University Daily Kansan, April 7, 198 $ ^{\circ} $
Opinion
An encouraging start
The Student Senate's new budget subcommittee proved in the past few weeks to be a change for the better.
Although some veteran Senate watchers predicted that the committee members' zeal for their task would fail as the meetings dragged on, more than 15 students stuck it out, a vast improvement over past committee attendance for spring budget hearings.
These students voluntarily put in almost 55 hours listening to budget requests from 60 student organizations and deciding where cuts had to be made.
And cut they did, trying to pare the $121,000 in requests to fit the $53,000 that the Senate has to allocate.
So far the new system has worked well. Now it's up to the full Senate to make the remaining cuts, ideally using a similarly consistent approach. Or it may decide to allocate the extra money from its large surplus account.
Making consistent and rational cuts, the committee reduced the requests to about $78,000.
The committee has done its job well, but when Senate leaders and senators evaluate its success, they should view it as a starting point for improving the budget system rather than as an end in itself.
The Senate should now concentrate on improving the steps that groups take before they present their requests to the committee.
Recently, Senate leaders have tossed around the idea of using money from the surplus account to buy a computer system for the Senate office.
By reducing the amount of time spent on paperwork, the new system could allow the Senate treasurer and administrative assistant to spend more time with representatives from student groups, explaining the budget process and helping them fill out their request forms.
If all the groups could present complete and understandable requests, the committee's job would be simplified.
By consolidating the spring budget hearings under one committee, the Senate has taken a big step toward improving the budget process.
Details about World War I overlooked in history books
If the Senate uses some imagination to further improve budget hearings, it may turn what was once a dreaded ordeal into an orderly and efficient system.
As I was counting the number of days until the semester ends, I stumbled across a long forgotten piece of information on my calendar for October 15, 2015. This week the United States entered World War I.
I stared at the six words "U.S. in World War I 1917" standing nakedly underneath the big six on my April calendar and desperately searched my brain for some additional knowledge about this war, which obviously was big enough to earn a Roman numeral. Boy, I thought to myself, this thing is right up there with the Super Bowl, and you don't even know when it was fought.
I'd always like to consider myself somewhat of
CHRIS COBLER
a history buff (a buffet, you might say), but I realized a world war was more than just a detail I'd forgotten. Why didn't I remember more from my 12 hours of history?
This brutal succinctness bothered me. Even I remembered that the war actually began in 1914. It was increasingly beginning to appear that this war just got no respect from Americans. I decided a random sample survey was in order to verify my hypothesis.
I re-read my American history text, and I concluded it was because hardly anything had been taught about the war. All my book more or less said in its two-page section was that the Germans bullied us once too often, we charged in and the war was over a year after we entered it.
"Mike," I yelled to my roommate, "when was World War I fought?"
"Before World War II," he replied.
That did it. I glum realized that Americans knew more about the War of 1812 than World War I. At least they knew when the War of 1812 was done, and expected from a war that was outdone by its sequestre?
Still I resolved to be different. I headed to the library determined to learn more about this Great War. Intuitively, I knew that they didn't give it a number until another world war came along, but I figured old copies of the New York Times could tell me more.
And so I learned that on Tuesday, 78 July, 1914, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. Momentarily, I felt better, but then I realized there was much more. Serbia was defended by Russia, which caused Germany to enter the war and which caused France and Great Britain to come to Russia's aid and which caused the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) to come to Germany's aide.
Quickly, I decided to dispense with the players and concentrate on the motives. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, he tolerv the Austrian throne, and in 1834 he married Elisabeth Austria, by a Serbian student who sympathized
with his country's desire to regain control of the sea-desier bordering provinces Bonnie and Herculese.
I congratulated myself because this sounded familiar. But again there was more. The underlying causes, according to the history books, were the growth of nationalism in Europe, the competition for colonies and other territories, the system of military alliances that created a balance of power and the use of secret diplomacy in trying to avert the war.
That was enough. I decided to concentrate on the American point of view. In 1914, America had little linking that a world war was imminent, judging from the lack of coverage in the pages of the Times. When war did break out, the Times said Europe had "reverted to the condition of being a nation" for democracy immigrants, couldn't decide who to rest for and so professed to be neutral.
But England controlled the seas, and so the United States traded mostly with the Allied Powers. Germany soon tired of this inequity and began using its U-2 boats to sink all enemy ships. The Germans tried to screw out the sinking of the luxury liner Lusatian, which carried more than 1,200 passengers, including more than 100 Americans. By then, American sentiment was favoring the Allies, and the stories failed to mention that the British would formation rounds of ammunition for Bremington riders.
When America finally did enter the war on April 6, 1917, the European countries were drained of both men and resources. The influx of American troops was followed, and on Nov. 11, 1918, the armistice was signed.
The Times boasted that the world had been "made safe for democracy," Reading this, I still felt uneasy. What really was the outcome? This Great War took the lives of two as many men as all the large wars from 1790 to 1813 put either, but I couldn't understand the point of it.
The Times cared only that we had won. The history books tell us that America was dislusioned by the horrifying realities of war in the trenches and remained isolated until 1941 and that Germany was resentful of the uncommonly violent massacre that was forced to sign and ripe for the rise of fascism.
But rather than think more about the war, I took the American way out: I turned to the sports page. There I found the perfect description for a pointless war. Ty Cobb, the ruthless Hall of Fame centerfielder for the Detroit Tigers, was involved in a fight with an opposing player in his hotel room. The Times described the aftermath: "The coach threw off their coats and proceeded to dust off the furniture with each other." World War I made about as much sense.
But this simplified version of what I now saw was a very complicated war didn't satisfy me. But at least I understood why Americans tended to blame the War; it raised more questions than it answered.
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Is this what you call an education?
The University of Kansas is a body of minds at rest. Like a rock floating in free space, we are inert matter—sluggish to act and resistant to change. Inertia permeates our campus, pervading lifeless classrooms, banal conversations and lackuster activities. As a body of minds, we don't have enough gravity even to possess an intellectual atmosphere.
The evidence is woven into the fabric of our day to day experience: in shallow courses, in trivial classroom discussions and in substandard classroom performance. The zeal for learning has faded in our student body and on our campus, so we fire the fire we do have left is slowly being smothered by a pool of indifference that rises inoxorably and is making KU a backwater institute.
JOE BARTOS
The problem has even become palpable enough to achieve an official status of sorts with the University administration. Expressing concern for the intellectual atmosphere and undergraduate education as a whole, KU's executive vice chancellor appointed a commission to study ways of improving them. The commission's report, which recommended change in curriculum, academic standards, scholarships, teaching, learning policies, called for a mix of new programs, academic tinkering and a crackdown on students.
While this blueprint plan for renovating KU calls for many changes for students and faculty, it overlooks one important area: the administration that commissioned it. And it has contributed substantially to the problem that it is now trying to solve.
Dykes' strategy was to suppress unruly student elements and his administration's tactics ranged from the questionable to the illegal. Field exercises included prohibitive drills in classrooms and campus; harassment or violence by KU police against students carrying banners, protesting speakers or assembling on campus; canceling a speaker and an art exhibit for fear of controversy; overruling and dictating Student Libraries; and Intermediate Humanities program, and more.
The administration's first contribution was the general ignorance of student rights during the chancellorship of Archie Dykes. A man who seemed more concerned about public relations, the alumni and the condition of campus shrubbery than about students or faculty. Dykes' administration consistently trampled on the rights and integrity of individual students, student groups and student governmental bodies.
Such suppression of free speech and independent thought and the violation of students' integrity don't go far to promote a "strong intellectual atmosphere."
The second contribution by KU's administration has been its misplaced priorities. Although for the past ten years Strong Hall has been very good at dealing with the alumni, the Kansas Legislature and the people of Kansas, it hasn't been nearly as good at tending to the needs of students and faculty. The problems of education have not declined quality of education have not occurred overnight; they are the results of a decade of neglect.
But the problems are the result of more than inattention to campus needs—they are the effect of misplaced priorities on a deeper level. That level is the loss of commitment to learning in favor of a good public image. And that is what happened with the Dykes administration.
For the past ten years, the image of a healthy institution has been more important than the health of the patient itself. Priority has been given to grandeise building projects, a strong basketball and football team and packing in as many students as possible. Our school to offer this educational resource was squandered to make a pretty display, the substance of our education has withered.
For Barcelona 1982
If priority had been given instead to strengthening the quality of education here and communicating the need for that education to the alumni, the Legislature and the people of Kansas, the University of Kansas would be in place to help students who poorly funded, faculty salaries are dangerously low, classroom equipment is outdated or out of repair, student employees and assistants are grossly underpaid and the undergraduate program at KU is in need of significant improvements. If the University's deterioration is to be checked and reversed, the administration must give its commitment to learning and have the fortitude to pursue policies that support it.
But these are not good times for higher education, and so KU's administration will have to make a change in its final contribution to the University's problems, a shortening it shares with its commission's report. And that is a failure of imagination.
Because of declining enrollment, reduced government funding and the growth of the professional schools, the nature of higher education is changing, and our administration will have to take an active role in recreating it. The traditional academic solutions outlined in this report will have to be augmented with more creative and open-minded solutions.
Those solutions could involve new sources and new application of funding, different structures for classes and curriculum, new faculty positions between community and campus and other areas of innovation. They can be achieved only through campus-wide dialogue, trial and error and an openness to new approaches and learning. These are important for learning must abide in Strong Hall, too.
It is critical that KU's administration take strong, active measures to improve education at our University because they have their own methods. It is important And the direction they lead us must be away from the policies of the Dykes administration, which pursued a neat, orderly appearance to the detriment of learning. It must be strong and it must be soon, because as we all learned in high school, our physics class, inertia cannot be overcome with the presence of some significant force.
Letters to the Editor
Columnist's scenario impossible and absurd
To the Editor:
This letter is in response to a column printed in the April 1 University Daily Kansan written by Susan Ahern Marusco. The column described the mechanics of, and through that, the chances of an American intercontinental ballistic missile being launched and detonated over Lawrence. Her story is evidently her justification for advocating the dismantling of all nuclear weapons. I can only wish the problem were as simple as she presented it to be.
To begin with, I must say that *Marusco* is the description of the launching of an ICBM is not only unfounded, it is utterly absurd. It is not even remotely possible to launch an ICBM without the combined and coordinated efforts of more than forty men and several computers. No one man, nor any single computer (much less a strip of magnetic tape) could launch a missile.
In addition, when these missiles are set to go, they either go or they don't. They don't just putter around up there and then fall five miles from their launch site.
Aside from this, the missiles themselves have little to do with the warheads they carry. These warheads must be individually targeted and armed. In the event that the rockets within the missile malfunction, a fail-safe mechanism completely disarms the warhead by causing it to explode. It gets the facts straight; a fifteen minute phone conversation with experts at the Pentagon worked for me.
The fact that we have nuclear weapons is another matter. Nuclear weapons are the most wretched application of man's ingenuity they exists. However, for the people of the United States to say at this time that we do not need them is sheer innocence.
I would doubt the sanity of anyone who claims to want or like the idea of ever using nuclear weapons, but thank God there are those who have the capacity to realize that we need them.
What do you suppose the Soviets would do if tomorrow we dismantled all of our nuclear weapons? That would be the point at which that scarcite story of Marusco's might be appropriate. Even then, though, it would need a few changes.
The people of Europe have reason to want to appease the Soviets; Russia is just at their back door. You would think, though, that they would notice of that door getting closer and closer to them. I have a friend in West Germany, he has cousins in East Germany, and the line dividing them isn't just an imaginary political boundary, at least not any more.
There is a reason the Soviets put that wall there, and you don't find anyone jumping it from the West to the East. After World War II, the U.S. occupied France and a part of Germany. Russia got Poland and the remainder of Germany. America rebuilt and gave Germany back to its people, and, like any other country, we compete with the Germans in the world economy.
Meanwhile, aside from trying to make sure our people have oil to heat their homes with, America has been trying to help people like the homeless.
For this, Reagan is called a war manger. It is not wrong for us to do what we can to help our
Russia, on the other hand, kept Poland and Germany and it is obvious that the people of those countries don't appreciate it. Since then, these countries don't appreciate other things, or, more appropriately, countries.
allies in preserving their own liberty, par ticularly when they ask us to—as they have.
Reagan realizes, as we all do, the horror of any nuclear confrontation. If those missiles do their job, they will rot in their silos forever, or at least until our civilization matures beyond this embarrassingly barrical stage. At that point, dismantling them would be appropriate.
President Reagan is a man; he is a rather smart man and he is no fool. He is not out to show the world what military might America possesses. If that were his goal you can be sure that Iran, El Salvador and perhaps Libya would be American provinces by now.
No. America and her leaders don't want wea-
and they never have, but if it came down to it as
it has in the past, and still could, our country is
more important than peace. It is necessary for
the people of this country and of the world to
realize that; freedom isn't free.
David L. Locke,
Overland Park sophomore
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