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Tuesday, December 7, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Bus Subsidy Questionable
The Student Senate's motivations for subsiding the Lawrence City Bus Company were good, but the end results remain questionable.
Bus service would have stopped Friday, but will now be continued to March 17 due to the Senate guarantee of $15,184 to the company. Not all of this will come from activity fee money; money collected from fares will be deducted from the $1,500. This means simply that the Senate will foot the difference between the total amount of fares and the total amount of services incurred in the specified period. Whatever the Senate pays, it will be a substantial amount.
What are we getting for our money? Fares will be lowered from 20 cents to 10 cents. This is an obvious benefit for the students who ride the bus, but what about others?
The Senate has guaranteed almost $3,000 for the finals period alone. Dugge Ogle, president of the company, says he expects about 500 to 600 rides a day during finals. Doing a little simple arithmetic, this would mean at the most $480 fares over the eight-day final期, or a total of $480 collected in fares. $300 for $480 for rides is about 60 cents a ride. The cost of fares is adding about 50 cents to each 10-cent fare so that the bus company can break even.
In other words, the students who don't ride the bus during finals are getting ripped off, because they're paying most of the cost anyway through their activity fee.
That is a practical consideration. A more theoretical, but related, consideration is the distasteful practice of government subsidizing "private," "free" enterprise. The federal government has used Lockheed, and the Lawrence City Bus Company, in its support Senate is using with the Lawrence City Bus Company.
A quick answer to the Lockheed analogy is that students are reaping more obvious and immediate benefits from the bus subsidy than the bus loan. The Lockheed loan腰. We all ride the bus now at
half-cost, but only a few of us will
I could be wrong; the lowered fares could provide a substantial incentive for students to ride the bus, and the company could find itself with enough riders at the 10-cent fare to not need the Senate subsidy. It's doubtful though. More than half of KU's students have cars; more than half of those who mind others walk. Are we really the people who need bus service? I don't think so.
The Lawrence City Bus company gets 80 per cent of its business from KU. Most of its route go through the campus. The service it gives to the city of Lawrence is minimal.
And I submit that Lawrence residents need bus service much more than do KU students. The residents of north Lawrence and east Lawrence are, to a large extent, more impatient with the business paying decent wages they need cheap transportation, unavailable to them now and unavailable under the Senate subsidy. It's a vicious circle for the poor, unable to afford the benefits they cannot afford to live within easy access of such employment or cannot afford the transportation to get there. Merchants in poor areas know they have a captive, essentially immobile audience, and can as a result pay much higher than in other parts of town.
The thought at the Senate meeting Sunday was that perhaps a Senate subsidy could help persuade the city of Lawrence to subsidize routes within the city itself. This is the largest possible benefit which could come from the Senate subsidy, but it's still only a possibility.
The city should and must, if it wants bus service, share in the cost of such service. The riders are there, but they need to be found first. Bus service can thrive in Lawrence only if it is actively promoted. The Senate subsidy is only a partial, temporary and essentially weak answer to continuing bus service in the city.
Pat K. Malone
Guest Comment
A Sure Fire Cure
BERT C. CARLYLE Reprinted from the
Reprinted from the Douglas County Observer
It looks like the six state colleges and universities have reached a point in history where each must re-examine its own reason for being a college. It follows with little or no increase in state funds.
Tears of sympathy and understanding flow in volumes from legislators, the Governor's office and the office of the budget director, James Bibb. Everybody agrees that our state has a financial institution MUST have more money or lose valuable faculty and nonteaching employees.
But neither the legislators nor the Governor are going to go to the already overburdened Kansas taxpayers and ask them to dig in. So move would be pure political suicide this year.
With their anger over property taxes already fanned into a white-hot fire by state-ordered repealsaplays, sky rocketing budgetets, city budgets, and county budgets, they have come to get hog-tied, branded and turned out to help these days is to advocate higher taxes.
So, regardless of the eloquent pleas delivered by the college presidents before the Governor—and his budget director, and those that will no doubt be recited again before the appropriations committee of the state legislature—nobody, but NOBODY in his right mind politically, is going to carry the ball for higher taxes for higher education.
This writer has a solution. Like some of the other solutions we have offered, it may go unberailed and unneeded. We have never given them any thought. They are too simple (the eghegads say "similistic") or the people we try to convince are too simple. Anyway, here is the B-CIM-SOLVING FORMULA FOR SOLVING KANSAS COLLEGE FINANCIAL PROBLEMS
Step No. 1; Raise the tuition, fees and dormitory rentals for ALL out-of-state students to the ACTUAL COST OF SENDING THEM TO HIGH-SCHOOLS. Now, this is not a new idea. But everyone somebody suggests it, they are hooted down by the very professors who want higher salaries, on the theory that it would be more atmospheric atmosphere in our universities.*
That might have been a valid argument back in the days when Kansas students never got out of Kansas until they get out of college but it doesn't hold water today. Most kids these days see a great deal of the United States—and many of them several foreign
countries by the time they get in college. So the need to maintain that precious "cosmopolitan" atmosphere in our state colleges is a dead issue.
The average person doesn't realize that student tuition is only about 19 percent of the total cost of maintaining the university. So—the rest of the money comes from federal programs, not from alumni (which would be tax money if they didn't give it) and tax money paid to the state.
Kansas taxpayers have neither legal or moral obligations to furnish college education for the offspring of citizens in other states! We get all of these students from high schools, and our living fees are far below the costs in universities in the East and on the West Coast.
Why should the Governor and the state legislature strap the Kansas taxpayer even further to furnish fine universities for these students, whom we estimate to make up at least 30 percent of our current state college enrollments?
Step No. 2: After we raise the out-of-state tuitions and dorm fees to actual costs, that brings 5 times present fees, we can count on losing about 100 percent of those "bargain" fees, so our enrollment will mean about a 30 percent decrease in our enrolments at these state schools.
Step No. 3: With the 30 percent enrollment drop, we may then proceed to "weed out" the poorest 30 percent of present faculty. Let us set up a greater challenges' they keep talking about.
Step No. 4: Now that we have weeded out the incompetences and the weirdos from the faculties; let us give the remainder of our faculty and employees a 20 percent raise in salaries, so they won't have any reason to leave Kansas.
Step No. 5: Let's take the other 10 percent of the budget we have saved and start some new, revolutionary educational programs that will equip the students with needed skills; some which will get them jobs when they graduate.
In Lawrence, Topeka, Wichita or Kansas City, you have to wait 3 to 6 months for an appointment with a dentist, eye doctor, or most any other medical specialist. But our colleges keep turning out people with majors in "peace," "poet art and philosophy."
This state has turned out too many people in TPhD, Masters' and Bachelor's Degrees in the field.
WE CAN have excellent universities, top salaries for faculty, and students educated for needed professions—IF we will only stop the education of students from other states.
Garry Wills
CBS Views Upper-Middle American Climb
CBS recently devoted an hour讲事 to the discontents of an upper-middle-class family, one living in a posh home where they had moved on—moving up—to even posher circumstances as we leave them, the moving van their escalator from one building to another.
Well, the pater families has no time to think about his goals, and runs like a squirrel in his cage: "I try not to look back . . . We're moving on." The mother has to too much time, and doesn't know what to do with it: "I may be competing for something; but if I am, I don't know what it's for."
The children are forced to pre-achieve their parents' *aimless competitive expenditures of energy*: "You have to help them get it," and you have to hurt yourself to get it." This first time, the hurt is rewarded by parents who demand it. But when they learn that one track as adults, how do they justify doing so in terms? "Fash to get what you want"—
And they are sad-sad in their wealth, their health, their TV-ad good teeth and medicated breath. Why is this?
Needed by whom? By her children?
Well, yes and no. She tells the cameraman that he is seeing as much of her life as she has on school day. Week-ends, the family "escapes" his hard-earned home (the home that is its castle) by driving for hours to a cottage, where—the mother lives—she is forced to be with her children.
but what is it you want? The mother has a standard acceptable liberal-moral answer: she wants to be wanted. She feels the need to be needed.
A bad mother, then? No. A frightened one. One who knows the children will grow up; marry; leave her. What then? The anxieties are anticipatory, like her mere touches of a future Age, slight wrinkles showing her long-sketch lines to be scored in later with heavier strokes. Who will need her then? And if no one needs her, what will she do with herself?
the aim of the game is to keep feeling needed—i.e., important—to satisfy herself, then revealed that better than the wife did. The other way at any change of neighborhood. In her
old area, she says, "I started as low man on the toponole of the cancer drive, and worked my up way to area chairman." Yet when she came to a new neighborhood, "I was back down because I was not a way of satisfying our needs, but—to her—a way to feel needed (important). She argues, in a crazy parody of women's liberation, that her husband got a promotion (at the *career* department) a demotion on the *charity* toonole pole). She thinks there should be some way to retain rank earned in one suburb's scrimgames of the tea-and-bridge circuit—she does not even ask what demand could be more easier?
And so the grisly joke: She wants to feel needed, yet must keep moving farther away from those in real need. Since her way of being "needed" demands being important, she must have a bigger house, ever further from the potometer and even from new starts from the bottom of the totem pole, once she reaches the top she must start over. That is all she knows how to do—to climb. And one needs a pole, to
climb; new poles when one has exhausted old ones. She is the one who "needed" the new home.
The saddest of many sad scenes showed a clucking gum-load of such ladies, the heroine's soul-mate rivals (who is inside on the toen pole?) as they were being treated to give them soul-sensitivity sessions. It was "Rent-a-Spade" at its most blatant. They paid him to come in, with a tie and briefcase, and ranted at them in sympathy to them while they nodded in sympathy to various ghetto-shoppers of a literary terror.
The camera caught the one indispensable comment on this scene—the puzzled face, looking in on the lecture, of the gym's black janitor. Poor invisible fellow, he was the true death's head at this suburban family's feast, but one the banqueters will never see. They see only the hated ghetto rhetoric and the loud speeches, spokesman; not the man at hard who needs them. All they ask for is to be needed. Yet never such need-needers and the truly needy shall meet.
James J. Kilpatrick
Copyright, 1971
Copyright, 1971 Universal Press Syndicate
The Boring Athens Colonels
ATHENS, GREECE—The revolutionary government of George Papadopoulos sits over the seabird colony of legendary Colossus of Rhodes. It won't be topped any time soon. But if the colonels should be run out of office, it'll be because the things are measured in the
Balkans, the colonels are not so awfully despotic—but they are dull. And the Greek people are well-impressed, they are bored.
These impressions emerge from a hectic week of interviews, field trips and field field trials. I advance them subtly subject to later revision.
The complaint, it appears, is that there is simply too much peace, too much order, too much difficulty in Greece. For most of the past 150 years, since the glorious revolution of 1821, the Greeks have been passionately fighting against Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Turks.
Griff and the Unicorn
By Sokoloff
"Copyright 1971. David Sokoloff
Germans and Italians, and find time hanging heavy on their hands, they fail to fighting each other as their finest national pastime.
For nearly five years, since the colonels seized power in April of 1967, this bellicocity has had to be contained. Because there is no parliament, there are no electors, there are no parties, no splinters, no factions. The Queen Mother, who once provoked some splendid quarrels, has vanished from the Capitol, has fled the doggie. And the colonels, whatever their ideological faults, are running the country superbly. Politically speaking, the Greeks are like three well-fellied bridge spiders. They are getting along fine, but they're not having much fun.
It will be a long time, one is told, before the colonels bring back a parliament. The Greeks they want to return to status quo ante. The parliament of five years ago was mostly sham and the country was in chaos. But the Greeks who want to return to the forms of democracy are still much cherished. What is desired is a revival of the old system of democracy stance. This the colonels are now unwilling to risk. They are providing clean streets, new industries, and a stable currency stance. This the colonels have had a bad press from American industry and from liberals generously. This is the intellectuals tend to hate colonels as cats hate dogs. The animosity is instinctive, not reasoned. Intelligence abounds here in Greece that something better.
The country's industrial development, for one thing, is eye-popping. Greece's gross national product is soaring at a rate of 30 per cent everywhere one looks, in Salinika and Athens, construction is booming. A visitor is proudly escorted to new shipyards steel mills, refineries and factories being held to 2.5 percent. There is virtually no unemployment. The government is collecting taxes with such efficiency that its turnover is falling. Per capita income is rising Illiteracy is falling. Tourists are flocking. This government is Getting Things Bone—but it is not the big thing more about penguins than he really wanted to know. The volatile Greeks seem to feel a little caged by the bankers' bar statistics is not much poetry in statistics.
In terms of population, Greece is about the size of New York City. To draw some common conclusions with drugs or crime; its sidewalks are free of hippies and litter; the peak-hour traffic is not yet intolerable, and the sky above is cloudy blue. A blue Egane New York, by contrast, has the right to elect Mr. Rosenthal, the a moralistic mediator in the sidewalk cafe and watching the girls go by, may be forgiven the heretical thought that maybe Greece would like to arrange for
Deputy Prime Minister Stylianos Pattakos, answering a correspondent's question, insists the government should support of 95 per cent of the people. This is most probably an oversubscription of an October bond issue provides evidence of a remarkable public confidence. The military government is insignificant," as an aide to Congressional last month reported; it is the kind of nonsense that used to be called bithering. The colonels say the value ofoyal; what they are chaikas.
(C) 1971 The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
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