Page 4 University Daily Kansan, March 26, 1981
Opinion
Shankel holds the key
Acting Chancellor Del Shankel has reserved a 4:15 p.m. appointment today with the entire University community.
In Woodruff Auditorium, Shankel will discuss important KU issues during a convocation, an event that could be enlightening for the University. That is, if one important condition is met.
Openness, Shankel must be as direct as possible with everyone during the convocation. Simply reaffirming KU's high academic standards or reading a prepared University Relations' speech will not be enough.
The KU leader must level with the community if KU's problems are going to be tackled. Otherwise the proceedings will be a complete waste of everyone's time.
Unlike his predecessor, Archie Dykes, Shankel has always been an open-minded, easy-to-talk to person. A convocation could be the perfect way for Shankel to talk directly to the community.
Issues that need to be discussed, among others, include academics and athletics, tenure, free speech and KU's legislative dilemma.
For too long, students and faculty have been kept in the dark concerning these and other vital issues. In a time of controversy and transition, it is important for all of us to be aware of the issues.
Shankel now holds the key. If he keeps to his tradition, today's convocation will prove to be something to remember him by.
Reagan administration cuts could derail Amtrak service
California over spring break. That's the place to be! I boarded Amtrak's "Southwest Limited" at Lawrence for the 1,750 mile, 29-hour run to Los Angeles. A pleasant, uniformed attendant took my bag and showed me to the side airplane-style seat. Minutes later we were rushing into the night, heading for the sun and surf of the west coast.
The ride was smooth and without the clickety-clack of old-time rail travel; the evening soup, pan-sautéed trout and risotto, a spaghetti dish, and coach fare from Los Angeles was only $231, about $100 less than by
PETER
SOMERVILLE
air. There was only one problem traveling Amtrak: it is now so popular that reservations for long-distance travel must be made weeks in advance.
Few rail journeys in the world could match the U.S. overland routes for sheer length and scenic magnificence. And with air-conditioned, wall-to-wall carpeted carpets, reading lights, 118-volt power outlets for electric shavers and dryers, dining car service, bar, electric piano in the lounge, sleeping bunks . . . Amtrak's new Superliner facilities are excellent.
When the U.S. government set up its own passenger train authority in 1971, Amtrak was the biggest rail modernization program in the history of the steel wheel. It was believed then that a passenger rail service would many overseas, there was a need to maintain a passenger rail service throughout the country.
Now, however, the Reagan administration Office of Management and Budget is recommending drastic cutbacks on Amtrak and huge increaseares. Reagan's proposal would force Amtrak to dismantle its passenger rail service everywhere except the Northeast corridor, between Boston and Washington, according to National Conference of State Railway officials.
The point is that most overseas rail networks are subsidized, and under the proposed funding cuts no rail system—not even Japan's—could survive. The United States now has the dubious honor of possibly becoming the only developed nation without a passenger rail system.
on the nationwide Amtrak system, passenger fares offset only 41 percent of the system's operating costs. Congress has mandated that Amtrak users pay 80 percent of costs by 1985, but it has not reduced the current administration's proposed level of 80 percent user cost is wildly unrealistic.
Fares would increase from 50 percent to 300 percent over current levels—and that’s not even taking inflation into consideration—but the airline would go from $13.50 to $33.50. Of course, most passengers
wouldn't tolerate these face hikes, and patronage would drown off substantially.
On the Los Angeles-San Diego run, the second busiest in the nation, passenger fares now make up 82 percent of operating costs, according to figures supplied by Amtrak. Even this run would be discontinued by Reagan's $613 million budget proposal. Certainly it would make more sense to eliminate the rail lines that are worst producers first, if cuts are inevitable.
About 22,000 Amtrak employees would have to be laid off if services are limited to the Northeast corridor, with expected labor settlements costing $200 million in the first year alone.
Obviously, the more service Amtrak provides, the fewer employees will be affected by the cuts and the labor protection costs less. And if aggressive pricing and marketing strategies are employed, even greater finances could become available for operating other routes.
It is ludicrous that just when Amtrak's ridership is increasing, when train on-time performance is the highest ever and when brand-new railroad cars are in service, the administration is proposing to lower the already meager commitment to passenger trains.
A balanced budget does make sense. But the allocation of funds within the Department of Transportation needs investigation. Despite the rhetoric, the proposed cuts are not equal; Amtrak is threatened with obliteration, although the funding would be only slightly affected.
..uns save energy, ease traffic congestion and pollution, use existing tracks, serve large and small towns. Yet they have never received the support funds given to other transportation systems.
If we want to get federal spending under control, then sure, we are going to go without some luxuries. But providing an efficient nationwide passenger rail service is a government responsibility. And as gas prices and air travel costs become prohibitive for many people even now, the government is now the time to upgrade and improve the existing rail facilities—not tear them down.
High-speed railways, before diesel and some operating at 127 mph, were developed in other countries in 1909. Today they have been developed to even greater standards.
Are we to close down what we have not really tried? The true potential of a modern railway has not been developed in this country. When the people are provided with a fast, modern service at reasonable cost, rail patronage has skyrocketed in other countries.
It seems that the Reagan transportation advisers either want a paying service or no service! This is what is being attempted by the budget proposals now in committee in both houses of Congress. That concept has been rejected upright by European railways, but it appears we can't learn from anybody else. As long as you read the opus of Paul Tundt funding must be reversed; railroads don't always pay, but they do provide an essential service.
90e Montos B
Students, faculty, alumni . . . I'm proud to introduce your new chancellor.
America's paranoia threatens world
He was irate in French. She was up against the wall in both French and English, truly a distressful situation, much compounded by occasional emphatic jabs from his index finger.
"You Americans are cowards, you are scared," he said flatly, pushing the lolstice of red socks over his feet.
She took a brace-myself gulp from the wine and, returning to her hank, offered him, it was the first time he had a casual breakfast.
But she had lied, or rather, in the heat of that sticky summer night, she couldn't yet admit, even to herself, that his accusation, indeed her own dreaded suspicion, might be true.
That is, at the very base of all the arms buildup, the nuclear strategies, the military aid and the superpower hands-on policies, is the horrid fear that "we" never not survive. But "we," in this case, is much more than a two-letter personal pronoun in the first person plural.
Although March 1981, the United States of America, is much removed from June 1980, Bourges, France, in many respects, what clearly unites the two situations is the shade of truth in the young French student's statement. People here are scared, particularly the powerful people, and the frantic fear of some may well be edging the rest of us to destruction.
Europeans are frightened too, a fact not only evidenced in the Frenchman's fiery debate, but even more so in a burgeoning mood of anti-militarism that is spreading throughout Europe. Even across our northern border, the Canadians are acared, and their fear surfaced recently in hostile demonstrations against visiting President Ronald Reagan.
American students are scared as well, staging quiet demonstrations and hunger strikes in protest of U.S. involvement in El Salvador, such as the recent attack on KU Latin American Solidarity July this week.
What, then, is all this fear about? The answer is very simple: survival.
The irate French student was speaking for more than himself and his three companions
when he accused the United States of destroying "us" in its fear-driven military enemy. He was, he claimed, a Communist, so perhaps he spoke nobi for the protelariat, for the workers and students of France, who in turn are the soldiers, of which he has defiled in order to preserve the rich man's world.
Belgians, the West Germans, the Dutch, the Spanish, the British, for Europe as a whole, or rather as a portion, a portion of the world, that is, which happens to lie quite unfortunately, and uncomfortably, between the tremendous jaws of the mighty East and West.
However, it seems more likely that he spoke for many more, for the French in general, for the
AMY HOLLOWELL
Quite clearly, there is fear among the Europeans, and the rest of the world, that they will be gobbled up by one or the other of the two superpowers, if not by both, in the Soviet-American struggle for supremacy. There is fear, as a British Labor Left-Winger put it, "that we will be annihilated to save the United States and the eastern part of the U.S.S.R."
Yet, unlike the fears of the Europeans, who helplessly stare at U.S. missiles on one side and at Soviet ones on the other, American fears, generally ungrounded, border on paranoia. Moreover, we don't even stop in our paranoid rage to think about the consequences.
But Americans are scared, too; they are scared because their leaders and policy-makers, who feel that their power and influence are somehow jeopardized by a strong Soviet Union, are scared. And their "we" is a way of life, and that "is" diametrically opposed to "theirs."
It had to have been paranoid that prompted a bristly Secretary of State Alexander Haig to assert before a congressional committee last week that a Communist take-over of El Salvador
is the hoped for second stage in a four-part Soviet plot to win Central America, to be followed, "obviously," he said, by control of South America, and then by who-knows-what.
These were hardly the gracious words of a confident diplomat. Instead, they were harsh stabs at a highly sensitive rival, at a rather inportune time, from a deeply insecure and somewhat macho U.S. Army general. But, even worse, they are received in the international community as American doctrine, raising fears in Moscow, in Peking, in Bonn, in London and back across the Atlantic in the cities and towns of a baffled America.
Pacifists and anti-militarists regard such dangerous rhetoric as stirring up unnecessary trouble. So they do all they can: they demonstrate, as the Canadians did upon Keanan's visit, that the Canadian air force had recently against the proposed deployment of U.S. missiles at Holland's Soesterberg Airbase.
Not that the Soviets are not guilty of stirring up trouble as well. After all, their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan hardly made the rest of us feel secure. Of course America responded in protest, boycotting the Moscow embassy and emulating it in the Soviets. But we don't tend to see ourselves in the same light.
So then given the opportunity to make amends, the Americans turn up their nirses and flip off the Russians, as the Reagan administration did recently in response to Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev's invitation to summit talks. We just don't seem to think.
And now the Reagan administration announces a campaign to convince Western Europeans that they simply defend the United States against militant Islam, abandon their "rather-red-than-dead" attitude.
For the Europeans, though, their attitude is not the problem. They want peace, they want to survive. If compromise stops war, then compromise is for it is many Europeans. They are arguing.
He handed the half-full bottle back to her. He was silent but his eyes were screaming at her, and he turned around.
“Perhaps,” he said, in English, with a casual shrug, and it made her think.
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