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University Daily Kansan
Monday, Dec. 12, 1960
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A False God
The witch hunt is over, and the accused has been duly burned at the stake. As the ashes grow cold, it seems a proper time to examine the circumstances that made this trial, so reminiscent of the Salem hysteria, such an infamous example of what is unjust and degrading about inter-collegiate athletics.
ATHLETICS GROWS NATURALLY out of university life, and should in no way be separated from academic discipline. The bookworm who is so enthralled with the life of the mind that he loses touch with the combative, competitive world outside the library walls is to be pitied just as much as the stereotyped athlete who has played out his precious years of eligibility on a diet of academic courses geared to the seventh grade. Both leave the university poorer than when they entered.
We have no quarrel with the high purposes of intercollegiate athletics. The mind and the body work best when each is highly attuned to the other. With this in mind, American universities have tried to educate the whole man.
If athletics in general is a natural corollary of university life, then intercollegiate athletics is an extension of the fierce competitive spirit and will to excel that characterizes our entire society. In a way, it is a formal play depicting the combat that marks a dynamic and progressive philosophy of life.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
It is true that many who profess to like athletics, particularly football, are simply blood relatives of the Romans who cheered lustily at gladiatorial combats which could only end in death or disgrace. But we think these are a minority. The satisfaction of watching physical grace in action, the elation of fighting for a cause, even if it is only from an end zone seat, and the joy of vicariously taking part in a contest in which the rules are weighted so as to favor neither side are more prevalent motives.
NOR CAN WE EXPECT that those who give up so much of their time and energy for our benefit should do so for no consideration. Athletic scholarships are necessary and fair awards. They too are natural outgrowths of the competitive system of intercollegiate athletics.
But there exists a great gulf between the ideals of intercollegiate athletics and the practical administration of them. Somewhere, there has been slippage. In many schools, winning is all that really matters, and the outraged howls of bloodthirsty alumni and students have driven many a high-minded coach from his job. The
drive to win has led to a decay in the moral structure housing college athletic programs. Football scholarships multiply like rabbits, pedagogy strains itself to the limit in the creation of new courses for the athlete who has no business being in school in the first place, coaches use every legal and extra-legal-inducement they can find to snare a promising prospect while the administration looks the other way. This has led to the stereotype of the football player as a hulking, brainless pinhead incapable of tying his own shoes, and has made football a target for suspicion and smirking cynicism.
KU is fortunate that this distortion of values has not been able to penetrate its athletic program. Everybody likes to win, but there is no evidence that the University has gone overboard as so many other schools have gone overboard.
There are no plush-lined living quarters for athletes here, no watering down of academic standards.
But the idea that victory supersedes all else in importance has touched the University, and damaged it.
WE WERE JUDGED and found guilty by a body of our peers who must have known that their action was unjust and ridiculous. They ask us to believe that Bert Coan was lying in his teeth about his trip to Chicago, that Jack Mitchell was lying, that the Senate Committee was wielding the whitewash brush. They had no real evidence to counter the statements made by these men. In convicting KU, they sold out to the baser elements in the conference who wanted to win more than they wanted to be just and impartial.
When a University with no apologies to make for its athletic program is faced with such a monstrously unjust perversion of fair play, what should it do? Write off the whole thing, keep the stiff upper lip, and play the man? Not if it values justice. Turn surly, try the eye-for-aneeye philosophy, and join the wolf pack? Not if it hopes to maintain high standards.
It must point to the cause of the injustice done to it, and be vocal in condemning this injustice. It must ridicule regulations so obviously geared to skirt the real problems of honesty in athletics that these regulations may soon specify special penalties for recruiting left-handed tackles from Minnesota. Above all, it must try to make all who will listen know that victory for victory's sake is a false god, and that intercollegiate athletics will never achieve its high promise until the men who run it understand this.
Bill Blundell
Editor:
A Rose Is a Rose
It seems to Miss Carol Heller that representational art is not as high an art form as abstract art. Using as her guide the classic phrase "art imitates nature," she rushes to defend abstract art from those who scorn it. As one who cares little for abstract art, I wish to make a few comments.
First, a canvas "full of blue geometric patterns" with a title such as "Vase of Roses" probably expresses the artist's reaction to
what he observed, not the scene itself. Abstract art usually represents emotions, not objects from nature. It appears that Miss Heller would take an abstraction titled "Vase of Roses" to be a representation of a vase of roses. However, many times an abstract painting is given a title which is merely a whim of the artist. On the other hand, lack of imagination, or basic honesty, or both, often leads to titles such as "Composition No. 7." The point is this: abstract art and representational art are not as a rule concerned
with the same type of subject matter. One is subjective and one is objective. Therefore it is pointless to compare the two on that basis, as Miss Heller has done.
Dailu Transan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
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$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon
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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
Managing Editor
She has addressed her scholarly article to the art students of KU. Can this mean that she has sympathy for the abstractions produced by our budding Picassos? For those who don't know, these atrocities can be seen regularly in the gallery of Murphy Hall. Brief study of these student masterpieces brings one to the conclusion that it is the "artists" who deserve our sympathy. These vile concoctions demonstrate clearly that one must learn to crawl before he can walk. Seldom is a canvas hung there which gives any hint that the person responsible for it has any shred of talent. Perhaps Miss Heller had KU student work in mind when she wrote that "not all abstract art is good."
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill Blundell ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
Concerning the remark of museum visitors about the possibility of monkeys producing abstractions, I remind our eminent female journalist that chimpanzees have been induced to "paint" such things, and that these priceless treasures have been exhibited and even purchased by culture-loving dupes. I'll bet some of them are hanging in Murphy Hall right now.
Bill Charles
Bill Charles Oak Park, Ill., senior
"LOOK-IF I KNEW ALL THE RIGHT ANSWERS I WOULDN'T BE TEACHING!"
From the Magazine Rack
Political Social Science
- The Wiggins-Schoeck survey reported that sixty-four per cent of those interviewed had some form of health insurance. This is in sharp contrast with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare's official figure of forty-two per cent.
- At the height of the debate on old-age medical assistance legislation in the post-convention session of the last Congress, the American Medical Association released what purported to be an independent national survey by university sociologists. The survey concluded that "nine out of every ten older persons report no unfilled medical needs;" that lack of money was not an important factor among those who did need more care; and that the vast majority of those over sixty-five preferred to finance their own medical care "without government intervention." The report not only made headlines, but undoubtedly helped scuttle the Forandtype medical-aid proposals then before Congress in favor of a weak and cumbersome system of federal-state matching funds that, in effect, throws the burden back on the states, which can least afford to carry it.
- Deliberately excluded from the interviews were: anyone receiving old-age assistance; non-white;s and persons in hospitals, homes for the aged, nursing homes, and other institutions. Senator McCarthy estimated those excluded represented at least forty per cent of persons over sixty-five, most of them the neediest of all.
- The survey found thirty-four per cent of those over sixty-five in the active labor force, whereas the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports only twenty per cent.
- BUT THE "independent" survey which so delighted the AMA has now been exposed as a calculated fraud. The study was made under the direction of sociology Professors James W. Wiggins and Helmut Schoeck of Emory University, in Atlanta. Sixteen sociologists around the country did the interviewing and provided the raw material for the survey. But when the survey was published, nine of the sixteen protested the conclusions and disassociated themselves from the results, using such strong language as "appalled," "amazed," "political propaganda," and "unscientific."
- Professor Edith Sherman of the University of Denver, one of the interviewers who was "profoundly shocked" at the conclusions of the survey, said her instructions were to interview only sixteen per cent of the lower-income oldsters as against thirty-two per cent in the upper-income bracket. Professor Constantine Yeracaris of the University of Buffalo was asked for only nine per cent in the lower income group.
- EUGENE McCARTHY of Minnesota, who is a sociologist as well as a Senator, analyzed the survey in a scalding speech on the floor of the Senate which was buried, for the most part, in the fine print of the Congressional Record. Among the distortions, inaccuracies, and deceits of the AMA-approved survey exposed by Senator McCarthy are these:
- Most persons interviewed in the survey reported a net worth of more than $10,000—an obvious indication of the grossly-loaded nature of the sample.
Not only was the AMA-lauded survey rigged to cover an unrepresentative higher-income sampling, but many sociologists—including Senator McCarthy—attacked as "naive" the survey's technique of attempting to determine a person's state of health merely by asking him how he felt.
(Excerpted from "The AMA Backs a Fraud" in the November 1960 Progressive.)
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