UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editors.
JANUARY 19.1979
Dump handouts policy
But that may not last for long.
The policy is scheduled to be reviewed by members of the University Events Committee, which developed the guidelines. Del Shankel, executive vice chancellor, has said he expects the policy to be changed to allow literature distribution inside campus buildings, which has been the prime point of contention about the policy. Yet, he still supports some guidelines for literature distribution.
"THERE DO need to be some guidelines for the distribution of literature," Shankel said. "I think students in residence halls don't want people to come into their rooms and hand out material. I think the faculty would resent people walking into their classes and disrupting them by passing out literature."
This, of course, is true. Classes should not be disrupted. Students
should not have to answer a knock at their door and receive a pamphlet promoting political opinions or personal crusades.
"We have supported the rights of controversial speakers on campus and we have also repeatedly supported the rights of controversial material," Shankel said.
OF COURSE, it is assumed the administration would not overtly attempt to suppress controversial ideas. It says it would not.
But disruptive behavior by individuals can be handled by existing regulations. The administration simply is overreacting to a situation that easily can be controlled without impairing the open distribution of literature.
But the actions of the administration in the Jonathon Kozol incident last semester and in several other recent incidents do not bear those words out.
On a campus already burdened by a multitude of regulations, further guidelines concerning literature are not needed. The Events Committee would be taking a step in the right direction by abandoning the literature distribution policy.
Students substitute God for intellectual curiosity
BY SHARON NIEDERMAN N.Y. Times Feature
DENVER, Colo.—I am finishing one of those semesters which makes me think I should leave teaching. I know at least 783 people would line up for my job teaching economics, administration, urban college. As I have no particular inclination to go into either ‘sales’ or ‘the business world,’ my prospects would indeed be limited. So just imagine how emotionally worn-out and toxic I must be to even think of putting.
Clearly, taxpayers and politicians agree that education is no longer a priority. It is frightening and heartbreaking to realize what is now top priority with many college students.
Only someone on the front lines in the classroom everyday knows for certain that a girl is on her way to school it is dead. It died just one short generation after my own, along with curiosity, spirit of inquiry and imagination, all the values of education, all the love and tried to cultivate in my own life.
YOU THOUGHT IT was jobs and economic security? Guess again--it's the
With the job picture grown so dark, students are now applying to that great employment agent in the sky, in hopes that they can get hired. Students tell me she cannot accept Darwin's theory of evolution because the Bible says we were created in six days, then I ask: How can I, an ordinary, questioning, understated state employee, compete with the Lord?
Lest anyone misunderstand, I am not objecting to faith or religious practice. What shocks me is that students use their backpacks when they need to see information presented in absolutes. I have not had the experience of being "born again," so I cannot share what President Carter knows, or what Craig Nelson knows, about the hardback in the land of Bronconiaism, knows.
IN THEIR PUBLIC praise of the Lord, both the president and the quarterback neglect to attribute their own efforts toward their success—the years of perseverance, study, and questioning, which enabled them to become instrument of the Lord.
My 28-year old student has been born again, and since that day nine months ago, she has been off heroin and high on Jesus. She tells me that once you've found the Lord, you need look no further. Maybe that's the answer. D on the midnight–thenook looked like
When she came to my office to complain that the course wasn't what she expected—she wanted "a class where we all sit in nets and walk take objective notes," not this seminar where she's expected to ask and answer questions — I suggested that perhaps she could give her students a challenge. "No," she replied, "it's only taught me to painter harder."
LISTENING TO HER speak, I sense that the divinity and the accompanying rhetoric all came to her in a flash; suddenly her daily actions acquired meaning. We'd all like to have a clearer focus on the purpose of life, and I thought one of the purposes of her work was to receive the long and short views, the details on the landscape, the perennial visions.
As this young woman's teacher, I want badly to ask her the questions that would compel her to think—but she already has all the answers; she is so fragile that I am afraid to disturb her balance andjar the terrific anger she is clutching so tightly.
A FELLOW INSTRUCTOR, who earlier this semester had his life threatened by a student, grimly confided over coffee one morning: "You've got to either be totally impersonal with these students or go crazy!"
It's all so simple, really. Acquire the Lord and live in a state of grace. What need is there to trouble with inquiry and scholarship? Say, "I believe, therefore it is true," and deny all hope of the intellect, gain absolute certainty. Life becomes easier when you know at least God loves you, that he loves you more than any other need you all need do is call on Him and He will, in His infinite wisdom, provide the answers on the final exam.
If I've got to turn off my caring impulses in order to collect my paycheck, somebody else should have my job; either somebody who is capable of doing that, or somebody who can keep up with the students who ask. "Why read books?" That learning doesn't go with you when you die."
Sharon Niederman's first play, "Family Jewels," was produced in Denver in 1977.
Once again the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in support of perhaps the most controversial issue it has had to decide: abortion.
Anti-abortionists must promote views
In a 6-3 decision, the high court last week struck down a Pennsylvania law that held a physician liable for prosecution for aborting women who have been able to survive outside the womb.
In its ruling, the court said that the term "may" was too vague and that the statute itself "conditions potential criminal liability under a law which requires major opinion, written by Justice Harry A. Blackmun, on went to say that the law presented "serious problems of notice, discriminatory application and chilling action" on the exercise of constitutional rights."
The Pennyvian law was first enacted in 1974, one year after the court's controversial decision that prohibited the government from interfering with a woman's choice to get pregnant or during the second trimester of pregnancy or during the second trimester if her health is in serious danger. The
Phillip Garcia
January 1973 ruling also stated that state legislatures could enact laws to protect a fetus once it is able to survive outside the woman's womb with or without artificial aid, which was the basis for the Penneviania law.
THE COURT, in exercising its duty within the judicial process, ruled against a statute it considered unfair to physicians, and one that did not respect to physician's constitutional rights.
However, the court has conversely ruled unjustly against the rights of the unborn child and once again has interfered with the most basic process: life.
With this most recent decision, the court has increased its stature as the authority on criminal prosecutions.
It is up to the churches, anti-abortion groups and individuals to replace the court. Unfortunately, the court has been providing more than the moral and ethical community.
The court's responsibility is to deal with civil and criminal laws and to rule on violations that people commit against each of these areas, not to rule on moral issues.
NINE MEN cannot determine at what
mature life may be terminated
during premature death.
But if the court has no responsibility to rule on the abortion issue, why did it have to rule in the first place? Obviously, the issue was brought before the court because enough people believe that abortion is a solution for getting rid of an unwanted child. More and more people began to challenge the existing anti-abortion laws.
The anti-abortionists have failed to promote their ideas to the extent that few people think as they do. Those who do not believe in abortion can be forced to speak out against this injustice. Anti-
abortionists must increase their efforts for the rights of the unborn child, they must begin to provide more direction then they have.
THEY MUST further promote the idea that abortion as a solution for keeping a child out of poverty and dismal environment, due to a maldistribution of goods and services, communities, is false. The problem is not a child born but the environment he is provided.
They must further promote the idea that abortion is not a responsibility, but many
They must further promote the idea that although a woman has her choice to abort, she cannot claim it her right when another life is killed.
They must promote the idea that the goal is not to condemn the pro-abortion, but to support it.
They must work to discard the notion that eliminating life is not a solution to insure the health of humans.
That is the challenge that anti- abortionists face.
MARINUDX
Rape laws leave wives defenseless
An Oregon rape trial which drew the nation's attention recently is thought to be the first time a wife charged her husband with rape.
Greta Rideta, 23, charged her 21-year-old husband, John, with first degree rape, a crime with a maximum penalty of 20 years in jail and a $2,000 fine.
As a result, a 1977 amendment to the Oregon rape law, which removed marriage as a defense in a rape case, received its first test in the Rideout case.
At issue was the question of whether a husband could be charged with rape after exposure to blood.
Although Ridout was found innocent, the principle still stuck. A man charged with rape should be prosecuted by the law, re-enslaving him and marrying to the woman with whom he had sex.
RAPE is a violent act of aggression that invades an individual's human right of
choice. The law should punish anyone found guilty of that act.
But, in most states, it does not
Oregon and a few other states are the only ones with laws denying marriage as a defense in rape cases. Since the decision, Oregon legislators have been closely examining the issue and are working on a bill that would provide a lesser charge in the homicide defense case, but would have a more specific definition of rape in that situation.
The Rideout decision could deter the success of similar cases in the future, but the
New Times magazine in its closing issue called this decade the "decadent age," and the decade has often been billed as the first century of what is probably most astute observers of recent American society, has suitably called these eight years the "me decade."
Indeed, after the first four years—which might better be described as the spasms of the explosive '60s than the beginning of the '70s—there have been few events that could explain the '70s. And to me, and to most of the events is the best definition of the '70s.
But there is something wrong with a society that feels that only by improving one's own condition will the world revolve smoothly. There is much validity in the
The beginning of a New Year has prompted me not only to look optimistically forward to the remainder of the year but I also want to make sure that we made up the 1970s. But in looking back, not only am I uncertain about exactly what the 70s have meant to me and the world I live in, but also I am dismayed that when 1979 was over, I will still be left with this same uncertainty.
Not that something is wrong with the citizens of a society who work to improve themselves. Indeed, the current American love affair with jogging is one of the most encouraging trends to emerge recently in this food-crazed country.
Self-interest eclipses activism in '70s
BOOKS SUCH AS "Looking Out for Number One," which she saired to the number two best-seller spot for 1977, and others devoted to self-improvement—with an eye on using it to get ahead—have been selling at all-time highs.
Mary
Ernst
However, there still are thousands of Americans, and countless others throughout the world, who live below the poverty level. We need to stop them from finding who find it nearly impossible to live on limited incomes. There is still wide-spread racial and ethnic discrimination. And there is an alarming percentage of American children who end up in a job because they are functionally illiterate.
psychological argument that it is impossible for a person to help and be happy with others until they have helped themselves and are happy with the end result.
There may not be an active American involvement in the Vietnam War. There may not be the mass violations of black America. There may not be a presidential crisis.
BUT WHERE IS it written—other than in "Running and Being"—that a brisk fivejole jog is the only way people can find the fulfillment that readies them to help others.
Incredibly, on Jan. 9, two weeks after the emotional trial in which husband and wife did not speak to each other, the Rideouts announced their reconciliation.
THERE USED TO be a time when Americans found it self-rewarding to paint the peeled steps of a house that had not seen paint for years because of a lack of funds. Because of that they felt it self-rewarding to take an elderly woman to the store for her groceries.
And there used to be a time when Americans found it not only self-rewarding, but vital, to maintain an active voice in a government that was founded on the principle of the active—if not direct—participation of its citizens.
THEY ALSO announced that a divorce petition, filed the day after Rideout allegedly raped his wife, would be withdrawn.
Regardless of what one thinks about Christianity or faith in any god, communication in a relationship, be it marriage or friendship, is essential. The Rideouts seem to have redeveloped the communication that had been missing from their relationship and their prospects for a future together are encouraging.
In a decade that finds itself without causes, it has become convenient—even vogue—to turn all attention toward one's self and away from that obligation.
Yes, the 'me decade' label seems to best explain a decade that has left little else to happen.
What brought the two back together?
"I am a born-again Christian and John has always been a Christian," she said. "We had no outside source to take our problems to before the trial and they just stayed bottled up. We didn't have any communication before the trial. Now we do. We're trying to work it out together because being apart would be harder for both of us."
two principal witnesses may have reduced its importance by their own actions.
In a television interview Jan. 15, both said the emotional intensity of the trial and a new sense of religion, which surfaced as a result of the trial, brought them together.
We can only hope that as the 1970s wane with this final year, the 'me decade' will end.
A collapse of communication led them in the courtroom in the first place, then after the trial a secret meeting rekindled their commitment to each other.
The two met at Mrs. Rideout's request, to discuss their divorce.
But, when communication breaks down in a marriage and the husband demands his "rights to property," the woman's rights are ignored under most state's laws.
THE TWO agreed to a reconciliation with the stipulation they would always talk with each other when problems arose, Greta Rideout said.
Rideout said, "We realized we couldn't meet in public because everyone in Salem knew who we were, so we just drove around for a few hours and talked about everything under the sun. I realized I couldn't live outside and asked if we could not work things out."
it is time for a change in states that do not penalize for rape in marriage.
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