6714
Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansan, December 7, 1981
Searching for quality
"We in America are haunted by two confusions, one of which confounds education with learning, the other with technological proficiency. These two substitutes are attractive and relatively easy; but neither of them entails education, nor does education imply either."
This quote from Brand Blanchard introduces the newly released report from KU's Commission on the Improvement of Undergraduate Education. For months, one of the administration's favorite phrases has been "high-quality education"—that's what the University is known for and that's what it must work harder to maintain. Until now, the term "high-quality" has been ambiguous, at best, but the commission's report finally puts into black and white some ideas for improving the academic programs at KU.
Led by Deanell Tacha, vice chancellor for academic affairs, the commission was eager to stress that it did not base its findings on data spewed from a computer. Rather, it solicited letters from every faculty member and asked them to list their concerns about programs in their school or department.
The faculty wrote back about a lack of student interest in learning for learning's sake, about courses with little content and about a need for a better system of rewarding truly good teachers. It was to these concerns that the commission addressed itself.
Some of the commission's goals were more idealistic than others, but all were backed by good intentions.
The idea of establishing a core curriculum that would govern both professional schools and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences may seem radical, but it makes sense. A common complaint among teachers is that students simply don't have fundamental reading and writing skills. Applying minimum academic standards to everyone should eliminate this problem.
Other proposals, such as recording excessive, unexcused absences on students' permanent records or making adding and dropping courses even more difficult, would be less than popular with students. If such policies are adopted, they should be accompanied by some system of appeal, for there are always valid exceptions to every rule.
And creating an "intellectual atmosphere" on campus, although an admirable goal, is a plan that would be especially difficult to carry out in practice.
To its credit, the commission is being realistic in recognizing that "the recommendations of the report will be widely discussed, often criticized and perhaps not readily implemented." And at least one faculty member has warned that the proposals could meet the fate of many others at the University—be assigned to committees and then left there.
If the commission and the University are serious about searching out that elusive "high-quality education," these findings and proposals must be openly discussed, and any final decisions must be popularly supported, or at least accepted.
Opponents of book censorship should fight the battle head-on
But increasingly, the controversial question of censorship, particularly in public schools and libraries, is becoming an important issue for Americans in the '90s.
Mention book censorship and images of Hitler's Germany in the '30s flash into the minds of many people, a time when volumes of objectionable materials were burned in bonfires.
The phenomenon has become so widespread that the Supreme Court decided this year to hear a controversial five-year-old case of book banning. It was in a Long Island, N.Y., high school in 1976.
Throughout the country, teachers and school principals are reporting increased numbers of protests from concerned parents and community groups over printed material used in public schools. And according to the American Library Association, the rate of incoming protests over library materials has jumped 500 percent in the last year, from about four a week to four a day.
DAVID HENRY
Both sides believe the court's decision will have widespread ramifications for the future and both are already claiming victory for their side.
: The fundamental question facing the court is what does the First Amendment protect—and prevent? Thirteen years ago the Court decided that students and teachers don't leave their rights to freedom of expression "at the schoolhouse gate."
; Yet even opponents to this new wave of book banning readily admit that these guarantees are not worth the effort.
:: "There's no bright, clean line when you try to apply the First Amendment in these cases," says Bruce Emnis, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
:: What is it then that increasing numbers of parents are finding objectionable in student textbooks and materials? In general, they feel that declining test scores and increased violence promiscuity among youths reflect the Christian-Christian values in public schools today.
"Today everything is gray and one teaches right from wrong," maintains Terry Todd of St. Paul, Minn., who last year formed a national organization ironically called Stop Textbook Censorship.
Betty Jenny, a Shawnee Mission member of Todd's organization—actually a branch of Phyllis Schaffy's conservation Eagle Forum—takes the idea even further. "Values are taught (in public schools) but the question is whose values are taught. At one time the values of our society were the same. Today this is no longer the case, and we're trying to restore ours (the parents)' to schools."
Jones adds that "I don't believe that we are the censors but, in fact, we are trying to restore what we were."
Both Todd and Jones believe the so-called decline in morality was planned and programmed by "change-oriented" university educators. They view their organization as a grassroots reswakening of a majority of paranoid self-obsessed view of what was behind the decline of education.
And as if on cue, the reaction from educators and the press has been loud and angry. Articles in the Saturday Review and the New York Times Book Review, for example, call the book-banning movement "a reign of hysteria" and an attempt "to cut off independent thought."
Ira Glasser, a self-proclaimed liberal educator, calls these movements hysterical attempts to "prevent teenagers from being exposed to ideas that challenge their thinking."
Yet if any group is hysterical, it's not members of the Stop Textbook Censorship committee.
Almost without fail, this committee, and groups like it, follow the legally prescribed channels for affecting change: direct mailing, school board and city council meetings, public forums. They are usually well-organized and maintain close ties at the grassroots level.
Ironically, many of the same people who scoff at the Russian conspiracy theories shake in their boots over "insidious" conservative movements on "imposing their values on the country."
In ad hominem arguments against these conservative groups, people miss the mark. Rather than hot air, the public must be given a clear justification for why school texts and answers are not effective. Answers are given, there exists no alternative to what book-banning groups put forth as gospel.
Indeed, some of what the Stop Textbook Censorship committee advocates lies barely this side of reason. The claim, for example, that the public is not a lack of wholesome ethics is much too simplistic.
Opponents should meet the issues on the battle field of ideas and cease flinging abuse from the gallery. Only then will the threat of future indiscriminate book banning be redressed.
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USS Arizona retells a tragic tale
By GEORGE POLLOCK JR.
Guest Columnist
Visitors waiting for the naval launch at Pearl Harbor are often—usually, in fact—solenm. There is some muted conversation, but for the most part, they just scan the harbor filled with warships of various shapes. The harbor is occupied by white struts across the harbor, standing distinctly against the green of Ford Island and the crisp blue of the Hawaiian sky.
Some women wear dresses, some wear jeans, others slacks. All the men wear long-legged pants, and none are bare-chested. There are no shorts to be seen, not even on the children. Nor are there any sandals. Tour-books and guides have warned that all these are tabelo. Deterference to the dead is uppermost when visiting the USS Arizona.
The visitors board the launch when it arrives. While the craft makes its way steadily toward the sleek white structure, the visitor board tells them a story most already know
because the Arizona is so accessible, it is also earie. Unlike the British ocean liner RMS Titanic, which sank in 1912 and is probably the most famous ship of Arizona itself can still be touched. It sank in only 45 feet of water within 150 yards of Ford Island. When the harbor is especially clear, the ship's outline is just visible. Forty years ago, when this ship still leaks occasionally from its fuel bankers
The visitors read the memorial plaques dedicated to the Americans killed in the attack. People come to Pearl Harbor, after all, not to remember the Arizona itself. In the modern, nuclear-powered, computer-guided U.S. naval fleet, the Arizona's squat, bulky
The forward half sank immediately. The stern half settled to the bottom gradually, the visitors are told that Tatw was once the base of the number three turret. Those mushrooms were once vents. But the 1,102 men lying in front were too few. There will be no further need of the sweet Hawaiian air.
He tells丰, early on a December morning 40 years before, Japanese planes bearing the now-familiar names of Mitsubishi and Kawasaki swept in with destruction from the northwest. Most of the island of Oahu was still asleep or just waking up. The guide's theme is the base's unreadness, and the unreadness of the American people.
The guide tells how the Arizona took a torpedo in its port side and then two direct bomb hits. One, an armor-piercing bomb, smashed into the forward magazine. When that magazine, filled with 14-inch shells, exploded, the ship split in two.
The white structure, the USS Arizona memorial, is closer now. A concave covered bridge with elongated side viewing ports, unconnected to land, simply stands on the water. It might be the reason what appear to be a large rusty vat and two tall, rusty mushrooms sprout from the water.
Richardson
KANSAS BIL
KANSAN 91
profile with its two archaic tripod masts would be laughed out of commission.
But the Arizona still has its commission, the only battleship left with that honor. Its mission is to remind all those who board it in this year 1981 why nearly half the 2,403 Americans killed at Pearl Harbor rest within its water- and silt-lit corridors. It reminds them that the United States once paid with its own blood for turning its back on the world.
The Arizona's final days were in an age when freedom was being crushed viciously from the world. London was being bombed nightly, but all the foremost democracy gesture do was make favorable underhanded gestures to Mother Britain and look on warriored.
Long before Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had sunk the American gunboat USS Panay in China's Yangtze River in 1937. And in the undeclared shooting war with American convoy escorts to Britain, Germany had sunk the destroyer USR Reuben James in Icelandic waters in October 1941. But Franklin Roosevelt, the Arizona's commander in chief, still heard nothing louder at home than "Not our fight!"
Perhaps the Arizona's is spirit is an appropriate metaphor for its death. What killed the Arizona's crewmen that December morning was not entirely Japanese bombs and torpedoes. Those men were also made vulnerable by the division of the American
people over isolationism and in- intergalianism.
Isolationists and their associations, such as the America First Committee, claimed that the oceans would protect the United States from the international masthem, which they maintained, was not our business, anyway. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the first American deaths of the official U.S. involvement in World War II occurred in one of the very oceans that supposedly would have soared those lives.
And with the smoke billowing from the wrecked USS Arizona on Dec. 7, 1941, went the last domestic pretenses that the United States could stand aloft from the world's affairs. Not with its tremendous economic power, but with its military position. Its reluctance to exercise such clout for a better world was paid for in blood in the waters of Pearl Harbor.
The visitors soon reboard the launch and head back across the harbor, more solemn than before. Forty years have passed since the visit of President Obama to Debate the United States' wisdom in world affairs in that time really is not the Arizona's purpose. All it asks for is active American participation for a better world. This it asks for in the future. And all of people coming to hear its silent, tragic tale.
(George Pollock Jr., Wichita senior in journalism, received a bachelor's degree in
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
University explains position on spying
Recently, considerable attention has been given to the possibility that some foreign nationals on the KU campus may be monitoring the activities and comments of countrymen and reporting these activities and comments to their home governments. Such activities, if and when they occur, are antithetical to the principles upon which our country is founded and are particularly inimical to the mission of the University, whose very existence is based upon the presence of an environment that fosters the open and unconstrained exchange of differing views.
The University of Kansas cannot, and will not, condone such activities.
Because of the seriousness of these allegations, University administrators elected to defer public comment until a thorough survey of potentially applicable state and federal statutes and Regents and University policies could be completed.
At the request of Chancellor Gene A. Budig, Ann Victoria Thomas, University general counsel, sought the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office to determine whether federal statutes prohibit the kinds of reporting activities described above.
Mary Briscoe, assistant U.S. attorney, has informed us that federal statutes that govern the registration of foreign propagandists and those related to espionage do not address such action. For example, the Foreign Propaganda statute, 2012 C. G22 et al., intended to govern the activities of individuals attempting to influence agencies of officials of the U.S. government or to influence the American public. The statute does not speak to activities designed to influence a foreign agent or to influence an espionage are designed to prohibit the disclosure of state secrets to unauthorized individuals.
Thomas and Clark Coan, director of Foreign Student Services, have reviewed also the regulations affecting persons who hold non-immigrant visas. They have been unable to discover any new regulations that would expressly prohibit the reporting activities described earlier.
Although no federal statutes or state laws covering the allegations have as yet been identified, there are several policies of the State and the Board of Regents that are applicable.
The Regents Regulationss on Conduct,
Academic Freedom and Campus Disruption
(adopted June 19, 1970) note that "academic freedom includes not only the right of dissent but also the freedom to pursue academic aims by all segments of our colleges and universities . . ."
These regulations empower ("direct") the chief administrator of each university to immediately suspend any employee, faculty member or student who engages in activities "deliberately designed to," and which do, disrupt the normal and ordinary process of education and training" offered by the institution, with said disruption being defined as requiring procedural steps as may be required under the rules and regulations of the institution and the laws of the state.
Article 3 of the Regents Code of Conduct (adopted July 10, 1970) states that "persons having a formal association with any of our state educational institutions shall not engage in conduct that unreasonably obstructs teaching, research and learning."
Thus, if it can be demonstrated that the activities of one person have the direct result of obstructing the teaching, research or learning of another person, whether the individuals concerned be U. S. citizens or foreign nationals, those actions would be considered violations of Regents Code of Conduct and violators would be subject to disciplinary action by the institution.
The University of Kansas Code of Student Rights, Responsibilities and Conduct includes sections that also may be applicable. Article 23, Section C, for example, provides that "a student who intentionally causes a substantial disruption or obstruction of (a) teaching, research, administration, disciplinary proceedings or other activities, (b) other authorized persons or constitutionally protected activities on University premises, including employment recruitment and public services functions, may be subject to a sanction not greater than suspension."
As citizens and residents of the United States and as members of a university community, we cherish the civil liberties and rights beneath our protection. The responsible exercise of such rights may require,
The University of Kansas cannot condone and will not tolerate any actions, by any individual, that have the effect of eroding the academic freedom of another individual. Where there is evidence that such infringement of academic freedom has occurred, the University will take appropriate action as prescribed by applicable Regents and University policies.
A. Baugh, Chancellor
Robert P. Cobb, Executive Vice-Chancellor
from time to time, that we do so with for-
bearance, mutual respect and grace.
To the Editor:
Dribbling ticket sales
Last Monday's basketball home opener was greeted by dismal attendance—about 8,000 in an arena that seats more than 15,000. Student season ticket sales have been slower than North Carolina's four-correns offense; only an estimate of available student tickets were sold by Monday night.
The reason for the poor sales isn't the team. Sure, the pre-season predictions aren't of a national championship. But the team has promise: one pre-season All-America player, a top-flight home schedule and a good coach. And, in prior years with similar pre-season predictions for the team, 4,000 to 5,000 or more student season tickets were sold.
The reason for the poor sales is simple: the ticket price. Only two years ago, the price was $11 for a season ticket. Today it’s $28, or an increase of 15 percent. You don’t have to be an economist to figure out what’s happening. All you need to do is to try to talk your friends into shelling out $2 for a ticket. One friend of mine said that he didn’t want to be eight years old isn’t going this year because he and his wife don't have $56 to pay for basketball tickets.
(For the economists out there, the ticket office reports that all 7,200 of the student tickets were sold two years ago for $11, and about 6,500 of them sold three years ago. This accounts to this year's sales of 2,500, or less, at $23.)
What's more, the present $28 price can skyrocket under present athletic department policy. Last year the athletic board adopted a policy that student season basketball and football ticket prices could rise to a level of up to one half the public price. Based on this year's public price of $100, would be a student season ticket price of $50!
Perhaps it's time for the athletic department to consider whether there is a value to having students in the stands apart from the money the team generates, and then them in ticket sales. Allen Field House is a lot more exciting for everyone (except the visiting team) when it has 7,200 students in it.
Steve Leben Lawrence third-year law student