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University Daily Kansan Tuesday. March 15. 1960
Harvard, KU and NSA
About two years ago Harvard's student council faced a situation similar to the one plaguing KU's All Student Council.
Harvard was dissatisfied with the National Student Association (NSA) and was considering dropping its membership. The student council voted to withdraw and the decision was backed by the vote of the student body. The council then prepared a majority and a minority report explaining its decision. Both were distributed to all member schools of the NSA.
The majority report said the NSA did not justify the expenditure of the amount of money and effort that was being spent. Most of the specific criticisms were directed toward the functioning of the National Conference, not at the purpose of NSA.
The reason for submitting the reports was to encourage a similar reappraisal of the NSA in hope some of the faults would be rectified.
Both reports were lengthy, detailed resolutions which analyzed the role of NSA. The charges of the majority report were specific and showed the results of long hours of objective study. The minority report listed 17 NSA merits that the majority report did not include. The minority added that "withdrawal as a method of effecting changes in the NSA was ineffective and ridiculous."
Last summer Harvard sent eight observers to the National Student Congress at Urbana, Ill. This group prepared a report requesting the Harvard Student Council and students reevaluate NSA. This led to Harvard rejoining NSA.
To quote from the 1959 report: "If NSA is to become a vital component of the student community, it must be actively promoted on each
individual campus. This promotion will be most effective if NSA is presented as an educational force which has much to contribute to the college and its students."
The only objections we have heard against the NSA have been superficial compared to the Harvard reports. If KU's student council decides to disaffiliate with the NSA it should submit a detailed report, both to the NSA and to the students.
We doubt if anything could be gained from submitting the question of disaffiliation to the students. They are not familiar with the NSA now and any attempt to educate them at this stage would require about 8,500 copies of meaningless material on the NSA. But the students should be given access to a report compiled by the ASC which objectively states the reasons for disaffiliation.
We feel that ASC has been inactive in the NSA long enough. Even if the Council decides to remain inactive and stop attending national conventions—which would entail a continued isolation of KU from the only organization that directly represents students on a national and international level—the ASC should not disaffiliate.
It is worth the $195 KU pays in fees to help maintain a Washington lobby that works for federal aid to education, the re-enactment of the GI Bill and removal of the loyalty oath and disclaimer clause from National Defense Act loans. It is also worthwhile to continue support of the International Student Conference, the only student organization that can provide an alternative to the Communist-dominated International Union of Students.
— Doug Yocom
A Positive Step
Sanity slowly is coming to the South. The "racial problem" ultimately will be solved, and the current lunch counter demonstrations constitute a step in the right direction.
The demonstrations have spread from Greensboro, N. C., to seven southern states. Negro students sit down at a dime-store lunch counter and when they are refused service remain seated for several hours as a protest against the discrimination.
There has been no overall organization of the demonstrations. A group of students made a natural protest to discrimination in Greensboro. Others heard or read of it and repeated the action.
Such a dignified and orderly protest scarcely can be criticized by the radical advocates of white supremacy. Both Greensboro newspapers favored serving Negros at the lunch counter. Several organizations of the clergy urged the same action.
The Negro students are working toward a reasonable goal. More than half the business of the large dime stores in the South comes from
the Negroes. They should expect lunch-counter service if they are keeping the stores in business.
And if they are denied service, they have a powerful weapon in boycotting the stores.
The Negroes must gain the respect of the whites. They are doing so through their present demonstrations.
Southerners may do a little serious thinking after observing a group of Negro students neatly dressed in suits and ties sitting at a lunch counter reading their college textbooks, while a gang of black-jacketed white hoodlums stands outside shouting and cursing.
It takes courage and determination to face the often bitter-public opinion of the South, and to do so with quiet dignity. The students in the lunch-counter demonstrations have shown both courage and dignity.
More and more of the students of the southern Negro colleges are stepping forward to aid in the struggle for their lawful rights.
— Jack Harrison
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
'YOU HAVE USED TH' FIRST 10 MINUTES — 40 TO GO!!'
Telephone Viking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became bweeklew 1004,
trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represenbled by National Advertising Service. 20 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. New York Daily Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and vacations. Reserved as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1879 at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Morton ... Managing Editor
Ray Miller, Carol Heller, George DeBord and Carolyn Frayle, Assistant Managing Editors; Jane Boyd, City Editor; Ralph (Gabby) Wilson and Warren Haskin, Sports Editors; Carrie Edwards and Priscilla Burton, Society Editors.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Douglas Yoeom and
Jack Harrison ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bruce Lewellyn ... Business Manager
John Massa, Advertising Manager;
Mark Dull, Promotion Manager;
Brittany Beiler National Advertising Manager; Tom Nolen, Classified Manager; Martha Ormsby, Classified Advertising Manager.
International Jayhawker
By Humberto J. Mirabal Puerto Rico Senior
The captive Indian women of the Caribs, which the discoverers of the island of Puerto Rico rescued in Barlovento in 1493, pointed the route to the navigators to reach Borinquen (Hispanicized name for the island from the Indian Boriquen). When these women saw the coast of their island they abandoned the ships and threw themselves into the sea in a rapture of primitive love for their native land. The memento of the captive islanders is still preserved in the history of Puerto Rico united to the Columbian gest with legendary and poetic tones.
This fact comes to my mind in significant patriotic and ethnic dimensions. The people of Puerto Rico are deeply attached to that bit of almost invisible land that apparently floats in the deep blue of the Caribbean. Sensory images play together with deeprooted feelings towards the home-land to create the common nostalgia felt by its people away from home.
We are one, being many, in the same proportion that the Caribbean is a plural land, being at the same time an unique world by those subterranean forces that stir in its historic, racial and cultural background. Puerto Rico's goal is the liberty of being and existing, guaranteed by democracy for the development of the latent forces in man towards his individual fullness and his contribution to the common works of humanity. This liberty brings equality between the native human beings and with the people of the diverse lands of the sphere.
Generosity, hospitality, charity and whatever other virtues than can be dreamed about, exist in the spirit and blood of our people. These inherent forces make possible the fraternal life of the Puerto Rican family.
The three ethnic elements should be taken into consideration when describing the formation of this population, its development and the future of its structure. The Indian pre-Columbian element is chronologically the first. The second is the Spanish element that has been brought by the discovery, conquest and colonization from 1493 on; and the African element as the third.
The base that holds the cultural homogeneity of the people of Puerto Rico is characterized by all these attributes of its formation not forgetting the minor foreign groups that have been assimilated in our land. In the racial and cultural amalgam of all these diverse beings . . . a national reality has been shaped that persists and projects itself into the future with growing impetus, settled in the mother Spanish language and its derivatives, and everything obtained from the traditional heritage accumulated for more than four hundred and fifty years of existence in the Hispanic-American orbit.
Puerto Rico is a significant bridge between the two cultures of the Western Hemisphere. Today, it is the best proof of the result of friendly intercourse between these cultures.
This has been perplexing to the close observer.
Governor Munoz Marin in his inaugural speech on January 2, 1949 said: "What colony has ever elected, with the free votes of its people, its own legislative and executive government? In what colony, in what part of the world or in what time has there taken place an act like this?" This inaugural celebration was undoubtedly the most overwhelming and spontaneous outpouring of human spirit in Puerto Rico's history.
On July 25, 1952 another celebration marked the finale of the island's colonial status and the democratic fastening of the two countries . . . the emergence of the new Commonwealth of Puerto Rico as a self governing member of the American Union; a relationship that defies duplication and often even description. After years of careful study, the possibilities of statehood or complete independence were shown as impossible.
Today we are proud of our own flag: the solitary star in blue triangle. The song known as the national anthem of the island is called, La Borinquena, keeping a vital link with the ancestral name of the land.
Yes, we are different from the United States, we are two different countries. We don't want those differences to disappear, but conserve them for the enrichment of the cultural patrimony of the Americas. The Puerto Rican nationalistic feeling and the Puerto Rican-United States alliance are not incompatible. We are not less partners, less allies, less associates because we are more Puerto Rican, more nationalistically Puerto Rican; the only way of being authentically American.
When thy rare beauty he first described with wonder thrilling Columbus cried:
Oh! Oh! Oh!
No land like thee, Borinquen,
the world does know:
I shall meet with no other, no other wherever I go!
Worth Repeating
The powerful press of sexual desire between man and woman often misleads us into thinking that this desire is love. Actually, whatever the power of the sexual embrace, it is not for this that we love one another. The act itself may engage us in all sorts of matter ruinous to love, such as deceiving, lying, raping, killing. Love between man and woman, like any other love, is a relationship in spiritual greatness. It is a love generous in offering and generous in receiving; it is full of laughter, mercy and rejoicing. Love nourishes but does not possess; in love we affirm one another but do not dominate. To love is not to win or lose but to help and be helped.—Robert Reynolds