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Monday, August 29, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Opinion
Larry's legacy is strong but the departure was weak
More than two months have passed since basketball coach and local demigod Larry Brown left the University of Kansas to coach the San Antonio Spurs, but the bad feelings still linger, and will for a while a.
Not that any Jayhawk basketball fan will be forgetting the triumphs of his stay in Lawrence. Larry's (and fans would like to remember him as Larry because they feel too affectionate toward the man to be as formal as "Mr." Brown or even "Couch" Brown) 135-44 game will be a tough act to follow, and the championship will be saved for as long as they play there.
Basketball fans aren't the only ones who will miss Larry. Charities such as the American Cancer Society and the Special Olympics will have to look long and hard for a local figure of Larry's stature who will help out as much as he did.
Of course, it was expected. Everybody knew that his departure was inevitable. Even the most faithful expected it in April, when it was certain that he'd head for California. But he had never seen her before. She would stay. The jubilation that followed was earmost, but too short.
Although Brown built some great teams and an even greater legend while he was here, many of those memories were tainted by his own actions.
The $3.5 million deal that led Brown to go back on his word soon after he promised to stay was, as he said, once-in-a-life.
Coming so soon after his widely publicized announcement that he was staying, and all the adoration the University heaped on him for saying so. Brown's departure made the school, the team and its fans look like fools.
But his timing, and the position he left the team in, were lousy.
Coming so late in the coach-changing season and during a crucial recruiting time, his move made the job for the next coach difficult, at best. At worst, it put the whole 1988-89 basketball season in jeopardy.
Not that Roy Williams has shown signs of being anything less than a competent, likable coach, but the building blocks Brown left him would be a challenge for any coach, even a great one like Larry.
So the last word on Larry Brown has to be thanks. Thanks
some terrific basketball and memories fans will cherish.
**THANK YOU**
And thanks for nothing
Michael Merchel for the editorial board
Stories we don't want to write
No doubt University administrators and parents are breathing easier this morning. Country Club week has come and gone without any deaths or serious injuries.
Kansan reporters are equally relieved.
Death is news, particularly when the lost life was only 18 or 19 years long. When a student dies, a Kansan reporter is assigned to write a story about the student and a life cut tragically short
It means reporters have to talk to family members and friends, either interrupting their grief or sometimes breaking the news. It is heart-wrenching and difficult, but it has to be done if a proper story is to be written. There are questions that have to be asked. Because of deadlines, it has to be done so soon after the death that many people think it's insensitive
In the past few years, Kansan reporters have had to call several students' mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters. The calls continue to classmates and roommates, and sometimes to high school teachers and others affected by the deaths.
The students had died in car accidents, train accidents and had fallen off roots. Some deaths were pure accidents. Others.
nowever, were caused by carelessness and alcohol abuse. Students want to have fun and enjoy their youth, and they should be encouraged to do so. They need not sit still and watch the world go by.
Consider the words of Henry James:
"The only way to know is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered. I think I do not regret a single 'excess' of my responsiveness youth — I only regret, aged, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."
James calls upon youth to live life to the fullest and take advantage of every opportunity. He also calls upon youth to
In reading James' words, don't fail to note that he wrote it at the "chilled" age of 29.
But in reading James wrote it at the "chilled" age of 70.
Todd Cohen for the editorial board
News staff
Todd Cohen . **Editor**
Michael Horak . **Managing editor**
Jule Adam . **Associate editor**
Stephen Wade . **Editorial editor**
Michael Merschiel . **Editorial editor**
Noel Gerdes . **Campus editor**
Craig Anderson . **Sports editor**
Dave Niegelberg . **Photo editor**
Dave Eames . **Graphics editor**
Jill Jones . **Art/Features editor**
Tom Eben . **General manager**
Business staff
Greg Knipp ... Business manager
Debbie Cole ... Retail sales manager
Chris Cooke ... Customer service manager
Linda Prokop ... National sales manager
Penelope Paterson ... Promotion manager
Sarah Hidgdon ... Marketing manager
Bred Lenhart ... Production manager
Brad Harford ... Assistant Product Manager
Michael Lehman ... Classified manager
James McCarthy ... Sales manager
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Sometimes hell-raising is necessary The Kansan will seek to practice and teach good journalism
In 1861, the Chicago Times declared that “it is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise bell.”
Those were the days, many journalists may cry. A time when newspapers were the defenders of liberty and morality "Muckrakers" uncovered the scandal of factories and helped stop the tragedy of child labor.
And they poked and prodded at the corrupt political machines that ran our country's greatest enemy.
It also was a time when journalistic objectivity was almost disappeared, almost single-handedly pushed the United States into the Spanish-American War through inaccurate, inflammatory and jingoistic tactics.
Other yellow journalists promoted their own agenda, usually at the expense of others. These reporters and editors were unfair and uncaring, they spread malicious, unsusceptible rumors
But that's not entirely true. For one thing, journalists do go to college these days.
In journalism school, students learn to write, to edit, and to take photographs. They discuss the law, from lei libero to privacy to freedom of information, from ethics and consider what's fair and what's not.
Todd Cohen
Editor
Some KU students also learn the ropes on summer internships at such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Minneapolis Star and New York Times. Some KU students attend Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Florida Today, The Statesman-Journal of Salem, Oregon, Kansas City Star and Times, Topeka Capital-Journal, Omaha World-Herald, Fort Myers (Fla) News-Press, World-Wide, Atlanta Journal-Salina Journal, Iola Register and many others.
The Kansan, though, is their first chance to put together an entire newspaper. The reporters, photographers and copy editors are enrolled in journalism classes. In the newsroom, hired student editors plan coverage, edit stories and photographed images. Students write editorials, lay out pages, design graphics, prepare events calendars and monitor the Associated Press.
in the advertising department, a student staff sells ads, prepares ad campaigns and designs the
Of course, we seek advice from the news and advertising advisers and other faculty members. The budget is managed by the school, and we are aided by the staff at University of Kansas Printing Department. We are pasted up and printed. We also rely on readers to tell us when we do well and when we screw up.
We hope the experience creates good, objective journalists.
The Kansan, however, is not here to serve iourialism students exclusively.
It is an independent student newspaper that serves all students. It is a role we take very seriously. And our work has been rewarded with an excellent rating from the Associated College Press.
We will cover the news important to students and to the University community. We will question the leaders and the followers. We will comment on the events we open our editorial page to your letters and cartoons.
It is our responsibility to provide balanced, reasoned coverage. That is our charge
And, if necessary, we also will raise some hell.
Opinion page: the myth and mystery
Editorial page to serve as forum for ideas from the entire University community
Wake up with a hanger from drinking with the reporters the night before. Intentionally cut a slice of bread into the mooled Speed through traffic and curse at all the other drivers. Arrive at the newsroom, grab a stale doughnut and a dirty mug of acid-black coffee to agitate your ulcer and sit down at a typewriter.
That's the way an editor at a Colorado newspaper once described the editorial-writing process to me, or rather, that his way of describing how most people think it happens.
You're ready to write an editorial.
Michael Merschel Editorial editor
Actually, I suspect most University Daily Kanan readers have a much more sophisticated view of how editors are written. A mysterious gang is present in the newsroom and the agenda of what they want done each semester. Then, by subtly manipulating the reporting staff and altering facts they disagree with, they twist the news to carry out this agenda, which usually involves using a less authoritative and authority and the humiliation of everybody else.
I hope that's a bit of an exaggeration. But showing what an editorial page isn't makes a nice lead in the article.
What we're interested in on this editorial page is ideas, and not just our own. Our editors are written, appropriately enough, by the editorial board. Some of the people on the board are editors who oversee the general operation of the paper. Other board members have nothing to do here but write news articles that are involved in news gathering, and none of them call reporters what kind of slant to put on stories.
'What we're interested in on this editorial page is ideas, and not just our own.'
Although columnists aren't assigned topics or given ideas, we've tried to recruit a staff that we hope will be able to entertain, inform, provoke and/or outrage readers, from those who think Michael Dukakis is a bit too conservative to those who think Reagan should be appointed king.
So much for the news-twisting theorv.
The other regular contributors to the editorial page are columnists, who, in another example of the power of words to convey precisely what they mean, write columns.
As nobody tells columnists what they can or can't write about, we hope to have a regular offering of opinions of all kinds, even opinions that are not directly related to the subject, before he or she would admit it was valid.
So much for the secret agenda idea.
In other words, we want your ideas to fill this space. Are our editors too left-wing/right-wing? Are they too space-minded? Do the spaces need high-struggle/stupid? Does the spaces need better coaching/recruiting/luck? Write it down. Send it in. Somebody should hear you. Are there coaches or interns that hear you rave through your too-thin walls?
The final group that has any say on what goes on the editorial page is everybody else. That’s not just the news staff, but everyone reading this, and even people who stopped reading back at “Wake up.”
You see, what we'd like to be here is sort of a newspaper version of the Statue of Liberty. "Give us your tired, your fed-up, your liberals and conservatives yearning to write free . . ."
In return, we'll be your metaphorical marketplace of ideas, which is what is supposed to be at the heart of a newspaper, a university and a God-fearing, Mom's apple-pie-living, God-bless-it from the mountains-to-the-prairies-to-sea-to-shining-sea country.
But remember, without kindly advice and angry chastise
ments from as many people as we can fit, this page becomes just so much wasted type. And even if you still think we're angry crones or manipulative beings, we're not that bad; it's not anybody's agenda, secret or otherwise.
Michael Mershel is a Lakewood, Colo., senior majoring in journalism.
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