Page 4 University Daily Kansan, April 22, 1981
Opinion
62 dollars, no sense
Remember a few weeks ago, when the KU administration and the Student Senate were feuding over 55 cents?
Last week, the Board of Regents made such quibbles look like chicken feed. In one astonishing swoop, it increased tuition statewide by 22 percent, which will make attending KU next fall $82 more expensive for in-state students and $180 more expensive for out-of-staters.
The boost can be traced back to a rabid Kansas Legislature, which, in a frenzy of budget-slashing, butchered the Regents budget by $5.8 million. That money has to come from somewhere else, and you've guessed where. You.
The legality of the Regents' boost is in
question. So is its impact upon future enrollments. Some have suspected all along that good education in this country is only for the wealthy; the board is doing its best to prove that suspicion.
The increase will hit students next fall when they make their semesterly pilgrimage to the field house. About that time, thanks to federal budget-cutting, student loans will have dried up like a Kansas creek in July. Will students pay the extra money? Those that can will. Those that can't will find something other than college to do with their lives. But whichever category you fall into, let the Regents and your legislators know just how much you appreciate what they're doing for public education.
Urban environmentalists overreacting to problems
Each Christmas, as a gift from a dear friend, I receive an honorary membership to the Wilderness Society, an organization committed to the preservation of America's flora and fauna. And as a result, my name is placed on the mailing lists of every conceivable environmental cause, ranging from the Sierra Club to the campaign for those cute white baby seals in Canada. Although their concerns are different, these impassioned pleas
DAVID HENRY
for money to save the whales or stop Three Mile Island are actually quite similar in meaning. They appeal to those who wish to maintain a risk-free world—a botanical garden free from smelly air, noon lights and noisy picnics with objectionable children.
Only in America can such a phenomena occur; for only a nation possessed of immense wealth can afford to keep dirt out of the air and protect it from pollution. The most diligent advocates of environmentalism over the past twenty years have been those with considerable means. Wishing to maintain the status quo, these people worry that they do not really care to understand.
They resemble passengers on board a luxury yacht hoping to God that somebody knows how to steer the thing, and meanwhile telling one another disturbing stories of racial discrimination, the decline of public schools and the small darter's plight in our expression of racism. And so we learn his way of sounding like a landowner asking his way about this year's rain.
This form of environmentalism, more common than the Sierra Club will admit, brings to mind the news story about the woman who was nearly stabbed to death several years ago on a beach at East Hampton, a fashionable summer spot for New Yorkers. Apparently, she looked out her window one afternoon to see a crew of fishermen struggling to drag in a heavy net, a difficult and time-consuming task. The sight of the pitiful fishing gasp on her chest caused the woman to panic, working herself with a pair of garden shears, she rushed forth to cut away the net. A younger fisherman, not wise to the ways of the world and concerned only with selling the fish for money, had to be restrained from filleting her heroine.
I admit that the woman is an extreme example of many Americans' environmental
fervor. Yet it illustrates an important point: presumably she didn't object to the killing of fish, but rather to having to witness the event and thereby becoming an accomplice to the crime. As long as her鱼 came from the deep blue sea she could pretend they volunteered to be eaten. But the sight of dying fish shattered her dream.
So also with those who protest the building of power plants, nuclear or otherwise, in their areas. If the plants cannot be built in New Hampshire or near Burlington, Kansas, then the power companies have no choice but to build them elsewhere, usually in communities desperately in need of the revenue. Like the firefighters, we need to find uses for light, heat and electricity but they do not want to bear the burden of its creation.
The environmental movement has accomplished many good and extraordinary things, and my purpose here is not to quarrel with its obvious benefits. People foolishly do stupid things to the earth, and if these can be avoided or made less terrible, then the natural world will profit. But in its more militant and evangelistic fervor, the environmental movement begins to sound like a doom-drenched preacher.
Few mention man's courage and resilience or nature's capacity to recover from calamity. In March, 1977, the natives of Eniwetok returned to the atolls in the South Pacific on a small expedition that plowed between 1948 and 1958. They found a profusion of life, birds everywhere, the fish and the coral restored. Nor could assist biologists find any evidence of mutation, even among the descendants of the rats who had buried themselves in holes at the time of exhilaration. So they decoyed dozen generations. Nature, it seems, has the amazing ability to recover from its injuries.
People who grow up with the wilderness instinctively understand that there is a time to live and a time to die. But the urban environmentalist, surrounded daily by explainable technological wonders, thinks of the natural world as if it were a complicated machine. He worries that if to many people there are too many problems in Third World countries who always want more material goods), then he and his companions are in bise trouble and probably will die.
Therefore, the environmentalist strenuously campaigns to decentralize energy, reads "Small is Beautiful" and the work of Alan Watts and prays his efforts won't be in vain. The other one is "Hold On," is his motto. And if he saves a few seal skins while saving his own, he doubles the return on his investment—and it's not a bad deal, if you happen to be a seal.
Guardian of truth may have stumbled
The headline might as well have said that Monet didn't paint the waterillies. Or that Springsteen didn't illustrate "Born To Run." The headline didn't indicate it could come in sizes. A fake is a fake is a fake.
Rather, the trouble is with the Washington Post, the Pulitzer Prizes and the American press in general. The questions (which Emily Dickinson claimed are the best answers) must be focused on the big picture instead of on the tiny vignette.
And what pure disillusion it was last week to find a page one story about a genuine fake—a fake, that is, that made it to the top of the newspaper world before being toppled, along with its author, and endangering, in the process, the very existence of what we know as newspapering. Or at least what everybody thinks about newspapering.
All because a young woman was grabbed by raw ambition and found herself, or rather put herself, on the precipice of fame and fortune, on the verge of a sparkling career in an often glamorized profession. Wrong. That's only part of the story, a much too simple answer to just one tiny profound question being asked in the seamy aftermath of the Janet Cooke debacle.
Cooke was a reporter, who, at age 26, was obviously going places; at the Washington Post for just over a year, she was already on the metro beat and a Pulitzer prize winner, having received the award of Toledo, Ohio, who landed the job primarily as a result of her own stunning resourcefulness.
But when she did this prize-writing story about an 8-year-old heroin addicted jimmy, her resourcefulness overstepped its bounds: it went beyond truth and led to a wonderfully funny story that became social and society. It surely would've made great fiction; in fact Cooke admitted that it was fiction.
Journalism, however, is not about fiction. It's about truth and facts and trust. And with this one gross overstep, Janet Cook managed to stamp rather rudely on all three very delicate tenets.
At the very least, one must question how "Jimmy's World" ever made the paper. It was a case of unidentified, confidential sources, and the Post editors, including Bob Woodward of
So, as Ring Lardner once asked, what of it?
What of Cooke herself? Finished? Perhaps, but probably not; she's young and she's good, despite her questionable ethics. However, when asked an investigator, Cooke is not the real problem here.
Watergate fame, chose to render the green, young reporter unabated trust. Although such confidential sources are not particularly unusual, circumstances should determine to what degree they go unidentified. There is, after all, a considerable difference between proving to an editor that a source exists and printing the sources's name on page one.
AMY
HOLLOWELL
But the Post ran Cook's story anyway. Fine.
If they had left it at that. However, the editors
saw prize potential in the dramatic account and thus pushed it for a Pallitzer. Recall that this was a virtually unprovable story, supported by only one word: that to have been breathholding time at the Post.
Then the question is, why would a panel of judges, supposedly comprised of our finest journalists, award the prize to such a teering story? They even went so far as to switch it from its original category to another, in which it had a lower price. That was an error; they were determined to take the piece a prize.
Why did they stick their necks out then? Easy. "Jimmy's World" had drama and controversy, it was well-written and it raised profound questions. How could a computer screaming Fulitzer and the Post editors knew it.
most important is: some are claiming politics, that
we have the weight to throw around on the Pulitzer prize.
hesitate to do so. Maybe. But what this really suggests is something greater. That perhaps these Pullziers are nothing more than a crook of the underworld, who wants to hone his hope. Hopes is, of course, that this isn't true.
Enter disillusion. Because now when the big fellow is called to the stand, questioning goes all the way to the top. (Picture Richard Nixon, alias the President, on the stand facing Leon Jaworski, or better, Archibald Cox.) So what of it, the American press?
What of it? Its mission as unduaded pursuer of truth seems to have gone awry. In the push to win readers, to sell, to appeal, has the press forsaken fact and accuracy for more reason than its ability to satisfy these perhaps gluttonous readers, has the press chosen to sacrifice the readers' trust?
So it can happen here. If it could happen once, at ironically all of places, the grand guardian Washington Post, why couldn't it happen anywhere? Why couldn't it happen again; or worse, how many times has it happened before? Our watchdog has betrayed us.
Luckily, the Post's watchdog, and its prime competitor, the Washington Star, was on its toes. Its breaking of the Cooke affair, although its own sweet revenge, was, more importantly, an act of defiance. It is an example of democratic function of checks and balances. Some faith, therefore, can be salvaged.
However, it doesn't caustic the disillusion, disillusion that causes to exclaim, as does the young narrator of Marcel Proust's "Swamp's day" upon his discovery of the dreams. "My disillusion was grand." Indeed Mr. Proust, though it doesn't come in sizes, this disillusion is truly great.
Letters to the Editor
To the editor:
Economic theory concerns could easily be predicted
So the dawn has finally come to him, and the scales have fallen from his eyes and he has seen the light, and all that other poetic stuff, and Eric Brende has finally begun to think that maybe, just maybe, Ronald Reagan might not be such a man after all. Welcome to 1801, and the 20th century.
Where the hell were you when knowledgeable, intelligent people were expressing the same reservations about Reagan who you seemingly just discovered? Even George Bush, who does not qualify in either category above, could figure out the basic difference between essentially "voodoo economics." Until (and unless) supply-side economies has had an actual test in the real world, this remains an accurate assessment. And as for your spasm of environmental concern (no doubt brought on by your close proximity to all that dreaded climate change), you have expected anything but the worst from a man who thinks trees are the country's major pollution problem?
However, you shouldn't feel alone. In the coming months and years, you will be joined by millions of others, all singing the same refrain: "My god, I never thought he'd do that!" You've got exactly what you asked for, haven't you? And you're going to get plenty more, because "mandate" means whatever its recipient wants it to. Or perhaps you don't remember the last Republican who was given a "mandate" as president. Or the last Democrat. And so, as you watch the antics of Generalissimo Francis Perez, remember your teachers and deja vu, remember the words of Thomas Jefferson: "People tend to get the kind of government they deserve."
James J. Murray Clerk, biological sciences division
To the editor:
Headquarters assists
I felt the need to comment on Sharon Applbaum's article on all us volunteers at CARE.
out with the story and looked forward to its publication. Given that the editor obviously 'edited some of the story Sharon left him to marry the man, an essential message of HD might have been lost.
This message is particularly lost in the title of the article, "Crisis center solves problems." I regret to admit that even our most experienced counselor cannot "solve" the problems of our callers. What HQ does is facilitate, organize, and resolve these problems. Like most helping professionals, the role of a HQ counselor is to lend support and guidance to the individual.
It is common for many callers and walk-ins to imply or simply request that we come up with an answer or make a decision for them. And as much as we volunteers are people who have to deal with our own experiences in life, we often feel this as a pressure to 'help' We often can personify this experience with the belief that this represents the beliefs of my fellow HQ workers, I feel that the most effective way of 'helping' this person is to help him help himself.
I encourage all Kansan readers and members of the community to feel free to contact us no matter how small or large their question or concern is, and that through this clarification and helping process, chances are that things with them might get a whole lot better!
Andy Schechterman Miami, Fla. senior
Miami, Fla., senior
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