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Monday, January 24, 1994
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
In support of its action, the college cited a "justified single-gender admissions policy that has defined its institutional mission and persona since its founding."
VIEWPOINT
Citadel should update rules, accept women
The time has come for Student Senate to evaluate its rules and regulations. The rules need to be revised for clarity, or Senate needs to ensure a consistent interpretation of its regulations.
The decision to allow Shannon Faulkner to attend day classes at The Citadel was correct. Despite protests from the male-only military college in South Carolina, Chief Justice William Rehnquist lifted a temporary stay. This cleared the way for Faulkner to attend classes while her lawsuit, which charges violation of her equal protection rights, is pending.
It is unconstitutional to deny women access to educational opportunities equal to those of men, but The Citadel is attempting to do just that. The college's night classes, which women are permitted to attend, are clearly not the same opportunity.
The state-supported college wants a male-only environment for its daytime classes, claiming it is "essential to The Citadel's holistic educational mission." How can a holistic mission exclude women?
The Citadel has not been forced to house Faulkner in the barracks or allow her to join the Corps of Cadets, nor should they have to at this time. Admittedly, there are practical problems in incorporating one woman into an all-male living environment.
There is no question that Faulkner was denied admission solely on the basis of her gender. Faulkner, who The Citadel initially accepted, was rejected only after the college discovered she was female.
The Citadel was founded in 1842. Its archaic policies have not evolved beyond that date.
Senators, stop bickering over the finer points of punctuation and the real meaning of rule 7.7.4.
MARGARET BECK FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Student Senate rule is inconsistent and unfair
A recent incident of confusion involved Who'sinations. The independent campus publication was denied money it requested from Senate because the paper gives course credit to intern writers. An ad for writers brought the paper's policy to Senate's attention.
The Senate Finance Committee would not hear debate on the request, citing rule 7.7.4 of their rules and regulations. That rule states:
"No funds shall be allocated to any student organization whose members receive academic credit for being a member of the organization."
The paper argued that the writers who get credit for their work on the paper are not members of the staff. That argument, however, did not sway the Finance Committee, which decided that the request did not comply with the rules and therefore could not be heard.
Who'sinations has received Senate support in the past, even though the paper always has provided credit internships for students.
Senate should stand by that precedent and finance the newspaper. If senators are unwilling to do that, they should come up with a clear and consistent interpretation of the rules and rewrite them to reflect that interpretation.
DONELLA HEARNE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
BEN GROVE, Editor
LISA COSMILLO, Managing editor
TOM EBLEN General manager, news adviser
BILL SKEET, Systems coordinator
Editors
Assistant Managing Editor...Dan England
Assistant to the editor...J. R. Clairborne
News ... Kristi Fogler, Katie Greenwald,
... Todd Selfort
Editorial ...Colleen McCain
... Nathan Olson
Campus ...Jess DeHaven
Sports ...David Dorsey
Photo ...Doug Hesse
Features ...Sara Bennett
JUSTIN GARBERG
Business manager
JENNIFER BLOWEY
Retail sales manager
JEANNE HINES
Sales and marketing adviser
Business Staff
Campus sales mgr ...Jason Eberly
Regional sales mgr ...Troy Tarwerster
National & Co-op sales mgr ...Robin Kring
Special Sections mgr ..Sheliy McConnell
Production mgr ...Laura Guth
Gretchen Koothelteinch
Marketing director ..Shannon Reilly
Creative director ..John Carlton
Classified mgr ..Kelly Connelys
Teareatsheets mgr ..Wing Chan
Letters should be typed, double-spaced and fewer than 200 words. They must include the writer's signature, name, address and telephone number. Writers affiliated with the University of Kansas must include class and hometown, or faculty or staff position.
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The Kansas reserves the right to reject or edit letters, guest columns and cartoons. They can be mailed or brought to the Kansas newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall.
More justice at a lower price should be standard for lawyers
A 17-year-old New Jersey high school student will have $7 million to put in his savings account because he recently won a lawsuit against a bicycle manufacturer. The student was disfigured and partially paralyzed when a vehicle struck him while he was riding home at midnight. His bike had no lights.
The argument that won him the suit stated that his bike should have been sold with either lights or a warning about riding at night without lights. The boy's lawyer will receive a percentage of the award.
Such suits are earning some lawyers millions of dollars with the "who can I blame for my mistake?" attitude that pervades society. It has been estimated that it costs Americans $80 billion a year on direct litigation costs and increases in insurance premiums. Dow Chemical Co., for example, spends more than $100 million a year on legal services and liability insurance. If you don't think this affects you, ask an engineering senior how the job search is going.
The costs of having a legal system are starting to outweigh the benefits. The threat of expensive legal action is having detrimental effects in all fields. Medical breakthroughs are often stifled because of the fear of litigation. Business contracts are becoming more convoluted and therefore more expensive to prepare. And those with true legal problems find the courts clogged with unnecessary suits and the costs of pursuing a grievance prohibitive.
nies, like Motorola Inc., have ordered their legal departments to find other alternatives to court such as hiring independent mediation and arbitration consultants. These consultants often settle disputes in a matter of hours. One such consulting firm in California saw 14,000 cases in 1992. In Motorola's case, its litigation bills have been reduced 75 percent. Fewer legal action means fewer lawyers. The message here is that unless lawyers find a cheaper way to conduct business, we'll find others who can.
But it is the responsibility of the system to reform itself if, for nothing else, self-preservation. Some compacolleagues at PollutionCo Inc. can keep pouring benzene into Shady Lake without the government pestering you.Mostly, though, the ad devoted itself to proving that attorneys, as a group, rank somewhere below the sea anemone on the evolutionary ladder.
If those reasons don't inspire the lawyers to take a good, hard look at themselves, then consider how some other countries control their legal systems. In England, the loser of a civil suit is required to pay the winner's legal fees. In Japan, the number of students accepted to law school is limited to 2 percent of the applicants. That means Japan will add only 400 new lawyers this year to the 14,336 already practicing. The United States, with twice Japan's population, has
780,000 lawyers — 54 times as many as Japan.
A legal system is still a necessary part of our society and we will always need lawyers to settle those disputes, that, having gone through mediation, are still unresolved. We also need lawyers who want to solve their client's problems, not prolong them. We need lawyers who are prepared to refuse cases if they feel ethically compromised, lawyers who would regard the word "loophole" in the same light as "bribe."
Society is beginning to show its displeasure with the legal system through jokes, lawyer-bashing and a general disrespect for the profession. That displeasure will only grow unless lawyers are prepared to rein themselves in and review their purpose. A lawyer should be defined as one who solves problems and brings justice to the unjust. But when you hear the word "lawyer", do any of those definitions spring to mind?
Jack Flahier is a London, England senior in Journalism.
Lawyer bashers getting out of hand
COLUMNIST
I want to preface this by saying that I am not a lawyer, nor am I studying to become one. There are no lawyers among my family or friends, and I'm not sure I've ever met one.
But I think lawyers are picked on too much in our society. And if you'll stop cursing and ripping up this newspaper for a moment, I'll explain myself.
Lawyer jokes have been a part of Western culture at least since Shakespeare's time. Everyone can laugh at the stereotypical portrait of the shyster, the ambulance chaser, the personal injury lawsuit bottom-feeder who advertises on late night cable television. No profession should be so proud that it cannot handle being laughed at a little. But within the last three years or so I've seen a disturbing trend take form as the lawyer bashers have begun to take themselves a little too seriously.
About a year ago Miller Lite beer produced a controversial television commercial featuring a bunch of good ol' boys in a lawyer rodeo, roping frightened attorneys who looked kind of like Christians in the Roman
Colosseum. Can your beer do this?
I saw an ad in the sports section of a recent USA Today for a book called "How to Outfox the Foxes: 263 Secrets the Law and Lawyers Don't Want You to Know."
"Plain and simple," the charming advertisement read, "these people have mucked up more time and money than we could possibly have room to describe here." The ad took up an entire half page, so I think the authors probably could have found room if they would have tried. They offer a lot of suggestions that are, at best, unethical, such as the one that tells you how to defeat lawyers for regulatory agencies so you and your
This is an extension of the Ross Perot mindset. The people who know what they are doing haven't produced satisfactory results, so why don't we hand over the reins to people who don't know what they're doing? This kind of misguided populism manifests itself in many forms. There are the term-limits people, for example, and there are the people who write poorly constructed letters to the editor of the local paper angrily branding the news media as a pack of incompetent fools.
Anti-intellectualism is at the heart of these mean-spirited attacks. There are some people in our society who are dissatisfied with their own cognitive abilities, are jealous of those who can succeed in rigorous academic programs such as law school, and consequently construct ways to make
themselfs feel superior to the vex professionals whom they envy.
Anti-intellectualism begins in grade school when intelligent children are ostracized because they are different. It is encouraged in the adult world by demagogues like Rush Limbaugh and finds an outlet in the cranky grumblers of the guy down at the tavern who thinks he got screwed in his divorce settlement by that pettifogger his wife hired.
I know that a lot of people don't take this kind of thing seriously; those are not the people who worry me. The fact is, we need all of the professions in our society, from the garbage collectors and ditch diggers to the lawyers and the (gas) politicians. It bothers me that there are folks who feel comfortable passing judgment on entire professions, rather than weighing the merits of each individual in turn. Prejudice is never acceptable whether in matters of race or vocation.
Pai Henry is a Tacoma, Wash., graduate student in Journalism.
NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE
Verdict may result in equality for all patients
They've got their eyes open now.
That's how jury foreman Robbie Bowen sums up the staggering $80 million verdict against California's second-largest health maintenance organization. He speaks for thousands of families facing desperation similar to that of the plaintiff, James Fox, whose young wife was denied a bone-marrow transplant for her advanced breast cancer by the Foxes 'insurer, Health Net.
The award — including $77 million in punitive damages and $121,000 on medical costs for the transplant treatment — does deliver a loud message to HMOs everywhere: Treat all patients equally.
Critics of managed care have chosen to ignore that message and twist, the California verdict into a grave warning against the national health plan envisioned by the Clinton administration, which supports regional alliances that would shop for HMOs on behalf of a large pool of potential subscribers. While such an approach might keep costs in line, the critics warn, the savings will come at the expense of patient
choice. That, in turn, will mean many more cases like Nelene Fox, 38, a mother whose last slim chance for survival was a treatment that Health Net considered too experimental to underwrite.
There's a poignancy to Mrs. Fox's case that clearly appealed to the jury. Unable to get their HMO to pay, the family turned to public appeals for cash and drugs, and received enough response to proceed with the treatment. For five months after that, it appeared that Mrs. Fox's cancer would remain in remission. Then, suddenly, she took a turn for the worse and died. Her husband wonders if the stress of battling
Health Net didn't contribute to her death. Who wouldn't sympathize with such a struggle?
Yet it's wrong to interpret the verdict as vindication for one wronged patient, or a clarion call for unlimited patient choice in treatments. The jury's decision was based as much on Health Net's promises as on anything else. It found the HMO had violated a promise to pay for bone-marrow procedures, and was therefore arbitrarily selective in denying Mrs. Fox's claim.
Times Union Albany, NY
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