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Friday, February 22,1974
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Old Grads Linger On
It's generally a bar where you meet one of them.
If the person is a man, he will be sitting alone, nursing his beer and gazing moody at the mirror behind the bar. He will either be chain-smoking or crunching Been Nuts.
"Our boys played a great game last night, didn't they? you ask
You're alone, too—these meetings always happen that way. You order a beer. After a few quiet minutes, it刚好 try to start a conversation.
"Yeah," he says. "Reminds me of wolf, and Pierre or wolf, and them dawn."
"I never saw that team play," you say. "Looks like we have a good chance to beat K-State this year."
"Oh yeah, we'll take 'em. They weren't even any good when they had that 7-foot girl—what was his name, Nick Pinio? Yeah, we'll beat
"Yeah, right," you say, and go back to sipping your beer. Can't this guy talk about now instead of then?
The chances are that he can't.
He's probably an old grad—'55, '66,
possibly later. The present doesn't
interest him. He just cares about
the good old days, back when he and Ed and Harry all drunk one night and jumped into the Chi Omega faint.
Those indeed were the good old days. The campus was calm and the new, new buildings hadn't been built yet. Everything might as well have been covered in ivy, it was all so traditional.
The trouble hadn't started yet.
The racial problems and chancellor replacements and raids by Vern Miller were still in the future. Everybody loved everybody else. It was great to be a KU student.
But now it is seven or eight years later and times have changed. The guy next to you in the bar hasn't. Oh, sure he got his degree in business—but the only job he got was in Minneapolis, and why move away when you still have friends in graduate school?
Then the job was gone, then the friends, and suddenly it is years later. He's taken a job help out with a liquor store and he's getting by.
And he's still hanging around at KU. talking about old times with whoever will listen, going to basketball games and imagining that once again he is a student.
It's tough to leave.
s tough to leave. —Chuck Potter
Foreign Students File Complaints
"The only way to improve the Intensive English Center," said a graduate student from Caracas, Venezuela, recently, "is to destroy it."
Intensive English Center Conflicts Bring Reforms
By CAROL GWINN
Kansan Staff Reporter
In most organizational disputes, both the administration and reformers recognize the same problems; the major controversy is whether the satisfaction solutions to those problems.
I. E.C. administrators in many cases,
The Intensive English Center (I.E.C.) has become the source of bitter controversy during the past several years and the school has been criticized for having students has grown increasingly hostile.
The conflict centers on the student's accusation that the I.E.C., mistreats them as individuals and poorly evaluates them through grades and exams.
however, have failed to recognize the problems to which the L.E.C. students object, and at times they have even refused to acknowledge that any problem exists at all.
The Intensive English Center is administered by the University and is designed to give potential college students necessary skills in the English language. Students must be accepted course with a B+ grade in order to be accepted to the University.
The administration has said that the I.E.C. students themselves are not the source of most of the conflict, "Outside agitators"-foreign students attending the University of Kansas-have caused the university to become dissatisfied, the administrators say.
This belief can be partially understood, I.E.C. students depend on KU foreign students.
Suit Disputes Minority Admissions
WASHINGTON—If a university admits a black student to its law school, while rejecting white applicants with higher grades and test scores, is it simply compensating for the historic exclusion of blacks from the legal profession?
By LINDA MATHEWS The Los Angeles Times
Or is it practicing reverse discrimination and violating the constitutional rights of whites? These are the questions facing the Supreme Court in what may be the touchest, most troublesome civil rights case of recent years.
Riding on the Court's decision are the admissions policies of hundreds of universities which now show preference to blacks and other minorities.
THE CASE, which will be argued the week of Feb. 25 and decided by late June, has already attracted unusual attention. The Supreme Court has been blitzed by friend-of-the-court briefs from every major civil rights organization in the country, as well as from 59 law school deans, the Association for Civil Rights Commission, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers, and a handful of Jewish groups.
Also drawn into the fray are the legal community's big guns. Ousted Watergate Prosecutor Archibald Cox filled a brief for Harvard College and former U.S. Solicitor General Ervin N. Griswold wrote a brief for the association of American Law Schools. Both Cox and Griswold favor the preferences.
The reason the case has caused such commotion is that, in the words of one Justice Department lawyer, it "represents the collision of two cherished liberal beliefs: for being kicked up to the blanks for being kicked around, and judge everyone strictly on his own merits."
"THIS TIME," the attorney said, "you can't have both."
The case was brought to the high court by Marco DeFuni Jr., of Seattle, after he was twice rejected by the University of Washington Law School.
A Phi Beta Kappa and Magna Cum Laude graduate of Washington's undergraduate college, DefoFs objected to the law school's admitting 37 minority students in institutions—grades and scores on the Law School Assessment Test were lower than his.
Law school administrators, acknowledging that they gave special consideration to minorities, argued that their policy was inadequate for the needs of representation of certain minorities in the
law school and in the membership of the bar.
A SEATTLE trial judge rejected the law school's rationale, ruled that the university had violated DeFurnis's equal protection law and could not enroll him at once in the first year class.
This ruling was reversed by the Washington Supreme Court. A six-man majority held that the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection does not require a university to be "color-blind." The Justice Department missions process because "the state has an overriding interest in promoting integration of public education."
With his appeal pending, DeFuns has continued his studies at the University of Washington Law School under an order from Justice William O. Douglas, the member of the high court who oversees emergency appeals from the West Coast. DEFUNS will graduate in June and, according to Josef Diamond, one of his attorneys, done "very well academically—better than the minorities in the class."
But Defun's law school career has not been completely pleasant. This case has singled him out," explained Diamond. "It's been embarrassing for him, because his
classmates say, 'Well, there goes the smart guy who made sure a fuss.' He's had to get an unlisted phone number. I think he wishes the whole thing would just go away."
The primary argument pressed by DeFunis in his appeal is that the Constitution requires that all applicants to the law school be judged "on an equal basis." The fact that most applicants have grades and test scores be considered, but he insists that if admission officers, in the case of minority applicants, look at such subjective factors as recommendations, extracurricular activities and personal circumstances, then they are to do the same for white applicants, too.
**WHAT HAPPENED at the University of Washington is that all white applicants whose grades and test scores fell below the cut-off point automatically rejected. Those white applicants above the cut-off point—including DeFunis—then competed for places in the
But the applications of blacks and other minorities were handled differently. Even those with the lowest scores stayed in the applicant pool. The admissions committee made appropriate applications by themselves, without comparing them to the whites, and chose the best.
The result, according to Defuniis and the trial court, was that at least 30 minority students were admitted with grades and test scores so low that, had they been white, they would have been summarily rejected. But Defuniis said one had a better record than Defuni's.
DEFENDING THE University of Washington, Shade Gorton, the state attorney general, argued that the law school's decision to boost minority enrollment was supported by precedents dating from reconstruction days.
Gorton listed all the federal civil rights acts and presidential proclamations specifically designed to help "the welfare and education of the former slaves," which show, he said, that the Constitution permits "color-consciousness."
Only racial classifications that deprive minorities of rights violate the equal protection clause, Gorton continued. And no one, he said, had been injured by the law in a case where he was accused of the education of all law students, black and white, had been enriched by integration.
And added benefits flow to the public at large, which will soon have available more minority attorneys from whom to select counsel. Of these, 1 per cent of the legal profession is black.
Oil Ads Raise Credibility Question
By LOWELL PONTE
Special in the Los Angeles Times
Special to the Los Angeles Times
Did the big oil companies invent the fuel shortage to boost profits and win political concessions? One would never know from what they say in their advertisement.
—Exxon pledges: “We want you to know.”
—Texaco says: "We're working to keep your trust."
Sen. Birch Bayh (D-Ind.) charged last month that the $22 million spent for such "image" ads by the oil companies was "an attempt to pass the buck while they rake in the dollars." Then he and five other Democratic members of Congress issued a special commission, which oversees advertising practice, compel 12 big oil companies to submit "proof" for claims made in 16 specific advertisements.
THE CONGRESSMEN challenged claims such as these: that political and environmental pressure blocked oil exploration and development of new wells, pipelines, refineries and deep-water ports; that government antipollution laws, price
*Mohm volez: "Our crews are working 24 hours a day around the world" to find more
controls, tax policies and anti-trust actions destroyed incentive for such development; that the oil companies are doing their best to provide more fuel while protecting our ecology, and that America's fuel crisis is merely part of a worldwide shortage.
BEYOND THAT, the FTC has been asked to judge the personal psychology and motivation of oil executives, as reflected in their advertising.
The oil companies defend their ads as an exercise of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment to every citizen, compelled to answer the questions about the time and space to present their views.
Truth of falsehood? In some instances the oil companies are right. Who would deny that environmentalist influence delayed construction of the Alaska pipeline? But environmentalists still cannot abstract to be labeled simply true or false; they are matters of interpretation.
Should the FTC decide to take action on "image" ads, which neither promote a specific testable product nor make specific provable promises, it would be something new and frightening. The door might be opened with a punch at the truth commission, able to punish anyone
whose opinions were deemed deceptive or misleading.
ADVERTISERS are right to invoke the First Amendment, but wrong to see the issue merely as free speech. When Thomas Jefferson framed the First Amendment, he carefully combined in it the freedoms of speech and respect, and knew these freedoms were faceffers of the same gem—the right to seek and express truth as one saw it.
Yet advertising, says historian Daniel Boorstein, "has meant a reshaping of our very concept of truth." It is this idea which has brought politicians to want new restraints on advertising; they fear its influence as a version of truth contrary to their own.
by Sokoloff
THE CONTEST between differing versions of truth has almost theological overtones—which the FTC has recognized for more than a decade. A recent example is that Benjamin Nolan's show a toot be a tall teen-ager in 10 seconds by eating the stuff. In February of this year one of Bayh's co-petitioners, Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal (D-N.Y.), proposed legislation forbidding Wonder Bread to use the word "wonders," which it reportedly worked "wonders."
Griff and the Unicorn
Thus on one side of this epic battle are the mythical ads with St. Josephine, the plumber's comet, and the flying man from Glad—armed with promises of a world whose mundane duties are wondrous and full of magic, where toothpaste means romance, where slobs become Cinderella when the right hair dye appears. On the other hand, the hero of priesthood's white robes, standards of objective truth and cosmology.
AN EDUCATED BODY of consumers, willing to vote with its dollars, is the best insurance against excessive hucksterism—and corporate wrongheadedness.
Educating consumers may require counter commercials and other innovations. But the Constitution is consistent with the spirit of the Constitution than a federal truth commission that might gain political control over what corporations and individuals are allowed to
The L.E.C. has become a catchall symbol for many of the troubles that foreign students encounter after entering the new country. It is useful to have a grocery store clerk, for example, can be traced to the vocabulary taught in the L.E.C.: the center didn't teach the words necessary for communication in a grocery store. It is not necessary, therefore, untimely attributed to the L.E.C.
culture. Incomplete knowledge of the English language forces I.E.C. students to use KU foreign students as a voice, essentially as translators, for complaints to the bermelic American culture, which engages the local community in communication with anyone on the outside.
However, the I.E.C. has received complitious complaints. A new "policy" committee (as opposed to the previous "advisory" committee) was formed in November to consider student charges and now meets twice a month. This committee is also the C.A. are now under the jurisdiction of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The policy committee consists of representatives from the departments of education, English and lignicalia, the dean of foreign students, Associates Dean of Art and Sciences Robert Cobb and two other students who have been through the LE.C.
The major charges made by the foreign students have been:
—That the I.E.C. program isn't structured to the speed of individual student reading, it is in the same section for an entire semester; it can be transferred to a student in a lower section that he has a very slight chance of passing the course or not. It is also made necessary for admission to the University.
-That the classes are disjoint. Grammar, pattern practice, pronunciation, reading and composition subdivisions don't form a cohesive unit.
-That I.E.C. students are unfairly evaluated. Regardless of the achievement level of the student, he takes the same midterm and final, and all levels are graded on the same standards. A student from a lower level competes to complete well with a higher level student.
-That the final examination is the only basis for the letter grade given to the
—That the laboratory equipment is out-orate. The system used by the I.E.C. did not allow the student to hear his repetition of the exercise, and he couldn't judge his own ability to pronounce the problem is partially remedied by the language laboratory that has just been set up in Wesley Hall. McCollum Hall also has playback of the language laboratory on its international floor.
that the classes are too large for the individualized help. Class average sizes 15 to 20 students. The ideal size for working individually would be five to seven students.
student for the entire course. Many students are on scholarship and lose financial support if they do not maintain a certain grade point. A lower level student cannot pass the course (he is not expected to) and therefore may lose his scholarship.
—That the L.E.C. is being used as an instructional training ground for linguistics graduate students. Dr. Edward Erzamus, director of the L.E.C. since 1964, has said that the L.E.C. is providing graduate students as a form of cheap labor, and the center cannot afford to hire anyone else.
—That the mixture of students who speak many different languages in one classroom creates problems because of varied vocabulary, applicable only to individual languages.
The problems reported by foreign students have no quick and easy solutions. However, the new policy committee has written a comprehensive analysis of the situation at the I.E.C., which should bring results in correcting at least communication difficulties between the administration and students in the center.
-That the students are being treated as objects; they have no representation in administrative decisions and because they cannot speak English very well are sometimes looked down on by their own teachers.
A major difficulty has been overcome for the foreign students. The I.E.C, has finally been evaluated closely, and the "outside" foreign students in the I.E.C, have at last been able to find a viable means of working to change the system that has had autonomous control over their lives in the United States.
Readers Respond
Work Stifles Student Play
To the Editor:
They are non-flexible in the sense that even brilliant students must put in overtime to meet new requirements. They must until the new ones arrive year after present students in CS 200 must suffer an inconvenience. These courses epitomize the unreasonable devotion expected of them.
(I and I assume most other students) feel that man is basically a social animal. Times
But how do we cure this basic problem?
One way is to alleviate the workload so as to allow the average student some time to see a Monday night basketball game without having to worry about neglected homework.
Some courses do not require excessive work, but many courses are unreasonable in their expectation of the student's academic success. In fact, pharmacy and computer science are examples of such overtime courses.
What the students of this University need is a social opportunity. I am especially referring to men and women and dating. By classical precedent students should work hard when they work and play hard when they play. However, it is difficult to work efficiently when there is a fundamental overabundance of work.
The inefficiency in work arises from conflict between the students' sense of educational responsibility and his basic needs. We must understand in social experience leads to the creation of educated idists who can not communicate their thoughts and emotions to society. Many times I have seen students give up what they want to do, so why should they what they really want to do is socialize
have changed and are tending to a new sexual and social norm. The esteemed University of Kansas is now due for change. By attempting to make that change we may find ourselves exceeding our own experiences in social, as well as academic affairs.
Tony Pickett
Kansas City, Kansas junion
Gordon Elsten
Baxter Springs senior
To the person who took the purple velvet plant and the jade plant from Watson Garden.
Disappearing Plants
Either Carol Chittenden or I would have been glad to have given you cuttings of any plants that we have in the Library or from my house. The plants are there for everyone
Please return the three plants and ask for chippings instead. It seems incongruous that someone who likes plants would take them as you did. If you decide not to return them, then please take good care of them. They need U be watered twice a week.
If you want to return them, leave them anywhere in the Reference area so that we can find them. We have put work and students there, but it is much more placeive, for staff and students alike. But this is the third time someone has taken our plants. Don't force us into removing the plants because we are afraid of having them stolen. Just return the plants.
Pat Mimeau Staff. Watson Library
Exhibit Bans Watergate Souvenirs
By EUGENE L. MEYER
The Wellington Post
The Washington Post
Washington—The Watergate office-and-apartment complex has scheduled a flea market for the next week in political America, but invited dealers have received a written, capitalized admonition: "NO ANTI-NIXON ITEMS AND BOAT GAME ITEMS ARE TO BE PLAYED."
"There will be no derogatory or unfavorable items to the present administration," said M. S. Scher who is running the flea market. "It's just that (the Watergate management) didn't want to add any additional fuel to the fire."
Some of these have been distributed by pro-impeachment groups. The Republican National Committee, on the other side, has a "get off his back" humper sticker. There
At issue are the buttons, bumper stickers, games, records and other items that have become a commercial tide in the wake of Watergate. While some collectors dismant them as the products and few fast-buck items remain, many are an authentic part of political America.
The slogans displayed on the items are legion: "Nixon knew." "Wink if you think you can beat him," "Impeachment with honor." "I'm an American--don't bug me." "Nixbug me." "Richard M. Nixon P.O.W. (Prisoner of Watergate)," and "No amnesty for you."
is also a button that says simply, "Back the President," put out by the Republican Party.
Martha Mitchell items (a 1972 campaign button says "Free Martha") are forbidden. But Agnew items ("Et tu Agnew") all right because they have nothing to do with them.
Of the Nixon items, Robert Frattin, head of the American Political Items Collector, says, "I think they're curiosity pieces rather than significant. A lot may wind up being used in the 1974 campaign, which would make them more interesting."
Anyway, Fratkin predicted, "In years to come, people will look at them as being a legitimate part of campaign collecting." In another case, Fratkin said, "because they believe in what they say."
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