Opinion
University Daily Kansan, September 18, 1881
Safety must be sought
To its credit, the KU Medical Center has its act together, as far as campus safety goes.
Students who attend night classes or work late can call the campus police and ask for an escort home. They use this service, too, more than 150 times a night.
In addition, closed circuit television cameras help officers watch the labyrinth of hallways in the buildings forming the core of the campus, and students must use picture identification cards to get into the buildings after hours.
This security system is necessary at a large medical school in the middle of a large city.
Too bad the Lawrence campus has nothing to match it in thoroughness and dependability.
Feeble attempts have been made to establish an escort service here, but they have died relatively quiet deaths because of general student apathy and lack of volunteer support.
The latest attempt was made by the campus safety services office in the fall of 1979, when it launched a student-r escort service. Less than a year later, the service had only five volunteers and came to a sputtering halt, following the lead of
smaller programs that had been started in the past.
Somuch for late-night protection.
KU police are not equipped to provide a full-time escort service for the general student population. And we have nothing like the television surveillance system that would allow them to watch several buildings simultaneously.
Unfortunately, the Lawrence campus is big, too. We have wooded arenas, deserted alleys and dimly lit parking lots. And we have assaults and assorted other crimes.
Clearly, something needs to be done to give KU students on the Lawrence campus a semblance of the protection they could get at the Med Center. Effective security measures would require the joint efforts of the campus police, the administration and a representative group of students, such as a portion of Student Senate or some other organization.
But more important, they would need the support of the students themselves. Students are the ones who would benefit from the protection, and they are the ones who need it.
Anyone who has ventured down a silent, dark Jayhawk Boulevard after 10 p.m. knows that.
Roommates, not schoolwork cause early-semester ulcers
As the fourth week of classes ends, most KU students have completed the drop/add process and settled into a relatively comfortable routine. Mid-terms are still far enough in the future to be ignored and all seems well with life on this Big Eight campus.
But this sense of well-being is at best a temporary condition, for around the corner lurks the terror of the stalker who has been living with Sally about a month now. At first it was great fun, going to Country
CORAL BEACH
Club Week parties together, talking about old
young friends until 3 a.m., listening to her favorite
Village People album and playing backgammon
until dawn, etc.
Now, however, the good times are over and the reality of school has set in. And with the reality of homework comes the reality of Sally. Four weeks is just long enough for the artificial politeness to wear off; the person underneath is not the Sally you thought you knew.
It never fails. When you're asleep, Sally is entertaining friends. When she is snoring in the next bed, you need to study. If it's her turn to do the dishes, something more important always comes up, and you end up cleaning them while Sally goes to Joe's with the cure blond from chemistry.
The list of irritations grows along with the ulcer in the pit of your stomach. You find yourself hoping Sally's out as you walk home from class. When you open the door and see she is, in you realize that you want to rip her pandread out with a button hook.
But stop. Why bloody a perfectly good button hook when a less messy solution exists? Just follow three basic rules and life with Sally will be tolerable, if not enjoyable.
First and foremost is the rule of open communication. This does not mean talking about the weather or what you are wearing to the next football game. Communication means letting Sally know what you think and feel about things and listening when she tells you her views. You don't have to agree with her and Sally won't be able to talk about and agree on the other ground rules.
Second, continue to communicate if problems arise. The silent treatment will only aggravate your stomach. Besides, how will she know her bunny encana nameate you unless you tell
Finally, don't agree to share each other's responsibilities, but make it clear that each of you will take care of your own obligations. When Sally's chilled tapioca pudding grows a fur coat and little tapioca start climbing up the inside of her refrigerator, it will be her responsibility, not yours.
Granted, this could result in a war, with neither of you cleaning anything, but what would be the point of such a battle? Sally would suffer, but so would you.
Ideally, these rules should be enacted at the very beginning of a roommate relationship. However, they can be initiated later if the other person has made a mistake in their living arrangements.
For some people, these three simple rules may be impossible to observe, thanks to the presence of an incredibly belligerent, or in some cases, a terribly dense, roommate.
Letters policy
in these extreme circumstances, there is no choice but to resort to the button hook. Relatively inexpensive, and of course reusable, hocks can be fitted at most fabric shops for less than a dollar.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include the class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansas reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
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It starts innocently. You wake up thirsty and spy a roach in the kitchen sink. This strikes you as a fun chance to play God. But you're not sure where it will lead. It streptosed this roach down the drain toward
Pot Shots
Hell, you can't force yourself to drink. You return to bed still thirsty.
Next evening a client checks into your newly bought hotel motel.
By morning there's no vacancy left in your first motel.
His eyes dart around—don't like what they see. But he can't leave. His twigly legs are
While buying more, you wonder if your kitchen isn't a roach convention center. Days later the room looks like a multi-model kitchen with all its high-end roaches, all of them bloody well alive.
How long before a roach starves? You feel a pang of pity. Poor things. Maybe it would help to name them—Lassie, Lefty, a bug named Sue. ..
One night you watch Jed, your first client,
escape from a motel. The glue, you find, is
They're eating themselves free!
You dump all your counter-top property into a stack, rush out of doors and stamp until it overflows.
In bed, you find you cannot sleep. All the world is now a roach. And you're a helpless one.
In watson in Haton Library is like an hour at KCI. Powder blue graphics cover the walls. Linoleum coats the floors. And flimsy wood panels protect the windows. Step through the metal detectors just inside
Vanessa Herron
the doors and a stewardess, I mean circulation clerk, directs you to the periodicals
Listen closely and you can almost hear the rear of the DC-10s.
In the new Watson Library, orange-lettered signs hang above the aisles to direct newcomers, and the circulation desk tjw which contains the number (user) is in a logical, easily accessible location.
Watson's new design is more efficient, but still. I miss the Watson of my lost youth.
One of my earliest memories of KU is of gazing at Watson's marvelously impractical entryway and thinking, "Where do they keep the box?" And yet the box is used for forgotten corners without fear of a nervous mother snapping on a light to save my eyesight.
Thanks to renovation, I don't need my mother—a fluorescent glow lights every corner. And thanks to renovation, the way of all airports and office buildings.
Watson Library is new, it's with it and it's Watson. But somehow the building's cheerful.
The acute pencil sharpener shortage on campus, as reported in the Sept. 9 Kansan, is solvable. A student was quoted at the end of the semester for taking a break and ground it (the lack of wall-mounted sharpeners).
peners) is to use a mechanical paint." But
peners" are around it, and "get around"
one's pencils, but it's not around them.
I would point out that the Kansas Union Bookstore stocks metal penil sharpeners with stainless steel blades for a painless price. The sharpeners are about the size of a police officer's whistle, and a lot quieter, which is an outstanding feature for pencil sharpeners to have, especially during an exam. I've found they shave a sharper point than wall-mounted sharpeners and your pencil sharpener. And they can be only a pocket's pull away at all times, which is another feature uniquely suitable to take tests. The sharpeners also come in handy as spare chess pieces, if you've lost some of the rooks in your set.
Pencil sharpening becomes a pleasure, not a chore, with these pretty little beauties. In my leisure moments I've sharpened many a pencil down to the very stub—pointlessity. We enjoy enjoyment of it. So buy a hand-held sharpener and learn how to shave legs legally.
This advertisement was brought to you by a satisfied student.
Man must 'pay his way' to survive
By LEWIS THOMAS
New York Times Special Features
NEW YORK—We like to think of ourselves as the most special things on Earth, uniquely endowed with intelligence and awareness, but this is a notion we probably will have to outgrow. We cannot survive indefinitely thinking of the Earth as a kind of combination domestic animal and garden placed at our disposal. We are obliged, all other living beings, to pay our way.
The challenge confronting us at this stage in our development is to discover what is meant by paying our way. This is, I believe, the underlying purpose of science, for many of the things we need to learn concern the way the whole place works, from the inner parts of individual cells to whole organisms, then to coral reefs, rain forests and other ecosystems. We all perhaps indeed the only species on the planet in possession of consciousness. But for all our frontal lobes, we have an enormous deal to learn.
Come to think of it, I am not all that sure we are unique in the matter of consciousness. There is an extraordinary insect known as the weaver ant, which lives in huge colonies scattered over acres of forest trees. Now, the weaver ants do a series of tasks, including nesting on other trees and across the ground, but they are always aware of the precise boundaries of the colony's territory.
When a group of ants from one colony encounters an alien ant within its territory, an extraordinary defense reaction occurs. Some of the defenders rear up on their hind legs and make threatening gestures, while others remain motionless to avoid being trailed of scent along the route so that they can find the way back without failure. Within a few minutes a whole army is recruited in this way.
One way to look at this behavior is to dismiss it as entirely automatic: the ants are little encoded machines, the individual parts-on-legs of a larger computer, the colony. But another way to
Our trouble may be that our brains are extremely large, and we are, therefore, unable to imagine anything else. We might have thought, like a flea, or two or three thoughts at a time, like a weaver an.
see it, fair enough so far as I can see, is as a carefully out-response of very small animals endowed with very small brains, maybe capable of giving rise only to one or two very small thoughts, but thoughts nonetheless, same as ours.
our lives.
Human society is not like this at all, of course. I am of things together, build cities, for example, and swarm into and then out of them, but we are not bound by our genes to keep doing the same sort of thing over and over again, generation after generation. We rose above the social insects long ago, thank goodness. We can change our minds, think up new ways, imagine different futures. Still, we are bound to each other by language, by music, by affection and most of all by our curiosity about each other and about the world at large.
But consider what comes into play when half a million or a million ants are assembled in a colony, exchanging messages and single bits of information, always touching each other. It is what biologists used to call a superorganism. The colony can live as long as a turtle, even though each individual member has a life span of only a few weeks.
what we need is time: time to figure things
It is not enough to pay our respects to the
photographs from photographs from
satellite link to our family album.
Very likely, we have obligations. Human society is as much a working part of the planet's collective life as any other part. But what are we good at? Could it be that we are a transient tissue, something being tried out for a role in evolution, here today but gone tomorrow? Do doubt this, partly because it's not clear if it, or whatever nature makes sense in every natural enterprise explored thus far, and I am inclined to the view that our species will make sense as well.
out, time, above all, to grow up as a species, to begin thinking together as a species, at least as cleverly as weaver ants and termites.
It is the tendency of life to survive by propagating and to extend itself into any new niche that it can find. Even in the rocks dug from remote depths beneath the antarctic ice, there are living creatures. The near-to-bolling water of geothermal waters contains living cells that can move and propagate, at that temperature. There is no limit to the ingenuity of nature on this planet.
Perhaps we will land and set up households on other planet someday, even build ourselves mobile cities in plastic domes to travel from one place to another, tack our way to the edge of the solar wind.
When people from my profession talk like this, it is sometimes called hubris. Science is thought to be a process of pure reductionism, taking the meaning out of mystery, explaining everything away. It is not like this at all. The scientific method is guesswow, the making up of stories. The difference between this and other imaginative works of the human mind is that science is obliged to find out whether the guesses are correct, the stories true.
The greatest single achievement of science in this most scientifically productive of centuries is the discovery that we are profoundly ignorant; we don't know about nature and we understand even less.
Starting with ourselves, and the life immediately around us, we have lots of homework to do, lots of pride to swallow, lots more ignorance to face. But I think we can make a guess at one kind of answer to my question: What are human beings good at, really good at a species, that makes us worth all the trouble we cause] In the very long run, if we are to have a chance of surviving, we must keep at it long enough, we may one day begin to pay our way.
Lewis Thomas, chancellor of the Memorial Slom-Kettering Cancer Center, is author of "The Memoirs of Slom-Kettering."