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Wednesdav.March 10.1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
Quality v. quantity
Worry over financial exigency and declining enrollment has once again receded as a continuing lure of new students. Kansas enrollment to a spring record.
ADMINISTRATORS AND education experts have been predicting a decrease in KU enrollment for years only to find their estimates confuted by continuing growth. This spring's enrollment is 22,796, an increase of 6.1 per cent from last spring. This is the third straight year the spring enrollment is a record.
The reason the predictors were wrong is that they didn't take into account changes in the preferences of students for particular colleges. The predictors assumed that the decrease in the total number of college students in a given college would result in equal percentage decreases in all colleges. That assumption was wrong because the percentage of Kansas college students choosing to attend KU increased.
WHY KU IS now relatively more attractive than many other colleges isn't hard to see. In times when college costs are increasing and the monetary value of a college degree is less certain, students are naturally more selective. We have a lot of a college education and faculty, concern for its undergraduate teaching and adequate equipment and personnel for a strong research program.
Because the governor and the Kansas Legislature have seen fit to appropriate
sufficient funds, KU has been able to retain its excellent faculty and to maintain sufficient buildings and equipment to guarantee it a place among the country's premier academic institutions. The prestige that has justifiably become attached to the University has contributed to the growing percentage of students electing to come here.
THUS, THE UNIVERSITY can be justly proud of its growing enrollment. But that isn't to say that bigger is always better or that having more students in the Allen Field House during enrollment increases the quality of the University.
In fact, many smaller schools argue that large universities are intrinsically constrained from providing services for students. During the period of rapid growth of nearly all colleges and universities in the 1960s, quality often suffered as administrators dealt mechanically with the flood of students. Education has to as much as meet increased production demands, and students were like a product on which the quality control had lapsed.
Now that period is past, and KU ought to be able to maintain a relatively stable enrollment somewhere between the two extremes of serious growth and crippling attrition.
By John Hickey Contributing Writer
Rivers shouldn't be tamed
I want to make a plea for our rivers. The waterways of the United States are being dammed and destroyed at an alarming rate. The Army Corps of Engineers are believing that rivers must be manhandled. For some reason, rivers are evil and reservoirs are good. Well, you can fool most of the people all of the time because you can't fool Mother Nature. She'll strike back.
RIVERS ARE an ally of man, not an enemy. They contribute immeasurably to both body and soul. In the book Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse tells of an old man who is living in a river in India. The old man has learned the truths of life through the river.
"I have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river has been nothing but a hindrance on their journey," he says. "They have traveled for money and business, to wed a woman who lives in the river has been in their way, the ferryman was there to take them quickly across the obstacle. However, amongst the thousands there have been a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have heard the sound, and the river has become holy to them as it has to me."
LIKE THE THOUSANDS of travelers, the Corps sees rivers as obstacles to be controlled. A couple of storms and flood strikes and everyone
mourns the staggering financial losses. They only see what the river takes and seldom what it gives. If the river didn't drop its water, the abundant crops of the floodplain would soon wither.
Floodplains sometimes
put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineer have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstrus science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river
By John Jobston Contributing Writer
flood- it is a fact of nature: Americans should accept it. They should farm the floodplain and build their homes and industries in other areas or accept the consequences.
"But a discreet man will not
CONTROLLING RIVERS to futile. Mark Twain realized this more than 100 years ago, but the Corps still hasn't been enlightened. Twain wrote in "Life on the Mississippi": 'One who knows the Mississippi will tell himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, "Here," or "Go there," and make it obey; can not save a shore bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and launch at.
and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it."
THE CORPS IS still trying to channel rivers. When a channel has been dredged, the water picks up speed and as a result picks up more debris from the bottom of the river, then slows down at a bend, the load is dropped, thus creating barriers to the river's flow. Even though the Corps has been assigned the task of caring for the nation's waterways, it has not managed its physical properties of rivers.
The only way the Corps can perpetuate its devastation of the environment is through manipulating the cost-benefit ratio of projects in its favor. To have a project approved it must be assessed against the costs. The system the Corps uses is so flagrantly deceitful that it's difficult to see how it continues to get by with it.
enormous flood of 1951 is used to justify the dam. The Corps forgets to mention that a flood in October once every 100 to 200 years, while the estimated life of the dam is at best a little more than 50 years. After that the silt in the reservoir has filled the reservoir.
IN PROPOSING a dam such as Lawrence's Clinton project, the corps always cites flood protection. In this case the
In stretching the system to its limits, the Corps often takes a perfectly clean waterway, and then a perfectly clean a dam. The industry floods the dam and pollutes the stream below the dam. So the reservoir of clean water is necessary to dilute the dam's water without the dam the water clears.
The Corps also puts a dollar value on the recreational benefits of a new lake. The benefits obviously exist, but, despite the lack of loss of farmland and the recreational value of a river.
ONE OF THE CORPS' most questionable calculations deals with new industry. It argues that because of the dam, industry will develop. The protection of this industry from the floods is needed by the benefits. It doesn't seem to realize that without the dam, the industry wouldn't need protection.
IT DOESN'T take a wise man to see the values of rivers. Huck Finn appreciated the nature of the river. Whenever Huck saw a river he confined the confines of society he headed for the muddy Mississippi.
But unlike Huck and the ferryman, the Corps has never taken the time to learn from the river. The Corps discounts any natural goodness in the river. The February issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin
contains a cartoon that depicts this rationale very vividly. The cartoon shows an aspiring young engineer in the office of his superior. He says, "The way he did it was all right, but had wanted rivers to flow, he wouldn't have given us concrete."
So with the aid of such reasoning the Corps就会 to restrict the flow of the nation's arteries. Today's Americans are being cheated of the opportunity to learn from the river, as Siddartha did. But eventually the river will return.
HESSE WRITES, "The river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere, for it, not for it, not for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
"And when I learned that, I reviewed my life and it was all a river, and Siddartha the boy, and Siddartha the mature man and Siddartha the old man, were only separated by shadows, not reality."
THE RIVER makes different things to different people, but as Hesse says, the river is everywhere. And even though it may be confined for awhile, the river will return. One of the reasons that the river will seek the path of least resistance, It may meander, but it will continue. The dams may ruin the rivers for our generation, but the rivers will remain long after the dams are gone. The sooner the rivers are closed, the its energy can be used constructively instead of destructively.
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The signs that remain up on campus seem ironical. "Birch Bayh for president, organizer of meeting, march, March 4 say. On Thursday, March 4 Bayh was no longer an active
Bayb's campaign over before it really began
the edge, buying time until he, too, becomes a spectator on the sidelines.
BAYH'S DOWNFALL came about because of finances. Although he was labeled a late starter, he announced his
By Marne Rindom Contributing Writer
candidate. His campaign essentially came to an end before it began.
THIS YEAR'S democratic presidential campaign seems to be striving toward the goal of total confusion. First the field was flooded with a throng of hopefuls—there were liberals and conservatives. Old-timers and conservatives. So were complete unknowns and voters had to stop to take time to learn the names before concerning themselves with issues or past records.
Now when people are just getting ready to get down to the real issues, everything is changing. After three primaries, Bayh is out and Sargent Sheriver is titering on
Bayh had received the praise and support of many. At 47, as a junior senator from Indiana, his accomplishments fill page after page. He has been a fighter for civil rights and liberties for both men and women. He has also been extremely active in many areas, including the economy, environment, and health care.
candidacy in October, 13 months before the actual election. After only five months, with eight months yet to go, Bayh's campaign effort is $100,000 in debt.
Everything was practically decided for him. After finishing third in the New Hampshire basketball championship in embarrassing defeat in Massachusetts. The candidate, considered by some to be the strongest liberal in the race, was appointed as department of the Massachusetts vote.
and his bank account showed that he lacked funds. It didn't matter that more than three-fourths of the country hadn't even begun to think seriously about the campaign.
AND SO IT IS in this vast country where popular vote is so important. Campaigning from one end of the country to another takes months requires a vast sum of money. When the support is lagging and the money is dwindling, getting out can seem like the only feasible plan even a campaign has hardly ever begun.
BUT FEW PEOPLE, at least in this area, seem to know anything about him. There just wasn't enough time. The organizational meeting came on Monday and was in New England, Bayh was finished. The vote tabulations showed that he lacked support
Election reform act hash overdone
For even with campaign spending laws, the power of the dollar can't be completely taken away. We've had shadowed issues and records in past campaigns and it will undoubtedly do so in the future.
Thus it ends for Birch Bayh in 1976. No more organizational support for new signs will herald his name across campus. His supporters will start all over, selecting and supporting new candidates all over the country soon come and Bayh may then get his much deserved break.
WASHINGTON — Everyone who spends time in the kitchen knows about the leftover problem. Now and then you can learn to prepare the remains of a leftover roast. But if what you start with is leftover ham, that's what you end with, too. This is the problem Congress faces with Federal Election Campaign Act.
IN JANUARY, the Supreme Court made hash of that act. Toward the end of its long opinion, the Court toyed briefly to allow the law altogether. Unfortunately, prudence and custom prevailed. The Court made a deferential bow to the supposed wisdom of the House and Senate, and the hash back in their laps.
Now a couple of short order chefs—Wayne Hays in the House and Howard Cannon in the Apprentice job. They are about to make bad matters worse, and the lamentable prospect is that they have the votes to prevail. In the months after Watageate, the officers will be spasms of morality; now the convulsions have subsided and
the Congress is quite itself again. Election reform is a bore.
UNDER TERMS of the Supreme Court's opinion, the most urgent problem had to do
Everything else could have been left for later action. But few persons ever have charged the Congress with rational behavior. Any such simple procedure would have reflected
By James J. Kilpatrick
(C) Washington Star Syndicate
with the Federal Election Commission that had been created by the 1974 act. Under the law, the six members of the commission were to be named the Chief Justice, no longer a way, said the Court. The Constitution plainly vests such appointive power in the President. If the commission was to survive beyond a 30-day period, the commission would have to be reconstituted.
If the Congress had wanted to proceed along rational lines, a few key changes were wipped up to accomplish that aim and nothing more.
**WHAT** **WE** **HAVE**, therefore—what we had a few days ago, at least—is a 46-page report of the case of Hays of Ohio," but is more truly the prose composition of Mr. Meany of the AFL-CIO. The key provision of this interesting study is that he was an even-handed ruler of the commission pursuant to the original act. The purpose is to restore to organized labor the rights conceived as rightfully his.
poorly on the congressional capacity for the devious.
The revised provisions represent a sorry performance by too many high-handed cooks. It is a case of hashes to hashes and crust to crust. Scott predicts a veto if the Hays-Meany bill passes, but so much money is riding on the commission's continued existence that a veto might well be balanced. Mr. Meany makes balancing actions, says Senator Griffin. "It takes a strong stomach to watch either process."
Under the original law, as the commission decreed in
UNDER THE Hays-Meaney revision, unions naturally could continue to solicit their members and their families, but a corporation could communicate politically only with "its stockholders and executive officers and their families." The text "executive officer" should be defined as those salaried persons with both policymaking and supervisory responsibilities.
response to an inquiry from the Sun Oil Co. unions and corporeally could treat equally. Unions are their members for political contributions. Corporations could solicit their emplores.
WHEN THEY GOT around to the mullifying amendment, on page 33 of the bill, Senator Scott was heard to describe the revised provision as abyssal, dirty, god-awful, horrendous, monstrous, pernicious, punitive, reprehensible, uncontrollable, vindictive "And besides," he added reflectively, "I don't like it." Senator Cannon had the grace to mask a yawn.
The Senate Rules Committee met on a recent afternoon for what is known as a "mark-up," when the committee's board committee was not marking up its own bill, for it had none; it was marking up the Hays county houses of which had been the property provided. Over the vehement protests of Republicans Robert Griffin and Hugh Scott, two Republican members, steamroller down its appointed path. The Democrats had five
votes, the Republicans only four, and as the old story tells us, that does make a difference.
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