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Opinion
University Daily Kansan, November 10. 1984
211
Busby, Cannatella duo offers students a strong 'Alternative'
Student Senate recently has undergone several dramatic changes. Because Senate has cut its size in half, moved elections from February to November and streamlined the budget process, next year's student president and vice president can look forward to a more efficient Senate and a sound point of departure.
When students vote next Wednesday and Thursday, they will face a choice between three groups of candidates, each of which has a different approach to student government.
Loren Busby, student body presidential candidate, and his running mate, David Cannatella, leaders of the Working Alternative Coalition, possess the greatest overall strength.
!Usby and Cannatella have the muchneeded Student Senate experience found lacking in recent administrations. Together, they are the most broadly representative of all the candidates.
Busby, Hutchinson junior, is an undergraduate with extensive Senate leadership experience. Cannatella, Opelousas, La., graduate student, is an outspoken senator himself. They unite a nuts-and-bolts understanding of Senate with a mature outlook on student issues.
As a graduate senator, Cannatella represents an often-overlooked segment of the student population. He has served on Senate and also has been a representative to the Graduate Student Council.
Busby is a two-term senator, serving this year as Finance and Auditing Committee chairman. He is a member of the University Council and also acts as vice chairman of the University Senate Executive Committee.
Yet Busby and Cannatella would bring more to the positions than their resumes alone. Their complimentary personalities and their balanced view of the executive roles make them unique.
Busby is willing to take on the traditional presidential responsibilities in Topeka and Strong Hall, but not at the expense of neglecting Senate. Though he is confident of Cannatella's ability to run Senate day to day, Busby seeks a leadership role in Senate affairs as well.
Each could, however, learn something from the other. Busby, with his clear understanding of the issues, could employ some of his running mate's strident manner. Cannatella, on the other hand, could gain from a bit of Busby's polish.
Although all the candidates have expressed a desire to move beyond internal reform, many of the disputed campaign issues do in fact center on Senate itself.
In particular, certain issues deal primarily with Senate funding policies. For example, Busby and Cannatella support a funding policy that respects the rights of groups with minority or "extremist" ideas-ideals that belong in any university forum. The coalition also seeks funding for all groups based on their service, not solely on the size of their membership.
This semester's Senate created a new Budget Committee to expedite funding of student organizations. In many cases, however, this improvement has left Senate's other standing committees with few remaining duties.
Busby has proposed filling the void by asking these committees to take on new responsibilities, tackling such issues as pre-enrollment, plus-minus grading and minority concerns.
Still not completely resolved is the question of Senate election ballot box placement. Busby and Cannatella both recognize the inequity of placing ballot boxes in organized living groups without also placing them off campus. In fact, they propose limiting the boxes to daytime on-campus locations.
At a time when government support for higher education is at an ebb, Busby and Cannatella support a combination of state and national student lobbying. They favor continued KU involvement in the Associated Students of Kansas and the United States Students Association.
Further, they propose creating a separate group concerned exclusively with promoting KU interests in the Legislature.
The two other pairs of candidates share an active interest in Senate and the University.
David Adkins, leader of the Perspective Coalition, is knowledgeable, articulate and experienced. But Adkins' abilities are not balanced by those of his running mate, David Welch. Unlike Cannatella, Welch lacks the assertiveness necessary to lead a sometimes turbulent Senate.
Together Adkins and Welch are far too willing to settle for the programs and limitations accepted by past Senate administrations. They appear primarily concerned with sailing a smooth course and with avoiding Senate involvement in campus conflict.
The ticket fails to compensate for its lack of Senate experience with a solid understanding of Senate and University issues. However, Phillips and Janssen are not a joke coalition, and their strong emphasis on student involvement is admirable.
David Phillips and Monte Janssen bring a great deal of enthusiastic but naive idealism to the campaign with their Groucho Marx Coalition.
Loren Busy and David Cannatella have made the effort and offer student voters the strongest combination of experience and responses to the issues. They have the potential to increase Senate's credibility and service to the individual student.
Busby and Cannatella deserve student support next week. But whichever ticket students favor, they should make sure they are heard.
All three coalitions have shown an interest in student governance by actively participating in the electoral process. Running for Senate is a difficult and time-consuming task too few are willing to undertake.
Chancellor Gene A. Budig and his Board of Regents cohorts rode valiantly into Topeka last Friday with a laundry list of budget tips topped by a request for a 13 percent increase in faculty salaries.
Our stubborn governor
For the entire Regents group, but especially for Budig, with his reputation of quick work with hesitant state governments, the experience must have been humbling.
Gov. John Carlin listened to repeated claims that the salary increase was needed—urgently needed—to combat inflation that has left professors financially strapped.
Apparently the governor's preference for other budget priorities precludes sensitivity to claims that another sad year for the professors (last year's increase was a slim 7 percent) could send record numbers of the best faculty members packing for private jobs. Apparently, the quality of teaching at Regents schools doesn't weigh all that heavily on his mind.
Carlin, who said he saw "nothing today that would make me change my mind,"
seems to be leaining in the direction of his budget director's recommendation for an 8 3/4 percent faculty salary increase.
Budig has politely, tactfully stated that he believed Carlin was sympathetic to this dire salary need, but it's beginning to look as though it will take more than tac to prevent a repeat of last year's disaster.
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No realistic solutions from Cancun
By JAMESSCHEUER
New York Times Special Feature
WASHINGTON—The artificial elegance that shields the Cancun Sheraton from Mexico's population pressures, joblessness and desperate poverty was an appropriate setting for the North-South talks last month. In splendid isolation, statesmen from both sides of the equator said what they did not understand, and absurd and rescheduled as "global negotiation" the same pointless double-talk that has passed for "a North-South dialogue."
Anyone alive and well during the last decade cannot have failed to notice that the U.N. General Assembly has degenerated into one of history's most irrelevant, demagogic and irresponsible "deliberative" bodies. But, with straight faces, heads of state from all over the world have endorsed a vast redistribution of northern wealth and power under its auspices.
It is also ironic that ruling elites from Mexico, Venezuela, Nigeria and the Philippines presumed to speak for exploited southern masses in rejecting any compromise involving the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund in a rational readjustment of the international economic system. An internal redistribution of wealth has been achieved in many countries, where petrodolls have bought high technology and profits for the wealthy but precious little employment, health care, nutrition and education for the poor.
President Reagan left Cancus promising that "our search for progress will continue," but with sadness and sad. South deal with health, nothing will change in the lives of suffering people.
Despite Reagan's faith in private capital, it is no panacaine, but neither is a "New International Economic Order" that would subsidize in equal measure Third World leaders striving to fill the needs of the poor and those striving to aggrandize the comfortable and entrench the powerful. If the world's neediest peoples, we are obliged to favor with most of our assistance Third World leaders who are working to ease suffering.
Take Somalia and Sri Lanka. Their per capita capital gross national products are among the world's lowest, but wealth within each country is distributed in very different ways. Far more revealing is the "physical quality of life index," a measurement of actual living conditions by the Overseas Development Council, an independent research organization.
Sri Lanka's rating is 81, Somalias 34. Sri Lanka emphasizes primary education, and 78 percent of the people are literate. Privileged Somalian children study abroad, and half of the people can't read. Under Sri Lanka's government-sponsored contraception program, more than a third of all women use family-planning centers, and the population-and-poverty cycle is winding down, with 26 percent of 400,000 people in Somalia where there is no such program, 1 percent of the women practice contraception; with a birth rate of 48 per 1,000. Somalia's population will double in 25 years, frustrating all hopes for development.
Somalia's dictatorship is a caudron of instability. Sri Lanka's parliamentarians rise and fall by the ballot, not the bullet. Somalia's development resources are largely devoted to facilities. Sri Lanka's are devoted to health care, jobs, nutrition and other human services.
Somalians are more destitute than Sri Lankans, but foreign governments can do nothing for people whose own governments ignore their basic needs. We should reserve most of our help for Third World leaders who make themselves too messy, hunger, ignorance and disease.
Third World elitists condemn selective foreign aid as "cultural imperialism." Nonsense. In 1979 more than 200 members of parliament from 58 countries, mostly Third World, participated in the U.N. conference on population and development. They insisted unanimously that before multinational programs were necessary to assure an equitable distribution of resources and a just society within each nation."
The conferences unanimously called for comprehensive health-care and family-planning programs; the deployment of paraprofessional doctors and teachers; assured access for women to education, jobs and credit; and measures to encourage food production and labor-intensive industry in the countryside to discourage migration to overcrowded cities.
Instead of pandering to the "neo-colonial" rhetoric that the novelist S.V. Naipaul, who writes about the Third World, describes as the "applauded lie," the developed countries should require southern leaders seeking foreign help to demonstrate their commitment to worthy goals. Without such commitment, the people discussed at Cancum can do nothing to ease the unspakeable suffering of the peoples of Asia, Africa and South America.
(Rep. James Scheuer, D-N.Y., is former chairman of the House Select Committee on Public Safety).
Test-stealing indicative of student stress
Someone has a key to the office and file cabinet of David Smith, assistant professor of business.
That, at least, is the rumor behind the disappearance of a business exam from Smith's office last week. And because of it, Smith is unlikely to leave any copies of future exams in his office.
The exam theft is certainly not the first of its kind. Business professors know of at least one other break-in at Summerfield Hall this week, and the search of a test, that time without the use of key
Much could and has been said about the reasons people steal. As I see it, however, this question is not at the heart of the issue in instances of test stealing.
The issue is pressure—pressure on students to make grades, and how individual students respond.
I was attending middle school in update New York when I first heard of test stealing. Friends in high school were shocked (and some were embarrassed) by the Regents examinations were being canceled.
No one knew how or by whom, but copies of the Regents exams were being sold to high school students for as much as $100 a copy. What high school student would pay $200 for a test?
Probably none of his own volition.仕 in New York State, where passing Regents exams is a stipulation for passing courses that are in turn taken by the university and private colleges, the tests were selling well.
As with at least one student I knew, some of these high schoolers had managed to convince their parents that they could not compete unless they, too, had a copy of the test. Others, one may suppose, collected the $100 through other sources, justifying an action they normally would have found unacceptable because getting into a "good school was all-important."
In any case, the recent theft of a KU business exam seems little different from the high school exam.
What kind of excitement or thrill can there be in a test-staing "orland"? Simply the planning
and execution of these exam thefts defy their being called pranks.
More likely, someone or some group of students was determined that they needed a test copy to do well on the test. How well? It could have as easily been one who feared giving a "B" as someone who feared an "F." The important difference is that the student(s) probably, or obviously, believed the grade was more important than what it signified.
Translated, there was a parent, grandparent,
REBECCA CHANEY
friend or patron with expectations that, for one reason or another, could not be disappointed.
This is not to say that the student did not bring his academic problems upon himself, through mismanning time or responsibility. But the teacher was very careful in deciding whether parent or mentor for this can be overwhelming.
Individual students often set high goals and expectations for themselves, and they may be extremely disappointed when these aims prove elusive. But if such goals are truly those of the individual, he is likely to work hard for them at all stages, not just at test time, and he is unlikely to accept the kind of delusion and compromise that test stealing indicates.
Surely there is not a student on this campus who has never thought about cheating on an examination. But one may contrast what I hope I may call the majority of students, who may joke about jumping off a bridge if they don't get the grade they are looking for, with the kind of
For those obliged by emotional or economic commitments to maintain, at the very least, the illusion of success, the stealing of an exam may seem to be the only alternative to failure,
These students would do whatever was necessary to avoid facing failure, regardless of, if any.
students who find themselves actually stealing tests in order to make that grade.
Making an analogy between test-stealing and suicide may not be all that extreme. Lorna Zimmer, director of the KU Student Assistance Center, said last week that some people would rather learn that students have no prespective of students who steal tests as "not much less serious" than potential suicides.
"It is still crisis-oriented behavior," she says.
In Lawrence, the number of calls to such counseling services as the KU Counseling Center, Headquarters, the Student Assistance Center, and the School Community increasingly just begin midtermss and finals.
"It is still cross-oriented behavior," she says. And figures show that student suicides increase as the pressures of school increase—the same kind of pressures involved in test stealing.
The differences in student response to the pressure of exams, and of the continuing correlation between grades and success, is a function of the difficulty to Zimmer and others from the above agencies.
When the pressure to perform is great enough to transcend moral values, or the value of life itself, you may be in danger.
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