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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tuesday, September 26, 1967
Hope in the OAS
In a year in which most international organizations seemed to convene merely to select their cemetery plots, the recent show of concord by Organization of American States nations brings hope for the future of international cooperation.
One cannot deny, of course, that circumstances surrounding the OAS meeting were dismal and foreboding. Communist harassment of Latin American countries had reached an all-time high in quantity and quality. Continuing hints that the wonder of the Cuban revolution, guerrilla chief Che Guevarra, is clandestinely rolling the ball of Communism throughout Latin America, were giving many countries severe cases of nerves.
Certainly the atmosphere at the conference itself was not always solid smiles and goodwill. Although Latin American countries are concerned by the growing plague of the Creeping Castro, U.S. admonitions that the countries must blackmail all non-Communist firms dealing with Cuba did not go over with all of her co-leagues, and the blacklist idea was dropped from the sanction pact.
Furthermore, the application of new sanctions against the Castro government, does not insure the hindrance of his plots against Latin America. Previous sanctions against Cuba by
the U.S. and other American countries certainly have made Castro's people hungry. Although Communist countries have improvised elaborate and costly subsidy programs to keep Cuba alive, rationing is her way of life and her relations with other countries virtually have been paralyzed by a lack of foreign exchange with which to barter. Yet Castro's school for Latin revolutionaries appears to have a robust and growing student body.
In spite of drawbacks surrounding last week's OAS conference, the very fact that the American nations finally met and agreed upon a concrete plan of action forecasts hope for the hemisphere. The United States still acted as "big leader," and the Latin countries still rejected some of her ideas; yet the organization emerged with a policy which is not merely a wad of cotton.
The attributes of the new OAS program are yet to be proved, but the benefits of a united organization are obvious. Surely the strong commitment of the OAS, rather than a loud solo cry by the United States as it drags a somewhat reluctant Latin America along with it, in produces a more formidable opposition to potential Communism than any single economic decision can ever present.
— Betsy Wright, Editorial Editor
Things rough all over
The dining hall is unnaturally quiet this year. True, a newly-laid carpet eliminates the spine-tingling scrape of chairs on tile and garbled dinner conversations no longer ricochet off the floor. But the presence of a rug doesn't explain the cafeteria's eerie silence most noticeably felt by upperclassmen. This lack of noise in indicative of the fact that another Bethel tradition is being challenged—freshman initiation.
In past years upperclassmen have been serenaded at dinner by freshmen singing choruses of "Onward Bethel." But now one cannot even hear carpet-muffled strains of the fight song simply because no one is singing it.
Upperclassmen are carrying their own empty trays rather than haggle with freshmen while noticing with varying reactions that more and more freshmen are not wearing their beanies. One junior lamented that he asked a freshman girl to wear her beanie and by suppertime she still hadn't put it on. Another junior admitted that such rebellion might be a good thing.
There is not much point in asking individual freshmen to wear their beanies when scores of others parade around bare-headed. Likewise, requesting a group of freshmen to sing the fight song is absurd after it has already been sung to them by upperclassmen.
It's time for a decision. Initiation without initiative is senseless. —Reprinted from the Bethel Collegian North Newton, Kansas
"We Send Them All Up The Same Hill"
Scott Nunley's Friday review of the movie "Hawaii" can best be described as an insult to the movie industry, particularly to the Mirisch Corporation.
Letters
'An insult'
To the Editor:
If the best of settings, the best of photography, the best of performances, and the best of plots is lack of quality, then Mr. Nunley's taste in motion picture entertainment is beyond reproach.
As far as the Dalton Trumbo and Daniel Taradash screen-play is concerned, one knows that to convert a book the size of "Hawaii" into a screenplay is not an easy task, but nonetheless the movie is an excellent reproduction of Michener's ideas. True, the plot of the picture is not the most complicated, but it remains consistent throughout the entire sequence of events which lead to the Christian colonization of Hawaii.
Fine performers cannot afford to sacrifice their reputation by giving as poor a performance as Mr. Supercritic suggests. As a matter of fact, the performers gave such a realistic portrayal that Nunley fails to realize the significance of their roles.
The large number of people still being attracted to this film in spite of its length and the price of reserved seats show that it can't be so "embarrassingly bad." as we are led to believe by Nunlev.
Granted, "Hawaii" does not deserve a Good Conduct Ribbon, but rather a Medal of Excellence.
Tom Doyle, Mike Casey and Sal Dasta Kansas City freshmen
...quotes...
Ewald Hermann Auguste Banse in "Germany Prepares for War" (1934): "The Russians are only formidable when they retire into their own geographical and psychological interior."
Heywood Broun in "It Seems to Me". "The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts."
kansan column
To a new school
by Hamilton J. Salsich
Editor's note: Hamilton J. Salsich, graduate student and English instructor, will contribute a weekly column to the Daily Kansan this semester. His views do not necessarily represent those of the Kansan or its staff.
It is a tribute to man's love of delusion that our university officials come back year after year with the same empty rhetoric about the freedom of education and the dignity of the student. One comes to the point where he wants to stand up and respectfully ask them to spare him the ridiculous pretense.
For here there is little freedom and less dignity. It becomes more obvious with each year that beneath all the smooth extravagance of campus life this institution is finally nothing more than a wealthy, scholarly ghetto—a mass of small people dominated and silenced by a clique of big people. On the surface we move quietly along like a democratic community—students and teachers and administrators cooperating equally in the adventure of education.
But beneath the surface there is another movement—the wandering movement of thousands of students who are little more than pawns at the hands of their elders. They have come here because their elders told them to come, and they live here the way their elders tell them to live. They have no real voice in the classroom, and certainly no real voice in the administration. Like the Negroes, they have been bought and put away, and, like the Negroes, the only voice they have is the voice to scream with the music and yell in the crowd.
But the University pretends that the student has a real voice, and the student enjoys the pretense. He amuses himself by setting up innumerable ASC's and CIB's, all of them carefully conservative and—though he will never admit it—safely backward. He enjoys this delusion of power, the feeling that he is important and that the big men will sit up and listen. He enjoys it, but he knows, really, that it is a lie.
Pretense at voice
He knows that he is powerless, and he knows that if he wants his degree he will finally have to accept that old professorial philosophy that a student, like a child, should be seen and not heard.
He knows that his education has been merely a long set of rules about when to speak and what to speak and how to speak it, and he knows that he has finally lost both the ability and the desire to speak on his own. He knows, most importantly, that his education has been a sham.
But recognition of the disease is the first step toward a cure. Despite the fact that the majority of the non-student population still seems intent on smooth-sailing and quiet blindness, there is a distinct possibility of radical vision and revolutionary change from the students' side.
Change—now
The vision and the change, however, must not begin next month, nor must it be delegated to the doldrums of endless committee meetings. It must begin now—today, and it must begin with the individual student.
What we need now is a student who stands up in the classroom and announces, loud and clear, that he has had it with ridiculous tests and boring lectures and unfair grading systems; or the handful of students who decide, without a moment's delay, that they want a voting representative on each and every administrative committee, from the top on down; or the group of students who declare that they will sit in front of the Chancellor's office until he puts an end to the racial discrimination in fraternities.
What we need now, simply enough, are students who want a free school instead of a closed prison, and who are willing to speak out clearly and pay up personally to get it.
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