many awards that he has received are the Padma Bhushan and the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Recently, Dr. Swaminathan was elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences-the third Indian and the first agricultural scientist to be so honored.

u.s.

h

HUMAN RIGHTS IN AMERICA

DO ALL AMERICAN WOMEN WANT EQUAL RIGHTS? Apparently not. A recent poll revealed that 45 per cent of the women in the United States are against the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the American Constitution, which would provide a legal basis for corrective action in many areas of life where it does not now exist. The article below reports on the controversy now raging in the u.s. over this amendment.

"Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex."

In the context of modern-day America, that simple declaration-a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitutionseems so straightforward it's hard to picture it as the center of a nationwide controversy. Yet that is just what it has become. That simple declaration has raised such a specter of change within the American family that its enemies have labeled it a threat to the very structure of U.S. society.

The current controversy began to take formal shape in March 1972, when a proposed Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA as it's generally referred to, was approved by the U.S. Congress. (The same Equal Rights Amendment has been introduced in every session of Congress since 1923 and was finally approved in 1972, probably as a result of social, political and economic changes brought about by many factors, including the women's movement.)

In order to become a part of the U.S. Constitution, the proposed amendment must be ratified by the legislatures of three quarters (38) of America's 50 states within seven years of the Congressional action. In the beginning, it looked as if this requirement would be met easily.

The women's movement that had sprung to prominence in the mid-1960s had brought the need for more legal backing of women's rights to the nation's attention, and the majority of Americans, regardless of sex, were judged to be in favor of ERA. The climate for reform was favorable.

During the first year, 22 states ratified the ERA. The next year, 11 more gave their approval. But by then, many legislators and women themselves were beginning to have second thoughts. Only one state ratified ERA in 1975 and two other states voted to rescind their earlier ratifications. (Their legal right to do so is now being challenged in the courts.)

The number of ratifications now stands

at 35. Three more will be needed by March of 1979 if the amendment is to become the law of the land. Whether it will succeed or fail will depend on the outcome of the battle now under way between the amendment's partisans and its opponents, who feel that constitutional legislation to stop sex discrimination would introduce dangerous side effects.

Proponents of ERA, such as First Lady Rosalynn Carter, former First Lady Betty Ford, Joan Kennedy (wife of Senator Edward Kennedy), tennis star Billie Jean King, former Congresswoman Martha Griffiths and women's movement leaders Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, plus a growing body of men including President Jimmy Carter, generally believe the amendment would bolster women's legal rights in many spheres of society.

Public opinion pressures for opening up primarily male-held jobs to women have already been highly effective, but ERA, if passed, would probably increase the pace substantially. One possibility is that it would open the door for a flood of attempts under the law to make available to women certain arduous private sector jobs now denied them under "protective" laws, semiskilled jobs traditionally reserved for men, and high-paying ones where women, although qualified, have heretofore been little in evidence.

It would also lead, undoubtedly, to the removal of those lingering legal shackles on women which, in some parts of the United States, deny them equal rights with men in such matters as property or business ownership.

Opponents of ERA, such as Phyllis Schlafly, who founded the Stop-ERA movement, and Annette Stern, who founded Women United to Defend Existing Rights (WUNDER), see the amendment, however, as a threat to family life as it now exists in the United States. They fear that its equality provisions, while bolstering some rights in their economic and social relationships with men, would simultaneously strip away many of the

traditional protections women have enjoyed in their roles as wives and mothers.

(A recent poll showed that while 59 per cent of adult males supported ERA, only 55 per cent of adult women favored it.)

The opponents of ERA acknowledge that women would gain increased job opportunities and nat~onally enforced equal pay for equal work from ERA, but they draw attention to the erosion of women's rights they believe would follow within the family context. In particular, these misgivings concern women's traditional advantages in regard to child custody and support payments (alimony) for an ex-wife in case of divorce.

In the United States, women have tended over the years, more because of tradition than because of strict legal statutes, to receive favorable treatment from the courts regarding questions of custody and child support. The divorced wife usually received the custody of the children while the father was obligated to provide money to support them and their mother. ERA's opponents believe that this tradition is already endangered and that codifying sexual equality will simply make things worse. In the current climate of social change, court decisions in these areas already have become less automatically favorable to women. More cases now are being decided on the basis of the husband's and wife's individual needs and money-earning capacity, not gender.

More child custody decisions are being based on the degree to which a parentfather or mother-is better able to care for the offspring. And more women are sparing the judges agonizing decisions by opting to follow their careers and by voluntarily giving custody of children to their ex-husbands.

Not all women are equipped to follow such a course, however. Particularly vulnerable, claim anti-ERA groups, is the woman who has devoted most of her life to her family and then, after a divorce, faces the daunting prospect of earning her living at an advanced age

and without professional job skills or experience. Another fear of ERA's opponents is that the proposed amendment's insistence on sexual equality will be interpreted in the courts to mean that women have an equal obligation with their husbands for financial support of the family.

Despite a vast growth in the numbers of working wives in the U.S. economy, major family support is still traditionally the husband's responsibility. Equality pushed to the extreme, say ERA's opponents, might mean women who wanted to remain solely housewives would be forced into the job market against their will, with an inevitably disruptive eff~ct on family and children.

Would ERA really have significant impact in these sensitive family areas?

In some measure, certainly. But there is no way to predict what would happen in a given case because the final decisions on custody and support are made by individual divorce and family court judges.

In actuality, the worries about women being driven from home and forced to find work seem inflated. The record of the 16 U.S. states that already have equal rights amendments written into their state constitutions shows no such problems arising. Parental obligations are mutual under equal rights legislation, but courts have consistently defined that mutuality in terms of each parent's role, not merely in terms of how much money each brings in. If a couple have structured their marriage so that the husband is out working as a breadwinner and the wife works as the homemaker, the ERA would mandate no change. The amendment simply sex-neutralizes the language of the laws, substituting the word "spouse" both for "husband" and for "wife."

Thus it should help to remove the traditional legal and cultural assumption that men work and women stay home. "It is a case of the law catching up with life," claims an ERA proponent.

Another area of controversy concerns

Social Security benefits, which at present provide more financial compensation to widows than to widowers. What would probably happen under ERA is that the court would extend the additional benefits to widowers, not take them away from widows. In this case, a traditio.nal injustice primarily affecting men would be eliminated.

But the essential point about ERA is that noone really knows what definitive changes will come about if it becomes part of the Constitution-the 27th formal addition to that 188-year-old document.

In the United States it is the courts that act as arbiter of constitutional legal arguments and the courts-by a series of decisions in trial cases- that would define what is and what is not illegal discrimination on the basis of sex.

The amendment would merely set the guiding principles for the courts by declaring that any such discrimination is illegal. In effect the legal result would be that if an existing law restricts women's rights, that law would no longer be valid.

And if the existing law provides protection only for women, that protection would automatically be extended to men, as will most likely occur in the case of the disparate Social Security benefits.

Yet, oddly enough, it is the important role that will be played by the courts and individual judges-an integral part of the American governmental systemthat seems to be responsible for some of the second thoughts that have developed since ERA was first presented in 1972.

In 1975 voters in New York and New Jersey, two states generally viewed as "liberal and progressive" within U.S. society, went to the polls and voted against the amendment even though their state legislatures had approved it.

New York State Senator Richard Schermerhorn, an outspoken opponent of ERA, said at the time that he feared women would lose more than they would gain by the amendment and, as he explained it, "I don't want to put the lives

and rights of women in the hands of some judge."

But the proposal was rejected in the two states, not only by male voters like Senator Schermerhorn seeking to protect women but by the women themselves.

Reportorial probing to find out why turned up the fact that many women had voted against ERA as a way of saying "no" to the whole women's movement. Justly or not, the amendment had come to symbolize all the changes, good and bad, that have occurred socially in the decade since the women's movement began demanding equal rights and opportunities. And it offered women lacking sympathy with the goals and/or the tactics of the movement a chance to register a protest.

Many women who voted against the amendment indicated their belief that there has simply been too much change too fast in the field of women's liberation and that while many of the changes had been worthwhile both for this and succeeding generations (their own daughters, for instance), it was time now, they believed, for a pause.

The New York-New Jersey pattern was a blow to the partisans of ERA, who felt let down by the very women they'd been trying to help. Their goal, they reiterated, had never been to disrupt the lives of women comfortable with the old system but merely to give women the right to wider opportunities and the chance to make a free choice.

Even if the amendment falls short of the needed 38-state approval within the seven-year deadline (after which the proposal dies and could only be resu~rected by a new proposal and new ratification attempt), there is another way to work the goals of ERA into the law of much of the land.

This is via equal rights amendments to the constitutions of the individual states. Many of the 16 states that have already taken this route did so because they simply did not want to wait for the slower process of amending the Federal Constitution.

Just what will happen between now and ERA deadline day in March 1979 cannot be predicted. If the amendment fails to be ratified, more states may alter their own constitutions to achieve the same ends. Whatever the formal means and the legalistic result, however, the battle over ERA has raised some fundamental questions about basic attitudes and issues in American society that the nation will be wrestling with for years, if not decades, to come.

0 About the Author: Penelope Lemov is a contributing editor to the Washingtonian and many other American magazines.

Left: In Durametallic's Madras Factory, an Indian-made drill and a six-jaw pneumatic jig supplied by Durametallic Corporation of the U.S. is used to bore holes in a mechanical seal. Right: Durametallic's most sophisticated piece of equipment-a diamond-impregnated' rotating plate on which the surfaces of the seals are precision-ground to a 35-millionth of an inch. Above: A portable "Dura Lapper" that is used to check the result of the precision grinding.

Top: A few of the finished seals. They are marketed under the trade name of "Dura Seal."

INDO-U.S. JOINT VENTURES

DURAMETALLIC SEALS A BOND BETWEEN INDIA AND AMERICA TEXT BY MALINI SESHADRI PHOTOGRAPHS BY AVINASH ~ASRICHA

For the first time in India a dynamic new company is making sophisticated mechanical seals.

They're used by some of India's most prestigious industrial and scientific institutions.

The first feeling is one of utter unreality. Can this be a factory?

Where is the grime and the soot and the debris crunching underfoot? Where are the harsh lights, the high asbestos roofs, the nerve-shattering roar of machinery? Where is all the coming and going, the bustle and clamor, the echo of human voices? No tall chimney belches smoke, and the flowers are in full bloom in the garden beyond the windows. It takes getting used to, because it's all so different somehow, as Alice might have said on stepping through the looking glass!

Indeed, if Alice had stepped through into the mechanical seal factory of Durametallic Limited in Madras, here's what she would have seen. A pleasing white building set in the green countryside. Inside, the purr of lathes cutting. through steel. Intent young men, working at beautifully gleaming machines, eyes keen, fingers precise, almost as if they were engaged in a surgical operation-which in a way they are, for they have to slice and shape the raw steel into precise configurations, precise to thou-

sandths of an inch. A mistake here could mean tremendous losses, of time and money and materials-perhaps of human life.

These young men are making mechanical seals. So what's so important about seals? After all, they are only meant to prevent leaks from pumps and other such equipment. You can always throw one away and get another. Ah,¡ but think of a giant petroleum complex, a continuous-process industry where the pump shafts are rotating for hours on end. A shaft packing gives way, and the petroleum gushes out. It is volatile, it is inflammable, it's a hazard to life. The machinery groans to a standstill. The precious fluid has to be contained, the packing or seal has to be replaced. Alas, no one can replace the loss of production time.

A chain can only be as strong as its weakest link. The weakest link in any conventional rotary pump has always been the "gland packing" of the shaft. It is this link that Durametallic (India) Ltd. at Madras aims at strengthening, by producing, for the first time in India, sophisticated mechanical seals that meet

In this joint venture the U.S. company has 'a stake in our doing well. We don't pay them any royalty, so their profits depend solely on our succeeding and building up a sizable market.' international specifications.

"DuraSeal" is a synonym for quality seals among many continuous-process industries and pump manufacturers in India, who have been importing these seals from the u.s. for years.

There is many a maintenance engineer in industries ranging from fertilizers to rayon who would swear by a DuraSeal. But: it was only about a year ago that these high quality seals began to be manufactured in India-a substantial import substitution. This has been made possible by a technical collaboration agreement with an American firm called the Durametallic Corporation of Kalamazoo, Michigan. Under the terms of the agreement, the American company has a 40 per cent holding in the Indian company, Durametallic (India) Limited. For an initial period of five years it will play godmother to the fledgling Indian company, imparting technical know-how on a continuing basis, including the most recent innovations.

"Do you know what is the most significant aspect of the collaboration agreement?" asks the young director of the company, N. Sankar. "They [the parent company] have a stake in our doing well. We don't pay them any royalty, so their profits depend solely on our succeeding and building up a sizable market in India."

How far has Durametallic India come toward achieving this goal? "Well," says Sankar, "you must remember we've been in production for just a year now. But I must say we've had remarkably few teething troubles. We seem to have hit the quality target quite early on. In the very beginning we had some problems, but now our product is fairly well established." ~d to prove his point, Sankar reels off the names of some of his customers- the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Fertilizer Corporation ofIndia, Union Carbide, Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, Kirloskar Brothers, Hindustan Steel. It's an impressive list, by any standards.

Sankar comes from a family known for its vitality and vision in the world of business. His father, K.S. Narayanan, is managing director of India Cements, and the group has major investments and interests in a cigarette manufacturing company, and in Chemicals and Plastics Ltd. (Chemplast) in Mettur, Tamil Nadu.

Another of their business concerns is Industrial Chemicals Ltd., Madras, who are the promoters of Durametallic Ltd., along with the parent American corporation of that name. "Well, it did help that we already had a collaboration with B.F. Goodrich and Company for Chemplast, and that the collaboratiQn was such a success," says Sankar. "B.F. Goodrich and Company U.S.A. has a good relationship with Durametallic Corporation, so naturally they were able to put in a word for us. But I think what really swung the deal was the fact that we had done our homework. We had done a market survey for seals, and we could show that we had the necessary ability, both technical and managerial, to make a success of it."

And so convinced was Durametallic U.S.A. that the technical know-how started flowing from Kalamazoo to Madras even before the agreement was officially signed. "Usually, there is an agreemen.t on paper, but the reality is a long time in appearing," says Sankar .. "In our case it was the other way around. Their specifications and drawings were here with us even before I went to Kalamazoo to ratify the agreement. There's confidence for you!"

Speaking of confidence, that seems to be a prominent facet of the personalities of both Sankar and his younger brother Kumar, another director of Durametallic. Both envisage a very bright future for Durametallic in India. Their enthusiasm is shared by the managerial staff.

R. Ramachandran, commercial manager, describes Durametallic's sales and service network. "We have sales and service facilities in Bombay, Delhi and Madras, and we are now establishing these in Calcutta as well. All our service personnel are technically trained and can attend to customer needs with regard to proper fitting of seals or replacement of parts. Making the perfect seal is only one part of the job. Making it function perfectly in situ is the other part. We aim to do both in the best possible way."

As for S.R. Seshadri, manufacturing and engineering manager, it is plain for all to see that he is in love with this project.

It was his brainchild in a way; he was one of the first to suggest the indigenous manufacture of mechanical seals. "From my own experience at Chemplast," says Seshadri, "I was convinced that mechanical seals are far more efficient than conventional 'gland packing' methods. And if our industries are to make use of them as a matter of course, they must be made freely and easily available in the country; which means they must be made in India.

It is too costly and frustrating to wait for imported spare parts every time."

On the shop floor or in the quality control room or paying a visit to the despatch section, Seshadri is in his element. His fingers caress the polished steel as he points out the minute details of the shape of the seal. Sitting on the table is a model of a pump shaft with a DuraSeal fitted on. How does it work?

"Basically," explains Seshadri, "there are two highly polished mutually parallel faces in the seal assembly, with a microthin film of lubricating fluid between them. The seal is fixed on the shaft of the pump in such a way that one of these faces rotates with the shaft, while the other is static. See, this is one face. It's made of tungsten carbide. The other face is made of high-grade carbon. These are imported materials. They fit together like this."

And Seshadri's sensitive fingers assemble the components.

Whoever thought a seal was a simple device hasn't seen a DuraSeal. It's complicated, but how beautifully complicated! Like one of those modern metal sculptures, only with a far more important function to perform than merely pleasing the eye.

And each of these little beauties is truly precious to the customer. The seal alone accounts for about 30 per cent of the cost of the pump, which means a fairly substantial investment for the customer. "But this initial outlay is easily set off in 18 months or so," explains Seshadri, "because of the saving in material waste and 'downtime' of the pump. So ultimately it's a decided advantage to the customer. That is why many industries that were using ordinary nonfrictional packing materials or 'gland packings' are now changing over to mechanical seals despite the initial investment." What would be the cost of one of these small seals, small enough to nestle in the palm of one's hand?

"Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 5,000 depending upon what materials go into it.

Those big ones over there would cost a customer about Rs. 25,000 each. They're really the ultimate in sophistication and will be used in feed-water pumps for boilers in thermal power stations.

Can you imagine what will happen if the seal were to fail in a

N. Sankar, director of Durametallic India Limited, and S.R. Seshadri, engineering manager, inspect mechanical seals made at their Madras plant.

thermal power generator?"

Because the unit cost of these seals is so high, and because the raw material is mainly an expensive grade of stainless steel, it's very important indeed to test the seals for quality and dimensions even at intermediate stages of the manufacture. First comes the chemical testing of the raw materials themselves. Then, after each stage of machining on the lathes, comes further testing, this time of the dimensions. They must agree with the drawings close to thousandths of an inch. There is very little margin for error.

Why use such expensive materials as stainless steel, tungsten carbide, silicon carbide and high-grade carbon? "Imagine the seal fitted to the pump," says Seshadri, gesticulating for emphasis.

"Here is the pump shaft rotating at several hundred revolutions per minute. So our seal, that is the dynamic part of it, has to rotate at that speed too. Imagine the mechanical forces in the system-imagine the heat and pressure generated. And to top it all, there is the fluid in the pump, let us say a corrosive acid in contact with the seal. And this is not for a few minutes but for hours at a time. There must be the minimum of interface friction, no corrosion, no degeneration, no distortion. A tall order, isn't it ?"

Maybe, but it's a challenge that Durametallic is certainly equipped to take on. Consider their testing equipment. It's a quality control man's dream come true. Here's an interferometer to test the perfect flatness of the seal face, with its helium lamp casting a bright glow. Over there is an apparatus for testing the performance of the seal under various degrees of pressure.

"All this quality control apparatus is imported, mostly from the United States," says Seshadri, "because it's not yet available in India. But all machines such as lathes are Indian."

"Indigenization is part of our policy," says Sankar. "Right now, anything between 7 and 30 per cent of the material that goes into a seal is imported from abroad. The stainless steel is from local sources, but we have had to import critical materials like tungsten carbide, carbon and some special ceramics that are

used in some of the seals. We are trying to reduce the imported component of our seals to the extent possible."

Durametallic India is a young company, not only because it's completed only one year of production, but also because the average age of its staff and workers is probably as low as 30. In the factory downstairs and in the office and commercial section on the first floor, youth seems to be the common factor. The engineers at their drawing boards making detailed technical drawings, the production personnel, the office staff-they're all young people. "Yes, they're young, but we have the best," says Sankar.

Have any of the technical personnel been trained at Durametallic U.S.A.? "Oh, yes," says Sankar. "As you know I was there myself, my brother Kumar has spent some time with them, and our engineering manager, Seshadri, was in Kalamazoo for training. We're planning to send some of our other technical people over to the States."

Meanwhile, there have been several Durametallic U.S.A. visitors to Madras. The president of the American company, Paul Jackson, was here last year. The vice president in charge of marketing came-as well as two technical experts. "You see," says Sankar, "they're keenly interested in us. We may not be a large company. Our investment is about Rs. 50 lakhs, of which about Rs. 24 lakhs is the paid-up capital. Our parent company holds 40 per cent equity, and this may not mean much to one of the giant multinationals. But Durametallic U.S.A. is a mediumsized corporation. It is fairly closely held and quite conservative and this is their only venture, as far as I know, in this part or"the world. So they're very keen and enthusiastic that we should succeed. It's a really fine relationship."

Durametallic U.S.A. is one of the mere handful of companies all over the world who have perfected the technology for the manufacture of mechanical seals. "And all this technology has been handed to us in one neat package," says Sankar. "They've worked out the best metallurgical design possible under almost every conceivable set of working conditions." Does the agreement prohibit export of the Indian-made seals ? "On the contrary," says Sankar, "they encourage us to export. But, of course, it's early yet. We are not yet working at our licensed capacity of 15,000 mechanical seals a year. The infrastructure is ready. It's only a question of time. The pace is bound to be a little slow when you're breaking new ground. The Indian Government has banned import of mechanical seals for original equipment manufacture, so this should help too."

The dynamic young director of Durametallic has planned far ahead. Though the company is small-it employs only 50 people altogether-there is potential for growth. "We're not a laborintensive industry," says Sankar. "The unit cost of our product is high. So our turnover depends on prestigious orders and the sophistication of the products rather than on sheer quantity."

That's true enough. It is quality that will be the guiding principle in the growth of Durametallic India in the years ahead. "In the tradition of our parent American company," says Sankar, "we are selling a service, not a product. We have to build up trust and confidence among our customers, and this will be the true measure of our success."

On Sankar's table lies an advertisement brochure. It shows the Statue of Liberty holding aloft a DuraSeal instead of a torch!

"From Kalamazoo, U.S.A., the perfect mechanical seal now comes to India" reads the caption beneath. And during that journey, it has "sealed" yet another bond ofIndo-American coopera0 tion in the field of technology.

A BICENTENNIAL MEMOIR What is life like in the town of Stamford, Connecticut, on the Fourth of July in the 200th anniversary year of the United States? A noted Indian writer, who traveled widely in the U.S. with Stamford as his home base, recounts his experience vividly in the following article.

"Hope it's a good Bicentennial trip for you. And have a good day," said the man behind the customs counter at JFK airport with a smile, and waved us through. As I thanked him, I heard the tiny psychic tinkle of a minor myth being shattered.

They had told us that customs at New York were absolute monsters, rude and offensive.

It was the first of many myths, big and small, that we'd heard or seen or read about America, which were to be destroyed or transformed during our three-month visit to Bicentennial U.S.A. The highway flowing away from the airport in the warm thaw of the late afternoon sunshine provided another surprise with its sign-posted speed limit of 55 miles per hour. "Why, that's 15 m.p.h. lower than in England and Europe! But I'd always thought. ... " I'd always thought so many things about that vast, glittering, complex, controversial, bafHing, alluring, enraging fantasy world labeled America. I first encountered this chimerical world in early boyhood, within the covers of brightly jacketed comic books,. and on the sepia screens oCSunday morning Roy Rogers reruns at the local cinema hall.

America came to me in a jigsaw tessera of tiny picture frames, in flickering images that sometimes jumped or faded if the print was very old. The Lone Ranger galloped on Silver across a landscape of desolate tumbleweed and wind-carved mesa; Clark Kent dashed into telephone kiosks and emerged as Superman to soar like a bird,

bewildering kaleidoscope. I drifted down the sweep of the Mississippi to the rhythm of banjo and paddle wheel and Mark Twain's twangy prose, ranged Westward to new intuitions of frontier with the freewheeling momentum of Whitman's verse. Later still, I had to somehow try and accommodate a sense of these broad, foundational landscapes between the cramped gray lines of news media, cluttered with headlines of Vietnam, the space program, P.L. 480 and the explosive growth of student power.

At about this time I, along with a lot of other urban Indians of my generation, began to encounter a new breed of visitors from the West. Long-haired, beaded and beflowered, these young people displayed a vocabulary and a value system as immediately strange and intriguing as their garments. Coming from the most affluent nation in the world they spoke, with an almost ritualistic earnestness, of counterculture and dropping out, of community living and nonmaterialism and the raising of consciousness. Even as I listened, spoke, sometimes argued, the interweaving ironies of the situation, which in a sense were the situation, didn't totally escape me. America was getting to be quite a problem for me. It was no longer just a state of mind, but an attitude.

An attitude gradually formed by infonnation and opinion and discussional feedback, and then suddenly shaken by an unexpected event or a startling view. America kept surprising me. It intrigued me with the energy of its contradictions and the interdependent stamina of its competitive beliefs.

I felt I wanted to get to closer quarters with this provocative and puzzling stimulus.

And when better to do that, I decided, than like a plane, like himself, over the sky- at a time when the whole historic awareness scraping towers of Metropolis; Dennis, the of the country had been telescoped and menace of an otherwise tranquil suburbia, condensed for the Bicentennial of its creation. pilfered cookies, ate peanut-butter-and-jelly My own awareness of American history sandwiches and sent frogs to girls instead was both fragmentary and vivid, like sudden of Valentine cards. On the screen the stern- freezes on an otherwise speed-blurred film jawed hero lassoed a wild steer, shot the or dramatic tableaux in a passing parade. gun out of the rustler's villainous hand, Stray images came to my mind, fact and saved the ranch and rode away into a sunset fiction inextricably interwoven.

Miles of bold color scheme and epic proportions.

Standish standing on the sprayswept deck Later, more dimensions, newer and more of the Mayflower. The landing at Jamestown. complex patterns were added to this already Hawkeye and Deerslayer silently¡ flitting

through the great green glooms of the that 213 million people were shaping or pine forests. Ben Franklin flying his kite reacting to, each in his or her own indiin a thunderstorm, the crackling brilliance vidual way. I was to remember that fire of the lightning a metaphor for his own hydrant later in much the same way that irrepressible ideas. Thomas Jefferson taking one recalls a small detail, inexplicably lodged 18 days (or was it 28?) to draft the Declara- in memory, of a long, complex book one tion of Independence. Washington, standing has read years ago. by the cherry tree, guilty axe in hand, and The red-white-and-bhie was everywhere, years later, posing in the prow of a boat as though the summer sun had tired of its crossing the Delaware River. The midnight greensand browns and suddenly elected to splash of tea chests in the December waters burst out this season in a new colorful of Boston harbor and the rattle of hooves disguise. Flower beds, banners, paper plates, of Paul Revere's ride sparking alarm from beer cans, T-shirts, garbage bins, pedestrian sleeping cobblestones. Bunker Hill. Corn-. crossings, wallpaper, grocery bags, bikinis wallis's surrender at Yorktown. The great on sunny beaches, and smooth gleaming buffalo herds rumbling across the prairies dripping ice cream cones bloomed together like earth-bound storm clouds. The rich in chromatic conspiracy. Even the weather incense of steam rising from the thanks- sometimes seemed party to it. White clouds giving table ringed by domesticity. The banded a blue sky under an orange glow of lumbering, creaking covered wagons voyag- sun. I asked our neighbor, John Autoria, ing westward across the grass seas of the a postman, what he thought about it all. prairies. The trauma and triumph of the . How did he, as a patriotic American and Civil War, the last, tragic shot of which was good citizen, feel about his national colors to be fired in the dress circle of Ford's being splashed so indiscriminately around, Theater. The Indian wars and Custer's on candy wrappers, trash barrels and street long blond hair swirling in the dust and corners. He looked genuinely surprised, slaughter of Little Big Horn. Lowing, rangy I should ask him that. "Why, I think it's longhorns .herded north and east to the only natural, considering. Don't you?" And brawling cattle towns of Wichita and Dodge I, my earlier suspicion of the summer heat City and Abilene, which bred a raw culture producing this spontaneous combination, of violence. And when the frontier was found myself entirely agreeing with him. finally tamed, there was the challenge of For me the summer and the Bicentennial other, newer horizons to be faced, in science experience became one. The Fourth of and art and technology, and the pioneering July, as it approached, was not just a twoimpetus found its new emblem in the soaring dimensional date circled off on the kitchen thrust of the Apollo mission and the ad- calendar. As it drew nearer-or rather venture ofthe space odyssey. as its achievement was jointly engineered Yes, I thought to myself, America had by thermal currents and rising anticipation, packed a lot of living in the 200 years of by tidal changes and the increasing tempo its history. The afternoon sun, jazzing off of preparations, by shifting winds and the the roofs and windshields of the soft- growing ballast of Bicentennial news and sprung, smooth-rolling cars on the highway flashed these and other images at me in a swift, allusive stream.

One of the first things I noticed when we got to the town of Stamford, Connecticut, which was to be home base for our threemonth stay in the States, was a roadside fire hydrant. it was an unexceptional, regulation public utility. But what made it remarkable was that it was painted red, white and blue-the colors of the American flag. I was told that the hydrant, like others in diverse areas of town, had been painted by schoolchildren as a part of a special project that would earn them academic credits. Looking at the amateurish, slightly smudged paint job, I had a sudden intuition of the tongue-in-lips concentration that had gone into those wavering strokes, the sense of involvement that, overflowing the tacky The Italian Center tennis club of Stamford baked surface of the hydrant, spread outward, a cake seven feet wide and seven feet high to coma tiny part of the vast network of events memorate America's Bicentennial.

advertisements in the local papers-the nearing event seemed to evolve as inevitably as a natural event, like the summer solstice.

The weather remained typically unpredictable-muggy and clammy one day, crisp. and clear the next. New Englanders assured me that this unusualness was usual. I was glad. I wanted to have as traditional a Bicentennial Fourth of July as possible.

On suburban lawns scintillating with sprinklers, and in backyards strung with drying swimwear and T-shirts, the props of summer were set up. Housewives in halter tops arranged light tubular metal and plastic lounging chairs in conversational circles while their Bermuda-shorted husbands wrestled portable barbecues out of basements. Children in sneakers, their rubber soles squeaky on watered grass, flung random constellations of beach balls in the air or whooped in pursuit of the pied piper jingle of the Good Humor ice cream van.

In the dusk, smokeless hibachi fires glowed, the sputtering broiling meat flavoring the air with a tang of ersatz hickory. Shirtsleeved men sipped beer and called out across neighboring fences to borrow more briquets of coal or skewers for the meat.

Women tossed salads and spread gingham cloth on the weathered picnic tables. Through the open windows, ignored TV sets flickered like fitful summer lightning trapped indoors.

We too set up a hibachi in our backyard.

We got the fire lit and arranged the spare ribs and steaks, glistening with a thick coating of sauce, on the. metal grill over the cherry-red coals. The meat hissed and sizzled and curled, seemingly animated again by the heat. There was crunch coleslaw, and sourdough biscuits warm from the oven, and supermarket strawberry shortcake. Everyone agreed it was a good summer, and getting better.

As the Fourth of July drew closer, the shops and supermarkets raged with an epidemic of ¡feverish bargains and special sales. Special ¡offers and discounts on TV sets, photographic film, air fares, California peaches, furniture and pork chops. On a weekend visit to New York we saw on sale in Macy's (the World's Largest Store) chips of wood taken from the original oak beams of Liberty Hall, Philadelphia, and priced at $ 17.76. "It's become a regular 'Buy-centennial,'" said our hostess. But that evening she availed herself of the special pot roast offer at the neighborhood supermarket, and we finished off with red-whiteand-blueberry ice cream.

Over meals the main topic of conversation was what to do for the Fourth. A dozen trips were planned, routed, mapped, and discarded. The roads would be jam-packed,

'Suddenly, there was an excited shout, a man pointing across the choppy, blue-green bay. We turned to look and saw the Tall Ships sailing into the bay. Crowded with swelling canvas, their bowsprits rakishly high, the ships presented a magnificent symbol of exploration and discovery.' the traffic impossible. A friend from New York phoned to ask if he could come and spend the holiday in Stamford. Report had it that the city would be a nightmare, choked and stifled by the estimated three million out-of-towners who were expected to pour into it to watch the famous Tall Ships sail up the Hudson.

The Tall Ships were legend. Everyone talked about them and the media crackled with the electric excitement they generated.

For all their impact on the electronic age, the Tall Ships were throwbacks from a premachine past. In keeping with the spirit of far-ranging adventure that had founded and built America, some 225 sailing ships from over 30 countries, including Britain, France and the Soviet Union, were participating in the symbolic tribute.

The big day and the ships drew closer.

Some of the ships were already sailing along the New England coastline, north of New York, and on our way back from a weekend trip to Boston, we caught an unexpected sight of them. A serious traffic hold-up had stalled us on the highway, which at this point ran past a broad bay.

We sat in the car fuming and fretting, knowing that we couldn't get back to Stamford by dinnertime. Overhead, traffic patrol helicopters buzzed like ineffectual, angry flies in the afternoon sunshine. Suddenly there was an excited shout, a man pointing out across the choppy blue-green bay. We turned to look and saw the first of the Tall Ships rounding a headland and sailing into the bay. In that golden late afternoon light the proud-sailed ship, cleaving a curling furrow of white through the water, looked like a Turner painting miraculously come to life. Another ship followed, and another. Soon they were sailing, seven of them, in single procession down the bay while cameras clicked and whirred and the petty annoyances of traffic jams were forgotten in the high drama of the moment. Crowded with swelling canvas, their bowsprits rakishly high, the ships presented a magnificent symbol of exploration and discovery. Then, anticlimactically, the traffic unglued and began to move again. As we drove away, I craned my head for a last backward look at the ships, their tall masts imprinted unforgettably against the wide, blue sky.

Stamford was a welter of excitement

and rumor, the largest of which, literally, concerned the huge cake that the posh Italian Center tennis club was confecting for its Fourth of July ball. It was going to be a superbly splendid affair, with tickets at $40 a couple. There'd be dancing on the lawn till dawn and white ties and, of course, the famous cake. There seemed to be some controversy about its exact dimensions. The local press had originally reported it as being eight feet in diameter and six feet high, then later changed it to seven feet in diameter and seven feet high. People argued about it, an authoritative few claiming to have inside information and to be in the know.

The Viking space vehicle was to land on Mars and start relaying the first closerange pictures of that alluringly mysterious planet. What if the sci-fi writers were really right and there were men, or at least some form of life on Mars? Meanwhile, back on earth, fantasy would do its best to keep pace with fact. After the Tall Ships had been Presidentially reviewed and the sun set beyond the shadowy chasms of Manhattan (stranger by far than any Martian landscape), the sky over New York harbor would be dazzled with a galactic novae of fireworks. Organized by Disneyland, the pyrotechnic display promised to be a spectacle to remember, a brilliant orchestration of light and sound with fireworks visually playing out themes such as "America the Beautiful." There were to be parades and picnics and re-enactments of historic battles and contests ranging from pancake eating to pig catching, and a ringing of bells across the country. A 13-hour nonstop telethon was to record the essence of all this for millions of TV viewers.

My recollections of the Fourth are vivid yet vague. It was a big jumbled gift-stocking of a day, packed with events and bursting at the seams with too many things to do in too little time. The day didn't seem enough to accommodate itself, no matter how much you stretched and pulled and crammed.

OUf New York friend, as forewarned, had descended on us the previous evening and we had yarned long into the night to wake next morning in sore-eyed, muzzy excitement and rush off to the Scottish Games-high jumping, flat races, football, and the traditional tossing of the caber

(a cumbersome log of wood weighing some 200-odd pounds).

We arrived at the grounds which were aswarm with picnickers and the crowded, confusing day set its pace with all of us getting lost in turn, and the highland reel taking place at the same time as the threelegged race at the other end of the field, and everyone going off to eat ice cream when the high jump bar was crossed by a record-breaking back roll and my camera running out of film just as the caber was finally and spectacularly tossed by a small, stocky man with a tartan beret and a Bronx accent. The day seemed to be running away with us and we couldn't seem to keep up with it. We hurried home to lunch and watch TV, bumping into each other as we bustled in shuttle service between the kitchen and the set in the living room, bearing plates of hasty tuna salad, going back to get a cold can of soda, rushing in again when the commentator's voice suddenly rose to a new pitch of excitement.

It was an unending montage of jump cuts and stray sequences. Smiling blonde cheerleaders carrying banners saying- "17761976"; marching, larger-than-life Disneyland characters, Goofy, Mickey and Dumbo the Flying Elephant; vigorous enactments of battles long fought and buried; spot interviews with the famous and the anonymous; and parades, parades and more parades, drum-thumping, band-playing, flag-waving, from the grand cavalcades of the big cities to a tiny procession in a small mid-Western village, population 600.

What with so much happening we almost totally missed out on our own parade in Stamford. We suddenly remembered it at the last moment and hurried across the park and public playing field to Shippan Avenue where the parade was to end.

It was almost all over. Under banners and marquees, uniformed Revolutionary War militiamen sprawled on the green grass, overcome not by enemy action but by their own vigorous enthusiasm on the long, hot march. Girls in ethnic costumes, German dirndls and Dutch clogs, served them pitchers of lemonade and iced water in informal, unrehearsed tableaux. Pilgrim Fathers bought ice cream cones and fanned themselves with their straight-brimmed black hats and leaned on the bonnets of Model "T" Fords. The Stamford Fire Department,

The most impressive salute to America's 200th anniversary was the armada of 225 sailing ships from 30 nations. In the photo above, the Tall Ships are seen moving across the Atlantic toward their destination- New York City on the Fourth of July.

done up in three-cornered hats and buckled boots, marched in file, followed by the local Boy Scout body. Suddenly, it was all 'over, including the shouting. The floats had all come in and were scattered on the field like an armada of marooned galleons.

Bickering about who should have reminded whom about it earlier, we budged home to watch more TV. But later the fireworks made up for it. Determined not tb be late this time, we set out on the short walk to the beach when the sun was still casting long, bronzeblue shadows. There were people already there, entire families, the adults looking if anything more anticipatory than the children. We found a vantage point and sat on the sand and waited in the long suspense of twilight as the waters of the bay grew darker and the white sails of the boats tacking and veering seemed to glow luminously against them. The beach was packed now, and the seascape dark, like a vast auditorium where the lights fade and die out for the beginning of the performance. The first rocket streaked and

sizzed across the sky from the far end of the bay. A soft, deep sound, like the sough of wind or surf, rose from the audience.

More and more rockets flashed up into the sky like a topsy-turvy shower of fire.

As each rocket soared on its golden arc everyone seemed to hold his breath. The glowing stem would bloom into a red, green and blue flower of crystal flame, frozen in space. Then slowly at first, and then swifter, the glowing petals would fold in and fall, dimming and disappearing, and the audience would release its breath in a long, low murmur of appreciation.

"That was the best one, that was! It was fantastic !"

"No, the other one, the green and gold one. That was super!"

And then the last trailing sparks drowned in the dark and we walked' back from the beach, still arguing and dazzled by starbursts, and found our way to the community party.

The town square was unrecognizable, overwhelmed with people. The area had been cordoned off and people milled and thronged on the carless streets under the light of floodlamps and the shadows of flag-draped public buildings. A melody of unexpected greetings and chance encounters swirled through the crowds, echoed by the freewheeling, amplified music played

by a band on a raised dais. Here and there couples began to dance, people cleaving space for them. Soon there were more and more dancers, fox-trotting, waltzing, tangoing, shaking or hustling.

When the band finally packed up, someone began to sing "America" and in ones and twos and threes people began to take it up till gradually the first ragged flutterings of song swelled and unfurled. The high tide of song carried us past the square, drifting toward home. Walking down the empty night streets, we caught occasional glimpses of other groups walking homeward, some still singing, and as their voices grew fainter in the distance the winding road seemed like a slow unraveling of melody.

At home we congregated in the kitchen for a last cup of coffee before going to bed, bone tired yet reluctant to call it a day. "Well, what did you think of it all?" asked our host. I looked at the jumble of pots and plates and cups on the table and tried to put it all together. Then I shook my head and said, "I don't really know.

I'm still trying to work it out for myself."

And in a way, I still am.

0 About the Author: Jug Suraiya is an assistant edi-

tor of JS magazine. Among his published works are The Interview and Other Stories and Homecoming.

.

THE ALVIN AilEY DANCERS

'CELEBRATING THE BEAUTY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT' TEXT BY ELLEN COHN PHOTOGRAPHS

BY JAMES DENNIS

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is considered by many the most exciting and original modern dance troupe in the United States.

Blending Mro-American with classical ballet, urban rock with Brazilian samba, Alvin Ailey says: 'Our company is celebrating the beauty of the human spirit.'

Modern dance-the loves of Isadora notwithstanding-has never been hot. True, companies have drawn critical accolades and cheers, but the cheers have come from the refined throats of adherents, and never from vox populi. Since the 1930s, modern dance has been an art form identified with drafty lofts and lofty theme&-yearning and t@rment on a metaphysical plane., brought down to earth by occasional heavyfooted cries of social concern-yearning and torment on an earthly plane.

The late drama critic Stark Young, an early admirer of Martha Graham, nevertheless once said of her work, "I'm always afraid that Martha's going to give birth t6 a cube on stage." And this deadly image of pain in pursuit of, to say the least, a rather curious pleasure has clung to modern dance as closely as new tights. Small wonder then, the audience remained a hard-core coterie.

Alvin Ailey has been changing all that.

In 1970, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater-the first modern-dance company to perform in the Soviet Union-ended a six-week tour in Leningrad with the audience chanting, "Thank you, thank you, thank you" during a 23-minute ovation. A year later, in New York City-where the public can choose from several modern-dance companies in any week-the Ailey company scored the largest advance sale of any modern-dance attraction at City Center, then topped that figure the following spring.

In 1972, a critic wrote of "rumors" coming from Ailey performances that "dance could be painless, stirring and fun." Reporting about "audiences on the edge of genteel frenzy," she certified the rumors as fact.

Also in 1972, the renamed Alvin Ailey City Center Dance Theater joined the New York City Ballet and the City Center Joffrey Ballet as dance constituents of the City Center of Music & Drama, Inc. Modern dance began to get hot.

Since 1972, Ailey's dancers have drawn rave reviews and standing ovations in packed houses in several countries, from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. The Ailey company, Left: Alvin Ailey 11"110, afier brilliant success as a dancer, turned to choreography.

Above right: In .. Rel'elations," dancers reach skyward/or surcease. Right: A scenefrom "Mary Lou's Mass." Far right: In another sequencefrom "Mary Lou," Dudtey Williams (feJtJ is Lazal'us and KelVin Rotardier a preacher. .

which formerly found it difficult to get even a couple of engagements, now offers three seasons a year in New York.

Ailey's latest work, performed during the troupe's 1976 winter season, is "Three Black Kings," a contrast of King Balthazar, King Solomon, and the Rev. Martin Luther King. Another highlight of last year's program was "Facets," described by one critic as "a duet between dancer Judith Jamison and a dress trunk."

Recognition of Ailey's outstanding stature in the world of dance was made at the 20th annual Dance Magazine awards in April 1975.

Presenting him with the silver bowl, the magazine's highest honor, Eugene Loring described Ailey as one who has "fused 'black' and 'white' dance into a brilliant chiaroscuro. " "One of the life-giving experiences in contemporary dance and theater" -that's how an unnamed English critic (quoted by CliveBarnes) described a recent Ailey season.

Barnes himself had previously applauded the company for providing "art and entertainment" -a double-header that many would assume is the beau ideal but some modern-dance devotees believe to be as esthetically unsound as a two-headed dog.

Marcia B. Siegel, writing at the time of Barnes's own comments, spoke out for "dance purists" and accused the Ailey company of a "kind of commercialism that cannot be justified. Under [the dancers'] electric spell," her indictment ran, "audiences forget to ask whether they are contemporary, relevant, profound or even honest." Her piece appeared under the title "Selling Soul" -a barb Ailey cannot forget, and one that still makes him wince.

"The black pieces we do that come from blues, spirituals and gospels are part of what I am," he says. "They are as honest and truthful as we can make them. I'm interested in putting something on stage tilat will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance; that will get everybody into the theater .... What do people mean when they say we're 'Broadway'?

If it's art and entertainment-thank God, that's what I want to be."

"There's been a tendency to keep modern dance something precious," says Walter Terry, who has been writing about dance for more than 35 years, "as if popularity were not quite pure. But Shakespeare and Sophocles were the popular theater of their Left: Demonstrating loneliness, anger and violence, dancers gyrate before a juke box, bright with colored lights. The ballet, called "Maskela Langage," is a collaboratzve effort between Alvin Ailey and the African composer arid singer, Hugh Maskela.

day. The Rockettes are just as good as Martha Graham, only different. 'Broadway' should be a great compliment. f\lvin's highly theatrical style is having an impact on modern-dance choreography that naturally attracts more people. And if he is remolding the classical ballet vocabulary to suit his temperament and ideas, that's only right."

At the Alvin Ailey City Center Dance Theater and its school, the American Dance Center, Alvin Ailey leans over his desk, exhausted, and rests his head in his hands.

In brown velour trousers newly ripped in rehearsal, a rumpled red velour V-neck shirt, a thick clip-on brass bracelet at each wrist, he is at once frayed and oddly elegant.

Even slumped back in his chair, Ailey is imposing, an aristocratic figure, peering

'I'm interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending; that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance.' out at the world from narrow eyes in a massive proudly held head. Voluble, a gifted raconteur and mimic, his rich, musical voice slides in and out of accents with ease.

He laughs often and with great gusto, delighting in show business anecdotes.

Yet Ailey carefully controls how much he reveals about himself. Even a query about a particular piece of music may be met with a grieved look and stony silence. "He tried to get inside my head," Ailey says of a well-known interviewer, suddenly pressing his hands to his temples as if preventing a fissure. "I let him come to my apartment," he continues in a gritty mixture of anger and sorrow most people reserve for recounting a mugging.

Alvin Ailey (rhymes with "daily") was born in Rogers, Texas, a small town 80 kilometers south of Waco, in 1931. As a boy Ailey attended Sunday School and the Baptist Young People's Union; gospel meetings with Holy Rollers.

Ailey lived in Texas until he was 12, when his mother moved to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed. "She had two jobs.

She also worked on the other side of town cleaning people's houses ... but I didn't realize that till later."

It is out of the Texas experience, his "blood memories," that Ailey's two most popular and critically praised works have come: "Blues Suite" and "Revelations."

Both use traditional Negro music.

"Revelations" is the Ailey masterpiece; the company's signature work. To dance linguists, it reveals his early interest and ability in employing a broad dance vocabulary. Graham contractions, Hprton arms, the arabesque of classical ballet, jazz and ethnic elements all meet easily here with Ailey's own invention.

The first of the three main sections in "Revelations" opens with a community of nine dancers dressed simply in earth colors gathered together in an amber light, gently swaying in unison, arms upstretched, palms open, reaching for surcease. The section closes with "Fix Me Jesus," a tender pas de deux where faith in the healing love of Jesus is reflected in the female) trust for her male partner. She is slightly tenuous at first, testing him, perhaps, then finally secure.

He is wholly responsive to her, attentive yet unstudied, notably gentle. The intensity of the emotional commitment between the two-on a human rather than a heroic scaleis riveting.

The second or "white" section (so called for the costumes) features a jubilant baptism ("Wading in the Water") and Ailey's most stunning use of props-stylized white branches; a large white umbrella so full of itself that the canopy overflows and floats with abandon unevenly past its hinged ribs; and two stretches of fabric, turquoise and white, that fill the stage with waves of water (a simple but splendid coup de theatre). This section ends with "I Want to Be Ready," a solo for male dancer that begins with a slow catlike stretch on the ground, unwinding a seamless ribbon of movement performed with utmost precision, and as if in one hreath.

Almost the entire third section, "Move, Members, Move," is a rousing, though preacherless, revival meeting attended by eight couples in' sunlit costumes who finally rock the house with "Rock-a My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham."

As soon as the curtain falls, as if in reflex action, audiences rise up shouting. "Anyone who doesn't like 'Revelations' should be shut up and put away," Walter Terry remarked recently. Most critics would agree.

No matter what their quibbles or disappointments with Ailey's other works, nearly all continue to heap praise upon this one.

The work of the women and men who make dances is the most ephemeral art we know. Painting and sculpture are permanent testimony. Scripts and scores are on hand for actors, musicians, singers, directors and conductors. But dances exist enfair.

Most revivals are reconstructed by rumor.

If the choreographer is unavailable, those who have danced the piece, or dressed it, or lit it, or have seen it many times are the

'The last night in Leningrad the audience wouldn't go home.

They screamed and clapped.

I got down into the orchestra pit and signed autographs.'

fallible trustees. Photographs are extremely helpful; films are as rare as "old snow."

Even hearsay evidence is admissible.

Even. the creation of a new dance is somewhat evanescent. For "Love Songs," a long solo for Dudley Williams, Ailey began work at home listening to the music, "A Song for You," "A Field of Poppies" and "He Ain't Heavy," breaking it down into sections and phrases, noting the counts in a hardcover composition book, a kind familiar to every schoolchild.

That same child, wandering into the rehearsal studio during the following weeks, might conclude that the two grown men there are playing an eccentric form of Follow the Leader. Ailey, in his velour pants and striped cotton shirt, facing the long mirrors, is gliding across the floor, reaching, falling, turning ... counting aloud: "1,2,3,4" ... seemingly carving the shape of the dance out of the studio space. Behind him, Williams, barefoot, in striped pullover and knit jersey pants, is duplicating Ailey's movements. As the patterns transfet;,. to his body there are subtle changes, refinements, a natural process that precedes dramatic interpretation, as the dancer's own body structure and particular strengths alter the image, the impact of the choreographer's design.

Satisfied with a sequence, Ailey turns on the tape recorder and now the two men execute the steps with the music, both counting as they go. Sometimes the counts don't fit and Ailey wilt rethink the counts and the accents with his body; then he'll scribble a new series of numbers in his book. The notebook offers no direct visual clue to the choreography. It might be the book of a child struggling with arithmetic.

Columns of numbers are never tallied.

The sum will be seen on stage.

In any field, insiders believe in the unique eccentricities common to those in their line of work. Opera singers, boxing referees, brain surgeons, waiters-each could furnish proof that his occupation attracts a special breed.

But in no field of human endeavor has the almighty ego been so institutionalized as in modern dance.

The history of modern dance is, in fact, a panorama of supercolossal and merely

giant-size egos; firebrand revolutionaries unable to survive under the status quo; radicals drawing on their own bodies for new techniques of movement, plumbing their own psyches for rationales for the new orders they devised. Without their determination there wonld be no art. Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Ted Shawn, Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon, Lester Horton, Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor were all dancer-choreographers; Alwin Nikolais is a designercomposer-choreographer-and each, to a greater or lesser degree, contributed by breaking sharply with the previous generation, or with contemporaries, to go it alone.

Ailey is a dance revolutionary of a different sort. He is trying to bring choreographers together. His energies have gone toward

building a modern-dance repertory company that would perform the important works of the past, as well as commission new ones. Nine choreographers other than Ailey were represented in a recent season. Along with the diversity of programs, another factor in the company's success is the high caliber of the dancers, most notably Dudley Williams, Mari Kajiwara, Sara Yarborough and Judith Jamison-modern dance's first box-office star, whose solo "Cry," to Ailey choreography, can assure a sold-out house.

The choreographers who move easily between ballet and modern dance are relatively few. To Ailey, who began his training in California with Lester Horton's company, where ballet and ethnic influences were welcomed, the East Coast enemy camps [ballet vs. modern] seemed absurd. His

,

Left: The four main dancers in Ailey's" Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder," choreographed by Donald McKayle, acknowledge applause for what one critic called "a gutsy and gut-grabbing performance."

On a junior high school class trip to the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, Ailey discovered not only ballet but the theater section of Los Angeles, where every Saturday afternoon something was going on. "I first saw the Dunham company there. I went over one day and there were pictures of black dancers!"

Ailey began watching classes at Lester Horton's school and, after high school graduation in 1949, enrolled for a month.

He dropped out of the school when he entered the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) to study Romance languages. The next several years were a loving-but-Ieaving period for Ailey with I the Horton school.

In 1953, after a series of odd jobs and some semesters at UCLA, Los Angeles City College and San Francisco State, Ailey succumbed and returned to the Horton studio. Later that year, Horton died and, "to fill the vacuum, " Ailey became the company's artistic director and choreographed his first dances. "The night before rehearsals started I slept in the studio so I wouldn't be late. Rehearsals started at 2 :00 p.m. !"

In 1954, Ailey and Carmen de Lavallade, also of the Horton company, came to New York to be leading dancers in the Broadway musical "House of Flowers."

Ailey began a frenzied course of studymodern dance with Martha Graham, Hanya Holm, Charles Weidman; ballet with Karel Shook; composition with Doris Humphrey; acting with Stella Adler and Milton Katselas -and he appeared in many Off-Broadway and Broadway shows as actor and dancer.

After the Ailey company's 1958 onenight debut at the 92nd Street "Y," things ideal dancer is trained equally in classical fell into a disconcerting rut. One or two ballet and Graham technique. ("Then, if performances in New York each season, they're talented, they can do anything.") a few more in scattered places around the Most of modern dance's historic dancer- country, triumph upon triumph abroadchoreographers were driven by a desire held over for six weeks in London, 61 to be not only the single creative force curtain calls in Hamburg-and return to in their respective companies, but also the New York to disband for lack of work. performing star. Many, unwilling to transfer The U.S. State Department sent the comtheir roles, danced on past the peak of pany on successful tours to the Far East their performing powers. in 1962, the World Festival of Ne-gro Arts In 1965, Ailey, then 34, stopped dancing. at Dakar, Senegal, in 1966, and¡ East and "I wanted to be a choreographer. But West Africa in 1967. In 1970, it arranged an if you dance, too, it's a different ball game. Ailey tour of North Africa, and that same You start competing with the kids in your autumn the troupe was in Russia. "The own company. From o~t front, I can look last night in Leningrad the audience wouldn't at Dudley and say, 'God, isn't he beautiful.' go home," Ailey grins. "They stood and But if I were dancing" -Ailey roars with screamed and clapped. I got down into laughter-"l'd say, 'Oh' hell, he'd better the orchestra pit and signed autographs. get in the back.'''

I signed people's arms, calendars and pro-

grams. It was beautiful." The company was the first American attraction to appear on Moscow' television and was seen by 22 million viewers. "At the Moscow closing, I did a Judy Garland, sitting on the edge of the stage after 30 curtain calls."

The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was an all-blac~ company until 1964. "Then I met some incredible dancers of other colors who could cut the work. Also, we were running into reverse racism. On our Asian tour in '62, people kept saying about my pieces and Talley Beatty's pieces- 'Oh, they're wonderful, but only black people can do jazz.' f don't think black dancers should be limited that way.

"There's a well-known choreographer who says black people in 'Swan Lake' are historically inaccurate. Well, then white people; and Orientals in 'Revelations' are historically inaccurate-but it works anyway. It's like saying only French people should do Racine or Moliere. Black people are not historically inaccurate, but we have been historically ignored."

The Dance Theater Foundation, a nonprofit public foundation, is the parent organization of the Ailey company and the school. "In terms of public response, critical acclaim and artistic achievement, we're an unqualified success. As for our financial situation -catastrophe."

Ailey himself says he's "been beating the gong" about foundations' neglect of modern dance in favor of the ballet for years. He is mournful, too, that funds are more readily available for new works than for securing those of the past.

"How can foundations ignore this important American invention?" Ailey asks. "I just don't understand it. I don't understand why Martha Graham doesn't have anything she wants. Look at the legacy she created.

I don't understand why there isn't a Martha Graham Dance Theater; there's a Helen Hayes Theater. Look at what Graham has done. Look at what has come from her. This woman is like Picasso and Stravinsky.

"It sounds so corny, but I hope I can look back in a few years and think what we're doing here with our school and our company is celebrating the beauty of the human spirit, of people coming together and accomplishing something. I think people are sanest when they're working together creatively. That's the act we live every day in the studio."

0 About the Author: Ellen Cohn is a well-known dance writer. She was formerly an associate critic of Dance Magazine, which has the largest circulation of anYpublication on this subject.

EDUCATION

THE UNCERTAIN PASSAGE FROM COLLEGE TO JOB

by WALTER GUZZARDI

JR.

The proof was never positive, but for most Americans the sequence seemed so obvious that it hardly needed testing: first you went to college, and then you got a good job. The country's convictions about the rewards of higher education, an ineluctable part of the American dream, never appeared better substantiated than during the golden years of the 1950s and 1960s, when good education and good job seemed so securely conjoined. For about 20 years college graduates in swelling numbers poured out of the gates of academia, usually to enter a welcoming world of work where they fitted neatly into well-paying jobs with promising futures. The hardest decision confronting the new laureate was which job offer to accept.

Now this gratifying correlation between the rate at which we produced college graduates and the capacity of the economy to absorb them is no longer indisputable. The golden age was fortuitous and ephemeral. Large numbers of college graduates are seeking the kind of jobs that the job market no longer offers to all of them. The material value of their degree has come down commensurately.

For the new degree holder, as the cartoon above illustrates, the transit from education to work, once negotiated so easily, has become a passage perilous for expectations and self-esteem.

As the certainty of getting a substantial monetary reward for going to college has decreased, so has the proportion of people of high-school age choosing to

go there. Great numbers of them have rushed instead into vocational education, while others have gone directly into fulltime jobs rather than forgo four years of earnings, and layout a large sum in addition for a college degree.

This response to the change in circumstances is exactly the one that economists of the "human capital" school would have predicted. That school minimizes the "consumption values" of college: the acquisition of learning, the broadening of attitudes and interests. Instead, it postulates that people go because they get a better return on their invested capital than they would if they made alternative investments. The trend in the last couple of years appears to bear out this utilitarian theory. It also raises the trou-

nn II '-i

'I

D IJ !!

- -.DDII nnnn~1 GOPI

GA0WANI

For the American college graduate of today, the transition from education to work, once so easily accomplished, has become 'a passage perilous for expectations and self-esteem.' There are fewer jobs available; salaries are lower. But educators and businessmen are playing a new role in the reshaping of education to equip job-conscious students with 'salable skills.'

bling prospect that for the first time in American history the next generation may be less well educated than the preceding one.

Campuses under siege This unprecedented pattern has set off alarms throughout the academic world.

Administrators and teachers are worried by the decline in enrollments, and they fear that worse is to come when demographic factors send the numbers of young people reaching 18 into a prolonged decline-a slope that will start in 1980. Some small liberal-arts colleges have already closed down, and many more are in trouble. State and Federal legislators are not in the mood

to increase the already huge appropriations for higher education, which received $22.1 billion from the taxpayers in 1975. Around the campuses, a sense of siege is in the air.

At this vulnerable moment, colleges and universities are being pressed hard by a student population of a tough and practical bent of mind. In part because of open-admission policies, students in college today number nearly 10 million, one of the highest figures ever. In college now to make money later, these huge, heterogeneous masses are well aware .that the diplomas they are working for are becoming inflated pieces of paper.

Acting out of moods and motivations far different from those of the revolu-

tionaries of the sixties-the rapidity of the change is startling, and worth remembering-today's students are bearing down on faculty and administrators, insisting that college must give them an edge in the competition for jobs by equipping them, in the phrase of the U.S. Commissioner of Education, T.H. Bell, with "salable skills."

Bell exactly reflected the views of a large part of the nation's student body when he remarked that imparting such skills is "the first and foremost requisite" of education. In a fanciful passage of a speech, Bell, a small man whose voice can hardly be heard across a coffee table, unexpectedly added: "To send young men and women into today's world armed only with Aristotle, Freud,

and Hemingway is like sending a lamb into the lion's den."

Customers to please Colleges and universities all around the U.S. are falling over themselves to give the students what they want.

Their desire to please shows in many ways, including a subtle but significant change in phraseology. Using terms singled out as abhorrent by purist educator Jacques Barzun, educators have taken to referring to students as "clients" or "customers." In the small, expensive private colleges that sprang up to meet the needs of the past decade; in elite old establishments like Dartmouth and Smith, and some say even in the sanctum sanctorum of Harvard Yard; and in the big public universities with multiple campuses and hordes of students-everywhere colleges are trying, in widely different ways, to demonstrate that they can and do equip students for the world of work. Commissioner Bell's "first and foremost requisite" is seldom challenged.

As a consequence, educators are regarding the business community with new interest and respect. Gone are the days when all they wanted from businessmen or corporations was money, and no advice please. Like the new student, today's educator is seeking from business . knowledge and direction about a world he never made. Educators are asking businessmen what jobs in business are really like, what attributes make successful executives, what kinds of peopie they look for, what methods of training and selection and promotion they use -all with a view to putting this information to practical use with job-hungry students. To their gratification, surprisededucators are finding that businesshas a lot to contribute, and that help is readily extended once they ask for it.

Match and mismatch The exigencies of the day are thus creating new partnerships between academia and the business world. But there is some doubt about how far all this should be allowed to go. Just as educators surrendered too quickl~ to firebrand student leaders in the 1960s, so they may be surrendering too quickly now to the urgent cries of today's "clients" for jobs.

Education seems susceptible to such extreme swings.

The swing that has brought about the present situation has been tracked by

Richard Freeman, a young Harvard economist, in his book, The Overeducated American (Academic Press). With interesting results, Freeman analyzes some of the fundamental economic, social, and demographic forces that have eroded the value of a bachelor's degree. He points out that after the Russians launched their Sputnik space shot in 1957, national interest in education in the U.S. also shot up: the Federal Government's support for higher education quadrupled in the decade from 1960 to 1970. The great growth in spending for research and development, especially in aerospace and defense, created vast needs for people with college or advanced degrees. Employment in "college-intensive" industries-industries that em-

'The best education comes by removing the students at regular intervals from the community of scholars and plunging them into the realities of life,' says an eminent American educator. ploy relatively large numbers of college graduates-went up twice as fast from 1960 to 1969 as employment in other industries. And higher education, itself a big employer of the educated, became a huge business: By 1970 it was employing more people than the steel or the automobile industries.

The demographics were right to meet this stoked-up demand for college graduates. The babies of the post-World War II boom were just coming of college age.

In 20 years, the number of college graduates doubled, and the number of college students tripled. In 1968, a historical high of .63 per cent of all male high-school graduates enrolled in college.

A lifelong return Successful absorption into the economy of these increasing numbers of college graduates had a double-barreled payoff. "It was fruitful both for the individual and for society," Freeman says. Economists of the social-accounting school agree that at least 20 per cent of the increase in the GNP in the 1950s and 1960s was attributable to the higher levels of education of the work force.

A rIsmg share of the nation's capital stock was held in the form of human skills rather than in machines-in social terms, a better place for it to reside.

For the individual, the investment in college-disregarding the pleasures of "consumption" -was indisputably a sound one. Per capita income increased more rapidly among those who had a postsecondary education than among those who did not. Late in the sixties, it cost an average of $17,000 for a student to get a college degree-a calculation that includes four years of forgone income. At that time, according to Richard Freeman's analysis, the individual "investor" could anticipate that his earnings over a 40-year span of work would bring him a comfortable return of II per cent annually after taxes on that $17,000 investment.

Then the ratio of job demand to the supply of college graduates suddenly came tumbling down. The government's expenditures for higher education leveled off to a stable, rather than a growing, portion of the GNP in 1970, and have remained stable ever since. Federal and private-sector outlays for research and development dropped like a moon rock. From 1969 onward, the "collegeintensive" industries in the private sector slowed their growth.

The multiplication process in education-which calls¡ for teachers to teach large numbers of young people from whose ranks still more teachers must be recruited to teach still more young people-finally came to a halt. Families were having fewer children, there were already 2.75 million teachers out there, and more were coming off the line in response to demand that was drying up.

So, as Freeman says, "there was a sudden, disastrous shift from shortage to surplus." James O'Toole, an assistant professor at the School of Business Administration at the University of Southern California (USC), points out that by 1980 there may be 2.5 new holders of college degrees competing for every college-level job.

The downward shift The starting salaries for college graduates moved down with demand, so that the average graduate in the class of 1975 started out making less money in real terms than his predecessor did in 1969.

Within that generality, however, there are wide variations. Hardest hit were those who majored in the social sciences

and the liberal arts. There were ilmaller dips in pay for majors in such fields as mechanical engineering and mathematics. Over-all, the shift was clear: Starting salaries for new graduates all through the sixties rose both absolutely and relative to others in the work force. Now starting salaries for new graduates are actually declining-by as much as 25 per cent, Freeman figures-while other salaries are holding steady.

As average earnings were coming down, the price of a college education was going up, so the rate of return dropped from that 11 per cent to around 7.5 per cent in 1973-less than the capital would have earned if invested in prime-rated corporate bonds. College enrollments came down from that high of 63 per cent of male high-school graduates in 1968 to 49 per cent in 1974, the lo\\\est since 1960. The number of white males signing up for college went from 1.2 million in 1968 down to 840,000 in 1974.

The flight to vocational education and junior colleges was on. William Ferris, a staff associate of the American Association for Higher Education, says: "Going to college lost its magic, while not going lost its stigma "

Intellectuals on street comers All these switches have confounded those social scientists who were predicting to be unendingly induced by technocratic age in which knowledge would be the most precious commodity on the market. The demand for more of the educated-so ran the rationale-was going to be unendingly induced by technological progress. Society's chief worry would be the undereducated, who would be left behind to their glasses of brew and their brewing dissatisfactions. But nothing of the kind-indeed, something more resemb,ling the opposite-has taken place. Lots of people have been acquiring degrees, but not as many jobs have been acquiring characteristics attractive to new degree holders. So it is the overeducated worker who is flooding the market, waving credentials whose monetary value appears to have collapsed.

Some analysts have argued that an explosive situation is in the making. If the educated are forced into jobs classified as low level-meaning with low pay, low challenge, no upward mobility, and little required skill-the underemployed, and not the undereducated, will be the great source of social discontent. USe's O'Toole fears that, like some of the

port in 1970, the Newman Report on Higher Education done for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in 1971, and the Meyerson Report in the same year-drew conclusions favorable to some combination of work and study, and conferred a kind of legitimacy on cooperative education.

The prototype of the successful co-op ed program is found at Northeastern University in Boston. Every activity there reflects the philosophy, as president Kenneth Ryder puts it, "that the best education comes by removing the students at regular intervals from the community of scholars and plunging them into the realities of life." The university runs year-round, on quarterly cycles, with students oscillating between class and work.

less developed countries, we may end up with a lot of intellectuals standing around on street corners, and he adds darkly: "They are the ones most likely to engage in revolution."

That view may be a bit extreme, especially since not a great deal is known about the true nature of underemployment and its consequences. But it is clear that expectations and educational levels move up together, and that many college graduates looking for employment are now being disappointed. As educators themselves note, education has to take some of the responsibility: It fanned expectations by saying or implying that college was the sure road to an affluent life.

Desire under the elms The myriad new programs aimed at ratifying the primacy of work are changing everything about college life today. Education sags under the weighty labels for these programs, among them career education, experiential learning, cooperative education (co-op ed), crosscultural experiences, mastery learning, and so on. The old semester-and-vacation cycle, which is out of phase with today's world anyway, is being replaced by new rhythms permitting alternation between work and study. College administrations are reallocating resources as undergraduates shift toward fields where the job market is relatively promising, opting for business administration, health services, and .the physical sciences-classifications that include oourses in "salable skills" such as accounting, computer programing, nursing, physical therapy, speech therapy, and biology.

Students on paying jobs

Doubt about the "lockstep" For many years business and education have met in cooperative-education programs, which call for the student to lead a kind of double life, alternating between study on campus and work away from it. Recently, the number of colleges offering cooperative education has multiplied, so that 970 stand now where only 70 stood 15 years ago.

One reason for the increase is the state of the job market. Others are Federal funding for starting up cooperativeeducation programs, and a spreadmg doubt about the wisdom of the "lockstep" of four years of high school, immediately followed by four years of college. Also, a clutch of hefty studiesamong them a Carnegie Commission Re-

o

Thirty-four faculty members work full time as placement officers in their own field of specialization, and keep in touch with the needs of some 3,500 organizations. These "coordinators" have so much accumulated knowledge and blanket the market so completely that they always seem to be able to come up with jobs. Vice president Roy Wooldridge says that "last year no students were placed at Ford Motor, which usually takes over 100. But we were able to make up that difference by filling more openings at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Lahey Clinic."

Right now, Northeastern has 4,000 full-time students at work on paying jobs, and 8,000 on campus. Students usually work in their fields of major interest - business, engineering, nursing, teaching-and take five years to get their degree.

Undergraduates are no more likely to announce total happiness than anyone else in the world, but those at Northeastern do point out that cooperative education has lots of advantages. "First, we're getting the experience, second, 'Ne're making the money," says one senior. In a remark much applauded by his peers, another, commenting on the need to cope with both businessmen and teachers, says that "one thing you develop around here is a survival instinct."

Generally, students think that their experience on the job sharpens their perceptions and their skills.

Teachers agree. One notes that "the alternation with work increases the students' interest in studying when they

return to campus-they're glad to leave and glad to get back." And most of Northeastern's teachers accept the purposes of education as Northeastern sees them. "Education is for the masses now," says Professor Karl Weiss. "It makes no sense to turn out 35,000 Shakespeare scholars and have them floating around the market place."

Getting the chores done cheap Employers like co-op ed because it gives them a look without a commitment.

A young Johnson & Johnson executive remarks that by hiring co-op ed students his company gets an opportunity to evaluate them for future employment.

"The surprise element is largely eliminated," he says. "When we hire co-op students we get qualified entry-level people already familiar with business norms and with the way we do things at J. & J. And while the student is working as a co-op, we're getting chore work done cheap; in effect, we're using a group of para-engineers."

Northeastern's placement effort is so effective that the university is now selling its services to other colleges. Sixteen eastern colleges of the liberal-art variety-among them Brown, Colgate, and Tufts-are using Northeastern's facilities to locate jobs for some of their students. Right now Northeastern loses money on every student it places, but a foundation grant covers the deficit.

Charles Shain, former president of Connecticut College and now director of Northeastern's Institute for Off-Campus Experience, believes that the institute can help these other colleges find ways "to introduce career interests into liberal-arts teaching, without profaning the atmosphere. "

Will anybody read Chaucer in 1990?

Among recent college graduates, no one has been more seared by early contact with the job market than the holder of a degree in the liberal arts. Supply and demand are especially out of phase in that broad category. Although chief executives are fond of saying that they want generalists- "people who can read and write" is the usual phrase-they don't seem.to be telling that to theiJ: personnel officers. Unemployment stands at around 15.4 per cent for new degree holders in the humanities, and at about 16 per cent for social-science majors.

Liberal-arts colleges are finding imaginative correctives. Alverno College, a

small Catholic school for women in Milwaukee, was hit hard by a drop in enrollments a few years ago. Suddenly, Alverno's president Joel Read recalls, "It was a question of survival for us.

We had to ask ourselves-why should anyone come here? What do we advocate? What are we accountable for?

Alverno's answer has entailed nothing less than a sweeping new definition of the liberal arts, and a radically new way of teaching them. Instead of requiring a certain number of credit hours in conventional courses, Alverno has made the achievement of levels of skill in various "competences" the requisite for graduation. Among the eight competences taught at Alverno are such tricky concepts as "social interaction," "problem solving," "decisionmaking," and so on.

The traditional materials of the liberal arts are used in instruction, but they are

'Education is for the masses now,' says Professor Karl Weiss. 'It makes no sense to turn out 35,000 Shakespeare scholars and have them floating around the market place.' approached from the perspective of the skills that their study imparts, rather than as compartments of knowledge to be acquired.

One of the difficulties with this new organization of learning is how to evaluate the level of competence reached in each rubric, and for this purpose Alverno enlisted the help of Wisconsin Telephone Co., an A.T. & T. subsidiary.

"The usual testing services had nothing but multiple-choice tests, which overlook the active aspect of the competences, and concentrate on the 'accumulation of knowledge' approach," says Professor Loacker. "But we found out that the Bell System had been doing just the kind of assessment we wanted for 20 years."

Wisconsin Telephone loaned Lester Weinberger, a personnel supervisor, part time to Alverno. With his help, Loacker and a colleague, Austin Doherty, set up a student-assessment center that made adaptations in the methodology that Wisconsin Telephone uses

to evaluate its executives. Unlike the answers to multiple-choice questions, there are no right or wrong answers to problems in the assessment center; its purpose is to measure skills in such judgmental matters as assigning priorities, analyzing elements of a problem, and so on. Weinberger and other members of the Milwaukee business and professional community sit on assessment teams, feeding back their judgments to the student-and sharing directly in the teaching process. "Businessmen can't shout 'ivory tower' around here anymore," says one teacher.

Better products for sale Alverno's program is still too new for evaluation, but its teachers and Milwaukee businessmen believe that AIverno will soon be turning out students with skills far more marketable than those that the conventional liberal-arts major takes away from ,college. The belief appears to be supported by the performance of Alverno undergraduates who hold outside jobs as part of the college's off-campus experiential learning program. "These skills are what business wants," says president Read.

"They are the most useful and portable of possessions in a world of technological change-a better lifetime investment than specific knowledge." In a telling phrase she sums up Alverno's answer to the shortage of jobs: "Change the meaning of a college degree," she says, "and you change the demand for it."

A quite different means of accommodating work and study can be found at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, where more direct couplings with the job market are made. Not long after Bowling Green's president Hollis Moore perceived that demand in the field was growing, the university founded a College of Health and Community Services.

Although only in its fourth year, the college already has almost 1,000 students.

Courses range from nursing to social work to law enforcement-fields in which, according to Joseph Balogh, dean of the college, "jobs are wide open."

President Moore is now thinking about starting a college of agribusiness.

Career proving grounds Other associations between the world of education and the world of work are being hammered out in varying combinations, extending all the way to total ownership of universities by big companies.

• M.LT., Carnegie-Mellon, and the University of Oregon, in conjunction with the U.S. National Science Foundation, house "innovation centers" where the techniques of entrepreneurship are taught.

Students learn how an idea moves through the process of innovation, starting with the concept itself, and progressing through stages such as design, prototype production, cost analysis, and marketing. Businessmen work as parttime teachers in the analysis and in financial planning. • At Berea College in Kentucky, whose students come mostly from Appalachia, undergraduates do just about all the work involved in operating the college.

Freshmen do what Dorothy Coffey, career-development coordinator, calls "the scut work" involved in serving food; then they progress to getting out the payrolls (one student does the payroll for 1,500 others), doing administrative work, and even running the Boone Tavern Hotel (where products made by students are on sale). Recently, seniors have entered into work relationships with nearby corporations, such as Goodyear Tire & Rubber. • At Hollins, college for women in Virginia, "career/life workshops," designed to help students focus on their lifetime goals, are offered throughout the school year. The objective, says a spokesman, is "to establish good career orientation-which we had to do to survive." Students also work as interns for nearby companies, which serve as "career proving grounds."

the exigencies of the moment we~e to remake higher education into the servant of the labor market. There are practical problems, and there are deeper purposes, which are in danger of being overlooked.

As a practical matter, educators and curriculum designers may find themselves chasing the ghost of economics past. There is always a lag of several years before the demands of the job market for the college-educated can be met -during which time what economists rather euphemistically call "exogenous factors," by which they really mean events that they didn't foresee, may have changed the whole picture. The $60 billion that the U.S. Congress has appropriated over the years for National Aeronautics and Space Administration created huge demand. Great potential demand suddenly collapsed when Congress unexpectedly rejected plans to build the Supersonic Transport-which was turned down in the Senate by a margin of just five votes. Medicare and Medicaid fueled the need for health care beyond anyone's calculations. Environmental concerns created needs for experts in fields unknown 10 years ago.

Skills yet unknown

Gearing the supply to "college-level" jobs is also complicated by the fact that when society's perception of a job changes, so does the job's content. Law enforcement is a good example: Society is demanding more skill in that field.

Policemen, parole officers, the staffs of correctional institutions, officers of the court-all could use a lot more education.

Too much of a good thing?

Yesterday's dumb cop will be tomorrow's Much good can come from this pattern of rapidly expanding association between trained professional. The anatomy of debusiness and education. For educators to mand is not set in concrete. Peace to all nobody really be responsive to the surrounding society demand projectors-but keeps them from becoming fixed in old knows what skills we'll need five years molds, and shakes them out of the ab- from now.

Changes in our social structure may surdities and bureaucratic excesses that characterize ingrown organizations. Stu- also bring great numbers of Americans, dents get an all-important exposure to hitherto underprivileged as regards eduthe workplace, from whose processes and cation, to seek college diplomas. Blacks purposes they have too long been iso- and women are more numerous on collated at home as well as at school. Busi- lege campuses today than ever before. nessmen benefit from having a part in A recent survey showed that young blacks shaping the attitudes and aptitudes of' and women are twice as confident about young people, and helping to make them the future as other groups in the popmore skilled. And society can only be ulation-an attitude that might be better off as the gross misunderstandexplained by their widening exposure to ings about business that are held by education. some educators and young people are Pressures on colleges today have led dissipated by a co-operative effort. them to make congenial arrangements It would be unfortunate, however, if for study that will enlarge their markets

still further. They now readily accommodate people who want to intersperse study with periods of work or periods of just bumming around, as well as people long absent from academia. Corporations are more liberal about letting employees get another crack at education.

Only 15 per cent of the members of the 90-million-strong work force have a college degree. If one out of 20 of the other 85 per cent decides to go for a diploma, educational in'stitutions would be swamped. The coming drop in teen-age applicants could be more than compensated for by such new entrants.

The rejection of yahoos No important change comes free of risk, and the risk amid all the change in higher education today is that it may become "vocationalized." Some teachers express their concern over this possibility, but few are raising their voices against it-the message now being one that nobody wants to listen to. 'What a traveler going from college to college rarely hears is the resolve on the part of college teachers to impart knowledge because its possession is pleasurable, because it enriches lives in ways that go beyond money, and because it can give people some degree of gratification and moral certitude in a world that is full of perturbation.

As in so many other contexts in our society, what seems lacking in higher education is a statement of aspirations -our hope for what the country may become. The hope surpasses markets, job skills, and payoffs; it is a hope that we may become an educated society. An educated society is one that acts dispassionately, votes intelligently, respects cultural and literary excellence, rejects yahoos, abhors bigotry, and admires scholarship. It perceives richness in leisure as well as in work, understands the past, transmits a sense of human decency and compassion to new generations, and knows enough about freedom to protect it.

Above all the others in society, educational institutions have the responsibility to define those values, to preserve them, and to teach them. It is not entirely clear that American education honorably discharged that responsibility in the 1960s. Today it faces a different but no less rigorous test.

0 About the Author: Walter Guzzardi Jr. is a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine.

Debunked by some critics as a "professional mind-blower, inhabiting a technicolor Waste Land," and as "one who never deviates into sense," and lauded by others as "one of the most outstanding poets since T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane," John Ashbery has remained enveloped in arid controvers'y for 'quite some time. But with the publication of his most recent collection of poems, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, he has emerged as America's most original poet today.

"No one now writing poems in the English language is likelier than Ashbery to survive the severe judgments of time," prophesies educator Harold Bloom.

Self-Portrait has bagged some of the most coveted honors in the literary world-the prestigious Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the top grade from the National Book Critics Circle. Consequently, there is a sudden spurt of comment on his work-zealous research scholars, scouting for abstruse areas of investigation, have descended on him for the mere joy of confrontation with "obscurity in its densest form." In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, "How to Be a Difficult Poet," Richard Kostelanetz dwelt at some length on the innate impenetrability embedded in every line or phrase of Ashbery's poetry. And to this charge Ashbery seems to lend himself, most willingly, with a kind of defiant impishness, by describing (or mystifying?) his modus operandi, his compositional technique. Referring to one of his earlier collections, Europe, Ashbery said to an interviewer: "I remember writing it in a state of confusion about what I wanted to do. I would

sit down and cover pages without really knowing what I had written .... I'd get American magazines like Esquire, open the pages, get a phrase from it, and then start writing on my owt.l. When I ran out, I'd go back to the magazine. It was pure experimentation. I didn't really consider these to be poems."

On another occasion, he said, with his customary frivolity: "If you write a poem by taking the last line from every third chapter of each green-bound book on your shelves, and rhyming the last word of each with the first word of each fourth line, adding the name of a soft drink, an Aristotelian category and an expletive from the comic strips to every other line, you will have cunningly constructed a poem whose beauties are strictement litteraire."

And yet behind this brazen faryade of willful obscurity, seeming incoherence, syntactical irregularity and bizarre imagery, there is a transparent lucidity, an authentic compulsion to embody a vision of life un tinged by false sentiment or irony.

The basic strategy here is to challenge the reader at each stage into coming to terms with his inner self. As Ashbery has said: "I'm interested in communicating, but I feel that saying something the reader has already known is not communicating anything. It's a veiled insult to the reader."

To enter into the imaginative world of Ashbery, one may find it helpful first to know something about his life. Born on July 28, 1927, an only child, he was inevitably driven into introspection, feeling more at home in his dreams and fantasies than in the world of external reality. This has lent his poetry

a refreshing dimension of what may be termed fecund solipsism.

The "I" in his work looks at the world with the eye of an uncanny sensitivity, nurtured on lone meditations. There is a certain holding-back from any assured knowledge of other people, a realization of utter futility in any human intercoursea commitment, almost mystic, to silence and darkness. Take, for instance, his poem "No Way of Knowing": There is no way of knowing whether these are Our neighbors or friendly savages trapped in the distance By the red tape of a mirage. The fact that We drawled "hallo" to them just lazily enough this morning Doesn't mean that a style was inaugurated. Anyway evening Kind of changes things. Not the color, The quality of a handshake, the edge on someone's breath, So much as a general anxiety to get everything all added up, Flowers arranged and out of sight.

Why must you go? Why can't you Spend the night, here in my bed, with my arms wrapped tightly around you?

Surely that would solve everything by supplying A theory of knowledge on a scale with the gigantic Bits and pieces of knowledge we have retained: An LP record of all your favorite friendships,

Of letters from the front? Too ¡Fantastic to make sense?

Later, a brief apprenticeship at the Museum School in Rochester stimulated Ashbery's imagination into conceiving striking metaphors throbbing with warm colors, lines and curves. In the title poem, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," "Clouds/In the puddle stir up into sawtoothed fragments" charged with the "light behind windblown fog and sand," and there are "stubborn leaves ripped from wet branches."

This is undoubtedly a rare perception of the sensory phenomena realized in their pristine glow.

Indeed, this poem derives its esthetic validity from a view of experience represented in a painting by Parmigianino, a 16th-century painter-a self-portrait in a convex mirror, symbolizing an apparent distortion of perspective to provoke the beholder into a new awareness of the "magma of interiors" : As Parmigianino did it, the right hand Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer And swerving easily away, as though to protect What it advertises. A few leaded panes, old beams, Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together In a movement supporting the face, which swims Toward and away like the hand Except that it is in repose.

Although

it occasionally groans under the pressure of

heavy allusiveness ("Sydney Freedberg in his/ Parmigianino says of it: 'Realism in this portrait/No longer produces an objective truth, but a bizarria .... ' "), the basic concept stands out unmistakably-Ashbery's preoccupation with human incommunicability: Love once Tipped the scales but now is shadowed, invisible, Though mysteriously present, around somewhere.

But we know it cannot be sandwiched Between two adjacent moments, that its windings Lead nowhere except to further tributaries And that these empty themselves into a vague Sense of something that can never be known Even though it seems likely that each of us Knows what it is and is capable of Communicating it to the other.

In 1951, under the influence of his poet-friend Frank O'Hara, Ashbery developed an enduring interest in contemporary music; he once told an interviewer how a concert by David Tudor of John Cage's "Music of Changes" stirred him into returning to poetry after a long spell of inertia and depression. Much of the difficulty in understanding Ashbery's work would disappear if the reader realized that music often supplies him not only with a mode of structuring his poems but also with a perennial source of ingenious metaphors. There is i¡n his poetry a kind of symphonic awareness of life. Viewed from this angle, his poem "Tenth Symphony" acquires a new meaning: There is some connexion (I like the way the English spell it They're so clever about some things Probably smarter generally than we are Although there is supposed to be something We have that they don't-don't ask me What it is ... ) ... It connects up, Not to anything, but kind of like Closing the ranks so as to leave them open.

Ashbery here seems to suggest a new aspect of the symbolist concept of musicalization of experience in poetry, enunciated in his curriculum vitae after The Tennis Court Oath was published: "I feel I could express best in music. What I like about music is its ability of being convincing, of carrying an argument through successfully to the finish, though the terms of this argument remain unknown quantities. What remains is the structure, the architecture of the argument, scene or story. I would like to do this in poetry."

That is the tune but there are no words.

The words are only speculation (From the Latin speculum, mirror) : They seek and cannot find the meaning of music.

In other words, Ashbery seems to move toward the condition of music, subscribing to Eliot's view that at "the moments of greatest intensity ... we touch the border of those feelings which only music can express."

In Ashbery's poetry, the indeterminacy of music and its

power to harmonize experience often combines with dreams and fantasies. "I would also like to reproduce," he once observed, "the power dreams have of persuading you that a certain event has a meaning not logically connected with it, or that there is a hidden relation among disparate objects."

It is this "hidden relation" that most of his readers, seeking instant communication and easy intelligibility, often fail to perceive. To the common reader, words in a poem must articulate clearly, answer all questions, dispel all doubts. Little does he realize that the supreme mystery always persists, for how could the complexity of response be reduced to simplistic enunciation?

You've never told me about a lot of things: Why you love me, why we love you, and just exactly What sex is.

A poet who, unlike Allen Ginsberg or Anne Sexton, chooses to meander into the shadowy zones of the human mind often runs the risk of impenetrability. But, however diffused the overall design may appear to be, the imperative need to organize is never forsaken-a point very forcefully reiterated by John Ashbery: "I have a feeling that in my mind is an underground stream, if you will, that I can have access to when I want it. I want the poetry to come out as freshly and unplanned as possible, but I don't want it to be stream of consciousness. I'm bored by the automatic writing of orthodox surrealism. There's more to one's mind than the unconscious, I have arranged things so that, as this stream is coming out, I make a number of rapid editorial changes" (italics mine).

This is undoubtedly a very judicious theory of the creative process, recognizing the role played by critical judgment in molding experience into an artifact. A poet who respects the validity of selection and arrangement cannot be a mere "mindblower." And so even though his style seems to flow mercurially, bearing on its surface a flotsam of ellipses, sundered phrases, parentheses, tonal fluctuations and sudden shifts of points of view, the basic mood or situation manifests itself in unequivocal terms. Take, for instance, his poem "Worsening Situation," which evokes the gradual slackening of one's hold on life, a disconcerting feeling that the center can no longer hold: Like a rainstorm, he said, the braided colors Wash over me and are no help. Or like one At afeast who eats not, for he cannot choose From among the smoking dishes. This severed hand Stands for life, and wander as it will, East or west, north or south, it is ever A stranger who walks beside me. 0 seasons, Booths, chaleur, dark-hatted charlatans On the outskirts of some ruralfete, The name you drop and never say is mine, mine!

Some day I'll claim to you how all used up I am because of you but in the meantime the ride Continues. Everyone is along for the ride, It seems. Besides, what else is there?

The annual games? True, there are occasions For white uniforms and a special language Kept secret from the others. The limes Are duly sliced. I know all this But can't seem to keep itfrom affecting me,

Every day, all day. rve tried recreation, Reading until late at night, train rides And romance.

One day a man called while I was out And left this message: "You got the whole thing wrong From start to finish. Luckily, there's still time To correct the situation, but you must actfast.

See me at your earliest convenience. And please Tell no one of this. Much besides your life depends on it."

I thought nothing of it at the time. Lately rve been looking at old-fashioned plaids, fingering Starched white collars, wondering whether there's a way To get them really white again. My wife Thinks rm in Oslo-Oslo, France, that is.

Reprinted

from Self-Portrait

in a Convex

Mirror

by permission

of CorcanetjManchester Press. Copyright © John Ashbery.

Or his poem "Mixed Feelings," which projects as tenuous as Lamb's "Dream Children":

a fantasy

A pleasant smell of frying sausages Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around An oldfighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.

How to explain to these girls, if indeed that's what they are, These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas About the vast change that's taken place In the fabric of our society, altering the texture Of all things in it? And yet They somehow look as if they knew, except That it's so hard to see them, it's hard to figure out Exactly what kind of expressions they're wearing.

What are your hobbies, girls? Aw nerts, One of them might say, this guy's too muchfor me.

Let's go on and out, somewhere Through the canyons of the garment center To a small caje and have a cup of coffee.

1 am not offended that these creatures (that's the word) Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem, Pay so little heed to me. It's part of a complicated Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt. But this talk of The garment center? Surely that's California sunlight Belaboring them and the old crate on which they Have draped themselves, fading its Donald Duck insignia To the extreme point of legibility.

Maybe they were lying but more likely their Tiny intelligences cannot retain much information.

Not even one fact, perhaps. That's why They think they're in New York. I like the way They look and act and feel. I wonder How they got that way, but am not going to Waste any more time thinking about them.

1 have already forgotten them Until some day in the not too distant future When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport, They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as Worthwhile ones, but allf/ooding the surface of our minds As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change.

Reprinted

from Self· Portrait

of Corea net/Manchester

in a Convex

Press. Copyright

Mirror

©

by permission

John Ashbery.

Granting that. Ashbery is an original talent, does he not still owe any allegiance to tradition?

"No poet," Eliot has categorically asserted, "no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead." This notion Eliot expounds more as' "a principle of esthetic" than merely "historical criticism." Viewed from this standpoint, Ashbery is palpably influenced by W.H. Auden (on whom he wrote his honors thesis, and who chose Ashbery's first book of poems for the Yale series of Young Poets in 1956); Wallace Stevens (from whom he learned the art of making an abstract statement acquire the vitality of metaphor: "We can only imagine a world in which a woman/ walks and wears her hair and knows/all that she does not know.

Yet we know/what her breasts are."); Saint-John Perse (his plasticity of imagery: "Lovely tribes have just moved to the north.jIn the flickering evening the martins grow denser./ Rivers of wings surround us and vast tribulation."); William Carlos Williams (his openness of form and rhythm); Marianne Moore (her amazing ingenuity); and Elizabeth Bishop (her seamless language). Ashbery avowedly admits his indebtedness to these poets and others. "I don't think of poetry," he observes, "as coming from nowhere. It extends certain traditions."

Essentially speaking, Ashbery belongs to the tradition of metaphysical verse that delights in yoking contraries to new perspectives, straining language to yield its utmost significance, and encountering experience in all its baffling multiplicity and unpredictability.

But as an artist Ashbery has never disregarded the need for communication; in fact, he offers us several clues to the understanding of each poem. For instance, the title may lead the reader to a poem's meaning. If the "River" integrates the symbolic and naturalistic facets of experience, the "Miirchenbilder" interweaves motifs from a fairy-tale with an Eliotesque fear of the unknown, and his "Ode to Bill" evokes the poignancy of transience.

Yet another clue may be a statement or two so positioned in the poem as to illuminate its central theme. The "Fear of Death" is heralded by a lull in the air and an ominous silence.

"Is there no state free from the boundary lines/of before and after?" And, of course, the over-all structure of each poem is always suggestive of the patterning of experience.

If certain passages in Ashbery's poems do not "work" for the reader at first encounter, it is because they demand sustained scrutiny, supple imaginative response, and pliant readiness to accept reality as multi versant and mysterious. "The difficulty of my poetry," Ashbery hImself explains, "isn't there for its own sake; it is meant to reflect the difficulty of living, the everchanging, minute adjustments that go on around us and which. we respond to from moment to moment-the difficulty of living in passing time .... " Paradoxically speaking, therefore, those who find life baffling, mystifying and challenging may not find Ashbery "difficult" at all.

0 About the Author: Dr. Shiv K. Kumar is a poet, playwright, literary critic and short story writer. He has published three books of poems (Articulate Silences, Cobwebs in the Sun and Subterfuges), one play (The Last Wedding Anniversary) and a book of literary criticism (Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel). His short stories have appeared in both Indian and foreign publications. A professor of English at Hyderabad University, Dr. Kumar has also taught at several American universities.

AN ASHBERY SAMPLER It thinks itself too good for These generalizations and is Moved on by them. The opposite side Is plunged in shade, this one In self-esteem. But the center Keeps collapsing and re-forming.

The couple at a picnic table (but It's too early in the season for picnics) Are traipsed across by the river's Unknowing knowledge of its workings To avoid possible boredom and the stain Of too much intuition the whole scene Is walled behind glass. "Too early," She says, "in the season." A hawk drifts by.

"Send everybody back to the city."

Some things we do take up a lot more time And are considered a fruitful, natural thing to do.

I am coming out of one way to behave Into a plowed cornfield. On my left, gulls, On an inland vacation. They seem to mind the way I write.

Or, to take another example: last month I vowed to write more. What is writing?

Well, in my case, it's getting down on paper Not thoughts, exactly, but ideas, maybe: Ideas about thoughts. Thoughts is too grand a word.

Ideas is better, though not precisely what I mean.

Someday I'll explain. Not today though.

I feel as though someone had made me a vest Which I was wearing out of doors into the countryside Out of loyalty to the person, although There is no one to see, except me With my inner vision of what I look like.

The wearing is both a duty and a pleasure Because it absorbs me, absorbs me too much.

One horse stands out irregularly against The land over there. And am I receiving This vision? Is it mine, or do I already owe it For other visions, unnoticed and unrecorded On the great, relaxed curve of time, All the forgotten springs, dropped pebbles, Songs once heard that then passed out of light Into everyday oblivion? He moves away slowly, Looks up and pumps the sky, a lingering Question. Him too we can sacrifice To the end progress, for we must, we must be moving on.

Six poems from 'Self-Portrait

Es war einmal ... No, it's too heavy To be said. Besides, you aren't paying attention any more.

How shall I put it?

"The rain thundered on the uneven red flagstones.

The steadfast tin soldier gazed beyond the drops Remembering the hat-shaped paper boat, that soon ... " That's not it either.

Think about the long summer evenings of the past, the queen anne's lace.

Sometimes a musical phrase would perfectly sum up The mood of a moment. One of those lovelorn sonatas For wind instruments was riding past on a solemn white horse.

Everybody wondered who the new arrival was.

Pomp of flowers, decorations Junked next day. Now look out of the window.

The sky is clear and bland. The wrong kind of day For business or games, or betting on a sure thing.

The trees weep drops Into the water at night. Slowly couples gather.

She looks into his eyes. "It would not be good To be left alone." He: "I'll stay As long as the night allows." This was one of those night rainbows In negative color. As we advance, it retreats; we see We are now far into a cave, must be. Yet there seem to be Trees all around, and a wind lifts their leaves, slightly.

I want to go back, out of the bad stories, But there's always the possibility that the next one ...

No, it's another almond tree, or a ring-swallowing frog ...

Yet they are beautiful as we people them With ourselves. They are empty as cupboards.

To spend whole days drenched in them, waiting for the next whisper, For the word in the next room. This is how the princes must have behaved, Lying down in the frugality of sleep.

Easing the thing Into spurts of activity Before the emptiness of late afternoon Is a kind of will power Blaring back its received vision From a thousand tenement windows Just before night Its signal fading

in a Convex Mirror' by John Ashbery

Unsupported by reason's enigma Water collects in squared stone catch basins.

The land is dry. Under it moves The water. Fish live in the wells. The leaves, A concerned green, are scrawled on the light. Bad Bindweed and rank ragweed somehow forget to flourish here.

An inexhaustible wardrobe has been placed at the disposal Of each new occurrence. It can be itself now.

Day is almost reluctant to decline And slowing down opens out new avenues That don't infringe on space but are living here with us.

Other dreams came and left while the bank Of colored verbs and adjectives was shrinking from the light To nurse in shade their want of a method But most of all she loved the particles That transform objects of the same category Into particular ones, each distinct Within and apart from its own class.

In all this springing up was no hint Of a tide, only a pleasant wavering of the air In which all things seemed present, whether Just past or soon to come. It was all invitation.

So much the flowers outlined along the night Alleyswhen few were visible, yet Their story sounded louder than the hum Of bug and stick noises that brought up the rear, Trundling it along into a new fact of day.

These were meant to be read as any Salutation before getting down to business, But they stuck to their guns, and so much Was their obstinacy in keeping with the rest (Like long flashes of white birds that refuse to die When day does) that none knew the warp Which presented this major movement as a firm Digression, a plain that slowly becomes a mountain.

So each found himself caught in a net As a fashion, and all efforts to wriggle free Involved him further, inexorably, since all Existed there to be told, shot through From border to border. Here were stones That read as patches of sunlight, there was the story Of the grandparents, of the vigorous young champion (The lines once given to another, now Restored to the new speaker), dinners and assemblies, The light in the old home, the secret way The rooms fed into each other, but all Was wariness of time watching itself For nothing in the complex story grew outside: The greatness in the moment of telling stayed unresolved Until its wealth of incident, pain mixed with pleasure, Faded in the precise moment of bursting Into bloom, its growth a static lament.

Some stories survived the dynasty of the builders But their echo was itself locked in, became Anticipation that was only memory after all, For the possibilities are limited. It is seen At the end that the kind and good are rewarded, That the unjust one is doomed to burn forever Around his error, sadder and wiser anyway.

Between these extremes the others muddle through Like us, uncertain but wearing artlessly Their function of minor characters who must Be kept in mind. It is we who make this Jungle and call it space, naming each root, Each serpent, for the sound of the name As it clinks dully against our pleasure, Indifference that is pleasure. And what would they be Without an audience to restrict the innumerable Passes and swipes, restored to good humor as it issues Into the impervious evening air? So in some way Although the arithmetic is incorrect The balance is restored because it Balances, knowing it prevails, And the man who made the same mistake twice is exonerated.

What is it now with me And is it as I have become?

Is there no state free from the boundary lines Of before and after? The window is open today And the air pours in with piano notes In its skirts, as though to say, "Look, John, I've brought these and these" - that is, A few Beethovens, some Brahmses, A few choice Poulenc notes .... Yes, It is being free again, the air, it has to keep coming back Because that's all it's good for.

I want to stay with it out of fear That keeps me from walking up certain steps, Knocking at certain doors, fear of growing old Alone, and of finding no one at the evening end Of the path except another myself Nodding a curt greeting: "Well, you've been awhile But now we're back together, which is what counts."

Air in my path, you could shorten this, But the breeze has dropped, and silence is the last word.

ENERGY

THE ULTIMATE SOLUTION: HARNESSING THERMONUCLEAR FUSION Scientists in the United States are working on the 'toughest technological feat ever attempted on this planet'-controlling the enormous power of thermonuclear fusion to solve mankind's energy problem. In this article, the author discusses fusion resear~h in America and India.

This way, please, to the center of the sun. No, I'm sorry we can't go any further; we have to stop now and watch what's going on. You may have noticed it's rather hot here-about a million degrees. And the pressure is half a million times that on the surface of the earth.

But there, in the star's center, both heat and pressure are much greater: 20 million degrees and probably 100 million atmospheres. That's why we can't go any closer.

Still, we can see what's happening.

As you may know, this is one of the greatest power-houses in the neighborhood. It generates and releases such a colossal amount of energy that we have to use several zeroes to express it. Here quintillions of hydrogen nuclei ram into one another every second and fuse to become helium nuclei. In the process they lose a tiny bit of their original mass. That is converted into extremely energetic particles, radiation and heat. In other words, a mighty fire is burning at the center of the sun, with the newly formed helium moving outward and fresh hydrogen moving in, continuously feeding the tremendous conflagration.

It is this fire of fusion that we, back on the earth, feel as sunlight and sunwarmth. The fire that gave us life and now sustains it.

* * *

Such a conducted tour is, of course, a fantasy-but a pleasant one. It gives us a rough idea¡ of the immense process

The total world energy consumption at work in the sun, a process known as thermonuclear fusion, which keeps today is estimated at 62 trillion kwh the sun bright and will so keep it till per year. All of it could be supplied by fusing just 600 tons of deuterium! all the burnable matter is consumed-Now consider this contrast: To produce several billion years from now.

Can we mimic the sun? We can. the same amount of energy we would We have already done it in a violent have to burn 120 million barrels of form: The hugely destructive explosion of oil a day. The world's oceans contain what is popularly called the hydrogen enough deuterium to last more than a long period bomb. But can we do it in a gentler, 30 billion years-quite more useful manner? That is what for a planet that is less than five billion scientists are trying to do. In 25 years years old. Such is the promise held out they have achieved some success, which by this resource. makes them confident that the impossible * * * To get the hang of it all, let's look dream soon will be a reality.

Fusion is rightly described as the ulti- at some basics. All matter is composed mate source of energy for the world. of atoms. These consist of a nucleus, It isn't here yet. Realizing the ultimate which contains particles named protons is .not easy. In the words of one scientist, and neutrons; orbiting the nucleus are it is the "toughest technological feat electrons. The lightest and simplest of all elements is hydrogen whose atom ever attempted on this planet."

Yet when the complex engineering has one proton as nucleus and one difficulties are overcome (and most investi- electron in orbit. Some forms of hydrogen gators are hopeful they will be in 40 have something extra in the nucleus: to 50 years), the prospects will be incre- one or two neutrons. But they retain dibly rosy. The basic fuel in a fusion all the chemical properties of ordinary reaction is deuterium, a component of hydrogen. Such atoms are known as water that is virtually inexhaustible. One isotopes. Hydrogen's two isotopes are gram of deuterium can yield 100,000 deuterium (one extra neutron) and trikilowatt-hours (kwh) of energy. This tium (two extra neutrons). The fuels is about 10 million times the energy for the first fusion power reactors will released by burning one gram of a fossil fuel. The entire U.S. demand for Right: At the KMS Fusion Laboratory in Ann electric power today could be met by Arbor, Michigan, a laser beam irradiates a fusing 10 kilograms of deuterium per cryogenic target-a mixture of deuterium and hour. This could be made and supplied tritium liquefied at temperatures near absolute by a small plant that would separate zero. The use of cryogenic targets is one of the the deuterium from seawater by simple latest developments in laser fusion research at the KMS laboratories. distillation.

be these two isotopes.

We must also know something about the states of matter. Three we are familiar with: solid, liquid and gas. There is a fourth, known as plasma, consisting of extremely hot atoms whose electrons have been separated from their nuclei.

This process is called ionization. Plasma is what the sun and other stars consist of, with their interior temperatures in millions of degrees and pressures in millions of earth atmospheres. In those unique conditions hydrogen nuclei fuse ,to form helium nuclei and release enormous amounts of energy in the form of heat and other radiations as well as neutrons.

Now let's ask: What exactly is fusion?

When lightweight nuclei are brought together under great force, they merge into one nucleus and form a new element; but they lose a small amount of their mass, which is converted into energy.

In the stars this fusion process is continuous because part of the energy released keeps feeding the fire.

On the earth, of course, we cannot possibly hope to duplicate the conditions existing in stellar interiors. But we can imita'te them effectively enough to draw off power in some form. In a hydrogen (or, properly named, thermonuclear) bomb, the release of energy is instant and immense, and hence destructive. What we need is controlled, relatively slow, sustained fusion.

To achieve this, three conditions must be fulfilled: (1) A small quantity of fusion fuel must be heated to a temperature high enough to ignite it (about 100 million degrees Celsius). (2) The hot fuel must be confined long enough for the fusion-produced energy to exceed the energy first used to ignite it and initiate the reaction. (3) The released energy must be converted by practical means to electricity or process heat. All these three objectives must be met before we can talk realistically of fusion power stations.

What are the advantages of fusion power? They are fairly easy to enumerate, although this exercise assumes the solution of numerous technological and practical problems.

The fuel that will be used in fusion reactors is neither scarce nor expensive (unlike uranium). While uranium and plutonium, themselves radioactive and dangerous, leave considerable quantities of waste products, fusion reactors leave much less. When deuterium nuclei fuse, the final product is helium, the safest substance known. It is true that deuterium fusion does produce tritium as a by-

product, but this is far less radioactive than plutonium. And in any caSl>,tritium can itself be used as a fusion fuel; that is recycling, not waste. And the process is relatively clean, unlike the burning of fossil fuels which releases several undesirable gases into the atmosphere.

Fusion reactors are safe. There cannot occur a "runaway" accident, as is the case in a fission reactor. The reason is that the plasma used is so thin in density that at no given moment can it cause a disastrous accident.

Another advantage is that fusion reactors can be safely located anywhere in the world, wherever there is enough water-a fact that at one stroke eliminates the geographical lopsidedness of most currently used forms of energy.

We shall have a case of energy without geography for the first time in man's history. There will be no more "haves" and "have-nots"; all the world will be "haves." A near-impossible dream that may just come true.

* * *

A chart tracing more than 20 years' work and progress clearly shows that we are "closing in" on fusion powerin the laboratories at least. The achievements of the last three years particularly have given scientists the confidence that practical fusion power will be achieved by the end of the century.

Why is such a promising goal so difficult to reach? First, not enough

One gram of deuterium, the basic fuel in ~ fusion reaction, yields 100,000 kwh of energy.

This is about 10 million times the energy released by burning one gram of a fossil fuel. is yet known about the characteristics of high-temperature plasma. Again, many scientific problems (apart from the engineering ones) have not been solved.

And they are so numerous that in spite of the thousands of researchers active in the field, designing and using complicated machines and trying out every idea in theoretical plasma physics, the final breakthroughs have yet to be made.

Of the three essentials mentioned earlier (heating the fuel, confining it for a length of time, and converting the released energy), the two key problems are heating and confinement. How to solve them?

Two methods are now considered most

likely to yield results in a reasonable time. One is to confine the plasma magnetically; the other is to heat the fuel in a very brief time (less than three billionths of a second) so that the fuel particles have no choice but to fuse.

Both techniques are being tried in a number of ingenious ways.

Heating the fusion fuel is, however, comparatively easy; electric power does that. But containing the plasma has proved extremely difficult since it is a tricky, unstable material. But since it is electrically charged, its containment can be achieved magnetically in specially designed chambers. It is not that the heat of the plasma will vaporize the container;' the problem is that if the hot plasma gets close to the walls of the vessel, it will instantly cool. So magnetic containers are used. They are shaped like a vada or a doughnut, with the hot plasma endlessly going round inside the torus. In February this year, a world record was set when the magnetic container at the Massachusetts I.nstitute of Technology achieved a two-fold improvement in the ability to contain a plasma of a fair density at a temperature of over 10 million degrees.

But these machines have to be big; the bigger they are, the better their performance. Princeton University, one of the main investigators of magnetic containment, is spending $225 million to build the biggest of them all in the U.S. The second approach to the problem is called laser fusion (referring to the tool that ignites the fuel, the match that starts the fire) or pellet fusion (referring to the container of the fuel, a tiny globular pellet). Properly, it should be called inertial confinement. The fuel is not in motion or initially in plasma form but is heated in a fraction of a second to high-temperature plasma. The aim here is to heat the fuel by compression in less than a billionth of a second, triggering fusion far too quickly for the pellet to fly apart. The compressing and igniting process is achieved by focusing very powerful beams of laser light.

The laser beam is split into two or more beams by mirrors; these beams are focused to converge in a tremendous collision on the fuel pellet. The pressure builds up rapidly, resulting in an implosion, the exact opposite of explosion.

Eventually, at the center of the pellet there is a pressure of 100 billion atmospheres.

The compression produces enormous heat (100 million degrees) and it all happens in such a short time that

the positive ions of the fuel do not repel one another as they normally do, but fuse: A brilliant burst of fusion occurs [see photographs on page 41 and inside front cover]. The fuel is converted into helium, neutrons and energy.

Several laboratories in the United States are now engaged in laser fusion research.

It is an "accelerating program." At the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the three establishments operated by the U.S. Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), scientists last March succeeded for the first time in producing a fusion reaction using a gas laser system (carbon dioxide). This was a milestone and may cut by 10 to 20 years the time needed to design a fusion reactor that works.

Some 80 kilometers from San Francisco is the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, also operated by ERDA. Here Argus, the world's most powerful laser with an output of two trillion watts, generates a lO-million-watt pulse of invisible infrared light. An even more powerful one, called Shiva, is to be completed this year; Shiva will deliver 25 trillion watts of power, with 20 beams, precisely aligned, converging on the target pellet.

Its output can be upgraded to 200 or even 300 trillion watts. Another ERDA fusion operation is Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where instead of laser light they use electron beams.

Inertial confinement fusion includes the use of energetic electron or ion beamsfired at fuel pellets. Soviet scientists have reported some advance in this field, which has some advantages over lasers, but progress is slow and no date for "break .even" (energy produced being equal to energy used to compress and heat the pellets) can yet be set. The laser technique is still relatively young, but according to some estimates its rate of advance is doubling each year.

All this may seem easy in theory, but in practice numerous difficulties present themselves. Laser efficiency is generally low, often as low as one per cent. (That is, for the amount of power put in, we get only a hundredth of it in a laser beam.) There are efficient lasers, but they are not powerful enough.

So the problem is how to combine efficiencywith power.

The laser system needs high-precision reflecting and focusing mirrors; these are likely to be damaged when highpowered pulses are used over a period of time. The pellet itself requires many refinements. But the most serious draw-

Such, in outline, is the status of fusion back of laser fusion technology is that the neutrons produced will weaken and power; such are the prospects. The cost damage the fusion chambers. New element has been deliberately ignored in this article because of this writer's materials that can withstand this radiation conviction that, when the effort gathers damage (it is impractical and uneconomic to change the chambers every few days) momentum and current fears and prejuhave not been developed yet. All the same, dices melt like mountain snow in spring, laser fusion seems to hold more promise the priorities and emphases will radically change. The world is now spending about than the magnetic confinement technique. $1.5 billion a year on fusion research There is something uniquely approand development. But as an American priate in using light to initiate controlled scientist puts it, the United States alone thermonuclear fusion. The sun produces light by fusion; we are trying to upend . will need to spend $15 billion between that process, by using a special form of now and 1990 to get to the stage of a electrically created light to imitate, on a laboratory fusion reactor. The pace must profoundly minuscule scale, what the accelerate. And with some luck and careful design, 50 years from now fusion power will flow into every home.

Man first used fire about a half million 'We are star children, born of years ago-and found it good. Fossil the universe as part of it, and fuels came to be used only about 800 we shall be powered by the years ago-they are not so good and process by which the stars and are fast getting exhausted. Today he the sun shine upon the world.' has another fire, a Promethean fire, almost within his grasp. Fusion energy represents a single and possibly unique solution to nearly all his problems: Feeding sun does all the time-until, in God's and housing a burgeoning population, good time, our star flickers out.

Not that there are no pessimists or cleaning up the environment, eliminating critics. (They will always be with us.) mineral shortages. You name it, fusion They say: "Lab fusion maybe, but fusion power has it.

Think of just 50 years from today. reactors? That's another story." References to clean, safe abundant power Surely that can't be too difficult. What's are all generalizations (they insist); only a half century in the life-span of a whole potentially true, but not possible by species? In that time, by 2030, the fundapresent development techniques. Their mental problem of energy, which has other points of criticism are that large bedevilled man ever since he climbed quantities of radioactive substances and out of the cave into the luminous freedom wastes will' be produced; the cost of of society, will have been forever solved.

Thus, an overwhelming source of worry attaining 10 megawatts output by 1990 will be $10 billion; fusion power is will be removed¡ from the world. Libernot cheaper than solar electric modules, ated at last from greed and insecurity, man will have the opportunity to develop which are themselves very costly.

In India fusion research is a low- to his fullest, to a higher consciousness budget enterprise and has been.essentially and a more meaningful life. In Shelley's theoretical and aimed at identifying prob- words: lem areas-a sort of plasma diagnostics. ... man At the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, Equal, un classed, tribeless, and Bombay, a pulsed electron beam generator nationless, is in the final stages of assembly and Exempt from awe, worship, degree, high-powered neodymium glass and the kinK carbon dioxide lasers are under developOver himself; just, gentle, wise ... ment. The work at the Physical Research A beautiful dream. But only a dream?

Laboratory, Ahmedabad, is chiefly on low-temperature, low-density collisional Would it be foolish to dream? Don't plasmas. Early this year this lab was dreams father reality? We are star children, born of the universe as part the venue of an Indo-American workshop on plasma physics, co-sponsored by the of it, and we shall be powered by the process by which the stars and the sun, U.S. National Science Foundation.

0 our sustainer, shine upon the world.

Investigations are also being conducted at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, Calcutta, the Indian Institute of Science, About the Author: M. V. Mathew is an assistant Bangalore, and Institutes of Technology editor of the Times of India at Bombay. He specializes in scientific subjects. in Madras, Delhi and Bombay.

ON THE liGHTER SIDE

\f

~U,1m DtlA1

"I changed my mind. Don'tfind him."

Drawing by Chon Day, Ladies Home Journal.

0U1' 10 L\IIIc~. ~\(~fl6.

ll{l\.t~'S 00./ OIJ~ A1JO

~6lG"lfIP \ S 6tJ Silt'.

A SPEECH TO SOUTH AFRICAN BUSINESSMEN

'-Your challenge is to draw your • • • majOrIty Into your system' The U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, was recently invited to address a meeting of 200 businessmen in Johannesburg, South Africa. He warned his audience that 'the rest of the world is not standing still and is not going to wait for you.' He told them: 'Your challenge is to draw your majority into your system.' The text of the speech follows.

As soon as I received your invitation to meet with you here today, I started thinking through what I could say that would have the most meaning. You've listened to plenty of lectures from foreigners. You knew when you invited me how strongly I feel about some of the subjects that are of such deep concern to you as well. As I stand here, I could not be more aware of the striking differences in our backgrounds.

I am an American. This is your country.

Yet I hope I can convince you that I have some honest understanding of what is going on here, of the choices that you are facing. With all the obvious differences of time and place, I have myself lived through some experiences that I believe could have some meaning for you.

Most of all I want you to know that I am weighing my words carefully, out of genuine concern for all the people of this dynamic and promising land at the southern arc of the African continent.

It is not my business to tell you how to face your future. But it is our business, as Americans, to plan our own future.

And it's only fair to let you know where we stand, for the benefit of all our peoples.

This is an issue we arefacing constantly at the United Nations and in various di'plomatic contacts around the world.

It is an issue that I know consumes much of

the waking energies and working hours of many people in this room.

Maybe the most useful contribution I can make to your thinking on this subject would be to draw from my own experience of the .working partnership which many of us in the American civil rights movement developed with the business community.

Mter you hear me oUt, then you can decide how much of what I say is relevant

to your situation. The decisions are yours, but I believe that we can work together if you want us to.

My argument boils down to my conviction that the free market system can be the greatest force for constructive change now operating anywhere in the world.

The most successful transformations of society can come, not from some fiery ideologist's doctrine nor even from force of arms, but rather from advancing technology and organization for the production of goods and services to all people of this planet.

Constructive transformation of a society can come by this method only if businessmen decide that it should. There is nothing automatic or inevitable about it.

An increase in wealth, by itself, doesn't do the job; wealth that is inefficiently created and unjustly distributed through a system built on denial will not produce a cohesive, productive society.

The partnership that some of the civil rights activists and businessmen built up in the American South proved an essential point about the free market system: When goods are shared with those at the bottom of the system, it doesn't mean they have to be taken away from those at the top.

Reducing the poverty of the poorest does not have to reduce the wealth of

the richest> In fact, exactly the opposite can happen.

As long as the 11 million blacks of the American South were held down, the South itself was held down. The entry of this vast and ready population into the economic system transformed the South from a depressed area to the most 'dynamic and rapidly growing region of the United States; that's what it is today: By and large, blacks in the United States know they have a solid stake in the system. They don't want to overthrow anything. Alongside their white neighbors, they are working, building, and enjoying a new pluralistic society. I'm the last one to say we've solved all our problems, but we're working to solve them in an expanding framework of social justice and equal opportunity.

This change came about in less than a generatio¡n. We could talk for hours some time-and I would love to do it-about exactly what we did each step along the way, our civil rights leaders and the businessmen in each community.

In Atlanta, it was five local panks that took the illitiative. They knew that racial violence would be bad for them, . for their business, for the community in which they had invested so much.

But other southern cities weren't so lucky. In Birmingham, for instance, I remember there was little local interest in dealing with racial problems until after violence had broken out. And even then, the city and state governments were no help-they seemed actively hostile to what a small group of businessmen decided to do.

I remember a little meeting we had with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the president of one of the big corporations that had a stake, in the community. Through their contacts, they lined up about 100 businesses of all sizes around town, who gradually introduced a deliberate program of phased desegregation in employment and business operation. This was an example of how the business community responded to the demands of the movement.

Everything was thought out carefully

Left: Andrew Young with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. at a news conference in Chicago •. in January 1966. Young was closely associated with Dr. King's civil rights movement [see "The Carter Cabinet, May 1977 SPAN] whichhe discusses in the speech reprinted on these pages.

ahead of time, everything happened in sequence, nothing was sudden. In the course of just one year, the city had started turning around. Any economist could see why. With an increase in black employment, there came an expanded consumer market. There were more customers, and so even more people were hired to produce more goods.

This is just what happened; this is what I lived through during those years, repeated in community after community, over and over again.

Now I've heard people argue many times that the situation you face here in South Africa is not in any way com. parable to what we faced in the American South. I understand all the obvious differences. But I'd like to see a little more imagination in recognizing some equally obvious parallels.

It wa~ a step in the right direction a few months ago, for example, when the Cape Town Chamber of Commerce called on its members for a "no discrimination pledge" in employment practices. There are a lot of us watching to see how that campaign develops.

It seems to me that the market potential of the blacks in this country is far greater in relative terms than it was in the United States.

You don't need me to tell you about the trends in your own economy, the

'I'm'the last one to say we've solved all our problems, but we're working to solve them in an expanding .framework of social justice and equal opportunity.'

fact that last year, for the first time since World War II, South Africa went into an actual recession. You know the way some American companies are starting to introduce more progressive employment standards in their South African operations and improve the living conditions of their black employees.

But you can't expect foreign investors to do the job for you.

Your economic planners talk about the booming market for your products across the southern half of this continent.

If you're ever going to get into such a position, you will need more than decent political relationships. You will need all the productive and sales capacity of your black population in order to reach those markets.

Now let me really get down to the basics. As at least this outsider sees it,

SPAN is available at leading newsstands at Rs. 2.50 per copy, An annual subscrip~iof.l at Rs. 18 for 12 issues saves 40 per cent and conveniently brings SPAN to your home or office.

you have no real alternative-except to go this route of change through the market place. South Africa has impressive military defense systems but is defending itself against the wrong threat.

The problems bearing down on you are not military, but economic: shrinking markets, shrinking investments, a large unused productive capacity within your own society.

Add to this the psychological element of fear-and what a climate of fear does to any potential investor-and you see the shape of a real threat. You should know one thing for sure: No foreign government is going to want to defend investment by its nationals in a harsh social and political climate.

We had a slogan in the civil rights movement that we used when some of our workers got a little too excited and wanted to go out and cause trouble that would backfire on us. I've been using it in my talks all around this continent, in arguing for nonviolent means to bring about social and political change. And I should use it with you here, too.

The slogan is: "Don't get mad-Get smart." South Africa's biggest enemy is not some external military threat or even subversion from within. What you should be worried about above everything else is the passage of time.

And I can argue this in strictly

I-

SPAN

Paid subscribers

please note:

If you change your address. you should notify SPAN MagaZine Subscription Service at the Bombay address given at left.

business and economic terms. (You'll notice I haven't been making any of the moral or humanitarian arguments against apartheid with you today. Ifs not because I don't believe in the arguments for human rights-the rights of white people and black people; and it's not because I don't think that you, too, resent injustices in a discriminatory social system.

It's just that I know you have heard all those arguments dozens of times, whenever you've gone abroad.)

The reason I say that time is your biggest enemy is that the rest of the world is not standing still and is not going to wait for you. New nations, new societies, new economies are growing, some of them on this continent. The markets farther north, which could be your markets, will be taken over by others.

There are some lucrative investment opportunities up there, and capital that once might have come to you is going to them.

In plain and simple terms, this country is in danger of being left behind.

I have heard the argument that South Africa needs time before it can come to grips with the basic problem of full political, economic and social participation for all its citizens. The point is that such an attitude is no kindness to South Africa or to its people. The longer it resists the social, political and

'I want you all to know that whenever you're ready to start along this course of fundamental and peaceful change, I'm ready to give you all the help 1 can. 1 know my country is, as well.'

economic evolution that is still possible in this rich land, the farther behind it will find itself as the rest of the world moves forward.

So this is the opportunity for change through the market place-change that is nonviolent, productive and humane.

This is what our system can do-better than any other so-called revolutionary system going.

The Soviet Union itself looks to the market systems of the West for productive capacity, the variety and quality of goods and services that their communist system has never been able to provide.

The itmer strength of the market system is that it has to bear people in mind if it is to succeed for very long. It produces things for people, it produces the things people want. This is what it is all about.

And this is what the aspirations of blacks across this continent are all abouta standard and quality of life that is better than what their parents knew,. better not only for being more comfortable, but better also for being more fair.

No market system can function at peak efficiency if it has to differentiate between first and second class buyers, first and second class citizens.

The opportunity for South Africa, as it was for the American South, is to expand and improve an economic order, to draw into the system an entire population that otherwise would grow disaffected and turn to some other system.

Your challenge is to draw your majorityinto your system. There is no reason why the kind of economic changes that I've been describing could not build a working political majority in which people of all races share an interest, have their own stake, for their own well-being, and the prosperity of the whole country. We would all benefit.

I'm grateful for your invitation to be here today, and for this chance to talk with you, to tell you exactly what is on my mind. And I want you all to know that whenever you're ready to start along this course of fundamental and peaceful change, I'm ready to give you all the help I can. I know my country is. as well.

0

CHANGE OF ADDRESS FORM TO: SPAN Magazine Subscription Service Sundeep 4, New Marine Lines Bombay 400 020

SPAN

When notifying SPAN about a change in your address, please attach the address label from a recent SPAN envelope in addition to filling out the form below.

Since four to six weeks are needed to process a change of address. please let us know about any change promptly.

NEW ADDRESS Name Address City

'Pin Code

LETIERS)

Dist.

_ State

I enclose payment of Rs. 18 in favor of SPAN Magazine Cheque 0

BLOCK

_

P.O ..

o

(USE

_

Bank Draft 0

Postal Order 0

_ by "A/C Payee"

Money Order (receipt enclosed).

MAil

TO:

Circulation Manager. SPAN Magazine 24 Kasturba Gandhi Marg New Delhi 110001

o

LD

In less than six years after it opened, Florida's Disney World has become America's top tourist attraction. It draws more than 13 million visitors each year, outdoing its older counterpart in California, Disneyland, by nearly three million. For Americans touring their own countryas well as for foreign visitors-no tourist site is as popular as Disney World. In the summer it offers some of the world's biggest displays of fireworks on the Fourth of July (see back cover), and its space ride (above) is the ultimate in science fiction thrills. But in spite of their continual addition of new attractions, the two amusement parks retain the classic features that have endeared them to so many-Mickey Mouse (right) still walks the streets and talks to delighted children of all nations.