4
Tuesday, March 13. 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Guest Editorial
Is Mert Qualified?
the University of Kansas Student Senate is a paradise for a budding leader. It is an organization of students in which leaders may prosper.
Many senate committees do not meet. Most that do meet accomplish little because either effort or manpower is lacking. Senate attendance is poor. Legislation is too often ill-considered, poorly presented and too hastily rejected or accented.
The credibility of students as responsible trustees of half a million dollars of activity fee money continues to decline. A senate that cries on the street to conserve money continues to dole out money to anybody with enough nerve to ask for it.
EXECUTIVE LEADERSHIP of the senate in the past year was at best lacking, at worst nonexistent. The president of the student body adhered to a policy of letting the senate run itself. He said that the senate was occupied by intelligent people who could run their own affairs without executive interference.
That policy failed, from beginning to end. It became increasingly clear that the senate could not run itself without leadership and that committees would not function without a watchdog. No one, most obviously the elected executive officer, gives the senate the power to move the senate out of its rut of petty squabbling and to rouse committees from hibernation.
SADLY, THE SITUATION probably won't change next year. Mert Buckley, unopposed candidate for student body president, has been a strong advocate in recent years. He promises to reform activity fee allocations and operation of the committees, and to generate member interest in the senate. Maybe he can do it, but when a candidate's record is as dismal as his own,
In his two years in the senate,
Buckley has established a record of
sleepy, attentiveness at senate
those who bother to attend. His demonstrated leadership and initiative have been nil for the duration. His work on committees has been at best occasional, and in his role has been little to indicate that he is providing the spark necessary to put life back into the senate.
IN TWO YEARS, BUCKLEY has never submitted a piece of legislation. For a candidate who promises to formulate charges to committees and proposals for legislation, who says that he clearly understands the legislation and has seen it for the past years, this is unusual. But Buckley's reasons for never sponsoring a bill are even more interesting.
In an interview, Buckley said he hadn't sponsored any legislation in his two terms "because 90 per cent of the legislation I saw was near ludicrous and a waste of time." Granted, perhaps, but is that a reason not to submit good bills? Quite the opposite, it is the best reason to submit needed ideas; a senator with the good ideas, initiative and leadership required of a student body president should
have seen his opening. But, Buckley says, "I just didn't see myself in the role of a legislator who proposes legislation."
This year, Buckley was a member of the Elections Committee and the Student Services Committee. He rightly resigned the Elections Committee membership because of possible conflict of interest with his employer inaction on the Student Services Committee is less understandable.
BUCKLEY ADMITS that he rarely attended a committee meeting. Why? Because his committee chairman didn't call him to tell him when meetings were being held.
As a reporter assigned to the senate, I found out quickly that it only took one phone call to find out that much information. Is it unjustified to suspect the initiative and leadership of a candidate for student body president who couldn't manage to make a phone call? One can't help but wonder about a candidate who explains inaction in the senate by claiming to be busy with his committee but then says, "The only thing I know about meetings is what I read in the paper the next day."
Whatever the case may be, the senate is in a crucial time. It has had a history of active, innovative work that is now in danger of being erased by a blanket of contusion, which has marked it through the year.
Student disinterest is high. When the Kansan distributed its questionnaire to senate candidates, the senate treasurer's office was swamped with phone calls from students. Disposition Contract was and what the Black Student Union fund freezing was all about.
The questions were included in the questionnaire to determine whether candidates had followed the senate closely enough this year to be aware of specific, significant actions that were taken. Unfortunately it was predictable that many potential senators knew nothing about the only significant activity fee reform of the past term and the still unresolved problems between the Black Student Union and the senate.
Strong leadership and active participation are the only things that can erase what damage has been done to the image of the senate as a viable body on this campus. We are forced to put our faith, be it justified or not, in Mert Buckley. No other campaign poster will challenge a campaign poster" notes him as saying, "Unless student senators begin to accept the responsibility for the senate's functioning, it is our genuine fear that it will die."
He is right, and so we must hope that the capacity for leadership that he claims to have is really there. If it was a bad case, I don't out. It's been hidden long enough.
John Pike
Guest Editorial Writer
I worked late at the office and was late in meeting my fellow journalists at a local bar in my town. I was followed by a swallowed an beer bottle and died.
By ERICKRAMER
Editorial Writer
last Friday I died
I had always thought that they would drain my blood, fill me up with smelly stuff and put me on my own. I can remember any of this. I can't remember any of this.
As soon as I died, I was stunned in this cloudy place with a bit of guilt. I thought of myself as pro-civil rights, but I thought it a bit punched to him of being a newsman. Being a newspaperman and a bit push myself, I said, "Boy, I
A kid who had been killed in a drunken brawl after his first year of law school was the best lawyer I could get, not having any of the dollars when I was killed, but since devaluation they weren't worth much up on the back. In fact, God was angered by the sight of dollars because church conspiracy be increased to maintain nearby
He politely said, "This is He"
I expected a lightbolt to hilt
but he had advised me of
my right but advised a lawyer
and set a trial date.
I asked my lawyer if I would get a full hearing before the court, but wasn't it so much worried about going to hell as to sit still while they lined everybody up to tell me what had happened. I relieved to find that the Crusades, subsequent religious wars and an increase in the birth rate of Jesus, had generated heaven reform and we were to argue our case in a lower court. We could have been beasts around the throne, which had been revealed to John, if we had enough money and a good character.
'Uncle Miltie' Unfolds in Playboy
We were going to have to argue our case on the basis of sin. Faith that we are so immune to be an absolute defense, but we were that poor church attendance and a "not superstitious" response on the matter of religion card invalidated this test.
I thought that I had been binned, and that my actions and reactions had been the result of the contents of these two cells and
W tried to figure out what sines I might be accused of. I told the lawyer about a time when I was seven when I mixed a package of cookies with my mother. My mother told me I would go to hell as soon as I died of sugar
I thought I could plead not responsible and get off. The lawyer explained that this wouldn't work because this approach necessitated correctional supervision, much favored the bottomless bit.
Escape from the Bottomless Pit
I remembered that, I had splashed a few people with my wine, smashed a few people's cars on dry days. In addition, I had encroached seriously on the utility room, willing to be punished for this, but compared to God, who had wiped my wine off one blow, I felt pretty good.
God didn't see it that way. He didn't if so. Godmorah and Gomorrah were getting out of hand, it would exceedingly evil not to smile them.
The lawyer said the courts were not likely to look at my case with lenency. It one time three years before the infringement of another's happiness as a basis for punishment, but two beasts died and were replaced by two Presbyterian men who made amazingly good beats. Senior observers estimated that the utilitarian cause had been set back 40,000 years after life-span of an immortal beast.
CHICAGO- The traveler who gets stranded in Chicago, killing two hours in between planes, is the first to be apprehended in a workshop. He there picks up the dead.
particularly hard.
"I must say, said the professor, ramming a sharp needle in the man from Playboy, "that I find it slightly revolting that people sneer at a system that made it possible for them to sneer at it. If we'd had minimum wage laws other the other trappings of the welfare system, half the readers of Playboy would not exist at all or would be citizens of Poland, Hungary, or some other country."
"My mother came to this country when she was 14 years old. She worked in a sweatswap as and because there was such a sweatswap in which she could get a job that she was able to come to United States. But she didn't say why she did it, but did most of the others. It was a way station for them, and a far better one than anything available to them in the old country. When I thought it was anything else."
enough, Friedman proved to be a friend of the old-fashioned sweatshoe.
Here is Friedman, for example, on the minimum wage law. He regards the act as "the most anti-negro law on the books," and how come? The minimum wage rate, he has found, hits blacks
In answer to another question, Friedman took aim on higher education: "That's one of the country's greatest scandals."
Friedman also took dead aim on Social Security, consumerism and governmental regulation of the oil industry, ecologists, he thinks, are phonies. As for the notion that corporation officials should take action to stop pollution out of a sense of responsibility, they buy stock in a company that hired that kind of leadership. A corporate executive's responsibility is to make as much money as the stockholders as possible."
February Playboy, and what does he find? Nekidk wimmen? Well, yes. But what else does he tell? Milon Friedman, that's a good one.
"As a result, the effect of a minimum wage law is to produce unemployment among people with low skills. And who are the people behind it? The main, they tend to be teenagers and blacks, and women who have no special skills or have been out of the labor force and are coming back from the job arenormally high unemployment rates among these groups."
Because the great state universities are heavily subsidized by taxes, the poor youth who can't go to college, and goes to work as a mechanic instead, winds up by paying taxes to support that other man's demand. The most dumbagogic about this, I say that the system in California is one in which you tax the people of Wataw to send children from Beverly Hills to college."
"How is a person better off," he asks, "if he is unemployed at $1.00 an hour than at employment at $2.00 an hour? Come to something. Let's suppose there is a teenager whom you as an employer would be perfectly willing to hire for $1.50 an hour. You must hire him at $1.00. Now, you're really engaged in an act of charity. You're paying $1.50 for his services and you're giving him a gift of 10 cents. That's how employees, naturally, are willing to do or can afford to do . . .
All of which goes to suggest that if you're caught in an airport barbershop, and you're just passing time, look at the naked wimmen. If you want a real kick, read Uncle Miltte.
Prof. Friedman, of course, is the Chicago economist whose libertarian views of the free enterprise system have won both denunciation and applause. Finding him in Playboy is like finding Sister Bernadette at a singles dance. What's a nice boy you like doing in a place, etc? Yawning professor being interviewed and making, as usual, gallons of great good sense.
Most of these were moral or service crimes. I had died at a rather young age so I was unable to imagine any of the white collar stuff.
diabetes. I didn't die, but I did have a stomach ache for a long time and thought that I might.
The Playboy interviewer, plainly ill at ease in the presence of heresy, sought to reproach the fashioner, fashioned a sweatshirt. Sure
We went from there through the next 14 years and we listed about 14,000 sins that might be brought up.
I said that I didn't think I had come up with anything original. I just watched other people, if they were the ones they were having fun, 'd it it too.
The lawyer said I might be charged with some original sin.
The lawyer told me to keep my mouth shut if the judge started telling me anything I explained that human beings were reproduced through a process called sex and that this process was the way anything that came from it would be similar. This is what he meant, but it wasn't something he would have to plead divine conception. But they could put the Holy Onge on the stand and let them walk.
We decided we would just try toemper the prosecution's attention on the two witnesses,then try for a light sentence ofmaybe 400,000 years in the bot
When I was brought into court I looked at my peers, Rev. Richard Taylor and 11 other members of
(C) 1973 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
My attorney jumped up and said, "The defense will stipulate that she was a stewardess and in an airplane."
The prosector walked in looking rather strange. Everybody up there had Biblical lessons and me. I had college-kid-looking-for-a_job-length hair; the beats has hair all over. But the prosector, whom they called did not, denn it had much air at all.
Things got started and Ver-
called his first witness. A big ol-
gol brought this brunette to the
game, she was pretty. Not Continental-
Minoispoil-to-Chicago pretty,
but more like North-Central-
Minois.
James J. Kilpatrick
Vern asked her where she was at 9 p.m. on the night of Jan. 15, 1973 A.D. She said she was 30,000 feet above Garden City.
He asked her if she had been in some type of vehicle.
he Kansas United Drys, who looked very pious if not a bit sloodthirsty.
"Did you serve a can of beer to anyone in this room?" the prosecutor continued.
This would make the dock backlog about 500,000 years long. The judge was very thankful that she had not anything that sped up a trial. The lawyer sat down, knowing he had taken about 3,000 years off my phone.
"Would you point out the person?"
"Yes, I did."
Because the list of counts was so long, the judge ordered us to give our defense to this count and prosecutor went on to the second.
"That's the one," she said pointing.
Vern started to cite the Kansas Constitution and statutes governing the sale of liquor in Kansas.
"The one chained to the wall over there?"
My lawyer stood up and stipulated that the can contained liquor and that I had bought it.
"Where were you on the night of April 3,1936 A.D.7?" my lawyer asked
"I was in my bedroom on my uncle's farm."
"And were there any unusual weather conditions that evening?"
Vern quickly realized my attorney was trying to discredit Kansas' claim to the airspace above, and objected to the use of an aircraft in witness a movie star and not an expert on distances.
"Yes, there was a tornado."
"And did it pick up the house?"
"Yes. It did."
"And how high did the house go?"
"No, in fact, upon landing in Ox
I remarked to my dog: 'Toto. I don't think we're in Kansas
anymore.'"
The judge overruled the objection and Judy said, "We were about two miles high. I think."
My attorney jumped up and shouted, "Anyone who can navigate a house through the air is capable of judging distances."
Vern, the upholder of justice,
didn't want to lose on this first
turn. "I'm just going to be
want't looking forward to
several years in court so he said
to my lawyer, 'Till drop counts
two through 14,000 if you'll enter
"Did it appear to you that you were in Kansas?"
Verna said that his case was crushed, and the court ajourned for lunch.
We didn't speak Latin at my One True Faith WASP Church, but my lawyer explained that a plea of nontence meant you really didn't think you were guilty, but if the court trial went through everything it was something else, so you took the punishment anyway.
We decided this was a good deal.
When things started again my lawyer went up and said the
When you get before the throne, knowledge of the law makes a difference. You must do-day work of the courts of original jurisdiction, the ability to come up with unusual circumstances makes you a good lawyer.
"In that case the court will find you guilty of purchasing liquor by your mouth, and you will be to 10,000 years in the bottomless pit. Unless you can show some unusual circumstances, you will be held in custody of the warden of the bottomless pit and will start an oral sentence immediately."
The judge said, "And as to counts two through 14,000?"
"Your Holiness, the prosecution will drop counts two through 14,000." Vern said.
defendant wished to enter a plea of nolo contendre on count one
My lawyer went on to show that I suffered extensively for my sins and had been forced to stomach ache from drinking the Kool-Aid, numerous hangovers from drinking something else and the clap from washing my hands.
This is where my lawyer's halo shone.
He pointed out that I had already gone through the humiliation of being in heaven for several months.
The judge said that this did indeed show good character. He suspended the sentence.
He said that I had never soiled my marriages on Sunday unless I was with someone else and that I had never defaced a "Honk If You Love Jesus!"
Actually, he was not very impressed with my character, but he had no choice.
The bottomless pit had been filled up years ago with Philistines, Pharisees and little boys and girls who told lies. Construction costs had gone up sharply and the voters were outraged that the outragers cost of digging a new bottomless pit.
The judge said this was irrelevant unless the rest room was in the airplane.
The judge didn't look sympathetic.
But my lawyer was not defeated and he started to tell the judge what good character I had.
Copyright 1973, Eric Kramer
]
Readers Respond
To the Editor:
Nine Defend Women's Studies
The Advisory Committee on Women's Studies would like to reply to Prof. Calder Pickett's article "24 Hours That Should Be Seen" (book 3), and Barbara Spurlock's educational ("Off Course," March 5).
First, we would like to make it clear that women's studies is not a program. It does not require requirements for an education or does not offer a regular major, is not designed to fulfill University requirements and its members have in common neither a theory nor a philosophy, but an area of interest.
The activities of the advisory committee, including sending out the letters to which both writers and students will receive EPPC Guidelines for special course listings, which were approved by the College Assembly (Nov. 21, 1972), and which include providing training to concentrate the resources available through regular departmental offerings." What the committee is doing is perseverance, and perfectly understandable.
Pickett refers to "some of the crap that plugs our schedule of courses," and later mentions "Frantz Fanon and Gloria Steinberg" in *Black Magic*. It will no doubt interest interest departments and schools to discover that courses dealing with women, which they have approved and placed among their offerings, are "crap." One question what justification Pickett has for using such terminology.
Perhaps he is referring to Humanities 100, Images of Women in the Humanities, or Women in the Contemporary World.
Is this trash? In the LA&S course, there are readings from
In the former, students read and discuss with qualified faculty "Medea," "Lysistrata," six medieval French works in translation, a Shakespeare comedy, novels by Eliot, Chopin, Lawrence, Lessing and others; and books about women of women in art, including photography and non-Western art.
psychology, sociology, consumer behavior, law and other areas; Steinem is not on the syllabus. True, one session is spent on a discussion of readings from the current women's movement, but there are no more temporary world without mentioning that movement would misrepresent the facts. But, perhaps Pickett would argue that university courses should be unaffected by influence from the world. Oh what bans, then, are professional schools to exist?
If we supported this position, we would have to assert that women should confine them to the job they fulfill and that they fulfill their potential by deliberately remaining ignorant of everything outside of these courses; and, as a necessary condition, they must eschew professional education.
Spurrock's assumption that, according to us, any course not falling under the heading of women's studies is irrelevant to women, shows an astonishing lack of sensitivity and logic.
In addition, Spurrock implies that the study of women is "a luxury" for our departments and schools. On what theory of education does she base this for. Instance, it is clear to many that she has had important effects on both women and men. Moreover, women make up over half of the population. How is a such phenomenon dealt with such phenomena extraneous, or a luxury?
By the same token, how can a consideration of the roles of women in society be more frivolity in a department of human development and family life?
Her thinking is not only illogical, but also is simplistic. In any case, women's studies courses are about women, not for they are for anyone who want to take them, made or female.
First, most departmental women's studies courses are taught intermittently; quan- fluently, they add up to very little.
Perhaps the issue is one of practicality, though one wonders how a handful of courses, out of the hundreds now offered each semester, can undermine the finances of the University.
and comparable topics would tend to prove the opposite. The question is not, "Why are these topics appearing in our current num? now?" "Why haven't they appeared here this?"
Second, as well as Spurkock acknowledges interest is high and enrolments are healthy. To get students to best self-interest to offer a women's studies course, if it has the faculty and the topic is pertinent to its curriculum, Finances should be one of many much money you have, but also of how many students you draw. Thus, the causal relationship on which Spurkock bases her sketch of the social situation is oversimplified.
S spurlock implies that if additional faculty members participate in team-taught LA&S and Humanities courses dealing with women, this would be another opportunity to teach matters to staff basic courses. She apparently is unaware that faculty participation in all LA&S courses, and in many other extradepartmental courses, has always been voluntary; whether they ought to exist, is another matter.
Third, we are not asking that women's studies courses be added at the expense of core courses. Finally, departments are primarily unit units; what one department cannot do is define what another does not afford, and never has.
Surely it is the individual faculty member's preregative to decide whether he or she wishes to participate in such courses. This has nothing to do with the course content, but do with Spurlock either. Because almost all faculty teaching in the courses mentioned above are
suspensate for just one week session, no one is being sacrificed to what Pickett calls "brave-new-world ventures."
Spurrock says that women's studies courses 'are taught by very capable professors, qualified to enlighten their students.' There is some inconsistency between this statement and her implication that such professors would be thrilled to see in the Timetable an impossibility like the one that exists for English like French Sidewalk Cafe Conversation for Women. The final paragraph of her editorial reveals more about the thinking of its author, we would assert, more generally than in other studies. Even to conceive of such courses is an insult to women.
Finally, we would like to suggest that editorial writers for the Kansas become better interns and offer their opinions in print.
Margaret
Assistant Professor of English
Elizabeth Banks
Assistant Professor of Classics
Kristin Duprat
Canajoharie, N.Y., Senior
Vicki Hamer
Lawrence Graduate Student
Janet Sharianistian
Acting Assistant Professor of
English
Michael Shaw
Acting Assistant Professor of
Classics
Joan Soutar
Associate Serials Librarian
Julie Welsmann
Assistant Instructor in English
Karen Zimmerman
Assistant Librarian, Spencer
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Published at the University of Kansas during holidays and examination periods. Mail substitution rates: $4 per week for students with paid address payed at Lawrence, KG 60044. Accommodations, goods, services and student education students without regard to color, gender or origin. Opinions expressed are that the university of Kansas or the State University of Kansas
News Advisor  Suanne Shaw
Editor  Joyce Neerman
Business Adviser  Mel Adams
Business Manager  Carol Dicks