University Daily Kansan, January 21, 1985
OPINION
Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
T
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kansan (USPK 650-640) is published at the University of Kansas, I181 Staffer Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kanun 66045, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Good-class postage paid at Lawrence, Kanun 66044. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $72 for seven months and $15 for six months or a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $3 and $10 per month. Free e-mail address changes to the University Daily Kansan (USPK 650-640) I181 Staffer Flint Hall, Lawrence, Kanun 66045.
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Today Kansas observes the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. He was born Jan. 15, 1929, but the holiday is observed on a Monday to create a three-day weekend.
King's holiday
During his 12 years of national prominence, King showed courage, compassion, vision and steadfastness. He gave voice to the cause of human dignity and equality as no one else had.
"I have a dream," rang his voice at the Mall in Washington D.C., in August 1963. Listeners stood almost disbelieving the hope he evoked in them, but they and many others in the country believed.
He helped organize the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in the mid-1950s. As president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he empowered the civil rights movement throughout the region.
The national holiday in his honor begins next year. Many people probably have an attitude of "You can make me eat it, but you can't make me like it" toward the state and federal holidays honoring King. They would do well to consider not only King himself but his symbolic place in making this a free country.
Before King, George Washington was the only person in U.S. history for whom a legal holiday was named. Washington, despite his imperfections, symbolizes the gift of democracy. But for many people, black and white, America did not let freedom ring until Martin Luther King Jr. set it ringing.
King's dream lives on, but in some respects it remains only a dream. Political and judicial progress, still not secure, cannot insure economic and educational opportunity. Some black groups recently have reported little evidence of improvement in the status of blacks relative to whites.
Moreover, funny things happen when a challenger of the establishment gains its approval. The direct effect of the holiday is that the Legislature will not convene, and that many state employees will get a day off today or a day-and-a-half later. The lost, the oppressed and the outcasts will find little different today, unless they need offices that are closed.
During his life, King worked for such people. In Atlanta, broken, hopeless people fill the tavern-lined sidewalks between a glistening downtown core and Ebenezer Baptist Church, where King was pastor. The holiday is for such people.
King used symbolism, but he sought real changes. It would be sad if the holiday became a form of lip service to a dream yet unfulfilled.
King's holiday
It doesn't make sense
At tonight's inaugural festivities in Washington, D.C. invited guests, dressed in their finest attire, will sip champagne and dance the night away.
They will trip the light fantastic at parties, balls and dinners that would have totaled $12.5 million if the outdoor ceremonies had not been canceled.
There is no doubt that the president's second inauguration deserves to be celebrated and commemorated with such fitting tributes as parades and concerts and parties.
Former President Jimmy Carter may have eliminated too much of the pomp and circumstance that goes with the office of the president.
However, President Reagan has gone too far the other way.
Dress for the day's activities is alone an example of such extravagance.
Nancy Reagan's inaugural gown carried a price tag of $47,000.
Granted, one does not expect the first lady to appear at the inaugural ball in a gown that she picked up off the rack of any Sak's Fifth Avenue.
But she might have maintained a distant contact with the common people by finding a slightly less expensive dress.
Some will argue that the price should be of concern to no one but the Reagans, as they are the ones who must work it into their budget. Taxpayers are not being asked to come up with spare change so that Nancy can wear the prettiest gown at the ball.
But at a time when every politician in Washington is trying to convince the American public that a balanced budget is one of the most important items on the national agenda, the celebration marking Reagan's second term would have us think that money is the furthest thing from their minds.
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 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject columns.
Responsibilities of professionals
Professionals in this country need to clear their heads. They have taken too many whiffs of their own importance and too many qualls of the public's demands. Fresh air is in order.
A professional is a person whom society has trusted with education, access and authority for its guidance. Students and established professionals must provide talent, hard work and education to the educator positions desired in the support of many others. With those things goes responsibility.
However, many students seem to conceive of their careers as personal opportunities almost to the exclusion of seeing them as social trusts. Such language may seem strange, but the result is a better concept of professionalism.
instrumental character at the expense of that larger purpose justice, health, learning — to which it is in principle committed." he wrote.
James T. Laney, president of Emory University, which has many respected professional schools, recently wrote in a report to Emory's education fails unless it includes development of a broad sense of ethics.
"Without such a constructive, critical understanding, any profession will tend to emphasize its
Desire for preprofessional education today often carries a negative connotation.
suggests "a single-minded striving after credentials that guarantee status and material well-being."
Such professional narrowness owes ethics as doing exactly what the profession itself requires in its standards and codes. It does not ask enough questions about what the culture and its people need.
It forgets that professionals' hardest tasks are not technical issues but ethical ones. Not how to design an online service, but why. Why, society trusts, or used to trust,
professionals to see into the future a bit.
But the responsibility for societal guidance affects too little in the professional world. Plain greed is nothing new, but preoccupation with symbols of power - credentials, modern offices - has increased.
As professionals concentrate on their own importance, they show a lack of gratitude for their training. And they highly underestimate the subsurface anger of the general force for the arrogance of professionals
However, a clear sense of professionalism reveals the demigod status of professionals in this country and the skewed values it produces. It is a status that professional and lay people alike both love and hate.
People want to trust professionals to make everything right, then resent their inability to do so. And some doctors and ministers, more than any other groups, accept the innocent yet perverted expectation that they can do everything and that doing so is their call in life.
Perhaps most harmful, the false promise of professional perfection is
driving minimum standards through the roof. Internships — sometimes multiple internships — have sprung up in more and more disciplines.
That impossible dream also is driving burned-out professionals out the door. The stress of thinking that no amount of work is ever enough is building a discoverer, to discover their dislclusion, that they cannot save the world.
Finally, the stratospheric world of today's professionals is leaving more and more people unable to gain access to their services. As in other cases, these players are the richer players in and forces the others out of the game.
Millions of people cannot afford decent health care, but its increased costs stem considerably from development and purchase of more and more exotic procedures. And Joel Hyatt of Hyatt Legal Services has at least part of it right: an idea got lost in those dusty old law books.
Professional standards cannot rise forever, nor should they. The professions already have more technical competency than they can manage. What they need, more and more urgently, is a sense of responsibility.
Tradition follows the fanfare and balls
If anyone wants to know why Americans are so proud of their system of government, yesterday was a good day to answer. It was the 50th enactment of one of the most important traditions in the history of mankind.
It was the day when power was conferred on one individual to lead 200 million-plus Americans for the next four years.
Even though Ronald Reagan has held the office for the last four years, in a very real way Americans made a presidential incumbent in the inaugural ceremony.
The inauguration almost always is carried out with considerable fanfare and celebration, but, more important, it is the last ritual of a voluntary process that remains rare in a world of coaps and revolutions.
Several thousand military marchers would have participated in the inaugural parade, but their part in
the selection of a president would have been the same as any civilian standing on the sidewalk. Each got to cast one vote.
How different that is from the way leaders once were, and in some places still are. chosen. From the time that human beings began living
ARNOLD
SAWISLAK
United Press International
together in tribes the assumption of leadership has more often than not involved violence.
The person who could defeat all other claimants to power by physical prowess or by skill with weapons became and remained the leader until ousted by someone stronger. The latter was proficient with the tools of violence.
Although a bloody method, it
probably was an appropriate response when people lived in caves and sudden death lurked one step outside the entrance. People needed leaders who were good at the things it took to become a leader.
As nations arose, the notion of inherited royalty was developed in an effort to civilize the process of passing leadership. This did avoid a bloodbath every time a king died, but it also enthroned enough incompetent, weak or tyrannical first sons and daughters to undermine the system. Over time, politicians and bureaucrats nibbled at the power of kings who now are seldom more than figurehead leaders.
The election of civil leaders was not invented in the United States, but the Founding Fathers did devise an enduring and peaceful process for giving men a voice that has accepted by the contenders even when there were disputed national
elections — 1876 and 1960 were two examples — the losers did not attempt to defy the verdict of the court, however close it may have been.
The American presidential transition is more dramatic in a year like 1981, when an incumbent is turning to power to a successful challenger.
But even when the presidency is not changing hands, the inauguration ceremony is a landmark.
In taking a new oath, for example, Ronald Reagan reaffirmed that as president he has a limited grant of power that must be renewed every year.
The winners celebrate loudest an inauguration, but there is reason that all Americans can take pride in what is happening. Once again, the law of the jungle has been defied, and at a time when there still are precious few such victories to mark that is something worthwhile.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Trivial tendency
To the editor:
Because of the attention the course on terrorism I co-teach continues to receive, I have become particularly sensitive to the tendency of the media to trivialize its presentation of the world to its readership. My contacts with journalists and journalism students suggest that they are "better than ever." But the world is more complex than ever and perhaps the media is becoming less responsible than previously.
Relative to the increasing complexities of modern society, journalists appear to be informing people more about the superficial rather than the fundamental aspects of issues. For example, because a small group of individuals pursuing an obsolete ideology (that even closely communist China has rejected) are more aware of aspects of our course, the University Daily Kansan focused almost exclusively on the same superficialities. Part of the same space could have been devoted to informing readers
about some of the fundamental aspects of terrorism, or perhaps even better, discussing issues covered in other courses that are fundamental to our future as a planet.
The media has the responsibility to educate as well as to report because for many people there is no other feasible alternative source of information. Yet, frequently the opposite seems to be occurring. CNN, which used to be a premium news network, now "newsworthy" material to "news" stories. It has also been reported that the Kansas City Times may be replacing some of its "hard news" with "human interest" reporting.
One of the primary responsibilities of the media must be to create respect for the genuine leaders of a society. Yet many of the leaders of our nation, such as some corporate executives, avoid the press. Their complex understandings of their own companies and those of the world in which they operate cannot be communicated to reporters looking for simple answers to complex questions.
If we lose respect for our leaders because no one cares to communicate the intricacies of their visions and move more toward an electorate that votes more from ideological ignorance than informed understandings, democracy is severely threatened. If it continues to exist at all it may be in name only. Let's begin to admit that our world is a terrifying complex place and report it as such!
Maynard W. Shelly
Professor of psychology
Sound of silence
To the editor:
Robby Ecker
Writer for Bureau of Child Research
To the editor:
Other universities get by without this. Must we mark our hours in such a rude and ugly way?
Let's get instead a big, melodious, bronze bell. It would carry over the countryside, too, but lifting up the spirit, not blasting out the sinuses.
Perhaps the temporary silence of the steam whistle that shrieks the change of classes can start us thinking about its use.
To the editor:
Campus like a hard hat area;
Construction's destruction
Campus like a hard hat area; Students dodging Peterbills and cement.
Card catalogs being jack hammered.
Mt. Oread begins to shake . . .
Buses backed up over crosswalks, can't tell the tourists from the students.
Parking can be criminal, peaceful learning atmosphere is minimal . . .
Overhead cranes, trees executed,
mass-produced intelligence.
When did "thinking" and learning
become seered?
And where can one "think" at this
construction site we call KU?
And where can one take his class for
an outside lecture . . . ?
Jim Alldritt
Research assistant in department of geography $ _{w} $