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University Daily Kansan, September 17, 1981
Opinion
A fight against tradition
Odily enough, "tradition" is the major reason cited for recent budget cuts affecting KU's department of special education, part of the School of Education.
According to Ed Meyen, associate vice-chancellor for research and graduate studies, federal support in the area of personnel training for the handicapped has been extremely shaky in the past few years. For some reason, special ed is never deemed as important or credible as other educational departments. Therefore, it is traditionally one of the first areas to be shut off from the money supply.
Right now, KU's department of special education can't afford to keep its library open or to offer unique courses it considers important, such as a class on physical abuse of handicapped children. The department also has discontinued all student scholarships and stipends.
Next week, Meyen will be in Washington, D.C., to begin lobbying for more federal support, which is expected to drop nationally from $58 million to about $45 million in the next year. Because KU's program is considered one of the best, if not the best, in the country, Meyen is hopeful that it will fair well in competition for funds. The trouble is that there is less money to compete for in the first place.
KU students in the department of special (all 400-plus of them) won't enjoy being told they must "learn to live on a leaner ship" as they work to become sensitive and educated professionals in one of the most demanding and altruistic fields imaginable.
Tradition is fine, as long as it doesn't stand in the way of needed change or perpetuate inequitable policies. When it does that, it becomes a liability, not only for those it hurts directly, but for everyone.
Quest for living dinosaurs proof that hope isn't extinct
Okay, all you perpetual cynics, listen up. All's not lost in this world of death and destruction, grief and sorrow.
way my optimism? Because no matter how bad things get, there's always someone with enough hope to keep going. Take Herman Regesters, for example. He's a former space visitor who knows that life is hard to have hope, he does. See, he's off hunting dinosaurs in the darkest regions of Africa
Yep, dinosaurus all right. Live 'uns, too. As you can see, Reguests, like the proverbial ant with the rubber tree plant, has high hopes.
Now, some disbelievers would say, "But the dinosaurs died out over 65 million years ago."
But we believers would say, "How do you know? Were you there when it happened?"
O, ye of little faith! You have been affected by the akegalation of a skelegal age. It is that harne
DON MUNDAY
to believe that somewhere on this planet—perhaps in the most unpopulated deserts of Australia, or in some greedy deli in Brooklyn…there could be roaming a dinosaur or two, perfectly oblivious to their status as living anachronisms?
Should we expect the dinosaurs to keep track of the calendar and one morning awake and say, "Hello," they'll be doing that too.
After all, look at all the other things that were supposed to have been extinct but really weren't. Remember when they found that fish off the coast of Africa, the one that was supposed to have been extinct for 60 million years? The coelacanth it was, and I suspect we wanted to believe it was extinct simply because it had such an unpronounceable name.
Face it. Our calling something extinct is like condemning a building but not having the power to break it down.
True, I'm a little touchy about all this dinosaur talk because I used to be a first-class dinosaur freak. I know a lot of you probably were, too, when you were kids, but I was a dinosaur maniac. I had more than a hundred of those little plastic dinosaurs that came in cereal boxes; I was nearly Post Toasted to death building up my collection.
Dinosaurs are still fascinating creatures to me, although my little dinosaur army has long since disappeared. Dinosaurs may have had brains only the size of walnuts, but they hung around a lot longer than we have. They were mighty versatile for such mindless beasts—some
walked, some swam, some flew and some even started a chain of gas stations.
And even today, long after my childhood dinosaur fever has faded, I still use a distant cousin of the brontosaurus—the thesaurus—every day.
No dinosaurs? Balderdash! Everyone assumes that just because they're 'extinct', the dinosaurs are all lost. Every last one. Boy, once you get slapped with the stigma of being extinct, you're branded for life. It's like being called a communist. Back in the '50s or being called a communist.
And even if the dinosaurs are lost, they can't be lost for good, because it's a fact that there are only two things in all the world that, once lost, can never be retrieved. One is virginity and the other's a 4.0 GPA, neither of which is at issue here.
Obviously, this Registers fellow—who used to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California—shares my sentiments, or he and his wife and another believer wouldn't be roaring around in a swamp in what used to be the Congo looking for brontosauruses. Their search is based upon legends that have persisted for centuries among the pygmies there, legends about an odd creature called the mokele mmembe.
from the pygmies' description, that mokele mbembe seems to be very similar to the brontosaurus; they just don't call it that because pygmies don't speak Latin. Missionaries, too, are not as much used in writing of the mokele mbembe. And if you can't trust overmiles and missionaries, who can you trust?
And then there are the reports of mysterious tracks—huge footprints that certainly weren't made by pygmies and their little tennis shoes. I suppose in the Himalayas these footprints would have been a common sight, but that's another story. In the Congo, tracks mean a dinosaur's be out for a stroll.
Now, with all this hard scientific evidence—rumors, pygmy stories and a bona fide former scientist hunting the biggest game of all—how could you not believe? Yet the same people who believe in astrology and budget balancing and computer science will say "bunk" to the thought of live dinosaurs.
Yes, Virginia, our own cynicism has hardened us against believing what we want to be real. Why, I was at a performance of "Peter Pan" not knowing why I should be broken because nobody in the audience believed.
And if I didn't have a history test coming up
I just might have joined the dinosaur expedition
I, for one...do not want to live in a world where an extinct animal we have is the Norwegian elkbond.
Video-game fanatics truly spaced out
Pac-Man, Gorf, Defender. No one can escape from them. You can't walk into a store, supermarket or bar without tripping over a video game. This country has been inundated with these electronic mind-numbing toys.
At first there were home video games, in which the family television set was hooked up to a video computer system. By simply changing game cartridges, players could be mesmerized with "Canyon Bomber," "Space Invaders" or "War Lords."
One video game company now has more than 1,500 game variations available. The American public spends enough time in front of the screen to enjoy a constant attraction of zapping asteroids two a.m.
Proponents of video games say they nothing more than good, clean fun for most
KARI
ELLIOTT
youngsters. At least the kids are staying home at night, instead of going around robbing convenience stores or smoking dope.
Video games wouldn't be so bad if they remained in the home. But through advances in miaturization and development of the miraculous computer chip, the hand-hold device that controls your keyboard makes it possible for any button-pushing zombie to take his obsessions with him.
These expensive computer toys are an obsession.
Medical authorities on addiction and experts on compulsive gambling are concerned about the addictive potential of video games. Many of the most successful gamers could become dependent upon the games.
If children spend an excessive amount of time or money on video games, parents should recognize that this pastime may be turning into an addiction, according to the American College of Alcohol Abuse program at the New York Hospital-Cornell University Medical Center.
Eyes glazed over, fingers flitting adeeply over the tiny controls, the video player sits in the back of a room, trying to get a higher score before the batteries wear down.
If a child's whole world revolves around Space Invaders, then he has a problem.
Many of today's addictive gamblers were yesterday's pinball wizards, according to
What is more alarming about video games is that a child's obsessive behavior with an electronic toy may lead to compulsive gambling as an adult.
surveys by Gamblers Anonymous. Current video games are even more captivating than silver balls bumping into obstacles, lighting up a half-naked woman.
Video game manufacturers contend, however, that their products are neither addictive nor likely to lead a child to a life of gambling. But the number of people dropping quarter after quarter into video games has increased dramatically in the past six years.
One manufacturer estimated that about 15 percent of the American public—more than 30 million people—played coin-operated video games last year, compared with 3 percent in 1975. These 30 million video freaks were plopping from 20 to 30 billion quarters into electronic games for a few minutes of vicarious excitement.
That's about $5 billion to $7.5 billion spent on public video games. Add to that figure the money spent on home and portable games and batteries. In fiscal year 1800, KU's total budget was about $124 million, which means that the money devised by video games in
one year could finance the University for more than 40 years.
The latest ploy to suck money from addicted consumers is the Space Attacker computer-game wrist watch. Now players will know exactly how long it takes them to
In addition to the watch's electronic sound effects, it plays themes from "Twilight Zone" and "Star Trek." The person who would buy the watch was born when "Twilight Zone" was first aired.
Nothing is wrong with a little escapism or with throwing away a few bucks playing a video game. Admittedly, the games are fascinating, watching your spaceship magically floating in a dark void, shooting a light beam at an alien creature and then falling back to the surface in another space level, fighting asteroids, all from the safety of a barrow stool.
But Americans have allowed video games to dominate their lives. The games have become a part of culture.
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Hunger strikers don't deserve disrespect
In the Sept. 4 issue of the Kansas, Rebecca Chaney turns to history for an explanation of the hunger strike in Northern Ireland—the stories of Romee and Juliet, Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe, among others. She fails to address, however, the most pertinent histories of all, the history of Ulster County, the history of the IRA and the history of the hunger strike itself.
Even when one does turn to the history of Ireland for answers, it is still difficult to understand the symbolic action of a people who claim a heritage other than our own. But misunderstanding (or even proper understanding) of the action does not give one the right to label it "selfish," as does Chaney. People choose to give their lives for a cause, one should not show disrespect by calling them "trendy dieters," nor their actions "theatrical performances," whether one agrees with them or not.
Perhaps it is better just to turn to the words of Terrance MacSwiney, mayor of Cork, who went on a hunger strike in 1920. After 46 days without food in Brixton prison, he wrote, "Whatever I suffer here is more than repaid for by the fruit will exceed the cost a thousand fold."
It is quite possible that the 10 men who have died in British prisons over the past four months had been victims of torture.
Mary Muldoon Olathe sophomore
Survey policy clarified
To the Editor:
I would like the opportunity to correct several errors in a story about the Student Opinion Survey Program that appeared in the Sept. 11 Kansan.
The story stated, "Questions will not be accepted if they concern faculty or staff, if they are from an individual, from an off-campus or if they will be used for academic credit."
This statement is not an accurate representation of the written statement I provided to your employer. Your employer may require you to complete this statement.
"The SOSC retains the right to reject any survey proposal for justifiable cause. For example, SOSC's survey of a local school"
a) academic credit will be given as a result of the survey findings,
b) the request is related to a regular classroom assignment,
c) the request comes from an individual not
requiring a corporate offer examination
d) the request is for the use of an off-campus organization or third party.
e) the request is for a survey of faculty or staff;
f) advance publication would bias the results of the study.
C
Note that while the program was designed to survey students, questions may concern faculty or staff, and that questions may come from intruders. You should note that they represent a campus office or organization.
I would also like to state that the committee has not met to vote on proposed questions it has received for its next survey, so it is premature to address them. Of course, topics are going to be addressed by that team.
Barbara Paschke
Chairman, Student Opinion Survey Committee
Convicts resourceful
To the Editor;
By the time you receive this letter, the three escaped inmates from the state penitentiary at Lansing will probably be captured, severely beaten and thrown in their dingy cells. They will be resigned to spend the rest of their lives watching the walls slowly close in on them.
On the surface, this seems like a good thing to do. It would look bad for the prison officials if three hardened criminals beat them at their own game.
The fact is that these men proved that concrete, steel and bullets cannot always contain intuitive individuals. If these guys can outwit the system, I say let them free. Sadly enough, there are many people who have committed the same crimes but who are now free.
These men have obviously learned their lessons. To date, they have had the opportunity to kill six men and women. They let these people go unharmed, both verbally and physically.
Let's not let the officials further embarrass themselves by searching in vain for three men who are obviously brighter than the officials are. Let's call a spade a spade.
Scott Francis Lawrence freshman
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