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Thursday, February 26, 1976
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN Comment
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
Festival dying out
The Festival of the Arts has once again been aborted.
Last year, the director got so far behind in planning the Festival that it was canceled altogether. Although this year's director had a solid program planned, the cancellation of Herbie Hancock and Lionel Hampton makes the rest of the "Festival" seem like a farce.
What's left are three supporting acts: The American Chamber Ballet, George Plimpton and 20 members of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra. All are well known and also undoubtedly meant to serve as warm-ups to Hampton and Hancock.
The Festival began in 1967 solely for jazz artists. Over the years it evolved to include representatives of all segments of the arts: Ella Fitzgerald, Al Capp, Lou Rawls, The Pointer Sisters and Michael Murphey, to name just a few.
But the Festival also lost money in all but two of its nine years. Lots of it—$7,200 in 1974, the last time a real Festival was offered.
The idea of the Festival is a great one, a week of artistic saturation for we uncultured students. In fact, I think one of the best week's I've ever had at KU was last Friday. Monday I saw a national touring company perform Kurt Novegut's "Happy Birthday, Wanda June;" on Tuesday I heard Robert Moog
demonstrate his synthesiser; on Wednesday I had the double treat of the quick wit of David Steinberg and one of my favorite singers, Jimmie Speheric; on Thursday playwright John Lahr spoke; on Friday I saw the Eleo Pomare singing from Carmine; and on Saturday I rocked to the incomparable music of B.B. King, B.I.
That was a Festival, indeed.
The organizers lately have been faced with diminished budgets and rising concert costs. Since the Festival began, they have sent a group to campus have skyrocketed.
There is really no way of getting an instructor to provide for higher profits to the artists.
I guess it's idealistic to think that artists might want to play to college audiences to familiarize them with their music. Hampton decided to play Europe's first album, said the Lawrence was too far out of the way. So much for enlightenment.
I'd like to say something nice and pait about next year's Festival, if there is one. I I'd like to say, 'sue the bastards' if there is one. I don't see a lot of good and different acts and concerts . . . concerts that maybe could be subsidized if they lost a little money.
But then, I'd like to have a lot of things and I get very few of them.
associate Editor
Students ignore bug
During the past two weeks, the number of people walking into Watkins Memorial Hospital with viral illnesses has increased considerably. There are also because hospital officials have been too busy to make computations.
Look around any classroom, the signs are all there—bleary eyes, coughing, and sneezing. Some students look as if they have so little energy that they could fall asleep and others do doze off. The flu season is definitely here and while you might feel through other days only are they robbing themselves of the rest they need but they are also increasing the chances that others will get sick.
IN A COLLEGE community, there is no time to be sick. Many students stay up late studying, eat at irregular times and leave themselves susceptible to illness. Then they ignore the early signs of illness, write tests to take and labs to attend.
Once sick, many don't properly take care of themselves. According to Martin Wollmann, director of Watkins Hospital, there have been few cases of relapses occurring because students try to return to classes too soon after being sick. However, being sick is physically draining. By pushing too hard, students may find that they don't have enough energy to do the work well.
IT'S SAD to think that school has become so important that students will
ignore all else including their health. But students continue to disregard sicknesses for many reasons. Some feel guilty about missing classes for which they have paid money to attend. Others are angry because they still others seem to believe that if they ignore the fact that they are sick, the illness will go away.
Many instructors are very understanding about sicknesses and they are willing to meet with the student to help him catch up on what he missed. There are a few, though, who take the class as a personal affront. These few only apply to the problem by pressuring students into attending class.
Wollmann has suggested that students with temperatures above 100 degrees should stay at home and that they shouldn't try to return to classes until 24 hours after the fever is broken. Sick students who do attend classes should go to school instead of spread of the germs. Maybe with a little common sense and some extra care, everyone will make it through another semester. By Marne Rindom
TOO MANY people have gotten their priorities confused. Sure, classes are important and expensive and grades, many times, can determine one's future. But somewhere, a line must be drawn. When a person abuses his health in the name of education, he is going too far.
Contributing Writer
Readers Respond
Reilly not a madman
To the Editor:
I am writing in reference to the editorial written against the death penalty by Contributing Writer John Johnston that appeared in the Kansan on Feb. 16. I personally have not made up my mind about the issue and have no objection to Johnston's calling callen. Sen. Edward Reilly, LeRavenworth, a "madman."
I have known Sen. Reilly personally for many years, and
I can attest to the fact that I have never known him to lose "all control of his sensibilities" or to be, in fact, a madman.
I THINK THAT it should be named that Sen. R Kelly has been re-elected three times, thus making him a District Three (Leavenworth area) for 12 years. In this district there is a Federal University and the U.S. Army Discipline Barracks. Having lived in
Johnston certainly has a right to his own opinion, but I am sorry that he felt the need to write a long man while expressing it.
Leavenworth, I feel that Sen. Reilly is representing his constituency well be being a sponsor of this bill.
Amy J. Kussmann Kansas City junior
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Jim McKinney
Kansan limited
I was up to find a story
titled "Sign limit may keep out
motel" to take up one of four
chapters in the book. Kansan.
I am very interested in the
politics and economic
possibilities of Lawrence, but to
gather more priority to the
placement of signs and a motel is a waste.
To the Editor
A UNIVERSITY is a mind-expanding teacher, and our newspaper should reflect this. Many important global events that have repercussions on our lives are covered in the Kansas the stories are limited to Kansas, Lawrence and University happenings. The journalism is calm and honest in the Kansan, but I hope that students can be shown and understood as an edge scope to think and work in than traditional mediocrity.
Doren Fredrickson
Amherst, Mass, sophomore
No hope for DESPAIR prof
STRONG HALL-II.
Lawrence Hutchings, associate professor of pseudochemistry, is the winner of this year's DESPAIR award, the department of Public Relations and Propaganda announced yesterday.
According to a spokesman for the sixth-year seniors, Hutchings received the award in December and 15 years of awful teaching.
The DESPAIR (Demented Educator Simultaneously Politizing All Intelligences Repeatedly) Award is given annually by the University's sixth and seventh year seniors. As winner, Hutchings receives absolutely nothing.
"NEITHER HE nor any students know what the hell he's doing most of the time," the spokesman said.
The spokesman said that if it weren't for the fact that the course Hutchings teaches, "Introduction to Seminars in Computer Science" is required for all fifth-year seniors, no one would take it.
"He kind of gets up there in the front of the room and assigns readings at random," he said. "Sometimes, if we are lucky, he hands out illegible mimeordeed sheets."
THE SPOKESMAN said he wasn't sure whether Hutchings
BY THE TIME they've made it to a University, students should be able to develop a study of their own, he said.
"It's not like they were babies or something," he said, "They don't need or want some
By Jim Bates Contributing Writer
thought his students were stupid or whether he thought they already knew everything.
"I'm up for tenure this year," he said. "With this award I can prove to the administration that I've been wasting my time teaching."
Teaching is all right in high school, Hutchings said, but really doesn't have much to do with college.
professor leering over their shoulder all the time."
Hutchings said he was glad to get the award.
Hutchings said that if he could get any money from the University, he'd hire a graduate student to teach his course for him. It would be to everyone's advantage, he said.
"The students would have someone more their own age they could relate to, the graduate student would get some valuable experience, and I could spend more time going
to staff meetings and doing research," Hutchings said.
HE SAID that the time spent grading papers and hunting for old lecture notes put him in a bad spot. He hutchings and another professor from a small university in Nevada are doing research in preparation for the new curriculum for beginning seminar students.
Since the students are there, he said, he might as well take advantage of them.
"Let's be honest," he said, "I'm my own top priority. Then comes Strong, then comes Topkea, then comes the taxation bill. These are important, but you have to remember first things first."
HUTCHINGS SAID he didn't dislike students. He said, however, that he didn't trust them. Students are generally undependable, he said, and some have a tendency to ask the wrong questions at the wrong time.
Hutchings said. "I don't trust them, either."
"Of course some of them don't ask any questions at all,"
If the University was as selective about its students as it is about its professors, he said, there wouldn't be any problem. He said that it might help to have a lot of tenure plan for students.
THEY JUST start to get to know their place and then wooh, they're gone. The only ones who really know what's going on are the sixth and seventh-year seniors," he said.
Hutchings admitted that many of his fellow faculty members disagreed with ideas about students and teaching. He said they could think what they wanted to because "it's a free country." They all have a right to their opinions, he said.
"After all," he said, "if the poo schenows want to throw away their chances at tenure or grants, it's just fine with me.
"I've always admired people who stand up for things, even if they are fools."
Hunt's spending wasted
WASHINGTON - Hours after the Supreme Court had said that millionaires might spend as much money on politics as they wanted, General Motors heir James Randolph bragging that he was going on a spending spree. The court also said that the millionaires couldn't legally contribute directly to candidates and their families, but would have to spend their money independently.
The thought of millionaires having to decide how to spend their money shouldn't fill us with apprehension. While the rich are more often than not selfish, they also tend to have a fear of losing them or bone growing between their ears. As a consequence, they are seldom able to spend their money effectively.
AS A CASE in point, take the serio-comic relationship between H. L. Hunt, the late Texas Republican Tabaku, the chairman of the Polish American Political Action Committee. For 10 years, from 1965 to 1974, he argued that the greedy but essentially harmless ward healers of the old Frank Hague Jersey City University were as a lobby-propagation and coat holder for Hunt.
Hunt, who was a serious contender for the richest man in the world award, spent a lot of money in politics, virtually none of it to any effect. For years he sponsored a right-wing radio
program that was broadcast
stations everywhere; but if
anybody paid any attention to
the message, you couldn't tell
me what was going on.
I spent a lot of money printing
a number of very dull books.
his need for adulation and admiration distract him from his purpose of saving the Republic from the Reds. That's not the case with Mr. Cafederia, so he could go up to the mail clerks and the typists
By Nicholas von Hoffman (C) King Features
cases of which Tabaka says sometimes got shipped into his living room for disposal any way possible.
TABAKA'S DUTIES included the guiding old billionaire around Washington while he passed out his pamphlets in Houston and headed to Mayflower Hotel and under the door sills of the members of Congress. The two of them were hard at it one weekend, when a Capitol policeman told them they couldn't be doing that as the place was nominally closed. He led L. Hunt of Dallas, Texas."
"Yea, an' I'm Richard Nixon of Washington, D.C.," Tabaka remembers the guard answering, after which he phoned his agent to report. "I've got an idea," says who says he is H. L. Hunt."
and introduce himself as Haroldson Lafavette Hunt Jr.
THE OLD JERK, according to Tabaka, was forever letting
The customers must have thought he was a creep, although the behavior does illustrate what happens when customers are infixed rich, which Hunt at least was not given, give their money away in politics. Their own ego needs are usually so extraordinarily demanding they they're trying to accomplish.
WHEN CONGRESSMEN did it know was the oil tycoon himself in the anteroom, H. L. got the respect his money remembered by Gene McCarthy and J. William Fulbright panning along Senate corridors after Mr. Megalomaniac Moneybags. "When you tell people, they do that." They think a helicopter
liberal, but the whole thing is money."
Dull, insecure, and threatened, who needs to listen to rich people's conversations? To rich people of money, but Walter Tabaka never got any of H. L. Hunt's errands; he sent hundreds of editors under his own name but he didn't message; he did dutifully pretended to respond when Hunt sent him to the Library of Congress to find out about a nut from Russia or the Russian and allows those who eat it to live 200 years. Tabaka's daughter even went down to Dallas to work for Hunt and live there, and she replica of Mount Vernon, to watch him feed his reindeer and
mistake the jeers and obscenities of the curious driving past the estate for cheer, and there to listen to him demand he get his toes rubbed with aloe gel because he believes to be almost as good as the fabled Russian Nut of Life. FOR ALL THIS Walter Tabaka says he never got paid, that he received nothing but cash, and that he was surging the estate for $1 million. "The only reason I stayed with him," Tabanka explains, "is that my friends on Capitol Hill need me to keep me alive. He always kept selling me. I'm going to leave you money," and he left me broke. I was a pawn. "The rich aren't different."
The rich aren't different.
They're always the same. They keep their money, but they're not so good at winning elections.
Letters Policy
The Kansas welcomes letters to the editor, but asks that letters be typewritten, double-spaced and no longer than 400 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor's judgment, and must be signed by the author each year in the journal and hometown; faculty must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
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