Page 4 University Daily Kansan, September 14. 1981
Opinion
Evening the score
As one might expect, KU coaches and administrators have said all along that academics comes before athletics at the University. Realistically, however, it has been the other way around for many of our athletes.
This was never made more clear than last spring when the Kansas City Times published a story alleging that KU's academic standards were easily manipulated by and for athletes. The article cited individual cases of cheating, grade changing and the steering of athletes into easy courses by their advisers.
Now, with the report of the year-old Committee on Academic Standards for Intercollegiate Athletics, some practical solutions for serious problems have finally emerged.
That story was followed by a three-part series in the Kansan (April 29-May 1) that explored the academics-athletics relationship at KU. Clearly, something was not right in the land of Rock Chalk and Javahawks.
The committee did not intend to act as judge and jury in cases of alleged abuse, but rather to serve "as a catalyst for greater cooperation in preserving and protecting KU's historic tradition of competitive intercollegiate athletics in the context of high-quality academic programs."
If all concerned parties, including faculty members, administrators, coaches, athletic department officials and
student athletes, conscientiously abide by the recommendations of the committee, it will have achieved its primary goal.
One fundamental change involves transferring the responsibility for all academic advising of student athletes to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences or to other appropriate schools.
Specifically, the committee report calls for better monitoring of the courses taken by athletes, some of whom have been known to major in eligibility—at the expense of their college degrees. Another committee will likely be formed to develop a clear-cut definition of "normal progress toward a degree," which will aid even more in guiding student athletes, and all students, for that matter, into classes that they can handle, but that also will help them toward graduation.
As the report reminds us, KU student athletes are, above all else, students. As such, they should receive academic opportunities and be subjected to academic standards that are equal to those of the general student population.
Note that the word used is "equal." We can only hope that coaches and student athletes won't think they are being picked on with the adoption of the new policies. In actuality, the athletes are being assured of getting as complete an education as all other students. They will be thankful for this in the long run, and should, consequently, be willing to work for it in the short run.
Proposed budget committee would reduce Senate babbling
History should be, without a doubt, a valuable tool for the modern-day Student Senate.
Any student body president can look to the lives of Napoleon and Mahatma Gandhi for model models. And senators at this Wednesday's meeting need go no further than the Bible itself for advice on a proposed revision in the budget-bearing process.
I suggest they look at Chapter 11 of Genesis for age-old advice. There they will find the story of the Tower of Babel, where people tried building a tower to God.
We all know the result: everyone went away speaking the same things. like, 'Boy, what a
DAVID HENRY
rotten contractor," but in a thousand different languages.
That ancient event was, in fact, an early ancestor of our existing Student Senate budget-hearing process. Every spring, eight Senate committees hear budget requests from approximately 90 campus organizations, such as Business Student Council, Commission on the Arts, the Friere Club, and allocate almost $52,000 which recommends the amount of money each group should receive and, finally, the entire Senate approves or disapproves each recommendation.
You might think the system sounds simple enough. Unfortunately, it's not. Too often, confusion, misunderstanding and misinformation plague the entire budget process.
The problem is too many cooks in the kitchen. Eight committees are arbitrarily assigned groups, are given different amounts of money to allocate and, inevitably, have eight different members from each committee that varies from meeting to meeting, with sometimes only three people making important decisions. These inconsistencies are obvious to everyone by the time the full Senate sees the finished product. There the mood appears a crowded Mexican restaurant, so it's for more money for their favorite organization.
Wednesday night, Senate has the chance to decrease the confusion. Several Senate officials wrote a proposal, designed to simplify the budget process and reduce the budget requests. Instead of a cast of thousands, budget requests
would be heard by a committee of about 30 people: the Senate committee chairmen, 10 senators, most likely chosen by application to the executive Committee, and, lastly, 10 senators.
The actual procedure will remain much the same: this new Budget Committee hears requests, makes its recommendations and passes them along to the Senate. Senate then approves, modifies or disapproves the committee's proposal.
However, some senators oppose the change to a smaller committee. Their opposition is primarily philosophical, lacking concrete evidence that the change would be a change for the worse. In a nutshell, they believe the "closed" committee of 30 would limit student participation in the budget. Currently, any nonsenator may participate in budget hearings by serving on a committee. Under the new system, senators would only vote on the mittee. "Foul," cry the opponents. "Senate is closing its doors to student input if it passes this bill."
Again, we need only look at history to find that year after year non-senators have not been beating a path to budget committee hearings. The argument doesn't hold water; masses of students aren't going to be turned away at the door.
And aside from simplifying the budget process itself, the proposal has added benefits. For instance, the eight Senate committees, freed of having to worry with the budget, can turn to other equally important projects. (If the budget bill passes, committee membership will still be open to any interested student wishing to participate. In fact, Senate actively encourages involvement.) In short, time spent debating the budget can be better spent in other areas.
Often, Student Senate is like a beached whale. So large and complicated and so lacking in protection, it tends to roll over and die when attacked. The entire budget process, as it currently exists, has time after time opened the Senate to well-deserved criticism. Groups come up with fund hearings confused and angered by the Senate's inconsistencies and confusion.
A smaller budget committee with one set of criteria for funding, rather than eight, is best for the Senate and the student body alike. Senate reduces its budgetary babbling and student organizations get a fairer, more consistent opinion on how to handle a headache, but the proposed smaller committee will make the task easier and less frustrating for everyone.
The University Daily KANSAN
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O'Connor outclasses unjust critics
The far-right groups that deemed it necessary to pass blistering, premature judgments on Sandra Day O'Connor, President Reagan's nominee to succeed retiring Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. all made a ridiculous mistake.
Despite her many obvious qualifications, perhaps O'Connor's biggest plus is her lack of support from those same groups, including the Moral Majority, which showed such success that she lack of intelligence in condemning O'Connor before her confirmation hearings.
The lady's got class. She doesn't need the support of idiots. Much of her success has come from her wise choice of friends, and they got her this far.
O'Connor's name had been floating around Washington ever since Stewart, 66, announced his intention to retire in June. But her nomination, which must be approved by the Senate this month, was a refreshing break with tradition. In its 192-year history, 105 judges have served on the nation's highest court, and all have been men.
O'Connor's qualifications are more than impressive. As an Arizona state senator, she was the first woman to serve as majority leader of a U.S. state legislature. Since 1979, she has been a judge on the Arizona State Supreme Court and has undergone her undergraduate work and law studies at Stanford in just five years, graduating magna cum laude in 1952 and joining the honorary
And rather than suffering the wrath of millions for nominating a woman, Reagan has been applauded by friends and foes alike for his decision. Even those who expected the president to nominate a rigidly doctrineintrist jurist to inject the Reagan political philosophy into the court were pleasantly surprised. O'Connor has a mind of her own. Her nomination was a gutsy, but necessary, move.
Society of the Coif, which accepts only the highest student ranked in the top ten in *business* class.
O'Connor had a brilliant future ahead of her, but only with perseverance and intelligence did she achieve it.
"I interviewed with law firms in Los Angeles and San Francisco, but none had ever hired a woman before as a lawyer, and they were not prepared to do so," O'Connor said of her job search after college. Among the firms to which she applied was Los Angeles' Gibbons.
CINDY
CAMPBELL
O'Connor is facing the same ignorance from the moral-issue zealots who failed to correctly interpret her statements on abortion. And despite her view, the subject shouldn't swing her appointment one way or the other.
In confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee last Wednesday, O'Connor took the offensive and declared in her opening statement that she would not detail her views on specific issues that might come later before the high court.
Right-to-life groups have attacked O'Connor for votes she cast as a state legislator on several bills. Most often mentioned was a bill she co-sponsored in 1973 that would make "all medically acceptable family-planning methods and information" unenlisted, so those who wanted it. The unspecified "methods" might be interpreted to include abortion, according to her critics. A strict constructionist when it comes to preparing legislative bills, O'Connor does not believe her family-planning measure could be construed that way.
son, Dunn and Crutcher. The firm offered to hire her—as a legal secretary.
"To do so would mean I have prejudged the matter or have morally committed myself to a certain position," she said. Only after persistent questioning by a dozen seniors did O'Connor say she found abortion abhorrent and never would have one herself.
Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a long-time friend whose early urging help gain O'Connor White House support, championed her once again in noting the opposition to her from the far-right groups. "I don't like getting kicked around by people who call themselves conservatives on the Senate floor," he added. "The question of who is best for the court. If there is going to be a fight in the Senate, you are going to find 'Old Gold' fighting like hell."
Goldwater took on a claim by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, head of the fundamentalist Moral Majority, that all "good Christians" should be concerned about O'Connor's appointment. "Old Gody" retaliated with, in turn, the moralist ought to kick Falwell right in the ass."
No one could have said it better. Those that are unfamiliar with a subject should refrain from judgment until they have the facts. The Moral Majority and several other right-to-life groups are guilty of prejudgment. As early as July 1, in a meeting with the president at the White House, O'Connor told Reagan that she found abortion "personally repugnant," and that she considered it "an appropriate subject for state regulation."
The means should justify the ends, and support O'Connor's statements into a pitch for abuse.
Letters to the Editor
Church endangered by 'militant' members
To the Editor:
Readers will certainly recall a recent pictorial (Aug. 27 Kansan) featuring photos of a fire-and-brimstone revival that took place in Lawrence last month, especially one picture showing a 12-year-old boy (the evangelist's son) on his back, arms outstretched in religious fervor.
Such excesses, and similar ones on campus this past week, while not an invention of the '80s, nevertheless remind us of the decline of the organized church in recent years.
The church today remains in a curious twilight realm: it does not seem to be aware of its precarious position in the hearts of thinking men and women—precarious because of a typical situation, while being necessary to a degree, does not accommade a century of ever-increasing change.
The organized church does, however, sense a deadly threat from within. This is the growth of an increasingly militant and supremely intolerant minority: the fringe elements, the fundamentalists, call them what one may, they are disslaughtering millions of thoughtful persons who are unwilling or indisposed to stomach the truth. And this is why the plunderie pleasone for money—this in a religion whose founder violently rejected the money-changers of his own day.
There is no need to be vague. Ours is, like it or not, a century that has introduced contagiousness as one of its precepts. It is also the era in which the theory of evolution has been resounding vindicated; a theory that, incomprehensibly, is still being debated in certain church circles and in academia. We know that it is not a smug dismissal of a group whose members are confident only because they talk to no one.
There is, however, a small number of sensitive thinkers who speak strongly and quietly for the
These are men who, if not familiar to all of us, nevertheless tolerated and considered and reflected upon life, men who tolerated everything except this: the insensitivity of fanatism (which will prompt and encourage a pathetic young boy to write on the ground) and simplistic creeds that cripple the growth of the mind and the spirit.
truth of the human heart—that truth which is the beginning of the religious impulse in man in our era. They do not theorize apart from science, they go beyond it. And our legacy, if any, lies with them. Men like Jacob Bronwksi, Loren Eisleyen, Nikos Kazantzakis and Pierre Tiliered.
William H. Wisner
Lawrence graduate student
Bordering on treason?
Referring to a U.S. military airshow as being akin to "Commist propaganda" is treasonous. While I am not surprised at another example of thoughtless, sensational journalism from the Kansas, I am disappointed that our former would choose to print such worthless items.
Did the Kansan really print that garbage editorial by Coral Beach on Sept. 4? If so, I am alarmed.
To the Editor:
Having just been to the Soviet Union this past spring, I can assure the readers of the Kansan that Coral Beach would be offered a job writing opinions for Pravda or Ivzesta. H, however, she thinks she will by writing large salary from an employer and by writing bold articles, she k very misjudged.
1 for one will be at the "Superbatics" airshow
Wyatt L. Butler Omaha senior
in Topeka (Sept. 12 and 13 at Forbes Field) and I hope to see many KU students there.
South African uproar
To the Editor:
Every sovereign nation in the world has not only a lawful right, but a moral right to protect its citizens, its territory and its way of life. If the United Satates were ever attacked by guerrillas operating out of sanctuaries in another country, would not the government be expected to act in their heat? Then why are South Africa's actions in Angola any different than what ours would be?
Isn't South Africa only doing what any country would do to safeguard its borders? If you answer no, then you must also ask yourself this. Why is it acceptable for Cubans to fight in a war, over that that isn't even theirs, yet unacceptable for South Africa to stop terrorism on its own borders?
Even with the prompt withdrawal of troops from Angola, there is still talk of imposing economic sanctions and completely censuring South Africa from the community of nations. Of course, not one of the countries that have recently condemned South Africa would have dared voice its opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Could it be that there are two distinct definitions in the world for the term "self-defense"? I for one am happy that South Africa has dared to set the example of a country that just isn't going to tolerate terrorism anymore. It would do us good to watch closely in the future, as South Africa's war against terrorism may just be closer than we think.
Mark T. Erwin
Mark T. Fusaro
Topeka freshman