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University Daily Kansan
Thursday, Oct. 3, 1963
Frosh--Go Home!
Go home, freshman.
We don't want you because we don't want the world changed and, even if we did, realize the futility of it all.
We don't want you because we don't want to serve humanity. We haven't the time nor means. We are concerned with problems of immediate circumstance—our own.
We don't want you because you pervert the word "social." You apply it to Man; we apply it to men—us. We are not apathetic. We just cannot afford involvement.
We don't want you because causes and crusades are products of idle dreamers. What good are peace marches, sit-ins, political rallies? We are concerned with working toward a financially comfortable future, not a peaceful present.
We don't want you because you might puncture the ego-inflated balloon of petty righteousness we call our campus mood.
We are happy in our situation. We are concerned with May poles rather than atomic bombs; picnics rather than civil rights movements; personal gratification rather than Berlin walls. We quibble about dining hall quality while half the world's people go hungry. We adjust our behavior to our peers while our Gods go forgotten on the shelf. We see brother hungry and we feed him not, naked and we offer no clothing, unsheltered and we do not open the door.
But this is our way. This is what college has conditioned us to. We don't want it to change. Go home and take your causes and social concerns with you. We don't want you.
Or perhaps you might remain and deliver us from ourselves.
In the Lebanon Valley College La Vie Collegienne
If Mt. Apathy Crumbles
Sept. 22, 1963, may go down in the annals of KU history as the first day the student voice was heard in University, city and state administration, or as the day that another partisan political attempt was made to dominate the student body.
On that day the Student Liaison Committee (SLC) of the All Student Council was presented to the public for the first time at a special breakfast meeting. Attending were KU officials and a representative of the Lawrence city government, along with members of the SLC and ASC.
The purpose of the SLC is to convey student opinion on matters affecting KU to such groups as the Lawrence City Council, State Board of Regents, Kansas Legislature, the governor and KU administration.
According to the committee's chairman, Jim Thompson, the committee will be free of partisan campus politics. The investigations by the SLC will arise from suggestions given the committee by the students. During the past week, the committee announced that it would begin investigation of KU's medical service and traffic control booths and a proposal for installment payment of tuition fees.
INVESTIGATIONS WILL be conducted to find out if there actually is a grievance, by talking to students and faculty alike. If there is justification, the committee will take the "gripe" to the proper authorities for their consideration. The university already has pledged its support of the student opinion group.
The support of the students is another consideration. The apathy of many students on this
campus toward student politics is a mountain, and the first echoes usually heard from it are, "the power hungry politicians will put the committee in their pocket," or "the committee won't be able to do anything."
This mountain must break down, or the mountain itself will cause the failure of the SLC. The committee is going to have to be a cooperative venture between the SLC and the students. If the group doesn't have suggestions and support, they will certainly fail.
Although the committee is an arm of the ASC, and is therefore within striking distance of the slings and arrows of outrageous politics, Chairman Thompson has guaranteed an objective and responsible committee, free of partisan politics.
THE SLC MAY NOT always swing authorities to the students viewpoint, but the student voice at least will be heard. Many times in the past, important matters concerning the university have been pushed through without consulting students, and this not only has made the student think he was living in a totalitarian state, but it has also let the chance of a cooperative venture which might benefit all go unheard.
If "Mt. Apathy" will crumble and students will take an interest in the work of the SLC and give it reasonable suggestions, if the SLC will work with the students in mind, forgetting politics and personal whims, and if the authorities will listen and give the student voice consideration, university communications will be a success and a benefit for all concerned.
—Phil Magers
The People Say. . .
What Difference?
Editor:
I was very surprised that a committee called a Human Rights Committee was permitted by students of an institution of higher learning to ask such a loaded question in a so-called attempt to secure student opinion on sorority and fraternity secregation.
In the first place how could the UDK call a random sampling of 500 OF WHICH only 304 responded a majority of the opinions of 10,000 students on the campus of Kansas University?
Secondly, with a question which set up a hypothetical situation there was only one logical answer — the affirmative one the HRC claims to have received from half or more of the campus on this subject.
As a Negro student I would like an answer as to what interests and attitudes I hold that are so different from other students whether red, orange, yellow, or brown? I would honestly like for some of the students with affirmative answers to explain to me about these differences. How many of these students have talked to a Negro student about conservatism, the common market, socialized medicine, the nuclear test ban or birth control? Maybe I just don't know what attitudes are being referred to.
What is so different about my interests? No where in a sorority house on the University of Kansas campus can there be found a girl who enjoys Starlight Theater productions as I do. My ambitions and achievemets, I am sure, are not so different. I hope to go to Europe to do graduate work. I plan to teach Home Economics, I enjoy designing my own clothes. I worked on the college board at a department store this summer, and I even hope to get married someday. Judging from the HRC question the student who holds any of these attitudes does not live in a sorority house on this campus. These are interests of a Negro girl only.
All I am asking is that someone tell me of my special interests or attitudes. I have lived 20 years without being aware that because of my brown skin my attitudes are different simply, because of my brown skin. Maybe it is simply because I live in Kansas and attend the University of Kansas. Negro students are members of Delta Gamma, Tau Kappa Epsilon, Phi Kappa Fsi and Alpha Tau Omega on other campuses across the nation, but here at Kansas University our attitudes are too different to permit this. Is this a racial question or simply a Kansas University-Human Rights Committee inspired difference?
Jo Anne Holbert Kansas City senior
The brain women never interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red. —Oliver Wendell Holmes
Worth Repeating...
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1880, became biweekly 1904,
published weekly 1926.
111 Flint Hall
UUniversity 4-2646, newsroom
UNiversity 4-2198, business office
University of Kansas student newsnauer
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service and Associated Press. My News service; United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the week, except Saturdays and Sundays, at Lawrence University and amination periods. Second class postage paid, Lawrence, Kansas
Mike Miller     Managing Editor
Terry Ostmeyer, Tryard Deserve,
Jackie Stern, Rose Osborne, Assistant
Managing Editors; Kary Javis, City
Society Editor; Society Editor;
Ray Miller, Sports Editor; Dennis
Bowers, Picture Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Blaine King Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bob Brooks   Business Manager
Carolynik, Ruechuk, Mgr.
Alice  Rueschhof, Circulation Mgr.
Brooks Harrison, Classified Adv. Mgr.
Donald Sizer, Mgr.
Donald Sizer, Production Mgr.
Donald Schreepfer, Merchandising Mgr.
Jerry
"It's An Entirely Different World— Like Birmingham"
BOOK REVIEWS
REBELS AND ANCESTORS: THE AMERICAN NOVEL 1890- 1915, by Maxwell Geismar (American Century, $1.95).
Here is a big book, and an excellent one, first published a decade ago, which gives us lengthy, detailed and discerning examinations of five major writers. They are Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser and Ellen Glasgow.
Geismar uses Frank Norris both as an introduction and a focus. Norris was a kind of bridge between the past and the present, in his novels which contain strong indictments of society but also a bit of fussiness characteristic of Howells or James. Norris wrote three important novels in the "naturalistic mode" (Geismar says many tend to misuse the term naturalism)—"McTeague," "The Octopus," and "The Pit"—and was doing in fiction what several magazine writers were doing in non-fiction, namely the "muckrakers."
Stephen Crane, despite excellent short stories and two important novels—"The Red Badge of Courage" and "Maggie"—was a writer unfulfilled. He splashed briefly but sensationally on the literary sky, and like several other writers had his spectacular successes as a newspaper correspondent. Crane paved the way for many, both in theme and in style, and it is as a stylist that he perhaps survives most today.
Jack London, says Geismar, is a relatively forgotten writer, and this is unfortunate, for in his time he was both important and influential. No longer is he regarded as a writer of children's stories of the North, for there are deeper meanings in "The Call of the Wild" than can be grasped by the young. London was exciting and flamboyant and though a lesser talent remains one of the unforgettable figures in our fiction.
There is only one woman in this book, but she is an important one. In her way Ellen Glasgow was as important in depicting the changing South as was the somewhat later Faulkner. Virginia, chiefly Richmond, was her arena, and in several penetrating novels Miss Glasgow gave us people as torn in their world as the Mississippiians of Faulkner.
Of the five writers discussed here, Dreiser extended his influence most into the period beyond Geismar's consideration, and his greatest book "An American Tragedy," did not appear until the twenties. But Dreiser was transitional, and his "Sister Carrie" was as shocking and as controversial in its time as Crane's "Maggie." Geismar observes that Dreiser's career was a series of suppressions. For he, like the other people in this book, embarked on literary voyages shocking to a somewhat conventional age—CMP
* * *
THE BIG SEA, by Langston Hughes (American Century, $1.95; cloth-bound, $4.50).
This is the first volume of Langston Hughes' autobiography, first published in 1940 and detailing the days of the twenties, when "the Negro was in vogue" and this young Midwesterner was breaking into writing and going through his formative years.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Mo., but raised in Lawrence, and his experiences are those of a northern Negro. He was a cook and a waiter in Paris night clubs, and he saw the life being led by expatriates of all countries in the roaring twenties. Like Richard Wright he knew musicians and artists.
He became an interesting young poet in Harlem, and established a reputation that he still holds today. And there were many other adventures. Hughes is an old-fashioned Negro in the eyes of James Baldwin, but he and others like him paved the way for the militant youths heading the protest movements of the 1960s.