4
Thursday, April 6, 1978
University Daily Kansan
-UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorial represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers
Abolish KUAC Girls
A sexist anachronism lingers on in the redink KUAC budget. The University's "Sunflower Girls," whose sole purpose apparently is to induce male athletes to sign with KU, ought to be abolished immediately.
The KUAC board last Friday approved a deficit of $112,730 in its athletic budget. Sunflower Girls appropriations are funneled through that budget.
Despite objections from Laura Pinkston, a student member of the board who pointed out that the Sunflower Girls were a "blatant Title IX violation," the hostesses still were retained.
Another board member proposed that the hostesses be made coeducational—presumably they would have been called hostpersons—but the motion to accomplish the change was defeated. The larger question, however, is whether the athletic department really needs sirens of either sex to lure innocent high school students to what Chancellor Archie Dykes likes to call a bastion of economic excellence.
A STATEMENT of the official duties of the hostesses is most intriguing. The Girls are required to "be available for all home football and basketball games and other football recruiting weekends at KU."
Once the prospective male has been lured to the University campus, a girl must "sit with prospective athlete at games." It's not clear why the game wouldn't be enjoyable without a hostess, unless the 'Hawks were having a bad day.
Another invaluable function the hostesses must provide, according to the statement of duties, is "to eat special (designated) meals at the training table with prospective athlete." KUAC, usually so unwilling to initiate coeducational athletic training, seems caught in a contradiction.
ONE REQUIREMENT, which was finally abolished only last Friday, focused on the need “to help get prospective athletes dates if desired.” It's commendable that the KUAC board saw fit to abolish the requirement, but it's nonetheless indicative of the thinking on which the hostess program is based.
The hostesses still must "make prospective athlete feel wanted by KU." No further elaboration is given. They also must participate in "anything else requiring hostesses." Again, no additional information about the duty is provided.
Even assuming that the program is totally innocuous, perhaps the University might consider just how much the hostesses are an insult to women. Why on earth does the athletic department think it needs hostesses to sell its programs? Surely good programs and teams will sell themselves to high school prospects. And why aren't the hostesses, even if they are somehow justified, coeducational?
IT IS HIGHLY questionable whether Title IX is being followed, either in letter or in spirit. The law states that athletic opportunity for both sexes must be provided at a university. Assuming that there is even a remote connection between super-saleswomen and athletic opportunity for men, a similar connection needs to exist by means of super-salesmen—"Sunflower Bowers," as it were.
An athletic department that wants to get away with deficit spending of public money has no excuse for frivolous expenditures, even if some of its money comes from private sources. Like so many "little" things in the KUAC budget, including that proposed $40,000 fence around the stadium, the Sunflower Girls program deserves careful scrutiny, then abolition.
Kansas" 'sunshine' "open meetings and public records laws apparently carry little water in these contexts of paper they are printed on.
Sunshine laws ineffective
The Topea Capital-Journal is appealing a Feb. 15 conviction of illegal disclosure of the names of two suspects in the Nov. 18 murder of Lawrence businessman Sam Norwood.
A reporter for the newspaper received word through the police radio frequency that two suspects, described as armed and dangerous, were being connected with the homicide.
The reporter obtained the names of the two suspects before the warrants had been filed. The two suspects were copied off the Shawnee County District Court docket, which, according to Kansas' public records law, K.S.A. 48-209, opened for public inspection.
JUDGE MIKE ELWELL of the Specialized Division of Douglas County District Court ruled that the court docket was open for public inspection. Douglas County Attorney Mike Malone also ruled that the suspect's record but that the publication of the suspect's names was an "ethical violation."
A grosser misunderstanding of the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the good cannot be imagined.
"Other news representatives," Malone said, "were cooperative in this matter" and that they had made sure before their own profit motives."
There is an air of
ludicrousness about the allegations of profit motives in Malone's remarks about the case. The innuendoes are more jarring than deceive even the most naive newspaper reader. The story of the suspects' identities was published on two days. Dec. 5 and 9, and the stories did not change in the pages of the newspaper.
THE ACCUSATIONS of ethical violations are convoluted. Newspapers that cooperate unquestioningly with law enforcement agencies might be rightfully nightly so of being gatekeepers.
an fact, the media that followed the directions of Douglas County law enforcers to withhold publication of the information were putting the wishes of their bedfellows into the role of their readers. A newspaper has an unceasing obligation to open the flow of information, not restrict it.
Of course, the argument that the suspects may have been exposed to information in news coverage is brought up by those who would further obscure the processes of public information to which they are entitled.
The Capital-Journal case is only one of the most recent and nearby assaults on the free flow of information to servants and their constituents.
Other public servants have made little effort to conceal their dislike for reporters and the guarantees of the First Amendment.
A KANSAS U.S. attorney recently told a newspaper we reported "$44,000 a year out to talk with reporters." The
Unfortunately, Katherine Conkey didn't to her homework be fore she wrote the article, "Kansas signs ruin view," which appeared in the March 21 Kansas.
Billboard homework neglected
To the editor:
In addition to being adjacent to commercial property, the billboard pictured lies within the Lawrence city limits. It would be a way out because of the Highway Advertising Control Act," as Conkey states. The validity of Conkey's statement that Kansas currently has more land area also is very questionable.
To start with, the caption for the photograph beside her article is inaccurate. The 1972 law does not even cover a city where she lived within 600 feet of either zoned or unzoned commercial property.
Regarding Rep. Robert Miller's comment that Kansas should not rush the richest states in the Midwest, I would challenge Miller to take a closer look at some of our neighboring states and their neighbors.
Contriary to what Miller implies, the outdoor advertising companies have not had an active organized lobbying effort for a number of years. The slow-ups in the buying process
Conkey's article really does little to present facts about billboard control but has provided a chance for an out-spoken legislator and an outspoken representative to exchange insults.
KANSAN Letters
have been at the level of the state agency handling the purchases. If the state's attorneys and other workers would concentrate more on making arrangements to buy signs and less time running all the same signs over and over, the purchasing process would move at a better pace and taxpayer dollars would be saved.
Legitimate advertising companies don't like catching the blame from such companies when the largest problems lie in the state's own offices.
John Lay
Wichita junior
Take the continuing epic of Father James Green and friend: The Green movement has again been brought to a
are appreciated
to the editor:
Kansan omens
Anyone seeking a fight or good clean fun could find it in last Wednesday's Kansan, an organization that confines their knowledge to what they see in the papers can say. They are also confronted with a simple truth.
screeching halt. Well, to the simple mind, that seems natural for a statue—more natural than that our high-tech devices be brought to a statue-eque standstill. And the simple mind ponders whether funds meant to move statues might produce athletic support. For as the pad moves the pair, armored mobilized pair, might they not serve as they are? Law, like Jeffersonian government, serves best by being as spare as possible, ideally not visible at all. To this ideal and banish from the light those playful souls who, noting that we hear too much of law and legalese, ask whether our air monument may mean that what we hear is unconscious.
Consider also John Mitchell's notes on competency testing. Elected legal experts fear the cost of re-educating those who have not read and watched Mitchell the pious faith that Kansas students would not fail. We need but observe that it would be a bankrupt school that, having been shown it is impossible to produce production—and a bankrupt legislature that contemplates continuing to finance the proven fiasco. Perhaps if we read Mitchell in his book or booked him that pad, halfway between Old Bailey and new Green.
Over a page we read a plea to revamp child labor laws, a shameful sixty years behind our time, to trust in OSAH and the
uniones and put our kids to work to add to family income. Nothing like catching them three ways at once is then better than keeping them up their study time and reap the profits! Well, it might produce that generation of service workers we've been looking for. Yet we haven't done that yet, beat it back to school for a valuable competency in economics, after a few employers had told them to come back when they could do more nearly maximum wage or their not-so-minimum wage.
And then we have a letter all atwitter at that new thing under the sun, the Men's Coalition. Feminists and liberated men, the writer seems to say, know you have discovered the sole and absolute orthodoxy; such asvars as wish to debate them should be forbidden to organize, have their doings reported or—Lord, preserve us!—be funded. Those concerned for equality are told about defending to the death one's right to be wrong, wasn't it?) may welcome the idea that at least some free speech need cost no more than voluntary pennies from individual pockets in an society for a patient that has to have so little give? Who knows? We may want these men as friends of the court on the day I've long anticipated when some fanatic sues Mr. Steak to force him (or is it he) his/her places Ms. Steak, where one is served and rogynous cattle, no bull.
But, ah, to let the lessons of that one-room school soak in! The photographs show discipline, hard effort, respect for teacher and country; the standards, relevant learning, equal treatment of both sexes and all ages. What if the school lacks portraits of presidents past JFK and gives the illusion that time stands still? Perhaps reality. There was a time when we let a statue mean what it meant where it had been put and erected a new one (by subscription, I do believe) when there was something more than something to decorate; there was a time when education had higher aims than to debate the motives of the latest minor extracurricular events when tests were tests and work was work and guarantee were even scarier than rewards.
As I see it, knowing only what I see in the papers, the Kansan says we're in a peek of trouble. "I'm going to point these floodwinds toward the stars and get on with the peraspera of our nobel and en- creature," Yours in honest appreciation of a good semester at the Kansan,
George F. Wedge
Associate professor of English and linguistics
Leben rebuts Waugh's charge
He could have said that I had misunderstood him. Instead, he publicly called me a liar.
In late January, Jerry Waugh, assistant athletic director, told me he was meeting students for students next year at basketball games. Since no student leaders or members of the athletic had been named to the committee statement to the student body.
To the editor:
Last week (in the March 30 edition of the Kansan) Waugh said I had made the whole thing up. To use his words, "That whole thing was just a picture of Steve Leben's imagination."
I suppose it's no secret that relations between the athletic department and me are less than perfect. But Baugh forgets that there were two witnesses to the conversation we had in January—and one of them was Mike Harper, the current head coach of the Nets. The conversation was just a "figure," then more than one person dreamed it the same way.
Waugh has further damaged the KUAC's already weakened credibility. Steve Leben
reporter, who happened to be a former employee of the federal bureaucracy, explained that requests for information about pending cases was not idle curiosity. The reporter represented about 250,000 Kansasans, to whom the attorney in judicial obligation to inform about legal processes in action.
Letters Policy
ElDorado senior
The Kanasw welcome letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and addressed in a phone address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include an address on your home town or faculty or staff position. Letters are not to exceed 500 words in length. Letters should serve the right to edit all letters for publication.
The Kansas open meetings law, K.S.A. 75-4317 and following, is so shot through with exceptions and unsubstantial penalties that it is not the law can be taken seriously.
For instance, University of Kansas student government meetings, such as assemblies of the Senate and Senate Executive Council, are not required to abide by the "Sunshine Law" because they are only an advisory agency, not a legislative or governmental agency.
An unfortunate ruling by Kansas Attorney General Curt Schneider last summer said Kansas State University's Senate did not have to comply with the open meetings law answerable to KSU's president and not to the state.
John R. Martin, first assistant attorney general, said
Tuesday that the ruling still applied. Meetings of the University of Kansas Athletic Corporation also are not under the provisions set forth in the open meetings law, Martin said.
"THE OPEN MEETINGS law does not apply to non profit corporations that are not agencies of the state or its political subdivisions," Martin said.
The exclusion of KUAC from the open meetings law is superficially understandable. It distracts to the university's chancellor, not to the state directly. Also, it is a chartered corporation, and there are nonprofit groups, such as Meals On Wheels programs for senior citizens, that would have to follow the open meetings laws if they were subject to the law's provisions.
However, the decisions made by such groups as Sen Ex, the Student Senate and KUAC affect student interest. It would be advantageous for them to conduct meetings as openly as possible. The murky waters of "public service" often are made public in a way that who feel one of the in-house benefits of a representative or
The suspicion that people have of freely flowing information about the same people attain positions of responsibility and power. Secrecy is dereliction of information about an organization is being "protected."
The KUAC would be wise to hold its meetings in a more open fashion. Athletics at the collegiate level have become easier to do because supposed beneficiaries of that business are like sheep: KU students are serious about opening up organizations such as KUAC to more constituent participation, they should use laptops and tablets, they have available to them, a boycott of KUAC sporting events.
advisory position is the right to make a secret decision. The arrogance of power knows no boundaries of scale.
That student groups and athletic corporations should jealously guard meaningless confidentiality on the campus of a university supposedly dedicated to knowledge is saddering. Those same students of public science become the officials who censure newspapers for publishing public information when they were "advised not to."
Because of a Kansas Supreme Court decision announced last week, municipal governments were legally liable for negligent acts.
Negligence ruling thornv
THE COURTS' decision also provides the opportunity for a civic dialogue and civilian working for the city government. If it comes to that, Argersinger and Clark agree, will be closest to fill.
On the surface this decision appears to be a good move. While increasing government spending, it deermines the medieval "king can do no wrong" notion still strong against governmental units.
"They're all litigation-mad."
Argersinger said. "Everybody hires a lawyer when they step off the front porch. I never believed 'the king could do no wrong.' In fact, we pay claims about once a month if the person has a legitimate case."
Philosophically, the ruling has its merits. Practically, it is a premature and incomplete standing government protection.
THE CASE INVOLLED a lawsuit filed against the city of Parsons for damages of $9,236. Some city employees were only left behind on duty were on property. Although the landowners objected and tried unsuccessfully to reach the city manager by chopping them off, the managers did not stop chopping until they had cut down 104 trees.
According to Barkley Clark, KU professor of law and city commissioner, the new decision will have its greatest impact on cities' police and fire departments.
The city protected itself by arguing that it was performing a government function and that it was thereby immune. The high court struck down that protection and reversed municipal immunity to apply only to acts of misuse of a legislative, judicial or administrative policy.
Former Lawrence Mayor Marnie Arngersinger said recently that the "absolute stupidity" of the specific case before the court might have surprised him. The court's surprising decision.
Although cities are "creatures of the state," the state of Kansas and all its agencies are still immune to what municipalities are now liable for. It would seem that the state's actions have not tried first, but, according to Clark, the court has no intention of narrowing state immunity.
"We have a two-fold problem in Kansas." Clark said. "We have a double standard for city clerks, and we have no comprehensive claims law. It is pitiful to read the Kansas Supreme Court decisions; they keep jumping and forth like a rubber ball."
The apparent inequity of this new judicial rulings drops the burden of rectification on the Kansas Legislature.
CLARK, IN Topeka this week representing the League of municipalities and the Legislature to set up an interim committee to work on a tort claims act. Clark said, "This Kansas came into the 2013."
Kansas needs a law to scale down the notion of government immunity for both state and federal officials, because reasonable limits, governments should be held responsible for their errors and should be ready to pay for them. Acts of outright negligency can be distinguished from others, which in retrospect, appears to be dereliction of duty.
Clark said that increased liability might discourage people from making judgments that they would make with no responsibility. The rest is that restraint is not disadvantageous to government.
THE SUPREME Court's decision undoubtedly will encourage many more persons to file lawsuits against cities. Some cases even may be retried, Clark said, because the decision didn't specify an effective date.
A claims law, which Clark said the legislative leadership and Gov. Robert F. Bennett seemed to support, will have to address the problem of payment of damages. A successful lawsuit might cause a city to add an exorbitant tax if cities were covered by comprehensive liability insurance, taxes still would be used to pay the premiums.
Clark said all lawsuits might be paid out of a state insurance fund, but again taxpayers pay the bills. Presumably, the fund also would provide for private individuals who have been sued for something they did while working on government on government time.
And a law certainly should have to set a maximum dollar limit for total liability so that insurance could not bankrupt a city.
The lifting of government immunity will be yet another cost to be added onto the taxpayers' bill, which few taxpayers can expect to directly pay for. Because that the king can do wrong can be found in at least one case in every court in the country.
If a law is drafted this summer, a private individual who has been wronged, not by another citizen but by the people's trustee, finally will have legal recourse. Governments badly need to be able to check accountability, but private citizens must be aware that it is a dimension of government not to be abused.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily August 15, 2008. Subscribes to Job and JOB, except Saturday, Sunday and holiday subscriptions. Subscriptions by mail are $ a member or $15 per month. Subjects are outside the country. Student subscriptions are outside the county. Student subscriptions are outside the county.
Editor
Burbara Rosewicz
Publisher
David Darys