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Monday, November 13, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Opening library records threatens freedom at KU
Maybe the Federal Bureau of Investigation has learned a lesson. The FBI tried sticking its nose into KU library circulations records, but promptly got the door slammed in its face.
records of what students and faculty check out at the library are confidential, and should stay that way. It is a threat to academic freedom to have it any other way.
With open records, students and faculty members at the University may be hesitant to check out materials or fail to check them out because they feel the action may be used against them.
Access to these records would give the government a window into the private lives of citizens, especially students who are often exposed to material the government may find questionable. The policy of the KU Library has effectively drawn the shade a bit.
It is morally reprehensible that the federal government is playing "Big Brother" and trying to keep track of what people read. There are few books and magazines as dangerous as an intrusive and paranoid government.
It is good to know that FBI access to circulation records was denied. The policy protects the students and the academic community from being drawn under scrutiny because of the free exchange of ideas.
If proposed changes in Student Senate rules and regulations are approved tomorrow, students running for Senate offices will be able to receive matching funds from Senate to offset the cost of running a campaign. Senate already has to deny a number of legitimate requests for money by worthy student organizations and has to pare back the requests they approve. An increase in the proportion of the activity fee consumed by the bureacracy seems inappropriate.
While the FBI says it was asking for records in reference to a certain "violent criminal act in the Lawrence area," the possibility for abuse of open records far outweighs the benefits.
Brett Brenner for the editorial board
Senators in favor of the changes cite two main reasons: making elections more fair by giving students without a lot of money an equal chance and offering an incentive for candidates to keep costs low. The theory is that candidates would have less incentive to spend their own money after reaching the matching funds limit, and they no longer are matched dollar for dollar with Senate money.
Matching finances won't make Senate elections fair
This doesn't make sense. Coalitions with bigger war chests would simply spend above and beyond the matching funds limit, defeating the purpose of the rule and further widening the potential spending gap. The result would be that poor coalitions would have more money to spend, but so would "rich" coalitions. Everyone would spend more, students would foot the bill, and elections would not be any more fair.
Surely a coalition running for Student Senate can generate enough revenue to manage a campaign without dipping into the coffers intended to finance student organizations. The most successful of past Student Senate campaigns consisted of posterboard, flyers, and lots and lots of manpower, not expensive glitz.
The constitutionality of existing campaign spending limits is yet to be determined. If Senate changes the rules and replaces the cellings with matching funds, the brunt of the impact would fall on students whose organizations could have been financed with the money that would then go to matching funds.
Some senators question the constitutionality of existing ceilings placed on campaign spending and want to replace the ceilings with matching funds. They claim matching funds would keep costs down if ceilings are eliminated.
Senate does not have enough money to finance all of the organizations it wants to. Senators should remember that before using students' money to help pay for future elections.
Members of the editorial board are David Stewart, Stan Diel, Brett Brenner, Ric Brack, Daniel Niemi, Craig Welch, Kathy Walsh, Thom Clark, Tifany Harness and Scott Patty.
News staff
David Stewart ... Editor
Ric Brack ... Managing editor
Daniel Niemi ... News editor
Candy Niemann ... Planning editor
Stan Dirn ... Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser ... Campus editor
Elaine Sung ... Sports editor
Laura Husar ... Proofs editor
Christine Winner ... Artist/Features editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Linda Prokop...Business manager
Debra Martin...Local advertising sales director
Jerre Medford...National/regional sales director
Jill Lowe...Marketing director
Tami Rank...Production manager
Carrie Slaninks...Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend...Coordinator
Eric Hughes...Creative director
Chardt DuBois...Classified manager
Jeff Meeesy...Teacheress manager
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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LETTERS to the EDITOR
Responsibility is choice
I'm writing in response to the many pro-choice activists who pardon the taking of an innocent life by claiming a woman has the right to choose what she wants to do with her body. I want to make it clear because the question will undoubtedly arise that I am not speaking of cases of rape, incest and health to the mother. I'm speaking to the many pro-cholers who think of abortion as a convenient way out, and no matter how you look at it that is what it is — the easy way out.
No one is trying to take a woman's right to choose away. The choice has been made when one chooses to engage in sex. Some pro-cholers act as if the pregnancy is something the woman had no control over. I don't know about
anyone else, but I was always taught to take responsibility for my actions. Therefore by engaging in sex, which obviously carries the risk of pregnancy because no form of birth control is 100 percent effective, a woman should take the responsibility for the life that has been created. The right for an abortion should not be an option because it involves another's right to life.
Susan Bammer Overland Park senior
Behavioral laws illogical
On Nov. 7, the editorial board of the Kansan spoke out in favor of gay rights. The board stated that Kansas should be the next state to pass legislation to protect the rights of homosexuals. I am in favor of equal rights regardless of race, color, sex, religion or creed. However, to make special distinctions for a group of people based on their behavior is illogical.
but our country was founded on the basis of religious freedom. To deny people rights on the basis of religion or creed would go against the very foundations of our country.
Factors of race, color and sex are ones that cannot be changed. Religion and creed (basic fundamental beliefs) can be changed.
However, homosexuls in favor of special legislation are people actively pursuing the gay lifestyle. Behavior does not justify special legislation to protect rights. It is wrong to deny someone their basic rights because of sexual orientation, but if we grant special distinctions to groups based on their behavior, we might as well make exceptions for all groups who display behavior which does not fit into the mainstream of American life. It would be illogical.
Eric Moore Great Bend junior
Viewpoint from a hunter
The purpose of this letter is to give an alternative viewpoint on hunting to the animal rights activists who lately have resorted to harassing hunters. Here are some examples, probably never thought about.
To survive in this day and age,
animals must pay their way, and one way that animals are paying for themselves is through hunting. Traditionally hunters license fees helped pay for animal habitats and conservation agents' salaries. Today the role hunters play in wildlife conservation has increased because hunters wanting a place to hunt have caused debt-weary farmers and ranchers to see the economic value in creating wildlife habitats that sportsmen will pay to hunt or fish in.
This has caused some interesting things to happen. Where once a farmer would have cut brush in his pasture, he will now let it grow wild and provide deer and pheasant habitat. Now he will fix up his ponds for fish and ducks instead of polluting or draining them. And instead of shooting deer for eating his grain, he will now put grain out to attract deer.
Also, there are people who still hunt for food. I've known families who received 25 percent or more of their meat through wild game and fish.
To read her was to hear a friend's voice — an opinionated friend, perhaps, but one who had reason to be. Her self-respect gave her a natural respect for those she was talking to; her assured voice simply arose from the printed page. When she was good, usually in her younger years or her memories of them, she was very good, and even when she devolved into an almost predictable leftist matron, she was never horrid. My favorite collection of her essays is "The Humanist in the Bathub," which for some reason is not mentioned in the long list of books that preface her later books. Did I just imagine that book? Or has the market for the medicine simply erased any record of it?
Only in her novels did Mary McCarthy's didacticiam grow weary, gossipy and, yes, a little dowdy. Her more popular works, like "The Group," were the thimest. She seemed so interested in characters who did not merit her attention. But in her essays and memoirs, she shone. Her reporting retained the amateur's freshness, perhaps because her standards were those of the
Mary McCarthy was a U.S. institution: the woman of letters. And like many a U.S. institution, she began to grow predictable long before her death last week at age 77. But even in what would have been old age for others, she held on to enough of her youth to remind one of the clear, even unshaded light she had been. Her best work, like some of her early essays and "Memories of a Catholic Girlhood," came early. In that sense, and perhaps only in that sense, she brings to mind Walter Percy, whose later work delights and instructs to the extent it mirrors his earliest, "The Moviegoer."
Overland Park graduate student
Brad Hansen
Death of critic leaves a critical gap
consumer rather than the dispenser of opinion, which is always refreshing in a writer.
Naturally she would see through communism the first time it disappointed her — some time during the Moscow show trials. That's when, like George Orwell in Catalonia, she first glimpsed the enormity of the lie. Despite her conventionally advanced views, she could not abide lies — little white, straight-out, means-justifies-ends, only figurative, or any other variety.
It was typical of Mary McCarthy that she should choose the losing side even of the losing side, the Trotskyites rather than the mainstream Stalinists in the battle for what little there was of the Far Left in the United States. She was U.S. citizen despite herself and her expatriate years. The proof is that she always sided with the underdog. (Naturally she was a Giants fan.) Mary McCarthy remained a writer of the Left, however moderately, and probably couldn't conceive of any other position. That is what deprived her of the moral grandeur of someone who crossed the great political divide — like Whittaker Chambers. She may not have been deep but, ah, she was so deft.
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnist
That's all right. Mary McCarthy would have been overdressed in moral grandeur. She was much better at the limited but absolutely clear, sharp, essential, unanswerable criticism. In her
time she punctured more moral grandeur than even this bombastic society could produce. As a critic, she ably defended Hannah Arendt when that writer was telling unpalable truths, and that pooh-poohed contemporary idols like Arthur Miller and J.D. Salinger.
Let us celebrate Mary McCarthy because the U.S. market is not likely to produce another anytime soon. Miss McCarthy may have been a front of unconventional wisdom in her time, but she had fallen to the U.S. televised culture long ago. These days consumers prefer their opinions like their motel rooms: no surprises. And television supplies opinion just that way — clearly marked, undevitating and loud. The marketers of U.S. opinion must be under the impression that they are addressing a hard-of-hearing nation. To quote the Boston Globe's irreproppable Marty Nolan on the assembling of the U.S. dialogue: "It's like ordering at McDonald's. I'll have one breathing-heart, wimpy liberal and three hard-breathing-right-wingers to go." Mary McCarthy wouldn't fit in, not on your typical talk show shoutfast. First of all, she was literate.
▶ Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor for the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Commercial.
Besides, Mary McCarthy held her own work and life up to the same calm but piercing criticism she applied to others. A couple years ago, just before publishing her last memoir, "How I Grew," she was asked for her assessment of herself, and replied: "Not favorable." It was one of those exceptional times when she was mistaken.
CAMP UHNEELY
BY SCOTT PATTY