KANSAN COMMENT
A Purple Passion
His speech completed, his ordeal ended,
President Nixon left Kansas State University as he
had arrived—in a flurry of newsmen, security guards and helicopter blades.
The speech had gone well. Though a small band of noisy hecklers shouted at the President during his address and held up forbidden banners, the vast majority of the crowd rewarded Nixon for his efforts with loud and sustained applause.
It was a safe speech. Except for a brief reference to the war in Vietnam, it carefully skirted the issues responsible for campus unrest, although the speech was about campus unrest.
It was introduced with a liberal dose of Purple Power, that commodity so dear to K-State hearts, and was sprinkled throughout with praise for K-State.
The audience, already prepared with several rousing choruses of "Eat'em up, 'Eat'em up, K-SU," literally ate it up.
Time and time again the President brought the audience to its feet in thunderous applause. Did they rise because of some great revelation derived from the reams of reports submitted by the President's corps of special advisory committees? Did the President announce a new policy to make the predominantly student audience so wildly enthusiastic?
No. They rose when the President said that no one was right all the time. They rose again when the President said that Americans must find what is right and change what is wrong. They rose when he said we must respect the law.
Perhaps the enthusiastic reception of each Presidential cliche was an over-compensation for the group of disrupters who shouted epithets and raised clenched fists during the President's speech. If so, it was a wasted effort because, although the disrupters were annoying, they were no threat.
Their slogans were worn; their rhetoric tiresome. They demanded freedom of expression for themselves, but refused to grant it to anyone else.
The President, except for a short deviation from his text that was directed at them, paid the disrupters little notice. But neither did he drop any pearls of wisdom to the multitude who so frantically agreed to his every statement.
The President told newsmen after the speech that he would make more frequent campus appearances if he could get his message across. More than 15,000 people waited for his message in Ahearn Field House, but there was no real message to be heard.
The speech was not disappointing; it was exactly as expected, though not as hoped. And the President was undoubtedly right on all counts. We know we are not always right, that wrongs must be righted and that constructive change must come through the law.
If not, God help us, for we must be satisfied with our own feeble attempts to pull ourselves out of a quagmire of institutional inadequacies and mounting social problems.
But how? Can our chosen leaders offer us no better answers than "It must be done?"
Cass Peterson Assistant Editor
Griff & the Unicorn
BY SOK010FF
"Copyright 1970, University Daily Kansas"
Politicos Square Off Over Universities
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy might have had the election situation of Kansas in mind Sunday night when he gave the first speech of this year's Distinguished Lecture Series at Boston University.
The "politicians of panic," he said, were having an easy time of it following the activities of the "apostles of force and destruction on campus."
"For those who pander to public emotion and perplexity at events on campus are also those who allow the war to continue, and who disorder our national priorities so that we invest in SST's and ABM's instead of teachers and health care for our sick," Kennedy said.
"Turmoil on the campus lends itself to the wildest and basest forms of political rhetoric," Kennedy said. "The kind of demagoguery we hear from our vice president and others provides a thick smoke screen behind which some elements of our society can hide what they themselves are really doing to this nation.
Some of the leading political figures in the state have used the activities on the campuses to further their own personal ambitions. Instead of going through the proper channels to clearly view the matter, they took it upon themselves to intervene in the workings of our educational system.
By proper channels, I am referring to the governing body of higher education—the Kansas Board of Regents. If the regents are not studying the events surrounding the disruptions on campus, then it is time to empanel a new board. But I am almost sure they are.
And so it is in Kansas. We see political contenders in the ring square off at each other and the university campuses all over the state are used as the gloves. KU is not the only one to suffer. Manhattan, Pittsburg and Emporia also will feel the political blows.
And instead of the legislature's issuing a subpoena last fall to a school administrator to acknowledge the names of students involved in an incident which brought about suspension of some of them, why didn't they subpoena the board?
And then, various members of the Kansas Legislature took it upon themselves to reverse a KU rule and promise to those students by demanding that their names be published. Did the taxpayers really want to know who these people were? What has happened to them since their names were put on public record? I really don't know.
And this summer it happened. One student was killed and then another. Even though neither was killed on campus, just because they had been KU students it immediately became the fault of the university and its administrators.
Now, some of these same politicians are running for higher offices. Their campaign platforms reek with what they say they will do on our college campuses if they are elected. Very little is said about other matters in the state which are very real and pertinent. What do they say about welfare and urban renewal? What do they say about the rising crime rate? (It is all related to the troubles on campus, that's what.)
When a teenage boy along with some of his friends decide to rid their county of marijuana, do the politicians say anything or offer any support? If they do, it is just in passing.
Students should be concerned with more of the election issues than just the campus problem. Have any of the politicians said they would support a bill designed to fund the construction of a building to help the growing problem of getting an education while we can? Even if you are not from Kansas, these things should still be important to you because you live here.
The men who are elected in this next election are the men who will be running the state government, which in turn has charge of the educational institutions.
For a few moments this week, our political leaders were not so much concerned with the problems on campus as they were with boosting their public image. Refreshing.
I am referring to President Nixon's opening lecture for K-State's Landon Lecture Series. They were all taking credit for getting him to speak at Manhattan. Yet few of them stopped to think that his appearance might have been, at least in part, out of respect for a former governor and a great man, Alf Landon.
It is past time for us to find out the candidates stand on all political issues, so we can only do the best we can in the time we have left.
Sen. Kennedy concluded his speech by saying, "And so, in large part because mainstream America is preoccupied with concern about the campuses, we all suffer."
And we will.
—Charlie Cape
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