OPINION
The University Daily KANSAN
October 20,1983 Page 4
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Day Kaman (USPS 609-640) is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Stauffer-Finn Hall, Lawrence, KA, 60045, daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer semester. Subscriptions are $125 for mail and $150 for phone; and final period subscriptions by mail are $115 for mail and $135 for phone in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 for a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $a semester fee through the student activity for POSTMASTER. Subscription fees vary by location.
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
DAVE WANAMAKER
Retail Sales
Manager
MARK MEARS
National Sales
Manager
LYNNE STARK
Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN
Advertising Adviser
Brandt's return
Willy Brandt, chancellor of West Germany up to the early 1970s, plans to participate in an anti-missile rally Saturday. Those concerned with the future of Europe may come to wish that Brandt had stayed home.
The rally that Brandt plans to attend is to further publicize opposition to the deployment of U.S. cruise and Pershing-2 missiles in Western Europe. The deployment is scheduled to occur in December unless progress is made in U.S.-Soviet arms talks.
Brandt's planned participation is significant and disturbing for several reasons.
First, Brandt, chairman of the Social Democratic party, is symbolizing the party's newborn opposition to the missile plan. The party, under then-Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, was in power in 1979 when the West German government first approved of the plan. The Social Democrats are no longer in power, but their opposition is a significant repudiation of a long-term defense strategy.
Second, Brandt — who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work to
improve relations with the Soviets — is siding with the Soviets rather than the United States. Brandt, although he left office somewhat in disgrace, is still regarded as a prominent figure both in West Germany and throughout the world.
Third, the United States is in danger of being cast — if it has not already been cast — as the bad guy of the Western Europe situation. Both U.S. and West German officials have said that the missiles were only a response to missiles already stationed in Warsaw Pact nations by the Soviets.
The Soviets have even said that more missiles would be stationed in response to any new U.S. missiles. Any protest that Brandt and the West German demonstrators may have made over the Soviet moves has been remarkably quiet.
Brandt's concern for the public good merits commendation. The deployment of missiles in Western Europe certainly is an issue to West Germans. Brandt's apparently sudden interest in nuclear missiles, however, deserves scrutiny for its timing. In light of his role in East-West relations, where was he in '79?
A descent from grace
A fall from grace can come at the strangest of times. Mary Hudson Vandegraft, chairman of Hudson Oil Inc., might have still further to fail.
The 70-year-old Vandegrift and the company's marketing chief, Robert Stallings, are charged with tampering with gasoline pumps — a felony theft — in the Topeka area. The two are to return to Shawnee County District Court in Topeka today for the setting of a preliminary hearing date.
Vandegrift was listed by Forbes Magazine in 1982 as one of the 400 wealthiest people in the United States. The magazine put her net worth at $100 million.
Vandegrift pleaded no contest in July for a similar case in Johnson County. In that case, too, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit felony theft for tampering with gasoline pumps.
gasoline another case, U.S. Labor Department officials estimate that a federal court judgment against the
company for violating the federal Fair Labor Standards Act could cost the company more than $15 million in back wages.
Vandegrift spoke at KU earlier this year about her company's humble beginnings. Times do change. Indeed, the sight of authorities taking her mug shot and fingerprinting her must have been an interesting one.
The company seems beset by troubles. Moreover, the troubles appear to be largely of its own making. For example, one of the judge's findings in the labor case was that station attendants were required to work an average of 45 minutes before the beginning of their shifts but were paid for only 15 minutes of work.
Not to be forgotten here are the customers — many of whom have been shortchanged. Vandegrift's tumble from tranquility and stature is a rough one. And probably deserved.
Clark is a poor choice
Environmentalists are understandably upset by President Reagan's selection of National Security Adviser William Clark to replace James Watt as secretary of the interior. Clark lacks the environmental knowledge and experience that the job requires; his chief qualification appears to be his unflagging loyalty to the president. In the wake of Watt, Americans deserve better.
mental policies. By filling the post with a capable, conservation-minded conservative, Reagan could have soothed the environmental community without forsaking the administration's pro-development philosophy.
They also had reason to hope for better. Watt's resignation gave the president an opportunity to recast public perception of his environ-
The only encouraging aspect of the appointment is that it will eliminate Clark's day-to-day influence on American foreign policy, thereby shifting more authority to Secretary of State George Schultz, whose moderating influence the administration needs.
Minneapolis Tribune
LETTERS POLICY
The University Daily Kansas 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 or faculty or position. The Kansas肌 also submit individual and submitted guest columns, and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
Shuttle idea needs more work
Like many KU students, I have been faced with the challenge of finding a parking place on campus at night.
Seated behind the wheel of my rusty, old Datus I have joined the cavalcade of cars cruising Jayhawk Boulevard. I have cursed the drivers of the already parked cars who, not ascribing to the bumper-to-bumper method of parking, leave half a car length in front and behind their rear wheels. What are they for anyway? I have risked and received tickets and paid fines for parking in spaces reserved for faculty and staff.
of Robinson Center for free, and a free shuttle bus would transport these students between the lots and campus.
Some students park on campus at night to conserve the energy it would take them to walk from a parking lot farther away. But for women, more is at stake than saving a few steps. Parking on campus is one of the safety precautions women take to avoid being physically assaulted.
After confronting this parking problem many times, I was encouraged to hear of a recent proposal from a subcommittee of the Traffic and Parking Board.
Under the proposal, 1,000 permits for parking on campus at night would be sold to students for $10 each. Only students with those parking permits and faculty with blue-zone parking permits would then be permitted to park on campus at night.
Students without night parking permits would be able to park in the lots near Memorial Stadium or south
Limiting on-campus parking at night to students and faculty with parking permits is an attempt to remedy a growing traffic and parking problem on campus at night. The shuttle bus idea was
added to the proposal to provide for the safety of students, particularly women, walking to and from the school. But the proposal has a few flaws.
It calls for the shuttle bus to make a round trip every 20 minutes and to stop at all of the marked bus stops on Jayhawk Boulevard.
Twenty-minute intervals between shuttle bus runs will require people to wait in parking lots and on Jayhawk Boulevard. There is safety in numbers, but waiting alone in a bus can be dangerous along a Jayhawk is not without risk.
The subcommittee has suggested distributing the permits on a first-
come, first serve basis or according to class ranking. But let's face it, the only people who really need to park on campus at night are women. The number of permits are not sufficient to guarantee every woman student a parking place on campus at night, but women should be given priority in whatever method of distribution is chosen.
Some could view this as discriminatory, but it is no more discriminatory than the crime statistics that show that women are, more often than men, the victims of assault on campus at night.
rine $10 charge for the night parking permits would be used to offset the expenses of the shuttle service. But if, to insure their safety, only women are allowed to park on campus at night, the women obtaining permits should not be the only ones to contribute to the costs of the shuttle service. The lack of safety on this campus at night is a problem that all students and faculty share, even though women are more often the victims of it. To require only women to pay for for a parking plan that gives them protection smacks of blaming the woman.
All this brings us to the real problem: Women are not safe on this campus at night.
I am not criticizing the Parking and Traffic Board subcommittee for not attacking this larger issue
Clearly, their mission was to remedy a traffic and parking problem. But the proposal for a shuttle bus service is a grim reminder of the dangers that can occur in camps at night and only deals with a small part of that threat.
A snuttle bus might get a woman safely from a parking lot to campus and back, but what protection exists for women traveling from one building to another? The walk from Watson Library to the west entrance of Staufer-Flint Hall — a sidewalk running parallel to and less than 100 feet from Jayhawk Boulevard — is dark enough to allow an assault along the road, but not as dangerous along so many of the heavily traveled paths on this campus provides perfect conditions for assault and other violent crime.
Better lighting, unfortunately, is not the only solution. Stricer penalties for crimes of assault and the organization of an escort service would contribute to the safety of women on campus. Even with these improvements, a night shuttle bus might be a necessity.
But if the dangerous conditions that women face on campus at night were dealt with directly, the campus traffic and parking problem at night could be solved in the same way it has been solved during the day.
And all students, women included,
could take the shuttle bus for
reasons of convenience instead of
personal safety.
Deregulation not the problem
WASHINGTON - With Brannifair Airways bankrupt, Continental Air Lines in reorganization and Eastern Airlines, among other carriers, considered near the brink, airline employees' unions are urging repeal of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. Their concerns deserve serious attention, but re-regulation is not the answer.
Tossing aside the benefits that the Act has brought to consumers, the industry, and to employees as well, would be a classic case of throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Consider, first, the fact that the Act has dramatically achieved its primary objective of helping consumers pay more for expensive prices without cutting service.
The real minimum cost of a round-trip coast-to-coast ticket is now less than 40 percent of its pre-deregulation level in 1974, when the Civil Aeronautics Board must to loosen regulatory controls.
Adjusted for inflation, the 1974 round-trip ticket costing $380 would today cost more than $1,000. Across the board, real-price levels are down by about one-fifth. Choosing the cheapest flight might seem complicated, but for most of us it sure beats having no choice at
Before anyone jumps to rebuild a regulatory shelter for the weaker
SIMON LAZARUS
Reinstituting regulation might make the going easier for some inefficient airlines, but it would not guarantee their immortality. Al-
Lawyer
airlines, it would be prudent to consider the public reaction to price increases that would make air travel once again, as it was before deregulation, affordable business travelers and the well-to-do.
As competition forces the older carriers to trim their ranks and to increase productivity, it is under standable that many of their employees look back with nostalgia to the era of industrialization has not adversely affected overall employment levels in the industry.
ter all, Eastern, currently considered precarious, was equally so throughout the 1970s in 1942. Eastern, held up as an example of regulated inefficiency, was reported to have 13 times as many executives as its chief competitor, Delta Air Lines.
The contrary. According to the C.A.B., employment by the trunk carriers in 1982 was 263,108 — down only slightly from the 265,777 registered in 1977. But this small drop was among the largest drops incurred during the same period. The expansion of these smaller carriers is directly traceable to the competitive opportunities opened by deregulation.
Taking aim at a broad program that is yielding such benefits simply to address the genuine but narrow transition problems of employees of certain high-cost airlines makes no sense.
Employees, in all industries, do have legitimate stake in assuring that the scope and pace of their adjustment to changes in the competitive environment should be fixed voluntarily, through collective bargaining under the rather than unilaterally by a federal judge under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy laws.
But the United States Supreme Court is about to decide that very issue. Certainly, there is no point in an initial action until the court rules.
These give displaced employees hiring preference with other airlines and also provide for federal monthly assistance and relocation payments. Curiously, airline employees' unions have not made it a major priority to direct public attention to the fact that the compensation provisions have never been financed.
Recent accords at Eastern and at Western Airlines indicate that the collective bargaining process is up to the challenge of accommodating the transition. To the extent that additional federal intervention is required, the place to start would seem to be the labor protection provisions of the Airline Deregulation Act itself
In view of the trauma of fuel-press escalation and the recent deep recession, what is most striking about the post-deregulation airline industry is its relative overall health, not its weak spots. Scrapping deregulation would not banish the industry's real problems, but would create a great many more.
Copyright 1994 the New York Times.
Simon Levin, a lower-bound
regulatory issue on the White House
Policy Stiffness between 1977
and 1981.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Double standard culprit in drug case
To the Editor:
What is all this condemnation of the Royals who have confessed to attempting to buy caine? Would you hypocrites feel the same toward them had they attempted to buy some Jack Daniels?
The real crime lies not in the behavior of the players but in the unjust laws that they have violated. And the fact that little kids have chosen them as heroes means nothing. It is the double standards in society, perpetuated by frightened, close-minded parents and other ignorant adults, that are the culprits in destroying a hero in a hero story. He has used ill-timed language. The same innocent twirl loses no respect for his idols when they douse themselves with and gulp down champagne after a big victory.
These men are obligated only to
play to the best of their abilities, and as long as they impose on no one else, what they do on their own time, you will be better off than Cola. Should they be our own business?
If their use of wrongly outlawed drugs erodes their effectiveness on the field, then they are demonstrating some immaturity and should be helped to correct their deficiency, not condemned by irrational fans espousing absurd virtues.
Doug Humphreys Great Bend senior
Senseless values
To the Editor:
Upon the glowing recommendation of several critics, I went to see the movie "The Big Chill." The story centered on the suicide of a
Searching for a reason for the hopelessness of the departed and
once promising young scientist who never got his act together and the reaction of his once close, once ideally radical circle of college friends, now disillusioned by the compromises the real world has demanded of them in exchange for success. The funeral has reunited them for what turns out to be an encounter weekend.
I can certainly say that the values peddled in "The Big Chill" left me cold, namely that casual sex is OK among friends, married or unmarried, and that when life is painful and you can't find the answers, another kind of help will allow, for a white, and close friendships, and I do mean close, offer you the only consolation obtainable.
their own, the characters never rose above a level of intellectual philosophizing and lay psychoanalysis, nor did they ever arrive at any conclusions of substance. Even the clergyman in this film provided no answers to the hungering congregation, only questions.
The belief that what you see is all there is, is often encountered in modern cinema and literature, and like this film, it leaves one empty and unsatisfied. Aside from a few warm human scenes, occasional good humor and believable characters, the only value of this film is that it points up the barrenness of lives devoid of spiritual focus, a tragically common phenomenon among bright young people, and, to me, the obvious reason for their hopelessness.
Pamela Peck
Lawrence graduate student