Page 2 University Daily Kansav Monday, Jan. 5, 1952
K-State Yearbook Seen as Example
Although it may be distasteful for some to seek an example in a traditional athletic rival, K-State has established a record in the past years for having the most consistently good yearbook in the country. We may be wise to overlook tradition and see if we might benefit from their leadership.
In reviewing our present yearbook situation and considering improvements that might be made, it seems a good idea to take a look at the methods used at Kansas State college.
C. J. Medlin, professor of journalism, is the guiding light of the Purple and Gold, as their book is called. He is instructor in a class called Yearbook Editing and Management which offers two hours' credit. Also he is graduate manager of student publications. In the latter position he oversees the business angle of the yearbook production.
Has the board succeeded? Yes. The arrangement began in 1934 with the yearbook holding a $5,000 deficit. Going into World War II the book had a sinking fund of 15,000 which easily carried it over the lean enrollment years of the war. Today they still have that same financial backlog.
The control board of the yearbook is the Board of Student publications. It consists of three students and three faculty members. The students are elected at large from the student body at the same time the student council elections are held. The head of the journalism department is chairman of the board while the other two faculty members are appointed by the president of the college.
The graduate manager is hired by the board which also elects the editor and business manager each year. The board has no connection with the student council and the council has no authority over the publications.
Speaking even more loudly for the success of the system is the remarkable record of being rated all-American yearbook by the Associated Collegiate Press for 17 straight years. This record alone puts the Purple and Gold on the top of the stack of American college yearbooks.
Students pay no more for their quality books at K-State than we pay for ours. The price comes from the activity fee which is paid when entering school. The activity fee also covers admission to athletics, dramaties and other campus activities, just as at KU. Their activity fee for two semesters is $20.
The latter record is attributed by Prof. Medlin to the class in yearbook editing. He says the classwork has improved the book's quality remarkably.
This presentation of the K-State system is not a proposal that KU adopt the same plan. But, while there are parts of it we do not care for, there is much of the plan that we would do well to consider.
A class to write for the book is necessary for a consistent level of high quality.
A full-time business employee to handle the routine but important bookkeeping and bill collecting is good and a necessary part of the K-State system.
Making subscriptions compulsory is not necessary and need not become a part of our system here. A large circulation for a yearbook is no worry if it is a good book.
A good yearbook is something to save and treasure. It is not something which one may share with several others then discard. If it is a good book, each student will want his own.
Under such circumstances, it is easy to see why a good book should be a success financially. Roger Yarrington.
Newest Russian Purge Follows Old Tradition
The Kremlin apparently has signaled the start of a new, harsh campaign against the Jews.
Jews already have all but disappeared from public life in Russia, although several million of them live inside the boundaries of the Soviet Republic.
Now the same policies are to be applied to the East European satellite states.
Thus it was no accident that 11 of the 14 former Communist leaders purged in the recent Prague trials were Jews. Ana Pauker's sudden plunge to disgrace in Romania is believed traceable at least in part to her Jewish origin.
The anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist policy also has been introduced in Poland where Premier Boleslaw Bierut called for vigilance against "Zionist intrigues."
Persecution of the Jews is an old story in Russia and Eastern Europe. The walled ghetto was a familiar part of eastern Europe 300 years ago. Pogroms against the Jews swept Russia, Romania and Poland as far back as the 16th century.
It is part of the Kremlin strategy to pose as the protector of minorities
Israel, however, has in the Kremlin's own words turned out to be a "bourgeois-nationalist" state, and a disappointment to the Arab world. Russia to the Middle East harp on the "threat" of Israel to the Arab states.
And the Communists had hoped to make use of the Jews, encouraging contributions to Israel from
Latest estimates say there are about 10,000 Jews in Czechoslovakia, 225,000 in Romania, between 30,000 and 40,000 in Poland, some 100,000 in Hungary and some 5,000 in Bulgaria.
One immediate result of the new Kremlin policy may be a ban on further Jewish emigration. One group of 3,000 has been scheduled to leave Hungary shortly, as the country negotiated earlier. It now is not known whether they will be allowed to leave.
the satellite states and even permitting Jewish emigration to Israel.
In contrast to the "liberal" policy which has been in effect in the satellite states up to now, Russia itself has never made any concessions.
Censorship by fear seems to be again getting a strangle hold on American education. Twenty years ago, so-called American patriots branded everything they distrusted in the public school system as radical, today it is branded communism.
One Man's Opinion
Books that have been texts in the schools for years are now being branded subversive. Shakespeare and Charles Dickens have become unwholesome reading as they preach discrimination.
—United Press.
By DON MOSER
Frank Magruder's "American Government," a standard text in schools for 25 years and a text used by the armed forces, is now banned as "pinkish." One group has forced schools to ban Howard Fast's "Citizen Tom Paine" because it is a crime against the church. Church leaders in those communities have no knowledge against what church it could be. The poetry anthologies of Louis Untermeyer are banned as they have Russian inspired poems in them.
Behind this blind censorship are hysterical little groups that call themselves such things as the Committee of Ten, The Minute Women of the U.S.A., Inc., and dozens of bogus citizen's committees. These groups, work through speakers who are trained in the fine art of distortion, misquoting, and quoting out of text.
Teachers are being censored in their speech. Lectures on the United Nations, UNESCO, and Soviet Russia are taboo.
The committee claimed that UNESCO was furthering a campaign to pervert the teaching profession in this country and to destroy the freedom of tax-supported schools. The attack was based on a non-existent article supposedly published by UNESCO that said teachers should not encourage students to show loyalty to the United States.
The lengths these groups will go to in discrediting teaching is amazing. In California, a group is trying forbid the studying of the UN in public schools because, "Alger Hiss had a great deal to do with the UN charter."
The recent commotion over the "subversive activities" of UNESCO is a good example of how these groups work. An outfit that goes by the stirring title of the American Flag committee in 1951 printed an expose of this UN organization.
This so-called fact got into the Congressional Record and was later printed in leaflet form and distributed to millions.
These super-fired patriots are having a field day denouncing everything and anything. In one school a committee had the picture of two knights in armor taken to the wall of a fifth-grade class because "Life" magazine had used the same picture in an article on communism.
These groups are continually undermining our education system by fear. The communities in which these outfits are working have teachers in constant fear of their jobs. In Scarsdale, N. Y., which has one of the finest school systems in the country, teachers are in dread of causing the disfavor of the powerful Committee of Ten.
The attack on Maguder's book is a good example of their use of misquoting. They claim the book said, "The United States and the Soviet Union are equals fighting for world leadership." What the book said was, "The United States.and the Soviet Union, the two most powerful allies in World War II are now rivals for world leadership."
American educators will be able to give a long sigh of relief when the public wakes up to the fact that these watchdogs of education are crippling all types of free thought and advances in American education throgh the use of the communist technique of fear and thought control.
This is just one of many misquotes and quotes that do not even appear in the book that these organizations are using the fight educational freedom.
by Dick Bibler
Three out of four motor vehicles involved in 1951 accidents were passenger cars.
Little Man on Campus
"At home for two weeks of Christmas vacation--you'd think they didn't have a smoke th' whole time."
Second Dust Bowl To Hurt Everyone
Today's Dust Bowl farmers need to observe and practice carefully the best of soil conservation methods to avoid a repeat of the 1934 drought.
During 1935 in Texas, 61 dust storms ripped open unprotected fields in which grain, sorghum, and wheat had failed to germinate. Wind dug holes in the ground, ate out ditches, and pulled up grass by the roots. According to soil conservationists, about 2,000 years are required to build an inch of topsoil.
Homesteaders in the early days were encouraged to settle in this area by liberal state land grants and by the coming of the railroads. They broke out the clay loam and sand for general cash crop farming which was necessary to earn a living from small acreage.
A long continued drought easily could bring a return of dust bow, conditions to the previously affected areas. The danger is centered in the western one-third of the winter wheat belt, which includes western Oklahoma, western Kansas, eastern Colorado, eastern New Mexico, and northwestern Texas.
In fact, whole counties turned into ghost communities and more than 150,000 bankrupt farmers fled the eroded soil. Nobody wanted the helpless sprawling network of abandoned farms, so the federal government bought them.
United States soil conservation service technicians planted most of the fields back in grass. This grass cover virtually guarantees that 1-16 or more of the dust bowl is defeated before it starts. High prices caused farmers of the area to throw away most of the recuperative meshes. There are 123 million acres of cropland now in use, 22 million are strictly high risk and should be retired to permanent grass.
In 1950, hot winds whipped up the old dust bowl again. Wheat farmers were again menaced by drought, insects, and dust. The "black blizzards" of the 1930's didn't return entirely, but the topsoil blew and rain was needed. Finally, rain did come and the luck of the farmers continued to hold.
Consistent rains ended the old dust bowl in the early 1940s, and so the government stopped buying land. But by then it had bought 669,521 acres of submarginal land.
The plains soils, as a rule, are highly fertile. Everything is there to produce phenomenal crops, everything except dependable rainfall. In
fact, the average rainfall is near the minimum with which it is possible to grow crops.
Gales of 40 and 50 miles per are not unusual on the plains. If an exposed soil becomes loose, fine and dry, the wind will find it. If enough land becomes dust and the weather is dry, dust storms are bound to occur.
Farmers say the whole situation has been exaggerated. In the 1930s is was said that 9 million acres of dust bowl land had been reduced to outright desert and 80 million acres seriously damaged. According to the farmers, the figures were never 1-50 of that.
The fact that eventually another drought will come, causing more dust storms, is accepted but shunned. Farmers state their lack of concern as due to the fact that a drought on the unprecedented scale of the 1930s is unlikely to recur again. Also, almost all Dust Bowl farmers now have large cash reserves, which they didn't have in 1930.
Dust never has worried southwest farmers as much as dollars. They say economic collapse hit them harder than drought in the first dust bowl.
They learned by bitter experience, to summer-fallow their land and not plant in a dry seedbed. Irrigation is a major drought weapon that few farmers had 18 years ago. The development of shallow wells for economical pumping has been amazing. Many talk vaguely of the modern methods being better than the old. The truth is that from a soil conservation standpoint, modern methods are worse than the old.
If another performance of the dust bowl is given all will suffer equally—the ones with soil conservation methods, the get-rich quick farmers, and the absentee investors.
—Mary Coope
Second only to speeding as a accident factor in 1951 was failure to respect the right-of-way.
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