Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, September 23, 1981
Pre-enrollment by 1982?
When it comes to enrollment, KU students have had blessedly bountiful patience. Patience in the long, hot lines in Allen Field House, and patience waiting more than a decade while Strong Hall mulled over pre-enrollment proposals.
Experience teaches that the administration periodically engages in serious talk about installing computerized pre-enrollment a couple of semesters down the line, but the passage of time brings no change.
They're talking again, and this time the word is that pre-enrolment could be in operation next fall for planning spring 1983 classes. Chancellor Budig reportedly is behind the not-exactly-new idea, but a committee, the bane of action on campus, must still discuss and dicker.
There are questions to be answered, such as whether the University will buy new computer terminals or use the ones it already owns. There are other issues, too, regarding organization, advising and cost.
But they are things to be dealt with in any new endeavor. They need not be roadblocks, and they need not force yet another shelving of a workable pre-enrollment system.
By all accounts, pre-enrollment is not panacea. It does not eliminate early classes or first-come-first-served facts of life, but it does allow students and the University to plan ahead and avoid the hell of last-minute enrollment.
Come on, Strong Hall.
Lack of early computer ed makes technology an enemy
Johnny is the model student who represents the failure of our educational system. He can't read, write or do arithmetic. He is an average reader and uses television while watching television when he should be studying.
An illiterate society is a high enough price to pay for our failure to help Johnny, leaving him unable to function in this world. Now, the price is spiraling upward. This country is undergoing the biggest change in its history, the computer revolution, and Johnny can't compute.
According to U.S. Department of Commerce figures, 50 percent of the jobs in this country now
BRIAN LEVINSON
involve information processing by computer. That number is expected to rise to 65 percent by the year 2000, when home computers will be as common as telephones. People won't have to leave their chairs to do anything; if they need to, they can have their home robot do it for them.
We already have been swept off our feet by the electronic banking mania. Calculators and wrist watches can now tell you more information than an encyclopedia. And, last week, a developer in New York announced he was building the first apartment building with built-in computer
The hypothesis behind all of this is great. I'm sure IBM Apple, Texas Instruments and all of the other computer and electronic chip manufacturers are smiling from the ground floor up to their executive board rooms. There's just one problem: by the year 2000 Johnny will be able to work on industry, and moving into a world that, for all practical purposes, will be beyond his grain.
We are now in a period of declining school enrolments and simultaneously declining school
budgets. The last thing most school districts can afford is a computer. There are a few exceptions, such as Holland Elementary School in Minneapolis. The school is using computers to teach kinds everything from biology to music theory. But few cities are as progressive as Minneapolis.
Johnny's prospects for computer training are not much better in college. I pity Johnny when he tries to enroll in a college computer science course, only to discover that there aren't any because all of the professors left for higher paying jobs in industry. And, the colleges will also be lacking enough equipment because of their budgetary constraints.
If we don't want the computer revolution to short circuit, we have to do something. Schools must realize that computers cannot be subject to budgetary limitations. The repercussions of not providing exposure to, and training on, compulsory software may pay their computer science faculty, like all school salaries they can live on, so they won't grab the first offer they get from industry and leave.
Colleges also must encourage students to go further in their training. With the combination of plenty of jobs and high salaries, many graduates are leaving school with a bachelor's degree. That's fine for all of the entry-level computer programmer and operator jobs, but what happens when the more skilled people leave the company? They must maintain them and thoroughly understand them. That's quite a task, as anyone who has ever tried to correct a computer mistake can attest.
Computerizing this country before we develop a process to ensure that everyone is educated to function in that society is dangerous. As the richest and most developed country in the world, we are already having problems because we produce illiterate high school graduates. Do we need to literate people to bring today to be technologically illiterate, unable to function in the world after the year 2000?
Technology is speeding ahead of society. Adults who don't understand computers will be left behind. Instead of benefiting from the technological marvels, they will suffer.
Letters to the Editor
Union fight shouldn't foster U.S. hostility
To the Editor:
Although the violent attack at the ISA meeting (at the Kansas Union on Sept. 12) must be condemned as a violation of freedom of speech, this unfortunate incident must not be used as a weapon by a very small minority of anti-Iranian students to criticize the Iranian nationals.
Since the hostage crisis, while the majority of American students understand that Irians in America should not be held responsible for a crisis they had no control over, a minority of American students have tried to pressure the Iranian nationals and have gone even to the extent of demanding that all Irians are deported.
Most Iranian students disregarded the insulting and provocative statements of this group. They realized that the Americans' psychological shock of recognizing the limits of American power, along with the intensive anti-Iranian struggle against it, required different layers of American leadership and the mass media, had, and would continue to, lead to expressions of anti-Iranian sentiment.
Although the consequences of the hostage crisis will be with us forever, it is up to us—Iranians and Americans—to either continue hating each other or to try to build a new friendship. The article (Sept. 16) by Kevin Heller, "Hate at home in heart of 'great Satan'," seems to prove that at least Hellerius has chosen to hate Iranians forever.
People like Helliker should recognize that the University of Kansas is an international institution that would lack plurality and liveliness without its international students. Iranian students constitute the largest group of foreign students at KU. The treatment of Iranian students in KU is one of the rest of the community would be of utmost importance to other groups of foreign students.
It is my belief that freedom of speech must be protected at all costs and that foreign students, even though not citizens of America, should enjoy the same freedoms as Americans. Freedom of speech would be meaningless for foreign students unless they were able to criticize the policies of the American government.
Helliker's statement; "It would be a mistake for Iranians here to imagine that this country's tolerance was limitless," is incorrect and provocative. It is incorrect because it attributes the behavior of a small number of Iranian students to all Iranian nationals in the state, and it is provocative because it threatens to deprive foreign students of their freedom.
MSA ("PSG) and ISA do represent factions of Iranian student here and portions of Iranian society. But both here and in Iran, they represent a minority, and their conflict should not be used to insult the Iranian nation or Iranians in the USA.
It is my sincere belief that the primary cause
Lawyers ready to manipulate a befuddled public
If you score high marks yet earn an im-
poor grade, you can do so. You do,
do, of course, is apply to some law school.
This semester, the KU School of Law has an enrollment of nearly 600 students, more than any other professional school on campus for graduates except the School of Education.
And though 500,000 lawyers now practice in America—an 48 percent increase in the past 10 years—the future of law students here and elsewhere does not look especially bleak. American lawyers are in the unique position that their own demand in a so-called free society
As the writers of law, lawyers are virtually in command of many state legislatures and may even be elected to the Supreme Court.
KEVIN
HELLIKER
can be said of physicians in respect to the practice of medicine. But although doctors are concerned with finding cures and thus decreasing society's need for prolonged illness, physicians must complicate laws to such a degree that the average citizen is lost without legal help.
Probate is hardly an exception. Inefficiency and outrageous expense would seem to be the rule in American legal matters. This country supports five times as many lawyers per capita as Germany, 10 times as many as France and 20 times as many as Japan. And the cost of lawyers is covered in nearly everything Americans buy.
One example of legal tyranny is the cost and time involved in processing an inheritance through the courts. While American lawyers annually average $2 billion in probate fees, the American citizen pays 100 times the cost of probating an estate in England. And the process takes 17 times as long.
The problem of too many lawyers involved
in too many aspects of American life prompted Chief Justice Warren Burger to remark, "We may be on our way to a society overrun by boroughs of lawyers hungry as locusts."
Faced with a situation calling for legal help, the average citizen has no means of intelligently choosing from among the horde of American lawyers. Too often, trusting one's money to a lawyer involves as much risk as betting on a horse.
John Kozielic of Atlanta and his wife found that their bet didn't prove safe. After saving for years to buy the country home of their beloved son, she met a lawyer who told them everything was fine.
The Kozielies moved in just weeks before the bulldozers. A golf course was being built on their property. Their lawyer told them not to worry, arranged a settlement of $1,000 with the golf course owners and presented the Kozielies with a $2,000 bill.
The Kozielies went to the state bar association but couldn't get a lawyer to take the case. Everyone was either a friend of the Kozielies' lawyer or was afraid of him.
Not all victims of legal tyranny suffer losses as great as the Kozielies, but the temptation to abuse funds on a daily basis is built into the legal system
F. Lee Bailey, in a recent interview with U.S. News and World Report, observed that 'the defense lawyer gets paid by the hour. He has incentive to string that case out for years, bringing it right to the courthouse steps before his client coughs up the money.
But the most frightening side effect of a legal system which is composed, interpreted and recomposed by lawyers, is that justice itself suffers. In satisfying their self-interests, as well as protecting the right of wrong. As a defense attorney in a controversial and well-publicized case it nudited:
Another abuse in the legal system is found in its dependency upon secretaries and paralegals. Many clients pay lawyers' fees because their case has been handed down or never reach the lawyer's desk.
"he earns his fees by running the meter. If he settled every case the day he got it, his insurance company would pay."
"Given enough money, I can buy justice. I
can win any case in this country, given
that he is one of 12 people deciding
who has the best lawyer.
Clearly, a legal system is corrupt when it is fueled by money rather than a desire for justice. And when lawyers coercively perpetuate society's need for legal help, the system feeds off its people. It becomes a parasite.
One reason for hope at this point is a Washington D.C.-based organization called
HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny). This group is composed of lawyers who have joined to free the American people from the growing entanglements of law.
HALT's goal is to prevent lawyers from entering the routine enterprises of American life.
With too many lawyers on the market now and too many more on the way, our legal problem is unlikely to vanish. It's time for Americans to take up their own defense.
of all prejudice is ignorance and the only way to combat prejudice is to educate people. Maybe Helliker should try to learn about more than just the hostage crisis in the proud 25-country history of Iran and its contribution to the world's war, and then write about Iranian behavior.
Farrokh Moshiri Shiraz, Iran, senior
'Show' is a program
To the Editor:
Thank you for the Kansas's coverage of the upcoming William Allen White Award, which will be presented to Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. All journalists should be as pleased with the selection as are those of us in public broadcasting.
I do have one stylistic comment about (Steve) Robrahan's article in the Sept. 15 issue of the Kansan. He referred to "The MacNeil/Lehrer Report" as a show.
Contrary to the teachings of some in KU's journalism school, "broadcast" and "journalist" are compatible words. "Show" indicates an item of entertainment. As Lehrer correctly indicated in his interview, the PBS program that works every weeknight is a program. It is news.
Although the airwaves are clogged with as much entertainment passing itself off as news as some newspapers, it would be a discreet to call the "MacNeil/Llehrer Report" anything but a program, newscast or other informative broadcast.
Lance Ross
Statehouse bureau chief and assistant news director KANU/KFU Radio
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