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Wednesday, September 7, 1977
University Daily Kansan
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Comment
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansas editorial staff. Signed column represent only the views of the writers.
Med Center is unstable
The KU Medical Center, a place that sorely needs stability, continues to suffer from instability. Robert Kugel, executive vice chancellor of the Med Center, resigned last week, adding another name to an overlong list of administrators who have shuffled through the Med Center doors recently.
Waxman was deputy executive vice chancellor at the time of Kugel's resignation and is now acting executive vice chancellor. It is no secret that he has been doing the bulk of the Med Center's administrative work for several months.
More than anything else, the beauleager Med Center lacks firm, level-headed leadership. The committee that will begin searching for Kugel's replacement might find that sort of leadership in David Waxman, a man sitting in the Med Center right now.
WAXMAN KNOWS the Med Center and its myriad problems. He is respected by the faculty and staff, an attribute that has been lacking in some Med Center leaders who have come and gone lately.
have
vice
man who becomes executive vice
chancellor of the Med Center will have to
take command of a faculty that has resisted leadership. He will have to solve festering problems of poor facilities and statewide skepticism about the Med Center's ability to meet the health care needs of rural Kansas. The problems today are no less monumental than they were two years ago, when heart surgery was halted at the Med Center because surgeons said the buildings were too dirty.
The executive vice chancellor of the Med Center is one of the three highest administrators at the University. The search committee that will pick the new vice chancellor should work with care, thoughtfulness and appropriate concern about Med Center problems that have been allowed to linger so long.
too dirty.
Waxman knows the problems. He has seen half-hearted solutions fail. He, more than a newcomer, may be able to put a firm, knowledgeable hand on the Med Center rudder.
But in its concern, the search committee should not overlook David Waxman. He may have the attributes the committee wants and the added benefit of an understanding of the Med Center's unique problems.
A public interest group asked the Federal Communications Commission to automatically "junk" telephone calls on the basis that they "constitute a potentially serious threat to privacy and privacy security of privacy."
Hanging up stops "junk" calls
the phone technique, however, is efficient and economic companies that may not be restricted by the FCC
The device dials a series of telephone numbers, selected or chosen at random, and plays a recorded message when the phone is answered. When the phone owner hangs up, the system automatically dials the next number.
SUCH A DEVICE can place 1,000 calls a day without needing human assistance once the message is sent. The company selected. One company, Digital Products Corporation of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., an aviation company can place four calls a week to every phone
According to a petition filed by Walter Baer of Santa Monica, Calif., and the Citizens Bank, the bank's公益 interest group, telephone attachments such as the automatic dialer and message box, D.R.M.P.) become prominent just within the last few years.
Rick Thaemert Editorial Writer
owner on a typical 5,000-line telephone exchange.
According to the committee led by Baer, the A.D.R.M.P.s are an invasion of the homes of a D.A.D.R.M.P. devices by advertisers could bring a barrage of unsolicited phone calls to random homes at any hour of the day or night, controlling or stopping them."
The committee fails to realize that when a person has a phone installed, he gives up a portion of his privacy. His phone is not a public record. Anyone can call it. Phone owners must accept the inconveniences that come with the privilege of having a phone installed. People prank phone calls, wrong numbers and solicitors.
FOR THE COMMITTEE to anticipate phone calls from solicitors at all hours in the afternoon, advertisers want to sell a product to a receptive customer, dragging a consumer from his warm bed at 3 a.m. wounding him with a friendly, sailing atmosphere.
The committee also stated,
Fog trails under your feet as if to wipe all memory from your camera, and the stream above your head, crying out the names of people in newspapers' past. Yes, this is the land of forgotten media
Imagine being blown away past the doorstep where your morning paper lies, into a land that time and the public has forgotten. A land not unlike a cartoon concept of limbo.
Walking through the swirling fog, you approach a man with curly, jet-black hair. Legs crossed, he strums a guitar. As you move closer, you can hear him mumbling, "... tramps like us, baby we were born to run."
Favorites enshrined in media hero land
"Aren't you Bob Dylan?" you ask.
"No, but on every week I was bigger than Dylan," he said with a nasal voice. "I'm Bruce Springsteen."
"OH YEAH, I remember you," you say, your memory suddenly triggered. "You were on the covers of Time and Newsweek on the same week, a media coup唤 me, a media coup唤 me, newly-elected presidents. Whatever happened to you anyway?"
"I was an overdose victim," he said. "I was hyped to death by the media and now I can't
Dave Johnson
Editorial Writer
even get on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine as one of today's burn-out rock stars."
o leave him strumming his guitar until the music finally fades away. Suddenly you stumble upon a man scribbling furiously on a note pad. You ask him what he is writing.
"A letter to the newspapers of New York City," he said. "They did such a swell job glorifying the details of mass murder that I thought I would congratulate them."
"Then you must be Son of Sam," you say, "What are you doing here, you're still in the national spotlight?"
nation spokes-
"I'm not Son of Sam," he
says. "My name is Gary
Gilmore."
Walking farther through the fog you bear cries of help in the distance. Running in the direction of the cries, you come upon a man failling away in a huge mound of shaving cream.
YOU QUICKLY move on, not wanting to engage a discussion with your teacher about the news impact of capital punishment.
x ou pull him out and instantly
(well, after he wipes the shaving cream off his face) you recognize him.
recognize him.
"Sav, you're Omar Sharif."
"Say, you're Omar Sharif." "No, and I'm not Barba Streisand either," he says. "Let me jog your memory — Munich, gold medals, swimming."
"And razor blades!" you shout. "You're Mark Spitz."
"I GAVE IT all up for a career in dentistry," he says. "After the excitement of my Olympic victories wore off, the big money and the fame that came with it just dried up."
"Of course," he says, teeth gleaming. "I'm not forgettable." Well, not quite, you think, "Hey Mark," you ask. "What's it going to take to take care of the endorsements, the millionaire dollar contracts?"
You say goodbye to Spitz who is still cleaning off the rest of the shaving cream. Your guest will be presented in a large museum, shaped in the form of a star. Walking inside, you come to a large exhibition hall. A sign posted near the entrance of the past and future media relics ."
The hall is cluttered with an array of apparently unrelated exhibits. Stooping over a large trash桶, you withdraw a grimy newspaper from inside. The newspaper's only headline
reads, "Reserved for Renee Richards."
The names on the other exhibits read like a "Who's" Director of the past. A newspaper called *Clifford Irving*. Vaguely you recall an author who wrote a factious book that completely fooling everyone, including the press
Next to the Irving exhibit is a mural honoring another "star" who managed to fool part of the people at least part of the time in his role as a Dummar picking up a stranded and bearded Howard Hughes in the deserts of Utah. There is a special area honoring media sports heroes Joe Bosse, Jose Pallavilan and Mike Maris as well as Spitz and Richards, who was listed as a mixed-singles player.
ANOTHER EXHIBIT in front of a large pink elephant carries the names of the members of a family. ROLLERS, YELLOW, YOU ROLLERS. "Lovely, you think."
Across the floor of the great hall, a man with a beer can is quietly sweeping a path toward the museum. "What is the purpose of the museum?"
"It's a shrine of cast-off heroes," he says. "They're examples of the media taking what they perceive to be the
public's flickering flame of interest in a promising or even unfavorable environment, storing it into a roaring bonfire of uncontrollable enthusiasm.
"It (A.D.R.M.P.s) could prevent other calls — even emergency calls — from being received, while a prerecorded sales pitch for facial cream or beverage is being delivered."
THINKING YOU must have run into Howard Cosell, you search the room for an exit.
"How does one get out of this place?" you ask.
"What about me?" you ask.
"How does someone like me get out of here when they didn't come be here in the first place?
"That makes no difference," he says, taking a swig on the can of beer. "Look at the vicinity of attention that they neither want nor deserve. I'd say for the time being, you're stuck until the media replaces you with somebody new to paint."
"By binging a comeback, announcing that you're coming out of retirement, or simply by hiring a better press agent," he
You resign you to a short wait, knowing that a new media herlus just around the next headline.
needme:
"Thanks for the advice,
anyway," you say. "By the
way, what's your name."
way, how,
"Me?" he asks, a foolish grin
on his face. "I'm Billy Carter."
That is not so. In an emergency situation, the operator has the power to cut into phone connections and inform the proper person of the situation. A tied-up phone could have been used to two gossiping hags as to a precorded message.
ANOTHER COMMITTEE beef was, "Widespread use of A.D.R.M.P. may drive many subscribers to install answering recorders or just stop answering the phone."
such a person could only be called an over-sensitive ninny, and probably would quit opening his mail, also, because Communist letter bombs may be among the mailbox loot.
Contrary to the committee's beliefs, many people may be interested in the sales pitches of companies and appreciate the
calls. When a sale is made, both parties benefit.
And because the phone systems are more efficient and less expensive, they should remain unencumbered. After all, that's the name of the business people for less money through a medium (in this case, the phone.)
As with any device used to reach the masses, there is an intrinsic possibility of it being used abusively. The device in question may also use shadowing techniques won't last long in today's consumer-conscious
NOT ONLY DOES the system help advertisers, it also helps people in airline agencies notify passengers of flight delays. Because the device is potentially good, it should not be canned because of the vaccinated whims of a group of professionals who are met at the other end of the line by a Brillo Pad ad instead of the local disc jockey giving away free cartons of yummy pop.
society. a smart advertiser will avoid the shams and will allow phone owners the right not to receive calls, will employ employees at the beginning himself at the beginning of the sales spiel.
Baeer and his committee can't be so bogus as to envision an avalanche of Jim calls, to call the A.D.R.M.P. systems have their own limits. Not everyone can be reached by phone, and calls are time consuming. Most will employ mail service.
It's absurd for Bear to envision, for example, thousands of senior citizens being duped into buying a case of Cheerilais because he never answered the message. Such suckers deserve it.
After all, phone owners have the choice of whom they want on the other end of the line. If they do not like their audio or recorded, there is a simple solution. Hang up.
MAFEELY BAIHAN YUEJIANG GAIPING CERTIFICATIONS
~ I GOT YOU THIS FAR, DIDN'T I ?
Editorial on Elvis stinks
To the editor:
I have read the University Daily Kansan for four years as an undergraduate in the School of Journalism and for the past year as a graduate student in the School of Business and having leading talent that many reporters have exhibited over the years and read with earnest their many news stories and feature articles. There have examined them, to be sure it has been much less prevalent than could realistically be expected.
but I have never, in five
KANSAN Letters
years, read an article so venomous and in such extreme bad taste as the one written—and I use the word loosely—by John Mueller about the Elvis Presley myth.
My knowledge of Elvis Presley could be placed on the top of a pinhead. I did not follow the man's cornings and goings, but I followed him and the other about his music. I was not, and am not, a Presley fan.
not, and not, a Treney letter,
But what Mueller wrote in
that fusillade of character assassination was journalism in its rankest form : excrement.
muerter did not begin to debunk myths about Presley. His entire article was an acerbic attack upon a dead man whose main fault, it seemed, was being loved by thousands.
I suggest that the Kansan editors send Mueller to a less demanding assignment in the men's restroom, where he could be better documented (doubledly) memorization of journalism ethics.
Costly act won't clean up cars' pollution
By BRUCE A. ACKERMAN
BY BRUCE A. ACKIE
N.Y. Times Features
NEW HAVEN, Conn.
Congress has reluctantly permitted the public to buy new cars this fall. Until its last-minute revision, the Clean Air Act allowed all further production.
The drama surrounding the reprieve was in the grand tradition of morality plays. Only the threat of a complete shutdown
R. Mark Pennington
Bogue graduate student
induced an indignant Congress to grant Detroit two more years to cleanse itself.
Indeed, we are assured by no less an authority than Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, D-Maine, that we want to be able to comply with the new congressional command and clean up their cars on the revised schedule. More recent reports show this time, Detroit will bill billions of
dollars and finally satisfy the Clean Air Act — such is the magic of a morality play.
The only trouble is that this heroic expenditure will do remarkably little to improve the quality of the air.
I DO not mean to recite another dreary tale of government. In a noble country, on the contrary, Ogress has given us precisely this
Clean Air Act we deserve. But we cannot expect to clear the air until we confront some illusions about technology.
Some basic facts: While congressmen talk as if they are voting on clean air, their statutory target is rather more modest. The controls is a handful of engines that each car maker tests before going into mass production. These prototypes
operate under carefully controlled conditions for 50,000 miles. If they pass the congressional limits, the Environmental Protection Agency authorizes mass production.
SOFTNESS IS due not only to administrative weakness. As we know, cars must be "broken in" for a few thousand miles before they operate smoothly. Assembly-line tests do not really show a car's "carry" the road. So cars are ship-able through many fail to comply with congressional standards.
It is here that slippage begins. The EPA has been reluctant to ban pesticides because that fail pollution tests as they leave the assembly line.
YET THERE is more here than cynicism and expediency.
In particular, the EPA allows manufacturers to install new catalytic converters on prototypes halfway along their roadways. Yet nobody believes that ordinary people will make this expensive repair voluntarily. Instead, they will permit their original catalysts to be installed on lead and other impurities in "lead-free" gasoline
And once the cars reach the street, there is no reason to think that they will be maintained with the same care the companies lavished on prototypes.
INDEED WE will be lucky if the consumer simply treats his pollution equipment with benign neglect. An EPA study showed that owners half of the waste in its sample were equipped with the equipment in an effort to get better performance.
While congressmen are happy to let the car companies take the blame for higher prices, they are not willing to take the heat when constituents are threatened with the loss of federal standards. Nor are state or local officials any more heroic. They all prefer to shake their fingers at Detroit.
Congress only requires the
prototypes to operate for 50,000 miles before certification for mass production. Yet most real cars run for 100,000 miles or more, and pollution in older models much worse in new ones.
It would seem, then, that there is a trick ending to the drama. During a period of time, the manufacturers will build cleaner and cleaner products, be the spent on the assembly line to build devices that look like these prototypes.
But until Congress, the EPA and the states require regular inspection of all cars on the road, very little will come of all this glittering traffic. The EPA said we save billions in we contented ourselves with dirtier prototypes but insisted on cleaner cars.
VER EXCEPT for New Jersey, no state has even attempted any kind of systematic inspection program, let alone that will actually work. Nor is it at all crucial to have its existing legal powers to prod the states into prompt and meaningful action.
prime piping. How, then, have we managed to produce so much modernistic junk in the name of clean air?
Undoubtedly, congressmen themselves woefully exaggerate the importance of their votes for cleaner prototypes. Simply have no idea of the distance between prototype and reality.
They somehow imagine that the hard job is technological innovation and that the easy job is human implementation. By pressing technology to its limits, they confidently expect the quality of life to improve at long last.
But it was precisely this illusion that led us to the Clean Air Act in the first place. In passing the act, we were responding to a vague recognition that our machines were running away from them.
After a decade's hard work, we have only managed to paraply our initial predicament: We have tried to solve our problems with machines simply by building more machines.
But there is no such thing as a purely technological solution to a social problem. Machines, especially engines of purification, will not work their magic by themselves.
Bruce A. Ackerman, professor of law at Yale, is author of "The Uncertain Search for Environmental Quality."
Few Sachems oppose women To the editor:
The recent brattling over the admission of women to Sacrem is an interesting case of cultural adaptation. The spokesman for the all-male tradition (alias, sexism) contended in a recent article in a local newspaper that the alumnies are quite opposed to inclusion women.
Having, myself, been a member of Sachem and knowing a good many former members, I can imagine only a few might be opposed to admitting women. Almost every member that I know would feel an obligation to allow women to enter the organization for the all-male tradition is or am misperceiving the opinions of the alumni of Sachem; however, as in our case, 'man' has not contacted me or any other sensitive Sachem in any systematic way.
Perhaps, the current membership (all but one), voting to maintain the all-male tradition, is seeking affirmation of its views by projecting them upon the alumni. We might disappoint them. We might Bull-Moose Sachem, dedicated to the ideals of excellence, wisdom, achievement and equality.
Dennis Embry
Demis Emily
Lawrence graduate student
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