OPINION
University Daily Kansan, March 19, 1985
Page 4
The Universitv Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansan (USPS 605-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Flint Hall. Lawrence, Kan. 6005, daily 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, Kan. 6004. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or a year in Douglas City and $15 for six months or a year outside the county. Student subscriptions may be made to the University of Kansas address changes to the University Daily Kansan 118 Stauffer Flint Hall. Lawrence, Kan. 6005.
MATT DEGALAN Editor
DIANE LUBER SUSAN WORTMAN Managing Editor Editorial Editor
LYNNE STARK Business Manager
ROB KARWATH Campus Editor
DUNCAN CALHOUN MARY BERNICA
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager Manager
DAVID NIXON Campus Sales Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Fitting budget
Budgets are usually, if not always, messy things. The 1986 budget for the University of Kansas is no exception.
The University asked the state for $175 million, and last week the Senate Ways and Means Committee whittled $2 million off the request.
Groans and grumblings are already seeping from offices around campus. What? Taking another $2 million from the University?
But it is all a game of give and take. For what the Ways and Means Committee took away, people need to look at what KU received in the long run.
First, what KU lost. The committee cut to 5.5 percent Gov. John Carlin's proposed 6 percent increase in faculty and student salaries and other operating expenses. It eliminated Carlin's 6.5 percent increase in graduate teaching assistants' pay.
Then $500,000 was cut from the increase in the state's contribution to the unclassified employee's retirement fund. Finally, the committee refused the governor's request for a center of excellence in education research, and it cut $200,000 from the proposed science library budget.
The numbers look big, and they seem to add up to a large cut for KU.
But then consider what KU gained. With the money that was to be used for the research center, KU can add new programs, such as one in computer engineering. The committee also approved funds for four full-time faculty members for the new program, four new classified employee positions, new equipment and a research program at Parsons State Hospital. And the Ways and Means Committee added $240,000 to the Snow Hall renovation.
Most people are amenable to budget cuts on paper tighten where you can. Trim the fat. The Senate Ways and Means Committee finally did.
It all evens out in the long run.
On Chernenko
Konstantin Ustinovich Chernenko was born in the central Siberian village of Bolshaya Tes on Sept. 24, 1911. He stopped attending Communist Party functions officially as of 10:20 CST on March 10.
A member of Komosol, or Young Communist League, he was accepted into the Commist Party in 1931. Cherenkenko was not called to defend his country until late in World War II and spent most of the war years studying ideology at the Higher Party School. In 1953 he earned a degree from Kishiney Pedagogical Institute, a teachers college.
Fate smiled on Chernenko in 1948, however, when he was placed in charge of agitation and propaganda during the "sovietization" campaign in Moldavia.
Although Chernenko's tenure at the apex of the Soviet hierarchy was considered lackluster, he arrived there only after staging a rare political comeback. Chernenko was Brezhnev's heir apparent, but Yuri Andropov, head of the KGB for 15 years, managed to win the approval of his fellow Politburo members.
Cherenkenko had to wait out Andropov's short tenure to become the choice of the Politburo gerontocracy.
Arkady N. Shevchenko, former Soviet official stationed at the United Nations until his defection in 1978, possessed extensive contacts within the Kremlin. In his book, "Breaking With Moscow," he describes Chernenko as "parvenu, a man lacking proper qualifications for becoming a leader."
Shevchenko writes that Cherenko was thought of as nothing better than a mere clerk by his peers in the Politburo.
Chernenko's most important contribution may have been setting a precedent for having a non-Russian as Soviet leader. But he is more likely to be remembered as a symbol of stale Soviet leadership — and as the man who preceded Mikhail Gorbachev.
it happened again last night. I awoke sweating and shaking, heart pounding in my ears. Once more I had been in the clutches of the nightmare.
101 omission leads to nightmare
"This has got to stop," I told myself. "My guilty conscience is killing me. Maybe I should turn myself in."
After a few minutes I was more rational. "Get a grip, man," I lectured sternly. "It was just a bad dream. They'll never catch you. If they were going to, they would have before now. Relax baby, reel-ax."
But the nightmare keeps coming back.
In my nightmare it is March of the fifth year as an undergraduate. I am ordered to an office in the recesses of Strong Hall. I try to brazen it out, but there is no way around me and shuffled on the desk, and finally the expressionless face looks up.
The drone has my transcript on it's desk, and I can see the situation is hopeless, but principle compels me to make some argument.
"I'm sorry," the voice intones with undisputable finality, "but you won't be able to graduate this spring. You haven't taken the required FRI 101."
"I'm sorry, but a requirement is a requirement. There's no way out. You're doomed. See you next fall."
"But it's my major. I've taken all kinds of Frig classes. So what if I never took the intro course?"
How did I come to be in such a state? It all began years ago when I enrolled in my first Frig class. It was
This is where I wake up in a cold sweat.
Staff Columnist
HARRY CROCKETT
going to be good, and I really wanted in. The only problem was that I hadn't taken the necessary prerequisite — Frig 101.
Frig 101 is one of those gargantuan lecture classes where enrollment is limited each semester to those whose KUIDs end in certain magic numbers. It is also a prerequisite for every other class offered by the department. That semester my number wasn't up.
I went to the professor and explained my predicament.
"Well," he replied, "you're certainly going to be at a disadvantage, but if you want to give it a try, I'll let you in the class."
I was in. I took his course, and loo
and behold, I got an A. Next semester
it was my turn for 101, but the class
didn't fit my schedule at all, so I
didn't take it. Encouraged by my
teacher, I attended two more Frig classes. Despite my lack of preparation, I did well in
those too.
Since then I have taken 22 hours of Frig classes and have managed to escape detection. Whenever a professor was outlining some basic concept and asked, "You all remember this from 101, don't you?" I nodded my head along with everyone else and wondered how many of them were on the lam. But no one, aside from that first professor, ever actually asked me whether I had taken the prerequisite to the class.
Lest anyone think I am trumpeting my success at this point, let me be to add that my transcript also contains Cs, Ds and FS, and even one semester has "ACADEMIC PROBATION" stamped on in red letters.
But back to the nightmare. I don't really expect anyone in my department to get upset over my not having taken an intro class at this late hour. I fully expect to graduate on schedule, or at least on my schedule.
There are, however, students who will not graduate when they expect
for similar reasons — an unfulfilled requirement or not enough hours. Thanks in part to the good people in the Office, the number is small.
Now, I admit that one point where reality strays pretty far from the ideal is student advising. Some faculty advisers enthusiastically inform their students about what they are required to take, which courses to steer clear of and which electives would be the most interesting. Others give their students only the most cursory attention, or worse yet, just plain tell them the wrong things.
Graduation requirements are often confusing. They vary even within departments. Some courses can be tested out of, some transfer hours don't apply and some introductory hours do. Why expect every professor to know all this?
The fact is that every student in college ought to be smart enough either to figure out what classes he or she will need to go ask someone who can tell them.
Why make things hard on yourself?
You don't want to work like a dog fulfilling requirements your last week. You want to enjoy the easy life. Unless you're like me. But in that case, you deserve the nightmares.
MX may get OK-as bargaining chip
Eleven years after entering advanced development, the MX missile continues to be mired in political controversy, with its future clouded by budget concerns, technical arguments and the success of arms talks.
President Reagan wants to spend $21.5 billion to build more than 200 of the missiles with 10 warheads and to sink 100 of them by December 1989 into silos now occupied by older Minuteman missiles.
The result, Reagan contends, would be a strengthened nuclear deterrent. His critics argue that the nuclear curve into the nuclear balance.
The program began in 1971. But while the MX met the theoretical specifications of strategic planners for a new type of missile, more powerful and accurate than the Minuteman 3, doubts about how and where to distribute it soon made the MX a homeless missile.
To review the history of the MX program is to review more than 14 years of false starts, missteps, retreats and, in the latest chapter added by Reagan, political confrontation.
Intended as a backbone of U.S. deterrence — one based on the premise that even after a Soviet first strike, the United States could deal a crippling retaliatory blow — the MX soon faced the problem of vulnerability.
The capability to strike back at the Soviets had little value unless the MX
NORMAN D SANDLER
United Press International
could survive a nuclear attack. The fixed silos that have been the cornerstone of the U.S. land-based missile force no longer provided sufficient protection from Soviet missiles that had approached their U.S. counterparts in accuracy.
While citing "remarkable progress" in developing techniques
Debate over a basing mode exacerbated the strategic arguments made against the MX. And in sending Congress a new report on the missile March 4, Reagan did little to quiet the debate.
to make silos invulnerable to nuclear attack. Reagan indicated any such modification to lessen the vulnerability of the MX was at least several years off and would require additional funds from a Congress that had not been sympathetic to the program over the years.
In advocating the use of existing Minuteman silos, Reagan was forced to concede that the MX would be just as vulnerable as the Minuteman, undercutting one of the major arguments for the missile, but insisted that an improved ability to withstand the lateral motion induced by ground shocks made the MX more survivable in the event of attack.
Ironically, the technical arguments that have fueled the MX debate for more than a decade were shoved aside when Reagan formally asked Congress to unfreeze $1.5 billion approved last year for the production of a second batch of 21 missiles.
The importance of the MX, it seemed, had shifted from its value as a weapon to its importance as a bargaining chip.
The U.S.-Soviet arms negotiations
in Geneva — the first in almost 15 months — put a new face on an old dimension of the MX controversy and from the scrap heap later this month.
Reagan, accused during much of his political career of being opposed to arms control with the Soviets, was told that Congress 'adundement of nuclear weapons' was "unique opportunity" for negotiated reductions in nuclear weapons.
After hearing Reagan argue for a strong negotiating hand, Rep. Sherwood Boehler, R-N.Y., usually a critic of the MX, signed on.
"I don't buy the MX." Boehler said, "Quite honestly, I think it's a turkey. We haven't got a proper chicken. But we can be invulnerable. But what we can do is use that effectively in Geneva and that's my interest."
So too is the MX's role at the negotiating table the short-term test advocated by Reagan. And if he prevails, the MX will have survived not on the strength of its technical merits, but on the strength of political arguments advanced for gain in Geneva.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Sincere interest?
I could not help but laugh at your letter to the editor in the University Daily Kansan Surely you don't expect anyone to believe that you are a professor of English interest in the extracurricular activities of our University students.
To the editor
You really blew smoke in an attempt to draw an analogy between football and basketball games, Band Day. Independence Days and the Fourth of July are different. These events are far different from the party scheduled for April 12.
First of all, no one has requested that the citywide events continue until 2 or 3 a.m. More important, those events do not promote the consumption of alcoholic beverages. No one is suggesting these city events
be banned, that is unless you have such plans in mind if you're elected.
In any case, had you taken the time to investigate the reasons behind the city commission's decision, you might have reached a similar conclusion. How would you like to have your yard trampled by trespassing students? How would you like to hold your crying young son at 2 a.m. trying to explain why the noise is keeping him awake? How would you like to replace damaged art work that fell from the walls because the wall so loud? Maybe you would like to get outside to greet another daughter that cannot go outside at early evening because there are fraternity brothers relieving themselves in the trees behind your home? Come on Bob, if you so convinced the party is a good idea, then why not offer to hold it in your backyard?
The problem is not that the students want to have a party. The problem is that over the years, we have learned that many students coming to these events have no respect for other people's property. We have had to escort them out of our yards, driveways and even out of our garages as they looked for a short cut to the party. The problem is that the resident of Lawrence have to suffer damage to their property and inconvenience every time a fraternity or sorority wants to party.
Since you seem to feel that the party is not an infringement on the rights of the homeowners, I invite you to visit me on the night of the party. Things should really be bopping about 11 p.m., so come on over. One thing though, Bob, bring your own ear plugs. I only have
enough ear plugs for me and my family.
Bradley Dick
Lawrence resident
EDITOR'S NOTE: The Lawrence City Commission voted March 5 not to close Stewart Avenue for a fraternity block party.
Speaking of twits
To the editor:
I am not surprised that Student Senate approved funds to bring Louis Farrakhan to campus for a "speech." I am not surprised because he represents a faction of black America of which many white Americans are terrified! Over the years, I've seen this sort of thing happen countless times in New York and California, which are strongholds of left-wing, academic super-liberal twits.
The inconsistence here is a glaring one. Why then can't Richard Butler, a member of the Aryan Nation, speak here — despite the fact that he is anti-black? Why? Because black students would riot, along with a horde of the aforementioned liberal twits.
Rick Valenti Baldwin City resident
To be consistent, anyone of national reputation — good or bad — should be invited to express their views at a university. This should be so, even if their opinions are based on pathetic hate for another race or nationality. Both of the aforementioned speakers have enough hate to satisfy any interested in listening to such crap.
To the editor:
Hillel and speech
I am writing in reference to the front page article on Farakhan which appeared in the March 7 issue of the University Daily Kansu.
I would like to say that as a Jewish student, I was disappointed with Hillel's decision to support Farrakhan's visit. If I understood correctly, they supported the decision to give Farrakhan Student Senate funds.
I believe in freedom of speech. I believe that Farrakhan has the right to speak. However, I strongly resent the use of Student Senate funds to pay him to preach bigotry at an equal opportunity institution.
Susan Goldstein
Susan Goldstein Northbrook, Ill., junior