Opinion
Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Lindsey Henry, Editor Marc Harrell, Business manager Dave Morantz, Managing editor Colleen Eager, Retail sales manager Kristie Blasi, Managing advisor Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser Justin Knupp, Technology coordinator
4A
Monday, Feb. 16, 1998
PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS
Editorials
Students should support proposal for Robinson Center expansion
Robinson Center has inconvenient hours and inadequate facilities. The recreation center is closed for classes during the times best suited for student use — 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. The few hours when it is open, and the lack of equipment and basketball courts makes long lines and student frustration common. Students would like to see things change — 47 percent of the 1996 senior class rated recreational services and equipment 3.5 on a scale of 1 to 5. We should demand a better recreation center that can serve more students.
Two years ago, Recreation Services proposed to build a new recreation center that would have been open to students during the day. There were two problems with this proposal, which caused it to be voted down by students.
First, the center would have been
The new plan would be cheaper, more efficient for University
located on West Campus near 23rd and Iowa streets—fairly inaccessible to students with daytime classes and no cars.
Second, the building would have cost $21.5 million. The proposal called for student recreation fees to jump from $13 to $90 per semester. And because the building wouldn't have been ready to use for three years, most of the students paying the $90 fee would never have been able to use the new center.
One of the reasons the new recreational center would have cost so much was because it would not have made use of any of the present facilities in Robinson or Anschutz Sports Pavilion. By building an addition to Robinson instead of a new building, the existing courts, equipment and office space at Robinson can still be used and won't have to be rebuilt.
Jason Fizell, a member of the Recreation Services Advisory Committee, has devised a plan that would bypass both of these problems. The proposal calls for an addition to Robinson to be built in the
The new proposal makes more sense than the old one and should be supported by students who are tired of the long lines and frustrations of Robinson.
field between Robinson and the Computer Center. Not only would this addition be located at the very heart of campus, but it would only cost about half as much as the previous proposal, because the existing center also would be used.
Susan Dunavan for the editorial board
Elections commission decision inane
The elections commissioners must be out of their minds.
The commission has decided to limit both where students can campaign and how much they can spend in doing so. Both provisions of the new elections code are equine scatology. Both should have been stopped before they were even included in the elections code draft. And both reflect bad thinking, worse commissioners and poorly hidden political motives.
The University's general counsel, Victoria Thomas, recommended to the elections commission that spending limits not be included in the elections code because of possible legal ramifications. There are two explanations for ignoring the general counsel: either the commissioners
didn't read the plainly worded letter
— or they just can't read. The latter is more believable.
In addition to paying no heed to the general counsel's legal opinion, the elections commission chose to ignore several students who filed complaints against the proposed changes.
The Supreme Court has ruled that spending money is a form of expression, protected by the Constitution. Thus, limiting such expression would seem unconstitutional on the basis of the First Amendment. But the elections commission has repeatedly trampled on the First Amendment like the grass underneathe the candidates' feet.
Our first response to the elections code changes was to petition the elections ommisstion. But logic and reason were obviously ineffective ways to appeal to the elections commission.
Now the only recourse is legal action.
We can think of no greater irony than watching Thomas defend the very proposal she advised against. We can think of no better entertainment than watching the elections commissioners defend their actions to a bank of ACLU attorneys.
As one student aptly said, students will be standing in the mud with their wallets clamped.
And if the next step of the elections commission is to tell candidates which drinking fountains they can use, no one should be surprised.
Andy Obermueller for the editorial board
Kansan staff
Paul Eakins ... Editorial
Andy Obermueller ... Editorial
Andrea Albright ... News
Jodie Chester ... News
Julie King ... News
Charity Jeffries ... Online
Eric Weslander ... Sports
Harley Ratliff ... Associate sports
Ryan Koerner ... Campus
Mike Perryman ... Campus
Bryan Volk ... Features
Tim Harrington ... Associate features
Steve Puppe ... Photo
Angle Kuhn ... Design, graphics
Mitch Lucas ... Illustrations
Corrie Moore ... Wire
Gwen Olson ... Special sections
Lachelle Rhoades ... News clerk
News editors
Kristi Bislel ... Assistant retail, PR
Leigh Bottiger ... Campus
Brett Cliffon ... Regional
Nicole Lauderdale ... National
Matt Fisher ... Marketing
Chris Haghrian ... Internet
Brian Allers ... Production
Ashley Bonner ... Production
Andee Tomlin ... Promotions
Dan Kim ... Creative
Rachel O'Neill ... Classified
Tyler Cook ... Zone
Steve Grant ... Zone
Jamie Holman ... Zone
Brian LeFevre ... Zone
Matt York ... Zone
Advertising managers
"Only to the white man was nature a 'wilderness' and only to him was the land infested with 'wild animals' and 'savage' people. To us it was tame... Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal freetail heaped injustices upon us... was it 'wild' for us." — Luther Standing Bear, Land of the Spotted Eagle
Letters: Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and home-town if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
How to submit letters and guest columns
Guest columns: Should be double-
spacepped with fewer than 700 words. The
writer must be willing to be photographed for
the column to run.
All letters and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions.
For any questions, call Paul Eakins (eakins@kansan.com) or Andy Obermueller (andyo@kansan.com) at 864-4810. If you have general questions or comments, e-mail the page staff (opinion@kansan.com) or call 864-4810.
Perspectives
Love is powerful, rare emotion in our society
Valentine's Day has come and gone. Most of us reflected upon love or lack thereof. Perhaps love is just some far-fetched concept that is too difficult to achieve. So we
set up a facade of lust or economic partnership that we institutionalize as a relationship or marriage and call this love. It is easier on us. We don't have to think about what love means and what it may cost us. Most of us can ill-afford to really feel in today's estranged and indifferent society anyway.
Often people forget that love is arguably the most powerful emotion we possess. We throw it around as if it were synonymous with
Nick Zaller
oplinton@kansan.com
fleeting passions or meaningless liaisons. How many people say "I love you" every day? How many people mean it?
More people say that they love someone without even knowing the meaning of the feeling. An eclectic array of consensus reports estimates that a quarter to a third of all marriages in this country end in divorce. In 1996 the World Almanac stated that more than 1.1 million people went through a divorce.
The marriage ceremony as the embodiment of love has been embedded within us. The ideas conveyed in the wedding ceremony invocation of having and holding in sickness and in health 'til death do us part has become a meaningless ritual. And the traditional wedding ring, the tangible element of the wedding ceremony, is a diamond which is supposedly a girl's best friend and lasts forever. The diamond has become a traditional symbol of love in our society. However, sometimes it seems as though the diamond is more important than the feelings it is supposed to represent. But even the Hope diamond, the largest diamond in the
I am not completely bashing marriage. Some day I actually want to get married and have a family, despite the assertions people make about marriage being nothing more than institutional jibberish. At one time marriage stood for love, and for some it still does.
world, cannot secure the longevity of a marriage if there is no real feeling involved. The size of the rock doesn't equal the size of the heart.
So where does this leave us in our quest to define and understand the aloof concept of love? We are no closer than at any time in human history, and our words cannot narrow the distance between what we think and what we feel.
Marriage has lost some of its force in defining the intangible notion of love. Marriage has gone from the sacred to the profane. For example, a man in Georgia recently threatened to kill his girlfriend and daughter. As part of his punishment, a judge ordered the man to marry his girlfriend. This is ludicrous. When will we realize that love is not something that can be force-fed down people's throats like the meal that we eat at a relative's house just to be polite?
But it is important for us to acknowledge and respect the true power of love. We cannot continue to immerse it in the quagmire of simple lust and desire. If you do not mean what you say, then don't say it. Everyone wants to hear those three little words on every Valentine's Day: "I love you." But what use are they if there is no genuine feeling behind them?
Love stirs us to great joy, it drops us into bitter despair and sometimes it just scares the hell out of us. It is the unmovable mover of our emotions. But love is an inextricable part of all of us.
Without it, we would be a part of a brave new world, fresh off the assembly line and jolted into the realm of nothingness.
Zeller is a Tulsa, Okla., senior in Chinese and microbioloay.
One man's return to nature restores faith in humanity
Sometimes I can get really sick of the world around me. I have even wondered what it would be like to chuck everything and live in the woods, the way humans did before television sets and couches.
Recently, I read an article in GQ about a man who left civilization as we know it 17 years ago to begin anew in the Appalachian Mountain Range. His name is Eustace Conway. He's not a nutcase or a hermit or a member of some anti-government militia, he's just a man who wishes to live a simpler life.
Tom Winter
opinion@kansan.com
Of course, without cars,
washing machines and
pizza delivery, life is not
exactly simple. Conway
The idea of wilderness survival has always fascinated me. Our culture tends to revere the ecological harmony that we think "noble savages" have with the world around them. Of course, at the same time we build Coca Cola factories in these untamed terrains at an alarming rate.
kills, picks and cultivates his own food. He is reported to be able to kill a rabbit pretty accurately by throwing his buck knife at it. But I'm sure that there have been many times where he has eaten bugs and worms to survive.
With the always expanding global marketplace, it is difficult to determine if wilderness societies will someday go extinct. However, there also may be a drive by some in "civilized" societies to return to these more difficult, yet more natural, ways of living.
I myself am a fairly avid hiker. While I don't have tons of experience in living off of the fat of the land, I have made a few backcountry excursions. For those of you who aren't familiar with this, it is basically walking into the woods on a fairly well-worn trail for several days or longer, carrying all of your clothing, food, shelter and survival accessories.
One thing is certain: If the majority of the people in this country attempted to walk into the wilderness and survive, they would die.
Backcountry hiking is an adventure, but it isn't easy. The last time I went on a multiple-day hike things didn't go exactly as planned. I
was with my mother and my brother. Yeah, my mother, she's tough. Anyway, I had brought iodine tablets with me to purify our water. About six miles into the trail, when all of the water we had ran out, I realized that the iodine tablets were missing. That was bad. Drinking from streams can make one very sick, and we all agreed that we would have to boil our water. Boiling water is a tedious, time-consuming activity. On the second day my brother pointed out that "you can piss away an entire day boiling water."
This kind of life is difficult, but not nearly as tough as Eustace Conway's. He has no portable gas stoves or seam-sealed tents or gore-tex anything. He lives the way people used to live before inventions started making our lives much easier. But still he doesn't want to change. He prefers working his tail off, plowing the land, making clothes and constructing his log house. And he thinks other people should join him.
Who's to say? If we were to revert back to a settlement time when your neighbor wasn't just that jerk who played his stereo too loud while you were trying to sleep, but was instead the guy you counted on most when you were hunting game with a bow and arrows, you might have a little different relationship with him.
Or, if your idea of entertainment wasn't being hypnotized by a magic box spewing hours of mindless sitcoms intertwined with brain farts given by commercial sponsors, but instead looking up at a clear sky and watching a million tiny flames flicker in the darkness, you just might have a little more inner peace and tranquility.
I know I'm romanticizing, but there is nothing romantic about not being able to see the stars because the glow of city lights is too overpowering. There's also nothing romantic about being surrounded by human beings, yet being lonely because your life is filled with so much unimportant clutter.
I guess in reality I'm not willing to part with eating out, Free State beer or late night reruns of Seinfeld. But I'm sure glad Eustace Conway is out there. It gives me a little more faith in humanity.
Winter is a Blue Springs, Mo., senior in biology and advertising.
Feedback
University enrollment system below par, should be improved
With all personal disgust aside, I would just like to say a few words about Jason Holsman's article on the University's current enrollment system. I agree it stinks! Quite frankly, it reminds me of high school enrollment at which students are herded around like cows, being forced to report to several different rooms before having the schedule that you worked on for hours axed in one
minute, and giving many a sense of insecurity about their next semester. I know of several colleges, mainly on the West Coast, that have such a relaxed enrollment that students are allowed to call at their leisure and sign up for classes over the phone. It strikes me as odd when "my University," which I brag about to my friends across the Midwest, cannot even update their enrollment system to
accomplate the number of students that attend it. If anyone is listening, let's press for the implantation of a computerized or phone enrollment system. I think it would save the thousands of students who have conflicts with their schedules time, and speed up the Add/Drop process in the long run.
Corey Snyder
Topeka Freshman