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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, November 7, 1961
The Passing Week
The past two weeks are probably not weeks that will go down as extremely important. Students of history will read in a few hundred years, if man exists on earth at that time, probably not about the Russian superbomb, but perhaps about the death of James Thurber or the birth of Viscount Linley.
How much of the present era will be included in a history, when it is written?
EXPERTS SAY VERY LITTLE. True, the history of science will record some major discoveries, such as the Salk vaccine and the orbital space flights.
But will students read about U Thant's appointment as interim Secretary General of the U.N.?
Thant is a mild-mannered man who believes firmly in equality of men. He wanted no strings attached to his post and got it that way.
ONE THING ABOUT THE BOMB TESTS historians might find interesting is the fact that millions of people behind the Iron Curtain did not know their own government was setting off blasts so dangerous to mankind. To inform these millions, the Voice of America massed all its possible strength to beam a program to them called "Did You Know?"
The Kremlin was prepared for the broadcast, however, and 2,000 jamming transmitters were called to use.
And during some of the blasts, England, particularly Londoners, turned their attention to a royal birth. As one newspaper headline said, simply, "The Jones Boy," was born.
PAPERS DRAGGED OUT STATISTICS and found the baby's birth weight to be below the national average, but when Dr. Peel, one of Princess Margaret's attending physicians, said the baby was doing all right, Britons heartily accepted the newest and fifth in line for the throne.
The baby is named Viscount Linley, taking the title of his father, but in a few years he will probably dislike it and ask why he was not called Butch.
If Americans who were extremely depressed over "things in general" during the past decade and found any reason to laugh, that reason probably was James Thurber.
HE MORE THAN ANYONE else understood what kind of a world we lived in, and decided the best way to make it better was to begin with people. Thurber showed us the American, lost in daydreams that come as a result of middle-age and lost hopes and frustration.
Maybe those who write about what our nation went through during this time will not include Thurber's death, but if someone doesn't include his works in literary collections of this era, posterity will never know the real American as Thurber saw him.
Carrie Merryfield
Physical Education at KU
What about a new gymnasium?
Each year the student enrollment grows larger at KU and the small, antiquated gymnasium seems to grow smaller and smaller.
University officials are aware that the gymnasium is inadequate for KU's intramural and physical education programs. They know that it stands on the site needed for a new classroom building. But nothing is being done, because it costs money to build a new gymnasium.
RAYMOND NICHOLS, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY of the University, says that it is unlikely a new gymnasium can be constructed with state funds in the near future. A new gymnasium is not at the top of the priority list of the long-range building program at KU.
One of the main reasons a new gymnasium does not have top priority on the building list is because of the need for new classrooms. Deciding which is more important is a debatable question. Although there are older buildings on campus than Robinson gymnasium, they have not received the wear and tear the gymnasium has.
ASIDE FROM THIS, THE FACT STILL remains that KU needs a new gymnasium. The building program cannot be changed. Mr. Nichols has suggested that a monetary gift might pay for part of the new gymnasium. The only other alternative he suggested was a bond issue, to be paid off through student activity fees.
In order to allow the sale of bonds for a new gymnasium the state legislature would have to change the law, but only upon the recommendation of the Board of Regents at the request of KU.
YOU, THE STUDENTS MUST HELP KU decide this issue. The student activity fees helped to pay for the new wing of the Kansas Union. A new gymnasium would give the students who come to KU in the next few years the same opportunities you have had, plus many more, to develop physical fitness. Adequate classroom space is important but so is maintaining physical fitness.
Right now the only remedy in sight for solving the gymnasium problem is an amendment to the law which would enable the University to finance a new gymnasium through the sale of bonds.
—Linda Swander
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"THAT'S A RIDICULOUS RUMOR, DEAN, I RUN HERE A VERY DEMOCRATIC CLASSROOM."
FLINT HALL FREDDY noted that the Lawrence Journal-World reported that the KU effigy of Krushchev had a sign saying "Lady Deformer," and he thinks that Mrs. K. ought to check on what he does on "papa's night out."
Short Ones
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1859, became biweekly 1904,
triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16. 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news rooms Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service. 18 East 50 St. New York 22234. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and weekends. Examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield,
Assistant Editorial Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
KESSEN B.
Tom Brown Business Manager
Dennis Gernick, Advertising Manager;
Bonnie McCullough, Circulation Manager;
David Wiens, National Advertiser;
Classified Advertising Manager; Hal Smith, Promotion Manager.
From the Magazine Rack
Execute the Nazis?
"... the reader today must constantly remind himself that Paul Blobel whose face was that of a storekeeper or a teacher, had led an SS unit which was involved in sixteen instances of mass murder, including the slaughter of 30,000 Jews in Kiev alone; that Georg Schallermair had beaten prisoners to death with his own hands at Dachau; that Otto Ohlendorf had been responsible for the massacre of 60,000 Jews and Gypsies.
"WHY IS THIS reminder necessary? Would it not be nobler to surrender to our spontaneous outrage and repulsion at the executions, to honor our impulses of charity and compassion above our wish to see vengeance done — especially now that so many years have passed and the desire for vengeance that would have been flaming and powerful in 1945 has lost its original sharpness and purity? This is not a question that can be answered lightly or dogmatically: in trying to answer it, we are carried straight to the limits of our moral capacity. My own view is that to a Jew the possibility that anything short of death should have been meted out to these men ought to be no less (and perhaps no more) outrageous than the spectacle of the hangings themselves. I believe that any Jew who so far permits himself to forget what the Nazis were and did as to condemn the executions altogether is committing a kind of violence against his own humanity that may be more deeply barbaric than the events described by Mr. Settel — barbaric in the way that the young father in Philadelphia was last year when he publicly trotted out all the cliches of liberal enlightenment to plead for 'understanding' of the boy who had assaulted and murdered his four-year-old daughter the day before. The Nazis dehumanized themselves in carrying out their mass slaughters; and any Jew who indulges the inclination to forgive and forget is countering that dehumanization with a species of his own — a species not at all comparable in kind or degree or quality, but one that can be called dehumanization nevertheless.
K
"YET CAPITAL PUNISHMENT is surely wrong, and one can argue that even where a man like Oswald Pohl is concerned, it achieves nothing — not even the satisfaction of the primitive desire for vengeance. But perhaps the same reasoning by which Camus has demonstrated the immorality of capital punishment — that society is employing absolute and irrevocable means in order to implement what can only in the nature of things be a relative and fallible judgment — justifies the hanging of the worst Nazis war criminals. Because the crimes they committed were on a scale that defies all our moral categories, and because no conceivable punishment could possibly have been adequate to these crimes, a cold-blooded execution performed years later by professionals who were not themselves personally involved somehow seems the one form or retribution that even begins to approach adequacy. The cold-bloodedness, the professionalism, the impersonality — these are the very factors that in ordinary criminal cases make capital punishment particularly repulsive and inhuman..."
(Excerpted from an editorial in the May, 1960, Commentary by its editor, Nathan Podhoretz)
Worth Repeating
On the impact of World War II: It all seemed such a pity. Just at the time when thoughtful educators were beginning to bring some order into American universities, and even the public was beginning to see the point; when life was returning to the teaching of the liberal arts and an appetite for something beyond facts was developing in American students, when hard-headed employers were beginning to take an interest in the intangibles of a cultured boy—along came a war and shifted all the emphasis back to machines again.—Robert I. Gannon
Copeland's scholarship as an undergraduate was no more distinguished than it was when he became a college teacher. His colleagues were to say of him that he was an extremely well-read man, but not truly a scholar. He was impatient with the burrowing of candidates for the Ph.D. degree in English, which he was never tempted to try for. He liked to speak of the "Ph.D. death rattle," and when the president of Byrn Mawr, Miss Carey Thomas, asked him to suggest some promising young man whom he thought eligible for her English staff, making the proviso that they have their doctorates, Copeland sarcastically replied that it was unfortunate she could not avail herself of the services of such men as George Lyman Kittredge, Barrett Wendell, Bliss Perry, and "your humble servant," none of whom had slaved over a thesis on the use of the conjunction "and" in Chaucer. The outburst was typical of a man who, although always an inveterate reader, was proud of having once remarked, "A man is always better than a book...”—J. Donald Adams
"Huckleberry Finn" is essentially a book about a marginal American type, who only wants to stay alive; but who does not find this very easy to do, being assailed on one side by forces of violence, which begrudge him the little he asks, and on the other by forces of benevolence, which insist that he ask for more. Against the modesty and singleness of his purpose, everything else is measured and weighed: religion, the social order, other men. — Leslie Fiedler
Culture is like a match burning in infinite darkness.—Bernard Berenson