.PAGE SIX
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE, KANSAS
MAY 15,1947
Kansan Comments
What We Can Do For War Refugees
The difference between the Estonians at Miami and the huddled thousands of Balts, Ukrainians, Yugoslavs, and Jews in the D. P. camps must be chiefly one of numbers. Yet the bills pending in congress call for the admission of only 100,000 carefully screened refugees a year for four years—an insignificant number compared to the volume of immigration into this country up to World War I.
Offers of financial help came from all over the country. Public sympathy was so great that President Truman issued a special order permitting the party to remain in the country, although its members had arrived without permission, passports, or visas.
Last fall the whole country's sympathy was aorused for 18 Estonian refugees who crossed the Atlantic to Miami in a 38-foot sloop to escape being returned to a government ailien to their principles.
This is in biting contrast to the refusal of congress to do anything about the plight of 850,000 hapless victims of Nazi aggression in the D. P. camps of Germany. Congress has dawdled for two years over reasonable bills to let the United States set a pattern for the absorption of these homeless people.
As late as 1914 this country opened its gates to 1,200,000 immigrants a year. What is an annual quota of 100,000 to a country which, when its productive capacity was far less, admitted for years more than one million immigrants annually?
In 1924 congress passed a law limiting immigration to 154,000 a year, and alloting quotas to various European countries. Immigration since 1924 has fallen a total of nearly two million under these quotas. The unused quotas for 1942 to 1945 total 570,000. A portion of these unused quotas should be reallocated in favor of the displaced persons.
If the United States would take 400,000, it would then be in moral position to call on other countries with relatively high resources and low population density to take the rest. Only a smug insularity and a down-the-nose refusal to recognize the great contributions to American life of recent generations of immigrants can account for the present attitude toward further immigration
Recent generations of immigrant have raised more than their share of wheat, mined more than their share of coal, smelted more than their share of steel, built more than their share of the nation's railroads and industrial plants. They have also written more than their share of the nation's poems, songs, and symphonies, and made more than their share of its scientific discoveries.
The continuation of the concentration camps for displaced persons belies the fine humanitarian sentiments which we were so fond of uttering during the war, and the
If it is at all possible to judge the future by the past, we will be missing an opportunity to enrich our country culturally, scientifically, and economically if we refuse to authorize the modest, temporary resumption of immigration contemplated in proposals to admit our fair share of European refugees.
camps are costing us $300,000,000 a year to maintain.
There is no rational ground for opposing the admission of a reasonable quota of refugees. The 850,000 still in Europe are as deserving as the 18 Estonians. They can contribute as much as the millions of immigrants for whom the Statue of Liberty has lighted the way into a friendly harbor.
Can we not relight the "lamp beside the golden door?"
(Condensed from the
(Condensed from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch)
Dear Editor- Needed: A Better Liberal Education
In recent months considerable attention has been given to the low level of teachers' salaries. Although I do not approve of these conditions, I suggest that perhaps teachers are getting not much less than they are worth.
When students emerge from high school with only sufficient knowledge to pursue the next course in mathematics or business accounting; when college engineering graduates know virtually nothing about the business of life—government religion, and personal satisfaction—and actually so little about engineering that they must start their education when they get out of college, can we say that educators have done such a "bang-up" job?
The educators may say they are unable to do anything about the present curriculum. Heads of our schools and colleges point to parental and political pressure as the rulers, if not of what we are taught, at least of what we are not taught.
I sometimes wonder if education is not used for a negative end, as something to hold juvenile delinquency to a minimum during adolescent years.
In college particularly we need some good survey studies. I cite for example the plight of a junior journalist vainly trying to get a general picture of what chemistry has done or may do, the end results, not the minutely detailed methods.
He finds himself in a laboratory decomposing HgO like Priestly did 171 years ago. Then he picks up some current literature and stares stupid at the miracle of histamine bringing life to a green foot.
We try to give a person a liberal education by considering only one main topic and as many details as possible in connection with it.
A notable exception to many of our confusing courses is the one given to engineers, principles of economics. I suspect that it is more the author's purpose (Dr. John Ise) than the school's that his book is so comprehensive. There are some members of the faculty who would make it a completely unintelligible exact science.
This holds not only for the journalist but also for the chemist who finds his first years much harder because he is traveling down an unlighted road unable to see where he is going or where others have been before him.
Teach us at least the important things known today. Give us a liberal education, not a profuse splattering of knowledge.
Harry E. Wheeler Engineering Sophomore
The University Daily Kansan
Student Newspaper of the UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
Member of the Kansas Press Assn. National Editorial Assn. Inland Daily Press. Represented by the National Advertising Service, 429 Madison Ave. New York, NY.
Managing Editor Marcela E
El Paso Technical Institute, J. T.
Reynolds, Director, El Paso, Texas:
"His information about the brain was
very educational and entertaining."
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