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University Daily Kansas Thursday, November 5.1959
Wake Up, Kansans!
Lest we forget, there are a few facts regarding KU enrollment which should be repeated at this time.
For that matter, they should be repeated a number of times during the coming months to Kansas legislators, politicians, students and citizens of all ages.
It is a matter of only a few years before the avalanche of grown-up war babies will be knocking at the doors of institutions of higher education throughout the nation. Beginning in 1949, the number of births per year began to increase rapidly and, in shortly over a decade, had nearly doubled.
With this horde of young Kansans trooping from the high schools to colleges and universities, KU enrollment could double in the next eight or nine years.
Can we wait until our classrooms and dormitories are bulging at the seams before we start building additional facilities?
The governor and a few other politicians seem to think so. Gov. George Docking's principle of spending money has been: "If you don't need it right away, don't do it." If the governor would take a look at current increases in high school enrollments, he would have to admit that we need more educational facilities "right away."
But the governor has won the praise and votes of Kansas citizens through his tight-fisted money policies. He can't afford to face the fact that a crisis in education is imminent. Politicians have a habit of looking no further ahead than the next election.
In a survey completed a year ago by Dean Kenneth Anderson of the School of Education, a KU enrollment of nearly 17,000 was predicted for 1968. This figure is a drastic revision upwards from a 1956 prediction of 12,000 students in 1970.
There are other enrollment-increasing factors besides the rapid rise in the number of students graduating from our high schools. Each year a higher percentage of high school graduates goes on to college, undergraduates are staying in school longer, and graduate school enrollments are rising rapidly.
KU has an enrollment of 8,711 in Lawrence this year, with 726 additional students at the Medical Center in Kansas City. The total enrollment is up 200 over last year. An increase of 800 students a year is predicted for the next nine years.
Time is running out. We must prepare now for the coming increase in enrollment.
State budget hearings will be held in Topeka during the next month. KU officials will have an opportunity to plead their case for a little extra money to keep the University running.
In February the Legislature will meet. If the legislators believe a crisis in education is at hand, they can initiate a crash building program to prepare for it. Or they may choose to wait a few years before appraising the college enrollment problem.
Numerous facts indicate that the time has come to act. Kansas citizens and their representatives in the Legislature must respond.
The Cheating Game
—Jack Harrison
Twenty-one campus organizations at Creighton University have signed a proclamation against cheating.
The proclamation stated that a limited minority of students have been using dishonest means in examinations and that these tactics have given the minority an unfair advantage over honest students.
Other points affirmed were that cheating invalidates the results of examinations and takes away due credit from those who do not cheat.
These are oft-repeated arguments against cheating, but the authors have done an excellent job of grouping them together to present a firm stand.
Each signer has resolved to do his or her part to abolish the practice. This is commendable. However, the proclamation does not say how this is to be done. Apparently, the authors trust to faith in their fellow man.
The emphasis was put on the harm dishonesty does to others. We can't see that this will be effective.
Those who cheat will not quit the practice
until they realize the injury it inflicts upon themselves.
It is difficult for a student to understand how copying or cribbing could be harmful if it goes undetected. A need has been fulfilled—a test has been passed.
This person, in his pragmatic way, concerns himself with immediate ends. This is why he fails to see that he has slighted his education.
Knowledge that should have been his has been slipped into a wastebasket. The sense of accomplishment that goes with a job well done has been sold for a passing grade. Integrity has been sacrificed.
Resolutions are satisfying to the people who make them. But they are not effective for inspiring reform in others.
Orientation is needed rather than resolutions. Students need to be shown that the best way to help themselves is by being honest. After graduation, a person can't get by on crib notes—regardless of his grade average.
The opportune time for colleges to get this point across to students is in their first year.
—George DeBord
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"BY GEORGE, ITS THOSE ARMY BOYS AGAIN — WE MUST BE GETTING AROUND TO FINALS"
Dailu Hansan
Founded 1888, became biseweek 1904,
tridayweek 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
University of Kansas student newspaper
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., New York, N.Y. Represents national. Mall 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 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 Managers Editors: Rael Amos, City Editor; Jim Trotter, Sports Editor;
Carolyn Frailey, Society Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
George DeBord and
Johan Husar
Sandra Hayn, Associate Editorial Ed-
dition
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Kane ... Business Manager
Ted Tidwell, Advertising Manager;
Joanne Novak, Promotion Manager;
Robin Cunningham, Advertising Manager;
Tom Schmitz, Circulation Manager;
John Massa, Classified Advertising Manager.
By Calder M. Pickett Associate Professor of Journalism
To understand why a film like D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" is a landmark in the history of the motion picture, one needs only survey the area of the motion picture in the second decade of this century. Then he can see the scope of the revolution wrought by the adventurous Griffith.
"INTOLERANCE" was a boxoffice failure. The public apparently was not ready for a spectacle picture that had a social comment to make. But the film has survived, and though it did little financially for Griffith it did much historically for the movies. It is the second offering in the series, "History of the Film," which is sponsored by Student Union Activities and a student-faculty committee. It will be shown at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday in the lecture room of the Museum of Art.
Arthur Knight, one of the more astute film critics, calls Griffith "the father of film technique." Griffith began his career in the movies in 1907, the year in which he performed, for $5 a day. in "Rescued from an Eagle's Nest," a short film made by Edwin S. Porter, famous for "The Great Train Robbery."
BETWEEN 1908 and 1912 Griffith began to make his unique contribution to the art of the film, taking the raw medium that was being critically scorned and shaping from it a form that would endure and grow and eventually achieve true distinction. Griffith ventured far beyond the rudi
ventured far beyond the rudimentary use of the camera that students saw in the initial offerings of this new film series at KU—films whose very titles reveal their primitiveness: "Washday Troubles," "Rescued by Rover" and, of course, "The Great Train Robbery."
Historians of the motion picture credit Griffith with inventing the close-up, cutting camera angles, and the last-minute rescue. He either invented these or refined them. And he meanwhile was producing pictures in assembly-line precision—more than two films each week.
To the filmgoer whose greatest adventures at the movies had been "The Squaw Man" or Jack London's "The Valley of the Moon," the Griffith pictures must have been films of unusual excitement. Griffith rebelled against the one-reel dogma of film producers and produced a two-reeler based on Tennyson's "Enoch Arden." He followed this with a four-reel spectacle, "Judith of Bethulia," in 1913, a film so long that the Biograph studio, employer of Griffith, shelved the film. Released in 1914, it was an immense success, even though its spectacle value had been undercut by an Italian production of "Quo Vadis?"
But "Judith" employed the Griffith trademarks—the closeup, vast crowds and huge sets. These elements of film production gained true stature in 1915. That was the year in which "The Birth of a Nation" appeared.
It is almost platitudinous in 1959 to write of the greatness of "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance." These pictures are as basic to American film history as "The Scarlet Letter" and "Huckleberry Finn" are to American literature. Great controversy surrounded these films, with political and church leaders condemning "The Birth of a Nation" for its frank glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
BUT THE PICTURE was pure motion picture, despite its lurid base (a cheap novel by Thomas Dixon called "The Clansman") and its incitement of anti-Negro prejudice. Those who have seen the picture in any of its numerous reappearances will recall the excitement of the climax, as the Klansmen, like the cavalry in a Western film, ride to rescue the heroine; the thrill of vast spectacle scenes, such as the burning of Atlanta and the march of Sherman to the sea; the gay young southerners dancing on the eve of war; battle scenes almost as sweeping as those in CinemaScope films of today.
"Intolerance," as has been suggested, was technically years ahead of its time. Here the embattled director, under criticism of being a bigot, may have been attempting to justify himself and wipe out the criticism. "Intolerance" used four interwoven themes, linked by Walt Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," to tell the story of intolerance through the ages. And the picture contained a documentary strike sequence which almost could have been at home in the militant proletarian dramas on Broadway in the 1930s.
IT ALSO EMPLOYED human values as brilliantly as Griffith had employed them in "The Birth of a Nation," particularly in a now-famous courtroom scene in which Griffith's star, Mae Marsh, nervously twisted her fingers together as she awaited the judge's sentencing of her husband. This ability to portray the individual and his joys and torments was Griffith's true mark of greatness, even more than the technical innovations or the exciting camera images that foreshadowed the thousands of spectacle films due to come from Hollywood studios in the next 45 years.