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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Dec. 2, 1959
The Loyalty Oath
The clause requiring students to sign loyalty oaths before they can receive federal loans has been a subject of controversy on many campuses this year.
Fourteen colleges and universities have withdrawn from the federal loan program in protest of the clause requiring students to pledge their allegiance to the nation and affirm that they are not, and never have been, communists. These schools include Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
The main reason why the schools have repudiated the federal loan offer is because they feel that the loyalty clause encroaches on our country's inherent academic freedom. The schools have acted in protest, even though they claim to need the money. We admire those eastern schools for their courage in forsaking money for principle. We regret that they must suffer financial loss to dispute an item such as the loyalty oath, which is not worth the cost of the paper it is printed on.
The cath has supporters who feel it is necessary to help root out saboteurs of American principles. They feel that subversive agents who sign the loyalty oath to receive funds can be tripped up on perjury charges should their actions ever be questioned. They feel that persons
participating in a radical attempt to overthrow our government would refrain from signing such an oath as a matter of honor, or would not be low enough to sign the oath only to "americanize" themselves.
This is a world which supports lies and treason. The dollar is the impetus and the end to man's actions. The majority of Americans rationalize any successful attempt to gain wealth in order to make it acceptable.
A man will lie about his car in order to get a better price; he will "forget" to keep an accurate account of his time and expenses feeling that what he can gain from the boss is deserved anyway. He will lie to go fishing and lie to excuse poor work. He can think hard to find an excuse which will explain anything he does. As long as his principles aren't "bothering" him he will sign a contract he intends to break.
In doing this he treasons himself. He violates those personal rules and regulations he had set up for all the world to see. In doing this he commits a crime against himself—treason.
The above view is the practical result of man's tortured fight with himself. Today it is hard to believe anything which is signed, even the now insignificant loyalty oath.
—John Husar
Organization Man
Although I am not in the Political Science Department, I would like to reply to your open letter in last Monday's (Nov. 23) issue of the Daily Kansan. This issue alone demonstrates the frequent abuse of the truth by the Kansan.
First of all, let us look at the open letter itself. The letter begins by stating, "We understand you (member of Political Science Department) made the following statement to one of your classes recently. . ." Instead of publishing this alleged statement, a responsible newspaper would have sent a reporter to interview the member of the Political Science Department to find out whether he made the statement, and if so, why. Then an accurate story could be published.
On page three of the same issue there was a story entitled "Growth of the Organization Man" which consisted primarily of quotations ripped from context from two highly dubious sources. If the author of the story had enough interest in what he was writing about to check with any member of the School of Business faculty on the validity of the source material he proposed to use and if he had
checked with some students in the School of Business as to their goals and reasons for studying business administration, his story of business students and a building would have been much less full of half truths and misconceptions than the published story.
For example, one quotation used by the author states: "Ideas come from the group, not from the individual. The well-rounded man is one who does not think up ideas himself but mediates other people's ideas, and so democratically that he never lets his own judgment override the decisions of the group."
This quotation is pure nonsense, at least at this School of Business. While it is important to be able to mediate ideas, the student must also think up ideas for himself as any student can testify who has taken an examination in the School of Business.
I could go on to cite other glaring instances of abuse of the truth in past issues of the Kansan. However, I realize reporters like instructors are human and can be expected to make some mistakes. I am sure that many of these mistakes are due to the pressures of daily publication. Perhaps the
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
quality of the Kansan and its service would be improved by abandoning daily publication in favor of publication only once or twice weekly. On the other hand, at least some of the mistakes are due to the laziness of the reporters.
For example, the Kansan recently ran an article describing the use of management games at several schools of business. A simple phone call to the KU School of Business would have revealed that use of management games for classroom purposes in undergraduate schools of business was first pioneered here at KU's School of Business.
Regardless of whether mistakes are due to the pressures of publication or laziness of reporters, I believe the editors of the Kansan should take action to ensure that reporters check their sources more carefully and completely before publishing their stories. Otherwise, I for one, will continue to believe that if it's in the Kansan, it's likely to be inaccurate.
QUICK- SOMEBODY TEAR UP SOME CLEAN SHEETS AND RUN FETCH US PLENTY OF BOILING WATER! "
Donald Grunewald Instructor in Business Administration
--still Kane Business Manager Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager; Martha Crosier, Promotion Manager; Ruth Bieder, National Advertising Manager; Tom Schmitz, Circulation Manager; John Massa, Classified Advertising Manager.
Closing Hours
Late closing hours ought to take into account the length of time involved in transportation from Kansas City, and 1 a.m. seems clearly inadequate in this respect. Where else can the student find cultural or social entertainment off the campus? Are we going to adopt the Oriental attitude that these are only for men?
I am, of course, delighted to see that the Associated Women Students is at last recommending some long overdue rationalization of closing hours.
Could I suggest three other changes which would help to make sense of them? First, the complete emancipation of all senior women living off the campus from closing hours, on the grounds that if three years of college life have failed to make them mature, the sooner they get into trouble and find out what it is all about, the better.
Second, the abolition of the ridiculous rule of having to state one's destination. This is wholly ineffective unless the University is going to adopt a policy aimed at preventing women from changing their minds! Besides, who is going to write down "House of ill fame"?
Third, why not simplify the closing hours by having only one early and one late closing time—say 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. with the privilege of deciding which two days in the week to check in late. This would be extremely easy to administer and would free University social life from the awful Friday-Saturday log jam.
Denis Kennedy
Lawrence graduate student
By Calder M. Pickett
Associate Professor of Journalism
THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN, by Mark Twain. Signet Classics, 50 cents.
PUDD'NHEAD WILSON, by Mark Twain. Bantam Classics, 35 cents.
The Mississippi River still flows past the boyhood town of Sam Clemens, but it flows as well through the minds and imaginations of millions of Americans. By now it is a platitude to call "Huckleberry Finn" the great American novel (there are many defenders of "Moby Dick," of course), but it is as the great American novel that the story of Huck and Jim merits examination.
The paperback Signet edition of "Huckleberry Finn" is being published just as one more Hollywood producer tackles this heretofore elusive (for movie purposes) novel. Many of us couldn't care less about what Hollywood does with some novels. But perhaps a measure of the greatness of "Huck" and "Moby Dick" is that we want to look over the shoulder of the director, to guide him, to see that what emerges is not as bad as the 1939 film that Time magazine reviewed in these words: "Mickey Rooney vs. Mark Twain."
Ending Changed
The producer, Samuel Goldwyn Jr., has indicated that he is changing the ending. Purists might scream; I welcome the idea, if Goldwyn knows why he is changing the ending. He is taking Tom Sawyer out of the proceedings, he says. This is all to the good, if Goldwyn recognizes that the presence of Tom Sawyer is what is wrong with the ending of "Huckleberry Finn"—an ending that is one of the continuing controversies in American literature.
For some three-fourths of the way, "Huckleberry Finn" is a human tale in the then emerging realistic tradition, the story of a boy and a man on the river, of their search for freedom, the one for freedom from slavery, the other for freedom from the constraints of society. Each experience ashore points up the fact that the river alone represents freedom for Huck and Jim—even though the river is ironically flowing south.
Then the magical story of the voyage on the raft ends, and the comic opera of Tom and Huck trying to free the captured Negro slave Jim (Tom all the time knowing that Jim already was free) takes place. Here is the storybook romanticism of Tom Sawyer vying with the common-sense realism of Huck Finn—"Confound it, it's foolish, Tom," is Huck's reaction to the scheme. This is the episode in which "Huckleberry Finn" falls apart, and reads no better than the conventional Sunday School literature of the period.
Lumping "Pudd'nhead Wilson" in with a discussion of "Huck Finn" almost seems literary sacrilege. But in its small way this story of another man of good will and great good sense is a landmark in American literature.
The book was written in 1894, yet it has insight into antebellum southern society that is not typical of books of the period. Mark Twain sees clearly the absurd conventions of certain aspects of the South—the notion, for example, that a person of but 1/32 Negro blood was as much a Negro as a full-blooded Negro.
With Understanding
He also writes with much understanding of the small town and its narrowness. Into Dawson's landing in the years before the Civil War comes, first, the lawyer, David Wilson. He establishes himself as "Pudd'nhead" after commenting, on hearing a barking dog, that he wished he owned half of that dog. "Why?" somebody asked. "Because I would kill my half." That is too much for the town. So is his fooling-around with the science of finger-printering, though it is his knowledge of finger-printering that aids in solving the mystery that makes up most of the story of "Pudd'nhead Wilson."
Also arriving in Dawson's landing are the Italian twins who are greeted by the provincial little community as members of the highest royalty. Mark Twain here gets in his digs at both social aspirations of the lowly and social pretensions of the high and mighty—common themes in Mark Twain. But is it "Pudd'nhead Wilson" himself who always dominates the stage, with his wisdom that is so much like that of the boy "Huck," floating down the river to freedom.
UNIVERSITAT Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone VIking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Eastern 2711, library
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., New York N.Y. News service: United 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 examination periods. Entered as second-class matter Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Jack Harrison ... Managing Editor
Carol Allen, Dick Crocker, Jack Morton and Doug Yocom, Assistant
Managing Editors; Rael Amos, City Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolyn Frailey, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George DeBord and John Hasar ... Co-Editorial Editors
Saundra Hayn, Associate Editorial Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT