Page 2
University Daily Kansan
Friday, Oct. 4, 1963
Our Own Slum Area
Across Memorial Drive from the Campanile are some of the classroom buildings at the University of Kansas.
Collectively, they look like a slum area, but they're the only answer to a space problem that has challenged the University since World War II.
Along with Summerfield, Murphy, Snow, and other campus buildings, they serve the students and faculty the best they can.
There are six of these buildings. They're white outside, drab inside, and shaky-looking all over. The window shades, partly pulled, are dark green.
The rooms are hot in the fall and spring and even hotter in the winter, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of a brooder house. Ventilation is difficult. Some of the windows are painted shut.
IF THEY LOOK as if they don't belong in their present location, it's because they don't. If they look temporary, it's because they are.
In fact, they're "twice temporary." Originally, the six annexes to Strong Hall were war-time buildings on a military installation. They were moved here after World War II to take care of the GI bulge in education, when soldiers were beginning or resuming their college studies. Enrollments mushroomed around 1945 and 1947.
A, B, C, D, E, and F have been in constant use ever since. They're still considered temporary, although they've been here 16 years.
It's hard to say who deplores their presence most—the administration, the students, or the personnel of the departments located in the annexes.
Keith Lawton, vice chancellor in charge of
operations, is no happier than anyone else about the annexes. He says that under the present building schedule, there is no possibility of replacing them until the late 60's. That would be the earliest possible opportunity.
"THEY'RE DIFFICULT to maintain and expensive to heat," he says. "We're constantly torn between maintenance and money."
Expenditures to improve the heating or lighting systems in the annexes would in reality be pushing replacement day still farther into the future. The situation is downright frustrating.
At least the annexes are hidden by dense trees and shrubbery and Strong Hall.
And anyway, it's kind of refreshing to attend classes in rather primitive surroundings. You aren't distracted by modernistic furniture and bright light.
Your mind is free really to concentrate on what the instructor is saying. You are closer and more in tune with your lecture topic. You are just about as close to nature as you can be inside four walls.
It's good for the soul to get a taste of rugged living once in a while. Beautiful classrooms could make you soft, make you enroll in some courses only because the classroom had air-conditioning or a scenic view.
But you would only be cheating yourself. Enroll in political science, Western Civilization, or sociology next semester. Give yourself a chance to really get engrossed in your subject matter.
You've got to in those surroundings.
— Joanne Prim Shade
Intolerable Plan
In "The Rise of Universities," C. H. Haskins describes how early-day students banded together to protect themselves from vicious price-gouging on the part of the townspeople. Victorious in their collective action, the students used the threat of economic sanctions to control the teaching of their professors, insuring that they would get their money's worth of education.
Ah, for the simplicity of those by-gone days. How simple it would be to take direct action to remedy a hateful situation. Now, of course, we have opinion polls and various committees to readily convert student desires and demands into sufficient red tape to prevent them from ever being realized.
Take, for example, the present football seating plan. It is the intolerable offspring of an intolerable predecessor.
FOR THOSE not familiar with the former method of admitting students to the stadium, let me describe the mess that led to today's horror. Basically it was a first-come, first-served method that impatient wise-guys (myself included) found a way to beat. You either sent several goons from your living group over to the stadium early to save places in line for the rest of the house or dorm, or you walked along the seemingly endless line until you found someone you knew to let you in ahead of him. Simple. People who had been waiting in line for a couple of hours only to be crowded out by several hundred late-comers got very hacked-off indeed.
Opponents of the current plan suggested the University hire more personnel so more than one gate could be opened to facilitate the everincreasing studen crowds. Their suggestions
were—lamentably—ignored; the current plan was
railroaded into existence.
In theory, this seems to be a practical way to deal with the increasing number of students who want to see football at KU. In theory, each student will go to the stadium and sit in his assigned seat. In theory, no one will be crowded out of the seat he paid for. In theory, apparently no student will bring a friend or date from out of town to sit with him at the game. This theory is worthless.
Enrollment continues to increase. Attendance continues to increase. Pinkertons continue to refuse to aid students whose seats are grabbed by thoughtless idiots. The seating plan continues to be intolerable, and students continue to get very hacked-off indeed.
THE SEATING PROBLEM for alumni has been remedied by the stadium expansion. The seating problem for students has not been remedied. Perhaps the answer for the difference lies in mathematics: students pay $1.50 for season tickets; alumni, $20.
It is time for the campus Rip Van Winkle, the All Student Council, to heed student complaints. The present seating plan has had adequate time to prove itself. It proves to be as undesirable as its forerunner.
It is too late for polls and committees. It is time for the ASC and the administration to formulate a satisfactory seating arrangement which can accommodate present student demand and remain workable through the period of increased enrollment expected in the near future.
Oh, for those by-gone days when we could have straightened this mess out by refusing to pay fees and attend class.
BOOK REVIEWS
THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO, by Alexandre Dumas (Everyman's Library, 2 vols.)
Literature probably has given us no book more famous than this one. It is long and involved but never complex, and this twovolume hardback edition is much better than the abridgments also available in paperback.
There probably are few who actually have read this long book, but most readers—or filmooers—know the plot, that of Edmond Dantes and his love for Mercedes, his exile to the Chateau d'If, his escape, his finding buried treasure, and his long revenge on those who sent him to prison.
Daily Hansan
111 Flint Hall
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, become biweekly 1904,
trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
University 4-2108, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service and the University of Texas at M. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence. Kan., every afternoon during the University's spring and fall holidays. University's holdout examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas
"Latest Reports On The Non-Free Areas"
with best wishes
Hootenanny Hoot Hoot Is A-Coming—Hoot
Hot damn, troops, here comes the Hootenanny. Let's all usn's hot-foot on down the road to Hoch come Friday next and hear us some real fine pickin' and a-singin'.
Well, if n you-all don't mind, I'll stay home.
All I need after a week at this fine obstacle course called KU is to hear some highly paid hillbilly howl "Abilene" through his nasal cavity.
Nothing against nasal cavities, you understand. Nasal cavities are recognized by speech experts as valuable resonance chambers, and human speech would sound strange indeed if it were not modulated by echoing around in the nasal cavity. But when the nasal cavity extends all the way...
OF COURSE, it might be that I am hyper-sensitive. After all, hillbilly singers are respectable, responsible people. One—Jimmie Davis—was even elected governor of the great state of Louisiana, although I'm not sure if that is a comment on hillbilly singers or on the people of Louisiana.
But it might be that Jimmie was swept into office by his own kind. One of the groups coming to KU is the Knob Lick Upper 10,000.
I had no idea there were that many hillbillies in Knob Lick, but if there are, there could easily be a huge number of hillbillies (or do I mean "red-necks") in Louisiana. Enough to swing an election, anyway.
What is unfathomable is that Louisiana was one of the states where the Blues were born, and I always thought the Blues could be classed as music.
AND HOW ABOUT the atmosphere in Hoch? Out in southwest Kansas, where I come from, the only time hillbilly caterwauling went over big was on Sattiday night, when all the folks came to town for a blow-out. Out there, though, the people have had experience with these things, and scrape off their boots for the dance.
At a university, where the emphasis is on authenticity, the fans might not realize what concentrated cow can do to the air in a closed place.
The advance publicity is all wrong, too. It takes at least two weeks to get a good batch of white lightning brewed up, and there is only a week left before the Big Day.
One good thing could come from this hillbilly hoe-down, though. The people who are coming are professionals, or at least some masochistic person pays them for their efforts.
Perhaps, then, the grass-root hootenanniers might pick up a few pointers.
Grass-root hootenanniers? Them are the people what taught themselves a few chords on a gittar about three months ago and figger they got a duty to spread the message of country and western every time they can corral an audience, willing or not.
I know I'm wrong on all this. These people are not hillbillies. They are folk singers. Just like garbage collectors are sanitary engineers.
Blaine King