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Friday, January 20, 1978
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unissued editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers
Fee waiver justified
Graduate students working as teaching assistants are approaching the final step toward realizing a fee waiver, after more than five years of effort. The fee waiver has been approved by Governor Robert H. Klatt and, if passed in April, will become a reality for teaching assistants for the 1978-79 academic year.
This measure is important not only for the individuals who will benefit directly and financially from a fee waiver, but for the University as a whole, which will benefit by being able to more actively compete for the best-qualified graduate students.
If the fee waiver is passed by the legislature, it would mean that teaching assistants and assistant instructors working half time would receive a full waiver of incident fees (tuition). Quarter-time assistants would have their tuition cut by half.
MANY OF KU's peer institutions already offer their teaching assistants a fee waiver and also offer higher salaries than KU. If KU is not to lose out in competing for top-notch scholars, it also must offer a waiver of tuition. Graduate students have the option simply as a subsistence wage, or there are serious doubts that KU's salaries even meet that level.
As it stands, KU compares badly with its nine peer institutions. Those peer institutions are Midwestern state-supported universities that KU generally uses as a standard in comparing funding for various programs.
The peer institutions are Wisconsin, Iowa State, Ohio State, Illinois, Oregon, Nebraska, Michigan State, Indiana and Iowa.
KU pays its teaching assistants an average salary of $3,550 for a nine-month period. Only one university among the peer institutions, Ohio State, pays a lower average salary than KU, according to a study done by the KU Office of Institutional Research and Planning. Ohio State, however, does compensate for its low stipends by granting graduate assistants a fee waiver...
THE OTHER eight universities offer substantially higher salaries ranging all the way to Wisconsin's $5,337. Five of the 10 peer institutions offer a fee waiver.
Even among the Big Eight schools, which are known more for their athletics than their academics, KU pays the second lowest salary for graduate students working as assistant instructors and teaching assistants.
The lowest average stipend is paid at Oklahoma, notorious for the meager salaries it pays its entire academic staff. What it all adds up to is this: KU is pitifully behind and must do something soon in order to lure ten students and keep them.
The quality of people teaching undergraduate classes and doing research at KU is a direct influence on the over-all quality and academic reputation of the entire University. This is especially true in light of the nationwide trend of decreasing enrollments that will, in turn, increase the competition for human resources.
BUT HOW DOES KU entice the high-caliber scholar?
Lynn Bretz and Mark Mikkelsen of the Graduate Student Council, the body that has spearheaded the political struggle for a fee waiver, say that one way to better the plight of graduate assistants is to raise their salaries. But a fee waiver has side benefits that a comparable salary increase would not, they argue.
For example, a fee waiver is untaxable income and would automatically cover any jumps in tuition. A fee waiver would withstand the inevitable pressures of inflation. Bretz and Mikkelsen also reason that a fee waiver would be easier to administer than would an attempt to raise salaries with every increase in the cost of living index.
IT IS DIFFICULT to find any fault with a measure such as the proposed fee waiver. Of course, the state will have to supply the funds needed to compensate for tuition fees lost because they were waived. Gov. Bennett has approved $243,194 of the $263,024 requested by KU. The amount is justifiable because it will benefit everyone at KU and will be an over-all boost to the educational system in Kansas.
Graduate students who are now teaching undergraduates and who will be the professors of the future are the irreplaceable core of the University's academic structure.
It is vital that they are the highest caliber and are well-paid.
He didn't know, nor would he have cared, about the elegant reception room discretely tucked into the recesses of the new museum. He wouldn't have been allowed there, and besides, he had come to see the paintings.
Museum paradise for art critic
With good insight, and a certain eccentric altruism, he decided to quit the premiere night's ceremonies and crowds. Stalking the packed galleries, muttering, "Trompe loeil!" Trompe loeil is real benery of the new museum, gored gowned ladies on his way out. He vowed to visit the collection the next day.
Not bothering with a leisurely perusal of the building's exterior the following afternoon, he walked quickly to the threshold. "If you really wanted neo-classicism, you ought to have built a walkway through three dwellings, odd numbers makes for better symmetry," he mumbled to the limestone columns.
The spotlights wheeling their beams through ice branches invited him to consider whether those inside ought to pay more attention to the hundreds of separating in the frigid night sky.
Once through the doors, he fell a gaze press upon his spine. Guards usually followed him to museums. This one didn't
AN INDEPENDENT basset hound, lounging in the snow, apparently felt as moved by the lights as the outcast critic, judging by the dog's rapt contemplation of the noisy generator and piercing spotlights.
The place was deserted.
"Where are the art lovers?" he smugly asked.
Nodding to Diana, released from her stone prison by a French sculptor, he heard being from the next galaxy.
"I WANTED Denver," a young woman admitted to her male companion, who evidently has an interest in illustrating the similarity between the bishop's gesture, finger pointing upward toward the heavens, and the No. 1 sign for players, fans and cheerleaders.
Strolling beneath a lintel leading to the collection of
Clay Stauffer Editorial Writer
Oriental art objects, the solitary critic stopped before each of the scrolls. He looked for the right amount of spontanity, finally sealing a friendship with a sister from Nagaoka Rosetsu, "Heron and Butterflies with Rock."
"Just right," he breathed slowly. Not toogarish with the painbox, the brush strokes showed the right angle, his face scorned those who made their opinions common as bread and butter.
"Why go to a museum if you can't get lost looking through the paintings?" he asked aloud. There was no response from the empty room. He remembered the stony glances he'd received from matrons and gentlemen the night before. He didn't
bother to consider his scruffy clothes. Weren't many of the personages in the paintings themselves rudely dressed?
Standing before David Sequeiros "Snarling Dog," the aficionado let go, a sigh of relief, to lie down bad managed to freeze a moment of rage in our critic and had then plucked the madness out painlessly. He brought on echo through the empty halls.
A DEVOTE of John Singer Sargent's brushstrokes, the pariah critic was disappointed when he married Sargent's work. The stained Mrs. Daniel Curtis had sat for the 28-year-old Sargent with impatience. The artist would have done better to pat him up and outcast it told himself. Variegated folds of clothing and aging, weatherbeaten skin would have been a proper match for his own canvas, as nearly perfect in his other work as anyone could imagine.
But when he spotted Winslow Homer's water color, "West India Divers," he relaxed. In the garden, he enjoyed palm sawing and clouds scudding, the museum's benefactress had instituted a window to those southern islands that dreamers like himself
He felt guilty about the disparaging remarks he had uttered the night of the opening. And as a token of the good will he had for the residents of this new museum, he saluted the pining figure of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "La Plata de Toleramman reminded him of Rossetti's Rosumand, languishing in another museum across the Atlantic.
THE SKETCHES executed by John Stuart Curry between 1938 and 1940 for the Kansas Capitol murals, still unfinished, jumped at him for their places on the wall. They struck our lonely critic as fine paintings in themselves. Curry's shady
figures hovering in high doorways seemed to envince Curry's distaste for the procession of civil servants who would be the trustees of his Kansas epic.
Having spent hours before Curry's murals at the museum, he tended to the prairie fire gaining ground on John Brown's rise, the parish critic became calm and full of joy.
Reminded that paintings, like windows, grow hazy and useless if not looked through and thus cleaned, he thanked Helen Foresman Spencer, who had been a patron of the "Gleaners," Albert Bierstadt's prairie sunsets and Homer's divers.
"Why go to a museum if you can't lose yourself through the paintings?" the pariah asked again, drawn to a Marsden Hartley landscape, waiting patiently for another critic.
He had come to see the paintings.
Keep tabs on bar associations
By MARK GREEN
N.Y. Times Features
WASHINGTON — Lawyers and bar associations must feel as if they are in a state of siege. For decades, unchallenged, they wrote the rules that defined their power, how to operate, why? Because professionals, of course, were only subject to self-regulation. Outside scrutiny by legislatures, courts and citizens was likely only security executives, not lawyers.
Today the bar's self-confidence, if not self-rule, has seriously eroded. Congress has vetted the economics of legal practice. Consumer and labor groups have sued bar associations for their anti-competitive and self-serving
In 1977 Law Day speech, Charles D. Brett, the chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals, surprised lawyers high-priced lawyers who "grab, grab, grab" because they may be killing the goose that lays the golden egg." and U.S. Supreme Court has had to instruct bar associations six times in a 15-year period—most recently June—to stay away from the institution or the Sherman Act by their rules against prepaid
legal plans, the advertising of fee information, and competition over fees.
In sum, bar rules have often operated to frustrate citizen access to the justice system.
BAR UNRESPONSIVE-NESS should now impire local consumers to organize and challenge local lawyers on the issues in their legal services. It is, of course, hardy unusual for citizens to take on a local utility, supermarket or bar. But take on a bar association?
Yes. But a secondary question is: What tactics can be used by non-clients to get the attention of this largely private organization? Several approaches should be considered in any group interested in reforming local bar groups:
- Organize. Form a broad group of interested citizens and organizations—perhaps calling yourself the Lawyer for the Community LAW—and then conduct a careful study of local bar rules and practices. The very fact of your study, and especially its publication in the press, get the attention, and respect of bar officials.
- Distribute fee information.
Obtain information from as many local attorneys as possible.
Distribute fee information to services. Then distribute the fee information.
results widely as a "directory of lawyers."
- Pro bono public? Send a questionnaire around to individual law firms inquiring into their free work: What percentage of all firm work is pro bono? Is it id hoc or rooted in a structured department? Release the results.
- PROPOSE A professionals' tax. Petition your bar group to "tite" each bar group at $10 each year-say $50. These dues could help fund a public interest law firm locally to represent otherwise unrepensible environmental interests.
- Who guards the lawyers? Bar associations rarely impose sanctions against incompetent or abusive law enforcement proceedings and to put laymen on disciplinary committees and on boards of governors. If non-lawyers can resolve complex social issues as jurors, they can do so in bar associations.
- Publicize with imagination. The leaders of LAW should send letters and opinion-page articles to local newspapers; they should address local groups and go on radio to talk about lawyer reform. If bar leaders should prove uncooperative, disaffain or hostile, peacefully pucket their offices with indictment. That honorable First Amendment activity can quickly get the attention of lawyers who shun publicity.
- Judge judges. As residents of Dorchester, Mass., have done, sit and observe judges in their courtrooms. If you can document a pattern of incompetence or abuse, present your case before the relevant judicial or bar authority.
- Work with local officials. Get local political candidates to take stands on bar-related issues. Contact representatives who are sympathetic to lawyer reform and discuss changes that be legislatively accommodated. Identify restricitions, requiring the bar to catalogue and release positions it takes on legislation, establishing a fee channel to resolve disburited fees.
- WORK FROM WITHIN and without. Give sympathetic lawyers to run for positions in the bar association. Or help a judge with his association to put pressure on the traditional one by its very presence. Both approaches have worked in Washington,
- Sue. Bring laws, especially class-action lawsuits if possible, against bar rules or practices that appear to be
As was true for the first people to challenge the health impacts of DDT and the Vietnam War, it will be more likely lines probably will be rebuffed, even ridiculed. But eventually some combination of these approaches could have changed the minds that the public will not forever endure the simultaneous facts of elitist lawyer associations, very high legal needs of most American.
A CENTURY AFTER the founding of the American Bar Association, the legal profession may yet accomplish the grand goal of Canon Professional Responsibility," which says that "a lawyer should assist the legal profession in fulfilling its duty to make legal counsel available to consumers and race the steps of meat packers and auto manufacturers, who in earlier years had also asserted that their self-regulation adequately protected the consuming consumer and prevented the administration preempted their private domains. Mark Green is a lawyer and director of Public Citizen's Congress Watch, a public interest organization of a recent Public Citizen's report, "Bringing the Bar to Justice."
unconstitutional or anti-competitive.
Legislative action likely
Gov. Robert Bennett says the 1978 session of the Kansas Legislature may be the most productive session in at least 13 years. According to his state-of-the-state address, Bennett's idea of productivity includes such things as additional aid to schools and a way to reduce local property taxes.
Bennett is not alone in his optimism for the success of this session. Senate Minority Leader Jack Steiner has been instrumental in the chair's ability to completely eliminate the 3 percent sales tax on food. And Steiner has hopes higher than Bennett's on what the state can do to enrich educational resources and other burdening property owners.
If it seems as if Kansans' wallets are being especially catered to this session, check the calendar. This is an election year. Bennett wants to be re-elected and the several state legislators' names will appear on state and national ballots in the fall. Because the executive and legislative branches hope that Kansans are taking note of their own best behavior this session.
FOR OTHER reasons, too, this session may well turn out to be productive. An estimated total of $23 million above the amount expected to be collected this year. That surplus, added to the $143 million already in the state treasury, will provide the legislators ample funding to draft bills from with Kansas and other states. At time, it will create favorable impressions of the legislators.
The adjustment of the 3 percent sales tax on groceries is likely to be a hotly debated issue; its outcome will be most concerning for both consumers and voters. Bennett's proposal that only the old and needy be exempt from the tax would cost the state a predicted $7.5 million a year. If the sales tax is wiped out completely, as it was in 2010, the state would take a loss of about $40 million annually.
Now seems to be the time to make the move to eliminate the food tax if it is really a burning, long-range wish of the people of
Kansas with the exception of the grim condition of the agricultural economy, the state is in good financial shape. The per citizen income of Kansas is $368 billion, and product has increased and thousands of new jobs were created last year. The state budget, as proposed by Bennett, is more than $2 billion for the state in the state's history—an important face pay-logically.
When the 1978 session opened
two weeks ago, 600 bills were
carried over from last year's
session. At the end of this
session, several key issues prob-
lematic as much as所 possible.
THE DEMOCRATS also seem intent on obtaining more state aid for local units of government. The Republican legislature has asked Bennett, is that the state government should provide help by which the local units can raise money on their own. They say they will have sans can be assured of some tax relief legislation this session.
Use value appraisal is a system that when fully comprehended is bound to create a major rift between urban and rural lawmakers. Because of its complexity and its controversial nature, the legislators are likely to save it for the next session.
The Kansas legislators who, after all, were politicians first, may be reluctant to arrive at decisions on emotional issues such as capital punishment and marijuana and abortion funding for the poor. Bennett himself has indicated that he is prepared to table his recommendation to a new medium-security prison in New York. He stead, he may just settle for expanded community corrections programs. Furthermore, Republican legislators in the House and Senate have already approved a $10 million request for a 7 percent across-the-board salary increase for state employees.
HOUSE SPEAKER John Carlin D-Smolan, and other Democrats have charged that Bennett stole much of his legislative program from the Democrats. It does seem peculiar that both parties would come up with very similar plans.
But what is more pertinent than who gets credit for what is that both parties are of such similar opinions about what will happen in the course of Kansas. If this legislative session, led by both parties in more or less the same direction, produces results that turn out to be favorable to Kansas, need only have a show on November.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas daily August 18, 2013
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