OPINION
The University Daily
KANSAN
November 15, 1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kannan (USF$ 60-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauff尔 Fint Halt, Lawrence KS, 65003 daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer sessions. Subscriptions by mail are $1 for six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year. Subscriptions by phone are $1 for six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year. Send address changes to the U.SF Central Office.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DON KNOX
Campus Editor
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
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Leaders lacking for Senate race
Man is a political animal. But his instincts are buried, and it often takes a leader to bring man in tune with his nature. Unfortunately, those instincts will lie dormant this Student Senate election. The leaders are not there.
None of the presidential coalitions
None of the presidential coalitions — Momentum, Costume Party,Priority, Freedom — inspire visions of Camelot or a Great Society, not even of President Reagan's "City on a Hill." They offer the eye only shades of gray and the ear only a monotone.
But still there is a difference. Look at the issues. Forget the insulting, meaningless phrases — "Top Candidates Facing Top Issues." "Only the Beginning" and the others
— and look at the issues. Therein may lie a smidgen of hope, because one coalition deserves to win this election based on issues alone.
The Kansan Editorial Board interviewed the candidates Sunday evening. These issues we think to be paramount:
- The KU campus at night is indeed a dark and potentially dangerous place. Men and women dread walking the pathways atop Mount Oread at night, and many fear that the next patch of shadow hides an attacker. The campus must be made safer — light must be brought to campus.
- Students, already financially strapped, can't expect college to get any cheaper. But they can expect a more compassionate university that will make paying fees easier. One alternative would be to spread the payment out over a semester, instead of the present lump-sum payment. The rules of the bureaucracy can be bent for the students — they must be.
- The disease that destroys the body politic — apathy — has wrested vitality, sense of purpose and direction from the Student Senate. The Senate must shake its image of a group of a few junior politics playing with student funds. Accountability, participation, direction — all must return to the Student Senate.
No easy problems. No easy solutions. But one coalition — Momentum — seems ready to address these problems. And although the Momentum candidates fail to win our hearts, they do win our endorsement. Write-ins Kevin Walker, the Momentum presidential candidate, and Mark McKee, vicepresidential candidate, get our endorsement because they have defined their issues and they have defined their solutions, and we agree with some of their solutions.
Priority, obeying politics rather than principle, stepped the mediocre path down the middle. No real solutions.
The Freedom candidates buried their platform in a seemingly immovable conservative ideology and preached a like-mindedness and intolerance that was downright scary. And budget cutting isn't the panacea they think it is.
The Costume Party candidates, though their sincerity was obvious and their vision wrapped in the ideals of equality and freedom, failed to transcend from the philosophical to the practical. Had
they been able to do so, they would've been hard to beat.
But on the issues, we think that the Momentum candidates offer the best solutions.
Walker and McKee have proposed taking $30,000 to $40,000 from Student Senate money to generate a move for better lighting on campus. They think that once the Senate takes the initiative, others at the University will follow. Momentum knows that it's time to start action. Although the other candidates recognized the problem, they did not offer a concrete solution.
Momentum also proposed a deferred fee-payment schedule that would allow students to pay their fees in installments, rather than all at once at the beginning of the semester. That would come in handy for those students, and there are many of them, who have to scramble for cash during enrollment. The plan at least deserves further review.
All of the candidates recognized the pocketbook problems of KU students. The Freedom candidates, Steve Bergstrom and Greg Haunschild, should be commended for offering a strong measure to cut the financial burdens placed on students. They wanted to cut funding for almost all student groups, but they didn't say where and how, though they said that political groups would be cut. We fear that valuable services, though they serve only a few students, would lose funding.
The Priority candidates, Scott Swenson and Dennis Strickland, had the right idea by suggesting tighter auditing of Senate-allocated funds. Students should be guaranteed that their money is spent wisely. But a standard review process must be established to make sure the auditing process is a fair one.
All four coalitions stressed the need for greater participation in student government. But once again, Momentum provided the best solution — a printing of Student Senate records in the newspaper. That might bring some accountability to the Senate, as well as more student interest. Priority stressed greater access — office hours and senators wearing buttons on Senate meeting days. Variations on a theme. Although Swenson and Strickland said their approach was different, they whistled a tune similar to that of previous administrations.
Dennis "Boog" Highberger and Carla Vogel of the Costume Party offered the freshest and most honest approach to increasing student participation. But it won't work. Socrates and the thinkers of his day were able to sit in circles and talk freely. But that isn't going to work with a group of sometimes unruly student senators, a few of them power-grabbers looking to political careers far beyond Student Senate. Costume wants each student senator to have the freedom and equality to participate freely in the Senate. That is the ideal, but it is not the political reality. And that is sad.
Momentum gets the Kansan's vote based on the issues. But this vote is cast reluctantly in an election in which the choice is wide, but also poor. None of the coalitions offer a version or a vision of the Student Senate that is likely to appeal to the political beings lurking inside us all.
Flashes of life on Highway K-32
Perhaps if my car radio nai-
broken six weeks ago, I would never
have noticed that the Elm Grove
Baptist Church has a somewhat
incongruent brick addition attached
to one of the older white church
building
Not that this is any big news.
except for my those who attend the church just a few miles west of Bonner Springs on Highway K-32. It's just that I seriously doubt I would have ever really noticed this small inessential, yet interesting detail if my car radio was still clamoring for my attention during
une 10 trips i make down that highway each week
Without a radio or companion to take up my attention, I have been forced to look out my car window to find more of those details that make sense, the inconsequential but enjoyable substance of our daily lives.
I have been highly rewarded most days. And these rewards have kept me going on a commute between Kansas City, Kan., and Lawrence to reflect and think, and at worst seems a frustrating waste of time.
In her book, "Two Towns of Provence," author M.F.K. Fisher writes about her "inner map" of two towns in France. She had grown to know the towns so intimately from extended residencies there that years later she is able to mentally recall the towns, remember the nooks and crannies, the fountains, and the curves in the streets.
Although it is not as exotic as
Fisher's memory maps of her French towns, I too have an inner map of K-32, which is a barely perceptible thin, gray line on the Kansas road map overshadowed on its own by a bright red line that is Highway 24-40 and the even thicker violet purple Interstate 70.
This memory map, partially composed of the more mundane bumps and curves, is also filled with delightful scenes I've encountered. At at 65 mph, flashes are probably the best I can do.
Some days these flashes have all the color and brilliance of an impressionist painting. In mid-October the trees and woods along the highway flamed reds — some crimson, others more of a softer, russet color — and yellows. To the boys of Tonganoxie, the hills that had been covered by a vast treasure years ago by retreating glaciers burned like the solemn colors of a stained glass window in a church cathedral.
Flocks of birds, black against the morning sunlight, arched sharply over green fields of what appeared to be winter wheat. A fire engine came out and with orange pumpkins sped by me to Kansas City to deliver its product.
Other days the flashes are more subtle. Once, while speeding up a small hill east of the town of Linwood, my three quarterways way around the highway and disappeared into the woods. It made my day.
On a few recent days a thick, muffling fog has siggally covered the hills and fields of K-32, transforming them into a mystery landscape and obliterating the usual landmarks by which I judge my own place in the unknown world, exploring new territory and happy to be there.
The dailiness of our lives is made up of the mundane and the inconsequential. But they are the color and the texture of life, making our inner maps all the more complete and rich.
Ohio vote may signal end to tax cuts
WASHINGTON — The most interesting and potentially most significant result from the elections a week ago was the vote in Ohio rejecting a repeal of a huge increase in the state income tax.
It always is dangerous to compare similar cases in dissimilar environments, but it is tempting to think that the Ohio referendum signaled the end of the tax-cutting mania that appeared to be possessing American voters ever since California approved its Proposition 13 in 1978.
No one can sensibly defend high taxes for their own sake, but there is an argument to be made for the proposition that Americans generally don't realize what a bargain they are making. "We won't be made here, but it needs to be noted that not everyone believes the well-being of the country improves in direct proportion to the reduction of taxes.
In any case, the tax-cutting fever that swept eastward from California after Proposition 13 did seem to be over. So the states were bad and all measures to cut or
ARNOLD SAWISLAK
United Press International
eliminate taxes were good. The correlative was that cutting taxes would force government to be more efficient.
Those are attractive but irresponsible and erroneous ideas. We have seen on a national level that deep tax cuts do not force equally deep tax cuts across the country, propelled the country into an area of deficit financing that would have
been regarded only a few years ago as madness.
As George McGovern said recently, "I'll had suggested we might have a $200 billion deficit when I was president." That has not happened even have carried Massachusetts.
How the world has changed since 1972 The United States already has had one defect in the $200 billion range and no one in authority disputes that more and bigger red ink years are ahead
Everyone publicly deplores the deficit situation, but there is no indication at this time that anyone in Washington has the faintest notion how to break the impasse that has developed around it.
The president blames Congress for refusing to cut federal spending more. Congress blames the president for raising taxes and increasing tax increases. Proposals to do both
- dividing the pain, so to speak - have been made but neither side seems willing to compromise
In truth, the president and Congress seem to be engaged in a game of "chicken," each counting on the other to change course before disaster occurs. So it appears the country will have to discover the consequences of mega-deficits by living through them.
Neither the people of Ohio nor the United States can reasonably be expected to do something that takes money out of their own pockets without good reason. From everything that came out of Ohio, it appears the tax repeal was killed because the state's leaders, in and out of government, made a case against it.
There does not seem to be that kind of leadership in Washington to deal with the deficit problem
Islanders support avenging of Bishop's death
ST. GEORGE'S, Grenada — T-shirts worn in the streets by many Grenadians say "Thank you, America, for liberating Grenada."
But real liberation means U.S. forces must leave Grenada, which could throw the tiny space island — whose Marxist government was swept away in a power conflict — into another crisis.
The United States sent its troops into Grenada Oct. 25 to ensure what Governor-General Sir Paul Scoon called "true freedom and democracy" but the troops are the only ones who have has of maintaining these concepts.
The remnants of the old-guard authoritarian organizations could make a comeback, a problem that a
Grenadian government official said he saw "no way out of."
Coard and other hardline leaders of the Revolutionary Military Council that toppled Prime Minister Maurice Bishop are being held
"True and fair elections mean that anyone can run, and that includes Bernard Coard and company," the official said.
DANIEL DROSDOFF
United Press International
without charges, though they are suspected of instigating and even ordering Bishop's execution.
Another Grenadian official said that the political arrests were temporary and that most of the
suspects would be freed as the interim government appointed by Scoon settled in to prepare for elections on the Caribbean island.
"It's like a hurricane. There is always a state of emergency after a hurricane and then a country settles back to normal," the official said.
Grenada has had two leaders since it gained independence from Britain in 1974, and both have been dictatorial in their ways.
Independence leader Sir Eric Gairy ruled as prime minister from 1976 until 1979, imposing his authoritarian policies and nukes known as the "Monsoon Gang".
Gairy was ousted by Bishop, who worked to build a revolutionary
socialist society with Soviet and Cuban help.
Any new leadership following elections within the next year is likely to emerge from remnants of the Bishop or Gairy governments.
Bishop's party, the New Jewel Movement, made progress in education, health, construction and party indoctrination, and his programs brought him popularity among Greedians.
U. S. Marines and paratroopers were cheered by Grenadians not because a Marxist government fell but because Bishop's death was avenged, and it is common to find islanders who in the same breath say "God bless America" and praise Bishop.
CORRECTION
Editor's note: Because of an editor's error in yesterday's Kansan, part of the Momentum Coalition's column on the editorial page was garbled. Here is the correct version:
"... The first issue deals with our education, or more specifically, how available education is for KU students. To aid graduate and undergraduate students, those with financial difficulties of any type.
Momentum proposes a deferred tuition program. Many large universities have deferred tuition programs, but KU has traditionally shied away from this prospect. A system in which students would pay tuition for a third just before midterm, and one-third just before final exams is not only feasible but practical as well. The administration could levy a 15 percent fee to cover the costs of the
program. This plan would ease the economic burden placed on students and their families while still making sure checks to make the system work.
"the second issue is a campus safety issue — campus lighting, KU has many problem areas where students cannot walk safely at night because of the light that we believe that we must wait for further tragedies before action can be
taken, Ronald Helms, an internationally known illumination engineer and a member of the KU faculty, has begun an in-depth campus lighting study. Momentum would seek to make use of this study and is committed to spending time with students on Senate unallocated account to share in the costs of proper campus lighting. A safe, secure campus for all. Your campus, your Senate working for you. "
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