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University Dally Kansan, September 3. 1981
Opinion
Keeping the door open
With mistrust of governmental officials now being the rule rather than the exception, it's nice to see local commissioners keeping one another honest.
At Tuesday's meeting of the Lawrence City Commission, Brad Smoot, deputy attorney general, sternly warned the commissioners against gathering informally before their official meetings. His admonition came in response to a complaint by Commissioner Don Binns that two other commissioners and Mayor Marci Francisco had been violating the Kansas open meetings law by occasionally meeting in the mayor's office on Tuesday afternoons.
As it turns out, there can be a very fine line between violating the law and abiding by it. For instance, as long as the commissioners had not arranged their meeting ahead of time and weren't discussing the agenda and—this is a sticky one—had not closed the door, they would not be breaking
the law. However, if a couple of commissioners knew that the mayor always went to her office at a certain time and they just happened to show up there and wound up discussing business, that simply wouldn't wash.
Smoot is to be commended for his quick response to the complaint and his careful clarification of the open meetings law. The commissioners, although they probably weren't intentionally straining the limits of the law, should be advised that no less than conscientious adherence to the rules will be tolerated. They are public officials, and whenever their actions bear the slightest hint of impropriety, they will be called to account.
Open meetings are declared a policy of the state "in recognition of the fact that a representative government is dependent upon an informed electorate." Publicly enforcing the law is the first step to making sure that electorate stays informed.
Letters to the Editor
Military spending robs us all
Now that we have embarked fully and without reservations on a course of "taking from the poor and giving to the military", perhaps we need to remind President Reagan of a statement made, not by a "bleeding-heart liberal pacifist", but by President Eisenhower on April 16, 1953:
To the Editor:
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the husbands of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who have been injured, those who are cold and are not clothed.
The cost of on one modern heavy bomber is a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 30,000 people.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of
Harry G. Shaffer Professor of Economics and Soviet and East European Studies
A blow to freedom
Once again, the Reagan administration's veto of the U.N. resolution condemning South Africa's invasion of Angola has given credence to the growing feeling among African nations that the country is unholy wedlock with the racist regime in Pretoria at the expense of majority rule in South Africa.
To the Editor
This action in itself does not mean that the administration had made perpetuation of racism (apartheid) in South Africa, the cornerstone of its African policy. However, the veto, coupled with Ambassador Kirkpatrick's meeting with South African military officials earlier this year, is an indication of U.S. preference of apartheid to democracy in South Africa.
It is dishearing to note that this great country founded on freedom, whose people enjoy the greatest freedom any nation on earth can enjoy, is now the country opposed to freedom in Africa and especially in South Africa. A possible answer to this action by the United States could be that she is morally bankrupt when it comes to dealing with racism in South Africa.
Victor E. Archibong
Victor L. Arcbong Nigerian graduate student
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90e Acabos '81
Hazing no example of 'brotherhood'
Archaic traditions are fine in their place. The 17th century peasants found wearing garlic effective at keeping the vampires away. Ancient Polynesians had great fun throwing virgins into volcanoes to appease them, and they did so with great ease. We have Greek organizations that think they are building character by branding and otherwise hazing their members.
Though assorted raps on the knuckles have occasionally been doled out by administrators and national fraternity and sorority officers, hazing still exists nationwide like a plague. Prohibitive measures have been ineffective, it seems.
The pledge classes that finally revolt and take fun-filled walkouts often face revengeful actives when they return. Pledges might be subjected to verbal abuse, covered with peanut butter, eggs or urine, or forced to sleep on rain-snowed mattresses outside.
Though many Greek initiation rites are physically harmless, many more are potentially very dangerous. And while every Greek organization formally denounces hazing, it still goes on across the country. Deaths from alcohol poisoning, burnings and severe paddlings haven't ended the ridiculous practice.
These archaic traditions aren't only practiced by fraternities, interestingly enough. Some sororites still cling to assorted macabre traditions involving caskets and blood. You've heard of reborn Christians. These are reborn Greeks. Good Lord.
Last February, Halleen Stevens, founder of the Committee Halting Useless College Lectures, lectured to about 50 people in Woodland, "Hazing and Why It Should Be Eliminated."
get in a car trunk with two other pledges and drink a pint of bourbon, a fifth of wine and six glasses.
Stevens's son, Chuck Stenel, died as a result of a hazing incident after he pledged a fraternity at Alfred University in Alfred, N.Y. As part of his pledging, he was instructed to
When the trunk was opened, Stenzel was unconscious and the other two pledges were vomiting. He died that night of alcohol poisoning. But the question you all are asking is, did he drink all that liquor like a "good" pledge?
One of the most recent hazing deaths took place at the University of Missouri in
CINDY
CAMPBELL
At the time of her lecture, Stevens had documented more than 65 hazing deaths since 1973.
Columbia last October when a 19-year-old man died from falling from a monument while a pledger was hitting it.
"Each and every instance began as one ever intended for anything to go wrong."
"I've heard every excuse in the book—it strengthens the bonds of brotherhood, unifies the house, I went through it," alumni expect it—but none of these excuses hold any water with me," she said. "That's not what brotherhood is about."
Aside from a death toll that would wipe out an average-sized Greek house, Stevens said countless others had been injured, not only physically, but mentally.
Well, of course not. We don't want to kill our pledges, we just want to scare them a little so they'll have a close, united pledge class that will bond together to win the wedgeclass
football tournament, or something equally as important.
In the long run, hazing is not beneficial to the house or to the individuals involved. As a sorytion member, I would find it very hard to respect an active who beat or verbally abused me. Disrespect among members is not conducive to house unity. Nor do I think being hazed would make me a better citizen, mate or parent.
The Greeks at MU never thought it would happen to them, yet it did. If hazing does indeed remain on the KU campus, it should be eliminated before a serious accident occurs. Pledges need to know they have a right to escape from the hazing mentality. Those who have the courage do so stand above the rest and possibly save others from the same barbarous treatment.
And what possible good could it be to the house? Prospective members would very quickly give up the idea of joining a house they know would haze them.
It should be noted that not all Greek houses persecute or harass their pledges by making them do humiliating, difficult or meaningless tasks. But there will always be groups that abuse the otherwise very organized Greek system, if their rituals are truly harmless, as well as allowing the guilty to be publicly scrutinized? Often the guilty are loudest. Neither Greeks nor their traditions should be immune to scrutiny just because they're Greek, or for any other reason.
Houses maintain their innocence year after year, yet blatant violations occur. Those who survive their pledgeships become actives. Those who don't are labeled "weak" and those of the title of active member. And all this occurs in the name of brotherhood or sisterhood.
It shouldn't take a tragedy to get rid of something that should have gone out with all its chips.
Tuition bill offers escape from public schools
Parents who choose a private education for their children may soon be free from the tyranny of public schools.
This year a tuition tax credit bill was ... produced to Congress by Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. The measure would allow a parent or self-supporting individual to take an income tax credit of up to $250 for each student he or she supports in a private elementary, secondary, or college-level school.
By 1984 the ceiling would be lifted to 5000 and the credits extended to graduate students and
THE COLUMBIA DORIAN © 1978 BY CHRONOSTATIST - NEW YORK, N.Y.
Although it is hard to predict how Congress will react to the bill, conditions look favorable for its passage. A similar bill won House approval and gathered 41 votes in the Senate in 1978. With a Republican majority now dominating the party, this could be the year for the bill's approval.
The Reagan administration, which has voiced support for the bill, requested that consideration of the bill be delayed until its tax-cut and spending-cut legislation cleared Congress. With the passage of the budget and Congress in recess, the tax credit bill will not be considered until Sept. 9 at the earliest.
part-time students at colleges and vocational schools.
With the quality and financial stability of public education deteriorating, the notion of educational services that would allow people to choose what they want and pay for what they
KEVIN
HELLIKER
choose, continues to arouse support—and opposition.
Among those opposed to the bill are the American Federation of Teachers, the National PTA, the League of Women Voters and the American Civil Liberties Union. Together they have formed the National Coalition for Public Education.
The arguments put forth by the NCPE are that a tuition tax credit bill would violate the separation of church and state and would cater to the rich.
A weakness commonly pointed to in the church/state argument is its assumption that religion follows necessarily from non-public education. Many private schools, in particular those founded by the logical positives, teach subjects like the public schools—secular humanism.
Many parents and educators have come to believe that they are not. Murray Rothbard, a professor of economics and libertarian author, wrote in Reason magazine that "the public school system was designed from its very marrow as a compulsory Protestantizing device,
But the very raising of the church/state issue seriously bites a more fundamental question: how does it help to build a community?
"Public schools teach religion too," he wrote. "Not a formal, theistic religion, but a set of values and beliefs that constitute a religion in all but name. The present arrangements abridge the religious freedom of parents who do not accept the religion taught by public schools. Children are exposed to religious children indoctrinated with it, and to pay still more to have their children escape indoctrination."
almed at taking Catholic and Lutheran High kids, forcing them into public schools, and molding them into good priest Protestant Americans."
Educators today are increasingly rejecting the claim that secular humanism is non-theological. In "Free To Choose," Milton Friedman put it best:
Few people can afford to "pay still more." Under the tuition tax credit bill, however, a private education would be affordable to more people. In opposing such a bill, it is the NCPE that is favoring the rich. Surely this group realizes that a poor child, if given only half the money allotted in a public school, would be able to fully enroll in the average private school
many more in a larger private school.
A voucher plan is presently being drawn up in Boston, where the per-pupil budget in the public school system is up to $4,000 annually.
John Silber, president of Boston University,
has taught us about the four times what is spent in excellent parachute training.
Boston's Finance Commission chairman, Edward F. King, has proposed a plan in which every student would receive a $1,500 voucher to pay for college expenses, public parochial, or suburban school in the city.
King said that the plan would make schools more competitive and efficient" and that if it weren't so, he said, "we'd have
It seems clear that with a voucher or tuition tax credit plan, more students would have greater opportunity to enroll in the school of their choice. Freedom of choice would then stir competition and raise academic standards, which is why the NCP opposes such plans.
Public education has never been able to compete with private education in terms of providing excellent educational services. But because the public school system has had a large number of public education—escapable only by the rich—public schools have never been forced to compete.
Despite the efforts of the NCPE to maintain educational discrimination, public schools might now wish to start preparing for an academic showdown.