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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Dec. 7, 1960
A Tense Wait
KU alumni and fans are not saying much nor making any predictions; they'll just be holding their breath tomorrow and Friday.
THESE ARE the days set aside for the Big Eight faculty representatives meeting in Kansas City. Executive Secretary, Reaves Peters, after a week of hemming and hawing, finally revealed that the eligibility of KU football star Bert Coan will be questioned.
If the TCU transfer is declared ineligible the following may result.
Will the league accept the findings of the NCAA or make its own clear-cut decision?
KU will have to forfeit the league games in which Coan played, and he will be ineligible for further competition at this school. KU would wind up with a 1-6 league record instead of its splendid 6-0-1 mark. The only league game KU would win legitimately is the Nebraska game, which Coan missed because of an injury.
Some officials said KU would have to forfeit only the Colorado and Missouri games but this would still mean the loss of the title. These were the two conference games Coan participated in after the NCAA placed KU on probation.
KU officials checked the league rules and declared Coan eligible. Laurence C. Woodruff, dean of students, is the KU faculty representative.
The zealous athletic director from Missouri University seems to be the man who is pushing the case. The lily-white Mr. Faurot even went so far as to telephone all Big Eight schools before the KU-MU game in an attempt to get a vote and declare Coan ineligible for that particular game. Supposedly the vote was 6-1 (the one vote being his own.)
It appears that the question of Coan's eligibility has arisen because of a league rule against off-campus entertainment for athletes. The alleged trip to the All-Star football game in Chicago with Houston oilman Bud Adams is part of the reason why KU is on probation by the NCAA. However, Coan was not declared ineligible by the NCAA.
AS OF YET, no one knows whether Adams was recruiting as a representative of KU. He has denied that he was, but KU's enemies in the Big Eight have fastened on the entertainment rule and are using it to try to punish KU.
Whatever the outcome, let's hope the Big Eight gives us a fair trial and acts independently of the NCAA.
Apparently it takes a 6-2 majority to pass a declaration of ineligibility. If we can find two firm allies, we might be able to block the next effort to rob KU of its Big Eight title.
Susanne Shaw
Nineteen Years Ago Today
Nineteen years ago today at 8 in the morning America was struck by a cataclysmic incident that shattered the illusion of "peace in our time."
Hurtling gray planes with blazing red suns on their bodies and wings swept in from the Pacific and unleashed their terrible fury that immersed Americans in the holocaust of World War II.
Pearl Harbor, December 7, 1941 — the day of infamy.
Meanwhile in California, scores of young men were entering churches with loved ones they would soon leave forever.
Meanwhile in Washington D.C., in two different parts of the city, the Franklin D. Roosevelt family and envoys from Japan were just
being seated for their Sunday meal.
Meanwhile in Pearl Harbor, devastation and horror roared in with each wave of Japanese planes.
The sleeping giant who had just begun to rise from his bed of Depression had been mercilessly humbled by the sneak attack.
Three years, eight months and 25 days later the defeated invaders with paper and pen ended what had begun with terror and surprise.
— Frank Morgan and John Peterson.
Counterattack on Athletics
Editor:
Whoops! I guess some athletes can read after all. But I hope Mr. Gardner reads more than just his letter to the UDK (Friday, Dec. 2, page 2). For on the page facing his furious outburst against my criticism of the values underlying his athletic scholarship is the conclusion of the article "Intercollegiate Athletics" in "From the Magazine Rack" (Friday, Dec. 2, page 3); in the preceding issue (Thursday, Dec. 1, page 2) is the first part of this article. At the risk of re-insulting Mr. Gardner, I shall quote often from both parts of this article.
...Letters ...
But first I would like to ask Mr.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"HE'S TH'MOST EVEN TEMPERED MEMBER OF TH' WHOLE FACULTY - HE'S IN A BAD MOOD."
Gardner where he got his information that "last year 90,000 dollars was awarded in scholarship hall awards alone." I—a former resident of a scholarship hall—would like to know exactly where this money has gone. You see, Mr. Gardner, dollars are not awarded to holders of scholarship hall awards; but it is estimated that one will save approximately $250 a year by living in a scholarship hall. I have met several capable students—who have done work far exceeding the "minimum academic standard" set for athletes—who have had great difficulty in remaining in school because of financial difficulties. Compare this with what happened at one college: "(W)e have seven new cars assigned to the athletic department . . . We have spaces for 92 student-athletes . . . and the entire building is air-conditioned and we have wall-to-wall carpeting." The situation in the scholarship halls is unlike this.
"In the state universities, now the chief supporters of inflated athletic programs, the intellectual life is the concern of a small group at best." This, as I indicated previously, has been the case at the University of Kansas—which is certainly not among the worst offenders. "The subordination of sports to intellect . . . would do much to restore sanity to college athletics."
I think I have sufficiently stated my case. If anyone wants to look further into the matter, he should begin by reading the above mentioned article. I shall conclude as I concluded before: When valuable class time is taken for pep rallies and football convocations, then our values need careful re-examination.
John L. Hodge Kansas City senior
Daily Hansan
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT John Peterson and Bill Blundell Co-Editorial Editors
From the Magazine Rack
American Slavery
"Why was American slavery the most awful the world has ever known? The slave was totally removed from the protection of organized society (compare the elaborate provisions for the protection of slaves in the Bible), his existence as a human being was given no recognition by any religious or secular agency, he was totally ignorant of and completely cut off from his past, and he was offered absolutely no hope for the future...
"This was not what slavery meant in the ancient world, in medieval and early modern Europe, nor in Brazil and the West Indies.
"More important, American slavery was also lawful in its effects. If we compare the present situation of the American Negro with that of, let's say, Brazilian Negroes (who were slaves twenty years longer), we begin to suspect that very different patterns of slavery must have produced such different outcomes. Today the Brazilian Negro is a Brazilian; though most are poor and do the hard and dirty work of the country, as Negroes do in the United States, they are not cut off from society. They reach into its highest strata, merging there—in smaller and smaller numbers, it is true, but with complete acceptance—with other Brazilians of all kinds. The relations between Negroes and whites in Brazil show nothing of the mass irrationality that prevails in this country...
"Mr. Elkins argues that the situation was so different in the United States because here individualism was unrestricted, freed from feudal limitations, aristocracy, a powerful church, monarchy —from any institution that claimed traditional authority.In the absence of all restraining institutions,the search for private gain and profit was unlimited,and the law so fashioned as to remove the slightest hindrance to individual action...
"In Brazil, by contrast, the church was powerful, and insisted on the protection of the slaves and the saving of their souls
"Why was a uniform description of the slave prevalent in the South—childlike, irresponsible, incapable of thought or foresight, lazy, ignorant, totally dependent upon his master, happy? Apparently Brazil had no similar stereotype. The Southerner's liked to believe that this was the essential nature of the African; it justified holding him as property. But Mr. Elkins finds no similarity between this stereotype of the Southern Negro, slave or free, and descriptions of West Africa by travelers and anthropologists: '... looking back upon the energy, and complex organization of West African tribal life, we are tempted ... to wonder how it was ever possible that all this native resourcefulness and vitality could have been brought to such a point of utter stultification in America.' A connected problem: in the United States, there are simply no 'survivals' from African culture—in Brazil and the West Indies, there are many. How explain this? Mr. Elkins' answers again point to institutional differences. Where the slavemaster wielded absolute power, the slave became absolutely dependent. Where the slavemaster's power was restricted by traditional institutions, the slaves—after all the horrors that accompanied the passage from freedom in Africa to slavery in the New World—had a breathing space, an area of freedom in which to reconstruct some part of their African culture. Where such a breathing space existed, it allowed slaves to perform some of the actions of free men—and therefore they were, even in slavery, more like free men.
"Here Mr. Elkins draws on the literature on Nazi concentration camps to get at the psychological consequences of a situation of total powerlessness continued over a long period of time. He points out that the psychological dependency, to the point of imitation and even love, of slaves on their masters, could be found in concentration camp inmates who managed to survive the early term of their imprisonment...
"Elkins seems to share a bias, common among contemporary historians, which I find difficult to understand, against the abolitionists. They are criticized for being moralistic, fanatical, uncompromising, vituperative; they refused to consider practical measures, short of emancipation, that might have alleviated the conditions of the slaves, and so prepare them for emancipation. Mr. Elkins suggests that the opponents of slavery might have proposed measures that would have given the slave an area in which to develop toward freedom—for example, 'bringing the slave into the Christian fold and under the eye of the church . . . insisting that he be offered a spiritual life marked by dignity and be given instruction in Christian morality,' or insisting upon the sanctity of the family 'as a basic principle of Christian practice. . . .' But it is clear from his own evidence that slavemasters would have accepted none of this. Mr. Elkins is deceived in thinking that what is useful for analysis is also useful for reform."
(Excerpted from a review of the book "Slavery, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life" by Stanley M. Elkins. The review appeared in the May Commentary and is by Nathan Glazer.)