Monday, April 23, 1973
University Daily Kansan
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KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Additional Math
The College Assembly will meet Tuesday to continue an examination of changes in requirements for a bachelor of arts degree. Among proposals that may come up for a final vote at Tuesday's meeting, we would increase the mathematics requirement in the College.
Under the proposal, which was formulated by the Educational Procedures and Policies Committee (EPPC), students would be required to take Math 2 and two other courses in mathematics or logic, or score 27 on Mathematics Exam. Students would course in mathematics, logic or an introductory course in calculus.
Math 2C. Math 11 or proficiency fulfills the present requirement.
The EPPC proposal survived last week's assembly meeting without
significant delays.
Proponents of the proposal say that increasing the math requirement will augment a liberal and philosophical education.
As a side effect, it also might augment the department of mathematics.
The argument runs that a strong liberal arts education should be part of university training. Students who are unable to master such an education have no place in a university.
Schools, it is argued, are overcrowded now by students who have nothing better to do than spend four years in college. A university is a place where a student should accumulate a wide range of knowledge, not a place for specialized, intellectual loafers.
Arguments against a structured liberal education point to increasing specialization in our society. Most jobs require specific skills, not general knowledge of many subjects. Besides, there is too much to learn in each subject to warrant a specialized degree. In liberal education simply draws from time that could be spent in an area of specialization.
The EPPC proposal has been criticized for another reason, however. Opponents of the proposal were against adoption of the new requirement will cause students to abandon a bachelor of arts degree for a
bachelor of general studies degree, which does not have a separate math requirement. One professor has warned that adoption of the requirement would cause two-thirds or more of the students in the College to abandon the B.A. for the B.G.S.
Presumably a B.G.S. degree affords a less liberal education because it does not compel students to take a foreign language, Western Civilization, a laboratory science, mathematics or speech. Given the choice, many students probably will not take courses in these departments. In the B.G.S. program students can take an unlimited number of hours in one department instead.
Apart from the merits of a liberal or specialized education are the logistics of the proposal. Students who score less than 27 on the ACT test will have to take a minimum of nine hours of math. Three to five hours are now required. These hours combined with other requirements for a B.A. already in force leave a freshman or sophomore very little latitude for choice, except within the general distribution areas or if proficiency is achieved. Requirements comprise about 70 hours, less than half of which are courses that involve a real choice.
So, the new proposed math requirement can be a boon to the concept of liberal education, an anachronism in a specialized society that simply nine hours a person's biweekly time which description is more accurate.
I am somewhere in the middle of the controversy, a supporter of a liberal education so long as it is not overly exclusive. I do not favor the EPPC proposal. The value of two or one more courses in higher mathematics or logic to a person who has no interest, aptitude, or use for them is questionable. And I stop short of adopting the philosophy that students should not be in a university if they are not willing or able to master some aspect of all disciplines.
I voluntarily fulfilled the requirements of the EPPC proposal, but I would not demand that another student do the same.
—Steve Riel
Financial Support
A recent study by an ad hoc committee on fiscal analysis shows that KU's credit hour expenditures for the instructional budget have slipped dramatically in past years, and a new study fell the legislature's pinch. Faculty salaries in most cases haven't kept up with the soaring rates of inflation.
Fortunately, the 1973 Legislature was more sensitive to KU's financial woes. It granted an appropriations supplement to partially compensate loss in tuition collections law loss in tuition the legislature provided the faculty with a disability and health insurance program. It also appropriated
The Kansas Board of Regents has pledged unanimous support to a goal of raising University of Kansas faculty salaries. The regents probably will ask the Kansas Legislature for an annual 10 per cent faculty pay increase for the next three years to compensate for the salary inadequacies that now plague KU's faculty. The regents hope that their efforts will finally bring KU faculty salaries in line with other members of the Association of American Universities.
However, signs of the legislature's former stinginess are still very apparent at KU. The two buildings now under construction, Wescoe Hall and the student health center, have been made possible only through appropriation. And KU never can bring back several outstanding professors who left to accept better offers from other universities.
money for an addition to Learned Hall and planning money for a sorely needed law center and visual arts building.
The fact remains that state appropriations, even after a comparatively generous year in the legislature, are not adequate. Funds supplied this year for a faculty salary increase of 5.5 per cent give hope but not complete relief to the faculty. Salary scales are still far below those of comparable universities. The faculty, as well as the students and taxpayers of Kansas, deserve better support for their university. Perhaps the encouraging 1973 session of the legislature was the beginning of a trend toward solid support to KU.
—Barbara Spurlock
Readers Respond
India Club Reply
The April 19 Kansan report on the differences within various national clubs which constitute the International Club was not a correct representation of the stand taken by the KU India Club. We expressed our concern to the Student Senate in a letter concerning the International Club. This was in no way meant to cast aspersions on the Arab students or any other national group on campus.
To the Editor:
We still dislike the present funding policy of the International Club and would have the Senate consider our request to make it a part of the Club, as was first recommended and later 'de-recommended' by
the Finance and Audit Committee. But we consider reports of the International Club being "fragmented in a bitter internal power struggle" and of the Arab country taking over the club to be sensationally and not representative of our stand. C. S. Chaterji
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Calcutta Graduate Student and President, KU India Club
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Jack Anderson
Silent Postmen Aggravate Reps
WASHINGTON—Congressman investigating the nation's slowpoke postal service are furious over reports that local postmasters have been ordered to report problems to members of Congress.
Just last month, Postmaster General Elmer T. Klassen assured Congress that no "ag rule" had been imposed prohibiting postal employees from speaking out. On the contrary, Klassen said he had personally arrested 100 postmen with Congress. The news, however, has failed to reach many postmasters.
Rep. Wayne Owens, D-Dutah, for example, recently sent letters to the president throughout Utah. Owens, who pledged to keep the names of the postmasters confidential, simply wanted ideas on how mail delivery could be improved.
More than a month has gone by and Owens has received only a handful of replies. As one postmaster explained to Owens: "We have been told not to discuss this very thing that our congressman sent us, so we have been selected by the Post Office department to do this."
Owen's complaints have triggered an angry response from Rep. James Hanley, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Post Office subcommittee. In a "Dear Ted" letter sent to Klassen, Hanley said he found the complaints "especially annoying"
Another postmaster replied simply: "I wouldn't dure to put in print what I think of the service but not even quote me saying that."
had voted for Owens in the last election. Those who admitted voting for Owens allegedly were赠送 extra deliveries that day.
Owens, meanwhile, has learned that a supervisor walked through a local Utah post office asking mail carriers whether any
"It was probably no coincidence," Owens wrote Klassen, "that the prior day I had made a request for the postmaster of service which the Postal
Service is now performing."
Representative Heckler, D-W. Va., has also complained about poor treatment from the Post Office pobahs. Heckler has tried for weeks to discover the names of postmasters of five new counties added to his district. Heckler assured Klassen he did
not intend to use the names for political purposes.
Rather, Heckler said, the new postmasters would be helpful in local rural institutions during college years; he added, however, refused to cooperate.
Copyright, 1973,
by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.
"ONWARD INTO THE FUTURE!"
OEO: Most Endangered Species
By DONALD M. ROTHBERG And Michael J. SNIFFEN
And Michael J. SNIFFEN
Associated Press Writers
WASHINGTON—The Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), launched eight years ago as the symbol and command post of the war on poverty, now a way of deciding its decisive exit from immediate extinction.
The battle over OEO, seemingly the final one, centers on assessments of its accuracy and the called most OEO programs a dismal failure when he ordered the agency dismantled by this summer and almost all its agencies relegated to their agencies.
Some OEO supporters an employs disagreed and won a fight over the budget, couldn't shut down OEO as long as Congress was willing to appropriate funds to keep it going. Some lawmakers tried to 1 and congressional prospects for
providing more funds are uncertain.
What remains certain for OEO are questions and assessments. The OEO may have been the symbol and command post of the poverty war, but it never controlled all of its programs, lost many of them to other agencies and never directed more than a fraction of its budget. The OEO spent $12 billion while all federal aid to the poor in the same period totaled $132 billion.
The federal bureaucracy never came up with a yardstick acceptable to both critics and backers of OEO that could afford it. The agency has various programs, but some key circumstances may be noted:
-The General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency, reported this month that $207.9 million out of $4.5 billion in OEO grants from 1966-72 have been inadequately
documented or spent in unauthorized ways. At the end of 1972, the GAO said, $13.4 million of the questioned costs had been determined to be allowable, $25.7 million of the questioned, $8.8 million remained unresolved.
Defenders of the OEO say that the accounting and financial management of its projects were more than those of some other agencies.
—Within a year of its inception,
OEo said it was spending $785 million to help, directly and indirectly,
the agency had been stripped of many of its programs. However,
its Community Action Agencies said OEO was serving eight persons at a cost of $1.18 billion.
Still, Sargent Shriver, first OEO chief, said recently that the funds were not sufficient.
"The great tragedy of the war on poverty is that we never got the ammunition: money," he told
Congress.
Between 1964-69 the Census Bureau's estimate of the nation's poor dropped from 36 million to 22.5 million. The total started to climb again in this decade and reached 25 million in 1971.
To the late President Johnson, the five-year drop was a measure of success. But no one is prepared to say how much of the decline resulted from OEO and other federal programs that have made economic trends in the nation.
- Welfare roles didn't dwell.
On the contrary, by June 30, 1971,
about 14.3 million Americans were on welfare at a cost of $10 billion. That was twice the people at three times the outlay of 1960.
It seemed a starting and, to many, a wholly contradictory development. But OEO-initiated Community Action Agencies, which Nixon wants killed, and Legal Services offices took the
responsibility of informing the need of what they could receive under welfare programs. As a result, OEO programs had a far greater initial effect of getting people on relief rather than off it.
—The war on poverty coincided with rioting and looting that seared many poor, black neighborhoods in cities across the nation in the mid to late 1980s. FBI statistics showed that the rate of violence against blacks in 1964 and 1971, another social indicator related to poverty.
—Some of the poor appeared to be using OEO in a push for political power as much as trickery. The same policy in the Community Action Agencies led that fight, and in some cases friction between the newly organized poor and public and elected officials. It was also a method of complaints to Washington.
Nicholas von Hoffmann
Doctors Write Off Women's Pain
The medical director of the Food and Drug Administration had some unkind things to say about the experiment while others wondered if the doctor who did it and the drug company that developed it needed to be pulled the trick on a group of white, middle-class women. There was less talk, however, about the purpose of the study, which was to determine whether there was any difference between pill users and nounsers in the occurrence of headaches, nausea, headaches, nausea, nervousness, depression and breast tenderness.
WASHINGTON—A year or so ago a story came out of Texas about a birth-control pill experiment on a group of women. Although all the participants were told they were being given oral contraceptives, actually 76 of them were given placebos or blank sugar pills. These women became pregnant.
If there was no difference, as the study results seemed to indicate, then a doctor might conclude that women who怀有 symptoms were just making it up recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that American male medicine frequently dismisses very real female body complaints (as womanish as February "Alleged Psychogenic Disorders in Women—A Possible Manifestation of
Another triumph of modern medicine is its understanding
Sexual Prejudice," by K. Jean and R. John Lennane.)
Take menstrual pain, which is believed to occur in one out of two women. Usually it first occurs about two years after a menstrual period and subsides after the birth of a child. Physiologists think the cause of the pain is linked to the process of ovulation, but medical literature flames the female character weakness.
The Lennanes have found the following quotes in texts written by doctors for doctors which purport to explain menstrual pain: 'This contains the high-strung, the nervous or neurotic female than in her more stable sister. A faulty outlook leading to an exaggeration of minor excuses may then expose it to avoid doing something that is disliked, the pain is always secondary to an emotional problem. Very little can be done for the patient who prefers to use menstrual pads as monthly relief from emotion and effort.'
Maybe all of that would be plausible if we were talking about a reasonably rare complaint. But half the female population suffers from this at one time or another and here are four different medical cases that these gals are a bunch of neurotic, indulgent ding-alines.
of what we laymen call morning sickness. This is something that hits more than three-quarters of all pregnant women in a mild or severe form. There is good reason to suspect it is caused by a hormonal substance called estrogen, but in medical literature, you can read that the hormone may indicate resentment, ambivalence and inadequacy in women ill prepared for motherhood."
What doctors are taught about pain in labor is no more reassuring. The Lennanes write, on the basis of their survey of medical literature, a remarkable persistence, however, toward the Biblical attitude to pain in labor, for which the woman is still held morally responsible, allowing irrational and ineffective treatment of prolonged and severe pain to the otherwise analgesia-oriented 20th Century."
A mother's pain in labor, says one text, will be largely of her own making. Another text, written with stethesics ward informs the doctor that, "One shrieking woman can run a dozen laborers. There will always be individuals who have no experience helping themselves, or accepting any responsibility for their own behavior. They should be looked upon as a maternity hospital, and treated accordingly."
(C) Washington Post-King Features Syndicate
With that attitude you can understand why so many doctors fall for this natural childbirth bokum. If it hurts, moma, it's your fault. You didn't prepare yourself going to give you anything to relieve the pain. Lie there and suffer.
1
The craziest theory yet is that mothers cause colic in their children by communicating insecurity, anxiety and tension to them. The study was conducted at through a psychological study of mothers whose babies were suffering from colic. Not surprisingly, the mothers of these sick children tested out to be anxious. The daddies didn't get tested, so the docets blinded the infants' illness on 'parental anxiety.'
It's hard to decide what is more disturbing about all this: The attitude toward women of the past, who call "modern" medicine, or the ignorance and lack of anything approximating a scientific method in the study of human behavior, is the most common disorders.
What has gone wrong here can't simply be cured by passing a health insurance bill or appropriating more money. American medicine must be aired out. It has to stop agreeing with itself and its self-satisfied unanimity is not only irrational and anti-scientific, but is the inexucable source of bodily pain and psychological misery.
A kind of poverty industry grew up, bristling with well-paid consultants, advisers and evaluators. No one can say for certain how much money was spent on them, but one current estimate is that the sum was between $100-120 million a year from 1964-80.
-Auditors from OEO and the GAO issued reports disclosing unexplained or improper use of federal funds ranging from $6.6 million in New York City to $2,259 in Lomp Coy, Neb.
Sen. John McClellan, D-Aark,
chaired lengthy hearings into
activities of Chicago's Blackstone youth gang that shared a 927,000 OEO manpower training grant. Witnesses told
their stories of being applauded
piling marijuana and guns in a
church it used for headquarters.
Federal grants to militant youth groups, for example, backfired on OEO with allegations that the money was used to buy guns.
GOA inspectors a covert unit a member of the Mission Rebels Action, a San Francisco youth gang project that received $298,000, was promoted two weeks after school officials cited the group for violating the two police cars with an axe. The same youth later tried to kill the project director, the report said. Not all reports found mismanagement. For example, GAO auditors who studied the Community Action Agency in St. Louis reported that activities appear to have had a favorable impact on the alleviation of poverty.
"Don't fall for academic claptrap of measuring costs and benefits" said Prof. Sar A. Levitan of George Washington a veteran of OEO's early days and a supporter of its objectives.
"We canned the public for years. Attempts for objective evaluation just don't work because I can make any program look good and any program look bad. It depends on what you include in the benefits," he said.