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Tuesday, January 31, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
A word to the Aggies
The Kansas State Collegian ran an extraordinarily witty column last week about the University of Kansas. The Collegian's pundit, who mercifully will be granted anonymity, asserted that "in the stomach of Lawrence is the campus of Cosmo U. The campus is easy to locate—just look for a hill covered with concrete and brick eruptions."
Not content with that bit of sparking humor, the columnist also informed his readers, "The mascot of Cosmo U. is a rather homely creature sporting the unlikely colors of red and blue." The author also held forth at length about the generosity of Helen Foresman Spencer: "The museum was donated by the alumni from spare
change left over from last year's donut kitty."
IN THE interest of fair comment, the Kansan presents a condensation of what the staff of the Yale Daily News, in its book "The Insider's Guide to the Colleges," had to say about the institution it called "K-Straight." The verdict:
"Kansas State is the premier university in the whole world at which to learn to be a farmer. . . If your heart's greatest desire is to stop lops or harvest wheat, the city is extremely dull and will never be confused with Manhattan, the island."
The defense rests.
A new kind of homesteader is coming to Kansas.
More people moved into Kansas during 1976 than left it during the same period. Simply put, Kansas is experiencing the biggest migration into the state since the late 1800s. But that Kansas has had that kind of migration since the 1900-1910 census period.
New settlers coming to Kansas
The news of the state's population turnaround originally came from a study by Robert B. Flora, sociology professor at Kansas State University. The study is funded by the Ozark Regional Commission and the Office of Economic Development.
GOV, ROBERT F. Bennett's economic policy statement for 1978 cites the preliminary results of Flora's study, scheduled to be published this spring. The trend of migration
into the state, together with a generally healthy economic report for 2077, paints a bright picture of what is to come. But there is one exception.
As an agriculture spokesman said at the second Kansas Economic Outlook Conference last week, "We're just glad it looks as if it's not going to get any worse." One wonders how much worse things could have been. Personal income has dropped more than 61 percent since the end of 1973.
Despite the complicated problems with which the farm component of the state economy is affected, it apparently is an attractive
place to settle down and practice a style of life based on traditional American values.
"People are moving in because they like that area," said another two-thirds of the people moving into Kansas settle in areas that can be called family farm. "They're along the state's northern tier."
THE HOMESTEADER of the 1970s is better educated than his counterparts who are moving out of the state. Many of the settlers are professionals and want the opportunity to work in a city that traditionally a strong element in the community. They come to Kansas with a clear idea of the kind of life they're looking for. Although mining, manufacturing and construction have increased employment figures in recent years, the state is not directly related to those parts of the state's economy.
The new homesteaders are different from their predecessors.
They're better educated. They have more capital with which to shape their community niche.
But like the pioneers who crossed the Missouri River at the turn of the century, the new homesteaders see the family as the fundamental social unit. Although moving to Kansas to practice one day a profession and a family may appear hopelessly bourgeois to some, the trend appears to be growing.
Kansas' low poverty rate, the sixth lowest in the nation, makes the state a more cheerful place to live than metropolitan New Jersey or New York. His income declined more than three percent since the beginning of the decade.
THE STATE'S efforts at increasing tourism in Kansas appear needless in the face of its image as a good place to settle down and raise a family. In 2017, the White House revealed that many American tourists think Kansas is "drab," a latent inferiority complex that most Kansans seem to have prompted businessmen and officials to contemplate how to make Kansas drab.
Pouring money into research intended to make Kansas less drab is a misapprehension on the part of the state's leaders. The reversal of a sixty-year trend of migration out of the state has led to lend some credence to the view that Kansas' drabness may be the state's biggest attraction. Judging by the change in population, family's drabness may be an island family's EL Dorado.
Energy glut now conceals future needs
There was some promising and optimistic rhetoric presented at the Kansas Economic Outlook Conference last Friday at the Kansas University. Throughout the day, state economic experts preached prosperity for Kansas in 1978, basing their predictions on healthy economic indicators from 1977.
Gov. Robert F. Bennett told business leaders that with the exception of a declining farm income, the state was sound economically, the state is substantial economic growth and that he could grow the growth to continue in the future.
Benedict cited several indicators that he said added up to a healthy 1978 economy. It includes increases in personal income and the state's gross per capita income, decreases in unemployment, from 4.2 percent in 1976 to 3.8 percent in 1977.
THE OPTIMISTIC rhetoric and last year's data combine to create an illusion that all is well and will continue to be well for years to come. But this kind of optimism can turn into realism if Kansas is going to run head-on in the inevitable energy shortage. Substantial and sweeping measures must be taken now by Kansas business and industrial leaders to soften the energy blow when it does happen in the
Also, the current session of the Kansas Legislature must initiate and follow through with tough legislation that emphasizes energy research, incentives for use of alternate fuels and conservation.
William Hambleton, director of the
Steven Stingley Editorial writer
Kansas Geological Survey, captured the urgency for drastic energy measures when he told business leaders at one of the conference sessions. "Again we will have adequate energy to support energy storage," he said. "We will always in the direction of higher prices. Unfortunately, this scenario may continue to lead us down the primrose path of lack of concern for the long-term several years away when it is possible to significantly increase conservation and increased production decisions languis."
HAMBLETON GAVE several examples of energy sources that are now abundant but in the future will diminish in quantity and soar in cost.
One such example was crude oil. Although the cost of imported crude oil in 1977 from $13.33 a barrel to $14.45, Hambleton said the OPEC nations had purchased it machines and been at least until June, when they meet again to discuss a possible increase.
"There is an oversupply of crude oil on the market," Hambleton said. "In fact, a glut."
He said the oversupply was a result of a decrease in international economic activity, conservation, utility complying with regulation and the lack of unseasonably cold weather
and the completion of the Alaskan pipeline.
but Hambleton said that the oversupply should last for only another year or two.
“This oversupply provides an awkward contradiction for the United States, for the glut is short-term and temporary,” he said. “Convincing the public of the need for conservation is difficult under the circumstances.”
IT IS THIS difficult task of convincing disbelieving Kansans that oil and natural gas supplies soon will no longer be available. In addition, firms and business leaders now must cope with. There needs to be less preaching of the positive and more substantial action taken to prepare our state for a major overhaul of our energy
The impending energy problem is by no means exclusively a national one. Even though Kansas utility companies, industries and consumers are in the middle of an energy crisis, we must stay in our "healthy" state that indicate where we are headed.
According to Hambleton, production of crude oil in Kansas during 1977 reached a 40-year low at an estimated total of 57,500,040 barrels. Production of natural gas increased by about 26 percent. These decreases occurred despite an increase in drilling activity in 1977. A total of 3,815 tests were made for oil and gas; 74 percent were used for oil and gas; 26 percent were used for 26 percent exploratory wells. The success ratios were 68 percent for development wells
and a dismal 23 percent for the exploratory ones.
Hambleton predicted that in 1978 oil and natural gas production would decline again, although the decrease for natural gas probably would be less than in 1977.
THESE SIGNALS, as slight as they are, should alert the state lawmakers and executives that it is time for more than cosmetic changes in energy use and conservation practices. An unyielding standpoint of energy management to ensure more genuine and drastic conservation practices, tax incentives for businesses and individuals who use alternative energy sources such as solar power, and quick conversion from natural gas and oil to coal. The list should be done be done and should be done is endless.
Bennett, the Legislature and other state and private leaders are starting to do something about the energy problem as it creeps into Kansas. But it is slow work that needs to be speeded up. It is also going through an atmosphere deal with the problem are snagged and stopped, which has happened at the federal level.
President Jimmy Carter's energy plan, with its emphasis on increased conservation and not production, is a benchmark to be the guideline for Kansas legislators.
Bennett has told the current session of the legislature that the state's commitment to research, incentives for alternate fuel use and conservation has been "thus far embryonic." It is time for that commitment to grow.
Society better if Johnny learns
To the editor:
Recently it has become fashionable to blame the student—you know that mythic Johnny, the composite American inventor, is a graduate educational system. Roger Sipher's article, "Obligatory education has flunked out," which appeared in the January 26 issue of the Kansan, is no excuse for an educational system. Sipher exhorts us to consider the possibility that compulsory education has failed and that we, educators, taxpayers, parents and future parents, should consider that education will life counterparts) to attend school isn't beneficial to us or to his peers because Johnny—the bad guy--doesn't want to be in school, doesn't want to learn and doesn't add to the attaches of the educational process.
Letters
Ho him. Nowhere in the article does Sipher consider the implications of his simplistic solution to a very complex problem in the American social system to the dynamics of the American social system if we were to allow Sipher to lull us into believing his solution has merit. An incredible mess would increase an astronomical proportion nearly overnight the job-seeking population. The present jobs rate is approximately 16 percent for whites and 37 percent (or more) for blacks. What would the society do with a great influx of youth, poorly trained, and uneducated students? Perhaps I am misinterpreting Sipher's suggestion, but if the high school student shouldn't be in school because he or she doesn't want to be, then I suppose that the grade schooler would likewise be released from school attendance.
And that's the crux of the problem. While it is true that shamefully large numbers of high school graduates (and
even larger numbers of high-school dropouts) can't read well, what then would the literacy rate be if no compulsory education were required and students could drop out or be dismissed from school to reach a higher level? Inferable, that's what.
But let's leave the "Johnny can't read" problem alone to consider some other implications of Mr. Sipher's article: Namely, what will Johnny do all day if he can't work? Steal, rob, maim, terrorize, After all, Jolynny's parents probably
work all day, if he is lucky enough to still have two parents, leaving him without any daytime supervision. Granted, the school system wasn't designed to become an institutionalized baby sister, but rather a childmate. The '70s: It is, or at least it has assumed that function. So if Johnny isn't in school and if Johnny can't work, then Johnny will probably be caught doing something antisocial; and, like many children, he will be confined to another sort of institution—prison. Instead of having to spend tax dollars to
support an institution that isn't doing all it could to accomplish its mission—education—the taxpayer will have to support an institution that rarely succeeds in trying to teach any skills necessary to exist in this society. For those Johnnyms or James caught in the breezy easy answer, you might little possibility will exist for them to learn how to contribute to their society. They will be thrust into the apprenticeship of the criminal class.
True, I, unlike Sipher, have no answer to the problem of why the school system has failed to accomplish that goal. I refuse to believe that irresponsible suggestions such as Sipher's help
any of us to see clearly how we can overcome the shortcomings of the educational system at the primary and secondary levels. Yet if we are to find solutions to our problem, we need to build a school system, such solutions will have to come quickly and from people who are reasonable before someone—any one of us —is seduced into believing that we must answer all of their answers. I for one don't want to live with more bars on my windows, more guns in my home, more fear of walking the streets day or night than I do already. To get around this, we accept Siphereques proposals.
Thomas A. Settle Assistant instructor, department of English
Grad school blues varied
From all indications, it is not easy to be a graduate student.
--are practical and still tough are overlooked or minimized.
Actually, most graduate students probably are seeking only to advance their knowledge in their major area, expand their educational horizon, help them do a job. But they put up with a lot to accomplish those goals.
The ordeal begins as early as the middle of the senior year, when the inevitable questions arise: Can you do when you graduate? Are you going to get a job and make something of yourself?" The one who answers "no" is looked to grad school, is looked at askance and whispered about as a "professional student," as if he were in cabs with the effort to destroy the country.
WITH THE BEGINNING of the next semester, though, they are acknowledged and put to use. Students in Grade 12 graduate students in classes that allow undergraduate enrollment are assigned extra research and extra papers in keeping with their "extra"
They are dethroned as student monarchs. The seniors are responsible for such awards as HOPE and Mortar Board. The seniors hold the positions of authority more often than any other faculty member. The seniors are feted at the end of the spring semester with awards dinner, job interviews, parties and farewells to local taverns. When the excitement dies down, the students study hard. The students are barely acknowledged.
Graduate-only classes have no extra work—everyone carries the same heavy burden. Paradoxically, although their extra assignments in other professions by professors that they know how to do research, graduate students often are required to sit through classes on basic research in the first year of college. The techniques they probably were using as undergraduates.
The word "extra" seems to describe many things about graduate students, and is used by undergraduates as on-angers to the student population. They are the motion-picture business.
Graduate students suddenly play a smaller part in the University show. For example, graduate student senators elected by write-in votes usually outnumber those whose names were actually on the ballot.
John Mitchell Editorial writer
The undergraduate financial aid that served them well they find unavailable, causing them to look for extra work. The most-wanted jobs are those of University assistants, but even there the pay is about the same as a movie extra.
The circumstances of their existence force many graduate students into becoming more competitive and more willing to take chances than usual. University, who else has the courage to take on an 8:30 section of listless freshmen with the duty of getting them excited about Western Civilization, Alastair Watson would dare prove his knowledge and capabilities in human behavior by throwing himself into the assignment of a 50-page paper entitled *What Shirley on the aspirations of Kansas City youth?*
The increased competitiveness leads to fear, too. Looking over their shoulders you wonder if someone is gaining on them. Stories persist about how much easier it would be to get a master's degree in so many areas of thesis requirements, or in human development and family life, where the comprehensive academic question be discussed and prepared for before the actual exams.
The facts that 72 hours of credit are required in social work or that the HDFL exams
Graduate status encourages self-withdrawal. It is easy for a student shadowed by a pile of assigned, work, deep in experience, worried about money and worried about money to imagine that his situation is unique in the universe. With a walk to Watson and a stroll by the study cubicles in the stacks he himself must realize himself that he is not alone.
Perhaps best of all, though, is that at times when classes are finished and paperwork can be postponed, the graduate student can reflect on the fact that he is acquiring a degree, or about some part of the world and some day might contribute to its improvement.
AND THERE ARE advantages to being a graduate student. There is very little competition at enrollment for the course numbers that usually are higher than the Dow Jones averages. The graduate assistant can use usually no more than two hours of office. He can call professors by their first names. He's great at parties because he can remember, on any topic, "how the whole thing started." If he's lucky enough to be a teaching assistant or assistant professor, he will enjoy the distinctive University classroom experience from the other side of the grade books.
These words are written from the anticipatory side of the defense, but they also serve for venturing into the job market armed only with a backerke's degree. It's hard to remember to stand back for heavier ammunition.
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