UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
February 14,1979
Fund limits disputed
KU's student body presidential candidates have taken an important step toward redefining and equalizing the Student Senate's primary function—the allocation of funds to student organizations.
or gamsat. Four of the five candidates signed a letter Friday supporting a plan to change the Senate code regarding the funding of the Gay Services of Kansas. The fifth candidate was in class when the letter was signed, but later said he supported the plan.
If approved, the plan would increase the chances for Gay Services and several other KU student organizations to receive funds that, for too long, have been denied because of an administration policy.
CURRENTLY, a clause in the administration's policy concerning recognition of student organizations prevents funding of groups oriented toward support of or opposition to particular religious or political activities or "particular personal and customarily private activities, habits or proclivities."
A group also must be recognized by the vice chancellor of the office of student affairs and three members of the Student Senate executive committee before it can be eligible for funding.
Although Gay Services, along with groups such as Hillel, KU Young Democrats and the College Republicans are registered with the office of student affairs, they cannot go before
the Senate to request funds because their overall purpose falls into a restricted category of the administration policy.
THE RECOGNITION process, unfortunately, looks not at the activities to be funded, but at the organization. Consider Gav Services.
The administration policy, in addition, seems to ignore Senate guidelines that allow funding of specific activities. Often only a portion of a recognized group's request is granted because of the guidelines.
WITH THE current recognition policy, it is possible that Gay Services or any non-recognized group could offer a program identical to a program offered by a recognized group funded by the Senate, and yet the non-recognized group would not be eligible for the Senate funds.
Last year the group supplied information and counseling to nearly 2,500 students—both homosexual and heterosexual. Any consideration for Senate funding of the group's service protect now is impossible.
The current recognition process works against the right of all student groups to have an equal chance to be funded. The move by Gay Services and the candidates is a step to correct this inequity.
Funding for student groups should be decided on the specific program or activity, not on the overall purpose of the organization.
State zeal for autonomy threatens 55 mph, lives
But this time the move is a negative one.
A recent move to cut government control over our lives has made it in yet another place, with speed limit限速.
At least 14 states are trying to raise their speed limits, thus abolishing the federal 55 mph speed limit mandate which has been in effect since 1974.
A battle between these states and the federal government looms as the state's main challenge.
Transportation Secretary Brock Adams warned a conference of governors recently, "We will cut off highway funds to states that raise the speed limit past 55."
The states want to determine their own speed limits. But a state that raises its limit faces a possible loss of federal highway 'luds as punishment.'
TO SOME states that could mean a loss of $50-$300 million annually.
The Wyoming Senate, a leader in the move to abolish the 55 mph limit, has already approved a bill setting the limit at 65 mph. The governor said it was "It's time to tell the feds where to go."
The two sides will face further conflict because states pushing for speed limit independence have vowed a court battle if the government withdraws the highway money.
The state could have lost $2 million in highway funds if the legislation would have been approved by the Wyoming House and governor. The House, however, voted down the measure last week and a compromise was rejected in the House on Monday.
Other states considering speed limit changes are Washington, Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, Colorado, Montana, New York, Florida, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Idaho and Utah.
IN TEXAS. Rep. Fred Head spoon
the speed up to 70 mph that would increase
the speed up to 70 mph.
“It’s time we put an end to this silliness and told the federal government exactly what they can do with that double nickel,” he said. Double nickel is CB slang for the $5
In the Congress, Rep. Daniel B. Crane, R.I., called the threat of a highway funding cut "blackmail" and has proposed federal emergency laws that allow states to set any lawlimit they want.
It seems that in an effort to be independent, the states are overlooking the reasons for imposition of the 55 mph limit—to save lives and money.
Jake
Thompson
STATISTICS HAVE shown that the 55 mph limit has saved thousands of lives since it was imposed in 1974. And as driving pressure up in the last year, more people have died.
For example, last year highway deaths rose to 47,617, compared to 45,235 deaths the previous year.
In the economic arena, the Department of Transportation said that if speed limits were increased, the consumption of oil would increase by 250,000 barrels a day.
Of course, the money for that oil will come from our pockets. And the additional oil, one must assume, will come from increased imports.
BY SEPTEMBER, according to Col Grover "Bo" Barrison, commander of the Louisiana state patrol, each state must be able to prove to the federal government that at least 70 percent of its motorists are abiding by the speed limit. Garrison has ordered that all motorists speeders in Louisiana to retain the money, because it opposes raising the speed limit.
Adams' threat to cut federal highway funds is not the only viable means to maintain the 55 mph limit. The 1982 fiscal code requires that state policies patrol and enforce the speed limit.
About 39 percent said individual states should be allowed to set higher speed limits if they choose and 2 percent of the 1,000 population nationally questioned said they were nocedible.
The federal bureaucracy frequently defends federal legislation saying it serves only for the public good. Upon examination from an economic and health perspective, this defense supports the 55 mph speed limit.
He is hardly alone in opposition. At least 59 percent of the public favors keeping the speed limit at 55 mph, according to a recent Associated Press-NBC noll.
It seems a state's independence must take a secondary role in the face of public good involved in this issue. We cannot afford to lose the more and die more just to drive faster.
Public Broadcasting needs big bucks
If the big oil companies pay big bucks to drill wells on federal lands, and paper companies chop down in national parks to cut utility company taxes the water impounded by federal dams to generate electricity, then why shouldn't the U.S. land's airways pay a fee to use this resource.
During the past 18 months or so, the commission has interviewed more than 2,000 witnesses in a search of a solution to public broadcasting's three main difficulties—money, bureaucracy and programming.
THE REPORT is no whitewash. It recommends nothing less than a radical overhaul of the public broadcasting system, including a new agency and another Carnegie commission 12 years ago.
Repeatedly assailing the condition of commercial broadcasting, the report
"The power of the communications media must be marshalled in the interest of human development, not merely for advertising revenues."
But the report also finds the present noncommercial system *fundamentally*
achieving programming expertise
consistently
achieving programming excellence
Vernon Smith.
"I retrospect what public broadcasting tried to invent was a truly radical idea," the commission says in its 400 page report. "The public broadcasting did not work, or at least not very well."
THE COMMISSION bases the system's failure on structural flaws, and it provides a cost-effective way to monitor them.
The most controversial, at least in the eyes of commercial radio and television, is a proposal that would require commercial broadcasters to help finance public broadcasting by paying a fee for use of the airwaves.
The commission has said that non-commercial television and radio ought to be financed at the rate of more than $1 billion a year, almost three times the present level.
"Financial worries upstage creative urges," the report says.
It is not known what proportion of funding would be expected to come from the fees—but it could have been more.
The report also recommends that a Public Telecommunications Trust replace the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the government funds to public broadcasters.
Congress—but the federal government would remain a principal source of money
IN THE PAST, the corporation has often been at odds with the Public Broadcasting System, the programming arm of public broadcasting.
"A complex institution," the report says,
"does not always cultivate the creative over
the practical."
*wit it is not clear how the new trust would simplify things.*
In general, the commission's report has been greeted with polite praise, and has received much praise.
Lawrence Grossman, president of the Public Broadcasting Service, applauded "the reports confirmation of the vastly increased funding level needed to make public broadcasting a major force for good in our society.
"While all of us in public broadcasting may not agree with all the points made in the report, Carnegie's efforts will help us enormously as the entire public broadcasting process proceeds to address the issue of public broadcasting in this country."
BUT RADIO broadcasters are disturbed by the commission's recommendations.
The commission would abolish the basic grant of $23,000 which each public radio station now receives annually, and would reduce the number locally for each federal dollar they receive.
"With apparently the best will in the world, the Carnegie Commission has produced a report which, if enacted would endanger the existence of the very public radio system it praises." National Public Radio chairman Edward Ellison warns. "It is important to understand the fundamental difference between public radio and television."
IT COMES AS no surprise that educational broadcasting is at a crossroads. It is inadequately funded and needs a financial shot in the arm. Broadcasters who are afraid that they might lose a large share of their dollar-rich audiences to public television if they are forced to support it are in danger of losing their audience. On nearly any night most of the video audience will tune in to Charlie's Angels rather than a live opera performance.
Congress will have the final say on whether the Commission blueprints for renewal of the copyright law.
In making this decision they will also be deciding whether the refreshing high quality of public broadcasting will continue, or whether it too will become another "vast wasteland" as commercial broadcasting has become in the last decade.
ACLU also protects 'bad guys'
STATE U.
There can be no denying that some pornography is degrading to women, and it is
By ALAN M. DERSHOWITZ
N. Y. Times Feature
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.-When Jules Feiffer spoke at a recent speech conference in Chicago, he amused the audience by recalling the good old days when the ACLU protected the speech of nice guys like Eugene V. Debs and Steve Lowe, who would be proud to have as dinner guests."
Now, he lamented, we seem to be defending only boots, such as the American Nazi Party, the Klan and Hushter magazine. A more thorough analysis has posed a dilemma for many civil libertarians.
But it is really no new problem that our civil liberties clients may be our political enemies.
CONIDER, FOR EXAMPLE, pornography. For years, civil libertarians have stood foursquare against government regulation of books, magazines and movies without regard to the content. But now leadership in the ACLU leaders, tell us that some of them must be banned as "genocidal propaganda" and as a new form of "terrorism."
The challenging new dilemma is that many of those who now oppose us—who insist that certain kinds of speech be banned—are our old and dead friends: activists in the women's movement, the civil rights movement and the radical left.
BY T. M. ASLA
not surprising that persons and groups that feel degraded and insulted soild seek to ban the offending matter. But it is precisely the same case with those who pose those whose speech offends and degrades.
Some of the more strident opponents of pornography inadvertently provide the most compelling arguments for its constitutional protection.
ANDREA DWORKIN, the author of "Woman-Hating," insists on characterizing pornography as "fasciic propaganda." The "communist propaganda" used to call it "communist propaganda."
Indeed, Phyllis Chessler, author of the book, "About Men," invited an interesting analogy when she said, "Pornography is just not a subject I can discuss reasonally." And Phyllis is also a victim in Kampf" reasonably or a black trying to discuss the Ku Xuk Xlan reasonably".
But all propaganda is within the central core of the First Amendment.
But the inability of some people to discuss an item of expression reasonably is surely no reason to ban it for everyone. Would any civil libertarian seriously propose that "Mein Kampf," "The Communist Manifesto" or Klan literature be banned?
FEMINISTS ARE not alone in seeking to ban expressions that offend them. Recently a coalition of blacks and civil rights activists persuaded Massachusetts attorneys to ban expressions they thought to be hurt in an effort to ban the use of the name "Sambo's" by a restaurant chain.
Some of these activists were the same ones who led the battle to rename libraries.
Claiming that the word "Sambo's" is so offensive to blacks that it discourages black patronage, the attorney general has argued that the use of the name constitutes a violation of the state's public accommodations law.
The name "Samba's" he argues, is equivalent to a sign "No Blacks Allowed." but blacks are excluded. In 1963, Samba indeed, none has ever claimed exclusion or actual discrimination. Many blacks, as well as some whites, simply cheer at the restaurant with a smile that is deemed offensive
THE 'PUBLIC accommodations'
argument is be laughable—consider it
a joke.
Dairy Queen — were it not for the distressing rhetoric of liberal libertarians support the attorney general.
Indeed, the board of directors of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union recently overruled its prior decision to file a lawsuit against the attorney general's attempt at name censorship. The board now has decided, after threats of resignation, to take no position at the board.
ACLU defended the right of the Nazis to march, and they won. even the majority of Jewish members ultimately seemed to reject it and rejoined the ACLU's membership rolls.
MANY CIVIL libertarians had believed that the Skokie debate resolved this issue once and for all. After all, what could be more offensive than a group of uniformed Nazis marching through a neighborhood of concentration camp survivors?
Elements of the radical left, especially the National Lawyer's Guild, are in the tradition of resistance and repression. They adamantly refuse to support anyone's right to express a view that does not further "progressive" causes, which means causes with which they agree.
But if the union now begins to take a different approach when the sensitivities of ferminists and blacks are involved, many think undoubtedly discern a double standard.
Indeed, one of the great virtues of the First Amendment is that it does not permit the government to pick and choose among offensive expressions. For if it were to ban expressions that offend one group, then it would be against ban expressions offensive to other groups.
It is in the nature of "offensiveness" that it cannot be quantified, and rational distinctions are difficult to come by. The best solution, the one implicit in the First Amendment, is that offensiveness is not a valid basis for censorship.
Alm A. Dermoshitz, professor of law at
the American Civil Liberties Union.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
(USFS 600-440) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and monthly through Thursday during June and July except April, October and holiday holidays. Subscription fee is $15 for six months or $27 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $3 a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $2 a semester, paid through the student account.
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