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Tuesday, October 10, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Legislative ethics proposal could keep House in order
It's time to clean House, in a manner of speaking.
Last Monday, the Legislature's Federal and State Affairs/ Governmental Organizational Committee recommended that a code of ethics be developed for Kansas legislators. The proposal still must run the gantlet of legislative committees for approval, but it is difficult to argue against the establishment of guidelines for ethics.
The proposal has emerged in response to some lawmakers' association with pari-mutuel racing and insurance company takeovers. Also, legislators are sensitive to the inquishment into campaign contributions by former Lt. Gov. Dave Owen to Gov. Mike Hayden's 1986 campaign.
The proposal would create a select legislative committee in the 1990 session to review laws and create a comprehensive code. Committee members have emphasized that no one incident or lawmaker sparked the plan for an ethics code. This is as it should be. The quest for a code of ethics should not degenerate into a witch-hunt atmosphere, similar to the recent wave of investigations in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A code of ethics should not be used as a vindictive political weapon but as a framework to guarantee propriety. Lawmakers are capable of wielding substantial influence and should avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest. A code outlining what is and is not acceptable would let legislators know what is expected of them.
In addition, the proposal would consider creating a permanent standing committee on ethics. The committee would review the code each session and accept complaints, which would be investigated by the Public Disclosure Commission. Although details are sketchy about how violations would be handled, a standing committee would ensure that the ethics code would not simply be a piece of paper with good intention
Lawmakers, because of their influence, are expected to conduct business with higher standards than the rest of society. A code of ethics would set these standards and eliminate the ambiguity of what is and is not proper.
Daniel Niemi for the editorial board
KU should have program to raise cultural awareness
We were very interested recently to learn of a new Kansas City cultural awareness program. A similar program is needed at the University of Kansas.
The Dinner for Eight program is sponsored by Harmony in a World of Difference — Kansas City's counterpart o KU's Cultural Diversity project.
The program is a grassroots effort engineered to strike at the very heart of racism — ignorance.
It brings together people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds for dinner once a month. Group members, all volunteers, say the dinners are a commitment to communicating outside their communities. As in all Harmony activities, program participants pledge to make a personal commitment to improving race relations and reducing discrimination. They also pledge to educate others about their cultural backgrounds.
Organizers hope the new relationships formed at the dinners will be the start of a network that will eventually choke the closed minds and ignorance that lead to racial strife.
The program is a positive step toward removing the perceived barriers between members of various racial and ethnic groups.
It is the kind of stem needed on this camnus.
Anti-Semitic slurs and other racial epithets have been scrawled on professors' doors. Black students have been harassed and attacked. Some students have been ridiculed because of their sexual orientation. It is unconscionable that such behavior could occur in an institution representing higher education.
Ric Brack for the editorial board
The University probably cannot teach a class in harmony or acceptance of diversity. But it could institute a program like the one in Kansas City which nurtures such qualities.
Members of the editorial board are David Stewart, Stan Diel, Brett Brenner, Ric Brack, Daniel Niemi, Craig Welch, Kathy Walsh, Deb Gruver, Thom Clark and Tiffany Harness.
News staff
David Stewart ... Editor
Ric Brack ... Managing editor
Daniel Niemi ... News editor
William Mann ... Planning editor
Stan Diel ... Editorial editor
Jennifer Corser ... Campus editor
Elaine Sung ... Sports editor
Laura Husar ... Photo editor
Michael Winner ... Art/Film director
Tom Ebben ... General manager, news advise
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 Slankin ... Assistant production manager
Margaret Townsend .. Co-op manager
Eric Humes ... Creative director
Cristal Doole .. Classified manager
Jeff Meesey ... Tearsheets manager
Jennine Nees ... Sales and marketing adviser
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Battle of Little Bullhorn
Greeks perpetuate stereotype
When Rich Cornell asked me if he could write a story about the greek traditions of panty raids, composite stealing and "laking." I told him it sounded like a good idea.
You see, I am in charge of coordinating all of the Kansan's campus coverage.
"Happen." I thought the court could be an entertaining feature. I don't want everything in the Kansan to be hard-hitting news. I try to save a little room for writing about the lighter side of life.
And being greek, I certainly knew that pranks went on all the time.
But when the story came out, the flood of complaints came washing in
came wailing in:
"The Kansan must hate greeks," and "You are perpetuating stereotypes," were some of the things I heard.
My first response was to try to explain that there were quite a few Greeks on the news side of the Kansan - both editors and reporters. And I, a member of the greek system, spend a great deal of my time deciding what the Kansan should cover.
Another complaint I heard was that we had run the story on page one. The reason for this had nothing to do with it being a slow news day or otherwise. The fact is, almost every day this semester the Kansan's editors have tried to run at least one feature story on the front page to keep it from being too serious or dry.
I have no intentions of finding negative stories to write about greeks and have found the people I work with generally to be the same way.
generally to be the same. Last semester's Rock Clunk coverage — or should I say last semester's was brought up. A legitimate complaint, but what needs to be understood is that the staff of the Kansan changes each semester. Those of us on this semester's staff have little to do with many of the decisions made in the past.
I reminded my Greek friends that this semester's Kansas had covered events such as Greek Week, Rock Chalk, efforts by the two greek systems to work together and the honorary membership of a mentally retarded member at Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. But such things seem to be easily forgotten.
No matter who I talked to, they would not listen. "The Kansan hates greeks," they said. "The Kansan hates greeks."
I am also disappointed that some of my friends have created their own stereotype about the Kanas based on past experiences and misunderstandings, a stereotype that we will probably have a hard time trying to erase.
If the story has caused this perception, I am disappointed.
Candy
Niemann
Planning editor
But I will never regret assigning the story, and I will never regret help in the decision to run it on page one.
You see, once I saw the story in cold hard copy, I realized it wasn't such a fun feature after all. And I realized why so many greeks were upset.
organized why so many greens were uges
it made me look like immatures children
There was no doubt about it. There it was in black and white — a story about a system I had always been proud to be a part of — and we were running around stealing each other's underwear and publicly stripping each other down to our birthday suits and tossing each other in fountains.
I realize that to most greeks those pranks are just a way to have fun, but if we want to continue them, we must be willing to pay the price with our public image. To the children who are afraid of being a "bull" and "laking" might not be looked upon as innocent people.
It might be seen as sexist, demeaning and juvenile. Even though we as greets may not have those intentions when we pull our pranks, that may be the image we create.
The Kansan only wrote about something that really does occur.
It is the greek system itself, not the Kansan, that perpetuates the "Animal House" stereotype every single day.
I am still proud to be greek and proud to be part of all the positive things the greek system brings to the Lawrence community.
Yet despite all of our charitable contributions, community service and University involvement, we allow ourselves to lessen our accomplishments every day by the actions we take.
Every action that we choose to take, whether it be stealing composites or participating in a philanthropy, will reflect on the system as a whole. We are all representatives of the system, and we must all take responsibility for our appearances.
If we are embarrassed or angered by what was reported in the Kansan,we have no one to blame but ourselves.
▶ Candy Niemann is a Overland Park senior majoring in journalism.
Defense investment pays off
In the course of celebrating himself in Arkansas the other day, J. William Fulbright paused to badmouth George Bush. The former chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee compared the U.S. president unfavorably with Alexander Yakovlev, adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and one-time Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. "Now if we only had a Fulbright Scholar in the White House," Fulbright said wistfully. "It's too bad the president only went to Yale. He hasn't learned about the rest of the world."
Not for the first time, Fulbright's timing was uncanny. Just as he was delivering his speech, the Bush administration was scoring a breakthrough in arms negotiations with the Soviet Union. The move could prove as significant as the Reagan administration's clearing Europe of intermediate nuclear missiles. (Fulbright didn't think much of Reagan's achievements, either. There is something about peace that seems to irritate him, at least when it is achieved through strength.)
This time the Soviet Union has agreed to negotiate controls on nuclear missiles without insisting that the United States abandon its plans for a strategic defense, also known as Star Wars. Such programs continue to prod the Soviets toward actually negotiating arms control instead of just propagandizing about it. Note how the prospect of a new, binary nerve gas in the U.S. arsenal has greatly increased Soviet interest in negotiating limits on chemical weapons. Now, the two countries have agreed to pursue restrictions on such weaponry, complete with procedures for ratification. Nothing so wonderfully concentrates the Soviet mind on arms control as a new U.S. arms program. For a fellow who hasn't learned about the rest of the world, George Bush is making some impressive strides.
Just as the U.S. investment in defense is paying off in mutual arms reductions, Fulbright continues to complain that the country invests too much in defense. It is not easy — it is nigh-impossible — to imagine the Soviet Union making the arms agreements of recent years with a United States that had no Pershing or cruise missiles to destroy, no chemical weaponry to limit and no Star Wars to use as a counterweight in negotiations.
Fulbright's view of the Soviet Union has been imaginative if nothing else. He hasn't changed much, if at all, since he was carrying on about the "Perniciousness of the anti-Communist ideology of the Truman doctrine" and regretting that U.S. statesmen, delts that they were,
Paul Greenberg
Syndicated columnist
couldn't see a moderate, peaceful, pragmatic figure in Nikita Khrushchev, architect of the Cuban missile crisis.
Fulbright now recognizes that this is a propitious time to end the threat of nuclear war, but he still doesn't make the connection between these first signs of a stable peace, communism's disintegration, and U.S. strength and perseverance for the past 40 years.
For connoisseurs of the ironic, or just the tricky, the best part of Fulbright's remarks had to be his defense of the much-abused word "iliberal." Nobody familiar with Fulbright's record on the race issue would confuse him for a liberal.
Whenever Fulbright returns to Arkansas to revise a little history and spout a few pictures, it helps restore perspective to remember that one is listening to a dignitary whose signature indelibly adorns the Southern Manifesto. As a U.S. senator, he opposed every civil rights bill to come down the pike except maybe the last one or two when it was politically safe to do the right thing.
Fulbright compiled this sordid record not because he was liberal or conservative — would that some principle, any principle, had been involved! — but out of fear, the simple fear that if he did the decent thing he would lose his precious place in the Senate. "That was the only way to stay elected," he once confessed. Incredibly, he offered that indictment as a defense. He did indeed get to stay in the Senate a couple more terms, casting vote after vote against civil rights accumulating his chains as methodically as Jacob Marble. What a bargain he struck.
There is a strange, pathetic kind of innocence that often passes, strangely enough, for sophistication. Fulbright sacrificed his chance for greatness, his opportunity to help decide the real moral issue of his time and region, in order to go on expressing his favorite unrealities about foreign policy — usually, thank goodness, in vain.
▶ Paul Greenberg is a columnist for the Pine Bluff (Ark.)
Gazette
LETTERS to the EDITOR
Greek coverage biased
Disappointed.
That is how I feel after reading the article written by Rich Cornell titled "Panty and Composite thefts remain tradition for greeks," which made the front page of last Thursday's Kansan. This article reinforces the fact that the Kansan is not doing its job and needs to reevaluate its news reporting priorities.
Initially, this article leads me to the conclusion that the Kansan does not understand the concept of newsworthiness, and for that matter, what is considered front page material. I ask the Kansan editors what they think is a more important topic and a more pressing issue to put on the front page of a newspaper. I discuss the policies policy (the latter received page three coverage in Thursday's paper.)
As a member of a sorority at the University of Kansas, I do not deny the fact that panty raids and composite swaps occur. What I do deny is the right the Kansan thinks it has to consistently misrepresent in print the sororites and fraternities on this campus.
Now it has been made officially known that Greeks do in fact swap undies and composites, I would like to know when Kansan editors are going to publish the fact that just two years ago McColum Hall residents thrived on setting off fireworks in the stairwells of their building and made a practice of spraying down the elevators with shaving cream on a monthly basis (two pranks I consistently witnessed my freshman year at KU). Now I ask you as readers what is potentially more dangerous — panicles or fireworks?
Another thing I do not appreciate about Rich Cornell's article is its persistinations. It makes sorority members look like they get their thrills from defending their dresser drawers. I am here to tell Mr. Cornell that he is sadly mistaken, and that the sexist element of his article is purely a reflection of his writing style and not of greeks.
The most important point I want to emphasize is that by running articles like Mr. Cornell's, the Kansan is not doing his job. If it were, it would print positive stories about grecks. Do we ever hear about the hundreds of thousands of dollars grecks annually raise for their families? Jack Chalk Revie which earned over $20,000 for the United Way and gave the University community outstanding entertainment). Clearly, the Kansan is not giving grexs fair representation.
Thursday's article is a libel against KU sororities and fraternities. I am confident that it speaks for all greeks at KU when I say that we have not been fairly written about in the paper — now or in the past. At issue here are the priorities, stereotypes and fairness. Based on what has been printed, it is obvious that a change in attitude towards Greeks is in order at the Kansan.
Columbia, Mo., Junior
Panty raid article idiotic
We are writing in reaction to the story that appeared on the front page of the Oct. 5 issue of the University Daily Kansan. We are both thoroughly embarrassed and humiliated! The article dealt with Greek organizations' pany raids and composite thefts.
First we would like to address the fact that the article was completely demeaning to women, in general. Especially the quote about the girls standing, screaming in front of their underwear and calling for their power them. Give us a break! Why in the hell would you print that??!!
Second, do you think this article really contributes to the unity of the student body, or are you just so confused by the difference that change to promote stereotypes?
We are not totally blindless because, unfortunately, these idiotic things do occur. But, let's remember the theme of this year is acceptance of diversity. If we, as a University, are to achieve our goals, we must put aside stereotypes and be aware of the already existing gaps between students. Because when it comes right down to it, we aren't Greek and independent. We are all students, essentially in the same boat.
Susan Hardy Wilmette, Ill., senior
Jennifer M. Phillips Overland Park senior
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