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Thursday, April 11, 1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commer Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Profs Must Bargain
The traditional image of the college professor is dead, dying, or at least descending from the lofty, ivy-covered towers of academia.
Today campus dissidents are more likely to be the teachers than the students—teachers who are fearful of losing their jobs. More and more they are being forced to wage thekthe kids in college, whom they have been fighting for years and to resort to such blue-collar tactics as collective bargaining
Neither administration nor the teachers themselves are happy about this sacrifice of professionalism or the apparent appeal of an inevitable part of what is becoming known as academic depression.
Earlier this month the faculty at Kansas State College at Pittsburg asked the Kansas Public Employee Relations Board to allow it to form a bargaining unit for negotiations with the college administration and the regents. This would be the first faculty collective bargaining unit at a school under the Kansas Board of Regents.
Anticipating insufficient budget increases for next year, KU recently fired all teachers whose titles included the term "visiting" or visitor to the university's tenure professors have caused tenured professors here to be fearful for jobs they thought were secure for life.
Last week the special SenEx committee on financial exigency finally issued a report defining financial exigency as "the fiscal situation in which the University is no longer able to carry out its educational mission and goals without eliminating the position of one or more tenured members of the faculty."
The report also said that tenured faculty could be dismissed only after the chancellor and SenEx had collected data and documentation to show that the financial condition of a University unit could no longer support tenured faculty members and that there was no other reasonable alternative but to dismiss them.
But the picture is even gloomier elsewhere. At Southern Illinois University 104 faculty members, 28 of them tenured professors, were fired last winter. Closer to home, Nebraska's state colleges may drop as many as 50 teachers. And these are only two examples of what is happening at schools all over the country.
Faced with such a disheartening situation, teachers can hardly be criticized for sacrificing some measure of academic professionalism for economic problems to mitigate the occurrence of firings and financial exigency carelessly disregard the needs and welfare of their students.
Bunny Miller
How to Tell It's Spring
Here it is—the annual spring-has-
arrived editorial. You know spring
has arrived when the newspaper
has announced the annual spring-has-
arrived editorial.
Never mind that it snowed on the weekend of the official arrival of spring and that the weather has been changing from springlike to winterlike and back from day to day in the succeeding two weeks.
You can tell it's spring because the birds are nesting on the air conditioner outside the bedroom and the trunk yard has blossoms on it.
Also, people are showing up for classes with the beginnings of some marvelous sun tans. The coughs and sneezes of those same people punctuating lectures are another indication that spring has arrived.
Spring brings a change of
scenery for the voyeurs. You start to see bare bellies and bouncing breasts. And legs and things.
It also brings a change of scenery in some classes. Attendance seems to drop significantly in late-morning and afternoon classes, and there's a marked pre- and post-weekend diu in attendance.
You can also tell it's spring because of all the unpleasant deadlines coming up. There's the April 15 income tax deadline; then there's the week of the Kansas Relays, when all teachers make all term papers due so that they can grade them in time for finals.
The only thing missing so far has been the rain. When it starts raining and keeps raining as if it will stop, the spring really has arrived.
Bob Simison
By RICHARD T. COOPER
PAUL E. STEIGER
The Los Angeles Times
Political Infighting Is Nothing New
WASHINGTON - Have you heard the one about Energy Czar William E. Simon, the leading candidate for secretary of the treasury? "If he gets the job, there won't be just long lines at gas stations. There will be long lines at banks too."
Punch-Line Politics
According to historian David Halberstam; against-Stenley Democrats circulated a story in which Stevenson, about to give a speech, asked an aide, "Do I have time to go to the ballroom?" Did he, or did Stevenson then allegedly pondered aloud, "Do I want to go to the bathroom?"
That jibe, a none-to-sbile suggestion that Simon caused the gasoline crisis and might follow it up with a money crisis, was quietly fed into Washington's bloodstream last week by the energy caar's rivals at the White House.
During the early 1960s for example, cold warriors in the Democratic party feared that Adlai Stevenson's less militant attitude toward Russia might endanger the United States. They chipped at his prestige by portraying him as indecisive and thus weak.
Calibau once arranged a Senate vote that torpeded Van Buren's confirmation as minister to England, but Van Buren won the final victory by cultivating a pretty, but socially young, woman named Peggy O'Neil Timberlake Eaton.
NOTHING SOMOENTUOUS as peace and war inspired the rivalry between John C. Calboun and Martin Van Buren during the administration of Andrew Jackson. The two men continually intrigued against one another for preeminence in the President's eyes.
The point of this exercise in punch-line politics was power: Less for Simon and more for his rivals, especially followers of the Labour Party, and the Office of Management and Budget.
In her childhood, Jackson had dangled Peggy O'Neil on his knee and years later, after his wife had died, she was a great supporter of the movement, caused most of official Washington, including Calibourn's Southern society wife, to scorn her. But the craft Van Buren sought
"Into Peggy's pretty little ear he whispered that Jackson was 'the greatest man who ever lived," according to Margaret L. Cott in a prize-winning book on the Ace Course Peggy told the general immediately, exactly as Van Buren had planned."
And if the anti-Simon ploy was not strictly fair, it unquestionably belonged to a venerable tradition. From the nation's earliest days, such sly tactics have played an important role in Washington power struggles.
JOKES, GOSSIP, telling wiscreaches, pet manipulation of protocol, flattery poured into innocent ears, rigged public events, leaks of damaging facts and of purported facts, all have contributed to the backstairs warfare of government.
"Jackson's eyes filled with tears," said Cout. "That man loves me, he declared." The next president of the United States was Martin Van Buren.
Sometimes, of course, this sort of conving and scheming can backfire.
During World War II, Ferdinand Eber-
U.S. Short Changes Vets
The Washington Post
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
WASHINGTON-The American people came to hate the war in Vietnam, all right. But it doesn't follow that they also hate the men who fought in that war.
That fact is slowly seeping through the public consciousness. And the pitiful little Vietnam Veterans Day parade staged here last week—as little and as late as it was—offered some indication that it is also into the consciousness of President Nixon.
"Because of inadequate and poorly managed programs, Vietnam veterans—and particularly minority veterans—have been effectively denied their earned benefits and have suffered grievous consequences," said June Willett, chairman of the Leadership Conference's task force on veterans and military affairs.
As inadequate as the country's response to Vietnam vets generally has been, it has created a unique set of veterans, a point made last week by a task force of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (a conglomeration of some 135 civil labor, social and religious organization).
In medical care, in education, in job opportunities—in all the "extras" that we customarily heap upon war veterans—the Vietnam veterans are being short changed. They aren't individuals less heroic than any other category of war veterans but that they aren't heroes generically, because they didn't save us from anything.
She pointed out that although blacks were only 12.6 per cent of the armed forces personnel, they accounted for roughly 20 per cent of the combat fatalities.
THE ONLY VIETNAM veterans to be treated as heroes were the returning POWs, and after the initial fanfare, even these men and women have become as far as the administration is concerned.
*MINORITY VETERANS* who bore the brunt of a discriminatory discharge病 in military service are now being placed on their return to civilian life," she said.
That last statement was in reference to a point made by the National Urban League earlier last month during house hearings on amnesty; that black GIs have received a disproportionately large share of less-than-honorable discharges from the military.
Ronald H. Brown, director of the League's Washington bureau told the hearing, "The military, like the vast majority of our other institutions, has somehow learned to dispense justice in a way that is not consistent with members were drafted in greater numbers, assigned in greater numbers to frontline duty or to unkilled, dead-end jobs, and generally abused by the unfair system of military justice. Finally, those who were called upon to bear the brunt of duty were more frequently accused with less-than-beneficial discharges."
The less-than-honorable-discharge represents far more than a blot on a veteran's record. According to those who have studied the problem, such discharges are often used as a basis for denying employment.
EVEN MANY DISCHARGES that appear to be honorable, are "coded with personal characteristics which may serve to offend or irritate you," are not even aware of the presence of such
He said that there was evidence that many major employers were able to decipher the codes, even though most veterans had no idea what they meant. (The Defense Department announced last week that it would no longer code discharges.)
There is very little reason to be hopeful about the prospects of reinstituting special programs for minority veterans, but it wouldn't be surprising to see a major administration move to upgrade benefits for Vietnam veterans generally.
codes." Brown testified.
Unfortunately, the Urban League, the NAACP and other member groups of the GIts have also shown success in getting the government to act on the special complaints of minority GIs—which isn't surprising in view of how little has been paid the plight of white GIs.
The President, so desperate for some gesture to improve his ratings that he has dredged up even the old stanchion of school headquarters, said he would climb aboard the veterans' bandwagon.
While the discharge codes can work against any veteran, they work "a special hardship on minority veterans, who already have served in the American society," Brown said.
stadh, vice chairman of the War Production Board, called several high officials to his home one night to plot the removal of Ebertstadt's boss, Donald M. Nelson.
Two elderly women employed in Eberstadt's household over heartaches of the conversation and thought they were bearing a plot to overthrow the government. They took notes in the kitchen and indirectly鼓励 them along to J. Edgar Hoyer of the FBI.
Eventually, the notes got to Nelson, who figured out what was going on and fired Eberstadt just as the lackless subordinate was about to visit the White House.
PERHAPS NO ADMINISTRATION,
before or since, was as rife with intramural
infighting as that of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
He insisted on a strict adherence to
deliberately invited such battles by
blurring the borders of various aides' responsibilities. That way he could the aides on their toes and made sure he would have control over them, and to prevent controversial decisions in his administration.
There were limits even to Mr. Roosevelt's appetite for inflighting, and on at least one occasion he stepped in to impose an armature on the dwarf, displaying his own talent for indirection.
The antagonists were the grand-champion feuders of his administration, Secretary of Interior Harold L. Ickes and Harry Hopkins, who shared responsibility with Ickes for the depression-fighting work relief program.
THE PUBLIC RIALYAR between Ickes and Hopkins got so bad that Roosevelt invited them both on a lengthy voyage aboard the cruiser "Houston." During the
"The feud between Hopkins and Ickes was given a decent burial today. With flags at half-mast . . . the President officiated at the solemn ceremony which we trust will take these two babies off the front page for all time.
trip, an anonymous item appeared in the ship's newspaper;
"Hopkins, as usual, was dressed in his immaculate blouses, browns and whites.
"Ikcars were his conventional faded gags, Mona Lilia amuse and carried his stamp on."
"The President gave them a hearty趴 on the back—pushing them both into the sea. 'Full steam ahead,' the President ordered."
The author of the unsigned article, as everyone involved instantly knew, was Pamela Heyward.
Griff and the Unicorn
Despite Strain, NATO Must Go On
By CHALMEKS M. KOBEKTS Special to the Washington Post
WASHINGTON—It has now been 20 years since Secretary of State John Foote Dulles declared that the United States would have to make an "agonizing reappraisal" of its foreign policy, and that it agreed to the creation of a European army. But France didn't agree. That was the France of Pierre Mendes-France, not Charles de Gaulle, though de Gaulle, sitting on the sidelines, also was opposed to the French. The French were all those of France and West Germany.
The current secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, has eschewed such provocative phrases as "agnizing reappraisal" but what he, and even more so President Nixon, have said in the current context has the same ring. Indeed Germans who have seen Mr. Nikon's letter to West German Chancellor Angela Merkel on his accusations that the European Common Market nations have turned "hostile" toward the United States.
bv Sokoloff
From this, one might divine that Franco-American, indeed European-American, relations have at least an irreducible content of antagonism and disagreement. So they do, but that hardly seems remarkable given history and a lot else. What, of course, is so very different from Dulles' day is the American relationship with Europe. It was that that makes the current transatlantic problem, on the 25th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), quite different.
IN THE 1950s the Cold War was on and Dulles was leading a crusade with religious zeal, and with religious overtones as well, to encircle the Kremkin's empire and hopefully bring it down. It is true that Dulles' chief President Eisenhower, came to see that there must be some break in the Cold War lest nuclear weapons come back from the Conference of 1958 he made the first American effort to change the atmosphere.
Richard Nixon, then the vice president, was more on Dulles' side than on Eisenhower's. But two decades later it fell to him as president to bring about the change he has described as moving from confrontation to negotiation. By doing so, and by breaking the old hostile relationship with China, Mr. Nixon, to a
large degree, has been responsible for removing that "cement of fear" that was the chief bind between Western Europe and the United States.
THE NATO TREATY, a quarter century old on April 4, was the irreducible minimum tie. On and over the succeeding years, various groups of NATO "wisemen" have been recruited from all over the world from a simply negative and defensive alliance to a more positive and more comprehensive mode that includes economic and political relationships. In years of calm, this has seemed to work. But when it came, this has produced great transatlantic strain.
Twenty years ago the strain came from the American opposition to the disastrous Angle-French attack on Egypt over the Suez Canal nationalization. Today it is excelerated by the latest Middle East issue, oil. Then, too, there were major changes in the policy specifically Indo-China. These were problems which recurred in the past decade over the same area. History may not repeat itself exactly, but it is remarkable how vast a role the Middle East and Indo-China have played in European-American relationships. Both then and been a policy difference and charges and counter-charges of a lack of consultation.
THE LARGER CONTEXT however, is very different. In the Eisenhower-Dulles agreement, with which it was deemed impossible to deal, save for the single Eisenhower effort at Geneva and what flowed from that. The larger context is the centerpiece of American foreign policy.
Messrs. Nixon and Kissinger have changed all that. By their opening of the dialogues with Moscow and Peking, and their playing off of one against the other, Western Europe has become a higher level of policy status. One reason this has come about is that the nuclear relationship between Washington and Moscow changed from one of American superiority, vast in Dulles' day, to something like rough rattle. If for a cold reason, it was imperative to break the Cold War, it may try to negotiate with the Kremlin.
Dulles's conceptual thinking was that the Soviet Union could be "contained" and in time, forced to alter its policies. Kissinger's conceptual thinking is that Soviet-American Detente, coupled with the new relationship with China, would create a balance of power in which it would be to the Kremlin's self-interest at least to moderate its policies.
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DULLES' CONCEPT was that Western Europe had no alternative to a close relationship with the United States under American leadership of the alliance. Kissinger's concept is that once the larger American-Soviet alliance collapsed, Western Europe should fit snugly into the framework by drawing closer in cooperation with the United States.
In each case there was, and is, a degree of European rebellion against the American scheme. In each case France led the rebellion. Then, and now, the West Germans dread being forced to choose between Washington and Paris. And in each case the French have played upon this fear with considerable success.
Thus, while there isn't likely to be any great NATO anniversary celebration in the current atmosphere of the uncertain Soviet-American Detente, the Atlantic alliance for all its struts and imperfections must continue out of simple necessity.
THE THREAT OF American troop wundrawal from Europe has constantly been used. But the truth is that now as before, those troops serve an American purpose and cannot be removed unilaterally without peril to the United States. A Kissinger statement cited in some same effect as a Dulles threat did, despite the many changes in postures and problems.
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