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University Daily Kansan, October 14, 1981
Opinion
Moving the ballot boxes
Those who argue that the KU Student Senate is nothing but a plaything for student senators, rather than an effective representative body, always point to voter turnout for support.
The roughly 10 percent student turnout in last November's elections does indeed make the national presidential turnout look torrential. Apparently, most students don't care about the outcome at all, or at least not enough to go out of their way to vote.
Some senators are aware of this laziness and the inequity it injects into the vote. They've introduced two different bills to deal with it.
Both bills, expected to be considered by the full Senate tonight, address the voting advantage of students in organized living groups.
Logic indicates, and studies of past Senate elections show, that those students who can vote at home in ballot boxes placed there in the evening vote in greater numbers than off-campus students, who must seek out a campus ballot location during the day.
In the 1980 election, for example, 40
percent of scholarship hall residents voted,
as did nearly 30 percent of those in the
Greek system. Turnout among the 70
percent of students who live off campus was
a paltry 5.5 percent.
The first of the two bills attempts to deal with this inequity by removing all in-house ballot boxes. It would force students to vote on campus or not vote at all. Unfortunately, many students now voting would no longer bother; thus even fewer students would be choosing senators.
The second bill proposes placing ballot boxes in the evening at such strategic off-campus locations as large apartment complexes or retail locations. Because the number of ballot boxes and personnel to staff them are limited, some of the boxes now in organized living groups would have to go elsewhere.
This latter bill deserves the full Senate's approval. Instead of making voting more inconvenient for some students, it makes it more convenient for the bulk who live off campus. Students in organized living groups, who may be forced to walk farther than just down the street to vote, won't be catered to unnecessarily.
High-tech learning track makes graduates inflexible
The surge of popularity being enjoyed by technical colleges and professional schools of universities may seem good for business in the short run. In the long run, however, the benefits to employers from its employees will have such limited skills that they will be no more canable than robots.
Students who want to get post-high school education should evaluate carefully the reasons why before running to enroll at a university. Students should only such education only as a steppingstone to a
BRIAN LEVINSON
nice, high-paying job. But, considering that the chance to go to a college is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, failure to see the sky is also a possibility. We are nearsightedness they will forever regret.
A liberal arts education provides a firm, wide base to which technical skills can be quickly and easily added. It provides the capability to adapt to a variety of professions. Students can learn new skills both in their skills at graduation and their future ability to adapt to the changing world.
In the computer age we live in, a person with a liberal arts education has been exposed to a variety of fields in addition to his major. That exposure would make it easier for the person to change professions, should he decide to.
Business at technical schools is booming. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of associate degrees conferred in liberal arts or general educational programs from 1970 to 1978 increased 15 percent, from 144,883 to 167,036. From 1970 to 1978, associate degrees in skilled or technical areas increased 128 percent, from 107,727 to 245,210.
There are a number of reasons for this trend. Skyrocketing tutitions mean many students can no longer afford to go to college just for an education. They have to be sure they have marketable skills when they graduate.
At a technical school, in anywhere from two months to two years, students can get training that practically assures them of a degree. The school provides a time commitment is so much shorter at
technical schools because they don't require the distribution courses that traditional fouryear colleges do.
Although students in professional schools at universities don't save on tuition, they, too, have the lure of a job waiting for them after graduation. In this tight economy, how can anyone ignore the starting salary of $23,000 and 6000 that technically skilled jobs provide?
From 1969 to 1979, enrollment in KU professional schools increased greatly, while enrollment in liberal arts departments declined.
Enrollment was up by 66 students in the School of Engineering, by 204 students in the School of Business, by 106 students in the School of Journalism and by 54 students in the School of Architecture. Meanwhile, enrollment was down by 15 students in the philosophy department, by 22 students in the anthropology department, by 17 students in the political science department and by 53 students in the history department.
Unfortunately, professional schools often don't require many distribution courses.
In the School of Architecture, students are only required to take 27 credit hours of liberal arts classes. They need 164 total credit hours for a bachelor's degree. The picture is a little brighter in the School of Business, where students must take 51 hours in non-professional education out of our 120 hours of instruction. In the school, students in the School of Journalism are only allowed to take 35 journalism hours of the 124 hours needed for graduation.
The freedom to take only professionally oriented classes is alarming. The United States is fast becoming a society of specialists. Although technology dictates specialization, if too many people become too limited in their skills, professional and communication will only be memories. Specialization will have hindered further progress.
The lack of distribution classes leaves doubt about whether students in professional schools are really getting the well-rounded university universities are supposed to provide.
Before a student invests in an education, or parents invest in their children's educations, a student should know why he is going to college or some other type of post-secondary institution and what he hopes to gain from the experience. A student should not go to college, as many students do, for purely economic reasons.
This question is addressed in the recent movie
Switch from abroad to the Hill a jolt
Every autumn a small group of students returns to the University of Kansas with a peculiar understanding for Thomas Wolfe's saying, "You can't go home again." These students are both old friends and new strangers to Mount Oread. They recognize the ivy-bearded buildings, they know the workings of the system and, chances are, previous years saw them in the same classrooms in which they found themselves this year.
But though they know KU like the back of their transcripts, they have been away a year, and to return to where one began is as good a way as any to lose one's bearings.
Re-orientation for these students is not accomplished by a guided library tour. Instead it comes spasmodically, from forgotten remembrances of the past, in ironic, sad smile, steal across only half of a face.
The other half of the smile remains in a foreign land. These are students who spent a year on KU's Study Abroad program. Each studied for an academic year at a university in one of about 20 countries with which KU has exchange programs. Annually about 100 KU students are sent, and they think themselves the most fortunate of students.
They return confirmed in this, but Fortune's scales are usually balanced by sorrow, as these students learn. They have, in a sense, given more than their right arms to go, for they've left half of themselves across the sea. Some of them mention that you're it's better half that has been as far from them.
They might tell you this as, from high atop concrete steps, they survey hug, caged creatures mechanically executing a precisioned exercise called American football. The sport is played on plastic grass before thousands of bored, sunburned students. Under the hot sun, players run through the field irresistibly back to autumn afternoons of a year ago, framed in crisp air made visible by the breath that issued from a rugby scrum's sudden shouts and calls. The sun gleamed coolly through clouds as the players swarmed back and forth over the playing pitch in continuous motion. They played in near solitude. A few clusters of players watched, as much for the aesthetics as the athletics.
Commitment no barrier to liberation
A roar goes up through the crowd in Memorial
Air Force and the students are jolted back to the
BREAST.
Back at KU, last year's exchange students taste a can of Coors and thirst for a pint of stout. They sit in a filling lecture hall and conjure on the dusty blackboard an image of a tutor's desk. Then they work together lineed with carelessly stacked volumes that seem to form a sort of corridor for a table below, at the
Thirty years ago women often tearfully expressed understanding that "a man must do what he must." Men today increasingly are able to accept this line of reasoning from women.
for rewarding careers. Lovers now are faced
come first, one's a profession or one's remembrance.
If the course of true love were in modern times made smooth, Shakespeare would slip out of fashion and young peoples' lives would grow perfectly stale.
But happily, broken hearts have not gone the way of such other human pains as polio and pregnancy. Like the common cold, love remains incurable.
And though in isolated cases professions truly render separation necessary, it is time to ask whether the perceived dichotomy between careers and relationships is real.
KEVIN
HELLIKER
Perhaps the greatest turmuli involved in loving today springs from the indiscriminate lust
In a recent issue of Time, feminist Betty Friedan was said to think that "some women have replaced the 'feminine mystique' with an equally limiting 'feminist mystique', freezing
To these men, women will not appear truly enlightened until they overcome their stuarch and become powerful.
But with much sexual discrimination now purged from American society, many feminists believe women should turn their attentions back to the family.
This determination not to stray from some platonic ideal of woman is especially frustrating to men who try to meet women halfway, who evaluate the value of career-enlightened women.
It's not surprising, then, that when women first taught for equality men and family life were treated less well.
This resolution is finally pleasing, if not pragmatic. Though the American dream is often synonymous with independence, few humans know that the fundamental wish for commitment to another.
Because both are obsessively devoted to their careers, and because fewer eagles nest in Chicago than good newspapers abound in the Rockies, separation seems inevitable.
“Continental Divide,” in which unlikely love arises between an overweight Chicago columnist and a high school student.
The movie's ending, in fact, is strained. The lovers say goodbye more than 10 times before they reach a compromise: they marry and separate to carry on with their careers.
Men never have hidden their desire to spend a lifetime with a woman. They've just been slow to realize that they can't be fast enough.
Although Frieden has been criticized by fellow feminists who view all long-term relationships with men as part of the Great Compromise, he is still seen as a clear early ready to reconcile with the opposite sex.
In this month's issue of Saturday Review, author-poet Eric Jong says, "I have always agreed that many feminists beating their heads against the wall by trying to deny the importance to most women of nurturing, childearing and warm familiar relationships. Denying women's needs will get us nowhere—but deeper into the trouble we are now in."
themselves in reaction against men and family life."
Friedan and her followers believe that feminists should now fight for day care and flexible business programs designed to help make the two-career family work. Opposed to this idea are those women who hold sacred the image of the Fighting Feminist, the woman who never gives an inch to any feminine need involving men.
head of which is a ruddy-faced tutor. The genial man point-of-tea of tea and coffee for his students is also a kind of teacher.
In Summerfield Hall a teaching assistant starts scrawling diagrams on the blackboard, and again the form exchange students are recalled to the current year.
They are always just a bit surprised when they see an old acquaintance who remembers who they are and can recall their name straightaway. The surprise occurs because they feel them
BEN JONES
The exchange students take with them from their host country an appreciation for its customs, determined to transplant these things into their own existence once they are back in the States. They would rather not have to adjust; they would like to incorporate into their life features unique to the way of life and the educational system of each country they have
selves to be strangers to the place, forgotten and forgetful. Forgetful, that is, while they were away, but at the first moment of return everything is exceedingly familiar. In the confusion that develops from the mixture of remoteness followed by immediacy, these students question the calendar; it does not answer except by progression always. So their questions turn inward: "Did it really happen? am I really back? has a year gone past?"
studied in. But they know all the same that circumstances will dictate their lifetimes to a great degree, and that many of the habits they acquired abroad will necessarily be lost to them.
Re-orientation into "the system" for the Study Abroad students is a solitary, involuntary process, undergone simply by looking and hearing, and on occasion seeing and listening. Now and then they see that a face makes them feel safe and of someone else who couldn't possible be here.
So these students will, to some extent, live split lives at the University their final year. They will sometimes see things from a distance of a hemisphere and-a-year. Even so, it is a fate they wish to maintain or forget, or Georgetown or Berkeley, who does not cherish having studied for a year in a "foreign" country.
The KU Study Abroad program is a tremendous opportunity for students, a glittering gem in what is too often an educational tool case instead of a jewel case. But be warned the emerald year abroad will inevitably come to an end. It's in the years ahead that we'll together three times, and she's back in Kansas.
Maybe it is better than way: Frost implored,
"May no fate willfully misunderstand me And
half grant what I wish and snatch me not
to return." (But I say by all means—or any
means—snatch me away with a return ticket in
mocket.)
Today I received a letter from the Scottish mother of a university friend I met last year during my stay at the University of Stirling. In his note, my stay will be in an old Seeds balloon. "Will you no' come back again?"
I hope so, Mrs. Vawdrey. I wish it with all my heart.
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