Fuel for the fire Certain Kansans are convinced the University of Kansas is a seething hotbed of incipient radicals bent on destroying the institution which harbors them. These alarmists—including State Senator Reynolds Schultz, Lawrence—are wrong, for very few KU students seek violence and destruction. But the fears of men like Sen. Schultz may be realized, because those few who want to burn KU may capitalize on mass student dissent engendered by many educational grievances. The ground at KU is ripe for the seeds of revolution, then, for even the "nicest," quietest scholars have seen their education is not fitted to the world into which they will graduate. Graduates enter a technological society, but few courses at KU give the student the inner resources he needs to cope with the octopus arms of this mechanism. A young woman in working-class America is considered a responsible adult, but at KU that same woman is subject to women's closing hours. Students are dissatisfied with grading systems—an outmoded form of extrinsic award, cryptic symbols which are not accurate indications of anything. Every KU student has yawned through at least one course taught by an inept instructor. There are many teachers who are insufficiently grounded in course material, who cannot communicate, who do not care about their students. Students are forced to study requirements which prepare them for nothing. Of what earthly use is a knowledge of the grammar of a foreign language when one is not taught to speak the language? Students are tired of waiting two hours to see a doctor during the flu season—so they are given a tunnel under the Hill, an expanded Student Union. Many schools and departments at KU need extra finances, curriculum changes, improved facilities. Vast amounts are spent on new buildings and laboratories for the sciences while the art department and others are sadly overcrowded. KU professors are often underpaid. Many of the better instructors leave for greener fields. KU students ask for bread and are given stones. No, KU students are not radicals or revolutionaries. We only ask for an education that will equip us to handle your world of war, urban blight, pollution, mechanization, mobility and decaying values. We can escape the burning, if we want to, for we don't want to see our lovely Hill racked by bombs. We don't want to be tear-gassed or imprisoned. We don't want the police to invade our quiet sanctuary of learning. To escape the burning, however, the Kansas Board of Regents on their thrones must be willing to support changes instead of merely lashing out at ROTC demonstrators. The Kansas legislature, including the state senator from Lawrence, must be willing to provide funds to support these educational changes instead of merely gleefully probing the sex and drug mores of KU students. The KU Student Senate must abandon New Left rhetoric and political hassles and instead develop some solid legislative programs. The Faculty Senate, their natural allies, must unite with the students to make KU the best possible educational source. But it would be absurdly optimistic to hope for such an altruistic response from these institutions. Which is why we wouldn't be surprised, if, before this year ends, the University of Kansas is besieged by frustrated students, led by one of KU's few "radicals." Their fire will be well-fueled. Joanna Wiebe Sorel's News Service In Trusts We Trust WASHINGTON President Nixon, speaking informally at the White House, expressed the hope that more young Americans would find in religion an answer to today's "crisis of the spirit." He suggested that there is too much emphasis on the materialistic side of life among the nation's youth. Shortly thereafter the White House released an official accounting of the President's personal assets $980,400, chiefly in real estate. R. K. Mitchell the apologist Last year—Feb. 28, 1969—Gus DiZerega devoted one of his columns in this paper to a celebration of the galvanizing effect which, in his view, the SDS and similar groups have had upon the University of Kansas. As he described it, the entire history of the student body here was one of apathy and submission before the New Left came—a sudden light in the wilderness. He said, in fact, that "most of what has occurred has been a direct result of New Left agitation. NONE has been the result of student liberals INITIATING anything." Now this was a curious thing. One cannot expect Mr. DiZerega to remember the violent anti-war protests that took place here during World War I, but one suspects that he ought to know more about the Strong Hall sit-ins of 1965, the march on the Sigma Nu house that same year, and the picketing of the Lawrence Selective Service system in 1966—the last of which resulted in one of the picketers' arrest, conviction on the charges and subsequent expulsion from school. He might at least have heard of the picketing of the regional meeting of the Arnold Air Society in 1964. And if he really thinks that SDS was the first major group of its kind on campus, then he is ignorant of the Student Peace Union, the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee and the Kansas University Liberal Action Committee. A simple thing such as the right to pass out leaflets on campus was not granted until 1964—a right won by those apathetic students DiZeregas speaks of. Back in those lethargic, submissive times, believe it or not, there were a few people who were doing things—Laird Wilcox, George Ragsdale, Lee Byrd, Jim Masters, John Garlinghouse, Nate Sims, Charlie Hook, Walter Bgoya, Rick Mabbut, Bert Renkle—the list could go on quite a ways. But we have no special quarrel with Mr. DiZerega—except insofar as he stands for the many. This ability to shove the past down some convenient memory-hole and this total espousal of whatever is new—be it the New Left or New Blue Cheer—that precisely characterizes both the great middle of American society and the so-called New Left itself. This New Left seems neither genuinely right nor left but suspended in a sort of hyperspatial void: the great Now. It is easy to believe that Mr. DiZerega and his friends do remember the 1965 action, and that they are able to dismiss it with the word that has become the great draught-horse of New Left rhetoric: irrelevance. The way in which the New Left manages to justify its goals gives us, at least, a sense of deja vu. We pause sometimes to stare at the upper level of Strong Hall, wondering when DiZerega and Co. will get around to carving the phrases there: Ignorance is Strength, Slavery is Freedom, War is Peace. There are some of us who have been around—neither as teachers nor administrators (nor even, sometimes, as students) long enough to recognize the fundamental truth in Dean Heller's notorious remark that "students are transients" in the University community. George Orwell knew that what was needed in 1984 was not so much vision of things future as a coherent vision of things past: history. The Apologist believes this to be true for 1969 as well. THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN An All-American college newspaper Kansan Telephone Numbers Newsroom—UN 4-3646 Business Office—UN 4-4358 Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and on weekends. 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