4
Thursday, November 11.1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Activity Fee Problems
It appears that a group of law students are spearheading a drive to secede from the Student Senate, or to escape paying student activity fees.
Their idea is that by seceding they would receive a greater "kickback" on the money they pay for activity fees—$24 per student. The plan is to lower the fee and keep it within the Law School.
A nice idea, but hardly realistic.
First, and probably most important,
the Board of Regents sets the fees
and the amount each student pays,
so it is not simply a matter of waving
good-bye to the senate and its money
bickering. Second, while the
proposal would halt law students
funding of the Concert Course and
the Daily Kansan, to use two
examples, there is no guarantee that
the law students would stop attending
the Concert Course and reading the Kansan.
This proposal offers little merit or sense, outside of scoring the general confusion surrounding the activity fee and its implementation.
The Student Senate, in hopes of finding a way out of the morass that is now the distribution of the $24 activity fee, commissioned a preference poll which was held in October.
The results of the poll are in, and have been for some time. Those students charged with analyzing the results of the poll are saying, in effect, that they can not make valid conclusions about the poll because of the small number of students that actually voted—about 18 per cent of the student body. Chancellor Chalmers says the poll shows him students "apparently oppose funding organizations."
The real beauty of this poll is that it is so complex and constructed with so many biases that it is open to virtually any interpretation—according to who you are and how you feel about the activity fee.
Many student senators, specifically the perennial politicos, would like to see the activity fee it provides them with a nice plaything game at big-time liberal politics. There is an equally large contingent of
senators that favors abolishing the fee in favor of a yet unexplained option or combination of options. Chalmers has said on many occasions he favors eliminating the fee altogether. The latter two reasons for elimination of the fee constitute a simplistic attempt, like the law student's—to solve a bothersome and trying problem.
Perhaps now would be a good time for all those with vested interests—shalmers, the senators—to follow their decision; those students who actually did vote.
Clearly, the sense of the vote must point to a maintenance of the status quo. The status quo option received not only the largest number of single choice votes but also the largest number of total votes for all three choices.
Now, I know there will be those who will reject this conclusion on the argument that the status quo option did not receive a majority of votes—my answer is neither did David Miller. In fact, if anyone on this campus should appreciate this vote as a mandate—it should be David.
To those who want to axe the fee because it causes administrative and bureaucratic headaches, I can only respond with the old story about the priest, who after a large meal belched quite loudly much to the shock and dismay of his dinner guests. Sensing their discomfort and shock, he asked, "What did you expect, chimes?" What do those administrators and senators expect—meetings where the only order of business is meaningful and relevant legislation?
Instead of eliminating the fee we should purge the Senate of those senators who use the fee for political leverage and boosting their own sagging political egos. I dressey that if Chalmers and the Senate would exert a comparable effort towards such a purge, as that directed to eliminate the fee, the headache would be less a pain.
Until that time, we are stuck with a system—not inherently bad—only sullen by a group sadly short on perspective.
Tom Slaughter
James J. Kilpatrick
Free Press Is Alive And Well
Taking one thing with another, and looking back to the bad old days of John Adams, this much is clear: The patient is remarkably healthy. Freedom of the press has not merely survived it, has flourished. Americans today have
WASHINGTON—Senator Sam Erwin sent me an invitation several weeks ago to testify before his sub-committee on freedom of the press. This was just before I was beaded abroad, and I began a return was uncertain; there would have to make the required 75 copies of a statement; maybe a letter would suffice.
At the same time, Senator Sam is the wisest man in the Senate; he is deeply concerned—just as all of us in the press are deeply concerned—about the survival of a free press. Perhaps a few observations would be useful.
The truth was that I didn't want to testify. For a working newspaperman to abandon the press table, and take to account what he sees against nature, like a lady wrestler or a horse on stilts. If we have something to say to Senators, we ought to say it in print; and if Senators want us to say, okay, let 'em put it in the Record.
access to more information and opinion than they have ever had. This material is presented far more readably and attractively than it was in the days of the "party press." It is timely. Most of it is objective.
Over the thirty-odd years of my own professional experience, First Amendment freedoms have expanded, not contracted. We no longer are in danger of being threatened by a threat of ruinous legal suits. When I came on the scene, an editor could write gingerly of "planned parenthood" and "social diseases." Now even the girl reporters are writing of contempt and syphilis and nobody blinks.
Changes in law and in public attitudes have been accompanied by fantastic changes in the technology of communications. We have tools now—satellites, and computers, and high-speed TeleX—that permit us to serve up more information than the ordinary can discert. We have network television, a tool of interactive television. We have greater freedom, better equipment, and a more informed audience than journalists have ever known.
As the Senator proceeds with his examination, listening to the heartbeat, thumping on our lungs, we will discover that freedom of the press is in the good hands of a bunch of health nuts. We are not afraid to point out the point of hypochondria. When Spiro Aignews cohesion, we tend to yell "TBJ" If Dear Burch murs his brow, up at the Federal Communications Commission, CBS runs a fever. Oneiculous prosecutor demands a reporter who says we cry that gangrene is setting in.
This jealous vigilance has its good aspects: As power increasingly is centralized in our society—in government and in communications—it becomes all the more important that a free press maintains its freedom. But when vigilance turns into caterwailing, some news organizations come and through as cry-babies. The public is not impressed by the notion that it is "free speech" when CBS belabors the government, but "insecure" when the government snaps back.
We do have worries: television, mainly. Surely, it is said, TV is entitled
to the "freedom of speech and of the press" entrenched in the First Amendment; but the matter is not so simple. In its technical limitations, its history of public licensing, and in the sheer magnitude of its potential audience, TV is significantly different from the printed media. It must be strict, must be restrained. In a free society, such problem is not unusual. Few such problems are perfectly solved, and the problem of TV will not be perfectly solved either.
We have other worries. Our magazines, starved for advertising revenue, are dying of malnutrition. Public broadcasting continues to grope particularly for an audience. Our craft desperately attract young men and women who we are letate, thoughtful, and curious; we are learning some, but not enough.
These are ailments that cannot be neglected, but they are minor aches and pains. I myself am just back from Brazil, and would say to anxious students in Brunei, let us look to our troubles, of course, but let us count our blessings too.
(C) 1971
The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Readers Respond
Internationality
As a participant in the recent intercultural Communication Workshop, I agree with any agreement with ABSH-Ship (Kansas Canter Lett. Ed. to Letter 11-47) that the 'camp was on balance at the moment' and the others who cooperated in the workshop. Likewise I agree with Abdul's proposal that all students should have avenues and approaches." With this suggestion, I would like to pursue his statement, "I will generally share in the responsibility for the state of virtual isolation to which the international student has been attached."
To the Editor:
From my observations and my associations and friendships with various international students, I begin to discerning the. The University maintains a Dean of Foreign Students whose duties (nowhere less than ten) are strictly devoted to the problems and concerns of international students, including the assignment of an interested student to a specific individual. In many of the departments and divisions of the University, international student work side by side with Americans.
At least three (Portuguese, French, and Russian) language departments have established a partnership to bring together American students and native speakers of the languages offered in the international Club is recognized and funded by the Student Senate, and numbers Americans who speak them.
International students reside in every University dormitory and are undoubtedly represented equally randomly in housing complexes, apartments, etc. in university buildings. Students scholarship halls, sorories and fraternities have extended invitations to international
students (and of course not on a pledge-recruitment basis). People-to-People solutions (tutors or mentors) solve the problem for international students, in addition to other services. Area and national clubs have been established as a cuisine of an evening with the university community, and thus far this semester we have enlisted "Indian Night" and an "Indian Night."
These realities which represent attempts at more than physical unintention do not seem to spell "viral" mischaracterization of international student here, however, I concede that I am incapable of knowing the degree of academic standing. And may our ears have been blamefully deaf to subjective suggestions for their education and concern for comfortable integration of international students if a state has not been approximated, then it is unfortunate for all.
Perhaps this account will be criticized for ignoring the very serious spiritual human issue. Indeed this spiritual inheritance which hauls us all, and by no means do I deny it, has previously confessed inability to necessity to be subjective would not foster conjecture on my part as to its degree and causes. But we must also recognize the social, intellectual and emotional communication and interaction mentioned, and the number of questions raised (over 800, according to the KANSAN of 11-15-71), is puzzling how a quarantine of "virtual humanity" is warranted.
For better understanding.
Henry McCarthy,
Boston graduate student
Letters Policy
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to space limitations and the editor's judgment. Students must provide their name and position; faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
The same point emerged, last year, in a New York interview with Eugene Rostow. The interview was to make him ask out how American power was to be retained, and why. Mr. Rostow said that was fine, he had often asked himself just that question, and all we had done in Vietnam was to give our power in Southeast Asia.
The interviewer kept saying he had answered the wrong question—the how question, not the why. Mr. Rostow would talk to you and elaborate on the repetition, and agree that why was the real question, while giving the answer to a totally different one. It became embarrassingly obvious that the poor man thought he was going the interview's point, he being literally unthinkable for him.
Apparently, with more leisure now, Walt Rostow went on television recently to defend his former boss. When the inevitable battle was tried bravely to find some answer that was not tautological. Why is American power necessary to the world? Well, because our nation meets its commitments! — LBJ's favorite one-phrase
At the time of that interview, the New Yorker's man sought to raise such questions with Eugene Rostow's brother, Walter, who was a professor at Johnson administration's delications. But that Rostow was unavailable, buried in the archives at Austin, Texas, and still has no refusal to address the real question has not issued.
But why make so many commitments? Here Mr. Rostow fell back on the "nuclear war" on her and now have a new curious situation in the world in which a number of countries, I wouldn't say ten, or
By Sokoloff
President Johnson's book of memoirs is a far-from-brief for all his actions in office—especially those actions taken in Vietnam. They show how little our recent rulers have been able to question their own basic presuppositions.
Griff and the Unicorn
Garry Wills
Walt Rostow Speaks: The Big Boy's Burden
Copyright 1971, David Sokoloff.
The TV host saw the point, and put it bluntly: "The moral is, the dangerous toys should not be given to little boys."
five, or fifteen, but a good many have jockeyed themselves up to the nuclear threshold . . ."
good for inferior to be ruled by their superiors.
Garry Wills says that the Rostows, both Walter and Eugene, fail to answer the important question about American power. How can the American power is to be retained, not why, Wills says.
Rostow at this point remembered the diplomatic niceties, and tried to phrase the matter more delicately: "No. The an-
But what does that have to do with our need to "meet commitments"? Well, said Mr. Rostow, unless we flex our muscles, they will try to fix some on their own. As it is, we are
trying to set "a ceiling in the arms race," so that "the other nations of the world are not going to attack" their larger breeds without the law."
swer is the big boys had better behave like big boys, or the other fellows will get them." No longer, then, will we live with Kipling's maxim of empire, and shoulder "the white man's burden" of ruling non-white. Our job now is to carry the Big Boys' Burden of responsibility, to gently stated, the answer is still an imperialist one. That is why men blit it from their minds, even while acting on it.
Obviously, he let it slip that time—the real issue, which we do not want to face. Americans must understand that those nations are not civilized enough to protect themselves in an acceptable manner. Our enquire must be maintained over those persons who are members of those very people. It is always
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
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