KANSAN Comment
Computers don't lie
Dr. Benjamin Spock and leaders of the moratorium, better known as the "intellectual eunuchs" and "an effete corps of impudent snobs" are just about ready to call President Nixon's hand. Nixon's reduction in the draft calls for November and December as well as his "secret timetable" is fooling no one, least of all his youthful opponents.
Nixon's hand is quick, but not quicker than the computers—computers don't run for reelection. And the computers show that he has been drafting young Americans faster than Lyndon Johnson did last year. The reduction in draft calls for this month and next are no great strides for the draftable young man, because the government has inducted so many into the armed forces since Nixon and his life insurance policy were sworn in, that there are more than enough to continue the "international abortion."
The unpublicized fact is that draft calls have shot up over 70 per cent since last year and Nixon's recent announcement of the secret withdrawal timetable of U.S. troops from Vietnam. In October of 1968, for instance, the call was 13,800, as against 29,000 this October.
In the five-month June-October period, the 1968 total was 79,300 compared with 135,700 in 1969. In 10 months this year, Nixon is going to draft almost as many men (290,400) as Johnson did last year for a twelve-month period (296,000), says the Armed Forces Journal.
Who does Nixon think he's fooling this time
in thinking he can make the American public, especially students, swallow this deception?
The administration has grossly underestimated the idealism that animates many students. The anti-war movement is not a self-interest movement for most of the moratorium leaders are immune to the draft.
The Armed Forces Journal, in analyzing casualties last month said: "The harsh fact is that U.S. military forces in Vietnam have suffered approximately 30 per cent more combat deaths in the first six months of the Nixon administration than in the last six months of the Johnson administration."
Under the Nixon regime, combat deaths have jumped from 4,894 to 6,358, and wounded rose from 31,557 to 45,363. Even now with our leader's plan for peace, the wounded have averaged around 1,500 a week or 75,000 annually for the last three years.
My fellow Americans, we are the victims of Pentagon propaganda that militarily the war is going our way. It is not, nor does it seem likely it will ever be going our way.
Why must we perpetuate this farce? Everyone admits American involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. Do two wrongs make a right?
If the "Great Silent Majority" want to watch the death toll rise, it's one thing, but thank God for "Vocal Minority."
Judith K. Diebolt
Off the wire
Bv United Press International
WASHINGTON—Mrs. Jacqueline G. Gutwilli, chairman of the Citizens Advisory Council on the Status of Women, talking to newsmen after meeting with President Nixon:
"A black male has a better opportunity than a white woman in many respects. From everything we hear, women are discriminated against more than blacks. . .
"Our aim is simply to help women in the
- * *
United States. They have been the real silent majority."
WASHINGTON—Rep. Henry S. Reuss, D-Wis., who plans to introduce a bill today to ban supersonic flights overland unless the noise will not harm or annoy people below:
"We simply cannot allow supersonic airliners to assault the peace and quiet of millions of Americans just so a few jet setters can get where they're going a few hours faster."
Sorel's News Service
3. 1969, King Features Syndicate, Inc. World rights reserved
Sock It to 'Em, Mao Baby
TOKYO—The top pop tune in Communist China is a new anti-Russian song called "Smash a New Czar." A correspondent for the Japanese Kyodo news agency reports that the song is played
every day on radio stations around the country. Chinese ideologists often accuse the Russians of reverting to the repressive days of the Czar.
Photo by Tom Jones
Readers' write
To the Editor:
No one sympathizes more than I with the financial plight of Assistant Instructors, revealed by your two recent articles. Indeed, I am strongly in favor of a $200 increase in base salary for next year. Nonetheless, I am appalled by the kinds of arguments presented in your articles.
First of all, Mr. Wallace, an Assistant Instructor in English, is hardly "a typical example of a married graduate student" chiefly because he has been here for six years and is still not finished with his degree. The very longest he should have been allowed to remain here as an Assistant Instructor is five years, two years at most for his M.A. and no more than three more years to complete his doctorate. To continue to carry him on the roles of Assistant Instructors for this long a period—already six years and presumably seven—is to deprive other competent graduate students, who might complete degrees more rapidly, the opportunity of an assistantship. Mr. Wallace, while not being encouraged to leave, should have been deprived of an Assistant Instructorship long ago. By staying, Mr. Wallace has made his own financial problems and thus has no legitimate bitch concerning his paltry salary.
Another point that rattles me is the inequitable comparison of Assistant Instructors' and Assistant Professors' salaries and work loads. There is no legitimate comparison at all. The Assistant Professor who makes $10,000 per year (your figure) usually has earned the doctorate, the degree to which most Assistant Instructors aspire. The Assistant Professor is a full-time faculty member who has made a career commitment to teach at this University. The Assistant Instructor has not come to Kansas to earn his living at teaching. He has come to earn a degree. The University is, in a sense, subsidizing his education by giving him an Assistant Instructorship. His commitment is not to his teaching—we don't expect it to be—but rather to himself and his earning of a degree. If he takes six or seven years to earn that degree, it is really his own fault. But when that degree is earned, he enters the legitimate job market, secures a full-time faculty position, and draws a legitimate salary, frequently at a scale higher than Assistant Professors at Kansas.
Perhaps it's a sign of approaching old age (I'm over thirty though under forty), but the situation of people in training (i.e. people working toward a Ph.D.) expecting the same kind of salary considerations as regular faculty seems to me incredibly short-sighted.
Robert R. Findlay Associate Professor and Graduate Advisor, Theatre and Drama
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