Page 4
Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, January 23, 1981
Super Bowl weekend
Talk about an exciting week. The networks couldn't have planned it any better themselves. The pageentry of an inauguration, the thrill of the hostages' dramatic release and the Super Bowl, all in one week.
The importance of the first two are obvious. One marked a change in national government, and the other marked the end of a national ordeal.
Explaining why the Super Bowl is important, however, is more difficult.
Suffice it to say the Super Bowl must be important, or else the streets of America wouldn't be deserted when the game is on. The whole country comes to a screeching
halt, or about as close to it as one can imagine.
Psychologists have tried to explain the Super Bowl's place in society by calling it the Wild West, apple pie, the Spirit of '76, Lindbergh and the V-8 engine all rolled up into one event.
The American Event. Or so football fanatics would like to believe.
Sunday, millions who don't even know which two teams are playing will be glued to their TV sets—which explains the Super Bowl's other function, that of population control. After all, fewer babies probably are conceived during the game than at any other time of the year.
Perhaps India and China should take up football.
KU finally recognizing need for sexual harassment policy
Most people don't realize when an advance from another person may be considered sexual harassment. At first, I didn't.
But then I got over the shock and began to realize that the person who was in a position of power over me was using that power to brech眼 over necessary in a professional working relationship.
Fortunately, it happened only once. I didn't have to deal with economic loss or feel the anguish like those subjected to prolonged harassment. Yet if it had continued, I was lucky to have someone to turn to. And I had confidence that I was not inviting the advances.
But most people, both men and women, feel they have no one they can complain to. They worry they may be subjected to heightened stress in their workplace, supervisor's actions which invade their privacy.
Harassment, which legally is tried as a form of discrimination, only recently has been given the
CYNTHIA CURRIE
attention that it so desperately needs. Only recently were people made aware that they weren't alone in their experiences. The well-kept secret is screwing slowly into the light.
And that light is shining both at universities and on the job. What was many times condoned and expected behavior has become an object of concern for many companies and businesses which are now held liable for their employee's actions.
In a recent decision, the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia unanimously said that a woman could sue her employer to stop sexual harassment on the job without having to prove that she lost job benefits by resisting advances. It has been difficult for the courts. They have had to decide what constitutes sexual harassment. In order for adults and unwanted advances are drawn, and the severity of the advances when those lines are crossed.
The courts are beginning to establish precedent, and each new case brings a new question. But many universities are realizing the need to deal with harassment before such cases reach the court. They, too, are establishing guidelines.
On Nov. 1 of last year, Ohio State University issued a sexual harassment policy, which condemns harassment and presents a definition of sexual harassment and the ramifications of such action.
Other universities nationwide, such as Rutgers University in New Jersey and Stanford
University in California, have developed sexual harassment policies.
And to the benefit of KU students and faculty, the University of Kansas is slowly turning the administrative wheels and plans to have a harassment policy included in its re-evaluation of the University's affirmative action guidelines. The University expects to be finished by the end of this semester.
The policy, which is a composite of several reports conducted for the affirmative action office and the policies of other universities, has been discussed by women's groups, students and faculty. It is now under consideration by the University of Illinois at William Hogan, associate executive vice chancellor.
There is much to consider in developing such a policy. It must be general enough to encompass all instances of sexual harassment. It must provide adequate punishment for faculty or students who are proved to have harassed someone. It cannot be based on sex, for both men and women are approached in subtle as well as blatant manners.
These approaches can consist of direct contact that is not desired by one of the parties, of verbal or pictorial communications which imply intimidation of one person by another, or of any conduct that directly applies to conditions of employment or academic standing.
Students and faculty cannot be punished or intimidated by reports of harassment. The evaluation of the situation must be fair, without prejudice or malice. The punishment must, in a sense, fit the crime. Reprimands should, of course, be the first method of solution, and if more stringent measures are needed to stop the harassment, they must be enforced.
Since 1976, no measures stronger than a reprimand have been used to stop sexual harassment at the University. According to William Bafour, University ambassador, in 1978 he dealt with two cases of harassment between students and faculty where 'were resolved without contract termination.'
However, several administrators and officials of counseling agencies at KU are certain that
A formal, recognizable and publicized policy at the University will be a start in combating a national problem.
That policy will give students and faculty members a starting point. It will be a source to build on when they need help—the knowledge they gained in the KU and KU is willing to deal with the problem.
It will help give confidence to people, so that if they are sexually harassed they needn't feel guilty or if they brought the harassment upon themselves.
A policy will raise the consciousness of everyone involved in working and learning relationships. The foundations are laid. Now, the changing of attitudes and actions, must begin.
MAGELLYBERGONDENSLEOVER. ©PER MARQUEO ROMÉNE.
Let free economy wage poverty war
Passt. He, America. You'd better look in the mirror. There. At your nose...bloody, isn't it? You just finished paying through it for that ill-advised encounter with liberalism you just had
Now, don't get me wrong. I know you began with the best of intentions. It's just that the federal government is highly inefficient and it comes to curing social ill, especially poverty.
Therefore. it is highly costly.
In this respect it is much like the scrubber of a coal power plant. The scrubber is successful to the extent of 90 to 95 percent in removing sulfur from the smoke of burning coal. But just try to remove the remaining 5 to 10 percent, and you push costs up to double, triple or more what they otherwise would be. And you still wouldn't remove all the sulfur.
Likewise, with the social apparatus of the federal government. The only difference is that, whereas coal scrubbers were originally built to do the job as they now do, government wasn't. Thus, the point above which government cures illions without cost-effectiveness is much lower.
Yet the number of officially "poor" people in this country has barely budged at all from 1966 on up to the present day. This occurred despite that from 1965 to 1975 alone, the federal government increased the amount of its annual expenditure on social programs by $200 billion.
When it launched its "war on poverty" in 1964 under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson, it did remove with one fell swoop a goodly percentage of people from the uncleared ranks of the poverty-strecken. The number of officially "poor" people dropped by 6 million in just two years. However, many more were still left in the lurch. So, the government tried again. And again. And again. Each time it poured in even more money.
Amazingly, as writer M. Stanton Evans points out, if the government had simply taken the amount of this increase and distributed it evenly among the 25 million persons who were "poor" in 1975, each would have received $8,000, enough to make him relatively wealthy. Each underprivileged family of four then would have netted $32,000 that year.
But no, most of the money went instead, as Evans suggests, to "social workers and counselors and planners and social engineers and urban renewal experts and the assistant administrators to the administrative assistants who work for the federal government."
In other words, it w tends to underwrite and expand the highly inefficient apparatus by which government attempts to eliminate poverty. It also tries to incite spontaneous hemorrhaging of the nose.
For example, the amount presently allotted to
ERIC
BRENDE
federal pensioners alone is about equal to that expended for the benefit of our nation's most demonstrably needy, the dependent children, the blind, crippled and handicapped. And even of this last amount, 10 to 25 percent pays for bureauxrals' salaries, which are already well above what they would be making in the private sector.
The remainder of government monies cascade into programs that are ostensibly for the underprivileged, but which actually benefit mostly the middle and upper classes.
If a power plant attempted to remove 100 percent of the sulfur from the smoke it put out, thereby forcing itself to spend beyond its means for daily operations, the plant would go out of business. Likewise, if we were to continue vainly try to eliminate poverty 100 percent using the chemicals it had been applied to apparatus—and the liberals would have us do this—then our country would go out of business. As it is, we've been coming awfully close. The signs have been unmistakable.
Our inflation has merely been a slow form of going bankrupt. Unemployment has been inflation's equally ominous complement. And ironically, the people hurt first by the symptoms of impending national bankruptcy are—guess who—the poor. The irony becomes excruciating
if one views the present predicament in its proper historical perspective.
From 1900 to the mid-1960s, the percentage of people in the country below the poverty line or its equivalent declined from 90 to about 10 percent. This came as a direct result, not of government social programs, but from the lack of them. That was an era of a prudent government and, thus, increasingly prosperous economy unharmed by punitive taxation and regulation.
But shortly after Johnson ushered in his "war on poverty," this growth of prosperity was halted in its tracks, and with it the decline in poverty.
But worse than the monetary costs for our ill-advised liberal excesses have been the emotional ones. Disillusionment is foremost among them, as former President Carter so accurately noted in his "crisis of confidence" speech. But again, the moral "war on poverty," the illillusionism has been composed by far more tragic consequences.
Government handouts, while serving to perpetuate and intensify the poverty they were designed to eliminate, have more brought about the virtual destruction of the inner-city black family. In order to qualify for welfare checks, many welfare mothers had to be able to work. The children they have stayed that way. Six out of 10 black children are presently raised without fathers.
America, after 15 years of paying through the nose for liberal-inspired federal bureaucracy debauchery, you'd think you'd have more to show for it than ravaged nostrils. You have. You came away smarter, at least the portion of you that, by voting out of office in the recent election many of the responsible liberals as well as the president who lately presided over them, seemed to realize that Big Brother wasn't getting anywhere in his noble must to reduce poverty.
Maybe now, anyway, the economy and the real reduction of poverty will have a chance to take up where they left off 15 years ago. Indeed, we can expect that our economic way of reducing poverty; from the evidence it would appear as though it is the only way.
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According to a Kansan article last week, William Bell, professor of entomology, is trying to develop and market a pheromone to rid houses of cockroaches.
This pheromone, a mating scent, would attract roaches to dishes of poison.
It's a noble effort, but it's doomed. Since coming to college I have lived with various
JANE NEUFELD
Pot Shots
roaches at various times, and I know they've got us beat.
there are more than 2,000 species of roaches.
There's one of us.
Roaches don't need much to survive. They'll eat almost anything including paper, grass, dog food and other things.
I think we'd better make friends with the little vermin before it is too late.
They could be the pets of the future. They don't take up much space, they're quiet and they're easy to feed. Just drop a few crusts of bread, some cookie crumbs, a cigarette and an occasional stray house pet on the floor before you go to bed at night.
I'm no fool. I've seen "Ben." If we're not careful, they could be leaving out little dishes of saltpeter and exploding copies of Playboy in an effort to rid houses of us.
So the price of peanut butter is going up. So
we are buying more and more peanut butter,
and banana sandwich. So what?
Brokenhearted apple butter lovers will have to turn to other cheap sources of protein, like tuna and eggs. But the laws of the marketplace make it easy. Baking with egg yolks willummy additives will force their prices up, too.
JUDY
WOODBURN
Remember the "energy crisis"? That was when Americans, frustrated to the breaking point by outandfall gasoline prices and endless lines at the pumps, accused big oil companies of cutting off the supply to jack up profits. It seemed unlikely at the time, but the pieces are starting to fit together now.
In our despair, we yogurt and egg fans will turn to tuna. So tuna prices leap, and the next thing you know, it's macaroni and cheese. Then rice and beans, cottage cheese...
And you were worried about a lousy peanut butter and banana sandwich.
White-aproned supermarket managers probably have cases and cases of peanut butter stashed away in their basements and garages. Jar by jar, they leak the brown gold back to ravenous consumers broken by spiraling grocery prices.
Much has been written on the "prepile" look on the KU campus. For the students of 1950, however, the student dress code has caused more heated comment. A woman wearing jeans, a skirt and a sweater is most unisexly and disgusting things that I have yet had the dubious honor of viewing.
My, how times change. The founding fathers of
PETER
SOMERVILLE
this University would be considerably alarmed if they could view today's skin-tight faded blue jeans. They would also be alarmed at one female student's reply to the above quote: "It may be giving away a trade secret, but they make a girl less attractive in this cap, and it's around. With jeans, you can wear it as steadily as the most playful male, but yet have no fear of creating a minor sensation."
She went on to say that a long, gawky boy in tight jeans was no work of art and that the better-unstolersted males when seen like this were "no pictures of grace and beauty."
But did the males of 1969 want to be viewed as pictures of grace and beauty? The young writer would certainly have a problem concentrating in淋湿, caught by one of today's Levi-cal teachers.