Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, April 28, 1982
Taking on a tough job
When Eugene Staples steps into his new job on July 1, he will face some tough obstacles.
Staples, the newly appointed hospital administrator for the University of Kansas Medical Center, is taking charge of a hospital that is $6 million short of the amount of money needed to meet its budget this fiscal year.
The hospital is suffering from a serious shortage of nurses and a significant drop in the number of patients.
Recently, state and University officials have agreed that the Med Center is having trouble competing with other area hospitals.
They offer several possible explanations for the hospital's financial woes.
Some say that the depressed economy is causing people to put off treatment for nontreating medical problems.
And one legislator, State Sen. Paul Hess, R-Wichita, attributes the institution's financial problems to inefficient management.
Others blame the hospital's troubles on the academic nature of the institution.
Staples, currently the administrator for the University of West Virginia's hospital, will inherit this less than promising situation when he takes up the hospital's administrative reins.
He was the selection committee's first choice out of 62 applicants, and the KU administration is confident that he has the experience to iron out some of the Med Center's problems.
We welcome Staples to KU and wish him well in the difficult task ahead.
Bolstering the hospital's sagging finances while still protecting the institution's academic functions is a tall order for anyone to fill.
Modern aesthetic sensitivity lost in pop culture swamp
Art; who needs it?
Not most people, if today's popular culture tells us anything. The things Americans spend time and money looking at, reading and listening to are often in aesthetic sensitivity, if not an utter downfall.
Art as a serious endeavor—both on the part of the artist and his audience—is ignored by all but a relative few. Instead, what passes for art is merely a commodity, something we turn on at the flick of a switch or pick up on our way out of the grocery store.
It is important to distinguish between what art is and what it is not.
Art is a product of intelligent effort. It involves skill and requires craft. It aims at the mastery of art.
TOM
BONTRAGER
people and their emotions and thoughts. It is the reflection of the world to which the shape of life is added.
Art is not trite. It is not meaningless. When it borrowed from tradition, it does so for beauty's sake, not tradition's. And it is never, never not traditional, mind of being sold for the highest possible price.
A KU professor enjoys calling literature a "true lie." The paradoxical mataphor applies to other art forms as well. Painting and pieces of music, for example, are never the things they represent—they are fabrics, fictions. Yet what it stands for, with such by embodying the spirit of it.
By these standards, much of what is peddled today as art is not. In every department, serious work is.
In literature, best-sellers are written by people like Harold Robbins and Barbara Carland, authors who stagnate in musty, unimaginative—but quite lucrative-genres. One has only to peruse a public book-rack to learn the meaning of the word "shallow."
Good literature is still being written, of course, but its readership forms a distinct minority. How many people do you know who curled up in front of you and to come to sieu by Saul Bellow or Bernard Malumud?
Probably the best examples of successful schlock are found in the realm of music, where three-minute pop tunes with little significance and less variety are churned out every day like a gorilla. The performers call themselves artists, then promptly give lie to their titles by intentionally
singing harshly and out of tune. Guitars—what wonderful acoustic instruments!—are often amplified and distorted beyond recognition, listener to guess where the melody's to be found.
The problem is not ultimately the fault of the genre or idiom in which a work is written. To use a literary example, we might call Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" a love story, a war story or both. It is then somewhat set apart from gems like "Love's Searing Passion" and "Bomb's Away!" by its all-important commitment to artistry. Good literature, and good art, in general, may possess elements of a particular genre, but they always transcend the boundaries of determinism to tell us something new about ourselves and the way we view the world.
Likewise, there is nothing inherently the matter with the musical idiom of rock 'n' roll, if only its practitioners would demonstrate more concern for beauty than they typically do. The limitations of 4/4 time, unvarying instrumentation and bangdams are difficult one to overcome; perhaps that's why so few groups have tried and fewer have succeeded.
Clearly, the unstable status of entertainers in the public eye must breed the desire to capitalize on marketability. But entertainers shape the tastes of their fans, and they have an obligation, if they call themselves artists, to uphold certain standards.
Admittedly, the present situation is not unique. Civilizations of other eras have had their diversions, their trite entertainments. An important difference today, though, is technology. It has become increasingly supplanted by formulaic drivel, reproduced, reprinted and broadcast ad nauseam. The classics in music, literature and visual art are in no danger but are kept alive in our cultural memory by a small portion of the population. It is not surprising that in any depth by a huge majority of Americans.
In a time of unusual economic strife—although perhaps things aren't so bad, after all—one might well ask, "Why bother with art? It's not essential."
Not to physical sustenance, no. But humans, in their very actions, in their communication with one another and, most consciously, in their art, hope to convey the truth of their condition to others like themselves. This they cannot help but do.
And when we accept as art its best imitator, when we dull our senses with packaged encapsim, when we lose our appreciation of the beauty and majesty are capable of, then we deny our own nature.
Ask again, "Who needs art?"
We all do, and more than ever.
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Letters to the Editor
Printing salaries will cause more problems
To the Editor:
I was disappointed to read my salary in the University Daily Kansan on Friday. Although the editors of the paper had intended to enhance the discussion of faculty compensation, presumably with the idea of helping us convince the Kansas Legislature that our pay is inadequate, some other, less desirable results are likely.
Several fields are blessed with relatively high salaries while others are far less fortunate. Knowledge of actual dollar discrepancies between well and poorly compensated departments will only increase the bitterness of the relatively poorly compensated. This will poison the information when financial difficulties are widespread and the University community must work together.
The figures are presented without perspective. My salary may seem high to many taxpayers, but it is not evident to the legislator or citizen that despite my doctorate and 10 years of teaching experience, graduate students who earn master's degree under my supervision still make more than 1 do when they take jobs in the oil industry.
Similarly, brand new Ph.D.'s in geology, working in industry earn about 40 percent more than I do. The Kansan could have compared average salaries with other options that faculty members have and made its point of inadequate compensation far more clearly.
A fact that has been generally overlooked in discussion of faculty salaries is that it is not possible for a faculty member to be promoted in any financially real sense. Promotion from rank to rank involves only a trivial salary increment (I got $400); otherwise salary increases are mostly about the average of the University unclassified raises.
Classified workers, despite their woeful undercompensation, have a series of grades in addition to merit raises and annual scale increases. The only avenues open to faculty for substantial salary increases are entering the college system by giving them academic life—students' teaching, research—of shaking down the University by threatening to leave.
The objectives of the Kansan editors are admirable, as expressed. Complete openness will increase rancor and decrease understanding of our problems in the state. I hope that future treatment of this matter will put the raw data in perspective.
Worth remembering
Anthony W. Walton, associate professor of geology
A word of warning and a simple request
Frustrated by a lack of response to their questions, the protestors moved their non-violent demonstration to the administration building, honing to force communication.
On April 19, 1982, a group of concerned students at the University of Texas gathered together in public protest. Their purpose was to question the university's decision to deny tenure to a Marquette faculty member.
The University of Kansas suffered through the fear and unrest of the late 68s and early 70s along with the similar institutions, but its surplus resources still present of Chancellor E. Lawrence Chaffers.
Distant though it may seem now, there was a
University of Texas President Peter "The Immovable Object" Flawn—ever anxious to prove that students are not an irresistible force"-answered with the university police and 18 arrests. Three of those students face possible charges, and they may be subjected to university disciplinary action.
Of course, KU students need not be concerned by these remote happenings since "it can't happen here." At any rate, there was a time when it did not happen.
time when KU students gathered together in large numbers to protest and debate, when they, too, had fears and questions crying to be answered. When that hour came, Chalmers members rushed to the National Guard, but with compassion, understanding and direct communication.
Before it was vogue to do so (if indeed it is now), Chalmers actually listened to the student in the lecture.
We must not forget those days, that man.
Granted, Chalmers had his shortcomings (as holdovers from that era will beisterously testify) but very few with regards to students.
Nor would it be fair or accurate to color the present administration in an unsympathetic light, untested as it is in this respect. We simply cannot rely on these voices to remind us of the past and what it means to students. We must remember for ourselves. We must build our own monuments for the benefit of those who must follow those radiant fading, important footsteps.
Today the KU Student Senate will consider a petition to urge that the Visual Arts Building be reinstalled.
Chalmers deserves such a monument, less for the man he is than for the principles, ideas and beliefs of his time.
Chairmen Hall" would serve as a daily reminder of these things for generations to come. KU needs that reminder, lest the disease spread elsewhere should find a home in Lawrence.
former KU student body vice president and University of Texas law student
Minorities hit hardest
To the Editor:
The students, faculty and staff who participated in the recent reception for Rep. Larry Winn should be applauded by the entire University. These people showed their concern with the financial aid cuts backed by President Reagan.
What concerns the members of Alpha Phi Alpha, the oldest black fraternity in existence, is how the president and Congress can repeatedly eye the eyes to the plight of the black student in Aargel.
The drastic cutbacks proposed by the Reagan administration will hurt anyone seeking higher education who cannot keep up with spiraling tuition and college costs, but the most seriously hurt will be the minority students. Many, or should we say most, black students rely on student aid to assist them in financially surmounting their problems. It seems that minorities and the middle class are being forced to carry the burdens of the very rich and very poor.
And what irritates our members even more is that Reagan has the gall to back a plan that would give parents who send their children to private schools a tax break. Reagan calls this a political favor, and it really is a political favor for the financially powerful—the group to which he owes his election.
What the president has done is set up a reward that those lucky enough to send their money to the president problems to pay.
plague public schools along with his financial aid cutbacks.
Congress must realize that the president's neglect of those without financial advantage borders on sinful, and that if the Reagan administration would back, instead of stabbing in school to suppress student activism, public schools would continue to disfellowshade education that thousands of students seek.
Reagan is going to push for his incredibly thoughtless and inhumane programs until the people of this nation say 'enough.' And the time to say "enough" is now, not when financial aid is cut back by more than 50 percent. Just ask yourself what you would do if your financial aid was cut, and you'll understand the severity of this problem.
Alvin A. Reid and the members of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
Keep on fighting To the Editor:
So the controversial Phyllis Schifaff has come to mind. The disagreement and controversy I use is here again.
I'm a pro-ERA woman, and I was angered by some of the things she said in her speech last week.
Scalfly points out that no woman is capable of carrying a 280-pound man off a battlefield. This seems to be a bit unreasonable. May the 138-pound woman couldn't carry a 280-pound man, but couldn't she carry another woman off the field, or even a lighter man? I can pick up my boyfriend with no problem now, and adrenaline does strange things to one's body.
I'm not too sure that men and women would get along very well fighting side by side in a battle. The男 would probably spend too much time with them that they weren't holding their rifles the right way.
Perhaps it would have made a difference if the crowd had been "armed with facts, figures and well-aimed questions," but apparently, Schaffy has all the answers to any questions one may put to her, or she succeeds in evading the question altogether.
But that's not the point of this letter. On April 21, the Kansan made some observations about the conduct of the crowd that came to see Schlafy that I disagree with.
The object of the ERA is not only to have women be drafted, but to guarantee their equal status with men. Men are still able to make more money, even though they are doing the same jobs and have the same skills that women have. I've grown a bit like a man makes, a woman makes about 60 cents.
If the ERA is passed, hopefully this will change. By its supporters being calm, quiet and rational, I doubt that it will pass. If I may make some vague correlations, how quiet and rational were the people in America before the 2016 election, when women got the right to vote? When Blacks were fighting for their rights? Before the American soldiers were pulled out of Vietnam?
They all did everything they could to fight for what they believed in, and I hope the ERA
Anne Johnson, Manhattan sophomore
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-lettered and contain no words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or institution and his position. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters.