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Wednesday, January 24, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Too Much, Too Soon
Too much of a good thing may be worse than too little. So it is with the city of Lawrence. The city has shown inordinate concern for future development to the exclusion of dealing with present problems.
An attempt to annex 1,780 acres to the northwest in late 1972 was symptomatic of this preoccupation with the future. The city wanted the tract to facilitate planning for future industrial growth. Similarly, the city is looking ahead to the impact Clinton Reservoir will have on the local economy. In a word, Lawrence looks on progress.
But while eyes are glued to the future the city is mired in the present. Sections of the town are glaring eyesores; others are in advanced stages of decay. Twenty-third Street is a mile-long eyesore. Block after block, the motorist is intimidated by ugly buildings and signs. Plastic, concrete and metal disfigure the street.
Even the empty lots with a growth of weeds are more aesthetic than the occupied lots. These too are zoned business and will soon disappear especially, 23rd Street is a gold mine in other respects it is bankrupt.
Twenty-third street by no means has a monopoly on ugliness. Sections of Iowa, 6th, 9th and Massachusetts streets are similarly endowed. Burgers and beer, gas and groceries beckon the motorist.
While the modern offends, other parts of the city decay. Older houses on the perimeter of the University of Kansas campus deteriorate by the year. Some houses between the campus and downtown seem to be sliding down the hill. Sidewalks in the area often are buckled where
they are not covered by mud, and foot-sized holes can be found in many places. Some yards are covered with underbrush and debris. Houses, for the most part are untended, and new paint jobs, done to satisfy city regulations, fail to hide disrepair. Inside they are not much better, with torn screens (if there are any), oid fixtures, exposed wiring, ancient furniture and discolored walls.
One house I visited in the same area while searching for a place to live offered a fine basement apartment complete with doors that wouldn't close, six-foot ceilings, a musty atmosphere, old appliances and a sink tucked into a tortuous cubbyhole. Another apartment several blocks away from the first boasted a tiny bedroom, a sink with unattached, a connecting portal between the bathroom kitchen, and rusted-out screens; it did have a good view of a church. Lighting is poor in these areas and sidewalks become tiltropes in the dark.
The city of Lawrence looks to the future and often myopically views the problems of today. The city has enforced some of its minimum standards for housing in the area about which I write, but the changes have done little to improve the neighborhood. On the other hand, the city zealously encourages new businesses of the type I call eyesores. Lawrence may have a perfectly reasonable plan for future development, but unless the city takes action to remedy present problems that future may be corroded from within.
Steve Riel.
Editorial Editor
Budgeting Education
The Kansas Legislature soon will vote on the governor's budget recommendation for higher education in the state. Our concern is how the legislature will treat the University of Kansas, and whether enough funding be provided for continuance of academic programs of excellence.
The game is an old one. KU makes recommendation to the Board of Regents. The regents cut the budget and submit their recommendation to the governor through the State Budget Director's Office. The governor cuts the budget and sends his proposal to the governor, acting as a "savior of higher education," then restores some of the cuts made earlier.
So the legislature will now get its turn. Let us hope it restores some of the cuts made along the line, and allocates more funds to KU.
Two years ago when the legislature did not fund KU or other institutions of higher learning in Kansas adequately. Concerned Students for Higher Education in Kansas was formed. Concerned Students has received wide publicity and has been a source of inspiration for our University. Recently the founder of that organization, Rusty Leffel, resigned as its coordinator.
In a letter of resignation to
members of the group Lefel said, "Concerned Students is not so much an organization as it is an invitation to students to meaningfully involve themselves in finding solutions to some of the critical issues facing our University."
He said a "transition is being forced on our system of higher education and a closer look is being taken as to what actually is the 'educational mission' of a university. Financing is only the most noticeable of the issues forcing this transition."
In the next few weeks we shall learn how our state legislators, some of whom we elected, view higher education. The amount of money they allocate to higher education will determine the importance of our state's colleges and universities. KU stands to gain or lose a great deal.
When: the budget vote comes before our legislators, they should recognize the concern students have for improved financing of the University. We will do our part to continue the academic excellence of KU by paying higher tuition next year. The least we can ask is that the state provide a better budget than we have had in past years.
—R. E. Duncan
LBJ: Reflection on the Man
By CALDER M. PICKETT
Professor of Journalism
It may be permissible to affect, this Jan. 23, on what would have been said by Lyndon B. Johnson had he died in 1965, or in 1968, shortly after the Democratic convention in Chicago. The commentators were kind last night, on television, and the editorial pages of The New York Times things about a person who has just died. Poll's demonstrated shortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy that if the persons who said they had voted for him had actually voted for him he would have been elected by a vast margin, instead of just squeaking
When was a time, in early 1965, when, even though the Gulf of Tonkin resolution had been passed and the big war was in motion, it began to look as if the United States would headline writers called LBJ in the pantheon of great presidents. Johnson had been extraordinarily successful in his first year. Social legislation that almost made the First Hundred Days of WWII been passed. The country seemed to be under the horror of the death of Kennedy, LBJ had swamped Barry Goldwater, and
Already the air seems cleaner, as we think about Lyndon Johnson, than it seemed in grim 1968. Henry Kissinger is off to Paris again, and peace, who knows, may be "at hand," but Nikon has had his mandate and America must do so. Protections don't generate the crowds or the enthusiasm of a few years ago.
Our recent audits of Title 1 funds suggest that where possible, states (and school boards) will use these funds to substitute for, rather than supplement, local programs. For these reasons, the kinds of strings we place on the . . . package are
conservatism seemed in decline. Some writers were even known to praise the style of Johnson, whether in dress or the way he moved and acted.
But all that euphoria disappeared, and the country became ugly. The war got worse, and hawks became doves, and off-Broadway produced "MacBird," and old jokes that had been used against FDR were brought back to be used against LBI. One was a song by Eddie Murphy called the President, or about Texas. People began to say they voted against Goldwater, not for Johnson. Johnson and his aides found it difficult to make public appearances, the rioters were too rowdy. The cities—at least the inner cities—were going up in smoke. Editorial writers forget how kind they were toward the Lyndon Johnson. On March 31, 1968, the President "abdicated," as we second guessers are putting it.
In giving governors federal school funds, for example, Richardson reminds incoming HWEN secretary Caspar Weinberger that "education is an area where states have strong incentives to disobey federal regulations.
We have a failing, we Americans (maybe Europeans have a similar failing), of trying to rate our leaders too soon. We forget that history gives us new evidence, that styles change. Already the new left has re-evaluated Dwight Eisenhower and come to admire him. Harry Truman, who was reviled in 1921 when he left office, is now admired by many as the art market; some critic may dislike Franklin Pierce or William Howard Taft one of these days, as other critics have discovered Edward Hicks or Frederick Church.
We still don't know about Johnson.
We won't know for a long time. Even after we think we know we'll find that we don't t. think, as I have thought for many years, that Johnson will look much better, in the year 2000, than he looks today. As a matter of fact, he seems to look much better right now than he did four years ago.
His accomplishments were not insignificant. He started by being one of the best major leaders the Senate has ever had; the people who talk about his lack of ability "don't mind" that he was an extremely able politician in both House and Senate. He managed to put through legislation that had failed John Kennedy. Many have criticized him for civil rights act, Medicare, education measures, poverty programs, a start in the war on pollution. How strange it seemed to hear Martin Luther King's voice last right on television, or when he spoke at a convention the hated Lyndon Johnson as the great friend of the black people of America.
It was the war that ultimately did him in, and it was his war. The war poisoned our land, and Johnson, as well as his brother, Halberstam calls "The Best and the Brightest," must bear much of the responsibility. But again: most of us appear to have forgotten that in some places he was hawky as Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
The takeover by the states is called "Special Revenue Sharing" but its prospects are so poor that it suggests state governors will have to be watched every minute. Besides losening HEW control of the money, the plan makes more eyes overseeing almost impossible.
The war did him in, and so did the times. Lyndon Johnson was a hot man in an age of the cool. He didn't come
through on the tube. He followed John Kennedy through, and that didn't help him, nor did Ladybird's following Jackie (in though increasingly Ladybird came to look much better than Mrs. Onassis). The Kennedy troops made life rough for Johnson, and so did some of the forgetful press. But he was Old Corpine for many, Herb Shirrine in a time when styles were changing. Bruce. We cheeked our tongues when drove across his ranch, paper cup in beer in hand, or when he showed us his operation scar, or when he picked up his dogs by their ears. We forgot that human beings—being, and that human beings—sometimes—do human types, and aren't always plastic TV types.
the death of Johnson seemed especially shocking because it followed so quickly the death of Harry Truman, Johnson and Truman were much alike. So were Johnson and Dwight Eisenhower. All were people the midlands, relatively simple people. He could not cool. I may lose my credentials in Marshall McLuhan club, and may be damned as a slob of the silent majority for seying this, but I liked Lydon Johnson, and his death daddies me. A scene last night on the drive him driving off to see the sun set there, and I like to think that the Pedaleraes, and I like to think that is what LBJ, every compone inch of him, would have been doing today, had he had his way.
Jack Anderson
These include such popular and beneficial projects as Head Start, aid to education, food for the aged, help for alcohols, VD control, rodent extermination and the drug addiction fliuit.
Parting Gift Bodes HEW Shift
BY JACK ANDERSON
WASHINGTON—As a parting gift, Secretary Elliot Richardson of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare is leaving behind a blueprint for slashing billions in federal programs for the needy, sick and aged.
In a classified memo, written shortly after he agreed to move to the Pentagon, Richardson recommends that the stakes be lowered in social programs now run from Washington.
particularly important."
Richardson also cautions that politically-motivated governors are not above diverting federal cash away from the intended recipients: Poor whites, blacks, Chicanos and Indians.
The governors, he fears, may "reallocate funds away from (these), politically vulnerable groups in their favorite projects. To block such money juggling, his confidential memo proposes "enforcement cuts" from fund cut-offs to federal investigations of citizen complaints.
present $400 million in federal Head Start funds would then be cut back to $60 million, just additional and experimental activities.
There may be problems, Richardson explains, "as states and localities eliminate Head Start, they are garped as politically troublesome." Head Start, which trains preschoolers, is given one more year by Richardson before he would cut it adrift from HEW.
A shift of Treasury cash to the states is also proposed for $2.6 billion in education money, $66 million for vocational training, $130 million for fighting addiction, and $66 million to combat alcoholism, $33 million in VD controls and $42 million for the aged.
Yet Richardson suggests the federal government abandon such agencies for the poor as Head Start and Community Action Programs, which run 90 per cent of Head Start's projects.
As reasons for his drastic dismantling of the federal
domestic aid machinery,
Richardson writes: 'HEW can manage well only a limited number of programs . . . The remainder . . . should be given to employers in a form which they will use. To attempt too much is to accomplain nothing at all."
"TO THE SHELTERS/ NIXON IS ON THE VERGE OF PEACE!"
Footnote: Now that Richardson has opened the door to killing off federal aid, the White House is trimming U.S. cash intended for the states, thus ending some programs entirely.
Copyright, 1973,
by United Feature Syndicate. Inc.
Unions Vie for Farm Workers
James J. Kilpatrick
WASHINGTON—Politics, they say, make strange bedfellows, and rarely have stranger fellows been found under the same blanket than the American Farm Bureau and the Teamsters Union. They are cuddled up this season to promote the extension of federal labor law to farm workers across the nation.
The Teammates *a-e* doing what comes naturally: They are acting out of a fine sense of opportunism. The Farm Bureau, by contrast, is acting from a deep sense of panic. Both of them see at the window the spectre of Chave, head of the AFL-CIO farmworkers who may not love each other, but they look at Chave with the same gold eye. They cannot abide the fellow.
For the Teamsters, the pending legislation presents a rich opportunity to play their own game. They have long ago mastered. At present, provisions of the National Labor Relations Act applies to farm workers. Where small armies of hand labor are required to work in California and Florida, the workers are ripe gipes for the plucking.
Chavez, the soft-spoken hero of the limousine liberals, is an intellectual quadron, one-fourth of the world. In mysticism overwhelms Ethel Kennedy types, and the bossiam plucks the grapes. In the four years since he began swinging his magic whip, Chavez has corraled a large portion of the crowd. He must join his union or be denied the only living they know.
The motivations of the Farm Bureau are quite different. They may not regard Frank Fitzsimmons as an angel of light, but they look upon Chavez as the devil incarnate. Frustrated, bewildered, out-maneuvered, he throws himself into a miserable time. They have suffered the grape boycott and the lettuce boycott; they have surrendered their workers to Chavez without free elections among the workers; and deserve prospect confronts them of strikes, boycots, and closed doors. The farmers have protections of federal law law.
John Davenport, one of the nation's most respected writers on economic affairs, said bluntly in Baron's Weekly early this month that the Farm Bureau is buying a "sense of protections imagined by the Bureau are likely to prove ineffective protections. It is one thing to regulate labor-management relations in a factory, where the bargaining process should also extend to the labor migrant workers who may be in Bakersfield today and Fresno
tomorrow.
One of the unfortunate aspects of this affair is the abandonment of principle by the Farm Bureau. A few years ago the bureau stoutly defended the principle of voluntary unionism. It as strongly opposed compulsion. Yet to advocate the extension of Tat-Harti is unlikely to be successful in union shop. The bureau invites a situation, a few years hence, when large farmers would be caught like so many fish in a net of NLRB regulations. They would encounter the "unfair labor practice," the skilled labor
lawyer, the experienced union negotiator. They might be worse off then they are now.
The pending bill cannot pass without the support of the Farm Bureau and other farm organizations. If they would give their consent to principle of voluntarian instead, and seek positive guarantees of a farm worker's right to work without joining a union, they could solve their problems. They could also give a union shop, Chavez, Fitzsimmons alike could then be pruned to manageable size.
(C) 1973 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
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