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Thursday, April 22, 1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
Review drop policy
When the College Assembly of the College of Liberal Arts and Science voted to return the proposed withdrawal policy to the Undergraduate Policies and Procedures Committee, it provided a much needed delay.
IT KEPT THE issue from being pushed through before some very important factors could be discussed and re-evaluated. One factor is the question of what the proposal would have been asking of a student. Under it, a student wouldn't have been allowed to withdraw from a class after the first four weeks of school. Another reason the dean of the College or his designated representative. Permission would be granted only for exceptional, non-academic circumstances.
What this would have meant was that a student would have had to decide right after the first exam, or in several cases, before any grade evaluation was made at all, whether he thought he could successfully complete the course. This is often an extremely difficult decision to make, especially in classes where one test score may be dropped at the end of the course.
IT HAS BEEN AN argued that college students should be mature enough to accept the responsibility of deciding to drop early or seeing the class through to the end. What should be considered is that students aren't always given a fair chance to know what is expected of them. Instructors aren't required to set down an explicit set of guidelines before the end of the first four weeks. Some courses drift along for several weeks before a student is given any concrete idea of the amount of time that he must spend on the class.
Although some will try to refute it, grades are probably the No. 1 reason students withdraw from classes. And it isn't just to keep from getting a D or an
F. In some cases it's to keep a C off the transcript.
SOME PEOPLE have tried to minimize the value of grades. The truth is that graduate schools have little more than grades on which to evaluate an applicant. For a person whose future rests upon graduate school, it is difficult to believe that it is knowledge acquired that is important and not the grades.
Also, although it can't be proved that the present withdrawal system has inflated grades, the committee must consider what would occur if the system is changed. Would grades deflate while grades from other schools continued to inflate? There is some worry that grade inflation might make grades meaningless. KU's KU-100 will decrease while other schools' grades continue to inflate or remain the same, it could hinder some students' chances for acceptance into graduate schools.
THE PRESENT withdrawal system is very lenient and it has allowed an annual average of 11,000 drops within the College after the fourth week of classes. This large number of drops leads to a large amount of wasted instructors' time and other resources. But the committee must consider the overall effect of a stringent change. The problems that would be placed upon the student can't be completely overlooked in the name of expediency.
There has been a great amount of clamor for some changes in the present system and some tightening of the policy is probably needed. Maybe by sending the proposal back to the committee some other alternatives can be considered. And among them one that will satisfy the needs of students while meeting requirements of a high quality academic institution.
By Marne Rindom Contributing Writer
It was late April and the campus was bursting in beauty. Flowers bloomed, birds sang and huge dogs playfully chased students through hedges. Who knew was deliriously happy.
Dorm dweller's dilemma
Everyone, that is, except Malcolm Snyder. Malcolm had no right to be happy. It was late apartment-hunting. It was still apartment-hunting.
MALCOLM HAD vowed that he was but a freshman that he would not spend his entire college in the hall. Not that the residence hall was awful. After all, it did have fairly clean toilets and offered a wide variety of possible varieties, just that he hated it there.
He had only lived there four weeks when he swore he would leave. He lit a small candle and, as its ghostly light illuminated his roommate's collections of Wayne Newton albums and
hand-painted ties, he listened to the screaming of the water-fighters in the hallway and whispered to himself, "I can't take it anymore—I just can't take it anymore." 783 times.
wasn't able to find a summer job and thus wasn't able to earn any money and found himself in the junior year in the residence hall.
Now it was late in Malcolm's
By Jim Bates Contributing Writer
BUT WHEN that spring rolled around, Malcolm's apartment-hunting comrades dropped out on him and he spent too much money on records. When everything was said and done he himself spending his sophomore year in the residence hall.
And when the spring of his sophomore year arrived he
junior year. It was his last chance and the apartment-hunting season was dying fast.
IT WAS A little after midnight on the last day of April. Malcolm was laying disconcertedly in his dormitory bed, wallowing in self-pity. He was just about ready to give up.
Suddenly, the room was filled with a blinding light and a
WASHINGTON - The abo-
bition question has tallied off for
several weeks now. That can't
be taken away without more
numerous and passionate to let
Abortion question beyond laws
women helping us would take care of suffocating the child and burying it in the fields. From their eyes we can see our men on the tractors would
the matter die, and the candidates are too exposed to popular emotions to tell them that we must live with abortion, that nothing can be done about it.
By Nicholas von Hoffman (C) King Features
MAKING IT illegal makes it expensive and dangerous; it won't stop it, probably won't even slow it down. Since abortion has become rather generally accessible, we're not asking for permission who want the right but live in a society that denies it to them.
"Gosh, goddess," Malcolm gasped, "This is beautiful!"
about how they tried to avoid it and what it did to their marriages to their good most husbands is indestructible.
Cautiously, Malcolm took her hand. As he did, the grey-green walls of the dome room seemed to drift away into mist. Soon he stood in a beautiful room of paneled walnut.
radiant figure in rather gaudy robes flattened down at him from the general vicinity of the ceiling. The figure, a woman who looked remarkably like an elephant,North, settled down at the foot of the bed, smiling softly at the astonished Malcolm.
"I would always tell my husband, 'Be careful,' or better, I would get hall-disease. ... I'm going to go to doctors. ... It means going up and down the hall for hours during the night, waiting for my child to fall asleep, to prevent from getting me pregnant."
WITHOUT ASSERTING that infanticide was or is a common practice among the farm women of northern Italy, without even asserting it even happened once, that such a story is even told at a meeting of a group of women tells how hard it can be. Not that these women courted pregnant. The testimony of the wives at the Emilia-Romagna meeting
find one of the small skeletons,
and then we would look astonished. "It must be
the bones." But no, it was our children. "It
was our children."
"TSK, TSK," she said. "Don't be afraid. I will not harm you. I'm Mildred, the goddess of wishing. I've come to help you."
EMILIA-ROMAGNA is a EMILIA-ROMAGNA is a section of Italy which has been heavily Communist for a long time, but from the quotes of the authors might be well have been practicing, bourgeois Catholics.
"Don't be afraid," she said gently. "Just take my hand and I shall show you the way."
A woman is recorded as saying, "I was a child and I would pretend to be a睡人, but I would hear those scenes and same because that beat my mother because she wouldn't make love and he would yell, 'What else did I marry you for? You're mine!' Another adds, 'You want what love is. To me marriage has meant nothing but terror.'
One more woman testifies,
"Intercourse has always been a nightmare to me. I got to the point where I would hate my husband." And finally, "It's a chance," she said, prepping a 10-day period, and then I would get pregnant anyway. At last, menopause!"
ALLOWANCES HAVE to be made for Italian historiics here. These women are Cicero's greatest praise and he read what the women say is to conclude the matter is beyond law and legislation. Any intervention by them will be unbelievable and ultimately unworkable.
The same must obtain in India, where the authorities are going to give any couple who were on the job or who are sterilization or prison. The
"But . . . But . . ."
predict mass sterilization won't work or that the women of Emilia-Romagna will just as surely refuse to have the children the women of India want. In the end the totalitarian state isn't that total, and most people don't opt out of opinions, would be wise to see that in certain areas of life public power must back off.
endeavor is so monstrous it's funny. What do you with young marrieds who have triplets the first time out? Or two? What do you with children and then you have twins? Is the fourth child taken away and given to a family who only has two children? If so, parents should be sterilized as the price for adopting a third? Public hanging is the least punishment that ought to be administered for the incarcerational crime of quintuplets.
THEUGH THE modern state and those who worship it may claim for it not only supreme power but all power, that does not allow it to be used. You don't have to know anything about Indian culture to
There was also air conditioning, a dishwasher, maid service and a built-in sound system.
"WE WOULDN'T even tell our husbands we were pregnant, nor our mothers-in-law who used to live in the city among us young wives. then, when the moment had come, we would leave the men in the fields for a while, we would give birth to the child with the help of a nurse, then we would go back to work so the men wouldn't know. We wouldn't even see the child. The
"INDEED IT is," the goddess said. "Let me show you more."
The goddess thereupon began to show him many wonders. There was wall-to-wall carpeting, a chandelier with a rheostat, a well-stocked bar, a window with a balcony, a plant house, mabogany cabinets and wrought iron wall fixtures.
"And all," the godess said,
"for a piddly $349 a month without utilities."
That's the situation in Italy which, Catholic country that it is, is going through the pain of a national debate on legalizing it. month of Conference of Commission Women. Romagna discussed the question. Perhaps because these are farm women of another culture the translation of their testimony of what the unwanted pregnancy means them is especially moving.
Malcolm blanched.
The following paragraph is, as they say in television, for a woman's own words it tells what they used to do when they became pregnant in their world before preception wasn't permitted.
"UHHHH." he said.
"Er," Malcolm said semicasually. "Could you show me something a little cheaper."
"How much cheaper?" th goddess asked suspiciously.
"Not only that," she said,
"but the campus is a mere 25-minute bus ride away."
"How does $60 a month sound?"
“$75 a month?”
The goddess sniggered.
ONE WOMAN, an aged lady from Anzola, is quoted as saying, "When we would get married we would solve the solution in a proverb from Bolgona that says, 'Create by night and hope for paradise by day'—that is, hope for nine months, the baby will be born dead."
"Be serious, Malcolm," she said.
"Well," said the goddess, "I do have a couple of things . . ."
"GOOD, GREAT. May I see them?"
"Well," said the goddess, "If you insist."
"Welcome to the student slums," said the goddess, sweeping her hand majestically across the room. Malcolm's eyes followed her hand, taking it all in.
The walnut paneling faded slowly away and was replaced once again by mist. Seconds later, the wall was covered by a wall of painted rock.
THE ROOM WAS more than vaguely reminiscent of Hitler's bunker in the last days of the Second World War. The ceiling was only five-and-a-half feet high at the most and was sagging dangerously. Three walls of the room were bumpy with red markings and a yellow. The fourth wall was made of wallboard covered with one-millimeter thick wood grain tape.
The goddess was about to explain about kitchen and toilet privileges when Malcolm interrupted her.
The floor of the room sloped dangerously toward a puddle in one corner. From the room's only window, high and small on one wall, Malcolm could see the feet of passers-by.
"YOU KNOW," he said, "I've always wanted to live in a house."
"Boy," said the goddess as the walls waded away again, "You really are asking for it, aren't you?"
Boy, was he. The house was above ground, it is true, but it also offered him the opportunity to enter the room furnishings that had escaped from a bus station and to share a kitchen and two bedrooms with four guys who lived behind parapolished doors on the floor above.
"It's not that," he said. "I've simply had enough of this. I'm giving up."
POOR MALCOLM. Not only was he getting nowhere, but a genuine goddess also was mad at him.
"What do you mean, you don't like this either?" she asked.
"You realize what that means?" she asked. "You realize this is your last chance for escape? If you don't leave the hall now you are doomed to be a lifer."
"I KNOW," he said, "But that's the way it goes."
"Sure you don't want to look at a mobile home?"
"Yes."
The goddess shrugged. Oh well, she thought, there are plenty more where this one was. She moved her arm and sent him home.
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'NOW JUST FILL THOSE OUT... CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL; MAFIA INFILTRATION COULD TAKE ALL THE FUN OUT OF THE GAME.'