OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
October 21.1983 Page4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily Kanal (USP5 60-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer-Flint Hall, Lawrence, KA 60045, daily during the regular school year and twice weekly during the holiday week. Sunday, holidays, and final periods. Secondary students receive a $2 fee per session plus $1 for each half-hour class and $1 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are a $1 semester paid through the student activity fee POSTMATER. Send address changes to the Usp5 Office, 97 W. 36th Street, Lawrence, KA 60045.
MARK ZIEMAN
Editor
DOUG CUNNINGHAM STEVE CUSICK
Managing Editor Editorial Author
DON KNOX
Campus Editor
ANN HORNBERGER Business Manager
DAVE WANAMAKER MARK MEARKS
Retail Sales National Sales
Sales
PAUL JESS
General Manager and News Adviser
LYNNE STARK Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Advertising Adviser
Ask the students
The Board of Regents has finished the first round in a five-year plan to review all programs at Regents schools and to recommend discontinuing, merging or keeping the programs. The idea of the reviews is fine, but the execution leaves something to be desired — student input.
The first round covered such areas as architecture and engineering. In the face of rising costs and shrinking budgets, such reviews are needed.
Both the information gathering and the decision making for the reviews, however, have been organized into a top-heavy system. Joe McFarland, Regents director of academic affairs, said that the primary participants in the review, in addition to Regents officials, had been administration figures, deans and department heads at the Regents schools. McFarland also said that individual schools or departments could solicit direct input from students, but that student involvement had not been required by the Regents.
Moreover, Regents executive director Stan Kooplik, when asked
whether the Regents thought that direct student input would not be beneficial said, "That is kind of a crass way of putting it, but there is an element of truth to that."
Students, however, can make perhaps the most valuable contribution to such a review.
Current students can give insight — though sometimes tainted by grades and academic pressure — into what is now going on in classrooms. Former students can tell whether a particular program helped them, both on the job and in their overall life.
Certainly students should not form the sole criterion or the sole source of information about an academic program. But neither should students, who will be affected directly by changes in academic programs, be completely ignored in the process of making changes.
Deanell Tacha, KU vice chancellor for academic affairs, said that the next review, probably of teacher education programs, might include more student involvement.
without such involvement, the Regents appear to have taken a position of "Let them eat cake."
Paving Bear Butte
It's a safe bet that most people have never heard of Bear Butte, near Rapid City, S.D. That fact, together with historical precedents, makes it almost certain that the Supreme Court will see that it stays that way.
Bear Butte is the site of an annual ceremony in which the leader of the Lakota Indians goes up onto the hill to renew contact with the spiritual world.
Also, the butte is called the "Learning Hill" by the Cheyenne, and is a sacred site where two Cheyenne prophets were given the medicine arrows and buffalo hat by the gods to guarantee the survival of the Cheyenne nation.
A pretty important butte, this. But not important enough for the government, which bought the area in 1962 and created a state park, erected tourist shelters and paved part of the site for a parking lot.
This intrusion, according to a member of a group of religious organizations that are filing a friend of the court brief on behalf of the Indians, is the same as if "the government were to build hot dog
stands and photography platforms inside St. Patrick's Cathedral and deny that religious liberty was abridged because worshipers still had physical access to the building."
The Lakotas earlier brought suit to enjoin the state from building further structures and seeking the dismantling of the existing ones, and a U.S. District Court's decision in favor of the state was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals.
Now, Presbyterians, the Central Conference of American Rabbis and other organizations are simply asking the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Maybe the Supreme Court has too heavy a caseload. Maybe the Indians do not have a legal leg to stand on. But whatever the excuse, you can bet that being sacred to American Indians just isn't a good enough reason for the court to keep Bear Butte from being another parking lot. Once again, we will find that the government has just one kind of Indian on its mind — Winnebagos. Preferably filled with vacationers.
The dismal science
Gerard Debreu is the latest American to win the Nobel Prize for economics. That makes 12 out of 15 we've won, and look where it's got us. Economics isn't an exact science, like physics. One economist's certainties are another's anathema
— and both can win Nobels. If all economists were laid end to end, they still wouldn't reach a conclusion.
models on the workings of the market economy. Someone else, one day, will produce a mathematical model to show how many economists can dispute on the head of a pin. Economics used to be known as the dismal science, but now there's money in it. Asked what he will do with the Nobel loot, Debreu replied, "I'll use it to stimulate the economy."
Debreu produced mathematical
—New York Daily News
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town and/or staff of the Kansan also invites individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansas office, 111 Staffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
U.S. must change Korean policy
WASHINGTON - The ugly events involving South Korea - the downing of its airliner, the Rangoon bombing, which killed 20 people, including four South Korean Cabinet ministers - fit a pattern we have almost come to accept as par for the course for the divided peninsula.
In the past decade alone, there have been many outrages: a 1976 tree-cutting incident in the demilitarized zone in which wo GIs were brutally hacked to death; the Korean Central Intelligence Agency plot to kidnap and assassinate the opposition leader Kim Dae Jung in
DONALD L. RANARD
Retired Foreign Service Officer
Whenever an incident occurs, before the evidence is in, South Korean generals angrily point to the North, and adrenaline flows. Seoul fabricates huge demonstrations of public indignation; tension builds along the demilitarized zone; both sides, including our military forces in Korea, go on alert; Washington warns Pyongyang and publicly reiterate a treaty commitment to stand by Seoul.
1973; the assassination of President Park Chung Hee's wife in 1974 and then the murder of Park in 1979; and now the apparent attempt to kill Seoul's current despot, President Chun dum Hwao in isolated Burma.
The prime suspect always seems to be the North Koreans $^{-1}$ with understandable though not always sufficient reason. Theirs has been a record of truculence filled with bizarre murder plots against South Korean leaders, tunnels under the demilitarized zone, spies sent overland, shootouts in the waters surrounding the peninsula.
Increased military aid floods out of Congress and the Pentagon, and the arms race on the peninsula escalates another notch.
Two of the world's largest armies glare across a tenuous trune line. No matter how many times each comes up with a new peace proposal, neither seems genuinely interested in reducing hostility. The North uses its army and civilian forces only a percentage of its gross national product for arms expenditures and to impose harsh control over daily life.
The South, whose human rights record is acceptable only in comparison with the North's, invokes the "threat from the North" to justify increased military outlays, severely restricting the ability of political process, press censorship, restrictions on unions and the right to strike.
The dangerously provocative rhetoric and mad race toward another Korean war must end. Each occurrence chips away at the time left before some trigger-happy general on either side gives in, allowing retaliation that could engulf Asia, and America, in conflict.
President Reagan's proposed visit to Seoul is no more an answer than it would have been for Manila. In 25 years, four American presidents have visited Seoul and two South Korean presidents have met him — with no visible effect on relations between North and South.
But small steps would be useful. Increased scientific, press and cultural contact, especially dealings in international conferences, might help. It would not hurt for a paranoid Pyongyang to be more exposed to Western democratic values and thinking.
We must begin with a reduction of policy toward the peninsula. Admittedly, our leverage with North Korea is negligible. Other than a more imaginative effort toward drawing Pyongyang into the community of nations, there remains little we can offer.
Restricting North Korea's United Nations observer delegation to
travel in New York City hardly serves the aims of modern diplomacy. The demilitarized zone situation is too dangerous for North Korea to be so ignorant of American policy and resolve.
The airliner tragedy and Rangoon bombing may have little in common, save for a disgraceful illustration of senseless resort to violence. Both involve Korean who, in the North and South, have known enough killing and sacrifice.
But with South Korea one can imagine more aggressive initiatives, including public and private expressions of the urgency to move toward an open society and a truly democratic government. There is growth in intelligence and with South Korea's youth and intellectuals with Washington's continued support of authoritarian rule.
Both sides are armed to the teeth. Neither is long on temper The United States is committed to go to war if need be. No less than in war that would allow reliable reliance on military assistance and preparedness to avoid conflict.
Copyright the New York Times.
Donald L. Burnard, a retired foreign
Service Officer directs the Center for
business policy, a public policy
organization.
Memories of a White House carpenter He says Harry Truman was his favorite president
WASHINGTON — "You wouldn't want to see a grown man cry would you," retiring White House carpenter foreman Bonner Arrington told fellow workers who wanted to give him a farewell party.
But they went ahead anyway and said goodbye with fanfare to the man who began working at the hospital when Harry Truman was president
Arrington, who has many souvenirs in his Bowie, Md., home, gifts
HELEN THOMAS
United Press International
from presidents he has served, was presented a medallion for each president.
The president and Mrs. Reagan also stopped in the diplomatic reception room to say farewell, and he met a girl autographed golf balls to Arrington
In an interview, he said the saddest thing that happened to him in his White House years was the assassination of President Kennedy.
He and others worked two or three nights and put up the black crepe in the East Room and other formal rooms while Kennedy's body lay in
He said that Mrs. Kennedy "had a place reserved for us" so that the maintenance workers could watch the funeral procession that moved from Capitol Hill to St. Matthews Cathedral.
He also recalls spending some time when the Reagans, helping them hang pictures in the Oval Office with their decorator the day before Reagan was shot in an assassination attempt in March.
Arrington said that all the first ladies made changes in the White House, but he felt that Nancy Reagan had transformed the family suite with elegance and coziness, and told her so.
Arrington said that one of his favorite first ladies was Mamie Eisenhower for whom he built a special knick-knack cabinet that is still in the Eisenhower's Gettysburg, Pa., farmhouse.
He said that President Truman "was kind of a favorite of mine. He was down to earth — to put it mildly."
Arrington said that Mrs. Kennedy was "one of the most exciting" of the president's wives because "she did so much changing around."
He recalled the time Truman passed the ground floor flowershop where one of his co-workers was making soup. Lured by the aroma, Truman ducked his head in and asked. "What's going on?"
Told that bean soup was on the fire, Truman said, "I'll be back for a bowl."
Sure enough, he returned after his appointments and sat down with the ground crew and had lunch.
On another occasion when the White House was undergoing a renovation, Truman walked over to the mansion from Blair House, the guest residence across the street, and seeing the workmen on the grounds, he said: "Fellows, I want
to tell you, it's too damn cold to be working out here."
The workers told their supervisor, who said, "Well, if the president says so," and they spent the remainder of the day working inside.
He said that Lyndon B. Johnson was all right "if you talked back and stood up to him."
He said that the Johnson women had asked him to build a dressing room in the gym, but he began using "some four letter words" when he had some problems taking down a rack. All of a sudden he heard a voice behind him. It was LRJ, who asked him what he was doing, and then passed on without another word.
Arrington didn't think much of President Carter charging the maintenance man for parking on the house, and for cutting down his staff.
Leaving with mixed emotions, he was asked what he would miss most at the White House after 33 years. "The people ... my friends, the doctors and battles, and all the wonderful work I worked with every day."
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
'Relativistic learning' has place in classroom
To the Editor:
In Tuesdays' Kansas, Charles Hallenbeck, KU professor of psychology, wrote about his outrage over an exercise for learning something about trust through being blindfolded.
This letter is to express my outrage. Not at Hallenbeck, who I know to be a generally sensitive and wise person, but at the attitude that his reaction reflected — that it is possible to judge what learning experiences are valuable and which ones are not — they are not academic enough or because they mintonentionally offend some sensitivity.
Too often, education in universities is looked upon only as learning what professors have to teach. In
some areas this is useful orientation. Over the course of history we have developed relatively closed systems that have been shown to be effective.
Such relatively closed and effective systems of thinking are quite rare. In my own field of psychology, which still is struggling to become a science in the 20th century meaning of the word, there is no such system.
I am nother female nor black nor gay nor handicapped. Yet I have all these types of students as well as other kinds in my classes. I cannot teach these types of students how to relate the ideas and relationships I discuss to their own background because I can never fully appreciate the significance of the experiences they have had.
And that is the source of my outrage — the efforts by unimaginative people to limit what students
Creating conditions for relativistic learning is difficult, especially in large classes. One thing is, however, abundantly clear: the methods that seem to work best for achieving relativistic learning are not always those that work best for learning when closed systems of thinking.
I can only try to arrange conditions which will permit the students themselves to relate the ideas to their own system of memories. Because the significant learning that takes place becomes relative to the person's background of experience, I call this relativistic learning.
can learn because they have already limited themselves in what they can learn. Halenbeck is not this type of trivial thinker, but his outrage against a student who was trying to help other students learn something momentarily reflected the same type of uncritical judgment. There is, however, another sense in which a halenbeck's outrage I regard compassion as the second greatest of all virtues (the highest being respect for those processes that create the genuine elite in any society). We have far too little compassion in our society today, and that too is indeed a cause for outrage.
Maynard W. Shelly Professor of psychology