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Friday, March 9, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Levels of Danger
I always have been under the impression that students entering a university have enough intelligence and presence of mind to make their own decisions regarding issues of substance.
There comes a time when children must grow into adults. To do so, they need to learn about self-management.
Every teacher has his opinions and ideosyncerias. Without them, a professor would be no better than a meal-mouthed baby sibiter. Baby sitters constitute a responsible sector of the population, I am sure, but college students are no longer babies. If they are, they have no business attending a university. Institutional safeguards should not be imposed upon students to protect them from a real world of opinionated so-and-sos, be they inspired or not.
Two years ago I suffered through an English class taught by one of the three professors now on the rack for his part in the Pearson Humanities program. He silked him intensely, and he defends his right to promote his own opinions.
I have reservations about the Pearson program. My main objection is that because of the hours involved, a student's exposure to
other strongly opinionated professors may be limited during his two years in the Pearson program. Professional jealousy runs in the veins of this University, be assured. I would be the last person to deny a non-Pearson professor his chance to teach. I would be the last person to deny a student as rich and varied a college experience as he can lay his hands on.
When a freshman, I duly enrolled in and attended (every class) of English II and I and Western I at the end of year I. I learned how to read and write.
Somewhere in our Medieval past, the tradition of going to great men to learn their ideas aligned itself within the walls of established institutions. Relative or absolute, truth was the cornerstone of this tradition. Academic freedom has become the mortar.
Having had no experience in the Pearson program, I cannot say whether there is a danger that students may be converted to the professors' peculiar brand of humor, outspoken professors, however, this University faces dangers more threatening than the Pearson program.
—Linda Schild
With Apologies
Meanwhile, back at the office: I can't write about the Whomper because I really don't know what's going on down there, and I can't write about the Pearson program because I was an upperclassman when the program started, and I can't write about the Rock Chalk Revue because I didn't see it and I won't write any more about city
politics because I'm tired of waking up to crank calls on Monday morning.
So, I will write about spring.
So, I will write about spring.
Mud epitomizes the joys of spring. It is the season when the rest of the year, but you notice it more between February and May.
—The Office Cat
A Voice from the Establishment
By CALDER M. PICKETT
Back to the Drawing Board
A professor of Judaism it happened at a major American university in the early seventies.
But this professor had gotten himself into the news a few times. He was mainly a mild enough person, but he had suggested in the public prints that Nee McGovern was less than divinely inspired. During the troubled days of the 1980s, he worked at University Assembly and opposed recommendations for faculty-student government. He was known within his department as "the universal" positions on education.
He also had received the two major teaching awards at his university.
His plan was simple, and it was very old-fashioned; he wanted to offer personal instruction to the door entering freshmen—those who were not as well-prepared more than they wanted a degree—in great books, great ideas, great music, great art. He wanted to teach them, in four years, as he could give them from his own experience and knowledge.
He planned to have his students read what once were called the classics, the Bible, some key theological works. Renaissance Enlightenment Enlightened 19th century, and into the 20th Century as much as possible. He
an "aging" professor submitted a new course proposal to his division. In most cases such a proposal would have gone through without comment. It had been years since anything new in the field was being taught, university there was a whole gallery of new courses being taught by seniors, because if a student wanted to take a class or teach a class—the enlightened new way had made this possible. And entire disciplines had come together to some of them duplicated content and concepts already taught in more established fields.
hoped to take the students to museums and exhibits, to play some music for them or take them to concerts.
Now normally almost no one would oppose such a plan, but he was controversial. So various parties had organized themselves began to look over the proposal;
Several colleagues said he was placing too much stress on religion. Madalyn Murray should be included to balance St. Augustine. They said he would be indictoring his students.
Several young scholars said he did not move far enough into the 20th Century. They said Kurt Ventnegut and William Burroughs were more relevant than Balzac and Tolstoy.
A professor from the School of Journalism, who just wandered in, said communications theory was ignored, and he said the program should include Marshall McLahan and Susan Sontag.
Representatives from the Office of Women, which had just been given the privilege of overseeing all academic programs, asked that (1) Michelangelo be taken from the list because he did so few representations of the female students. Fonda be worked into the outline and (3) the professor provide a segment on the rhetoric of women's rights.
A delegation of black students demanded the inclusion of Bobby Seale and Eldridpe Cleaver.
A New Left historian said the racist Thomas Jefferson should not be read.
A film buff said he though the movies of Don Siegel and Frank Tashlin had been unjustly imputed.
Several social scientists asked why he had not tried to have his program funded through a foundation.
A militant Polish nationalist was mollified after the professor said the students would learn language and listen to the music of Chopin.
Several faculty members
The President's Horatio Alger
WASHINGTON—The newest chapter in the book entitled "Richard Nixon and the Work Ethic" involves a bootstrap kid named Robert Vesco. Vesco is one of 25,000 campaign contribution to Nixon, and then he quietly handed back to him as it
stantiated, Vesco will be branded in international swirlter and possibly face criminal action."
pollsby raid criminal action'.
The dough involved runs to the airport for investment of thousands of people all over the world in a mutual fund operation called Investors Overseas Services. That's self-
Nicholas von Hoffman
become clear that he is, as Fortune magazine puts it," the central figure in one of the largest securities fraud complaints ever filed by the U.S. and Exchange Commission."
Large is the word for it. The magazine describes the allegations in the SEC charges as "a global deoit of deceit" in which the Bootstrap Kid and his associates, corporate and performers, are charged with Sarargso Sea of offshore companies for the purpose of moving money into legally impenetrable waters. If the charges are sub-
help of impressive dimensions,
but it's not just dough that's involved,
it's people, Republican people and Nixon people.
First we have the go-between who delivered this unreported campaign contribution, in cash, Maurice Stuare, Nikon's former director of marketing, who's been implicated in some of the deals the Nikon Administration has been caught at. The go-between is Harry L. Seans, a big-shot. Republican senator from Ohio and ran Nikon's campaign there last year and is a board member and general counsel of Vesco's
company. Now it also happens that Regina Cahill, the daughter of the Republican governor of New Jersey, a strong Nixon man, worked for Vesco at his Geneva, Switz., headquarters. Cahill was convicted in 2010 of ports a secretary who was "accorded V.I.P. treatment,"
This same spirit of Horatio Algirism wasn't confined to Maurice Stans and the President's supporters in New Jersey. From the testimony many years ago that Edward Nixon, the President's brother, was flown by helicopter from New York to New Jersey to confirm that the contract was paid, cash, presumably so that there would never be any record of it. A Stans spokesman has vigorously denied, of course, that Stans ever asked that any money be in账, but he also said that Stans didn't discourage it.
This touching story of old-fashioned American grit and working up from the bottom doesn't stop here.vesco, The挫掉Kid his wallet The挫掉Kid his wallet the Donna Nixon, as his executive assistant, and as far as Fortune magazine knows, young Donald is still working his way up vesco's pay-Donkey, however, is not a defender although James Roosevelt, although James Roosevelt, son of President Franklin D.
Roosevelt, is. None of which is to say that Donald wasn't working for his money. Fortune reports he was a frequent passenger on Vesco's private Boding 707, which is so expoentially decorated that it seems to be like Dickie's "Sirit of 76" "look like a Piper Cub."
but the tacky-shaky political follies continue. In November, 1971, Vesco was thrown in jail by a Geneva judge on charges of embezzlement and attempted embezzlement, but Fortune reports, "Vesco's Washington lawyers put through a call to the office of U.S. Amtrak," and the cabinell. A call from the Justice Department to the U.S. Embassy in Berne instructed officials there to apply all possible pressure to secure Vesco's earlier release." It was duly released on $175,000 bail.
The circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that it was the money the Securities and Exchange Commission alleges the Bootstrap Kid gained by fraud (the $45 million White House-Watergate burglar gang. Aside from that, these are the same self-righteous folks who put on the moral indignation Passion Play about the chiseling welfare mothers. These women, people who go about making people who do not effete intellectual snobs—the operative definition of snob
apparently meaning a refusal to sanction the shabbiest kinds of sharp practice, to use the kindest language about how the Nixon family and their buddies make their living.
Before the looting of investors Overseas Services began, the company was worth more than a million dollars and fifth of that left. This wasn't one of those deals where the Nixon people can claim they just happened to meet the Stootstrap Kid at a cocktail party and didn't about what If they took part in it. They were on the payroll.
If honest, hard-working snubs them, there is good reason. But heretofore, this crowd has been forced to the land dry of money simply by running around calling other people sissies. If you don't shut up, we call you a member of the Eastern Establishment Conspiracy and Mitchell are both Wall Street lawyers and that they've surrounded themselves with Harvard types like Henry Patterson to find a specious rationalization to gloss over every scandal.
So now you know why a shameless Spiro Agnew can run around with Frank Sinatra, and Nixon can proffer this un-efface, un-intellectual night club brawler at a gala at the White House.
(U)
Washington Post-King Features Syndicate
questioned his qualifications to teach Gallileo and Newton. They were angered by his observation that graduate students had been teaching these people in a "Great Books" program for many years.
An unidentified delegation said Alice Cooper and Janis Joplin were more relevant than Beethoven.
One professor said University bylaws did not authorize so revolutionary a course of study. Another argue that the
program paid too little attention to recent findings of George Leonard at Esalen.
A Computer Science professor objected because he said the program couldn't be programmed.
Several professors questioned the man's publications record, and they asked why he had ever become a full professor.
The American Indian Movement, a group of Chicanos and several disciples of Timothy Leary registered protests.
It was all, finally, too controversial. Not relevant. No attention paid to Consciousness III. Too conservative. No women among the Old Testament prophets.
The program, as reconstituted,
will be interdisciplinary. It will
not be taught by the professor,
nor will it include much of the
original concept. But it will be
relevant, now, part of the scene,
and the discussions will be led by
10 seniors.
"I CAN'T UNDERSTAND IT! AFTER ALL OUR CODPLING..."
Thanks a lot, Calder. Some of us have had some pretty punk students from journalism, too. So they write for me in "crap" in the second paragraph
"One student," he informs us,
"comparing the Rhetoric
segment of the Pearson class,
the program is intimately superior
to another student is getting in
English 2H. Any of us who teach
students who have been through
English 1, 2, and 3 will wonder
could be doing the Pearson people
now those nown teaching English."
Readers Respond
It is not enough for the College Committee on the Evaluation and Advancement of Instruction, the College Educational Policies and Procedures Committee, the department of English, the department of history, the drama, the department of history, the department of philosophy, the Western Civilization program and the College Assembly to spend thousands of man- and woman-hours on this question: now Pickett to give us "personal—and admittedly limited investigations."
The debate concerning the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program has gone on—I think we would all agree—a much too long; and it frequently has sunk to a regrettably low level. The program has been studied most carefully by two College committees, several departments and numerous individuals. The committee commonly may reach a solution soon. Certainly we all hope so.
Too Long
Comments on Pearson
But I really wonder what the column by my old friend Calder Pickett in last Friday 'kisana is going to do to help us reach a wise decision and heal the wounds which this debate has opened.
George J. Worth Chairman Department of English
of your article, "Crap," indeed.
One of the saddest things about this whole messy business is how it can be so awful, worst in all of us—including me.
To the Editor:
Pearson Story
Dennis B. Quin
Director, Pearson Colleg
The excellent story by Linda Chaput and Ann McFerron on the Pearson program (March 7 contains one pressure needing imitation and one that is unfortunate that so few of our underclass courses are taught by full-time faculty, I certainly do not think that graduate students produce 'low quality' in their Pearson program, and I know that many graduate teachers are excellent–indeed sometimes superior to full-time faculty instructors. I am sure, however, that they improve with age and experience and further education.
Rock Chalk To the Editor:
Rock Chalk Revue is dying Rock Chalk revue, in the past has been a humorous variety show. Serious Rumour is staged at the same time as The Revue of ways throughout the year. But does this serious type of drama
need to take over Rock Chalk? Rock Chalk shows us the lightning that doesn't. Doesn't Rock Chalk Revue have enough originality to be preserved—or will KU lose it, a annual comedy-variety show.
Courses emphasizing women's past contributions to society beyond the usual stereotyped conception an required to help women make positive changes and the effect they have on women today. This could be done in many existing courses, it is true. However, most instructors know as little about women's contributions to their field as do the students.
Jim Winfield Leavenworth Sophomore
My English course last semester did not include one female dramatist, although by reading Ms. magazine I know there were some who wrote during the periods we studied. The next question to be the women contributed nothing to history, just as blacks were supposed to have contributed nothing.
Up to Ms.?
To the Editor:
Do we have to leave it to Ms. magazine alone to disp this myth? Women pay tuition and courses for the courses for which they ask
By Sokoloff
Kaye Rands Lake Quivira Junior
Griff and the Unicorn
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