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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Sept. 20, 1961
Success for PTP
People-To-People, a new foreign student-American student experiment at KU this year is meeting with success. so far.
During enrollment and the first days of classes, the KU "brothers and sisters" have answered questions, given directions and helped to explain classes and schedules.
AND THEY HAVE DONE SO WILLINGLY and with enthusiasm. They are proud to be in People-To-People. They are in a core, experimental group establishing an organization with a purpose that is nationally recognized by President Kennedy.
Only a few administrative snags are left to iron out for next year's program—getting student's names early enough to begin correspondence, explaining how to get to KU, what to expect and what to bring.
But a bigger, more important hazard, rather than a problem, will soon face the People-ToPeople program. Will the enthusiasm last all year or will it fade out during final week and holidays, when everyone gets so busy there is no time for anything?
OR WILL PART OF THAT "FRATERNALism" or "friendly bond" wane when professors and students drag up an old phrase and accuse People-To-People members of "pseudoMomism?"
Will there still be pride and enthusiasm?
Officers in People-To-People say there will. The people themselves were chosen because they carry out projects once started.
Foreign students praise the efforts put forth by the KU students in People-To-People and the backing it is receiving by non-members.
CALL IT "PSEUDO-MOMISM," FRATERnalism, liberal lunacy or a conservative craze; call it what you will; People-To-People is here. It is appreciated, it makes a few more students feel welcome and wanted.
People-To-People is here, and if its officers have anything to say in the matter, it's here to stay—more proof of the varied functions of the University.
Carrie Merryfield
Enrollment Record Set
The record enrollment at KU this fall is only the prelude to continued enrollment records and University expansion. The specialized training that is required for the operation and understanding of an increasingly complex mechanized society would insure this by itself, but there are many other reasons.
THE IMPACT OF THE COLD WAR HAS increased the pace of education throughout the United States, especially in the large universities like KU. It has caused new programs of study to be created and old ones to be expanded. The creation of the Soviet and Slavic areas study program is a good example of KU's reaction to the cold war situation. The international outlook has also resulted in many exchange programs with other countries and an increasing number of foreign students at KU.
Another factor contributing to enrollment increases is the "baby boom" of the World War II and post war years, coupled with the knowledge of parents that a university education is now almost a necessity for promotion and success in the modern corporate world.
THE EXPANDING RESEARCH PROGRAMS of government and private industry as they work to probe space, find new ways to nourish the world's expanding population and carry out many other projects have also led to expansion of KU's facilities.
KU's reputation for scholastic excellence, coupled with these many factors, insures continued growth in its size and programs.
William H. Mullins
Warns On Birch Society Editor:
...Letters ...
In reference to your front page story in the UDK on September 14 concerning the possibility of a chapter of the John Birch Society being formed in Lawrence I have a mild word of warning. In the 1930s a number of well-meanting students and adults joined or espoused left-wing and neo- and pro-m communist organizations and had such espousal "come home to roost" twenty years later when they found their paths barred to many types of employment. They are still being harassed! If the people of the 1960s become too
servent and join right-wing and neo- and pro-Fascist groups the same thing may happen to them in the '70s and '80s. The John Birch Society, the Young Americans for Freedom, the National Republican Army, the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the White Citizen's Councils and other such organizations tend as far toward the undemocratic right as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, American Committee for Spanish Freedom, Scottboro Defense Committee, and the Labor Youth League of the '30s tended toward the undemocratic left.
This thesis is not to suggest that
Daily Hansam
University of Kansas student newspaper
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$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University
holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence,
Kansas.
Tom Turner ... Managing Editor
Linda Swander, Fred Zimmerman, Assistant Managing Editors; Kelly Smith, City Editor; Bill Sheldon, Sports Editor; Barbara Howell, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher ... Editorial Editor
Bill Mullins and Carrie Merryfield, Assistant Editorial Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Sincerely,
Frederick Townshend,
Wichita junior
Tom Brown Business Manager Don Gergick, Advertising Manager; Bonnie McCullough, Circulation Manager; David Weins, National Advertising Manager; Charles Martinache, Classified Advertising Manager; Hal Smith, Promotion Manager.
political activity has to be curtailed in a democracy but let us think twice before joining far right or left wing groups now springing up in our midst. We have Republican, Democratic, Socialist, and a host of minor parties in the United States which are, for the most part, committed to democracy as we know it. To invest our talents and monies in pro-communist or profascist organizations seems futile as well as dangerous to the individual involved and to our Bill of Rights. Fortunately, however, our Bill of Rights does guarantee such a freedom for undemocratic groups to operate in our country and we are all the stronger because of it. But, let us all exercise caution in the sixties!
Business Manager
Short Ones
The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and justice in their courts is forever in a passion. —William Makepeace Thackeray
To be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia — to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god or an ordinary young woman for a goddess. Henry L. Mencken
串 串 串
One drink of wine, and you act like a monkey; two drinks, and you strut like a peacock; three, and you roar like a lion; and four drinks—you behave like a pig.—Henry V. Morton
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No sensible man watches his feet hit ground. He looks ahead to see what hunk of ground they'll hit next.-Ernest Haycox
From the Magazine Rack
YAF Is Booming
Young Americans for Freedom is no older than last September, and it already claims 30,000 members, enough to impress journalism, if not history, that it is the dominant organized expression of the spirit of American youth. We have the dismal sense that some publisher will issue a "React anthology" to replace those beat anthologies whose fashion has withered.
TO CALL THIS A SUDDEN DEVELOPMENT would be to scant William F. Buckley's extensive missionary efforts in the academics. But there is a new spirit. YAF's predecessor, the Inter-collegiate Society of Individualists, which felt lonely, defensive, and under siege, confined itself to discussion. Young Americans for Freedom is an action group. Its literature pulses with the drum beats of the counterattack which means to become the offensive; its slogan is, "The tide has turned." YAF even has a Demonstrations Committee which sends vickers to scenes of crisis. Its greatest pride to date was its dispatch of two busloads of young patriots to Washington in January to picket in support of the Un-American Activities Committee, then surrounded by Representative James Roosevelt. "They outpicked the Communist and Leftist pickets two to one — a smashing defeat for the Communist propaganda apparatus..."
New York, from the stance of this manifesto, is the capital city of the infidel. Yet Young Americans for Freedom has made itself comfortable here. There is even a Greenwich Village chapter, which made its debut in February in an off-Broadway cellar showing of "Operation Abolition," the House Un-American Activities Committee film glorifying the repression of the demonstrations against its San Francisco hearings. YAF's detestation of statism does not, of course, include disgust at the sight of four policemen carrying away a limp and dripping woman. The passion of its rhetoric does not mean that Young Americans for Freedom encourages any passionate individual rebellion in action.
A career in the Republican Party seems to be a common outlet for YAF leaders; one director even started as Barry Goldwater's page. This notion of leadership may explain the exaggeration of YAF's importance which has impelled Time to assign a reporter to study it "in depth." There are few journalists to interpret the young except those themselves middle-aged. . .
A YOUNG AMERICAN FOR FREEDOM may be further excused from the complaint that he serves himself first. By his philosophical standards, self-service is the highest form of national service. To act otherwise is to betray principle. YAF, for instance, is not indifferent to the Peace Corps; YAF is against it. The highest calling is to be assistant to the President of Timken Detroit Axle.
N Is
No director of Young Americans for Freedom can be told from any other. Their efforts at humor, the last defense of the individual, indicate that they have managed to conquer the impulse at the source...
YAF's reverence for constituted authority turns out to be less absolute than Fulton Lewis III would have us believe. It seems in fact to be limited to policemen. At the Goldwater rally (a YAF meeting March 4 in New York honoring Barry Goldwater), there were tentative boos for President Kennedy and fully-developed ones for President Eisenhower. Young Mr. Caddy opened the ceremonies with a jocular reference to "Eleanor," presumably Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Sr., who is, while not constituted authority, a great-grandmother who might expect some respect from an acolyte at the worship of traditional values.
DOUGLAS CADDY, YAF'S NATIONAL DIRECTOR, delights in citing the college instructor who noted with pleasure that its members always wear neckties and suits that match and are conspicuously cleaner than liberals. This is enough in itself to discourage hopes or fears that YAF needs to be taken seriously; history has seldom been made by men who consciously dressed either well or badly. In the same spirit, Fulton Lewis III, as master of ceremonies for "Operation Abolition," YAF's main celebratory rite, habitually observes that the San Francisco students were demonstrating against law and order and that respectable persons do not conduct themselves in this fashion...
The Young American for Freedom seems to be notably without passion and is carefully polite to his enemies, without whose notice he would not feel himself in business. . .
THE YOUNG REPUBLICANS CHERISH GOLDWATER above all prophets. They will be permitted to cherish him until 1964, until the professionals blow the whistle and force them to accept some other knight, in armor so tarnished as to seem indistinguishable from the black of the enemy. Trained as they are to acceptance, they will make the transition dutifully and, dulled as they are by our educational system, they will not even know enough to understand that such absurdities are not only undignified but unnecessary. But, with luck, they may become administrative assistants to especially futile Congressmen and, with time, even especially futile Congressmen themselves, or commentators on news programs sponsored by furniture stores in small towns.
I describe no particular disaster; these are not children who, if they had not taken the wrong road, might have been poets or priests. Our children will remember Young Americans for Freedom, if at all, as part of a time sadly deficient in opportunities of self-expression for ordinary young men.
(Excerpted from "On Growing Up Absurd" by Murray Kempton in The Progressive, May, 1961.)