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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, Sept. 17, 1963
Keeping Good People
Chancellor Wescoe has proposed, in his address at the opening convocation, an "Operation Bootstrap" to help KU move toward becoming one of the nation's greatest institutions of higher learning.
One of the basic parts of this "operation" is sending faculty members out to speak to talented high school students and to encourage those students to come to KU. Too many top-notch students, the chancellor said, are leaving the state.
The faculty members who are sent on this mission can quote some impressive facts. The University is one of only 19 universities to offer Chinese. KU ranks fourth in the number of graduates listed in "Who's Who in Engineering," and the chances are good that one out of every 95 entering freshmen will be listed in "Who's Who in America." Wescoe said.
The University of Kansas is among the top nine schools whose students have won 17 or more Woodrow Wilson Fellowships in each of the past three years. The others are Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Michigan, Toronto, Cornell, Columbia and Chicago. That is the major leagues.
"The reputation of this institution for greatness depends as much on the excellence of the student body as upon any other factor," the chancellor said.
But just as important as the student body is the faculty. No matter how good the students may be, teachers must teach them. Poor teachers can produce only mediocre scholars. Good teachers can build a great university.
To get and keep good teachers requires money —an old theme, but one which will hold true as long as competition exists.
In his convocation address, the chancellor said that senior faculty members at KU get 12 per cent less than men in similar positions at other front-ranking universities. The salary gap is about five per cent at the junior faculty level.
This is intolerable. Every year good men leave the University of Kansas, many because they are offered more money somewhere else. No doubt KU obtains good men by the same method, and KU cannot be expected to outbid every other university in the country for the services of talented professors.
But this salary gap has existed for years. The ill-famed and ill-fated Eurich Report in 1961 called for immediate, across the board increases of 20 per cent for Kansas college and university teachers, and the gap existed long before then.
But the increase has not been granted.
The present Board of Regents has pledged itself to close the gap, and Chancellor Wescoe expressed confidence Monday that the increases would be granted by the next session of the Legislature.
Wescoe also said he sensed a commitment to education which would be translated into greater support for higher education for the state.
We hope he is right. The Kansas Legislature has a long record of chopping appropriations, but maybe the budget session in January of 1964 will be different. It should be.
Legislators piously speak of balanced budgets, and of how the State simply cannot afford greater expenditures on higher education. No doubt caution is justified, and the Legislature is, after all, the body which must determine how the resources of the State shall be allocated.
But if too many good students are leaving the State, as the chancellor suggested, the best way to stop this outflow of talent is to create within Kansas an educational situation so desirable that it would be folly for good students to go elsewhere.
And the best way to create that climate is to pay top university professors top salaries. There is no other way to keep good men.
Bogeymen in Literature
A British editor takes a jaundiced look at Robin Hood, concludes he was an adult delinquent who should have been jailed, and suggests that to nurture admiration for the men of Sherwood Forest is against public policy.
Friar Tuck was a disgrace to the Church, he continues: Little John a hoodlum, and Maid Marian was no maid, whatever else she may have been.
Such misanthrope talk is worthy of the Sheriff of Nottingham himself, and reminds one of a recent Soviet criticism of the little characters in "Peanuts," in which Charlie Brown emerged as a low-grade moron and Lucy as an incipient Fascist. But why stop with Robin Hood?
It has been recognized for years, among the social psychology set, that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were a pair of adolescent sadists with no respect for family or church, who stole with light hearts and lied as easily as a politician.
Alice In Wonderland was a dreamy little kook who needed a child psychiatrist more than a White Rabbit, and there's some murky Kraft-Ebbing in the story of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Sir Galahad is a sex symbol created by inhibited old maids, and Guinevere certainly is no
example for susceptible young students to be studying.
Little Tom Thumb, of course, is straight out of Freud, and the Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe needed birth control advice from the government. Ivanhoe was a bully-boy with faintly anti-Semitic tendencies. Tom Swift was a smartaleck who exploited his young friends for his personal gain, and Frank Merriwell was an insufferable snob. Paul Bunyan is a dangerous myth because he encourages brutality, and Donald Duck should be censored because he encourages youngster to lose self-control. Little Red Riding Hood was obviously a forerunner of Christine Keeler. Davy Crockett was a racist, Sam Houston believed in miscgeation, and Robinson Crusoe was obviously a Communist. As for all the characters of Charles Dickens—well!
The only trouble with these analyses is that they severely limit the volume of legend, fiction and folk-lore that it is safe to read. We're even beginning to have doubts about Little Orphan Annie, and someone told us the other day that Shirley Temple really was a little faker whose songs were dubbed in.
— In the Chanute Tribune
Nothing can be more unphilosophical than to be positive or dogmatical on any subject. When men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken and have there given reins to passion without that proper deliberation and suspense which alone can secure them from the grossest absurdities.—Hume
Worth Repeating . . .
At almost every step in life we meet with young men from whom we anticipate wonderful things, but of whom, after careful inquiry, we never hear another word. Like certain chintzes, calicoes and ginghams, they show finely on their first newness, but cannot stand the sun and rain, and assume a very somber aspect after washing day.-Hawthorne
In the schools of the wrestling master, when a boy falls he is bidden to get up again, and to go on wrestling day by day till he has acquired strength; and we must do the same, and not after one failure suffer ourselves to be swept along as by a torrent. You need but will, and it is done; but if you relax your efforts you will be ruined; for ruin and recovery are both from within.— Epictetus
* *
Let not the freedom of inquiry be shackled. If it multiplies contentions among the wise and virtuous, it exercises the charity of those who contend. If it shakes for a time the belief that is rested only on prejudice, it finally settles it on the broader and more solid basis of conviction. H.K. White
"Oh, Sorry We Thought It Was A Goldwater Rally"
BOOK REVIEWS
THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA, by Thorstein Veblen (American Century, $1.75).
More than 40 years ago Thorstein Veblen, in his satirical, slashing manner, gave it to American education in this book, which in its time was considered the best analysis yet made of American universities. A person reading the book today must conclude that many of the criticisms are still valid.
Veblen himself spent time in several universities, as a student at Carleton College, Johns Hopkins and Yale; as a teacher at Chicago, Stanford, and the University of Missouri. So he was in a good position to observe and comment. "Education," to Veblen, was taking the place of "learning." Universities had become competitive, like business, in their search for funds and personnel. The genteel were being educated on one level, the rougher classes in another.
This book, like the other Veblen tracts, should be read slowly. Veblen had a trick of couching his most biting observations in metaphorical language.
THE GRANDISSIMES, by George W. Cable (American Century, $1.45).
One of the more important books in the realistic tradition was Cable's "The Grandissimes," which first appeared in Scribner's Monthly back about 1880, and helped to build the reputation of its New Orleans author.
The novel is a romance of the Creoles of Louisiana, of the South in the days of slavery. It deals with miscegenation much more openly than did most books of the day, and there was some opposition to the book when it appeared.
"The Grandissimes" is as flamboyant as its setting, and the stay stands in strange contrast to the local color realism. It is a passionate tale, with murder, slave riots, a pursuit through the swamps, an epidemic, great balls and parties, whippings, and that family pride that was so significant to the Old South.
Dailu Hansan
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