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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, September 20, 1967
The rut and the remedy
Dull minds on the campus
University students have been accused of breathing the cloudy, isolated atmosphere which hangs over university life, an island off the coast of reality. The accusation approaches accuracy.
How many young people at the University of Kansas are trapped in the rutted web of classes, studying, watching the tube and a frequent or infrequent stilted date to the movies and Lawrence countryside? And how many, worst of all, don't realize the predicament that's pushing them dangerously close to losing the potential for imaginative, creative living, whatever that may be?
Chances are you'll unknowingly see such a person every day. But perhaps you won't—the pressures of conformity and the sheer weight of the masses often, but subtly, transform a personality into dull camouflage.
The dull mind on campus visits the same spots daily, takes the same path between them, greets the same people with the same empty salutation, accompanied by the same empty, sickening smile . . . and fades into the background like wallpaper in a populated room.
Say "I'm against the war!" but never really ask why. Say it often enough and you perpetuate the cloudy atmosphere of intellectual poverty that can ironically infect an educational institution. That's what creates the university island and the isolated individual.
So what's the remedy? The prescription to eure dull minds includes a dash of desire and a pinch of courage. Before desire, of course, must come the Eureka! of discovering one's plight. So after anxiety breaks out, the need and desire to change must be followed by the guts to experiment outside that rutted web.
Find out what makes a hippie think that way. Ask why DeGaule's so independent. Take a 10-mile hike by yourself. Trashcan apathy. Experiment.
But if possible, practice preventive medicine, start university life creatively in the first place and eliminate the waste of a second-rate experience and the agony of revision.
Allan Northcutt Editorial Editor
Enrollment strikes
You are old, Mr. Senior, the freshman spoke,
And your tatters must mean you are poor,
And yet you biannually line up in Hoch,
Had you planned, at your age, to have more?
In my youth, the old man replied to his friend,
A degree I believed I could get,
But it seems my initials were wrong at the end,
So my requirements are still to be met.
You are old, the young man continued to say,
And yet you insist on complaining,
You knew that the system would get you someday,
So why'd you keep slow in your training?
In my youth, the old senior said with wan smile. I sampled the classes with greed, I foolishly thought I would give some a trial, Before choosing the right path to heed.
You are old, said the freshman, becoming distraught And yet you're incredibly dumb. You'd better enroll in some classes well taught Do you want to remain just a bum?
I've answered your queries, replied the old man,
And now I've got something to say.
If seniors weren't trapped in the closed-classes ban,
A graduate I might be today.
—Betsy Wright, Editorial Editor
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"ALL MY SECTIONS ARE CLOSED BUT I BELIEVE FROM SNARF APPENDS LEFT IN SOME OF HIS SECTIONS."
Letters
To the Editor:
Monday morning at the opening convocation Chancellor Wescoe said: "For myself, I am content to deal only in the one true power, the power of the intellect."
Having read a copy of his speech the night before his presentation, this quote forced itself into my open thought—What has this man said so boldly? Has he said that this is my one true God and I am content?
I had just recently heard that the Chancellor had given a sermon in the church he regularly attends. A prophet of the Bible once said that many people profess to have gods but do not believe them. Is this applicable to the Chancellor? Does he praise finite man more than he does the infinite?
Finite is limited by what man can experience. True, I myself feel that the power of the intellect is probably the highest form of experience in man's world, the world of experience.
Has the Chancellor said that this is the one true purpose for man in life, to experience the one true power, the intellect, and then die, not proceeding forth into what I think is the one true power, the infinite? Man will never have a self-realizing contentness in what the Chancellor so boldly and sincerely called the one true power.
No, man will have to reach that self-satisfying goal in what is beyond, that which has been called God, not intellect.
Bill McKim Moscow junior
President Johnson, speaking in 1934 on Vietnam: "We are not about to send American boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys should be doing for themselves."
Official Bulletin
TODAY
DOYAL
CarlBon Recital 7 p.m. Albert
Cockett
SCA Membership Meeting. 7:30 p.m. Ballroom, Union.
TOMORROW
Connell of the Senate. 3 p.m. 108 Blake.
P-to-P Membership Meeting. 7:30
p.m. Ballroom, office.
Kansan Book Review: Landon of Kansas
An excellent history... an outstanding historian
LANDON OF KANSAS, by Donald R. McCoy (Nebraska, $8.50)—One naturally (sometimes unnaturally, too) carries with him certain prejudices when he starts to read a book. This, then, a personal introduction to this book review. I was brought up in an arch-Republican household that thought Roosevelt the villain of the age, and as a high school kid out of such a background I pulled hard for Alf Landon in 1936. I suppose I am a Kansan, because I have lived here 16 years. I long regarded Alf Landon as one of the lesser lights of American history, but have come to have a genuine admiration for him because of his positions in recent years. I am a friend of Don McCoy and think, after reading his biography of Coolidge last spring, his "Angry Voices" of almost a decade ago, and now the Landon book, that he is one of the outstanding historians in America.
And so to "Landon of Kansas," and how the prejudices came out. I remain convinced that we were more fortunate with Roosevelt, but think, we wouldn't have done badly at all with Alf Landon. I find the documented evidence as to why I like Landon today. I also know why I became disenchanted with Landon about, say 25 years ago, for the middle-period Landon I don't like much, and think his 1940 and wartime politicking the least pretty thing in his career. And I think "Landon of Kansas" is an excellent history.
ALSO, by the way, one of the biggest and bulgiest histories you're likely to encounter this year. Almost 600 pages of history, the most authoritative-feeling book I've read since Mark Shorer's "Sinclair Lewis." I felt on occasion that I had lived every day with Landon.
The 1936 election stuff remains, on reflection, the best part of the book, even though so many books have gone over all this. Alf Landon comes through as what we like to call a liberal, and much less an opportunist than Roosevelt. He was then, and is now, a person of genuinely human impulses, and except for some of the campaigning after 1936 seldom sounds like the stereotyped "politician."
HIS INCREASINGLY liberal internationalist positions of the past decade also make Landon an admirable person. One wonders how the picture of Landon as conservative became so much the image that persisted for so long.
Overall, McCoy writes well and sensitively of Alf Landen. He also provides excellent portraits of such persons as the Republican campaign manager, John D. M. Hamilton, of the late senator and governor Clyde M. Reed, of Henry J. Allen and William Allen White and Willkie and Dewey. The book deserves to be read by all students of either Kansas or, more broadly speaking, American history.
Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
* * *
SATURDAY THE RABBI WENT HUNGRY, by Harry Kemelman (Crest, 60 cents)—Another in what probably will be one of the most appealing detective story series in our time. Kemelman started with "Friday the Rabbi Slept Late," and he presented us a crime-solving hero who is also a deeply moving and likable human being. No James Bond stuff—the rabbi uses Talmudic method of inquiry to solve mysteries, and this story involves a supposed suicide buried in consecrated ground.
* * * *
COLUMBELLA, by Phyllis A. Whitney (Crest, 75 cents)—That which now seems to be labeled Gothic fiction. Phyllis Whitney is one of the best practitioners of this genre, and "Columbella" is set in the Virgin Islands and has equal components of love, jealousy and violence, and of course a damsel in distress, which is the hallmark of the Gothic novel.
* * * *
DEADFALL, by Desmond Cory (Crest, 60 cents)—Suspense and high adventure, the story of a jewel thief, with Spain as the setting and plenty of psychological motivation to set it apart from much of the junk on book shelves these days.
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