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Thursday, March 3,1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Men's home games need fans to fill field house
Student participation in the final men's home basketball game is imperative.
The yells and screams during the Jayhawks' trouncing of Colorado this past weekend lacked something. After glancing over the student section, it was obvious what Allen Field House was lacking: students.
After three consecutive losses, KU students gave up on an excellent team which remains nationally ranked. The loyalty of students has persevered throughout the years, but the display of that loyalty was pitiful last weekend. Those students who had held tickets but skipped out missed an exciting game.
Students at the game were so embarrassed by the attendance that many apologized to Coach Roy Williams as they walked past him in the halls. Players have spent long hours practicing and have risen early in the morning to represent the University of Kansas. For their efforts, they deserve the respect and participation of the students.
The seniors especially deserve that respect. Tonight is the final home game for a number of players. It will be the last time names like Woodberry, Scott and Richey will ring out in the field house during a game.
Tonight the tradition of loyalty to men's basketball will be tested again. But this time it will come during the fanfare of the final home game for the seniors who have represented the University so well during the past four years. Students should take advantage of this opportunity to show their pride in a team that has consistently done so well.
CHRISTOPHER LIVINGSTON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
New alignment prepares conference for future
Intercollegiate athletics witnessed another giant change last week, when the Big Eight Conference added Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor. In the new world of eat or be eaten, kill or be killed, the Big Eight acted wisely with its expansion.
With the expected demise of the College Football Association, the group responsible for dividing up most of the college football television money, every conference wants to make itself more attractive for lucrative television deals.
By adding the four schools, the Big Eight's TV market went from roughly 8 percent to 17 percent of the nation's total population. Spreading from the Mexican border to the cornfields of Iowa, the conference is in an excellent position to garner a substantial TV deal which will benefit everyone in the league.
By initiating the expansion, the conference could choose the best schools available rather than waiting for the leftover schools from the expected conference realignments. If the Big Eight had not invited the four schools, other conferences quickly would have picked them up, leaving the Big Eight to wither away.
Being proactive rather than reactive benefits the league. For the past year, rumors have floated around regarding the possible departure of several league members. Without the merger, some of the rumors would have come true. Now, it is unlikely that any league schools will leave.
It would have been simpler for the Big Eight to maintain the status quo it has enjoyed for more than 30 years. However, in the ever-changing world of intercollegiate athletics, this scenario is unrealistic. Fortunately for the Big Eight and its members, the conference has prepared itself for the 21st century.
KANSAN STAFF
RICHARD BOYD FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
BEN GROVE, Editor
LISA COSMILLO, Managing editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
JUSTIN GARBERG Business manager
BILL SKEET, Systems coordinator
JENNIFER BLOWEY Retail sales manager
Editors
Editors
Asst Managing Editor ...Dan England
Assistant to the editor...J.K. Clair-Groebner
News ..Kristi Fogler...J.K. Crowmore
Todd Bluntner
Editorial...Colleen McCain
...Nathan Glason
Campus...Jean DeHaven
Sports...David Dorsey
Photo...Doug Hesse
Features...Sara Bennett
Wire...Allison Lippert
Freelance...Christine Laue
JEANNE HINES Sales and marketing adviser
Business Staff
Campus sales mgr...Jason Eberly
Regional sales mgr...Troy Tervenier
National & Coops sales mgr...Robin King
Special Sections mgrs...Shelly McConnell
Production mgrs...Larua Guth
Gretchen Kootterlehricht
Marketing director...Shannon Reilly
Creative director...John Cartton
Classified mgr...Kelly Connelya
Teartheats mgr...Wing Chan
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We must think without limits
I have a copy of Robert Bork's "The Tempting of America" on my bookshelf. Remember him? He was a Reagan Supreme Court nominee who was rejected by the Senate in 1986 because of his original intent construction of the Constitution and his antipathy to judicial activism, affirmative action, Roe vs. Wade and other liberal bishoolebates.
Most of my friends are academic liberals for whom the mere mention of Bork's name is enough to provoke conflusion fits. My enthusiasm for President Clinton supposedly has established my own liberal credentials, so my friends are surprised to see Bork and other conservative writers on my shelf. "You don't actually read this stuff, do you?" one said incredulously. Bork's a conservative, for heaven's sake, and everyone knows that conservatives are, well, wrong. Right?
When I was an undergraduate, I roomed with my favorite professor during an honors conference in Florida. One evening, after loosening up a bit over some Scotch, he told me
about how, when he was a teenager
he had discovered the writings of Karl Marx, reading "The CommunistManifesto" with a flashlight under his blanket late at night. This was during the decidedly un-Marxist 1950s, and he came from a strict Lutheran background to boot.
living in a San Francisco commune and plotting the violent overthrow of the federal government. He smiled a little over the Scotch, recalling the heady days of his youth. His parents never really forgive him.
My professor told me that one of the reasons he had read Marx and other leftist radicals was because of their unacceptability. These writers were frowned upon by everyone he knew. His parents were scandalized when they discovered his midnight reading and the rebellion it had bred. He ended up spending part of the 1960s
As Marx was to ordinary Americans in the 1950s, Bork is to academe in the 1990s. All the hysteria from George Will and others about leftist "thought police" who punish an un-liberal utterance on campus is overblown. But let's face it: Academe is a generally liberal environment in which conservative writers are often stigmatized or ignored. Most students and academics I know simply will not discuss Bork in a rational manner. Once, when I brought him up in a classroom, the response was a dead, embarrassed silence. You would have thought I had quoted "Mein Kampf."
So it is something of a minor act of rebellion merely to have read Bork's book. I find some of his arguments persuasive, others less so. I picked it up not only because of a professional interest in Constitutional theory, but also because I just had to read something by an author Ted Kennedy
piously pronounced "outside the mainstream." Such a label is not a deterrent; it is an enticement.
Strange as it may seem, it is the Robert Borks of the world who are the new dissenters in this stiffing age of the politically correct. Bork; Camille Paglia, Katie Rolphe and Shelby Steel are writers who are appealing, not because they are "conservative," but because they are unorthodox. They ask uncomfortable questions of liberals who lately have grown a bit too smug in their beliefs.
Right or wrong. Bork possesses the virtue of having annoyed and offended mainstream academics, the very same people who probably once read Marx by flashlight. It was Todd Gitlin, a former student activist turned professor, who preached the importance of "unraveling, rethinking, refusing to take for granted, thinking without limits." You would think they, of all people, would understand.
Brian Dirck is a Conway, Ark., graduate student in history.
Troubled? Try these natural highs
I must admit that so far, this semester has been a bit depressing for me. I'm not quite at the level of academic achievement to which I've become accustomed during my first year and a half of college. I'm not up to my expectations on the baseball field and my social life is at a complete standstill.
It would be very easy for me to down more than a few beers, reach an "alcohol high" and wash my troubles away. Such is the option chosen by many a university student. But I don't drink, so instead, I've found a few alternatives to help get the troubles off my mind.
I call these things" natural highs." In my life I've discovered many simple things that help cheer me up and get my mind off the negativity in my life. I'd like to take this opportunity to share with all of you three natural highs that never fail to put me in a better mood.
The first is listening to a favorite song or one that rekindles some pleasant memories. In my case, the
song is "Life is a Highway," by Tom Cochrane. Now, to be quite honest, the only words I know in the entire song are the opening words of the chorus, which are "Life is a highway..." The rest of the lyrics are just blah, blah, blah in my mind.
This song is important to me because it takes me back to the happiest time of my life, the summer after my senior year of high school. This song floods me with memories of me and my buddies cruising to the beach in my vomit-brown 1979 Toyota pickup. We didn't have a care in the world. College was three months away, and
we were enjoying our final opportunity to spend some quality time together before going our separate ways. Whenever I hear the song today, it's a natural pick-me-up.
The second natural high is exercise. This may seem strange in my case, because, as I said, I'm having problems with baseball right now. But for me, going out and shooting some hoops on the basketball court has always helped.
I can remember even as a little kid, i. I had a problem with school, my parents, a friend, whatever, I could step on the court, and it would disappear. It was just me, the ball and the hoop; everything else was forgotten. In the end, I was so worn out from playing that I focused all of my attention on my exhaustion and forgot my real-life problems. This still holds true. With a quick trip to Robinson Center, my problems are gone.
The third and final high I'd like to share is not something that floods people with pleasant memories or helps them forget problems. But it is
something I truly cherish: clean sheets.
Now I'm sure some of you just read that and said, "What?!." But think about it. Have you ever done your laundry late at night, put the fresh clean sheets on your bed and gone to bed a short time later? Isn't it one of the best feelings in the world? I love climbing into my bed, the soft cotton rubbing against my skin, the freshness of my laundered pillowcase—a great reward after a hard day's work. There are few things better.
I hope that the next time people out there are feeling down, they'll remember these thoughts, and instead of reaching for that beer, turn to something else. If you can't remember anything else from this column, just trust me when I say that a tape deck and a laudromat present a chance to become your best friends. I speak from experience.
Scott Tittrington is a Poway, Calif.,
more in exercise science and journalism.
Free speech is manipulated to disguise homophobia
Back in 1972, Guy Hocquenghem, a pioneering French "queer theorist," asserted that paranoia was becoming our dominant cultural form of expression and that fear of boundary-less sexual desire in a society designed around social, economic and political institutions that depend on Oedipal power struggles was the cause. I'm not accusing any specific person of being paranoid, but a cultural paranoid seems to be prevalent in our society.
A microcosm of the descent into the world of cultural paranoia is the Dan Murrow crusade (or charade?) that is being portrayed in Kansan editorials as a classic struggle between political correctness and free speech. By allowing this to pose as a political correctness/free speech issue, much of the cultural subtext is lost.
If a little sign saying "For Abolish
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
ing Gay Groups of Templin* is a harmless exercise in free speech, we need to consider how does one abolish people. Is this really a harmless statement? The Nazis only wanted to "solve" the Jewish "problem." Or does Mr. Murrow want to deny only gay people housing? Where then do gay people live? Or are only openly gay people to be driven from housing?
Free speech advocates who battle the mystical creature of political correctness, however, never look at the content of the speech or of at its implications, should it be acted on. If words do have meanings, and we do not live in a value-free world where a speech by Hitler is assessed as having the same value as a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. (both the product of free speech), then the content of speech is important and possibly deadly. "Fighting words" and speech constituting a threat to public safety are not always protected forms of speech according to the
U. S. Supreme Court. Pernography is also a dubious form of expression.
Like Ruthless Persuasion
The key part of the Murrow text that marks it as part of our emerging paranoid culture is the fear of bathroom and shower peeking and the presence of unpure thoughts. This is the same argument used by the military. The real fear is that one of the naturally dominant members of society — a man — will be looked on as an object of sexual conquest. His maleness is threatened by the very possibility of another male desiring to have him as a sex object, even if he is not touched or does not know he is being observed. The possibility of invisible, ubiquitous people with evil thoughts is central to a paranoid culture. Ideally, gays would be invisible, closeted. The closest is not for the protection of gays, but for the protection of insecure straight men. This problem of sexual insecurity and fear of domination are only possible in a society that equates the penis with power; social, political,
economic and sexual power.
Let's extend the logic of Murrow's statements just a little bit. A man should not worry if a lesbian showed with him. Nor should a woman care if a gay man were in the same bathroom. But then gay men should worry about other gay men having secret, and potentially unwelcomed, thoughts about them, unless Murrow thinks that all gay men want to have sex with every other man. Are all men naturally rapists?
The absurdity of the logic only makes the matter clear. The problem is not that there are gay people on the loose staring at men but that our society promotes homophobia as well as other forms of human objectification, such as putting humiliating pictures of naked women on residence hall doors, and that these often masquerade as "free speech."
Raymond Birt Lawrence graduate student
Lawrence graduate student