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Monday, February 13, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unaged editorial represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Stated columns represent the views of only the writers.
Fund gays on merit
The issue of whether Gay Services of Kansas ought to be funded by the Student Senate has been buried in the flurry of a three-year legal battle, last semester's long-winded Student Senate debates and last week's legal opinion by the University.
Through the course of the now six-year debate, the question of why a gay liberation organization should not be funded has never been answered to satisfaction.
been answered. Enough legal and administrative reasons have been tossed out that the heart of the issue has become secondary and sexual preference unrightly has been instituted as criterion for Student Senate funding.
criterion for administration in a vicious circle of administrative policy precedent, Gay Services has been prohibited from receiving state-supervised student activity funds, administered by the Student Senate.
Senate LAST SEMESTER the Senate sought a means to fund such groups through its resolution to eliminate the University's recognition policy, which prohibits funding groups substantially oriented towards religion, politics or expression of sexual preference. A group must be recognized by the University to qualify for Senate funds.
In the administration's answer to the resolution, Mike Davis, University general counsel, last week reaffirmed that funding of religious and political organizations was constitutionally illegal.
On the issue of sexual preference, Davis cited the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals 1973 decision that upheld KU's right to refuse such funds.
Gay Services should be given the chance to be judged on its own merits.
The decision stems from a discrimination suit filed in December 1971 by the Lawrence Gay Liberation Front, the forerunner of the Gay Services, against former Chancellor E. Laurence Chalmers Jr. Chalmers, in the first and only showing of a chance power to veto Seman's operations, ruled that such actions would not be awarded to people whose sexual proclivities might violate state laws. His ruling stood in spite of the fact that an assistant Kansas attorney general said recognition of a gay liberation group would not violate state statute.
WITH SUCH an issue in such changing times, University precedent is not a good enough reason today to deny recognition to the group. The University should not cower behind its policy to avoid a touchy issue, even though recognizing the group could send hundreds of traditionalists rapping in anger on administrative doors.
Eliminating or amending the recognition policy would make that possible. If it passes other Senate criteria, the group should be funded or the current administration should be put on the spot to justify why not.
Steps to modify weather await only the go-ahead
By FITZHUGH GREEN N.Y. Times Features
WASHINGTON — On July 12, 1946, Vincent J. Schaefer, a General Electric Company laboratory assistant, exhaled deliberately into a three-cube deep foot-freeze unit that he had lined with black velvet. Then he scattered a handful of dry ice into the box. Magically, a beautiful little snowtorn appearance, its delicate crystals making minuscule drifts on the velvet. This culminated many expert analyses, and I no longer契机 Irving Langmuir had made to uncover the mysteries of precipitation.
By November, Schaefer had dropped three pounds of dry ice from a plane into a thick stratus cloud near Schenectady, NY., close to the city's white curtains of snow falling. The age of weather modification had dawned! Suddenly, man had moved miraculously closer to being the master of his environment.
AN ANALYSIS of what has happened since 1946 leads to hope and concern. Americans today are as lackadaisical about this important potential technology as they were in pre-Springs time. Our most promising weather-medication tools have accumulated a modest success, although scientists acknowledge this grudgingly. We have no sizable program, either private or public to undertake research further. The federal government's fiscal 1978 spending is only $18 million.
For 25 years, West Coast utility companies have used cloud seeding to augment by 10 percent the snow pack that accumulates on the Sorra's surface. The snow melted in snow turns hydroelectric turbines. Last August, the United States
Bureau of Reclamation listed snow increases of 52 percent in various mountain tests. Farmers in the southwest also have 18 percent by 15 percent in selected areas during the past 10 years.
COMMERCIAL SEEDERS also have practiced the reduction of the size of halitons at Texas ranches and tea plantations in Kenya. The Russians have banished the iron dioxide into the sky from long-barreled riffes and rockets to cause additional halitons to form so that none will become so large as to inflict crop breakage, of which 41 will occur annually worldwide.
Fog dispersal works, too. It has become standard procedure at 12 U.S. airports.
There also are indications that by injecting thunderclouds with metallic chaff, similar to that used for jamming radio signals, it is possible to reduce lightning bolts.
EVEN MONSTROUSLY violent hurricane may be tameable by seeding near the hurricane's eye to slow down
Last summer nature showed human weather modifiers a thing or two when the tropical disturbance called an El Niño Gulf of Mexico. If a Cyclone like Anita flies over water that is warmer than water it has just passed, scientists have theorized it may be triggered by added heat. Anita did encounter a warm-water loop meandering through the Gulf. At that point Anita promptly intensified, so much so that her clashing winds created a water from depths of 165 feet.
Days later, a second hurricane, Babe, intersected the cooler water left on the surface by Anita. Experts have found that the storm's storm center travels over abruptly chiller water it will
weaken and break up more quickly than expected—just what Babe did. She diminished her strength, she still carried inland a generous load of rain. In the United States and Asia, millions of people depend on food that is grown by such seasonal cyclones.
THIS NATURAL demonstration suggests that man may be able to achieve a level of storm control never before seen, and now look for ways to raise cold underlayers of the sea into the path of some future fierce hurricane? Perhaps we could find that the government's ocean thermal energy conversion program. This is a new, unperfected method to obtain energy from the surface temperature difference between surface and deep water.
ITS HIGH TIME that we in the United States discover more about what weather modification may yield, positively and negatively. The Commerce Department's advisory board is scheduled May 1 for a national audit. The board should call for creation of a Department of the Environment to bring all weather-modification responsibility under one roof. Control of pollutants should be handled by the new organization so that their effect on weather climate and agriculture was assessed and protected, something the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't do.
It is a shame to stand relatively late, as we are in this country, when we may be on the verge of vast new abilities to deal mankind great benefits or dire harm.
Fitzhugh Green, associate administrator of the Environment Ministry in 1971, was author of "A Change in the Weather."
Students deserve lobby choice
For several years, a student lobby group has dropped hints and issued outright invitations to the University of Kansas. The question they have asked is, basically, "Brothers, can you spare a quarter each?"
the group is the Associated Students of Kansas, which is composed of students at Washburn University and the state universities other than KU. ASK says it can represent the students in Topoka before the Kansas Legislature. The group pays a full-time division and a salary to the board that it has great influence in steering legislators toward the consideration of student problems.
ASK has alternated recently between trying to persuade KU to join it and asking if it could not care less what KU does. It also has registered many complaints about the benefits it brings to all students, including KU's, and how the University is receiving a free ride from its efforts.
TO JOIN ASK and contribute to the lobbying effort that it says helps KU, the University would have to pay about 25 cents for each student year. The would be more money. ASK asks students if it is interested that the cost be worthwhile.
Thus far KU has decided the cost would not be worthwhile. The University has stressed out of the lobby since it is staffed by members of the committee members have visited the workings
John Mitchell
Editorial writer
suitably on the KU campus. Their jobs are different. CSHE is specifically for KU issues and operates with part-time student help. ASK is composed of all major Kansas universities except KU and tries to concentrate on matters of concern to students from all over the state.
of the group, attended its meetings, talked with their lobbyists and brought back unofficial reports. A Student Council member reported that less than 20 percent of the Kansas legislators who responded thought that ASK was effective. Some argued that because the lobby charges director-ates, the group no longer per-mitted financial contacts could be made.
Those arguments, in a nutshell, were the case against joining ASK. The KU answer to ASK was Concerned Students for Higher Education, formed last year. They are not as well known as and is supposed to take KU's case to the Capitol. Students donate their time to organize and research positions on student issues, begin letter-writing campaigns to legislators and go to town to present their arguments personally.
THEERE are questions that ASK proponents are going to have to answer. Two-thirds of ASK's budget next year, if KU does not join, will be devoted to salaries. The turnover rate among campus directors is insensitive to the question of having little more than a rubber stamp for the opinions of its board of directors and lobbyist.
THEERE are weaknesses in the arguments against ASK. They have arisen partly because of changing circumstances. ASK is beginning to mature, to get a better idea of what it is supposed to be doing. The executive director, Deb Harrison, said last week that the lobby's rotating system of employing lobbyists
Acting Secretary of Corrections James Marquez accepted the responsibility for closing the prison after the former director of the prison system, Robert Raines, resigned because of legislative pressure. Marquez job is probably the toughest in the country.
might change soon and that she might stay on for more than one year.
But can such changes in attitude be created by legislative fiat?
Yet the lobby has proponents and they offer refutations to the charges against ASK's effectiveness. Putting the matter to a student vote would mean that both sides would have to try to convince the students of their opinions. It would take a well-reasoned argument to convince students that an addition to their fees would be good.
People are changing their opinions about joining ASK, particularly Steve Leben, outgoing student body president. "One and a half years ago I stated publicly I was against joining ASK," Leben said last week. "One year ago we was against it. Now I would favor joining."
Leben said he was planning to suggest to the new Student Senate elected this month that it reconsider joining ASK. would be best, he said, to put the matter to the stressor of the amendment, rather than have the matter decided by the Senate alone.
KU has been accused by ASK's member schools of being unfair to them by letting them have all the burden of setting up a student lobby. In the past, the accusations have been directed at the student leadership here. The referral proposition would be medium of interest and support at an infusion of the ordinary student. Let the ones who would pay it decide whether they can spare the quarter.
LEBEN SEEMS to have a good idea. For all the old opposition the guard can muster against ASK, there are others who would bring out the partisans who would bring out the partisans on both sides, and it would overcome the lack of information about ASK's past and future—information that is needed to overcome that will commit $8,000 of its students' money.
Like Kansas' correctional institutions, the state's attitude toward corrections is antimuted and due for revision.
Concerned Students for Higher Education is an organization that is still an infant. Its potential is unknown. Those who deride ASK because of its ineffectiveness have not seen many fruits from its KU allergy program. The university CSE, like ASK and all political organizations, has to stumble a bit while taking its first steps.
The Kansas State Penitentiary at Lansing was built in 1864. About 680 men are housed there; 85 percent of them are maximum and medium security inmates.
CSHE and ASK could exist
The Kansas State Industrial Reformatory at Hutchinson was constructed in 1895. The institution houses about 690 men, most of them admitted between the ages of 18 and 26.
About 50 women offenders are incarcerated at the Kansas Correctional Institute for Women, established outside the walls of the state penitentiary at Lansing in 1917.
Kansas penal reforms overdue
"For too long corrections
THE KANSAS PENAL Reform Act, which passed the State Legislature in 1973 changed the laws in favor of rehousing in Kansas from punishment to rehabilitation. An eight-year master plan of the Department of Corrections calls for a program of capital punishment designed to effect the legislative mandate.
have been in the shadows," Marquez said. Thursday, "Corrections don't have a very large constituency."
MORE THAN 90 percent of the inmates in Kansas need to emerge from the system and attempt to re-enter the mainstream of society. But how successful can a prisoner make
Besides the social stigma an ex-prize carrier with him, mental preparation for life on the outside is almost impossible. The most often bleak surroundings of a 114-year-old prison.
Although citizens pay lip service to the 20th-century concept of rehabilitation, the fact is, offenders' rehabilitation cannot be practiced in sterile and diapilated cages.
PUBLIC OPINION about corrections vacillates between two extremes: the lock 'em up and throw away the key attitude and rehabilitation. Ultimately, citizens will make a choice
Community-based corrections are a way to inject more flexibility into Kansas' rigid corrections system. In community-based corrections, offenders who have been convicted of a committed crime are able to learn that is expected from them at a community. But community-based corrections demand a level of involvement and responsibility from communities that has been neglected in the past.
Kansas' corrections system suffers from too rigid application of security guidelines.
"WHEN YOU TAKE an 18-year-old kid, I'm not saying the kang's an angel, maybe he wrote $300 worth of bad checks, and I'm not saying he's helping mmosphere, are you helping him?" Marquez asked.
Community-based corrections are not a panacea, Marquez cautioned. But a more flexible corrections system offers two things to remedy the negative effect of incarceration.
First, it would mentally prepare the offender for the flexible structure of society beyond the confines of an institution. Second, community-based corrections would give offenders convicted of minor offenses a chance to learn,
Gilman also implies that there is something reprehen-
probably for the first time, what members of a community expect from one another.
ALSO BOTH prison security officials and prisoners complain that some of the prisoners are housed in prison institution institutions don't belong there.
the high proportion of minority groups in prison might become more visible, in turn raising public consciousness about the need to protect minority and low income recipients of court actions.
Finally and most importantly, community-based corrections would make corrections a community problem, instead of a purely institutional cul-de-sac.
Rethinking corrections philosophy is not the job of legislators or corrections officials alone. Those who are in correctional institutions eventually will re-enter society.
Substantial number choose B.G.S. degree
To the editor:
I think that I should respond to Mark Gilman's letter in the Feb. 8 issue of the Kansan, partly because the letter is factually incorrect in some respects and partly correct, according to the task force that is to study the B.G.S. degree.
Gilman states that only a small number of students receive the B.G.S. degree, citing the figure 1,200 and comparing it with a total enrollment since 1973 of 20,000 students. The significant figure, suspect, is the number of graduates receiving the B.G.S. degree each year, in proportion to the total number of graduates in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
Last year 364 students received the B.G.S. degree as compared with 169 who received with 167 and 82 B.S.; the previous year 435 obtained the B.G.S. 698, the B.A., and 84 the B.S. degree. So the number of student graduates with the B.G.S. degree constitutes almost 40 percent of each graduating class. The figure of 1,200 B.G.S. degrees awarded since 1872 compares with 568 with 82 B.S. degrees—this period includes one year in which the B.G.S. degree was not available. So we are talking about substantial percentage of college graduates.
KANSAN Letters
sible or punitive about studying an academic program. I would argue, on the contrary, that any university worthy of the name should constantly be involved in programs and curricula and attempting to determine their effectiveness. This is precisely what is being attempted now: the task force Works on Education Goals, one of a series of tasks forces set up by the College Committee on Policy and Education Goals. Other groups will study diverse aspects of the work and are concerned with advising and is in the process of preparing a detailed report.
As chairman of the Committee on Policy and Education Goals, I would very much hope that the information gathered by these groups will be helpful to the College in maintenance and improvement, while proponent of mutual to examine what we are doing educationally can lead to only complacency and stagnation.
I do not know why Gilman seems to be so concerned with the issue of "lenience". The task force, certainly, is not obsessed with that issue. We are concerned about the programs allowed by the program, followed by candidates, about the reasons for selecting the program and the majors chosen, and about the light that all this can sheen on the general programs of the College. We are
also concerned with relationships between work in the College and professional goals.
rually, I would object to Gilman's statement that the group was formed at "the whims of a few faculty members." The Committee on Policy and Educational goals a standing committee composed of elected faculty members and student representatives. In setting up task forces, it is acting in accordance with the newly adopted bylaws of the Assembly. I would argue that Gilman will welcome its efforts to examine our educational policies and goals.
Andrew P. Debicki Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
K-State jokes are misaimed
To the editor:
I suppose I can understand the Kansan staff's childish desire to respond to a probably equally childish editorial in the Kansas State Collegian. What I refuse to understand is why the staff of the Kansan k-State is that it is a farmer's school. The only thing wrong with being a farmer is that farming is a low, sometimes nonpaying profession, and a mostly
Liz Powers
Manhattan freshman
thankless one at that. At a time when farmers across the country are organizing so they can finally get their due, I consider the remarks made in it to be in especially poor taste.
Student sides with IHP prof To the editor
I am writing to say that I don't think Professor Quinn's letter Feb. 1 is a sign of any peculiar qualities other than the normal anger that anyone would wish to learn from the looks of Rick Hallman's letter Feb. 3, I think perhaps he could write a far jujurice letter than Professor Quinn could ever dream of under the same circumstances. I don't believe that the Integrated Humanities Program is the only worthy educational endeavor at KU,
out unfortunately it cannot live up to the full compliment because it is not religious at all. Instead, he told Watson's letter Feb. 3 a little more seriously, except that, by gosh, I kind of like Professor Quinn. And, really, even if I didn't, I can't say he hasn't worked in the past two years and that is what teachers are for.
Furthermore, I have to agree with Professor Quinn's view of the Kansan. I have often been surprised at how ruthlessly the journalists treat the faculty and students; they treat the students I think they are abusing their right of "freedom of the press" by saying anything they like about the character of their subjects to create a juicier story. This probably is not true in my own experience. I am sure there has been some undeserved libel written in the hallowed pages of the Kansan.
A. Biggs Kirkwood junior
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