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University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, Jan. 12, 1960
College Bowl Spirit
We are inclined to understand the sentiments of the editor of the Wisconsin Daily Emerald, whose tsk was to editorialize on his football team's recent Rose Bowl defeat. Last Sunday KU's College Bowl team lost to Smith College, 145-140.
The Wisconsin man wrote a terrible editorial. He knew the team had done its best and tried to give it praise. But through his lines there exuded a bitter, let-down feeling which he could not suppress.
There is no doubt that the Kansas team deserves high praise. The week before it defeated a team of outstanding University of Chicago scholars, and Sunday it led Smith College until the final three questions.
The four team members, besides honorably representing the University, did one great thing. They tapped the resources of pride for the University, in which many students are rich, but which are too frequently buried beneath the rush of everyday living. During the week between the two games, the Kansas College Bowl team was the main topic of conversation on campus.
Then, Sunday at 4:30 p.m., conversation stopped and people all over town turned to their television sets. In the Kansas Union, free coffee was served and 250 people clustered around the set in the main lobby. When the program began, the Kansans were roundly cheered and the Smith team appropriately hissed. Someone tried to
start the Rock Chalk Chant, but the crowd was too edgy to respond.
Encouragements were shouted toward the TV set and comments on the questions intoned from all sides. One fellow proudly took his bow after guessing right on a question which the Smith team missed.
Then Smith began narrowing KU's margin and tension prevailed. One man kicked over his coffee. But Elinor Hadley eased the worry with a difficult answer.
"That's a girl, Elinor."
"I'm in love with Elinor."
KU missed a question ("No, no, no!") and Smith kept catching up. Soon we were passed and time began running out.
"Stop the clock!"
"Oh, sick."
"Call time out!"
Then the game was over and we had lost by five points. There were no smiles. There was no great surge toward the exits. Instead, some 200 people stood around in little groups, talking seriously, and casting occasional furtive glances at the television set.
"Fixed, by God, it was fixed."
"They gave 'em a lot more chances."
They gave em a lot of Chuck
"Well they put up a good fight."
"Yeah, they did a good job."
And one professor walked away with his wife. He looked like he was about to cry.
—John Husar
Louisiana State Suggests
Redistricting Needed
The U. S. is supposed to have a democracy wherein people through their own representatives choose the type of government the majority of the population wants. But a close study of a few facts and figures shows that a majority of the people have no voice simply because of poor districting within the states.
For instance in the state of Vermont the town of Victory and the city of Burlington both have one representative in the legislature. Victory has a population of 49 and Burlington has 33,000. This means that in Vermont one rural vote is equal to some 670 city votes.
California has one state senator representing 14,000 residents of three cow counties. The county of Los Angeles has a population of 5,970,000 and also has one senator. Here one rural vote is worth 425 city votes.
In Michigan two-fifths of the residents of the state are concentrated in and around Detroit but they can elect only one-fifth of the state senate
Dominant parties can really prosper by this misrepresentation, but the people suffer. The Republicans gather most of their votes from the rural areas and with the rural imbalance the Republicans are not about to ask for redistricting.
The only solution to the problem seems to be for the public to yell long and loud. In the past few years several attempts to reform representation have fallen flat. If the people don't care about their vote, then let them keep quiet, but if they do, then something should be done.
In approximately 20 states people can force legislative reforms by circulating petitions among the electorate. Also several groups of civic-minded people can bring enough pressure to cause reforms.
If the U. S. is to remain a democratic nation, then the 120 million city dwellers need to do something to get out from under the thumb of 60 million country slickers.-Charles Lenox.
Louisana State University Daily Reveille
Daily Transan
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904 trweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., for FOX News International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturday and Sunday, and for periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910. at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
Jack Harrison ... Managing Editor
Carol Allen, Dick Crocker, Jack Morton and Doug Yomch, Assistant Managing Editors; Rael Amos, City Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolin Fralley, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George Deborah and John Husar ... Co-Editorial Editors Saundra Hayn, Associate Editorial Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Kane ... Business Manager
Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager;
Martha Crosier, Promotion Manager;
Ruth Thatcher, Marketing Manager;
Tom Schmitz. Circulation Manager;
John Massa, Classified Advertising Manager.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"ANOTHER THING—DON'T BE TARDY—HE HAS A WAY OF
EMBARRASSING YOU WHEN YOU COME IN LATE."
So, far from our own countries, we could feel in those homes like we were in our own. The families that offered us their homes felt our happiness, and they offered us such a warm hospitality that we could not have been happier in our own homes.
And in contrast to this, I remembered when the greater part of the United States newspapers were planting the seeds of hate between this country and mine (Cuba). I thought of all those people who were victimized by this propaganda and who have suffocated their inherent feelings of friendship.
Tribute to Peace
By Felina Ferragut Instructor of Romance Languages
There are many monuments to non-living ideas or concepts. One of these is the monument to peace. This idea is cherished by all peoples, but in governmental arts the people's feelings are often forgotten. Then the words which express these ideas or feelings become non-living symbols like monuments of stone.
A GROUP of foreign students was invited to spend Thanksgiving vacation in this little town. It is as small as a drop of water, but a drop of water is very powerful if it is followed by another and another since together they can turn barren soil into fertile farmland.
Today peace is only a symbol, and in the hateful atmosphere that envelops the press of this country we could not imagine a truly peaceful place. But this place exists. It is called Burns, Kansas.
IF PEOPLE COULD ENJOY the happiness of another country without any barriers to obscure the truth, if the propaganda was dedicated to cultivating the seeds of friendship that were planted in Burns, animosity would not be possible. We will not forget the happy faces of our neighbors in Burns who were our hosts, or the sad eyes of a boy who almost cried because we were leaving.
Like the pollen seed carried by the mind to germinate new lives, the seed of friendship floats in the atmosphere of Burns. It sprouts in the heart of each foreign student, and they carry it to every part of the world. Our neighbors in Burns do not speak about peace, but they render to peace its greatest tribute when they plant the seed of friendship among the people of the world.
From the News-stand
By Karl Shapiro
"Almost every art in the twentieth century is a flourishing art—except poetry. Painting, music, sculpture, architecture, even the novel and the drama, have contributed richly to the age we live in. Our poetry, on the other hand, can boast only a tangle of subtleties and grotesques and the obscurantism for which it is famous. It is a diseased art."
"It is diseased because the standards of poetry, criticism, and the teaching of both are today dictated by the 'coup d'etat' of Modernism, a minor intellectual program which took the stage more than a full generation ago, about 1915. . . ."
"Ours is probably the only poetry in history that has to be "taught" in its own time. A contemporary art that must be taught to adults before it can be enjoyed is sick. To support and justify this ailing poetry and adherents of Modernism have taken refuge in Criticism. Modern literary criticism is the largest and most formidable body of criticism known. Its authors, amazingly, are often poets themselves, or those poets who have subscribed to the culture program of the 'Classical' school. Their obscurantism is as great as that of the poetry it tries to defend.
What we have in our time is not a flourishing poetry but a curious brand of poetry compounded of verse and criticism. It is accurate to call this hybrid 'criticism-poetry.' The person who can understand modern poetry must first be initiated into the vast and arcane criticism of our day. This is why almost every college or university in America must teach' modern poetry. It is like teaching a foreign language and the key to it is criticism.
"Anyone who has taught this 'criticism-poetry' knows that the student is left cold or horrified, once he is able to see behind it. The only advantage of this situation is that it has provided employment for thousands of college instructors...
"The revolt against Modernism seems to be gaining ground at long last. New poets are turning away from criticism and the dictatorship of the intellectual journals; they are even turning away from the sanctimonious evangelists of the Tradition. They are once again seeking that audience which has for so long been outlawed by the aristocrats of the Word. They are seeking to regain spontaneity and the use of the human voice, in place of the artificial culture myth and the bleak footnotes. They are beginning to use subjective judgment in place of the critical dictum. They are returning to Whitman, the only world-poet America has produced, and to Lawrence and such American contemporaries as William Carlos Williams.
If the new anti-modernist poetry is brutal, illiterate and hysterical, that is the price we have to pay for the generation-old suppression of poetry by criticism. It appears at long last that the poetry of the textbook will shortly find its way to the library stacks where, in fact, its death-wish has always pointed."
S
(in fact, its death wish has always pointed (Excerpted from "What's The Matter With Poetry," New York Times Book Review, Dec. 13, 1959.)
Worth Repeating
Somehow we must give positive attention to developing more physicians and dentists with the attitudes of a cultivated person, with an interest in literature, and with an appreciation of knowledge for its own sake.-Dr. Wallace Armstrong of the University of Minnesota.