4The Dally Reflector, Greenville, N.C.Thunday, December 16,178

Truly, A 'Curious Institution'

THEYji^Eu^^ Pursue

A college professor, who was an elector from Wisconsin, called the Electoral College a very curious institution.

And indeed It is. Perhaps suited to the times when it was established by the nations founders, it now seems to stand in the way of citizens choosing their presidency.

The Electoral College should be looked at by Congress. At the same time the entire voting process should be studied with an eye toward efficiency.

With the electronic equipment available now, there is no reason why votes could not be cast all over the nation with a push of a button or by a coded

card.

And with computers available it is technically possible for votes to be fed from voting booths into a central computer so that results could be tabulated instantly.

Of course there would have to be safeguards against fraud, but that possibility has always existed, even with paper ballots.

There is a pq)ular demand for getting voting results early in these days of instant communications. Equipment is available to do this but a uniform voting system will have to be devised before it is possible.

New Bonding Authority A Proper Move

Pitt County has established a bonding authority to issue bonds for financing industrial facilities and pollution control systems.

The bonds could be issued for private industry or public utilities. William F. Cox was named chair-

THIS AFTERNOON

man of the authority.

This is a proper move for our county now that such bonds are legal in our county. Hopefully this authority will be helpful in bringing desirable industry to our county.

No Big Change For Talley

ByBfLLNOBUTT

RALEIGH-How wUl it be eaving the cloistered confines of academe for the real world of hardball politics?

Not so very different, confesses Dr. Banks Cooper Talley, Jr., who will become executive assistant to the governor next Jan. 8.

I look forward to its being Interesting and exciting, says the vice chancellor for student affairs at N.C. State University.

Im not entirely a stranger to politics. We have a little of that on university campuses, and I have had some little introduction to hassles in the university world.

We have our different constituencies, you know. Each demanding different things: the faculty, alumni, studoits...

Similar Job

Working amidst the pressures and demands of various groups for various attentions in the governors office may be a lot like his duties at the university.

THE INSIDE REPORT

Talley feels. Or at least, he says, I was gonna say that but didnt because Ive never been in government.

Exactly what will his new duties be? Gov.-elect James B. Hunt, Jr. and Talley explain them in somewhat different termsnot far apart, but far enough to leave room for discussion. Does this mean he and Hunt can be expected to disagree professionally and cordiallyfrom time to time, or does he expect Hunt to want to hear only that which pleases him?

He and I have talked a great deal about that ... he expects people to give advice and counsel.

Discussion will go on about various directions which things may take-in house.

Then, if we are effective as team players, it means moving in the direction decided upon even though we had taken an opposite approach. If, however, it is a matter of principle, one

would have to get out.

Hunt labels Talley my strong right arm who will free him from administrative duties and will meet frequently with department heads and is going to be the man I expect them (department heads) to see first. Does that make Talley the gatekeeper, the H.R. Haldeman or Gene Anderson of the Jim Hunt administration? Far from it. Hunt protests.

His is a new post in which he will handle administrative duties and offer counsel and advice. Hunt says. ^ AnOpcanness The key to the post is in Talleys personality and nature, the governor-elect insists. Talley is a quiet-spoken, graying man of 50 years. He talks ^n low-key drawl and smiles readily.

A native of Bennettsville, S.C., he has degrees from Chapel Hill in history, masters' in education and doctor of philosophy. He has been at N.C. State since 1951,

and is married to the former Louise Wooten of Goldsboro.

So what does all this mean to the job Talley will be doing as Hunts right arm?

I cant overemphasize this matter of trust which we have talked about, Hunt says. It is a real thing . . . its something you have to feel and know, and with Dr. Talley, Its there... openness and trust.

Not all the roles and duties and relationships have been defined, tbou^ Hunt and Talley have talked long about them. But both agree it will workout.

Of the governor-elect, Talley says, I agree with his goals and politics, and I think we can work well together.

Talley stayed out of the political campaign, tending his duties at the university. It is surprising to some that he won such a choice plum from the young man who was once a student on the campus where he served as director of student activities and dean of student affairs.

A Divorce, Scottish Style

By ROWLAND EVANS and ROBERT NOVAK

LONDON - As if non-stop economic crises were not enough, the ominous spectre of Scottish nationalism now actually threatens the breakup of the United Kingdom accompanied by Englands loss of major revenues from Scotlands oil.

Scotlands separatist movement could ultimately deprive the central government of much of the rich new Scottish oil production it has been counting on. One leader in the governing Labor Party, asked whether Scottish separatism worried him, told us; Worry? It terrifies me.

Although that may be exaggerated, a keg of political dynamite clearly lies underneath Scotland: the nationalism that, in varying forms, is one of the major, world-wide political movements of this generation.

Scotlands 5.25 million British subjects today would undoubtedly vote against full independence from Englands 50 million by a

thumping majority. But acrimonious debate now starting in Parliament over the governments devolution bill (giving Scotland a little regional autonomy) is certain to fire tempers, revive long-dormant emotional issues and probably stimulate movement toward independence.

This isnt a devolution movement in Scotland, Margot McDonald, a leading Scottish Nationalist, told us last week. This is an independence movement, a movement toward full sovereignty. Mrs. McDonald, who looks more like a pretty young housewife than a political radical, exudes confidence and passion in what has become her lifes cause.

To such nationalists, the Labor governments offer of devolution ranks just above a bad joke; an elected Scottish assembly with highly circumscribed regional powers to allocate funds for health, housing and undergraduate education. But the money is to be voted

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by the British Parliament and the British central government retains tight veto power over the assembly.

^ But to many in the English-dominated Parliament, the governments offer of even this highly limited devolution is too much, opening the door to escalating demands from the nationalists. Why,then, did Prime Minister James Callaghans government decide to open the door at all?

One basic reason is curiously parochial; fear within the Labor Party that its vital Scottish wing would defect or lose out to the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP). Out of 70-plus seats in Parliament from Scottish constituencies, the Labor Party has 40, the Conservatives 21 and the Nationalists a mere 11 (even though the Nationalists claim almost one-third of the Scottish vote in the last general election).

To hold the line against any form of devolution was to risk losing these Labor constituencies to the Nationalists at a time the Labor Party could not afford the loss of any seats. Consequently, one Labor cabinet member told us, we had to do something. He added ominously that he hoped this first stage of devolution would also be the last stage and not another Danegeld the piecemeal loss of England to the Danes 1,500 years ago.

The Nationalists have a long-standing complaint that the British government has shortchanged Scotland, in Mrs. McDonalds words, as a fourth-rate region economically. Now, with oil income rising toward several billion dollars a year and most of it closer to Scotland than England, the Nationalists are ready to exchange their bitterness toward London for the lions share of that oil wealth. We would get at least three billion pounds ($5 billion) in oil revenues each

year, Mrs. McDonald told us. Of course, England would get some too. Nationalist bitterness runs deep, with claims that the British governments parsimony denied Glasgows onceirich shipbuilding industry investment capital for a revival based on mediumsized general purpose ships, with Japan now having captured the field.

The English totally disagree. Without English revenues, government leaders claim, backward Scotland would be far more impoverished than it is.

So far, the debate has been conducted like a polite revolution, to quote a shadow cabinet minister of the Conservative Party (which is badly split by devolution).

But it is not likely to stay Cimtinuedonpage 5)

Strength For Today

BEYOND THE FIVE SENSES We go out on a clear, starry night and look up at the heavens. What we see is exactly what our primitve forebears saw fifteen thousand years ago. But something we cannot see makes it quite different. 'The air waves are alive with broadcast messages from radio, television, and satellite stations.

This example of our limitations shows thoroughly inadequate our five senses are to comprehend the whole of the universe. And yet the skeptic

insists that there is no reality beyond what we can see, hear touch, taste and smell. How pretentious claims of this sort are. Actually, modern science has revealed so many wonders that man need not be overwhelmed with doubt as he reads in the Bible about the great spiritual powers in which man is to put his trust.

Science should strengthen rather than destroy religious faith. If what we apprehend with our limited senses is so ous, how great may be the things which a good God has laid up for those who trust Him.

by Elisha Douglass

By JAMES J^KILPATRICK

A Great Pregnancy Flap

The Supreme Court continues to catch flak from cartoonists, editorial writers, and womens organizations for its opinion of December 7 in the pregnancy case. The barrage, in my own view, is wholly unmerited. The Court in this case did exactly what it should have done.

The facts are not significantly in dispute. The General Electric Company provides for its employees a Weekly Sickness and Accident Insurance Plan. Tlie plan provides benefits equal to 60 percent of average weekly earnings to employees who become totally disabled as a result of nonoccupational sickness or accident. The plan specifically excludes benefits by reason of pregnancy.

A group of women em

ployees at the companys plant in Salem, Va., filed a class-action suit against the company. They contended that the pregnancy exclusion clause violates Title VII of the CivU Rights Act of 1964. The act forbids an employer to discriminate against any individual because of the individuals sex.

In its 6-3 decision, the Court found jno violation of the 1964 act. Speaking through Mr. Justice Rehnquist, the majority concluded that General Electrics plan is nothing more than an insurance package which covers some risks but ex-cludes others. Impermissible discrimination does not result, the Court added, simply because an employers disability benefits plan is less than all in-

Other Editors Say Bellow's Advice

(Greensboro Daily News)

In 1949, William Faulkner asserted in his famous Nobel lecture that modem man would prevail over the forces of darkness. In 1976, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow is not so sure. But in his Nobel lecture at the Swedish Academy last weekend. Bellow did offer some thought-provoking suggestions about the state of the bedraggled art of living today.

You hear Bellows theme cropping up in a number of different contexts these days. In a nutshell, it is that people especially writers and intellectuals are trapped in a complex web of preconceived notions, outmoded ideas and academic encumbrances. There is a desire. Bellow said, to return to what is simple and tme, to toss out old systems and useless intellectual baggage.

Referring to recent books based on the thought of such leading lights as Marx, D.H. Lawrence and Bauidelaire, Bellow noted, How weary we are of them. How poorly they represent us. The pictures they offer no more resemble us than w* resemble the

reconstructed reptiles and the monsters in a museum of paleontology. We are much more limber, versatile, better articulated, there is much more to us, we all feel it.

What Bellow appears to be arguing for, if news accounts of his speech are accurate, is a return to the originality and creativity which have been at th^ base of all significant flowerings of civilization. But this creativity is not to be found in much of what passes for intellectualism today arid parlors of thought and artistic expression cut off from the broad public which, in times past, has infused art with vitality and meaning.

Fortunately, Bellow holds out more hope for the better instincts of people than for the tired cliches of the parlor. The notion of returning to our roots, of questioning our assumptions, of looking beneath the wreckage of cherished systems, is a healthy one. And Bellows cautious optimism is a pleasing antidote to the prophesies of doom we are so accustomed to hearing and too often unblinkingly accept as gospel in this anxious, troubled world.

elusive.

For that level-headed, common-sense decision, the Court is being denounced as if it were the institutional embodiment of male chauvinist swinishness. One cartoonist equates the plaintiffs with a pregnant Statue of Liberty. The Washington Post complains that the decision is out of touch with the reality of modem life. The womens liberationists ^are howling their heads off; they seem to have forgotten a dozen cases over the past five years that have been decided wholly in their favor.

This was not a case of constitutional law. The question before the Court was entirely a question of statutory construction. In deciding such issues, the Court looks to the language of the statute itself, to administrative Interpretations of the statute, and to the legislative history.

In thisase, the language of the statute was not much help, for the statute does not define to discriminate. The record of administrative interpretation was of little help either. The Equal Emproyment Opportunities Commission had declared flatly, soon after the act was adopted, that a pregnancy exclusion clause was not a violation of the law; six years later the EEOC changed its mind, but its guidelines, in any event, have no force of law. As for legislative history, it appeared that Senator Hubert Humphrey, as floor manager of the bill, had sought to make it unmistakably clear that differences of treatment in industrial benefit plans would not constitute discrimination by reason of sex.

Given this record, what was the Court to do? Critics of the decision appear to want the Court to sit as a kind of super-legislature, enacting its own statutory law. But this is not the function of the Court. In any rational view, the Courts duty is to tend to its own knitting, and to leave legislation to Congress.

Mr. Justice Brennan,

Continued on page 5

Quaker Studies

By DAVD) ESPO Associated Press Writo*

GOLDEN, Colo. (AP) - T1 federal government, spendh more than $10 million this ya to see whether scientists ci predict earthquakes, is 1 vesting $5,000 more to chei the claims of housewives m psychics who claim they i ready have the ability.

'There have always b people in history who mai bold predictions, said Rogi Hunter, the geophysicist wi the Natimial Earthquake Info mation Service in charge of tl program. Were keeping file, and if someone makes hit we can say, yeah, sure, th time, but look at the mistakes

The program, launched foi months ago, frankly is designi to reassure the public abo wild claims such as the pei ennial one that a killer quak might plunge California into th sea. But the job of Hunter computer also is to see whethe there actually are people wh can do what scientists have ye to learn.

Hunter, who works only par time on the project, receives in formation from scientists ain people who think theyre scien tists to people who send m their dreams. He stores th data in his computer, the checks the claims against ac tual earthquakes.

Most of what he receives uninteresting to an agency tha would like to know more abou when and where earthquake will happen, Hunter said.

Some predictions, corree down to the nearest hour, proved statistically invalid be cause of other flaws:

A forecaster predicts a quake in an area where chance also would dictate one would occur.

He foresees a tremor in a geographical area so large that it is meaningless.

He fails to pinpoint the time or the magnitude of the shock that eventually occurs.

(Continued on page 5)

40 Years Ago Today

December 16,1936

A United States proposal for consultation by thte American republics If American peace is menaced from within or without won final approval today from the full inter-American peace conference, along with eight other F^jects.

The ^erican plan, (mlir slightly modified as it passed throu^ a committee, had the unanimous sponsorship of all 21 American republics. It was described by United Stat Secretary of State Cordell Hull as epochal.

It reiterated a similar recommendation of the Montevideo Pan-American conference of 1933.

Negotiations for a net commercial accord between the United States and Italy have been begun to relace the expiring treaty of 1871, iC was announced officially today.

The announcement also disclosed the denunciation t< day of the existing pact iaep. fectiveinoneyear.

Informed sources said the negotiations centered on new commercial treaty, not on a separate trade agree-, ment which will come, up; later. ^

Barbara Mathew

AAici(dle Managers In A Bind'

ByJOHNCUNNlFF AP Business Analyst

NEW YORK (AP) -Thousands of corporate middle managers are becoming caught in a career bind that threatens to end their upward mobility and terminate their dreams of the comfortable, affliKnt life.

Most of the victims are in the middle years between ages 40 and 50. Having advanced steadily in their jobs, they have long assumed that eventually a top management position, with more money and a comfortable retirement, was theirs.

'Those aspirations now are being threatened. With the ranks of middle management swollen by past hiring excesses and the slowdown of business expansion, many of them find they have to win their jobs over and over again.

"Theres no way for them to relax, said Eugene

Jeiinings, professor, author, student of routes to executive success and confidential adviser to the heads of large corporations. Theyre squeezed from the top and the bottom,

The pressure from the t<v is by upper management that seeks to cut costs and raise productivity. From the bottom they are being pushed by younger managers seeking to pull themselves i?) the ladder.

"They find themselves too young to retire and, in their own minds, too old to start over again. And they find themselves too high up the ladder to incur risk, and too low to dictate to the corporation, said Jennings.

The professor, who maintains listening posts in many of the largest corporations, rqwrts that few major companies arent oversupplied with these

middle managers.

He employs alliteration to describe the phenomenon; Its the middle-middle muddle. Managers in a mess of trouble.

Some companies are offering early retirement to encourage them to leave. However, some of them dont accept the opportunity and have to be pushed. Others are phased into positions known to be deadends.

Jennings, who is trained in psychology as well as in business administration, notes that the common complaint of such men is that they are misunderstood by the company and unappreciated by family and frloids.

Having been upwardly mobile since their earilest days in business, manyof them cannot explain to their families why th^ are not

continuing to advance into positions and moneyranges they had all but taken for granted.

Their progress is thwarted by many factors that coincide, including the slow, economic growth that has plugged ig> the corporate arteries above them, and confusion and uncertainty about the future of the eoMiomy.

Added to this is the realization by top management that a lot upward mobility was furious. Men were pushed along without having to demonstrate their competence. Now that they must, some cannot cut it, says Jennings.

'The problem is vexing to both employe and co^ poration, says Jennings, who teaches at Michigan State University. Neither is h^y with the situatioD.