Opinion
Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Jule Wood, Editor
Laura Roddy, Managing editor
Cory Graham, Managing editor
Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser
Brandi Byram, Business manager
Shaantae Blue, Retail sales manager
Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser
Scott Valler, Technology coordinator
Wednesday, November 3, 1999
Patrick O'Connor / Tribune Media Services
Editorials
Kansan report card
PASS
Science task force — Chancellor forms committee to ensure that science standards remain high at the University. A good move that will hopefully keep the Board of Education from making monkeys of us again.
Womyn Take Back the Night — March/rally sheds light on women's issues. It's a good event to raise awareness.
**Due process —** Student senators try to ensure students get fair hearings at the University. Downside: Spray-paint vigilantes get a chance to justify their handwork.
KU football team — Made Big Red(neck) fans squirm for almost three hours. Don't worry, after the great game we were too warm out to haul unwieldy goal posts anyway.
FAIL
Jim Gray — NBC sportcaster hounds Pete Rose in his moment of glory. Despite the rude interview, it's a good bet that the next baseball commissioner will acknowledge Pete's contribution to baseball.
Crazy bus driver — School bus operator leaves rowdy kid on the shoulder of 1-435. It's a good thing the little stinker doesn't ride a boat to school.
Gay panic defense — Accused murderer of Matthew Shepard says he was terrorized by a gay bully as a kid and that's what drove him to kill Shepard. The judge has thrown it out as a defense. What's next, the crazy bus driver defense?
End of the line for the trafficway may be beginning for mass transit
The controversy surrounding the South Lawrence Trafficway ended two weeks ago when the Haskell Board of Regents rejected the proposal to complete the trafficway along 31st Street. The idea of completing the trafficway project is now virtually dead, leaving $9 million for the city of Lawrence to use on transportation improvements.
Rather than using the money on road improvements, the city should invest in a city-wide public transportation system. The current transit proposal, supported by a student referendum, and City Commission election last spring, is long overdue.
Although devoting the money to public transportation may be diverting the money away from its original purpose of building roads, it is still a good idea. With a significant chunk of capital, the city — in conjunction with the University — can get a good jump on developing an effective public transportation system. Better yet, if the city pays for a transportation system with money originally meant for the trafficway, taxpayers will have to pay less of the initial costs.
Public transportation, not more roads, is the answer to Lawrence's traffic problems
win situation. If the city can use this money to get the bus system going and also encourage the public to use it, eventually there will be fewer cars on the road. Haskell Indian Nations University will be happy because the trafficway won't run by its school. The environment will not be hurt by the construction of new roads and will be improved with less car pollution. The goal of easing traffic woes will be at least partially achieved by instituting a good mass-transit system.
It's an easy argument to make. Developing an effective, inexpensive public transportation system is a win-
Concrete wastelands from Los Angeles to Johnson County have proven that wider roads don't solve traffic problems. Getting people out of their cars and onto buses is the only way to really end road congestion.
Kursten Phelps for the editorial board
Kansan staff
Chad Bettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editorial
Seth Hoffman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Associate editorial
Cari Kaminski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . News
Juan H. Heath . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Online
Chris Fickett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sports
Brad Hallier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Associate sports
Nadia Mustafa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Campus
Heather Woodward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Campus
Steph Brewer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Features
Dan Curry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Association features
Matt Daugherty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Photo
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T.J. Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Wire
Melody Ard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Special sections
News editors
Becky LaBranch . . . Special sections
Thad Crane . . . Campus
Will Baxter . . . Regional
Jon Schlitt . . . National
Danny Pumpelly . Online sales
Micah Kafitz . . Marketing
Emily Knowles . Production
Jenny Weaver . Production
Matt Thomas . . . Creative
Kelly Heffernan . Classified
Juliana Moreira . Zone
Chad Hale . Zone
Brad Bolyard . Zone
Amy Miller . Zone
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Broaden your mind: Today's quote "The incestuous relationship between government and big business thrives in the dark." —Jack Anderson
How to submit letters and guest columns
Letters: Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
Guest columns: Should be double-
spaced typed with fewer than 700 words.
The writer must be willing to be photo-
naphed for the column to run.
All letters and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions. For any questions, call Chad Bettes or Seth Hafthom at 864-4924.
If you have general questions or comments, e-mail the page staff (apinion@kansan.com) or call 864-4924.
Perspective
Rainforest farmer gives glimpse of Costa Rica
Carlos Sancho looked like my Iowa-farmer ancestors — rail thin, a bit humed, thick weathered fingers and sharply dressed in blue pants and a short-sleeve button-down shirt.
Slap a pitchfork in his hand and he could pose for "American Gothic." Except Sancho doesn't grow
grain or raise livestock. He tends an acre around his house filled with plants used in medicine and food.
He's a shaman of sorts to the small, cooperative, agrotourism community of Cerro de Oro, located in the jungle of Costa Rica's Osa Peninsula. Cerro de Oro (hill of gold) was originally a gold-mining camp during the mid-1980s Osa gold rush. Miners descended in droves to the peninsula, and especially Corcovado National Park, which Cerro de Oro borders
Matt
Merkel-Hess
columnist
qonimer @ kansan.com
This area contains some of the best preserved lowland Pacific rain forest in Central America. To save the jungle from the havoc of mining, the government evicted or bought out the miners. About 10 years ago, Cerro de Oro was turned into the community it is today. To experience agri-tourism and the jungle, all the students and two professors from the our program spent a weekend there.
To get to Cerro de Oro, we followed nature's own roads — rivers. In the town of La Palma we boarded a flat-bed trailer pulled by a tractor and used sandbars, an occasional road and rocky riverbed to grind our way upstream. Twice, water lapped over the edge of the trailer. Throughout the bumpy, three-hour ride, our views progressed from barbed-wire fenced pasture land to the dense jungle of the neotropics.
Trees towered overhead, vines draped like garlands, and spiky orange heliconia flowers poked out along riverbanks. We spotted birds such as the rare, white and black king vulture and the magnificent red, blue and yellow scarlet macaw, which was once commonly found in all of Costa Rica.
It's no wonder people choose to live or travel to this spot, miles from anywhere. Don Ricardo, Cerro de Oro's energetic director, was our guide
for much of the weekend. In rapid Spanish, he told us of the area's history, efforts in sustainable development, taught us how to press sugar cane to make a sweet juice (it tastes similar to sweet corn) and on hikes performed lunches wrapped in large leaves. These waxy leaves kept the rice, beans, fried bananas and tortillas warm for three hours and were a handy, recyclable plate. He also showed off their new 1750-watt hydraulic electricity system, enough to power about forty 40-watt bulbs. It also provided enough juice for us to watch the Tvson-Norris flight on the communal TV.
Then there's Sancho and his garden. This man, who once studied feminist psychology in the Czech Republic, lives at the highest point of Cerro de Orca's 10 or so buildings. Well into his 70s, he tirelessly explained his garden and the plant's uses, always with a grandfatherly twinkle in his eye. He showed us more than 60 plants, some familiar such as oregano, vera and citronella. But the vast majority of his garden is unknown to North Americans. Plants such as zacate de violenta, used in fine perfumes; calahuala, which has anti-cancerous roots; and apazin, which can relieve asthma.
There are some at Cerro de Oro who know many of Sancho's plants, and he mentioned students and researchers from around the world who had come to study with him, but there is no apprentice who will carry on his garden and the knowledge of the plants.
"I want honest people like you to work with," Sancho said. "Students who have an interest in the cooperative."
But many don't want to come he said. They are unwilling to give up life in cities, nights at the bar and the convenience of a supermarket.
Cerro de Oro and Sancho's garden will go on, surviving on the adventurous tourists who make it there.
And on the hike out, while crossing the Conte River 25 to 30 times, some of the students already were scheming how to return for more than just one weekend.
After all, Sancho needs some help tending his garden.
Merkel-Hess is an Iowa City, Iowa, junior in journalism and environmental studies.
Board of Regents skewed by capitalist membership
This is not the board of directors of a local corporation or members of the chamber of commerce. It's the Board of Regents for the state of Kansas. Like most governing institutions in this country, the Board of Regents is dominated
A grain farmer and ex-senator, a director of a Kansas City foundation, another farmer and rancher, a real estate agent and ex-House of Representatives member, the owner of a real-estate investment corporation, the CEO of a bank, a real-estate broker, the CEO of a tractor company and a music instructor.
by the business and professional classes.
At face value this concentration of capitalists may seem unimportant, but it holds serious implications for how the goals and purposes of higher education in this state will be framed, and, consequently, what will be identified as problems with the schools and what will be seen as solutions to those problems.
Aaron Major columnist
I'm not suggesting that the Board of Regents is malicious. It is not the board's
ment that I am questioning, but rather the members' perspectives. We all have a certain perspective, shaped by many things including our job, economic status, level of education, race, gender and so on.
On mts campus, as is probably true with the rest of the country, we recognize the need for diversity when it comes to race and gender. We realize that the perspectives of other groups can help us old issues in new ways and provide creative solutions to many problems.
This attitude towards diversity has not, however, been applied to class. Look around at your national leaders and your boards of governance, and look at who's on them. Most will be business people or professionals and many have served in other leadership functions (i.e.
Congress, chambers of commerce, boards of corporations, etc.)
The pattern found in the Kansas Board of Regents is not an isolated incident, but rather part of a pattern. Last time I checked the Board of Regents at Princeton, most of its 39 members where corporate heads, government officials, or lawyers, including Steve Forbes and representatives of J.P. Morgan, Citibank, The Gap and Landmark Communications.
I know that you may look at this and feel a little helpless in terms of what you can do about it. Well, I'm not going to be much help here because unfortunately these patterns found in higher education reflect the ways in which we structure our society, so the solution touches at the root of the political economy itself.
For starters, the state of Kansas could become a pioneer of progressiveness (needed in light of the evolution decision) and have Regents members elected, not appointed. It's a small step, but an important one in achieving much-needed diversity.
In 1991, former President George Bush set up the New American Schools Development Corporation to reform education as part of his America 2000 program. In this group you had people from Boeing, BellSouth, Honeywell, the American Stock Exchange, Ashland Oil, AT&T, Nabisco, and B.F. Goodrich, to name a few.
Although the "corporateness" of the Kansas Board of Regents pales in comparison to these examples, the same pattern exists. As a society, we have flooded our educational boards of governance with the capitalist class, inextricably the future of education to the future of the global economy.
Major is a Deerfield, N.H., senior in sociology and American studies.
A truly democratic education needs a truly democratic system of governance. We need an education that serves the needs of all people, no matter what their perspectives, instead of serving the needs of some people with a business perspective.
Feedback
Flag means slavery
John N. Martin out of Charleston, S.C., claims as unbiased history that slavery was not at issue in the Civil War, just the states' rights to control tariffs and taxes, yet at the same time abolitionists caused the war by despising the Southern way of life; also, that the stars and bars doesn't symbolize racism, yet at the same time is used by "immoral if not damnable" elements; and moreover that those who don't buy this self-contradictory mishmash are "ignorant fools" (Kansan, 10/27/99).
Only an ignorant fool would try to tell Kansans to their face that the Civil War did not start in Bleeding Lawrence four years ahead of time, that it did not involve people fighting for and against having slavery within Kansas, that seven years later Quantrell did not fly the stars and bars when he did not burn Lawrence, and that all of this struggle that did not happen in Kansas was based purely on the (anti-slave) federal government taking away the natural rights of the (anti-slave) majority in Kansas to levy tariffs and taxes.
140 years later a minority of white Southerners are still
spouting this defensive claptrap for three main reasons. First, they don't like to admit that some their ancestors perpetrated monumentally evil and dishonorable acts. (So did some of mine, but I don't feel any need to lie about it.) Second, in their hearts they really don't like Black people. And third, they want to be able to say these things symbolically without actually admitting them, by displaying the Confederate battle flag.
David Burress
Associate scientist
KU Institute for Public Policy and
Business Research