University Council to discuss ROTC—
A pres nous le deluge
The men with the briefcases drift into the tiered classroom, each carrying a 127-page document.
The time is Thursday afternoon: the men are members of the University Senate's equivalent of a think tank, the University Council: the stapled pages contain the majority and dissenting reports, appendices and exhibits prepared by the Senate Committee on ROTC.
Today, for the second go-round, the Council will examine these reports and attempt to synthesize a consensus on this extremely debatable subject. The Kansan report of last week's meeting stated that eventually the Council will form some sort of "decision on the future relationship of the University and the ROTC military programs."
I surely hope it will do so. However, we must realize that the University Council's decision will not in any final way determine the fate of ROTC at KU.
The Senate ROTC committee has brought its recommendations concerning ROTC to the University Council. After a suitable term of debate, the Council will in turn report to the University Senate with its recommendations concerning the Senate ROTC committee's reports.
And if the Council decides, for example, it would like the academic structure of KU's ROTC program to change, this would have to be approved in turn by the University Senate, the Chancellor and the Board of Regents—not
to mention the very bone of all this contention, the Reserve Officers Training Corps.
Since the University Council is ostensibly composed of members of the administrative and academic elite at KU, its words should and do carry some influence with the powers above.
Today the Council members will again attempt to wade through 40 mimeographed pages of dissenting and majority report, 51 pages of appendices, and 36 pages of exhibits.
The majority report appears to be an apologia for the status quo, introducing a few structural changes in ROTC academic makeup to make it more palatable.
The dissenting report is a fiercely-written attack on ROTC: "The mere presence of ROTC in any form on this university campus . . . is an interference with and a corruption of the university's ideals."
I have a feeling I'm going to gain much more enlightenment from reading the remaining pages of exhibits and appendices.
It appears that both reports were not written to convince or change minds, but to summarize and synthesize the already-polarized pro and con attitudes toward the ROTC program.
When I learn anything new, I'll let you know. Too many of us are defending or attacking the ROTC program on the filmsiest of reasons. You and I, and the members of the University Council, need to know what ROTC is before we enter the fray.
Joanna K. Wiebe
Windows, not mirrors
By MIKE SHEARER Arts & Reviews Editor
You wake up to a cold dark morning and last night seems still with you. You wrap a bedspread around your shoulders and stagger to the front door.
The neighbors not watching, you stumble outside and drag in the morning paper. Falling on the couch, you spread the paper open in your lap and stare at what happened late yesterday—in Vietnam, in Latin America, to Jackie Kennedy, to Queen Elizabeth's wardrobe.
For some reason, you open to page twelve. There, between an advertisement for a new comic strip that will begin Monday and a story on Richard Nixon's boating, is a story about someone who meant something to you, a story on his death.
Harry Emerson Fosdick, probably the most significant American theologian of the century, was a man who affected me just that way. His death this week, at the age of 91, went almost unnoticed by young people, who had become used to the outspoken philosophies of so many modern religious liberals.
Brilliant writer and preacher, Dr. Fosdick was the one who cut away the underbrush of revivalism to make room for intelligent thinkers in the religious community. Early in the century, Fosdick committed such heresies as questioning the Virgin Birth and the Second Coming.
He paved the way to legitimize the religious use of knowledge outside the Bible and he poured his quote-spiked thinkings into sermons and books. His words had meaning.
You read he is dead and you think to yourself how much he taught you, and you wonder if you've as much justification for life as he did. You feel you know him well enough to know he would have laughed heartily and understandingly at finding his death notice buried on page 12 while Jackie Kennedy is splashed across page one, scuffling with a photographer outside a theater. Fosdick enjoyed windows more than mirrors.
He wrote, "At the very best, a person wrapped up in himself makes a very small package . . . The great day comes when a man gets himself off his hands . . . He begins to get out of himself—no longer the prisoner of self-reflections but a man in a world where persons, causes, truths and values exist, worthful for their own sakes.
"Thus to pass from mirror-mind to a mind with windows is an essential element in the development of real personality."
And you think. Then you get dressed and you give that day everything you've got.
Gus DiZerega
Rapping left
The War goes on and on.
How many years ago was it that MacNamara (Who's he?) said the boys would be back by Christmas? Our current President was elected because he said vaguely that he would "end the war"—but what has he done?
Nixon has pulled out a minute fraction of American troops and intensified the bombing. He is trying to buy off college students by promising to draft them only in the summer when they can't organize. He has done very little at all. Can you dig it?
I can't.
As usual, the American ruling powers, like ruling powers everywhere, have proven more interested in keeping their own power than in honestly serving the people. After years of lies and deceptions they wonder at the "student revolt" and rattle their sabers if we—nasty ungrateful and anarchistic students—get out of line.
So what can we do? Even if we have a bloody revolution it would be a mistake. Most likely it would bring about civil war and a revolutionary dictatorship and such a cure is as bad as the disease. But working through normal channels is a waste, too. They are as useless under Nixon as they were under Johnson.
This isn't just symbolic. If the war isn't over by November the student strike will last two days. If the carnage continues into December it will last for three days. Every month the war continues will see another day added to the strike. Legally, peacefully, voluntarily—the higher education system in this country, upon which Mr. Nixon and his ilk depend for technocratic recruits, will slowly grind to a halt. Long before the thirtieth month the war will be over. Probably long before the seventh month it will have ended.
There is something we can do, something which might even force our "public servants" to end the war. Wednesday, Oct. 15, across the country students and faculty will strike for one day. For one day, colleges will be devoted to a discussion of war, militarism and the sort of sick society which can produce it. No laws will be broken. No heads will be smashed. No buildings will be taken over.
Many of us have had friends killed or maimed in Vietnam. Many of us know friends in Canada or jail because they had the guts to refuse to become the slaves of "our" government. Is it much to ask to stay home from class one day, and then an additional day each month?
Any student, and I mean any student, who claims that he wants the war to end but does not participate in the Moratorium, is a fool, a coward or worse. The war is not a plaything. It has caused great sacrifices and hardships for millions of Americans, both those who mistakenly believe that we're fighting for freedom in Vietnam and those who have come to realize that freedom is the farthest thing from Nixon's mind. To participate in the Moratorium is a small sacrifice indeed to ask.
In a time when too many on the left think only of violence and confrontation, a nationwide movement has sprung up with a constructive program which just might work. At KU the Student Mobilization Committee has done a superb job of telling the campus what is going on. The Moratorium has been endorsed by the Student Senate, the Independent Student Party, Council for a Humane Education, Law Students Civil Rights Research Council, Political Science Graduate Students Association, College Young Republicans (!), Students for a Democratic Society, the majority of Western Civilization instructors, fraternities, sororities and scholarship halls.
All can unite on this issue.
As our friends have sacrificed their lives and their futures because of this insane war, let us sacrifice a few days of our education to end it.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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GRIFF AND THE UNICORN
by DAVE SOKOLOFF
Griff & the Unicorn, Copyright, 1980
University Daily Kanman.