(2) 8
3 6 9
Page 2
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
University Daily Kansan Friday, Dec. 4, 195
Organized Men
A picture story depicting life at the School of Business which appeared recently in the Daily Kansan has angered the leaders in Summerfield Hall.
To quote from a letter from the dean of the school which appeared on this page yesterday:
"In my judgment, this article misrepresents the aims of this school, its curriculum, its students, and its faculty. It thereby performs a grave disservice to the School of Business and the University."
The dean questions the reporter's respect for the truth in his report, and says that the article was either poorly investigated or "deliberately distorted."
We can't agree with the dean on his interpretation of the story.
The page was nothing more than a pictorial satire on the School of Business. It was not presented as ultimate truth, but as one man's opinion of the school. It was not presented as fact, but as theory.
The dean is entitled to answer satirical criticism leveled at his school. But he is wrong when he portrays another man's opinion as a misrepresentation of the facts.
Certainly, the story was "deliberately distorted." We are surprised that the dean did not recognize this. For this is the method of all satire.
We are surprised by the defensive attitude of the dean. He maintains the article charged the
school with "deliberately trying to turn out organization men."
There were no "charges" in the satire.
But then, perhaps the attitude is explainable in terms of our prevailing social philosophy: a philosophy that makes great use of the defense mechanism.
Men are sensitive about their jobs, their goals, the organizations they work for or belong to. They tend to reject any form of criticism, however intended, as being untrue or at best a distorted view.
This attitude almost has made satire extinct. Men refuse to laugh at themselves any more. All jokes have become bad jokes.
Nor do men try to understand themselves or their relationships to society. Instead, they close themselves up in little worlds. Their world centers around a group—a group hostile to outsiders.
In business, these groups become organization men or office cliques. In labor, men protect their group with a cloak of unionism.
And at college, the protective group becomes the school or the department or the fraternity.
All these groups have the strength of close association.
All of them also have a common weakness: They are hypersensitive to outsiders looking in.
The schools at KU are no exception. For, judging from the dean's letter, the School of Business fits well into the over-all pattern of organizing men into tightly-knit groups which prefer to live in isolated worlds. George DeBord
The Christmas Sell
The Christmas season has officially arrived, starting somewhere between Halloween and Thanksgiving. The premature beginning of the season gives merchants time to indoctrinate the unwary before they can fully realize how expensive the season has become.
In Wichita, on Nov. 23, the merchants treated the citizenry to the longest parade in the city's history. This Yule offering was complete with a giant leopard balloon and half-dressed drum majorettes. Santa Claus was there too but not in the featured role.
New York City's Thanksgiving Day parade had a Christmas theme, and was broadcast on nationwide TV. The sponsor, a manufacturer of toy trains, pushed his product as "informative and pleasurable" for children, a phrase which sounds suspiciously like the functions of poetry, as drummed into us in English Lit., but not too much like Christmas.
The nation's businessmen have again this year made an all-out advertising effort to be sure that all Americans have a happy Christmas, or at least to assure that they go through the highly profitable motions.
Advertisements and sales talks indicate that books are good gifts for Christmas. This seems less a renaissance of intellectualism than a promotion of mental crutches and egghead-style prestige.
At one time, knowledge was indicated by the things a man knew and could remember. Today, it seems to be measured by the size, not the quality of a man's library.
Any best selling book is considered a good gift, or a good acquisition. It is not important that the book be read so long as it can be seen on the library shelf.
The decreasing importance of an individual's knowledge may be compared with the decreasing importance of the aptness of gifts. Knowledge may be printed, stored and forgotten in the form of an available, unread book.
The apt gift has become the one with the highest price tag. A gift is no longer a thoughtful remembrance, but a prestige symbol. The giver, rather than considering the receiver, considers what the receiver will think of him.
This month, more Americans than ever will be cajoled by massive doses of advertising into crowding shops and stores everywhere, to jostle each other in competition for the privilege of boosting their self-ego through expensive, "better" gifts.
Buyer and seller will revel in Christmas, knowing dimly that whatever it once was, it has become a gigantic grab bag, promoted and packaged as the biggest, longest sale of the year.
UNIVERSITY
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Vikking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated College Press Rep. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., Y. News, Mail-Union 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. And examine periods. Entered as announcement 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 Yocom, Assistant Managers Editors; Rael Amos, City Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolin Fralley, Society Editor.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George Debord and John Husar ...Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Kane ... Business Manager
Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager;
Martha Crosier, Promotion Manager;
Ruth Nahara, Advertising Manager;
Tom Schmitz, Circulation Manager; John Massa, Classified Advertising Manager.
A few years ago I spent the winter at a resort called Parris Island. I recall one poor soul who asked one of the Drill Instructors about marriage allotments. The DI's reply, which might solace a few of KU's NROTC students, was that if the Marine Corps had wanted him to have a wife, it would have issued him one.
... Letters ...
Stingy Quartermaster
Editor
I've read with interest the articles and letters to the editor bemoaning the fate of NROTC students and their inability to marry while in school.
East Hartford, Conn., sophomore
James Fisher
Correction
. . .
I should like to correct a statement concerning the areas of research in physical chemistry appearing in Monday's Daily Kansan. Professors Argersinger, Rowland and Bearman are also physical chemists, and they are performing
In addition to physical chemistry, the branches or divisions of chemistry (not "areas in physical chemistry") now represented in the department are analytical, inorganic, and organic. Excellent research in these branches is performed and directed by the other eleven chemistry faculty members.
and directing excellent research in the broad areas of thermodynamics, radiochemistry and statistical mechanics, respectively.
I regret the error and any confusion it may have caused.
Professor of Chemistry
Caught
Editor:
I didn't know there were any Journalism majors in my classes! "A certain member of the Poli-
A certain member of the Medical Science Department"
A certain member of the Fo-
cal Science Department"
Duped
Editor:
I didn't say it recently...
—An un-named member of the political science department
Allen-Lentz
By John S. Lewis Assistant Instructor of English
THE AGE OF REASON by Jean Paul Sartre, translated by Eric Sutton, Bantam Books. 75 cents.
WAR WITH THE NEWTS by Karel Capek, translated by M. and R. Weatherall, Bantam Books. 50 cents.
"The Age of Reason," the first novel in Sartre's trilogy, "Les Chemins de la Liberte," is an impressive book, a product of one of the most fruitful periods of literary activity that France, or any country for that matter, has enjoyed in recent years. The novel deals with Mathieu, who is, in the terminology invented by R. W. B. Lewis, a "picaresque saint," a modern man in search of spiritual identity.
SUCH IDENTITY is denied Mathieu who has discovered that his mistress of several years' standing is pregnant. Unwilling to marry her Mathieu seeks out an abortionist. The murder of the foetus is not carried out; a homosexual offers to marry the mistress and to accept the child. Yet the foetus symbolizes the condition which Mathieu finds himself in. He is unfulfilled. He is quite useless to the Communist party of which he is a quasi-member. His only capital is intelligence and the Communists do not need intellectuals, a party organizer tells him.
The book compares well with Albert Camus' best novels and demonstrates that Sartre's is one of the best literary minds of our time. One cannot help but regret that the French author's philosophical speculation, valuable as it may be, deters him from literary activity. His few critical essays reveal Sartre's powers; he may be considered in later years as one of the most astute literary critics in the mid-twentieth century. Like Camus, his compassionate sympathy for rootless modern man is undeniable.
KAREL CAPEK'S NOVEL, a political satire and science-fiction fantasy, was first published in 1936. The Newts, salamanders with human intelligence, conduct a successful war with their former masters, men. But the Newts, like their human enemies, cannot remain united. The Newts, the close of the novel suggests, will destroy each other. And man will survive to create postdiluvian myths about them.
The political satire might seem, to the casual reader, to be dated now. A more careful reader will realize that, political man being what he is, similar situations exist today. The Chief Salamander pleads for a situation not unlike "peaceful co-existence."
These new additions to the Bantam classic series are both further evidence that the series is one of the most attractive in the paperback field.
We have got to get away from the rigid idea of having one teacher to every so many pupils. All we have done is to take several dozen one-room schools and put them together under one roof. —Joseph W. Alsop
A core of non-conformity is essential to new thinking—President-elect Mary I. Bunting of Radcliffe.
Become a public official? That's a very honorable and good thing ...I'd rather be a newspaper man myself.—Walter Lippmann
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
'KEPUNZEL WONT TELL HOW SHE DOES IT, BUT SHE MANAGES TO
SNEAK ONE BOY UP INTO THE ROOM ALMOST EVERY NITE!'