UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of other editors.
February 1, 1979
Students need raise
Obscured by the sheer size of Gov.
John Carlin's recent $2.24 billion budget recommendation to the Kansas Legislature was a request that concerns KU students where it really counts—in the pocketbook.
In his budget proposal for fiscal 1980, Carlin recommended a 9.5 percent increase in student employee wages so KU students could receive the $2.90 minimum wage.
Carlin agreed to the Kansas Board of Regents request to increase the amount of student aid by $90,640 from fiscal year 1979. That increase would allow the University to pay the minimum wage to all students employed on an hourly basis.
THE REQUEST for the increase will be debated by the Senate Ways and Means committee before being presented to the full Legislature. Committee Chairman Wint Winter, R-Ottawa, said recently that there had been no expressed sentiment by committee members to approve or reject the request.
There is, however, evidence to support the need for the increase.
Tutition at the University of Kansas has increased 19.6 percent, from $288 in fall of 1975 to $344.40 in fall of 1978. According to an administrative study, between 1975 and 1978 rent for apartments off-campus had increased 22.7 percent from 1975 to 1978; residence hall costs have risen 15 percent from $1,130 to $1,300 and book prices have increased by 24 percent.
THE SAME study found that electricity rates have increased by 70.8 percent and natural gas prices have increased by more than 104 percent during the same period.
The study also found that for the pay period ending October 10, 1978 only 409 out of 2,125 students employed by the hour at the University received more than $2.65 an hour. Currently, 600 students on work-study receive $2.65 an hour.
Although the University, as a state agency, is not required to pay students the minimum wage, it must pay the minimum wage to students in the work-study program, as required by Department of Health, Education and Welfare guidelines. Those students employed through work-study will receive the minimum hourly wage of $2.99 beginning July 1, 1978. But not all students employed on departmental funds will receive the minimum wage if the Legislature fails to approve the 9.5 percent wage increase.
IF THE increase is denied, funds used to pay departmental employees will be used to pay work-study employees, the net effect being a smaller number of student work hours.
The alternative is to pay students through other allocations. But that is unlikely.
The Legislature's failure to approve the wage increase would place an unjust financial burden on students who face the same cost increases as other workers. The Legislature should rectify this situation by approving the increase.
America won't stomach Soviet 'Big Mac'attack
The Soviet Union's relations with the United States may have hit a new low recently after a Soviet newspaper threw a punch at another American institution. And the punch landed hard in America's softest spot—the stomach.
Okay, more Soviet propaganda. The United States could handle that.
New Times, the Soviet Union's weekly newspaper, charged McDonald's hamburger empire with grinding out poor quality food, exploiting workers with low pay and bending the minds of America's youth with slick advertising.
But then New Times hit below the belt when it went after the Big Mac, calling the multi-leveled speciality hamburger a "clearly poor quality product" that had its buns pumped full of air and its tomatoes chemically treated to look fresh.
"THE FOOD looks appetizing if one does not know of the technological and chemical manipulations that are concealed from the public eye," the Soviet weekly said.
Turner also denied the Soviet newspaper's explanation of why Big Mac, despite the supposed inferior quality, continued to produce increasingly large profits.
THE PAPER HAD claimed that the key to the large sales was McDonald's multi-million dollar advertising budget and a patriotic advertising campaign designed to make the hamburger empire synonymous with America-complete with American products and siege "that looks at the customer with fierce eyes from the wall inside the stand."
Turner said he thought the statement was an indication that New Times had a slow pace of growth.
And as thousands of Big Mac attack victims starred to their typewriters to let their names go public, going to stand for this, McDonald's Corp. of officials proclaimed to a relieved American populus that all the charges were untrue and that the propaganda baned Soviet press.
"Maybe New Times will report next week that they invented the hamburger," Fred L. Turner, chief executive officer of McCormick & Co., the company's Oak Ridge, IL, headquarters.
Indeed, where would American consumers be without million-dollar advertising campaigns—especially without the patriotic ones?
Without patriotic ad campaigns, not only would most Americans be unaware of the patriotic fulfillment each citizen feels when he eats a McDonald's hamburger, but most would not know that the All-American way baseball, balloons, dog apple, and Chevrolet. "
They probably would not know that giving the world a Coca-Cola is the answer to bring peace on Earth. And they probably would not have known that Wheaties cereal made one American the "world's greatest athlete" in 1976.
MEDONALD'S is not trying to "bend the minds of America's youth" by using slick advertising "sat appeals to over-euthanasia and moral disgust." The dredges of other American businesses, are simply attempting to supply the public with information about their products—in the words of one journalist.
Indeed, although McDonald's spokesman would not definitely say whether the harsh feeling between the company and the Soviets might lead McDonald's to look to China for a possible agreement, they did say there is a possibility that they may soon link to Chinese officials.
"There have been no active negotiations with China at all," a spokesman in Chicago said. "It's my understanding that some informal contacts were made between McKenna and the Chinese trade association, and some people from the Chinese trade association. But that's all. Very informal."
No doubt the people of China, after years of being denied the truth, will finally learn that to suffer a Big Mac attack is one of the things we need. The Chinese citizens can do for their country.
The current political instability in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the resultant triangle of detention between China, India, and the United States, issue that may seem distant and enigmatic.
The issue, however, became quite tangible after military officials last week expressed the possibility of resurrecting draft registration.
Military zealousness potential danger
Defense Secretary Harold Brown, during the Senate Arms Service Committee's briefing on record 1280 billion defense budget for France 1400, reiterated Pentagon sentiment for establishing draft registration in order to force an immediate force in case of a military crisis in Europe.
Brown warned of the "unesay balance" between Soviet U.S. military power and said the Selective Service Committee could not mount a military force to meet Pentagon requirements for a "worst case" of emergency war.
GEN. DAVID C. Jones, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, added that the military balance "is shifting adversely . . . We are inching closer to a potentially dangerous climate."
Although no definite action has been taken
to reinstate draft registration, there are proposals.
Jones favors a renewal of registration so that a pool of people could be drafted immediately in an emergency. Army Secretary Clifford Alexander said last week that women also should register, although they don't know whether they should be drafted.
Senate Armed Services Chairman, John C. Stennis, D-Miss., wants to resurrect the draft itself because the all-volunteer force could not meet the demand in a potential
There is, however, $5 million in the defense budget that could be used to im-
THE STANDBY system calls for the Selective Service system to supply the military some draftees within 30 days after a combat mission. The draftees within two months, and to supply
650,000 draftees within six months. The plan also calls for a large one-day registration, a draft lottery within 28 days and mailing of draft noticees within 28 days.
An administration study of the standby system concluded that the system needed a computer 10 times larger than the present one to handle the work load and that it would take at least 58 days to complete the draft over 10 months to supply the 600,000 draftes.
The budget also contained allocations for an increased build-up of tanks, artillery and other hardware for storage in Germany, and to outfit three divisions of U.S. soldiers.
But there are questions that need to be asked of the military and the ad-
ONE SHOULD ask whether the United States itself has not inched closer to a dangerous situation by heightening even the most commitment to meet force with force.
Opponents of possible draft registration might also ask what the Pentagon defines as "military equipment."
Opponents might ask whether the alarm shown by military officials and experts at unexpected Soviet production of nuclear warheads—they produced 1,000 in 1978,
doubling the U.S. production—is just a continuation of cold war reactionism or a realistic cause for concern and a valid assessment of potential spheres of influence and military balance between the United States and Russia.
In addition, would such a move, in order to meet an eventual challenge, be based more on a sincere desire to protect our freedoms as expressed in the Constitution and in the Bill of Rights, or rather a zealous response to a chance, as a too often pompous military estlust group?
AND THEN, of course, there is the question of the necessity for troops en masse. Obviously, in an age of cruise missiles, ICBM's and the potential for a particle beam weapon, the role of troops in a nuclear holocaust is not of the essence.
In responding to any potential crises, the United States, no doubt, should not be passive in its response either in direct negotiation or by a show of force.
Failure to do so could have disastrous consequences.
But, each decision, even one to reinstate
draft registration, must be carefully
weighed and its motives questioned. Re-
mittent must be placed on military zealousness.
Mass societies need reducing plan
N. Y. Times Feature
Bv LEOPOLD KOHR
NEW YORK—Can smallness solve the problems of bigness? The problems of bigness have become so large, it seems, that they have been called "bigger than them." Hence their pathetic effort to seek salvation in ever vaster unions, markets and alliances, on the assumption, for which history gives scant foundation, that global difficulties can be mastered only on a global scale.
Measuring their greatness by the size of the institutions over which they preside, politicians have a vested interest in enlarging, not reducing, their principalities. Even if they consider it good public relations to concede to a rising number of hecklers that the president may be forced to rarely fail to add that, progress being what it is, it makes no sense to step back.
TO THIS argument, the Welsh an-
thropologist W. Rees uses *Aeneas* to
indicate that the slave of the war.
abyss, the only thing that makes sense is to step back."
But to convince the big that smallness is not merely beautiful but also eminently sensible in the treatment of their malignant tumors, two things must be demonstrated.
The first is that it is not war, poverty or unemployment that threatens our survival—they are to history what dryness is to the desert or moisture to the sea. What should concern us vitally is big war, massive poverty, huge unemployment that threatens the life of modern societies is not the nature but the scale of its problems.
THE SECOND is that it is possible to reduce the size of our present societies from which we must live in what may be called the "Velocity Theory of Population," according to which a human mass increases not only with its members move, but with the speed with which its members move.
Every theater owner knows that when a
Candidate denied voice
Last Sunday the organization Hillel held a brunch which featured an opportunity to hear the candidates for student body president speak. The advertisement in the Kansan on the previous Wednesday and Friday specifically listed the other four candidates who would be speaking. Strangely enough, I was omitted from the list and was never given the opportunity to speak. I am a serious candidate and was officially registered in the Student Senate office by submitting 50 signatures.
To the editor:
Why he did not question that statement from such an obviously biased source baffles me, but what is more confusing is the authority the other candidate used in making that determination about my campaign. I don't object to anyone
Apparently Hillel conjectured that my status as a candidate is inferior to the other candidates. Hillel explained that the coalition called "Apathy." One of his colleagues Hillet told me he based his decision to omit me on a statement from one of the other candidates, who said that I was running as a "joke."
KANSAN letters
disagreeing with my views, but I feel that actively attempting to deprive me of an equal opportunity to voice my stand shows a grave ethical deficiency.
If I am not a "serious" candidate, the other candidates have nothing to fear. If I am, then they should attempt to defeat me or be reprimanded for resorting to cheap, libelous and dirty tricks.
And, of course, it is certainly not the place of the other candidates to decide if another candidate is serious or not. If a candidate is not serious in her intentions and the voters are too stupid to realize it, then that is a fault of the system that allows stupid people to be involved in the decision making process. So if an organization'sandidate's fault and they should not be condemned for exposing the system's inadequacy.
Mark Hazelrigg Emporia junior
group of people is seized by a pace-increasing emotion such as panic, it has the same effect as if the number itself had inwardly moved. Their theaters have more exits than entrances.
Measures dealing with human aggregations must therefore take into account not merely their number, but also their number multiplied by their velocity, which increases the effective size of the unit.
By extension, the size of urban and national populations can be reduced to manageable proportions not by reducing members but simply by slowing down their pace.
IT IS OUR increasingly motorized existence that, compounded by political integration, causes people to live at ever greater distances, requiring ever faster speeds to reconnect what progress has flung apart.
Hence, to decelerate their pace, it is not enough to tell them to slow down as an alternative to extermination. What must be done is to recreate a compact and roughly self-sufficient environment of units so that the units are no longer necessary in the first place.
At the urban level, this can be achieved by making the suburbs and smaller towns into nuclei of such beauty and attractive power as to enable them to capture and hold their populations throughout all the daily activities.
A successful metropolitan area would be a polynuclear federation of cities, each offering the local area of control to local leaders having citizens the incentive to stay within the boundaries of their borough instead of jamming the roads to them. We need larger than centers what they will then have close by.
AT THE NATIONAL level, deceleration can be brought about by cantonizing the regions, giving the remote areas of a state full-fledged governments able to take care of their own affairs. With more autonomy in planning and administration, each region could provide sufficient social, economic and financial support to satisfy its citizens and keep them at home.
A return to manageable small political units as a solution to the intractable problem of bigness thus may be regarded as considerable more realistic than is conceived in other works.
The real obstacle is not practical but mental, summed up in that mind-arresting slogan of the politicians that you cannot turn back the clock. They probably cannot. But we do precisely this with the greatest of ease whenever our timepiece runs faster than time.
Leepold Kohl, professor of political philosophy at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, is author of "The Breakdown of Nations."
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KANSAN
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