OPINION
University Daily Kansan, January 30, 1985
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
*The University Daily Kansas (USP5 600-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer Flint Hall, Lawen. Kansas, 600-640, 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. Kansas, 600-640, subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or a month or $3 a month and student subscriptions are $3 and are paid through the *INVASTER* address 'changes to the University Daily Kansas, 118 Stauffer Flint Hall, Lawen, Kansas, 600-640'.
MATT DEGALAN Editor
DIANE LUBER SUSAN WORTMAN Managing Editor Editorial Editor
LYNNE $TARK Business Manager
ROB KARWATH Campus Editor
DUNCAN CALHOUN MARY BERNICA
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager Manager
DAVID NIXON Campus Sales Manager
General Manager and News Adviser
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Exile to martyr
When Benigno Aquino was gunned down on the runway of a Manila airport in August 1983, few thought his assassins would ever be brought to justice.
The opposition Filipino leader had returned from exile to a homeland seething with outrage and short on justice. His martyr's death marked a beginning. Protests and riots followed, always accompanied by cries for answers to the assassination.
Since then, this social unrest, as well as growing foreign pressure, have caused ailing President Ferdinand E. Marcos to soften his stance on democratic reforms. The National Assembly election last May saw Marcos' opponents make great strides.
Last week's indictment of Fabian C. Ver, chief of staff of the Philippines armed forces, and 25 others in Aquino's assassination show how far Marcos has been pushed. The indictments should be followed up by fair and speedy trials.
Marcos seems a leader poised on the edge of political oblivion. His gestures to democracy and the recent indictments are welcome, but probably too late. Tyrants can't erase years of abuse with sudden, piecemeal changes. Indeed, relaxing control and beginning reforms are often an authoritarian's last step. Some of history's great revolutions have followed such a pattern.
What happens in the Philippines remains to be seen. But the memory of Benigno Aquino will doubtless have a say in the matter.
Parking problems
Somewhere, some time, someone implied that students and academics came first at the University of Kansas. For some reason, in some ways, things have changed.
Back in 1866, the first building on campus, Old North College, was opened for classes. In 1891, the first football team was formed. It had 16 players, and was coached by E.M. Hopkins, professor of English. The first basketball team was formed not long after. The 10 men were coached by James Naismith, the inventor of the game. That was in 1898. Since then, athletics have been as much a part of KU as enrollment and midterms.
That's fine. Athletics are a college tradition. What better way to spark school spirit and student pride than by having a winning football or basketball season?
But, at least in one instance, it has come to the point where athletics are inadvertently interfering with students' academic routine.
On evenings when there are home basketball games, Parking Service employees start closing parking lots on campus at 5 p.m. The barricades go up, and it doesn't matter whether students have a parking permit or not — the fans come first.
according to Parking Services, 15 lots are closed to regular permit holders on game days. And the lots aren't reopened until about 7:40 p.m. Students needing to park on campus are left only the few spots that escape the fans.
Athletic events are designed to be entertainment for students and other fans. It's unfortunate that at the same time they are an inconvenience to some students.
The need for parking space at basketball games is important, but the needs of students not attending games also must be considered.
Students taking night classes and doing library research need places to park, regardless of whether there is a basketball game. The University exists for students, and it seems some compromise could be worked out. Perhaps additional space could be reserved on game days for student parking. It is students, after all, who will be at this University whether we have a good season or a bad one.
GUEST COLUMNS
The University Dally Kansan invites individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns should be typewritten and double-spaced and should not exceed 625 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. Columns can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffau-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject columns.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and hometown, or faculty or staff address. The Kansan also includes individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
Comparing the worth of employees
To close the gap, employers would have to pay each woman $8,500, or a total of $294 billion. The issue. Is it worth for Comparable Worth" the solution?
Comparable worth is a method of job evaluation that compares classifications of employees to a set of numerically valued criteria. Such criteria include complexity, knowledge, contacts and physical demands. The numbers are plugged into an equation, and out pops the comparable pay level for that class of employees.
Proponents of comparable worth rely extensively on government statistics that indicate that women's wages have remained at about 59 percent of men's wages for the past 60 years. The statistics conclude that the Equal Pay Act and affirmative action laws are not enough.
So what is this 39 percent. It is the average percentage of men's wages that women receive. But a recent Rand Corporation study states that the average pay for all women has improved steadily from 43 percent in 1920 to 53 percent in 1980
The gap is reported to have closed by 4 percent in the last four years. Rand economist James P. Smith attributes the accelerating change to "expanding skills of women, both in experience of education and work experience."
There is no reason to expect an about-face of this decreasing trend, so current inequities will naturally
BRYAN
DANIEL
Staff
Columnis
diminish as more women attain higher degrees of education and work
Other factors contribute to this pay gap: 1) the average woman in the work force works 35.7 hours a week, the average man 44 hours; 2) the average man has been present on his job 4.5 years, the average woman 2.6 years; 3) women are 11 times more likely to leave the work force than are men; and 4) women are far more likely than men to move or change jobs to accommodate their spouse's career goals, so many women choose jobs from which entry and exit are relatively easy.
Whether one acknowledges these facts or not, they exist and they
influence personnel decisions. But as family relations evolve and more women remain in the market, these trends can shrink if current trends continue.
Advocates of comparable worth base their case on several other points. They contend that society channels men and women into vocations, creating occupations dominated by a single sex. The female-dominated occupations pay less because the market, reflecting sex discrimination in society, undervalue the work of women.
- Also, employers further discriminate by establishing higher minimum qualifications than are necessary, effectively excluding women from better-paying, male-dominated jobs. Comparable worth's mathematical equation should circumvent this.
The process sounds easy and objective, but it is neither, as we learn from the comparable worth study commissioned by Gov. John Carlin. The process of assigning a number to a factor, a process called weighing, is subjective and complicated. "Not only must factors be assigned numerical values to express relationships, but the levels within each factor must also represent a numerical value." the study reports
It is also far from clear how a comparable worth system would alleviate the effects of the "channeling" process. On the contrary, a comparable worth system would just reinforce the dominance by a single sex in a particular occupation.
Smith says that the science of economics has just not advanced far enough to accept comparable worth. And the weighting of factors would
replace the bias of the marketplace with the bias of job evaluators.
Young women just out of high school would not have the incentive to move into traditionally male-dominated fields or continue their education in pursuit of a more challenging career if the value of lower-skilled, female-dominated jobs was inflated artificially.
The rational woman would choose the least costly, better-paying alternative of entering the job market with a single-single occupations would persist.
The National Research Council noted that comparable worth would result in "reducing employment either because employers shift to alternative, less labor-intensive jobs, or because consumers might switch to other, less expensive goods and services" if the price was passed on.
Certainly the evidence does not support the abandonment of free market principles for a job evaluation system that has as many deficiencies as are found in current comparable worth systems.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Writing it right
To the editor:
In his letter to the editor (Jan. 21, 1985) Mnarday W. Shelly, professor of psychology, was right to attack the trivial tendency of journalism. While recognizing that journalism students are more intelligent and "better than ever," Shelly conceded that the world is a "terribly complex place" and demanded that journalists "report it as such!"
I agree with the trivial conclusion, but not the complex process of reporting. Journalism is writing for the people. The journalist's power is to comprehend the essence of a story, and to find a way to cut away the unnecessary gibberish when he or she expresses the contradiction in simple language.
News journalism evolved in response to the communication needs of people who were uprooted from their agrarian lifestyles and thrown into concentrated centers of industry. Reporting and typesetting were labor-intensive, making the best reporting only possible in concentrated centers of industry. But a corporate mentality resulted form this complex process of reporting, and the tendency to make trivial any individual experience is an inevitable outgrowth.
Of course it's not the same, but newspaper journalism remains a typeset institution. Yes, the technology in communication and printing has outstripped the typesetting of that era, but the mind-set of pre-World War II journalism still forms the infrastructure of our public communication processes.
Population movement has reversed in the past half century. Megalopolitan sprawls are very difficult to identify, let alone identify with. Not to mention, the "citizens" of the country have backed to the "country" lifestyle.
Group-think was made possible when newspaper journalism removed the individuality of the reporter and made his or her writing the property of a corporate body. Through a corporate identity (the incorporated image of their metropolis) channeled via newspaper journalism, the alienated farmer became a citizen of his city.
Improving the technique of writing is not sufficient to express the intricate fabric of contradictions in our world. News journalism, in order to respond to the communication needs of contemporary citizens, must change from "group-speak" to a sounding board of informality so that the writer how much individuality a reporter may put into her or his journalism, the report will sound one-dimensional and trivial when melted into the press.
Too degrading
Victor Clark
clerk-typist,
Hatch Reading Room
To the editor:
After a careful reading of staff columnist Bryan Daniel's Jan. 25 column concerning the end of apartheid and his so-called concern for protecting blacks, my blood has now come to somewhat of a simmer.
Daniel's address to Jesse Jackson was not only degrading but inappropriate as well. Apparently it has been widely accepted by the press to refer to the Kennedy family as the Kennedy clan. I think that these are meant as a personal demeaning of character by the idiots that use them.
Daniel clearly illustrated sarcasm on the subject. I strongly feel that he would have gotten the same effect across even if he had given Jackson and the Kennedy's the respect that they are due. A simple "Jackson" would have done the job, seeing that he was the only nominee by that name who ran in the recent presidential election.
My sincerest apologies if he may be, but I seriously doubt that Daniel is acquainted personally enough with him to be on a first-name basis with him.
As for Daniel's supposed understandings of South Africa's present situation, I think no person understands a situation unless directly confronted with it.
Lisa Whisenton
Lisa Whisenton St. Louis sophomore
To the editor:
Team basketball
I would like to comment on the latest performances of the Kansas basketball team and the coaching ability of Larry Brown.
The University of Kansas has excellent players and the potential to win the Big Eight. However, they seem to lack the fundamental skills of team ball play. In the Oklahoma game, KU turned the ball over 22 times and literally handed the game to OU.
The continual shifting of players bewilders me. The team cannot play together. They do not know how to rebound to make simple passes that are essential to score points.
The talents of Calvin Thompson, Ron Kellogge, Danny Manning, Mark Turgon and Greg Drelling are being wasted. Together they can score points, set the tempo of the game and play like a team should be seen to leave them in together long enough to get the game under control.
KU needs some aggressive ball-playing. Our games recently resemble a high school team's attempt to play college ball.
KU doesn't deserve to be in the Top 20. What is the point of having great players when they can't play team ball?
KU began the season playing as a team, playing hands-up defense and working the ball around for the best shot. This type of play has declined with each game. The players are in constant foul trouble, seldom get inside for the rebounds and turn over the ball with flustered passes.
Julia Brown,
Shawnee Mission junior
To the editor:
Fiallos not threat
In his letter to the University Daily Kansan (Jan. 24) on the appointment of Mariano Fialos as a visiting professor at the University of Kansas, third-year law student David Graham wrote of his "great amusement" at having read a Kansan article on the subject. I am writing to observe that he has little to fear from Fialos.
Graham's comments regarding those who defend the appointment — we "intellectual dwarfs" — and his absolutely flawless logic — Nazis favor centralized national government, the Sandinista regime is centralized; therefore, the Nicaraguans are "Nazi-like," demonizing a group of men who are closed-minded and incapable of rational analysis can be neither "disinformed" nor educated, even after 19 years of schooling.
Mel Dubnick associate professor of public administration
What if . . . ?
To the editor:
I find President Reagan's speech to the anti-abortion rally in Washington, D.C., very interesting. I wonder what would happen if the president spoke encouragingly to a group of guys rallying outside the White House.
What's the difference? Both issues are controversial, with numerous advocates and opponents on each side. What would be the difference if the president took a side in that instance?
All men are created equal, wise men once wrote. But Reagan announces his bias over loud speakers at the White House and in the national papers, while Tim Hamilton writes in his college paper — if he's lucky.
Tim Hamilton,
Wichita freshman