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Fridav. October 21, 1977
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent only the views of the writers.
Budget criticism valid
The Board of Regents institutions and their students will miss Mig Resent Henry Bubb after his resignation takes effect Nov. 1. But the value of the comments he made in explaining his resignation almost offsets the loss.
Bubb, the senior member of the board, could have quietly waited to leave when his current term expired Dec. 31. But he'd had his fill of the state's budget system, and the prospect of another round of fall budget hearings was just too much.
"Thev're so damn sillv."he said.
"I've gone through it 17 times, and I just decided no more. I've always thought it was a waste of the governor's time and the Regents' time."
INDEED, THE HEARINGS are a waste of time unless one enjoys hollow political theatre.
by this time each fall, the Board of Regents and its staff have spent hundreds of hours examining, cutting and approving the Regents institutions' budgets. The budgets have been submitted before they await the recommendations of Budget Director James Bibb.
"Then," as Bubb said, "Bibb cuts the hell out of it and the governor puts it back."
All of which is expected as part of the way
the game is played. About the only winner is the governor, who first gets credit for having a tough budget director, then later becomes a "friend of higher education" when he announces in January that he has restored most of Bibb's cuts.
IN THE MEANTIME, the Regents have wasted two days in hearings explaining why Bibb was unreasonable. The process is the same for each state agency. Then more games are played before the Kansas Legislature.
It is, as Bubb put it, a farce.
Bubb, head of Capitol Federal Savings and Loan Financial veteran whom components peril acked.
Bubb is not alone in his criticism. This summer, the Governor's Task Force on Effective Management called the system "too overburdened" and his post to try to dominate state agencies.
The students and institutions in the Regents system owe Bubb thanks for his 16 years of service on the Board of Regents and his continuing service as chairman of the board that administers the Higher Education Loan Program.
And if the state of Kansas heeds Bubb's plea, people in Kansas owe him thanks for helping them.
Vote for HOPE
Professors, like students, too often do not receive a pat on the back for a job well done. Today, seniors have a once-a-year chance to help缓解 the situation.
game Nov. 19, capping Higher Education Week.
The HOPE award is taken seriously by the faculty, and seniors ought to take it equally seriously. The HOPE bulletin is the only source of updated information on rare breed: competent professors who care.
Today is the final day to vote for finalists for the HOPE (Honor to Outstanding Progressive Educator) award, the only teaching award given solely by students. The award will be given at halftime of the University of Kansas-Missouri football
Seniors should stop by the Kansas Union
Seniors, the information boot or Wesley Hall
Coefficients.
Board puts bite on coach; frogs croak sigh of relief
A high school football coach in Eau Gallie, Fla., was reprimanded last week by the local school board for the morthodox tactics he used to inflict on his teenaged players to victory.
He bit the heads off frogs.
He wasn't asking them to go out and win this one for the ginner.
He didn't promise them new cars, dates or even steak dinners.
Apparently this had been going on for some time before the school board called a halt. The coach said it all started when he was finishing one of his inspirational spiels, attempting to get the team fired up against a tough opponent. As he looked out the window, he illustrated his determination, he spotted a笼—and bit its head off. The team went on to victory.
Such is the way legends are born.
Soon, decapitating frogs had become a requisite part of the team's pre-game or half-time rituals. The coach would say his team would bring home another victory. Parents even brought
Lynn
Kirkman
Editorial Writer
him frogs, he says, doing their part to help the team win.
SO WHY the sudden change of heart in Eau Gallie? Why has the school board decided that a basketball season is no longer appropriate?
One might hope that the board members finally came to their senses and realized that beheading frogs just might not be the proper way to teach young men good sportsmanship and the virtues of team spirit. Maybe, through some fluke of fate, they had been known in the locker room and they put a stop to the practice as soon as it came to their attention.
The coach has another reason. He says the team was winning last year—this year it had been losing.
Winning football games is a lot like falling in love. The participants can always come up with reasons why things
happen the way they do. Observers offer another set of reasons, and they're probably all equally valid. It may be intelligence, skill, physical strength. And there's a certain amount of that undefined element we call luck, fate or chemistry.
It may be hard for the coach to explain just why the frog trick wasn't getting the job done if you had gone old and old fire had gone out of his performance. Maybe it's time to find a new way to inspire the team. And maybe this year's awards aren't as good as last year's.
WINNING AT LOVE- or football- has certain rules, and there are times when the rules can work either for or against the players. What works on one team will not succeed at all the next time.
It was frogs in Eau Gallie last year. This year it'll have to be something else.
Anyway, the frogs of Eau Gallie are safe for the time being. Let's just hope they spread the word in the animal kingdom to stay out of the locker room.
Racial quotas ignore fairness
The U.S. Supreme Court is considering the oral arguments it heard last week in a case that could have a crucial impact on the civil rights movement. This case involves the question of reverse discrimination in college admission programs: Is it unfair to prefer preference to a member of a minority group over a white person with apparently superior qualifications.
The case concerns Alan Bakke, a white engineer who applied unsuccessfully to the medical school at the University of California at Davis in 1973 and in 1974. Bakke learned that of the 100 places for entering students, 16 places were reserved for estadistas, and most applications were considered separately from the other applications.
BAKKE HAD a grade-point average of 3.51. Those who were
admitted as disadvantaged students in 1973 had averages as low as 2.11 and, in 1974, as low as 2.21. Admission was based upon a point system in which Bakke scored 468 out of a possible 500 points in 1973 and 549 out of a possible 500 points in 1974, who were admitted had scores 20 or 30 points lower.
Bakke took the case to court and said he had been discriminated against in the election court ruled against Bakke. He appealed to the California Supreme Court, which reversed
Will the U.S. Supreme Court uphold the case? Let's hope so.
ADHERENTS OF such racial preference plans say the children underestimates the ability of blacks and is not the best predictor of the future. But such children are the vector of the future in most cases.
Mary Mitchell
Editorial Writer
Consider the numbers of students with high grade-point averages who are rejected by schools each year because they do not meet the required tests. On the other end of the spectrum, many students with low grade-point averages are accepted. Students have high scores on these tests.
If schools are to continue to use these criteria for judging a student's admission to a school, why bother with racial quotas?
Going to extremes to fill the minority quotas ironically has blighted the sense of fair play and rights movement was based.
Allowing students to enter schools merely to fill quotas can create further problems. If such students are truly disadvantaged and deficient in educational background, they are going to have difficulty with their courses. In many cases, the only way for them to succeed is to give them special consideration. Somewhere, fairness is lost.
Now Michael Straight, acting chairman of the Endowment, has come forth with a useful tip: he says to himself, he says, should stop making direct grants to individual artists, composers, poets and
ONLY JUSTICE William O. Douglas dissented. He is no longer on the court. Although he was wrongly ruled against the university, he suggested that minority students might be admitted under somewhat different criteria unrelated to race.
The Bakke case does not present an easy decision for the U.S. Supreme Court. Several years ago, the court had a judge who had avoided it. The case involved a white student who was refused admission to law school because of a quota system for minorities. The court said he must and would not rule on it.
WOULD IT BE right to allow a student to do a paper over or to do extra work for a test that he scored low on, while other students are not allowed the same advantage? Such cases do occur. Professors have been so intimidated by court action for plagiarism that they follow strict principles. The current rage of sung professors who give low grades bears out this fact.
Douglas was right. Minorities need to have the opportunity to be admitted, but a racial quota must be imposed in succession of minority candidates.
If the court decides that racial preference plans are the best way to assess racial special opportunities are represented in proportion to
their numbers in the population, group after group may petition to become one of the preferred minorities until no space is left in the professional school classes.
MOST AMERICANS belong to at least one racial or ethnic group. Among those that may have been born in first-generation immigrants, blacks, Chicanos, Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Italians and Chinese. Woman, handcapped or not, can sit somewhere in the picture, too.
Racial preference subordinates the value of the inferences made by the student virtually ignores the plight of the disadvantaged white student who often is in worse shape than a minority group.
Race should be a factor to consider in such a program but not an exclusive one. A white person should be able to qualify as a classmate he was economically or educationally disadvantaged.
AFTER MORE than a decade of federal legislation to upgrade the plight of minorities, it is time to reassess the progress. It is certainly not time to bend over backward trying to eradicate discrimination by a numbers game.
Fulfilling quotas is not going to uplift our steadily increased education standards. Improving the quality of education could accomplish this goal and could minority discrimination.
Let's hope that the high court will rule on this case with common sense. "Do much more than manage the elimination of discrimination hypocritical. What is needed is a sense of fair play across the board. Other winners become anachronistic.
Government has no business funding arts
WORD OF this expenditure eventually float; back to Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis. The senator hit the ceiling, all splattered out, and some time elapsed before he returned to the floor. Then he denounced the policy and awarded the National Endowment for the Arts his Golden Fleece of the Month.
By JAMES J. KILPATRICK Washington State University
To refresh your memory: A year or so ago, a Pittsburgh artist, Le Ann Wichukow, obtained permission from the National Endowment for the Arts for the production of a 20-minute film. Part of the grant financed a week in the Caribbean, where he photographed her at work. Most of the balance paid for a short flight in a small plane over El Paso in August 1976. It was during this flight that she learned to use unrolled while a camera recorded the interesting scene.
Let me return, if I may, to the business of the crepe paper, the sky divers, the sizingzer and the $6,000. Michael Straight has some further reflections, but I don't prompt my further reflections.
This is the fundamental question:
What is the federal government doing in the arts business in the first place?
the like. Such grants lay the endowment open to attack and cause more trouble than they are worth.
Straight ask: How is artistic excellence to be determined? It may be possible to reach a consensus in some areas. If 30 young pianists compete in a blind competition, playing the identical work, a competent jury usually will arrive at agreement on their talent. The musicians must think, think, thinks, of works of literature. But what of the visual arts? Here agreement comes hard.
"THEERE ARE Anti-Object Artists and Artwork Earthers; Conceptual Artists and Performers; Minimal Systematicists; and Minimal Systematicists;"
Traditionalists committed to form; and iconoclasts, whose sworn purpose is to annihilate all form in the visual arts. Given this range, standards become meaningless; no consensus can be assured," he said.
Straight's idea is to increase the public funds available for individual artists but to change the grant procedures. He would also permit artists to perpetuate the alienation between the artist and the taxpayer. Instead, he would have the government match purchase awards by art museums, galleries, libraries and phonies. By dispersing the patronage power, he thinks, a major obstacle to the continued
THE GENTLEMAN'S proposal makes sense; it ought to be promptly approved by Conference members. The museum had been willing to put up Endowment could have ducked half its responsibility. But Straight's temporizing sugared the begs the fundamental issue.
This is the fundamental issue: What is the federal government doing in the arts? You can search the Constitution from Article One through Article Seven and find not one shred of authority for Congress to establish a fashion. The power simply is not there. Only by stretching the general welfare clause to its utmost limit can ever a tenous budget be found for these expenditures.
growth of public funding for the arts could be removed.
EVEN IF the Constitution permitted such outlays, federal
subsides would remain a poor idea. At any given moment, thousands of artists, sculptors, poets, novelists, playwrights and public funds are given to Poet A, the funds must be denied Poet B. If the government smiles upon Sculptor C, whose financial and must be denied Sculptor D, who carves in classic themes. Erica Jong got $5,000 of the people's money in order to do a dirty book, "Tear Flyin' in Plains," what we have to pay for taxes?
No. sir, Artists, writers and composers should make it on their own or not at all. Once the government stamps its imprint on art and the government makes the race unfair. Congress is forbidden to make any law respecting an establishment of religion; by law it must be prohibited from funding establishment of art.
Renovated crowd rich but lonely
price increases gone Now our resident corporate
To the editor:
Clyde Walker, that beloved jockey of the KUAC money machine, has struck again, reasserting his belief in, and support of, the almighty dollar and those who control it. Once again the students of KU are faced with the threat of a football ticket increase. Had not Walker's attempts at keeping knowledge of the plan from the public been thwarted by the responsible reporting of the Kansan, students would have been confronted with the increase at a time when application was not be ineffective. (Is Clyde Walker's middle name really Milhous?)
When I first came to this University in 1973, the price of a student football ticket was $12. A ticket now costs $20, a $6 increase over a four-year period. That increases the prices that have come about in that span of time have been the addition of a giant, unisightly, computerized, commercialized scoreboard (paid for by the merchants who take up space on the revolving ad screen) and the number of empty seats in the student section, accompanied by an increase in the number of students on the hill (because they can no longer afford to pay the exorbitant ticket prices); and the addition of a coat of red uniform in the stadium. Where, Mr. Walker, has all of the money from ticket price increases gone?
KANSAN Letters
autocrat wants the students of the university to help finance such things as "V.I.P." seating, where the wealthy can sit in a room (the "village ball") and separate themselves from the "little people," and expansion of the "Victory Club" where these same people can feast and drink before games. Should not these facilities be charged so that they benefit from them? Why should the students foot the bill?
To top things off, Walker wants us to pay for a $300,000 addition to the press box (I have yet to see a time when a KU player was quite reported in the nation's press) and a $50,000 wall to enclose the south end of the stadium, so those who have attended a stadium and onto the hill need X-ray vision to watch the game.
Gary Kessler
Lawrence law student
Les Seaman
Shawne Mission senator
It will certainly be a sad day when, in the not too distant future, the team will be running out into the stadium, only to find the "crowd" consisting solely of those fans who have not been priced out of the football games and have been behind a glass enclosure (VIP seats), their cheers inadable to everyone but themselves.
Review terms
unprofessional To the editor:
Rick Thaemert has described himself better than the Beach Boys in his Monday review of their Saturday night performance. Our, and I quote, our head coach has overlooked several important aspects aspect in a Beach Boys' concert. Nostalgia, Mike Love's stage antics and that "middle-class mull about surpassing beautiful girls and cars" have been his trademark when they go to see the Beach Boys. Our students at KU regrettedly had to put up with
the tour's opening night sound complications, the poor acoustics perpetually present at Allen Field House and internal band conflicts, but the fact remains that a good time was had by all.
I would hope that as Theaerm matures as a reviewer for the Kansan, he will keep in mind that finding fault with productions does not make the difference of objective and well researched reporting with a minimum of personal bias is what the reader desires, at least until the reviewer finds his opinion nationally respected and sought after. The use of such descriptives as "monor, nervous rat, fart, monkey, and KU reviewers" should be noticed, reviewers whose professionalism warrants the same description.
Thornton Mason SUA president
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