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Wednesday, September 1, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Student Role Widens
"Feedback" is here.
It took two years and $30,000, but it was worth it.
Not so much for the booklet's 86 pages and black on silver cover, but for the promise those pages contain.
"Feedback is witness to the student's changing and enlarging role in the shaping of his own education, and it promises continuing and further widening of that role.
The booklet of itself is not enough—only a third of KU's faculty participated in the curriculum and instruction survey, and of those about 70 per cent consented to have the results published in "Feedback." As a consequence, bed-books on art were skimmed by the blame lies squarely with those university faculty who chose not to participate.
Their reasons were probably many, and, obviously, there is room for argument on the validity of a "student shopping guide." But even if the results of student ratings of courses and instructors are both
published, there is still a crying need for those ratings.
And who can best evaluate what he learns but the student himself?
Teaching effectiveness plays an important role in the shaping of university policy, especially in curriculum design, degree and major requirements, and—we would hope—in promotion and tenure.
"Feedback" does not provide comprehensive critiques of instructors and courses, but it does provide clues to the probable merits of those courses it covers. "Feedback" is, then, a step in the right direction for student control of the student's learning process.
We have too long been second-class citizens, "Feedback" and other efforts like it designed to expand the student voice in the university (and make that voice could) help change that status.
Feedback means reaction.
Hopefully, it will come to also mean
hope.
—Pat Malone
Election Prospectus
Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee of the national political scene, Larry O'Brien, Democratic national party chairman and his Republican counterpart, Robert Dole are scheduled to speak on the campus for the Vickers Lecture series.
This is a credit to the series, not yet in its first year.
Both will be here selling his party's version of a bill of goods to save the country. The largest single item figures to be the now-hot issue of the faltering economy.
The Democrats have been forced to give up their franchise on the war issue. If left alone by George Wallace, probable third-party candidate, the Republicans may be able to scamper past the race issues hoping the Democrats will prioritize minority oppression until later, more prosperous times.
Should Wallace bray too loudly, the Republicans will be forced to move further.
Providing the Alabama Governor is quiet, though the economy will be the issue.
The Democrats, now almost, issueless, are left with this last issue, the economy, as the ammunition for their attack on the formidable incumbent.
In the Democratic camp the issue is not who will beat Niixon but how. It seems the party's primary goal is to win over
looking for the magic to finally get Nixon. Right now public sentiment tells it it's the economy. If that bone vanishes they will lose the pollster, tell them is troublesome America.
If the first reports are accurate and the preponderance of the recently enfranchised 18 million voters 18-21 are registering Democrat, they should make the issues not let them be made. The Democrats shouldn't be making the same issue issues, ignoring the politically dangerous.
Depending on your optimism or gullibility, the Republican party this election offers few strong political or civil reforms to aid America's minorities and oppressed. Witness Nixon's non-stand on busing, the Pentagon rushed to help during the May Day demonstrations—on and on.
If a liberal Democratic candidate could capture a majority of the youth vote and 10 million other liberal voters—he would stand a fair two to one chance if he and a conservative could the conservative vote.
It is time then, to let O'Brien and Dole know that the nation's moral conscience has not bowed to a matter of money, and that come summer, the nationalICAL if I will take a more substantive clout.
—Tom Slaughter
Garry Wills
He Broke the Law—But Why?
When the government and its agencies break the law, what is going to happen? What'sidity? Garry Walls says motives perhaps become more important when the government breaks the law.
NEW YORK-Peter Forsdy, a young Jesuit priest, was recently arrested with a group of his brothers and released from files in Camden, New Jersey.
Last January, while preparing an article on the Berrigan brothers, I taped a long interview with one of them and the Berrigan defense committee. When I heard of his arrest, I took out the tape again, to see what it might tell me about this new chapter in his life, seven months after our interview.
realized that blacks must organize their race, the most important men who knew the limits of reality, because it is a reality they have always lived, and will never be.
His political radicalization took place when he realized, finally, that the world was in a state of level, and how much harm: "We raised all kinds of expectations from us."
FORDI SAID he had not been interested in politics in his early years. He was a Catholic, wandered at a Catholic President who took an imperialist line in Laos and Vietnam. He got deeply disillusioned with blacks, however, and tried to work with them against slim lords and "blockingbust" real power.
THE TOOK who what James Baldwin, Bob Moses, and Stokely Carmichael made a case problem" is other whites. If Ford was to change the world, it would have to be his world, where he had no world in which he was born and
educated. Going to the blacks, he had met with a response like that recounted in the Gospel of Luke (23:28), where women mourn for Jesus as he passes them on the way to Culvary—anil he told them to carry for me no, weep for yourselves and your children."
For Tori, weeping for his own world meant doing penance for its wrongs and errors, taking on the responsibility done in his name, and the names
of his peers. His religious order held stock in companies that were implicated in the war, in 1865. He practised heism. He and his friends started stockholder's actions on these issues. As a priest he was accused of being an unconformist; church gave an implicit endorsement of militarism through the chaplain system—so he was a minister of war in world's war), the military system (his country's system). (his church's chaplains)
Fordi has a low opinion of Catholic liberal's past attitudes; they did not want to criticize the system, they just wanted in. They wanted Kennedy for President. He could afford to ignore them.
FORDI MEANT to trouble bishops, and superiors; to request donations and country "The Gospel as a liberating force is something I've experienced, and I'm trying to make a community of risk. The Gospel, taken seriously, involves risk, a challenge for teachers for others. Christian community
means we have to be willing to go to the wall with each other, go all the way. Only in that willingness can we make a connection thing, the bone involved."
The tape seemed to answer my question—why he had done it, taken this new risk, gone all the way. I answered questions—questions many will not entertain. For them it is enough that Fordi seems to have broken a law: "We found this government," (Luke 23:2). Yet this is a time when the President seems to have broken international laws of war; when the FBI, the Justice Department, (Luke 23:2); Chicago police forces are alleged to be engaged in criminal activities, tapping phones, tapping without due process, suppressing evidence, harassing, killing.
The question may not, after all, be a simple one of who broke the law. If you have to ask, instead, who broke the law for life's sake, and who broke it for one's own benefit?
Copyright, 1971, Universal Press Syndicate
'Justice Department, non-existent-activities division speaking.'
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Left a good job in the city
Working for the Man Every Night and Day
Working for The Man every night and day . . .
CHICAGO  (LNS)—This week, 400 Americans will die needlessly. No, not in Vietnam. Not in car accidents on the highway. Guess again. From on the job 'acctecting' the firefighters killing American workers at the fantasize rate of 15,000 a year. Every day, 8,500 workers are disabled on the job. Every day, more than 27,000 workers are injured on the job. And every year, some 390,000 workers get accustomed to often crippling, chronic or eventually fatal.
LET'S LOOK at a few examples. Workers in an Army plant in Milwaukee have developed a physical dependence on the nitrolycerine used there to make rocket fuel. The team has also developed a system they experience chest pains that continue until they return and once again breath the nitrolycerine dust that in the air. A specialist at the Milwaukee County General Hospital examined 168 people who worked at a nearby hospital during disease rate ten times higher than normal.
In a Union Carbide plant near Buffalo, New York, union examination of 18 worker employed in making "molecular sieves" (a chemical powder with absorbent properties) showed that all 18 had acute bronchitis, all 18 suffered from dermatitis, 7 had emphysema
and 2 had circulatory problems caused by ulcerated sores. But the company said none of the men had "any occupationally incurred lung problems."
HARVEY COWAN worked at the plant for five years, leaving in 1967 totally disabled from emphysema. Two heart attacks later, he filed for workman's compensation but the company refused to bring the case before the compensation board.
Last year, at age 55, Harvey died.
One Union Carbide executive said: "I can't in the safety of business, I'm in the business of carbide."
In the textile industry, workers are exposed to clouds of raw cotton fiber, causing a serious respiratory allion known as bysinism, which now affects 100,000 people. And enormous amounts of noise. Decibel levels regularly reach over 100, while 85 decibels are judged harmful. Management will make sure it would take 50 cents per employee to reduce the noise level to bearable levels. Management's action: nothing.
...
WALK AROUND any large factory, and notice . . . the fellow with only one thumb . . . the person with no right hand . . . Old machinery dating back before the Korean war . . . machinery that breaks down . . . no safety devices . . . And it's cheaper for the company to pay the insurance premiums and the compensation to buy new machines
Born under a bad sign
I've been down
since I began to crawl
If it wasn't for bad luck
Don't you know I wouldn't a 'had no luck at all.
For increasing numbers of people, especially this summer, the problem is not improving working conditions—but simply finding work. This May, the official unemployment rate rose to 6.2 percent, a nine year increase, twice the white rate. If you're a black teenager or a young black woman, forget it. During the last three months of 1970, 42.2 percent of all black teenagers seeking work couldn't find anything and the rate mounts during the summer months. Young black teenagers between 35 percent and as high as 50 percent.
THIS SUMMER, black rebellions have already occurred in Newburgh, N.Y.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Columbus, Ga. as well as a three day Chicano rebellion in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Do you wonder why?
On June 30, Nixon vetoed a public works bill passed by Congress that would have opened up 150,000 jobs immediately. Instead he proposes to cut back welfare payments and
put welfare recipients into forced work
problems for less than $1.20 an hour.
Now on August 15, Nikon instituted a 90 day wage-price freeze that holds wages constant but allows corporation profit to rise unchecked.
UEMPLOYMENT is also beginning to hit middle-class professional sectors of the economy. Fifty thousand to 65,000 scientists and engineers were left unemployed by the economic recession. "People with bachelor's, master's and doctor's degrees are accepting jobs as janitors or cab drivers." After ten years of media propaganda trying to convince people of the benefits of college degree, suddenly employers were saying: "You're too qualified for the job-you would be happy in it." Suddenly there were "too many" teachers, "too many" historians, "too many" sociologists. A whole generation was no longer a school to train for jobs that wouldn't exist.
White collar layoffs have affected the aerospace, auto, chemical, airline, oil, banking, advertising, publishing and healthcare industries well as education. This spring, the white collar unemployment rate was 3.8 percent—the highest ever since the government started keeping statistics in 1968. Some analysis think that the labor market is improving. And a lot of "professionals" are currently
employed part-time or temporarily as shoe salesmen, etc. One problem is increasing specialization that makes transfer into other industries nearly impossible.
What all the unemployment does is force those who still have jobs to work harder for fear of being fired or layed off—enabling the boss to put across a lot of speedup, hold up raises, and in general push people around. It also helps management stir up racist behavior among white workers third-world people who are increasinglyistant that more of them be hired for good paying jobs—for example in the construction industry. Newspapers and television push the image of construction workers as fat, overpaid and lazy. But it's far from the truth. The truth is that construction of new buildings is off tremendously fast. Construction work, while it has a high hourly wage, is mostly seasonal outdoor work. It doesn't matter what you're paid an hour if you only work five or six months a year.
See my dadmy over there a dying
See his face a 'turning grey
He's been working and sweating his life away
REAL WAGES are going down. If you aren't earning 25 per cent more than five dollars a week, you won't be in the game.
inflation. Rent, food, utilities, clothes . . .
prices rcvocketing.
Sometimes, what's even worse than having no job is being trapped in a job with no dignity. One morning last January, I went to Seminary Restaurant in Chicago (favorite watering trough for the neighborhood) at 3:30 in the afternoon and already the old man was outside in the bitter cold at his newstand to earn his 3 cents a paper. The black man who mopped the floor in the restaurant was pushed outdoors in the snow to wait for the bus during the half hour the restaurant closed down, while the owner sat in the back of the waiting室 was sick to her stomach that morning—but if she went home they would fire her.
No I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more
No I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more
He hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime
He asks you with a grin if you're having a
dollar.
(Ed. note: Liberation News Service is a New York-based collective of radical journalists which publishes news packets twice a week. The Kanman will be offering LNS artifact page feature. Thanks to the Kansas Media Project for use of their LNS packet.)
Griff and the Unicorn
SPOILOFF
By Sokoloff
"Copyright 1971, David Sokoloff.
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