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Friday, March 2, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comme
cautorats, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Of Primary Importance
The hour has arrived to fortify my ribbon with a little deadly nightshade and again take to the typewriter, this time on behalf of an approaching city primary that may prove to be the most important political contest in Lawrence during the next two years.
Money and democratic government are blood brothers. He who has sufficient funds is endowed with an intimate knowledge of governess, whose son has such an intimate relationship also has, in all likelihood, influence.
Take a good look at the 14 City Commission candidates before you vote. (Here I assume that someone now reading this editorial will take it upon himself to traverse the long road from the voting booth. Everyone has his weaknesses, his price and his reason for running for a city office.)
This town is governed by a fiveman city commission, which is not run on the voluntary dogoodism of a PTA chapter. The commission sets policies and enacts the ordinances and resolutions of Lawrence. In doing so, the commission holds considerable power, and directs large amounts of city revenues. Honest and reliable commissioners are to the best advantage of every inhabitant of this city, regardless of how long he intends to make Lawrence his home.
Mud slingers we can do without, especially when they insist upon dressing themselves in immaculate white. The three candidates of the Support Your Local Police Ticket shouldn't cloak their own plans in secrecy if they insist on slurring the actions of opponents, whom they are willing to outline in detail but refuse to name.
One of these men, Gene F. Miller, is so concerned about law and order that he is willing to sacrifice his own ineligibility (he has not lived in England enough to be a candidate) to save the city from worse evils.
These three candidates—Fred J Pence, Robert L. Elder and Miller—have made a wag-faving, apple pie spectacle of their campaign. But they have yet to explain just how they will correct the multitudinous and flagrant problems which, they say, infect Lawrence city government.
They are, however, now climbing the ropes of business, which serve as such a sweet training ground for politicians, as are all of the candidates except Barkley Clark and Anna Laura Rusk. Not that I am promoting both of them as perfect candidates.
I am not trying to create an adage to the effect that businessmen are inherently evil, but to the effect that they have inherent interests in the powers wielded by a city government. I am not saying most interest to a candidate depends upon his line of business. Let the voter beware.
Let him also beware of innocence and gullibility, and sloth and greed and hiljacker profiles.
In short, take the time to find out what interests lie behind the little black box you mark at the polls. This is the one primary that may decide the outcome of the general election, an election upon which the next two years of city government in Lawrence depend.
Linda Schild
Guest Editorial
Executing Abortion
Abortion, considered by perhaps an unsacred few as just another kind of infant mortality, has developed into an issue that has challenged American morality like none other before it.
Just recently a curious conviction of this morality and the times in which he vowed to rear his head as a result of two seperate decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a June 29 decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that human execution was a cruel and unusual punishment, and was in violation of the Eighth and 19th Amendments to the United States Constitution, so execution immediately was lifted from over the heads of more than 600 U.S. convicts.
On January 22, less than seven months later the Supreme Court gave premature birth to another decision. The body ruled 7-2 that a baby born outside abortions during the first six months of a woman's pregnancy.
In the majority decision Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun said he rejected a theory that a fetus had legal rights and that it should be protected by law—state law in this case. Blackmun said that there was no basis in the U.S. Constitution for that theory, and that "the unborn" had never been recognized by law "as persons in the whole sense."
A state may not interfere with a pregnant woman's "right of privacy," he said, only during the last three months of pregnancy, when the child is developed enough to live outside its mother.
Blackmun might have added, "or
the mother-to-be or the mother-to-
have."
When placed side by side these two Supreme Court rulings—on capital punishment and abortion—seem to heavily contradictory convictions.
The convict who has had his chance in life, or whose chance has been spoiled by society (depending on how you look at it), in most cases, has had his life extended until his natural death.
On the other side of the law,
however, the unborn child probably
will not be given even the chance to
have a natural birth.
A convicted rapist, for example, is relieved of capital punishment unless the state in which he is charged has designated his crime punishable by death. His unborn offspring, the product of his crime, is more likely to receive the death penalty.
In the Kansas Legislature, action
has been taken this week on bills that would change state law to conform more closely to the Supreme Court's capital punishment and abortion.
Two bills that would alter Kansas' statutes on capital punishment have appeared before the Legislature. Thursday the Senate passed 24-15 and sent to the House one of the bills, which would impose a mandatory death penalty in Kansas for all first-degree murder convictions. An amendment to the measure had passed Wednesday by only a 19-18 vote. The bill, originally drafted to make capital punishment applicable for four types of murder in Kansas, was broadened to make the death sentence mandatory for all first-degree murder convictions, including premeditated murder and murder in the commission of a felony.
A bill that would change Kansas law to conform to the liberalized Supreme Court requirements on abortion was delayed in the Kansas Senate Monday, but it is still up for consideration. Kansas' present abortion law, adopted in 1970 as part of the state criminal code, allows abortions during the first six months of a pregnancy if a doctor says it is necessary for a woman's mental or physical well-being.
If nothing else, the lifeless juxtaposition of the law in the two Supreme Court rulings should make persons be concerned more about the means of prevention, or contrast them than the end of curing, or abortion.
Given modern medical technology, there are few excuses for wanton or unwanted conceptions: an eighth of an ounce of prevention seems to be at least worth, if not preferable to eight pounds of cure.
We could always shrug off this responsibility and say that modern-day abortion is more euthanasia than most of us realize or would not be. We, like Sorates, will never know the solution to this age-old problem.
Conceivably, the pathetic phallacy in most social misconceptions is that regardless of whether all rhythm, rhyme and reason fail, the law still may be either vented or circumvented.
Nevertheless, it is we, the living,
who render the final decision.
Despite the disputed depth of this graveless situation, might we not inscribe upon its surface this transverse THE BABE STOPPED HERE.
—Jerry Esslinger
Gray 'Stalled' ITT Investigation
WASHINGTON—The more you try to unravel the Watergate scandal, the more strands you find entangled with the ITT scandal. And the more difficult it becomes to distinguish those who violated the law from those who are supposed to uphold the law.
Jack Anderson
facing his own confirmation hearings to become FBI director. The key document in the ITT affair was the astonishing memorandum he signed, which included Dita Beard, which suggested an antitrust settlement was linked to a $400,000 political commitment from ITT.
It was almost exactly a year ago, for example, that Attorney General Ricanel Kleindienst reopened his confirmation hearings in an effort to explain away the allegations he made against his hearings, he turned all ITT matters over to his deputy, L. Patrick Gray. Now a year later, Gray is
The memo became such an embarrassment that the White House belatedly tried to claim it was a fake. The Washington Post wrote in Howard Hunt was dispatched to Denver to talk to Mrs. Beard.
Her son, Robert Beard, confirmed that a "very eerie" stranger, wearing a red wig on cockedley like he put it on in a dark car," called on his mother. Subsequently, Hunt was arrested in connection with the Wategater attack, and he found in one of the rooms rented by the Wategater conspirators.
The Washington Post also reported that Hunt's trip to Denver "was part of an effort... to discredit the Dita Bear memo" and led in part to her statement claiming it was a forgery three weeks after she had acknowledged its authenticity
While the beweigged Hunt was pressing Mrs. Beard for her statement, Senate Judicary chairman James Easland slipped the memo to the U.S. Department of Justice for an FBI analysis. This was done秘密ly without the knowledge of the other committee members. The FBI confirmed that the memo was written on DNA Back typewriter and that the typewriter ribbon was the same one in use the day the memo was dated.
But meanwhile, the document mysteriously turned up in the possession of ITT. Eastland later made clear that he had directed that the document should not leave the FBI's control.
Our sources say, however, that the memo was slipped to ITT by the Justice Department at Gray's office. We also staff at one point attempted to retrieve the document, we are told, they couldn't get it back right away because Gray was too late. ITT more time with the document.
ITT had it examined by a couple of dubious "experts," who concluded that it was written for people with disabilities, therefore, a false. Thus, Hunt and Gray appear to have been working in tandem to discredit the memo. Hunt has gone to jail because he has been appointed FBI chief.
Throughout the ITP hearings, Gray was in charge of deciding which Justice Department documents the Senate Judiciary
Committee would be allowed to see. He happily made available the papers which helped Kleindienst, but refused to turn over many others which might have proved embarrassing.
Senators who requested information were repeatedly told they would get it. But often, it would never arrive. Sen. Quentin Burdick, D-N.D., for example, asked time and again for a chronological summary of events leading to the ITT antitrust settlement. He never got it, but later, he sent Mass., repeatedly pressed Gray for the Justice Department's basic file on the ITT settlement. But Gray refused to let the committee see the file.
The Washington Post also reported: "During this period, the impact of the ITT allegations and had launched a major effort to discredit columnist Jack Annow."
This effort was directed largely by the same "Mission: Implement a Water Scandal" caught in the Watergate scandal. James McCord, then President Nixon's campaign security chief, and submitted memos to Hunt.
Hunt and McCord, instead of discrediting us, wound up discredited. Both were convicted at the Watergate trial and the effort to discredit us was taken over by Gray and the FBI.
Copyright, 1973 by United Feature Syndicate. Inc.
A Voice from the Establishment
By CALDER M. PICKETT
I have been following with interest the controversy concerning the Pearson humanities program that has taken up so much space recently in the Daily Mail. I have talked to a number of Journal-World. I have talked with a number of people about this burning issue, including some of the students, and think it time to say what I am now about to say.
The students I know in the Pearson program are sometimes inspired, sometimes angered. They also are upset at times by the 'controversial' aspects of the program. And they are also upset about all the fuss. We have people who may be one of the better programs on campus, and perhaps the time has come, as long as people are in an inquisitorial mood, to look into some of the crap that plugs our schedules of courses as well as their minds, instead of spending so much time on this one matter.
The Pearson program dispute has been taking place at the same time that new programs are coming into existence at the University of Kansas. In the past few days members of the faculty have received some interesting communications: a call for suggestions about interdisciplinary projects, an interest to participate, a call for similar suggestions about courses "rebelant to women."
We are getting the call for new
course ideas, the vice chancellor is wondering how the University can solve its budgetary and staffing woes, the Pearson program is being investigated and some of us are pounding away at our courses, wishing we had the time to experimentation being requested in what looks like official University communiques.
I am naive about budgetary matters, but it occurs to me that if someone teaches these brave people, they will not be teaching something else, and someone else will have to do the 'meat and potatoes' work. Let me save this for later because right now I want to say a few things about the Pearson program, which had been knocked about of late by the faculty tougs D/Derega.
The Pearson program, as I understand it, is an educational experiment planned by three veteran and highly respected teachers. (I recognize that these are loaded words, but my sources do not identify them) That Nelick, Quinn and Senior are veteran and highly respected teachers.) The program also happens to be controversial, largely, I gather, because Nelick, Quinn and Senior are controversial. Good, very good, especially the trouble is that their kind of controversy is not the fashionable kind.
--wrong way. If they were teaching Frantz Fannon and Gloria Steinen, or Topics and Problems in Math, they might not be so fierce. But they are teaching what sounds to me like the only real Great Books program on campus. Western Columbia has gone 'relevant' on us.
Anyone who knows these three men will know that they come on
Students to Be Advisers
In an editorial Wednesday entitled "Town-Gown Politics" it stated that the Town had been given a proposed City Commission to propose a City Commission Advisory Board. The Kansan has been informed that it is the intent of the Lawrence City Commission to include a "bread base" of representation for the Kansan City Commission.
Students will be included in the advisory board, a city commissioned said Wednesday, after the nucleus group consisting of 5 former city commissioners has had an opportunity to make a proposal for direct commission on the exact structure of the proposed advisory group
surong. You don't have blah feelings about them. My sources tell me that their students are stirred up, occasionally antagonized. Their students don't always agree with the teachers. But a number of them—at least the ones with whom I have talked—are turned on by them. In most of the pedestrian courses that too often make up a university education.
I have followed the Pearson controversy, and I do not pretend to be an authority on it. But I am aware of things I have heard and heard.
I am troubled by suggestions that somebody else should be teaching this group of students. Why? And who? How many students would be better off if the sophomores would be better off if this 24-hour program were chopped up into segments taught by graduate students or by others in the class designed by three possible inspired members of the faculty?
Stories and letters have suggested that the Pearson kids are not getting a true equivalent of English or Speech. This would
I am troubled by the feeling that if other teachers were running the Pearson program, three other teachers of no identifiable teacherly traits say, "I'm troubled by the feeling that the three teachers now running the program are controversial in the
Many of our students will leave KU without having had the stimulation of one fine teacher; that, at least, is the testimony of my friend Ms. Leigh gathering of young people who have 24 hours of Great Books—controversial hours, maybe—from three of the finest teachers in our school. That such an experience cannot be shared by our other students.
not support my personal—and admittedly limited investigations. One student, comparing the Rhetoric segment of the Pearson class, suggests that students have superior to what another student is getting in English 2. Any of you who teach students who have been through English 1, 2 and 3 will wonder why or how the teacher should be doing worse job than they now teaching English.
-Readers Respond.
To the Editor:
The organization toward which his editorial was directed, The Commission on the Status of Women, is a special interest group that directs its efforts toward better education and students about problems of our sexist society. Human liberation is a goal of this group.
Response to Duncan
The decision to acknowledge last Friday's editorial by R.E. Duncan was a difficult one. I felt that he did not deserve a response until I heard the article praised by other, equally unaware males. Duncan does not have any grasp of either men or women who are trying to live and grow in today's society.
The feminist movement has made some progress, but an overwhelming number of inequities still exists in our society. Men and women need to be aware of the oppression of
human beings. There is a men's consciousness-raising group that meets weekly to deal with the realities of face in our changing society.
I suggest that he become involved with other males to learn to deal with himself. In this way Duncan could be constructively bettered by bettering himself instead of mocking and criticizing women.
If Duncan's editorial is an expression of his frustration as a male in a society that is changing to meet the needs of its members,
Marilyn Kent Lawrence Senior
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