The Week

■ Dr. Seymour Halleck, head of the University of Wisconsin Student Psychiatric Services, said recently that the number of students seeking help with their heads had more than tripled since President Nixon’s hope-stifling Vietnam speech (Nov. 3), and that, well now, there wasn’t exactly any hard evidence to link the wave of student despair to the speech; well, it was “not a scientific observation,” but he and his colleagues had all pretty well come to the same conclusion, you know, that the speech “seemed like the same old thing and held out very little hope,” and so the students, well, a whole younger generation actually, were depressed and who are living on the edge of despair, couldn’t help being full of despair, and

■ The Nixon Administration, says Labor Secretary Schultz, is about to propose the first major changes in labor laws in twenty years. The White House would like to junk the creaky Railway Labor Act and put railroads and airlines under Taft-Hartley—on the grounds that the mechanism of the earlier law is so complex that negotiators don’t get down to hard bargaining until the eleventh hour. As to other points: Nixon contemplates no beefing-up of his antistrike powers under Taft-Hartley, just a little tinkering with the “fact-finding” process, and no legislation to deal with the spreading plague of strikes by state and municipal employees that shut down essential public services. Nobody in Washington takes the Nixon proposals very seriously anyway. The labor lobby, having just disposed of a Supreme Court nominee it didn’t like, should have no trouble in maintaining the paralyzing status quo.

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■ Dr. Seymour Halleck, head of the University of Wisconsin Student Psychiatric Services, said recently that the number of students seeking help with their heads had more than tripled since President Nixon’s hope-stifling Vietnam speech (Nov. 3), and that, well now, there wasn’t exactly any hard evidence to link the wave of student despair to the speech; well, it was “not a scientific observation,” but he and his colleagues had all pretty well come to the same conclusion, you know, that the speech “seemed like the same old thing and held out very little hope,” and so the students, well, a whole younger generation actually, were depressed and who are living on the edge of despair, couldn’t help being full of despair, and

■ The Nixon Administration, says Labor Secretary Schultz, is about to propose the first major changes in labor laws in twenty years. The White House would like to junk the creaky Railway Labor Act and put railroads and airlines under Taft-Hartley—on the grounds that the mechanism of the earlier law is so complex that negotiators don’t get down to hard bargaining until the eleventh hour. As to other points: Nixon contemplates no beefing-up of his antistrike powers under Taft-Hartley, just a little tinkering with the “fact-finding” process, and no legislation to deal with the spreading plague of strikes by state and municipal employees that shut down essential public services. Nobody in Washington takes the Nixon proposals very seriously anyway. The labor lobby, having just disposed of a Supreme Court nominee it didn’t like, should have no trouble in maintaining the paralyzing status quo.