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Thursday, April 1, 1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
Fears fog merger
For a time it seemed as if we would be rushed headlong into an ill-prepared scheme in which women's athletics would be "merged" with men's athletics, losing most all autonomy and perceptibly gaining little. Now, we are assured, the move is being put off for at least a year.
THE WOMEN athletes have expressed a fear of Clyde Walker and the KUAC, perhaps justifiably so. Most of the women's strongest programs are in non-revenue sports such as softball, field hockey and volleyball. Women have no real equivalent of football as a money maker and the basketball squad has just recently been able to offer a few scholarships and schedule some powerful teams. Under Walker, they were afraid that these programs would be shoved aside and all gains would be lost.
Title IX never really said anything about "merging" or subjugating one
program to another—only that the two should be equal. It is now up to the administration and various committees to decide how such an "equal" plan by next vear,
IT'S RIDICULOUS to argue that women's athletics could obtain truly separate but equal facilities. Neither the state nor alumni are going to go for another Allen Field House for basketball and volleyball or a Memorial Stadium for field hockey. But they should go for a few things like dressing rooms for female athletes and better upkeep of the present fields. It seems ironic that the softball team must go off campus to find suitable playing fields.
It is hoped that with a little more thought and planning a program acceptable to both men and women athletes can be developed—and developed with the help of suggestions. By Betty Haeagel Associate Editor
People will pay more for parking privileges
As the parking services division works toward paying expenses, people will find themselves spending more and more for the privilege of parking on campus. For if the recommendations are accepted, all parking permits will be raised for the 1976-77 school year—some as much as $20.
THE UNIVERSITY of Kansas police department is divided into two areas: parking services and the police division. The police division, financed by the state, is concerned with providing campus security and enforcing traffic regulations. The parking services division provides for parking lot maintenance and a system of parking permits and the ticketing of violators.
Unlike the police division, parking services doesn't receive any state aid and must be self-sufficient. The money in the collection is the making of permits and the collection of fines.
REVENUE IS used by the division to pay employees, cover paper and equipment costs and finance maintenance work on the lots. Because of salary raises that occurred this year and are expected for next year, the division has found itself short of funds. This year's prepaid cost of $340,000 far fall short of next year's predicted expenditures of $433,088. Even with the recommended permit increases, the division expects to have at least an $11,000 deficit.
No one will be happy about having to pay more to park, especially when they are parking where they live or work, but at least the new price raises take into account the location of the lot. Now, practically all of the permits cost $30. It doesn't make any difference whether the lot is behind Strong Hall or by Allen Field House. Under the new pricing, permits would range from $50 to $28, depending upon the lot's proximity to the center of campus.
WHAT IT COMES down to is the question of how far a person thinks that
he can walk. If he is willing to park his car and take a 5 or 10 minute walk, he will be able to park cheaper than if he is driving on the back door of a particular building.
The residence hall parking permits, which the proposal would raise from $15 to $17, will still be 50 cents cheaper than they were in 1974. Many students think they have spent more than $1,000 to park in front of the place they have spent more than $1,000 to live in.
THIS COMPAINT is understandable but it won't carry much weight in the parking services division. After all, with the price raise, the division anticipates increased use from residence halls and Sprague Apartment parks permits in 1976-77.
With the system as it is now, there are too many people who want to park on campus than there are spaces. To catch the violators and to insure that the people who buy permits can find places to park, the division must spend money on wages for lot patrollers and on the cost of necessary equipment. These costs then get passed on to the permit buyers.
THIS IS certainly far from a perfect solution but what else can be done? Surround the Campanile with asphalt parking lots and allow everyone to park free of charge? But then who would pay for the enormous expenses of building the lots? Raise tuition to cover the maintenance of lots and then distribute stickers according to need? This would penalize the people who don't own cars.
Parking problems will continue to plague the University. Studies can be carried out to find ways to cut costs and improve efficiency but as long as inflation continues to raise the costs of parking, you are going to keep parking will keep increasing. And except for determining an equitable way to pass these expenses to car owners, there is really little money can do about it. By Marne Rindom
By Marine Kindom Contributing Writer
'JUST GETTING Δ HEAD START ON Δ LITTLE REMODELING, MARIAN '
Strong inherits the meek
(Note: The following is an excerpt from the as-of-yet unpublished literary master's thesis of Dr. John D. Academic Underground" written by an anonymous KU administrator. It was originally found jammed inside an old warehouse on the basement of Strong Hall.)
I am a small-time administrator. I am a spilete administrative petty officer. I think my stationery is unofficial.
BESIDES, I am timid in the extreme—at least to the extent of fearing the chancellor (1) for the chance to not be timid, but I am.)
Actually, I don't know a damn thing about my position. I'm not even sure that it is unnecessary. I can't under表型 IX investigation and never have the investigators and the chancellor. I must be doing something right.
o sir. I refuse to see the
cancerolver simply out of spite.
I will probably fail to understand,
you may even think it is the
cancerolver who won't see you
or that you won't be able to tell
I will not be able to tell you
precisely whom I will injure by my spite. I know perfectly well that I am not giving the chance to kill him. I know very well that the him. I know very well that the
gnashed my teeth at them and gnashed insatiably whenever I succeeded in distressing them. I almost always succeeded.
Most of them were timid folk;
meaninglessness of my job will harm only myself. (Well, maybe the taxpayers and students).
AND YET, IF I don't seek out
the chancellor, it is out of spite.
My stationary is unofficial?
Good, let it be unofficial
and give me some unofficial pencils,
too!
I have been working at this job for a long time--about 30 years. Now I am 55. I used to have an office on the second floor of Strong; today I do not. I am in the basement.
But in my glory days I was a mean administrator. I was rude, and found pleasure in it. I knew not how to find the office my office needed help, I
naturally—students. But there were also student politics, among them one I really enjoyed to submit and chattered revoltingly. That idiot came to my office very Friday afternoon for a year and a half. Finally I got off the ship and he stopped chattering. I LIED JUST now when I said I was mean. I lied out of pure spite. It's just that I'm sick and being so colorless and unnoticed.
I could not become malicious.
In fact, I could not become anything; neither hated nor loved, neither liberal nor conservative. I cannot even get on committees.
And now I am eking out my days in this deserted corner of Strong's basement, tawning up the windows and useless consolation that intelligent man cannot seriously become anything. Yes, sir, an intelligent 20th-century college student with a more than a decade crot二
BUT I WILL! 我 have already lasted three and I will last four! Five! Six! I will show those gray-hairs up on the second floor what longity is? They will have to pry me out of this room before they are all gone long after they are all gone! They, with their accents and . . .
But you must be laughing at me. I am sure you are laughing at me. I will be lucky to last a minute and know that. The legislature is cutting corners and my basement corner will be one of the first to go. I fear that I will have an experiment in budgeting.
YOU HAVE TO forgive me. I was merely joking when I talked about second floor accommodation a feasible feat attemt at a loke.
what can an administrator talk about in true earnestness and knowledge other than his position?
I just get carried away when I talk about my position. For
My position right now is nothing. It will always be behind me, so I can see it. Do not think that I have not wanted to be an insect; for I have a friend who reaches too close to an insect. It would a considerable step upstairs.
YOU DO NOT have to tell me that my administrative career is finished. I know that it is. I knew long ago, when I first found out who it was that lasts seven decades: fools and brownnesers. I have many times their trade. Yet I sit here with my heart crushed. The bitter. I am not bitter at all. Resentful maybe, but never bitter. (There I go joking again. I must be serious.)
(Note: The author goes on to describe more of his inner frustrations and confusions and relates a story about how he escaped the chancellor's mansion, got very depressed and ended up advising a woman student. The rest of the manuscript will be saved, we find the practical joke who translated it into Russian.)
Polls Hamburger Helber of politics
WASHINGTON-Public opinion pollsters have triumphed in convincing us that their is a neutral sport, that theirs are more accurate than measurement. The abracadabra of numbers helps them. We ought to know better by now, but most of us can still be intimidated by Arab numerals and symbols. We need them. It looks like science to us and
little book which is given to the ward committeeman who totes up the backpack. The ward committee symbol that prefective workers have traditionally used to signify the undecided. The ward committeemen are called clerks, and he knows if he's going to win.
THAT DOESN'T make Mayor Daley a scientist. That doesn't make George
By Nicholas von Hoffman (C) Kime Fujitaura
(C) King Features
science, as anybody but a scientist will tell you, is objective. Hence poll-taking is thought to be the most objective activity in journalism.
ALL DOURTS AS to the hidden, uniscient character of poll-taking are conquered by the pollsters' excellent record of handicapping elections. Chumps that we are, we think that any set of manipulations that can predict accurately must be science. Mayor Daley can predict the outcome of the election by counting hundreds of precinct captains who go around to the voters before the election and ask them how they're going to vote. Each answer is recorded in a
People get so bedazed by the parlor trick of predicting the winners of elections that they're prone to over look the results, which is not moderity. They are bought and paid for by newspapers, television networks, politicians, and panty-hose women. You can ask them that, like anything else that is offered for sale, public opinion polls are
Gallup, who does essentially the same thing, a scientist either. It makes one a political boss and the other the commercial purveyor of an informational pnee that has far more market value than it does truth.
primarily designed for their customers.
Notice the dialogue during the lulls on the weekly Tuesday Night Election Specials. Crankite will say something like, "George Wallace has done especially well with two-generation suburban Bulgarians. According to a Lou Harris poll commissioned by CBS, he is extremely sensitive to the anti-Washington feeling. What do you make of that, Eric?"
THEIR CUSTOMERS use them as the Hamburger Helper of politics. They serve as an important successor from the squallied trigues which occupy journalists and others who make their living off the data. Their data is cranked out and poured over us.
SUPPLYING CUD for electronic ruminants is less important than the role pollsters play in making and shaping issues. It's possible to force pollsters to consider an issue without the help of the opinion surveyers, but it isn't easy. To a significant extent campaign issues are what polsters take poll about. They pick the issues which may account for this year, and because this year that no areas are
It would be interesting to have a sociologist study polling organizations to see how extent the selection of topics is, consciously or unconsciously, determined by the corporations who buy the poll's results. It is hard to
believe that when a poll is commissioned by a television network or a major newspaper it's underlying assumptions aren't skewed by the class, group and economic interests of the executives involved.
THERE IS NO mistaking the biases implicit in the way issues are framed. In most instances pollsters phrase issues as nouns or as noun phrases. Questions involving "inflation" can be phrased differently, a something, a something you can do a something else about. Inflation is a process, a continuous-flow event, or so it can be viewed. Pollls, however, teach the populate a static and rigid concept of inflation overestimates the importance of individual decision-making.
That's useful for beguiling a large number of persons into thinking that they bring their problems on themselves. But then poll-taking and poll information dissemination becomes a problem, not an advantage, to the quo. Without going that far, it it's still clear that our polls do not define public issues in either structural or dynamic terms. Definitions of issues that are more structural or more dynamic values that draw us away from the "centrist" values that pollsters lay dominate public opinion.
POLLING IS ONE of the most successful methods yet invented for making people believe that they are different opinions, all their neighbors are vapid.
conforming centrists. As the late C. Wright Mills once wrote: "Research on political opinion" is all the more curious in view of the suspicion that American electoral politics is a sort of politics without opinion—if one takes the word 'opinion' seriously; a sort of voting without much political meaning of it, with great depth—if one takes the phrase 'political meaning.' seriously."
Those words were written close to 20 years ago. Today a Mills might say that the effect, if not the purpose of public opinion research, is to destroy public opinion, if one takes the word "opinion" seriously.
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