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University Daily Kansan Thursday. Jan. 21 1960
1.
The Farm Problem
The farm problem promises to be a major battlefield in the forthcoming election campaigns.
Already Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo) has offered his idea of what a farm program should be in response to a challenge by Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson. Benson had said that Democratic critics of his program should come up with ideas of their own.
Two of Sen. Symington's proposals are to establish a food use policy to provide a better diet at home and alleviate hunger abroad, and to bring production into balance with needs. These two points are ambiguous, if the Senator really intends to alleviate hunger abroad. To reduce production would be a peculiar path to take toward feeding hungry people.
Sen. Symington's proposals are more in the order of hopes than plans of action. He does not say just how production can be balanced with needs, beyond advocating that farmers be put on a "true parity" formula. He says the farmers should be put on 90 per cent of parity until the new formula could be found. The "true parity," he says, would give the farmer a fair return for labor, investment and managerial ability.
Finding this "true parity" likely would turn out to be like looking for the proverbial needle (true parity) in a haystack of prices. Overproduction has been the crux of the farm problem for longer than any farmer cares to remember. Attempts to reduce production without incurring excessive storage and surplus expenses have failed.
The government has hesitated to dump surplus foodstuffs in poor countries in the past because of protests by other nations that grain markets would be ruined. But it is doubtful that donating surpluses to starving nations will seriously affect markets. If these countries had money to buy food, they would be doing so and their people
What needs to be recognized is that food production is no longer a national problem. This is a point that so far all presidential aspirants and agricultural secretaries have refused to recognize. The population explosion that the world has experienced, is now experiencing, and will continue to experience overshadows the importance of balanced production in any one country. It may be reverting to a worn maxim, but Malthus was undeniably correct when he said that population increases geometrically, while food increases arithmetically.
would not be starving. There can be no market where no money to buy exists.
It is a senseless irony of the world that the United States spends one billion dollars a year to store her surplus foodstuffs, while the children of India get, on the average, but four meals a week. The world needs food-badly. The world will need more food in the future, unless the unlikely advent of stringent birth control reduces the gap between food and population.
The United States is following an inhumane course when it worries about keeping food production in line with national consumption. The world is starving. Food production should be accelerated, not reduced. Soil bank programs should be ended. They benefit the rich, corporate farming operations more than the average farmer anyway. Farming should be heavily subsidized by the United States, and all other governments. The surpluses should be incorporated in extensive aid programs to under-developed, hungry countries.
The United States and other prosperous nations have a moral obligation to distribute their wealth to less fortunate countries until something approaching prosperity can be the norm for all countries.
Jack Morton
Second Political Party
It's about time someone was organizing a second campaign political party.
Spring elections are not far away. Healthy student government requires vigorous campaigns and spirited party rivalry. Vox Pepuli will be stronger itself if it has to fight for its leadership in campus politics.
There are many ambitious and politically minded students attending KU. If a few of them got together and created a second campus political party, they would be doing their fellow students a service.
We almost returned to the two-party system this winter when a group of independents made an abortive attempt to organize the "Independent Party."
It was never an official party, although much high-sounding talk was spread about by the briefly energetic party leaders. The organization folded last week due to a "lack of leadership
interest." Evidently there was much early enthusiasm for the idea of a party "strictly for independents." until it came time to put in a little work on the project.
Many students were glad to see the embryo party disintegrate. An independent-Greek split very likely would have hampered student government.
But a second party definitely is needed to replace the Allied Greek Independent party, which disbanded in mid-October. Vox Populi might even be more powerful with active opposition. Yet the opposition should be there.
The time has come for a second party to be formed. But considering the imminence of final examinations, I won't expect any action immediately. Hit the books now, you aspiring young politicians, but come back in two weeks and revitalize campus politics by giving Vox Populi some competition. —Jack Harrison
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became bireweek 1904,
trweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 16.121
telephone Viking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated College Repress. Represented by National Advertising Service. 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y. 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 examination fees are accepted on campus after Sept. 17, 310 Lawrence. Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
Jack Harrison ... Managing Editor
Carol Alten, Dick Crockier, Jack
Morton and Doug Yocom, Assistant
Managing Editors: Raael Amos, City
Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolin Fralley, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Husar Co-Editorial Editors
Associate Hayn, Associate Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Kane Business Manager Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager; Martha Croster, Promotion Manager; Ruth Bleder, Account Manager; Schulz, Circulation Manager; John Masse, Classified Advertising Manager.
... Letters ...
Editor:
A guy ought to have his head examined or at least marry well to spend four to five years getting a Ph.D., (a necessary prerequisite to the full professorship) for the $125 a week more than the man with the B.S. or B.A. (a necessary prerequisite for an instructorship)
Oh well, here goes my chances of obtaining the Ph.D. but I've just got to get this off my chest.
Barring printing errors, it pays $500 a year more to be the lowest paid associate professor at KU than to be the lowest paid full professor ($6500 vs. $6000). This unusual situation could only arise at a university whose teaching salaries are at such an ebb that even the suggested increase of three per cent would raise the average pay no more than $3 a week. Why it costs me almost that much to smoke and drink and I'm sure our fine professors would not put this paltry sum to a more noble use.
Another strange phenomenon is the pay increment between the different levels. The difference between an instructor and an assistant professor is about $40 a week; between assistant and associate, $20 a week while the associate and full professor is separated by the supernal sum of $70 a week.
in order to teach at this institution. Why at the conservative cost of $2,500 a year to get the Ph.D., it would take this efficiency expert two or three years as a full professor to just break even. This of course is not considering the fact that it would take him 10 to 15 years to reach a full professorship.
This over and above the fact that we cannot import good people to teach at these salaries, we do not even have the incentive to keep the good people we have. Although indirectly, I have heard that the professor voted best teacher at the University by the senior class makes less than $6,000 a year.
With all due respect to Vance Packard and his status seekers, the positive reinforcement gleaned from the higher levels of academic life leave much to be desired; at least at this University.
I hope this doesn't upset those professors whose courses I've yet to take, but if it does I'd rather follow where they go than wait around here in the hope of getting another man who may be, at the very best, more devoted.
Don Kissil
Bronx, N. Y., graduate student (Ed.s' note: The figures were correct)
WHAT FEMALE VOICE? "
From the News-stand
"...while attention in America has been directed to and distracted by the literary Outsiders, as well as by the English Angry Young Men, a more substantial and formidable development has been going on, as it were, from within—as indeed it has been going on under everyone's eyes since about 1950. This is the emergence of American-Jewish writing as a decisive force in American letters. Among leading critics to-day are Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Philip Rahy, Leslie Fiedler, Irving Howe; there are few younger fiction writers of unmistakable significance but among them are certainly Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud; though inactive in recent years, Arthur Miller remains our most solid and serious playwright; in poetry there is Karl Shapiro (a Roman Catholic convert whose latest collection is titled 'Poems of a Jew'), as well as Delmore Schwartz, Howard Nemerov and Stenley Kunitz, who is perhaps the most underrated poet to-day. Further, the unquestioned influence of 'Partisan Review' has been largely the work of these and a host of lesser-known American-Jewish writers. The prowess and enterprise of this group also has helped to establish the rapid reputation and influence of 'Commentary' — the first American-Jewish journal of any real literary distinction and impact. And even more indicative, perhaps, of this new literary energy is the growing group of younger poets, fiction writers, and critics who are just beginning to rise into prominence.
"But first some necessary qualifications. The present writer is aware of the tendency—particularly marked among the more official Jewish literary historians—to name whatever prominent Jewish names there are and call it Jewish writing. He is also aware of their tendency to take whatever time they have happened to be writing at since about 1930 as the beginning of the Jewish millennium in American letters. The point is not that these writers are Jewish so much as that they are American ones..."
"The American-Jewish writer, of course, is not alone in these things. At present he happens to be in the most favourable social and cultural position to make his move. The son of a bookish tradition, he is now also economically secure enough to convert business energy more purely into creative and scholarly energy—to become an Arthur Miller rather than an Elmer Rice, a Leon Edel rather than an Isaac Goldberg, an Aaron Copland rather than a George Gershwin. And because he is relatively secure in his personal career (almost all the writers here mentioned either teach or edit in respectable places), in his intellectual grasp of Western culture, and in his English prose and metres, he can begin to be bold. However, Ellison and Baldwin are unmistakable signs that another sub-culture is beginning to produce its secure and verturesome writers. Moreover, in the Puerto Rican slums of America's northern cities, there are, no doubt, the first inspired writers of their English compositions. One notices their talented middleweight is on his way up, the first small business men have opened the groceries and clothes stores, there is even the first movie star. It is very familiar, very heartening. In another twenty years there will be a fine jazz clarinetist and maybe a novelist or two, along with the lawyers and high-school teachers. In the following generation, a son of one of these—securely rooted in both his heritages and aware of the tensions to be channelled—may well be writing a note in these pages about the Puerto-Rican breakthrough in American letters. All of this promises well for its future..."
(From The Times Literary Supplement, Nov. 6, 1959, "A V Group.")
If I were concerned about adolescent subversives, which I am not, I would require them to attend universities rather than seek to prevent them.—Barnaby C. Keeney