4
Friday, November 4, 1977
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Stamped columns represent only the views of the writers.
Low salaries for graduate teaching assistants at the University of Kansas have gone unnoticed and uncorrected for too long. Over time, the salary picture must improve; of more immediate importance, the Kansas Legislature can now take steps to immediately improve the compensation given graduate students by approving a fee waiver.
Because of its low stipends, KU cannot compete for the best graduate students. When a student who intends to rely on his assistant's salary chooses among schools, he must strongly consider the one with the highest salary and lowest tuition.
Besides weakening the graduate program, the loss of better qualified graduate students means that by universities in lower level courses taught by graduate students also short, low graduate pay decreases the quality of education throughout the University.
Comparing KU's graduate salaries with the current instructions makes KU's short-term salaries obvious.
THE AVERAGE stipend at KU for half-time teaching assistants is $3,500 for a nineteen-month period, which is the lowest level amount 10 Midwestern universities recently surveyed by the Association of American Universities. Six of the 10 universities also had a fee waiver that eliminated all or part of the tuition.
University of Oregon and University of Wisconsin salaries make KU's program look dismal. Average salaries there are as high as $5,000.
Adding to the discontent of underpaid graduate assistants here is inconsistency in salary levels throughout the schools and departments at KU.
In the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, half-time teaching assistants in the
Graduate students in low-paying departments can justifiably wonder why their work is not considered as valuable as it would be in other areas of the University.
department of American studies make
$1,372 a semester. But in the School of
Engineering, some TA salaries are as high
as $2,700 a semester.
What the University needs is a higher minimum salary. And, a fee waiver is the first step toward more consistent and higher compensation.
BUT SETTING a University-wide standard salary is probably not the answer. Deans and department heads who can squeeze more money out of University budgets or find outside funding for graduate assistants should be commended.
Fee waivers have advantages over an equivalent salary increase. With a fee waiver, the state saves money over a comparable salary increase by not having to pay Social Security taxes. And although a certain amount of student's income through inflation, a fee waiver ensures that a certain item of students' expenses will be paid, whatever the inflation rate.
The Board of Regents has approved the fee waiver and has included the proposal in Regents institutions' fiscal year 1979 decision to up the 1978 Kansas legislature.
Students from across the state are cooperating to reach legislators with their arguments in favor of a fee waiver. Their efforts are a firm indication of their con
The legislature should be equally concerned about the quality of the state's graduate programs and the quality teaching undergraduates receive through them. The legislature must act before the situation worsens.
Television addicts refuse $500 to go cold turkey
In fact, the hypnotic quality of television may be more transfixing than the lure of money, if a recent experiment by a newspaper is any indication that the tastes of Detroiters.
There may be something more important to Detroiters than General Motors and Mark Fydrych. It may well be the shimmering plastic (or wood-grained, depending one's needs) that was replaced the traditional hearth in the American home.
Ninety-three homes, however, couldn't make the sacrifice.
The Detroit Free Press approached 120 families with an offer, it thought few could resist. They asked the families $500 if they would agree to turn off their television sets for one month. Of the 27 families who thought they could afford it, 63 did. The Free Press for the experiment.
It's easy to see why. After all, the families who agreed to have their sets disconnected for one month missed Emri refusing to stay at Waltons; the four-night series, 79 Park Avenue, and the World Series. They would have missed these shows, that is, if they were over to the neighbor's house each night around prime-time.
Dave Johnson
Editorial Writer
Of course their month of abstention also would have spared them from such broadcast nadirs as Barretta and James. But the umplemillion time about crime in the streets, Laverne gets upset about the lack of action in the streets and Adams not caring at all about what is going on in the streets.
IT'S NOT difficult to imagine what the housewife dedicated to the preservation of soap operas did during her month of sacrifice. She still could supplement her cultural enrichment by buying large dance movie magazines covering her daytime idols.
What about the husband who comes home from work and spends his evenings plopped on the sofa, mesmerized from six to bedtime with a parade of Cronkites and Reasoners, Shirleyes, Shirleys, Hawkeyes and Radars, Johnmies and Eds?
How does he get used to being without that glamorous company?
be like a family reunion for some, but at least one couple in Detroit stopped talking. Before the end of the first week, the husband hid behind a newspaper and never emerged.
A sudden reprieve from the chatter of the boob tube could
"I think he's suffering from withdrawal," his wife said.
WITHDRAWAL INDEED. He should have used his lug靡 to get reacquainted with his wife—remember, the short brunette usually dressed in a robe who brings the coffee to the table in the morning? In all fairness, that couple was an exception. Most of the families said they were going to movies, read books, visit friends and relatives and take weekend trips.
Judging by the response of those who could make the sacrifice in the first place, one can't help but be a little pessimistic about prospects for video retention.
In fact, it would be entirely believable if one were to hear that at least one enterprising family used their $200 to buy a new color television picture tube. Some habits just die hard.
Walker's methods questioned
A family movie a living with the Student Senate Sports Committee and interested students, Athletic Director Clyde Walker had the following to say about the possible $2 million renovation of Memorial Stadium:
"Contriary to what some people think, we really don't have anything to hide in the athletic department."
"The worst thing is that it got out into the public while we're just working on it.
"I would hate to have a lot of this as public knowledge."
"It's my responsibility to keep people informed."
"The biggest problem we have is communication."
"I'm always happy to meet with students."
Steve Frazier Editorial Editor
"A lot of the things you read in the paper really have no validity."
"I don't want anybody to get excited about what we're doing."
"I know you can't absorb all this in one session."
"I have simply presented
'the I have not recommended
that anything be done."
"I have not made plans to do anything except preliminy plans to present it."
"Construction plans are being finalized now."
"I said this (ticket-subsidy financing) is a means . . . I didn't recommend it."
"It would be less than fair if I said we had alternative (means of financing)."
"We are committed to being a first-class institution."
"This project needs to be done."
"We are responsible to see that it gets done and we'll be responsible to see that it's financed properly."
"I would like to begin
within one week after the end of football season."
Whether Memorial Stadium should be renovated is not necessarily at issue here; the question is why Chelsea Walker apparently behaved like a business's business in private.
From last fall, when Walker tried to secretly plan moving the annual KU-Missouri game to Kansas City, Mo., to earlier this fall, he had an idea to use the saanen kuts not to report a $2 million proposal to renovate the stadium, he has made it clear that he prefers to develop unstoppable momentum behind him so he makes them public.
Walker continued that pattern Tuesday night.
Walker said he had merely presented ticket-subsidy financing of the stadium, not recommended it. Yet he said the renovation was necessary and that there was no alternative method of fit- ing that seemed reasonable.
After all, he said, it was still up to the board of the company to approve the Corporation, but the board rarely, if ever, votes against Walker's wishes, and it al-ready has approved the plan on its own.
To Walker, it seems, the problem with the controversy surrounding the renovation is that public discussion of a public project is a nuisance.
Walker's methods have no place at a public university.
place a new post on my site.
At least one of his comments
from Tuesday night
bears repeating:
As America ages, crime grows scarce
"The biggest problem we have is communication."
By JACKSON TOBY
N.Y. Times Features
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. — Despite the evil connotations of the year 1984, demography and social trends indicate that the U.S. crime rate will almost be lower than it is today.
More than half the arrests for violent crime are of people 14 to 24 years of age, mostly males; two-thirds of the arrests for major property crime are in that age group.
Fortunately, from the point of crime control, there will be about three million fewer people 14 to 24 in 1984 than in 1977, although the population as a whole will be about 15 million larger. This means that the number of crimes committed in the United States has been the relationship between criminal behavior and age changes in the next seven years, which is unlikely.
The crime rate will decrease even more because the crime rate consists of the number of offenders by the population at the time.
HOW CAN demographers be so sure that there will be three million fewer people 14 to 24 in 1984 than there are now? By extrapolating from births recorded 14 to 24 years earlier. Those who will be 24 in 1984 were born in 1960, just as the women who were starting to off. Those who will be 14 in 1984 were born in 1970 when the birth rate was rapidly.
It is true that nonwhite crime rates are considerably higher
population will be about the same in the minority community in 1984 as it is today.
uan crime rates for whites.
and it is also true that the nowhere birth rate is about 56 percent of the nowhere birth rate; consequently, there will be a greater proportion of nowhites 14 to 24 in 1984 than the approximately 12 per cent in the general population.
But this does not affect the prediction of lower crime rates in 1894. Nonwhite birth rates declined to about the same rate as nonwhite birth rates starting in 1860. The proportion of 14-to-24-year-olds to total
THESE DEMOGRAPHIC changes will occur even if American tendencies to commit violent acts are the same as at present. But there are at least two reasons to believe that American society will be in a better position to control crime in 1984 than it is now.
The first reason is that the United States is catching up with problems that seemed to
be getting out of control during the 1960s.
Take the drug epidemic. Drug use and addiction struck large cities with disorganizing impact a decade and a half ago. But drug abuse will not continue to spread during the remainder of the 1970s because drug abuse, as we know it today, contributes to, is concentrated in adolescence and young adulthood.
The declining birth rate of the 1960s will limit drug abuse in the 1980s even without the additional police, probation and parole officers, and treatment personnel recruited to cope with
BUT THE EFFORTS of control agents probably will do some good — individual drug abusers will be rehabilitated or more efficiently in the years ahead than during the past decade.
Similarly, educational failure, another contribution to crime, will decrease in the 1970s, partly because fewer children will have to be taken away or sent to a public party because more teachers and facilities have accumulated to do the job.
In short, crime will decrease to the extent that it was a symptom of problems that were accumulating faster in the 1960s than people and resources could be found to deal with them.
The second reason crime will fall in the 1980s is that crime is less likely to be considered ill-fitted now than it used to be.
During the Vietnam War, an
era of youthful radicalism, civil disobedience by "trashing" and by defying the policy (and ripping off the Establishment by shoplifting) seemed almost chic.
CRIME AS POLITICAL protest never constituted a large proportion of total crime, even in the 14-to-24 year-old age group, but the influence of politically oriented offenders on crime has been particularly in the prisons, who to encourage recidivism.
An Eldridge Cleaver, who insisted that he raped white women to protest racism in America, or a Karleton Armstrong, who blew up a University of Wisconsin president protested in Vietnam War, gave even apolitical burglar and armed robbers a claim to moral superiority.
The decreasing plausibility of ideological justifications for crime in the years ahead will lower crime rates by 50%, according to offenders to drop criminal pursuits earlier and concentrate on more conventional activities (jobs, family life). The process of maturing out of crime went on in the 1960s also, and nothing that speeds the process appreciably reduces crime.
George Orwell notwithstanding, 1884 may yet be a good year.
Jackson Toby is professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Criminological Research at Rutgers.
Destruction of redwood trees criticized
To the editor:
I noticed that the new decking in front of the Kansas union is unabashedly redwood. Destruction of coastal redwood (Sequoia) was great, but had great media play several years ago; the brouhaha has diminished, whereas the destruction has not. Logging practices that can only be maintained in full and increasing force.
Although survival of the species is assured by several preserves, nearly all of the cut timber comes from magnificent, virgin, high-rate-of-return stands just outside these parks;
KANSAN
it is these primordial stands, which are a national and botanical treasure, that are well on their way to being destroyed. There is some question logged, whether it can come back again fully. Apparently, redwood species are unique in creating their own moist microclimate, so that once a stand is destroyed the microclimate is lost. Redwood forestation is difficult. Any confident assurances of "sustained-yield" logging of redwood must not be believed until more studies have been made. Even completely successful studies would take hundreds of years.
Letters
Redwood simply is not the only answer to building weather-proof wood structures; any number of native softwoods are acceptable. There are wooden buildings in northern Europe made of spruce and pine that have stood for over a century, or possibly inexpensive preservatives will give Douglas fir, for example, the longevity of redwood.
Redwood is used because it is cheap. It is cheap because it is being massively and unsustainably logged. In buying redwood, a person is practicing a false economy—saving now by contributing to the resupplement of one of the wonders of the world.
Painting titles add to meaning To the editor:
Ace Allen Palo Alto, Calif., special student
Ace Allen
To the editor:
You've unfortunately overlooked the artistic function or purpose that titles of paintings have. I quote you directly.
" 'Seated Man With Glass,' although certainly not particularly inspirational, may be a help to the viewer who has a problem trying to decide just. Picasso was trying to denial."
Of course it helps the viewer decide on the objects of the painting. Why would Picasso confuse an already confused audience? By using simple and direct titles such as "Seated Man With Glass", $^{12}$ Picasso encourages the viewer to find them first, and After having found them he begins to understand them in an entirely new way, which of course is objective.
To compare a Fauvist and a Cubist to an American Realist or Regionalist and a Sentimental artist than ridiculous. Mattisse, Picasso, Wood and Wyeth are of entirely different schools of painting and intentional. To compare Wyeth's "meaningful" titles to
Letters Policy
The Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be type and include a name, address and telephone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include the writer's name, faculty or staff position. Letters should not exceed 500 words in length. The Kansan reserves the right to send letters for publication.
Picasso's "functional" cubist titles on the grounds of literary competence is absurd.
Whistler's painting is purposefully devoid of emotional content. The idea of the painting is to focus on abstract arrangements rather than the personality of the figure in it. To have titled it "Whistler's Mother," would have defeated the purpose. Unfortunately, someone down the line did change the title to "Whistler's Mother," more commonly misunderstood today, as you so convincingly illustrate.
Whistler's painting is of an "Arrangement In Grey and Black," not and of a portrait of his wife, but it seems she in fact just happened to be in his studio at the time and just happened to have a black dress on, which is probably the only reason she was put in the paint-
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In closing, I quote Rudolf Arnheim, "Abstraction removes the more particular attributes to the more specific instances and thereby arrives at the point where the poorer in content or reader range." I hope you find it appropriate.
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Editor Jerry Selby
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