KANSAN Comment
New battle strategy for campus activists
Reprinted from the Salina Journal
College students please note: Here is how to use your power.
Kansas college chiefs are making solemn plans to prevent disorder on the campuses this school year. So are the heads of institutions elsewhere. President Nixon is fearfully concerned.
This concern I share. Academic freedom cannot survive in anarchy. The tyranny of the mob violates basic personal liberty.
But students need be neither anarchists nor tyrants to be effective.
Their main beef is the war and their personal relationship to it. Their other complaints can be negotiated. For a year now, college administrators have been busy setting up the machinery of collective bargaining on such issues as dormitory hours and bum professors. The semesters should be full of delightful committee meetings, a practical exercise in democratic action.
The point of attack should be the prime war makers, the President, the Senators, the Congressmen, the Governors, all the politicians who direct national policy.
But the deans and presidents have no answer to the war. It is a waste of time for students to attack ROTC, CIA, Dow Chemical or the Marine recruiting sergeants. These are effects, not causes; they are symptoms, not the disease.
The strategy should be envelopment, the blitzkrieg thrust coupled with flanking movements. It could work this way:
Everytime a politician shows his face, at airport, bus station, telephone booth or public
meeting, he should be enveloped by students asking questions, polite questions yet insistent ones, allowing time and quiet for answers, but plied without ceasing. These questions could be augmented by placards, not naughty but pithy. The politician should not be hindered but he should not be allowed to move without being enveloped.
Camouflage is essential because envelopment must be particularly thorough at rallies in behalf of the politician. The students should wear his badges, buttons and colors. This would further the element of surprise and also deter the fuzz. Above all, the men should be cleanshaven and well-pressed, the girls with the mini-skirts freshly laundered, wearing, not carrying their shoes. They should appear the concerned middle-class, asking questions without end, to the point. This is infiltration without the danger of backlash.
As an auxiliary to this psychological warfare, the students should use their spare time to write letters to the politicians, short, friendly, frequent and pungent but never stereotyped or mimeographed. In this effort, their parents and friends could be enlisted.
A politician so enveloped will be moved. He says he believes, often does believe, that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Let him hear it. Without ceasing. About the war.
Now I really don't believe the college students can or will organize to proceed on this envelop strategy. It would be entirely legal, require hard work, demand clever thought. It is much more fun to sit in the muck and shout childish obscenities.
Her soul thoughts...
By Mike Shearer Arts & Review Editor
The new Miss America, the latest non-entity of that now growing group of non-entities, has proven herself unbelieveably profound on the dilemma of the Black American.
After commenting that she thought the Miss Black America pageant (which is not affiliated with the Miss White America pageant) was "very nice." Pamela Anne Eldred said that she thought someday there would be a black Miss America.
"When a girl deserves to win it, she'll win it." this latest episode in facadical Americanism said.
Reminds one of the old plantation owner's line that he'll be glad to give his slaves liberty just as soon as they've raised themselves up to his level of whiteness.
But anyway, you black chicks out there keep working hard and, who knows, maybe someday you'll be able to keep the corners of your unbelieving lips turned up in a smile which is plastic enough to make you white enough to make you banal enough to be Miss America.
America, and where else?, is where you're allowed to live next door to anyone so long as your lawn looks like his.
Dandelions, anyone?
Off the walls
The "M" and the "F" on the bottom half of the poster are understandable, but we've scratched our heads a bit over the "N."
And we don't really understand another thing: how "fee codes" and "sex codes" were juxtaposed on the same poster.
All evidence seems to point to the news that at KU the woman is finally achieving emancipation from the "fees" so long imposed upon the fairer sex.
Unlike a few diehard colleges and universities, KU long ago joined the mass of institutions of higher learning which admit female students.
And this year, for the first time, freshman women—with their parents' advice of course—can choose to live in a residence hall with no closing hours. Coeduction has reached its zenith.
Those stick-in-the-muds who objected to the integration of women at KU were surprised when not a "whimper of scandal" occurred during the early years of KU coeducation, one historian notes.
And we will all be duly surprised again when we learn that women adjust to freedom as well as men.
There's only one problem left. What are we going to do with all those "N's"?
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