2
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, September 27, 1967
And then there was one...
Once upon a time there were four peas in a pod. They were as alike as four peas in a pod.
This bothered one of the peas. He was very conscious of his own attitudes, and of the coming harvest, and the fact that he might be like all the other peas in the pod. He turned inward, and decided to tune in, turn on, and drop out of the system. He became obviously different, and was known as the black-eyed pea.
The next little pea was very conscious that he had also started out like all the other peas in the pod. He was competitive and wanted to do well when the harvest came. He fit into the system beautifully and never got hung up on anything because he was busy trying to be successful. Busy, busy, busy.
The third little pea was kind of out of it. He didn't really know or care if he was like the
other little peas. He wasn't very competitive or ambitious, and existed within the pod without a lot of thought toward the harvest, or getting hung up, or much of anything else.
And then there was a fourth pea.
The harvest came, and the four peas graduated from the shelter of the pod into the world. The harvest came rather suddenly for the three peas, as though it were indifferent to what each pea had thought of itself while in the pod. One day, all too quickly, the black-eyed pea, the systemized pea, and the oblivious pea, found themselves part of that Big Bowl of Split Pea Soup in the Sky.
Which left the fourth pea. And a lot more for him to think about. . .
—John Hill
Associate Editorial Editor
Loan proposal faulty
A White House advisory board, the Panel on Educational Innovation, recently issued a recommendation that the federal government establish a novel loan program to help undergraduates pay their education expenses. Like many revolutionary measures, it has its faults.
The proposal calls for an Educational Opportunity Bank authorized to lend money to any undergraduate collegian or other postsecondary student for total finance of his education. In return, the student would sign an agreement to pay back a small percentage of his annual income for 20 to 40 years after graduation.
Shortly after the report was released, two national university associations representing 300 institutions released a joint statement rejecting the recommendation. KU Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe is president-elect of one of the organizations, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges.
To the student, the most serious draw-back of the proposal lies in the 20- to 40-year repayment plan. Although this may benefit the poor student by making his education possible, he would be saddled with a near-life-time indenture upon graduation.
In addition, both public and private institutions would no longer feel obligated to keep tuition and fees as low as possible, since the student could pay, through the loan, whatever is charged. With the resulting higher costs, the rich would be able to escape the plan, but lower-income students would be forced to accept the loan. Enter more discrimination in higher education.
The proposal could also destroy the whole concept of public higher education and the basis of voluntary support for private colleges.
A plan is needed to make higher education possible for the poor. This proposal, unlike another calling for income tax deductions for educational expenses, has too many pitfalls to be workable, however.
- Allan Northcutt, Editorial Editor
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
TO-DAY'S STUDENTS SEEM TO BE COMING TO COLLEGE WITH NO REAL GOALS OR PURPOSE."
... quotes...
Sen J. William Fulbright, D-Airk., on Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's plan for a "thin" antimissile system: "It will be thick before long."
"Who Have We Got Warming Up In The Bullpen?"
kansan book review
'Write-In'—both good and bad
By Scott Nunley
You must give credit to any publication that snatches up the student poem and passes it about. You must give delighted attention to the birth of an annual student anthology. And when its first issue offers you a score of good poems, you must buy and read "Kansas Write-In."
The poetry of Lynn Payer, Patricia Arrington, John Rezmerski, Allen Miller, Stephen Cromwell, Bill Holm, Ham Salsich, John Regier and Linda Matassarin is particularly remarkable. But, unfortunately, half the anthology is devoted to illustrations and poems by non-students.
It is difficult to criticize today's poetry. You cannot count the meter with a huge fist pounding out upon the seminar table an invocation to Jack Keats. You cannot add or subtract that count to arrive at a coefficient of poetics. You cannot even attempt with impunity the winnowing away of the world's prose gutterals.
Even Lynn Payer—probably the best of the group—fails to rise above prose in her "F theater Games." Her poem "To know an old building, inside and out," however, is poetry created from a prosaic subject.
Bill Holm, in his brief "Preface" to "Kansas Write-In," asks that the poetry be "not literary prose dressed up for the department committee," but "readable poems." To some degree Yvonne Evans, JoAnne Wikoff, and Jay Bremyer fail this test.
To know an old building, inside and out
To enter, if only once, each dusty Turret and austere door, to know what's Above, below—whose footsteps are likely, When. Others work in the building.
you work the Building, making you a god of some sort.
To enter, if only once, each dusty
and climb its stairs (up and down and Underneath) is power.
Mr. Holm felt the poetry proved that "the writer . . . has chosen, for a few moments, to live his own life as a man." It is Patricia Arrington's aliveness that transforms two sentences into her warmly pictoral poem, "This morning."
Ham Salsich, with images of loneliness and cold, turns the prosaic tasks of teaching and eating into new worlds. Bill Holm, when he avoids the mechanical images of emperors and bodies, reads with great speed and the power of starkness. John Regier has discovered the delight of blurring objects into subjects, but has not to learn that any trick quickly becomes tiring.
If Miss Payer is not the best writer of the anthology, then it is John Rezmerski with his "In small Kansas towns" and "What does the thought";
In small Kansas towns
at three a.m.
the houses fold and shrink
in the dark before the rain.
The people here float
through weedy dreams.
A mile to the west.
a breeze shakes the gravemarkers,
nudging the bones
through the dry soil.
I feel curiously alive
watching the heat lightning
across the cornfields.
The first "Kansas Write-In" has its amateurish poems. Its cover design is dull—much is made of cartography in pop art, but nothing is made here of the Kansas map. Its layout too frequently confuses one poem with the next and alternates Rose Ignatow's illustrations with deadly regularity.
But its poet-editors will learn. They have made a creditable beginning.
Paperbacks
From Italian literature comes Giacomo Leopardi's SELECTED PRCSE AND POETRY (Signet, $1.25), writing little known to most Americans but ranked by some as the greatest Italian lyric writing since the age of Dante. Mark Van Doren's 100 POUMS (American Century, $1.50) also is new, poetry selected by Van Doren himself.
Newsroom—UN 4-3646 — Business Office—UN 4-3198
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year. Recent holidays and examination periods. Mail subscription rates: $6 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 68044. Accredited goods, services and employment advertised to all in person. Guard to color, good or national origin. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
REPRESENTED FOR NATIONAL ADVERTISING BY National Educational Advocacy
National Educational Advertising Services
READER'S DIGEST SALES & SERVICES, INC.
360 Lexington Ave. New York, NY 10027
360 Lexington Ave., New York, N.Y. 10017