OPINION
University Daily Kansan, April 25, 1985
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Day Kaiser. K605 65440 is published at the University of Kansas. 118a Safer Fint Hall Lawrence. K605 64354 during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods Second class postage paid at Lawrence K600 64424 by mail are $13 for six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $14 for six months or $14 a year outside the county. Student postage paid at Lawrence K600 64424 includes address and addresses to the University Day Kaiser. 118a Safer Fint Hall Lawrence. K605 64354
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Quality control
What one could do with $4.3 million.
The possibilities are about endless.
You could buy about 358 Fieros, with air conditioning but not including tags. You could acquire about 39,090 shares of IBM stock. You could throw a party with 30,000 bags of potato chips and 122,000 kegs of beer.
you could also help maintain the quality of education offered at the University of Kansas.
Students now carry about 25 percent of the cost of their educations in their tuition payments. Last week the Board of Regents discussed a possible tuition increase that would push the student burden up to 25.6 percent, which is about the same as other schools in the country that are about the same size and have similar educational programs. The board will vote on the measure at its meeting next month.
Our tuition pays only one-fourth of the professors' and graduate teaching assistants' salaries. It pays only one-fourth of what it costs to heat and cool buildings. It pays for only one-fourth of the buildings to be cleaned and one-fourth of the campus to be kept neat. And only one-fourth of the offices in Strong Hall, such as the Office of Academic Affairs and the Office of Admissions, operate off our tuition.
The rest comes from the state. If left up to the students' tuition, not much of this University would be running.
The 0.6 percent increase won't buy anything new for KU. The money will simply cover inflation and cost-of-living salary adjustments that faculty and staff members received.
And it is not like the Regents are picking on the students at KU. The increase will be across the board, for all Regents schools.
It's more money out of our pockets, yes, but as far as investments go, it is a good one — even better than IBM stock. We're worth it.
A real bargain
Their salaries may not be low compared to insurance agents, computer programmers, government workers or some others.
But professors at the University of Kansas are not getting paid what they are worth.
In a survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors, KU faculty salaries were in the bottom 30 percent of all schools in the nation.
The University rated poorly when compared with other Big Eight conference schools and with schools in the University's academic peer group, which comprises schools that KU generally competes against for faculty members.
Many professors have spent years in academia, getting advanced degrees and teaching at smaller colleges and universities, before coming to KU. They have invested large sums of time and money acquiring the knowledge and skills necessary to teach.
Each profession has its own value to society, but few others are as intricately related to educating and improving the minds of so many individuals as the teaching profession.
Professors are responsible for imparting knowledge that students will carry with them through their lives.
Financial compensation as a reward for professors is an inadequate yardstick. There will always be those teachers who put far more into their teaching than they could ever be paid for.
But according to the survey, KU professors are being asked to do that more than those at most other colleges and universities.
Such news should worry everyone in Kansas who is concerned about education.
The higher salaries offered by other universities lure good professors from KU.
Good salaries often reflect the value that institutions place on education, and many professors realize that along with the additional dollars on paychecks from other schools, comes more support for such things as equipment and other resources.
Thus, professors committed to teaching can be enticed to the places that are committed to education.
KU has problems when it comes to attracting outstanding professors to fill positions that open up when other faculty members move on or retire because its salaries are not competitive.
Holding onto good teachers and hiring other highly competent educators should be a top priority.
It's time that KU faculty salaries reflected professors' contributions to education.
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GUEST COLUMNS
President Reagan says he will offer a simplified tax system to the nation next month. No need to wait; everyone has been waiting for:
Form 1040Super-Simple will never be
Line 1. Enter your name, address and Social Security number.
Line 2. Enter your total income from all sources.
Multiply Line 2 by .10 (or some such decimal)
put the old folks on welfare? That would cost the government a lot more than a mealy $1,000 exemption."
Line 3. The result is your tax.
Looks great, doesn't it? A 10 percent flat tax means the person who makes $20,000 a year pays $2,000 tax, the millionaire pays $200,000. Quick. Easy. Fair.
"Where's the exemption for the kids? You've got to give some credit for the kids, or people will stop paying taxes. You'll pay taxes 20 years from now."
And impossible.
So you add a child to subtract $1,000 for each child. Then people who are supporting their parents let out a vell
"What about us? Do you want us to
Fine, another exemption line goes in for dependents. Next heard from are the elderly who are not living off their children.
"We can take care of ourselves with a little help. How about putting back our exemption for being older
than 65? Oh, and don't forget the blind exemption while you're at it." So another line goes in.
ARNOLD
SAWISLAK
United Press International
OK, put in a line letting people deduct the first couple of hundred dollars of that income.
Now the folks whose income comes from stocks and bonds and savings speak up.
"Are you going to tax all income from interest and dividends? You'll be discouraging investment if you do. Probably cause a recession. Maybe a crash. Remember 1929. How about a small exclusion for that income?"
IRA owners are next in line.
Good idea. Add a line to let people subtract the amount they've socked away in IRAs.
"Don't you want to encourage people to set up their own retirement nest eggs? We'll do it, but if we're going to tie up our money until we nearly 60, we ought to get a tax break in income we put aside for old age."
Now the crowd is growing. People with heavy medical expenses protest that they need relief. Those who have paid heavy state and local taxes object to having to pay taxes twice on their money. Folks who are buying houses say they're out in the street and the construction, lumber, appliance and furniture industries will go ahead without arrest can't be deducted. And those who contribute to charity want you to know that virtue may be its own reward in heaven, but a tax deduction is needed on Earth.
So you let them all have some
deductions, which of course adds more lines to your tax form.
Then someone notes that you want to apply the same tax percentage to everyone.
"Wait just a minute. There's no way a flat tax rate is fair. The guy who's just scraping out a living and the millionaire both have to pay the same for the necessities of life, but that's not what we want. I more out of the poor bloke's total income. So the rich guy ought to pay a higher rate."
So you put in a couple of lines with different rates for different levels of income.
So now what have you got?
Practically the same long and complicated tax form you finished filling out just before April 15.
The point of all this is that the president may very well come up with a simplified tax system in May, but the simpler it is, the more people there will be finding something wrong with it. That might include you.
Pro wrestling A new national threat
There's always something new to worry about, some grave threat to our national well-being. And the latest menace has been revealed to us by the National Coalition on Television Violence.
It's professional wrestling, which has been booming in popularity lately and is just about the most popular sport on cable
The NCTV says two scientific studies have shown that wrestling
DICK WEST United Press International
makes people less sensitive to the feelings of others.
Even worse, people who watch it tend to become more hostile than, say, those who have been watching a sport such as swimming. One psychiatrist said, "There is no doubt that the intense hatred and brutality of professional wrestling matches is a part of the wave of violent entertainment that is slowly pushing our society toward a barbarian ethic of hatred and revenge.
The group's study also shows that illegal and violent tactics — such as eye-gouging, face-kicking, neck-elbowing, hair-pulling and ear-biting — outnumber legal tactics by more than 3 to 1. And it recommends that police health, professional wrestling be required to follow college wrestling rules.
Professional wrestling teaches a hatred of your opponent. Instead of trying to convert your enemy, it teaches to torture him.
One is that I remember when this same organization sounded a similar warning about the Three Stooges. Members said that the old Three Stooges movies were too funny, so they and Moe do all that slapping and eye-poking. And they feared that impressionable children who
Well, I'm always concerned about the nation's well-being, and I wouldn't want to see us become less sensitive. But there are two things about this alarm that bother me.
saw the Three Stooges on TV would start threatening each other the same way.
But TV stations kept right on showing the Three Stooges, and there has been no evidence of any increase in the number of little kids becoming punchy or wearing black eye patches.
The other thing that makes me suspicious of the NCTV's findings is a phrase in their report. It says that the studies show that wrestling has "a harmful effect on adult and adolescent viewers."
The key word there is "normal." And that means that there's nothing to worry about. No normal could take wrestling seriously.
Now, how can any normal people be influenced in their behavior by the sight of some fat guy in his underwear screaming at another fat guy in underwear?
The typical match consists of either two or four beer-bellied, slack-jawed louts waddling around a ring, pounding their chests, howling incoherently and pretending to hurt each other.
I challenge the NCTV to come up with even one case of a normal person suddenly leaping up from his living room chair, grabbing his wife, whirling her above his head and slamming her to the floor. "We can take it for granted," she who scream and pretend to light as their role models.
So, I don't think there is any reason to worry about his threat to "normal" people. If you can go to a wrestler's arena, you're better off looking or sounds norr
Sure, wrestling has become more popular, but that's the result of a clever hype Every time a wrestler is interviewed, he either threatens or actually attacks a TV reporter, and this becomes a big news story.
If they're influenced to do anything, it's to laugh or to turn the knob on the TV set
in or out of the ring - you can gouge my eye
The conservatives are consolidating their power in the White House.
Reagan's revolution of Republican rights
When Chief of Staff James Baker left to become treasury secretary, the conservative wing of the Republican Party started over and making President Reagan's revolution of the right "a reality."
So dedicated to the cause was Patrick J. Buchanan, that he gave up $400,000 a year from column
HELEN THOMAS
United Press International
writing and television appearances to become director of White House communications with a salary in the range of $72,000 a year, according to the New York Times.
Buchanan is a man with a mission. He wants to make sure that Reagan remains on the ideological straight and narrow.
One new appointee, Linda Chavez, who was named head of the Public Liaison, already had proved her conservative credentials as executive director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. She opposed quotas, affirmative action and other civil rights measures and feminist movement as a means of removing discriminatory barriers against blacks, Hispanics, women and other groups.
In another move that enhances conservative control, Chief of Staff Donald Regan has reorganized White House policy, creating two Cabinet councils, one on domestic police matters he headed and the other on economic policy, supervised by Baker.
Buchanan is head of Reagan's speech-writing division and media liaison office, which, with the exception of the White House press office, represents the president to the outside world.
The president will preside over both councils but the details will be left up to Meese and Baker.
Meese was the voice of the conservatives in the first-term White House and in heading the
administration's domestic policy formulation. He will have a say over the departments of Health and Human Services, House and Urban Development, Education, Energy, Interior and Transportation, as well as the Justice department, which he is in charge of.
The New York Times quoted Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation which is a conservative "think tank," as saying the Meese appointment was heartening to conservatives because Meese was one of their heroes.
Meesie will long be remembered for saying that some people go to soup kitchens because the food was free. Meesie has called the American Civil Liberties Union a "criminals' lobby." He also马士革承诺将 effort to allow tax exempt status for sergeated private schools
He had a tough time winning Senate confirmation to his Cabinet post because he omitted a $15,000 item on his financial disclosure.
Meese has sparheaded the president's drive to wipe out the Legal Services Corp., which provides legal help to the poor. Yet the taxpayers are being asked to pick up his work and he did in his balfleth he was being investigated by a special prosecutor
In the end, Buchanan, Meese and Baker will be answerable to White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, who has taken over the reins of power. Regan, a conservative, but not one who is viewed as an ideologue, has said that he was at the White House to see that Reagan's goals were accomplished.
Reagan, who once said the homeless sleep on outside grates "by choice," bills himself as a conservative. And in his second term, as a man free from having to run again, he has become more assertive and bolder on behalf of conservative causes.
Furthermore, Reagan still thinks that his 49-state mandate is an overwhelming sign that the country is philosophically with him.