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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, March 4. 1983
A financial straitjacket
The proposal of a $5 fee for library privileges should have students outraged.
KU's libraries are desperate for funds, no question about it. The Kansas House Ways and Means Committee yesterday eliminated $1.4 million for library acquisitions, academic computing and replacement of instructional equipment. Of that, $100,000 was to go directly to KU libraries. Now, any library acquisitions must come out of an operating expenses budget that has already been cut severely. The University was unable to finance the libraries last year, and there is no more money this year. A $100,000 grant from the KU Endowment Association has not been renewed.
If the state will not finance the libraries, somebody must. The University is having a hard enough time competing for faculty and graduate students. But a library is not a student service, as are Watkins Hospital and Robinson Center; it is a basic academic necessity. Students should not be expected to pay for such basics on top of tuition.
The $5 fee comes before the Student Senate Finance and Auditing Committee Monday. If the fee gets through Student Senate, it becomes a special campus privilege fee, like the women's and non-revenue sports fee. Once approved, the Senate can only advise its removal from future budgets. Plans are in the works to make the fee contingent each year on approval by the Student Senate and the student body, through a referendum. But whether these stipulations will be heeded is unknown. The Senate has been ignored in several attempts to remove the non-revenue sports fee.
Students concerned about KU's future will vote for the fee, because they see no alternative.
But the fact that the Kansas Legislature has put students and the University in an incredibly unfair position should not be forgotten. Not all KU students come from Douglas County. Let this fee become a rallying cry for those concerned about higher education across the state. Only votes will change the attitude of the Legislature.
Athletes should turn to pros if proper opportunity arises
It's nice to know that the folks down at the University of Georgia care so much about Herschell Walker. Just as it's nice to see that all across our great nation college coaches and presidents and state legislators are frantically protecting their innocent, young student athletes.
Walker, like a babe spirited away from its cradle, left his would-be alma mater because of the lure of money. He gave up his senior year of college for a professional football career with the New Jersey Generals of the United States football League. He will be paid $2.5 million a month.
Tut-tut. He hadn't even finished his education.
I almost cry when I think about it; how'll he survive in the real world without a college degree?
But, gosh, I say quietly to myself, if he won't have time to complete his education while he's playing pro football, how could he have had the time playing his-time college football?
I played one year of college football. It was small time. I wasn't on a scholarship and I
MATT SCHOFIELD
won't very good (third string junior varsity at a school of less than a thousand students). Yet college football, even in such an atmosphere, dominated my life.
It included working out in the summer, three practice sessions a day in the early season, at least three hours of practice a day the rest of the year, game film study sessions at least once a week, special team meetings twice a week and a week on week once a week that took up an entire Saturday.
If that much time has to be donated to a small program, how much more must go into a large program? In my situation classes were stressed, but were secondary until December. In a large college program, classes must almost be forgotten until the end of the season.
If Walker wants an education I would suggest that he play out his professional football career then return to college. When he returns he won't be eligible for football, but he will have the money to pay for school. More importantly, he'll have the time to actually get an education.
College students attend college to get an education or to learn a trade. Some come for both. I spent my first two years involved in
esoteric learning. I have spent my last two learning a trade, journalism. I am trying to make myself an employable person.
If I was offered $2 million a year to report for a newspaper somewhere at this moment, I would go. I chose the profession I would most like to be a part of, and the offer would mean that I had succeeded in becoming a part of it. I think I should have done with the hardy congratulations of my professors.
I fail to see any difference between my hypothetical situation and the situation Walker found himself in. Yet people across the country have voiced disappointment and shock at his decision. Walker chose a profession, pursued it and is now a well-paid member of it. He has succeeded at it. So why are the masses clamoring?
They clamor because the blatant sacrifice of college athletes' minds and bodies, which is necessary to maintain a high powered university football program, will be threatened in a system where athletes begin to look out for their own futures.
Opponents of a system in which athletes may become professional when they are ready instead of after four years of college ball say that aside from the educational deprivation, the athletes would be running out on their obligation to the school that gave them a chance.
But such arguments are malarkey.
The athlete was recruited to enhance the university's football program, not so that he could learn more about character or become a better member of society. He was recruited by the profit motive. He shouldn't feel obligated to stay protect it.
College athletes are used by their colleges. They are given a trade of an education for their athletic skills. They are not given a fair shot at an education.
Now, they are supposed to stay with a school until they are no longer eligible to play. Poor reasoning. The first time he steps onto a playing field, he gets kicked in the front, tended, any obligation he has to the school.
The student-athlete should have the right to control his own fate. If he has come to school as a manner of getting noticed by the professional leagues, he should have the right to join that league as soon as he is noticed and he should be encouraged.
The only commodity an athlete has to sell is his body. Every year he has to wait before becoming a professional is just another year less he will be able to do his job, and another year he has to risk injury for nothing.
So, Walker, and others, take the money and run.
KANSAN
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Neoliberals offer ideas, hope
Our future has been mortgaged to the national debt. Our factories lay idle in disrepair. Foreign imports rip hanks from the marketplace. The population is shattered into factions and shards. Special interest is the law of the land. American lives are good times! They packed up and left long ago.
Does anyone know how to lead anymore? The current political establishment in America has become a huddled group of old men, cowering at the gates of the future. The same tired voices and ideas are heard. The same stop-gap solutions are thrown into the breech.
About 200 million Americans are not. Nor is a group emerging from the wasteland of the political scene. The neoliberals, led by presidential candidate Gary Hart, are a radical but realistic departure from the past. In years to come, this splinter group of the Democratic Party has been the hope of powerful direct American who are fed up as hell with the present ideologies.
For the past 29 years, the combined ineptitude of Republican and Democratic administrations has brought a meaningless war, chronic recessions, corrosive inflation, towering debt, scandal and graft, and a generation disillusioned with government.
**what is the brave new world of the neoliberal?**
The current media rap is that they dwell in a wishy-washy no-man's land between the popular parties. They don't have a platform, let alone
If the situation were not so serious, it would be laughable to watch Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill strut upon the stage. Like mastodons weighted to chains of special interest, they bellow and stomp in a meaningless, choreographed manner, and power intact, they are more than satisfied.
Such disinformation only shows how insulated some elements of the press have become in their
What the neoliberalis actually offer is a bold combination of the very best of the traditional 20th century political philosophies. Blending the fiscal responsibility of conservative Republicans with the social values of the Democratic Party, the neoliberalistic politics have searched out a road to the future.
so-called adversarial role, and how out of touch they are with the people.
According to an in-depth article in the February '12 issue of Esquire magazine, all the issues on the neoliberal agenda are subordinate to the central government's economic through stimulating growth and
BONAR MENNINGER
This means tax incentives for new investment, government lending policies that accelerate growth and a deregulation of existing industry so the marketplace can again become strong.
But there is a difference. Deregulation does not have to mean raping the land and robbing the people. Says Randall Rothenberg, author of the Esquire piece, "Where the neoliberals differ markedly from Republicans is in their retusal to allow government to abdicate its role of protecting the environment and the individual from abuses of the market system."
investment in high-tech industries. The resulting multiplier effect of new wealth would reverberate through the economy.
But at the very least, the neoliberal movement appears to project a sweeping new vision across the land, a blueprint for transition into the post-industrial age.
As the 84 campaign progresses, we will learn more about Gary Hart and the kind of thinking he represents. Whether he is the man for the job or the people he will tell, and if he falters, others will come.
Environmental issues take high priority in the neoliberal perspective. Tax breaks would be used as incentives for industries to voluntarily adopt new technologies or market for reform*, as one supporter puts it.
Maybe I put to much stock in these people. Maybe they are just so many more film-flamm men. But I hope not, because I know this country can still achieve all it set out to be. If I am overly optimistic about this new political force, so be it. We have already seen what the others can do.
Another pragmatic policy favored by the neoliberals is compulsory national service for everyone at age 18. Two years of time spent in the military, the Peace Corps or other service agency would provide a work force for national security and economic development, continuity and cooperation among the people.
A strong national defense is favored by the group, minus the carte blanche approach which until now has been the gravy train for the military-industrial complex. Neoliberais are skeptical about the trend towards unreliable and expensive sophisticated weaponry.
The neoliberal synthesis of ideas is what America has been politically groping for in the 20th century. Finally there is another option: not the unrealistic, sentimental cure-of all the problems of modern society. In Darwinism and simplistic views of Reagan, but a new vision of the American future.
Do these approaches to problems sound like common sense? Could it be that a group of politicians has awakened to a fact that the American people have known for quite some time, namely, old solutions just don't work anymore?
To the editor.
Letters to the Editor
I question Stanley Kopfik's remark that people would be more willing to pay taxes to support a student from other states than a student from abroad. Taxes are levies for all Kamsans; what they feel most concerned about is whether any other state provides them rather than where the money goes.
Foreign student fees shouldn't go up
I intend to say a few words for foreign students after reading your report that tuition fees will be raised on them (Feb. 21 and 22).
Both foreign and nonresident students pay taxes to the state. We buy groceries, consume gasoline, pay our housing bills of which a portion finds its way into the state treasury. I am aware that Kansas residents do pay extra for us through assorted taxes, but the figure will not be as high as 79 percent, as Koplik asserts. Besides, I can't find any difference of financial contribution to the state between nonresident students and us.
Bob
Foreign students are generally the most hard hit (they can rarely find off-campus jobs) and the least financially affluent (except some from OPEC countries and those receiving scholarships). To attract additional income out of them is never a good idea.
If tuition fees for foreign students increase 100 percent, less than three million dollars will be added to the state coffer, without considering that many of them will transfer to other schools. The increase in tuition fees compared with the annual KU budget, but something intangible will irreparably be lost.
Yuan Hu.
Yuan H.
Republic of China graduate student
KU should also divest
Readers of the Kansan are regularly treated to stories celebrating the larges and fund-raising accomplishments of the KU Endowment Association. It is worth bearing in mind that this is the same Endowment Association that continues to support business in corporations doing business in South Africa.
To the editor.
Foreign investments are part of South Africa's total strategy to preserve its裂 apartheid system. Other aspects of this strategy include South Africa's escalating aggression recently at home and in the region; increasing numbers of trade unionists have been imprisoned and South Africa has expanded its military operations in Angola. In addition to its armies in Angola and Ethiopia, it has few new states South Africa has launched military assaults against Zimbabwe and Lesotho.
More than two dozen universities have sold at least part of their South African-linked investments. The University of Maine, last summer, was the latest to completely divest. None of these schools report divestiture having any adverse effect on their students, instructors and trustees at KU, meanwhile, are steered in complacency and indifference. It's too bad.
If, instead of investing in the multinationalis, the Endowment Association looked toward local and regional investments, it could help counter recession and unemployment in Kansas.
Laird Okie, Lawrence easy access student
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 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 staff position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.