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University Daily Kansan Thursday. April 21, 1960
Sex and the Classroom
Recently, the problem of academic freedom has cropped up in the news. Leo F. Koch, a University of Illinois professor, advocated pre-marital sex relations for mature students under certain circumstances and was quickly given the boot by the Illini president.
Then Tuesday the 32-member faculty of a 600-student high school in Georgia walked out after the school board refused to back the principal's paddling of an eighth grade boy.
WHILE WE ARE NOT SURE of the accuracy of classifying the latter incident in the same category of academic freedom with the Koch ousting, a similar problem is involved in both cases. How much freedom should any teacher have? Or to re-state the problem a little differently, how much should the public or school administration be allowed to interfere in the methods, ideas or policies of a teacher?
We look upon academic freedom as we do any form of censorship. Teachers, like writers or artists, should have practically unlimited freedom of expression. The only limits of which we can conceive are laws of treason—which we admit is a nebulous term — and the limitations of the content of the course. For instance, an engineering professor should not spend class time elaborating on politics or religion.
A principal should be given the authority to spank his students' juvenile behinds as long as the punishment is not cruel and inhumane. Teachers should walk out- if the school board prefers to bend to public pressure instead of supporting the faculty's actions.
We don't agree with Dr. Koch's ideas on sex. But firing him — that is ridiculous. He might have been asking for trouble by sending his views to the student newspaper. Yet he should be allowed to say what he wants in his class. He was fired
because of his ideas, not how he said them.
A FEW YEARS AGO some joker named Darwin was yelling about some stupid theory that had something to do with the origin of the species. The idea seemed contrary to existing religious beliefs. Many schools balked at having his shocking ideas discussed in the classrooms.
A few years earlier a fellow called Christ was walking across the countryside claiming He was the King of Kings.
He was received about as warmly as the blue- noses of Boston receive many notable literary works.
And then there was that ignoramus Copernicus who tried to tell everybody the earth was not the center of the universe.
Where would we be today if these ideas had been suppressed because they came from the minority?
ITWOULDBEINTERESTING to know how many students who oppose communism know what it is they oppose.
We firmly believe Communists should be allowed to teach in U.S. colleges. This way the students could hear arguments for communism firsthand. After having a class in Communism I a student would be able to explain why he does not believe in communism. He might even be able to project his ideas a bit and conclude why he prefers a democracy and the capitalistic system.
Is this tempting the student unnecessarily with un-American ideas?
A student should not be allowed on campus in the first place if he is not mature enough to be exposed to doctrines contrary to his accepted beliefs. Or maybe it is not his fault. Could it be there is something wrong with our whole educational system.
Foreign Students and ASC
Editor:
I read Mr. Vergara's letter concerning the behaviour of ASC towards Foreign Students. I solely agree with him. It seems to me, something is wrong either with the ASC or with its president. It pains me to read that a responsible person like the president of the ASC makes irresponsible statements like "if we give this privilege to you, will not the Negroes ask for it next?" What does he mean by it?
Foreign students should mind their own business—the International Club. Here again, the president of ASC has shown his ignorance. American students can also vote, and at the same time become office holders too. At the end I would like to express my feelings as follows:
Ohl intelligent president of ASG
— Doug Yocom
How can you forget?
How can you ignore?
The Foreign Students
You mean ...
They are not students
They can not vote
I ask you
Again I ask you
Why ...
Why ...
Why are you stone hearted
to them.
You must find a way
I must say
Easy to create differences
You have created
Who will patch it?
Who will patch it?
Now,
It's a question of vote
Vote
And to vote
You don't agree
But ...?
I fear
Tomorrow you may say
In the same house
You sleep with us
Now you sleep outside.
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Daily Hansan
India, graduate student
On Freedom
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50th St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $3 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the university year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays, and examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
Editor:
Another attack on freedom has been made. Another crime has been committed. And, ironically, all in the name of freedom.
The attack: A professor at the University of Illinois was discharged for his opinions on free love. A man has had the courage to express his opinion which happened to disagree with the "mass" view. So, he loses his job. Not only that, many have held that the University of Illinois was justified, at least in part.
Few seem to be aware of what is happening—or do they care? His right to freedom of expression is ignored, and he is accused of finding reason to "spout off," and of being "sociologically naive." The right to freedom includes the right to spout off and to be sociologically naive, if this is indeed what has occurred. Certainly no one should be fired for expressing his opinions. Any person, professor or not—even especially a professor—should have the right to speak out—even to speak foolishness (if, indeed, this is what has occurred).
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Managing Editor
Jasbir Singh
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Douglas Yocom and Jack Harrison ... Co-Editorial Editors
Bruce Lewellyn ... Business Manager
RUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Friends — students, Americans,
everyone—wake up! Look at what
is happening!
Or, maybe you don't care.
Kansas City, Kan. senior
It used to be
John L. Hodge
Ode to Oread Hall
Forlorn hopes
Are Oread's hopes,
Oread Hall.
Now relegated in use's abandon,
Now is a desolate retreat,
Like the post-rocket moon.
Our haven of refuge
From the cares of our day:
As barrage and onslaughts
Of short-guns and long-guns,
Of A-isings and flunkings,
To boot;
Then back to the abode
Of the fumes
Of our midnight oil
Of our upward toil
To heaven.
Anon to be scarred
By bulldoys —
This rickety, this sham,
Of the cataclysms of age —
Oread is an indelible blotch,
Oread yet will live
In our paeans and yarns
Of praise and song.
Anon to be dwarfed
By towing heights
Of new-fangled beauty,
Albeit,
Oread Hall was born
To endure in a day when
Beauty and solidarity,
Function and purpose,
Went hand in hand.
—Augustine G. Kyei
Ghana, West Africa, junior
What Is Love?
What is love ...?
The love is, ...
... a disease of madness,
Of sadness,
Of loneliness.
Away from happiness.
The result of,
Woman's touch,
Woman's smile.
Are worse than a sting,
Of a bee,
Swells later.
Results in infection,
That is ...
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
THE SURVEYOR, by Truman Nelson. Doubleday, $5.95.
In some of the most turgid and plodding prose since Dreiser, a New Englander who admits to fascination of the old Transcendentalists and their followers tells a story that should be of commanding interest as the centennial years of our Civil War approach.
"THE SURVEYOR" is about John Brown in Kansas. It is an enormously detailed and complex story of the border warfare, the tangled politics of the 1850s, the hatred and fanaticism that marked "Bleeding Kansas."
There are two antagonists, the Missouri senator, David Atchison, who was president pro tempore in the Pierce administration and became known to many as the Vice President, and Brown, whom Nelson refers to only as the "Old Man." Atchison is as deep-dyed a villain as any we have encountered of late. Brown is not the probably insane abolitionist we have come to know from 20th century history. To Nelson he is the personification of Emerson-Thoreau Transcendentalism, every bit the self-reliant individual praised by Thoreau in his "Plea for Captain John Brown."
THE EVENTS AND SETTING of "The Surveyor" are well known to those who have studied either American or Kansas history. Brown leaves his family and comes west to Kansas in 1855, bearing surveying instruments and a wagonload of Sharps rifles and swords once used in an expedition against Canada. His son John already is in Kansas politics, an ardent though vacillatingly abolitionist member of the Free State element.
In retaliation for the sack of Lawrence, Brown and six others execute five men on the Pottawatomie Creek. He engages in the Wakarusa battles, and at the end of the book he is headed east: "My plan is to take no more than twenty-five picked men and begin on a small scale at some such place as Harpers Ferry in Virginia..."
IT IS NOT the story that makes one most concerned with this treatment of the Brown narrative. There is no quarrel with the general structure of incidents. The greater quarrel is with interpretations of the historical characters in this novel.
Nelson segregates his good guys and bad guys almost as simply as does the writer of a television western, with some degrees of shading. Atchison and all the Missourians wear the black hats. President Pierce is similarly attired. So are the first governor of the territory, Andrew Reeder; the second governor, Wilson Shannon; the chief agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Co., Charles Robinson. The Negro-hating Free Staters are almost as evil to Nelson as the slavery sympathizers. Brown and his followers wear the white hats of virtue.
IT IS INCREDIBLE that an act as brutal as the Pottawatomie massacres can be rationalized as the end result of Transcendentalism. It was primitive savagery, and so Nelson describes it. He has Brown rationalize the executions as being no different from a cavalry sweep through a Mexican force or an Indian village, and he so rationalizes it himself. But these five men begging for mercy in the woody creek bottoms near Osawatomie create a picture as sickening as those we have come to associate with John Brown.
This Old Testament avenger rages through these pages as he rages in the famous painting by John Steuart Curry; he remains one of the unforgettable names of American history. We cannot condone David Atchison and his disregard of both the law and human rights, but neither can we see John Brown as the end result of the philosophy of the gentle Emerson.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler