Page 4 University Daily Kansan, March 5, 1981
Opinion
Letter is meaningless
Acting Chancellor Del Shankel wrote a letter to the University community this week, reaffirming the University's commitment to academics in light of allegations to the contrary.
Actually the letter reaffirmed nothing.
Shankel listed five steps to ensure high academic quality and quantity. Yet KU officials have not even acknowledged that an academic problem exists. They only have attempted to implement some vague proposals for a system that has yet to be adequately investigated.
In the letter, Shankel tried to convince us that academic quality is being ensured because of two new committees—the Commission on the Improvement of Undergraduate Education and an athletic Academic Standard Review Board.
These underpublicized committees—
virtually unheard of—were formed last fall, long before the academic allegations surfaced. The committees apparently didn't do much good then; what assurance do we have that they will benefit the University now?
The rest of the recommendations stress an increase in communication—but only internally. The University community needs more than a mere letter assuring us that the big boys in Strong Hall will take care of the problem.
The letter did nothing to answer the allegations. If there indeed is an academic problem, the University community—the students in particular—have a right to know. And the administration must confront the problem openly.
Then, and only then, can we start formulating effective steps to prevent the so-called abuses.
Dad healthy after operation despite his heart condition
My father has an anniversary of sorts this week. I say "of sorts" because it is not an ordinary milestone you would take note of. At the time it was not a happy occasion.
A year ago today my father was in the hospital about to undergo heart bypass surgery. Today he is fine. He is not on any medication, and he can do all the activities he did before he was sick.
My father's story is not unique. More than 75,000 bypasses are performed each year, with a very high success rate. In fact, the operation is
DAN
TORCHIA
so commonplace that medical authorities are concerned that it is being performed without first using other methods of treating heart disease.
My father's story started in July 1979, but the groundwork was laid long before then. Like thousands of other men, he was deceived by his lifestyle. Like thousands of other men, he had no idea that his habits would affect him the way they did.
And like thousands of other men, his habits caught up with him. He was a moderately heavy smoker for more than 15 years. He was overweight, and he had high blood pressure.
But it was not enough. He was playing raucquetball in July 1979 as a change of pace from tennis. He felt a tightness in his arm. When it hit him, he asked someone to call an ambulance.
But when all the evidence about heart disease and bad diet and bad lifestyle began to be collected, he took steps to correct his habits. He lost weight. He took up tennis, playing several times a week. He went on a low cholesterol, low sodium diet.
Ever since his business partner had a heart attack and bypass surgery, my father had joked about his being next. Now it was happening. He was 42 years old.
His youth was a blessing of sorts because he recovered faster than other heart patients who had been hospitalized.
But his recovery did not last. In January 1980, six months after his heart attack, he started to deteriorate. He quit playing tennis because he got too tired. He cut back on his walking. He added having heart flutters and angina, pain that caused by a lack of blood getting to the heart.
He went back into the hospital for tests last February. The tests showed that he had gotten much worse, and the doctors recommended surgery. My parents agonized over the decision, but they knew there was no choice. He stayed in the hospital, and they operated right away.
In a bypass operation, the doctors take veins from the leg and graft them onto the heart. They replace the clogged arteries that can't carry enough blood through the heart.
The doctors expected to graft only three arteries, but they did a fourth as a preventive measure. My father spent 10 days in the hospital, and he was taken. Again, because of his age, he recovered quickly.
I have a lot of memories of that period, some positive, some not. Just witnessing what was happening with my father was a traumatic experience. But friends and family were very supportive and that helped. There was one woman who came down and spent the afternoon with us, even though her husband had died of heart disease less than a year before.
We got to know many of the people who had someone in the hospital for the same operation, and we leaned on each other for support. In that case, we also find that your situation is far from the worst.
We met the family of a man from a small town in Kansas. He had cancer and heart disease. Before they could operate on the cancer, they had to go to the hospital where they have survived the trauma of the cancer surgery.
I met a man named Mr. Cutter at a seminar for heart patients and their families. He was in his mid 55s, but he looked like he was 70. He was spending much more slowly than he should have.
He always seemed confused by what had happened to him. It seemed as if his body had betrayed him, and he didn't understand why it had. He was a kindly man who never thought that he would be in that situation. He died a few months later.
The awful thing about heart disease is that it can ravage your body without your realizing it. My father always thought he might avoid a heart attack, or at least delay it.
Even after his heart attack, he thought that he might be able to do without surgery. That is what the doctors said. But when his recovery after his heart attack ended, you could almost mark daily how much he had worsened. And there was nothing anyone could do, except have survirz.
A year later, despite the positive feelings we have, there are still uncertainties. There is no telling how long my father will stay healthy. The doctors said that there would be at least five years of treatment guarantee; the Disease could start up sooner. Or he may never have problems again.
He hasn't had any problems for a year. Bypass surgery is so common now, but it's still a miracle to "is taking a body apart and putting it on" (that's not what I'm referring to) a friend of my father's who went through it too.
He is right. It enables many people to live full lives where they wouldn't be able to otherwise. People like my father. And my family is grateful.
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NOW, Let's not be Selfish
There was a time when I thought censorship meant only the little "bleeps" on TV when somebody like Johnny Carson or Dicky Smothers would say a naughty word. My brother and sister and I used to sit cross-legged on the living room floor and laugh raucously while trying to read the lips of whomever had gotten bleeded.
Library censors threaten free speech
The hunt is on. On one side of the gun are groups of people with names like "Concerned Citizens for a Decent Society" and "Moral Majority."
Of course, that was when I still thought Joe McCarthy was the name of a ventriloquist's dummy. I was only half as tall as a library worker. No idea that libraries could get censored too.
But they can. According to Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, its office is enough to ensure that libraries are threatening to become an epidemic. She noted recently, with a hint of urgency in her voice, that her office had received three to five times as many complaints than its censorship last November in 19 years past.
The prey? Any reading material that demonstrates their conception of a Christian anti-Americanism.
We've been hearing so much about other facets of this nationwide janitorial campaign—self-righteous salvos directed at gays, abortion, contraception, you name it. Compared to these, libraries seem like such unlikely targets. According to Krug, however, books by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and Jack London are particularly spirited off some school library shelves across the country. She says librarians are under such pressure in some communities that they fear for their jobs if they don't remove books.
Although school libraries account for the lion's share of censorship complaints, the percentage of public libraries falling under its seige also is on the rise, according to Krug.
There's the tiny library in Abingdon, Va., whose 24-year-old librarian is being threatened with eternal dammation by a Baptist preacher because she allowed the acquisition of books like Sidney Sheldon's "Bloodline"; and Jacqueline Susann's "Once
is Not Enough." The preacher even went as far as to demand the names of people in the community who had borrowed the offending volumes.
YEAH, you say, but that's in Virginia. Yeah, you ask, but that's in Virginia at the first floor in Launeyer at the first floor in Launeyer
Complaints about books in the Lawrence Public Library have been isolated—mostly from children.
JUDY
WOODBURN
stereotypes in children's books. A few times a year someone will go as far as to file a formal complaint, but that's about it.
Sofar, anyway.
Wayne Mayo, head librarian at the Lawrence Public Library, sees no imminent threat to libraries, but he does point to incidences like this one as an indication that demands for library censorship are becoming more acceptable.
"You can see little trends moving this way," he said. "It shows that people are a big part of it."
What about Bacon Bob, a commissioner just next door in Johnson County, who raided the library there because it carried books on sexuality and other un-American things?
Lawrence has been. In Davis County, Utah, it took the American Library Association two years and $43,000 to reconstitute a librarian who had been dismissed on pornography grounds.
The threat is just plausible enough that the board boarding is taking a few steps to protect itself.
So concern creeps in, even in a university community like Lawrence where tastes are broad-ranging and tolerance for differing views is likely to be the greatest.
By the next board meeting, the board hopes to have a formal policy on library acquisitions that emphasizes the right of individuals to select their own reading materials. The policy will shield the library board and staff from potential lawsuits because, under state law, library staff are immune to pornography charges if the material in question was purchased according to an established acquisition policy.
In the long run, it seems that having to protect librarians from prosecution is just the outward manifestation of some much larger questions. Just what is the purpose of a public library in the first place? What does it owe its patrons and the community at large?
Some communities are not as fortunate as
In the good old days of public libraries, there was never any doubt as to their purpose. They were for the "enlightenment of the common man," a means by which he could pull himself up by his own bootstraps a la Andrew Carnegie.
The Abingdon brothaila may not portend a return to the McCarthy days, when you couldn't look up "Communism" or "United Nations." The real issue is becoming suspect. It may open obscure the more important elements of the debate. After all, the issue really isn't simply keeping Sidney Shelldon or Jacqueline Susann on the ground. How would we know what they do with literary junk food like that?
Shortly after the turn of the century, when hundreds of thousands of immigrants flooded the country, libraries shouldered what Judith Kahn called "the burden of white men's burden" of "Americanizing the newcomers. Things changed again shortly after World War II, when the library became a symbol of a democratic society, and the university guardian angel of the public's "right to know."
Now, would be censors like the folks in Abingdon are playing Plato, demanding that both community and school libraries act as proponents of an ideal society—and it had better be a Christian one. They are adamant that their tax dollars not be spent to finance someone else's penchant for what they deem "smut."
But I do care what happens to the First Amendment, and I think the disappearing book act isn't nearly as funny as the bleeps and cuckoos I heard on TV as a child.
These morality mongers might do well to have a look at the American Library Association's statement. it reads: "While anyone is free to reject books for himself, he cannot exercise the right of censorship to restrict the freedom of others."
Proposals must fight Congressional maze.
B. C. FRED BERGSTEN
WASHINGTON—The 96th Congress departed with a record that was less than brilliant. It was unable to vote appropriations for much of the government, which will thus be funded by contouring resolution. One program (foreign aid) was its second straight year of such fiscal purgatory.
New York Times Special Features
Even these lackluster results required marathon end-of-season bargaining that left even those individuals most directly involved in making sure they were for days to find out what finally did happen.
It is commonplace to criticize the Congress for these specific shortcomings. There is less recognition, however, that much of the problem lies not with any particular Congress but rather with the basic process of legislating that has evolved, particularly over the last decade.
In fact, today we have a virtual stalemate system of governance.
A major systemic problem is that any money program that does not enjoy permanent authorization must clear at least 27 separate legislative steps to become effective. Three difficult areas are involved: one or more budget resolutions, authorization and appropriation.
Each process usually encompasses nine steps: Each House votes on a bill at both the subcommittee and committee levels and then again in the final vote. The committee reconciling the inevitable differences and
shipping the bill back once more to each body to final passage. Even programs with permanent authorization face 20 or so separate Capitol Hill hurdles every year.
Successful running of such a guantlet requires enormous stamina on the part of program managers and a major dose of sheer luck to complete the process within a single year.
For most programs, very few of the 27 steps are pro forma. Even non-controversial proposals sometimes fail simply because of scheduling difficulties. One willful member can—and will be an entire program by delaying a single step long enough to render passage impossible.
It becomes extremely difficult to alter the status quo—not only for those who seek enactment of new initiatives or spending increases but also for those who wish to cut existing programs and to reduce government involvement in our society.
The result is a plethora of checks with very few balances.
Conservatives who in recent years have used the stalemate system to block liberal proposals may soon find their own efforts thwarted in a similar manner. The Democratic counterparts of Sen. Jesse Helms and Rep. Robert E. Bauman will appear early in the 97th Congress.
The costs of the stalemate system are enormous. New initiatives are virtually impossible to enact. The reputation of the Congress itself declines perceptibly. Program managers must understand that they can win the Hill" rather than improving their programs and must cater to the whims of that willful
minority that can stop the process dead in its tracks.
More importantly, a president can neither govern effectively nor be held truly accountable by the public, as Lloyd托林, the former White House counsel, points out in the fall issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. This is particularly so in foreign affairs, where historically presidential leadership has been supported by the Congress.
It is far easier to describe the problem than to present viable solutions to it. Perhaps each Congress should pass only one budget and one set of appropriation bills, covering its two years of existence at once rather than trying to repeat the process annually. Perhaps authorizations and applications could be considered simultaneously, as has happened on a few occasions.
Cutter has proposed more ambitious reforms that would move, to some extent, toward a parliamentary system by focusing greater authority in the president and asking Congress to provide broad policy mandates rather than detailed numbers.
It is very doubtful that either a Great Society program or a Reagan program to fight inflation could successfully run the gauntlet of today's stalent system.
Reform of the congressional process should stand high on the agenda of both the Reagan and Bush administrations.
C. Fred Bergsten, who was assistant secretary of the treasury for international affairs under President Carter, is now a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.