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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Oct. 12, 1960
A Question of Policy
Last Wednesday night the governing board of the University Daily Kansan resolved unanimously to ban discriminatory advertisements from the pages of that paper. The resolution says:
"Be it resolved by the governing board of the University Daily Kansan that, effective immediately, the University Daily Kansan shall not knowingly publish any advertisement stipulating race, color or creed."
The issue involving discriminatory advertisements was raised when the UDK printed a classified ad, under the "Help Wanted" section, which specified that white females only were to be considered for employment. As soon as the ad was brought to the attention of the board chairman, the part of it which contained the racial requirement was removed and the question of a firm policy toward such advertisements was immediately placed on the agenda of the Kansan Board.
But some damage had already been done. Faculty members and students were quick to let the UDK know that they thought the ad was not in keeping with the liberal and enlightened spirit of the University. There were several letters to the editor.
Now the UDK has a policy, embodied in the above resolution. This policy was arrived at independent of the letters and comment that reached us following the publication of the ad. It was decided that only the complete Kansan Board meeting in formal session could lend the resolution the significance it deserved, and that emergency measures were no substitute for a clearly defined policy.
We were gratified to see the unanimous vote. It indicates that those who are responsible for the UDK are conscious of the spirit of the student body regarding equal rights for all, and are in accord with it.
But during the discussion on the resolution, there was a question raised which merits further discussion.
Some time ago, an ad was run in the UDK asking for roomers. No race was specified. Several Negro students answered the ad, only to find that advertiser wanted only white students as roomers. The Negroes complained to the UDK, saying the paper should have specified racial preference and saved them the trouble and embarrassment of applying. The question here is a valid one. Does any medium of communication have the right to deny to its readers information that is important to their interests, even though such matter might be termed discriminatory?
We believe the board answered this question in the only way possible for this newspaper. To have compromised the question would have been immeasurably unjust to those persons of both races who have been fighting for equality for the Negro for years. The newspaper can only keep faith with the ideals of racial equality and actively reflect them in its editorial matter. The question raised still goes unsolved, and will continue to be so long as people harbor baseless prejudices against those who are "different." But we believe that if discriminatory matter is banned from our newspaper, we may, in a small way at least, contribute to the spirit of tolerance.
Bill Blundell
More on Polls
Editor:
Thanks for publishing my letter concerning the validity of your Lawrence poll. *Your explanation of the physical difficulties connected with a more comprehensive poll is of course well taken. Your reply, however, contained a statistical fallacy which is so widespread that it should be clarified in the interest of your readers.
You stated in your editor's note: "We wish to remind Professor Shaffer that the Gallup poll is based on a smaller relative sample than the Kansan obtained." While this is correct, the relative size of the sample is quite unimportant in cases where the sample amounts to only a very small percentage of the total population, i.e., the absolute size of the sample is of much greater importance. A well chosen sample of 300,000 out of a total voting population of 30,000,000 would, for instance, enable a qualified statistician to arrive at rather valid predictions with a relatively small margin of error. Notice that, in this case, the sample would amount to but one per cent of the total population. But if you attempted to determine the voting preference of 50 students enrolled in a certain course, could you possibly make any significant predictions if you asked one single student? Yet notice that your "sample" would be two per cent of the total population in this case.
In the particular poll that I criticized, a test of significance such as the chi square test would clearly indicate that from your sample of 45 individuals (granted even that it was truly a random sample, which is not easy to obtain) a conclusion that one of the two candidates has at present a two to one lead over the other would have no validity whatsoever. Even a prediction as to which candidate is at present in the lead could not be made with a great degree of certainty.
Thanks again for the space allocated to me in this matter.
Harry Shaffer Assistant Professor of Economics
Conservative Mr. Dalby
Editor:
In an amazing display of conservatism, the University of Kansas student body has once again been represented by our esteemed student body president in last week's Kansas. Apparently even refusing to see what made both political parties endorse student sit-ins in their platforms this summer, Mr. Dalby tells us that KU must "assume a role of leadership for minority schools opposing demonstration sit-ins and other actions advocated by N.S.A." or leave the National Student Association.
Daily 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
Extension 776, business flr.
It may be true that we should withdraw from any organization which does such a pro-Communist act as "advocate a free-mail exchange with Russia." Of course, no decent, God-fearing, Bible-belt, Kansas farm boy would want to allow "ali types of propaganda from Russia (to) enter the U.S. without censorship." In the best of the Kansas tradition, we can swing behind Mr. Dalby in his support of censorship in order to protect our pure minds.
Member Inland Daily Press Association. Associated Collegiate Press.
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22,
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.
Ray Miller Managing Editor
Carol Heller, Jane Boyd, Priscilla Burton and Carrie Edwards, Assistant Managing Editors; Pat Sheley and Suzanne Shaw, City Editors; John Macdonald, Sports Editor; Peggy Kallos and Donna Engle, Society Editors.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT John Peterson and Bill Blundell
John Peterson and Bill Blundell Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
Rudy Hoffman, Advertising Manager; Marlin Zimmerman, Promotion Manager; Fredrick Milo Harris III, National Advertising Manager; Mike McCarthy, Circulation Manager; Dorothy Boller, Classified Advertising Manager.
But, when Mr. Dalby says we must withdraw from the National Student Association because they advocate "sit-ins," maybe we should at least remind him of the uproar last spring when he "represented" us by agreeing that sitins "violate the true principle of civil rights." We need to remind him of the resolution passed by the A.S.C., which, although it said little, certainly did not indicate that KU should lead the minority of anti-sit-in schools (most of which would, no doubt, lie South-East of Kansas). Even more, we might remind Mr. Dalby of the number of students who signed a petition supporting sit-ins. Why, we might even remind Mr. Dalby that more students signed that petition than migrate to Iowa State when we are represented there.
So, I certainly hope that Mr. Dalby will not advocate pulling out of the N.S.A. because of its left-wing leanings on the sit-in question. If he wants the University of Kansas to join such progressive schools as the University of North Carolina, Duke University, and the University of Alabama in leaving the N.S.A. because they want us to learn about the Soviet Union, well . . .
Ken Megill Vassar, Senior
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
"OH, COME NOW-YOU KNOW VERY WELL WHAT I MEAN BY AN ORAL EXAMINATION."
From the Magazine Rack
Cool Cat Candidates
"No matter what happens in November, it now looks as though the American people will have a cool cat for President. The essence of the cool cat is that he is controlled rather than committed; that is, he is self-controlled, rather than controlled by ideals to which he has given himself. And this focuses our attention not so much on the heart of the man—since that is precisely the organ whose existence is in question—as on the head. While this thought may be offensive to devout partisans, it is time for someone to say what more and more independent voters are beginning to think: that between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy there is an extraordinary lack of significant difference; indeed, there is an extraordinary resemblance between the two in essentials...
"Both men are cool in a calm self-concern. Once again, this focus on the self, rather than on some outward and objective loyalty, is a trait of the times. Costello, with the help of cartoons by Osborn, has documented for us the portrait of Richard Nixon as a wily and coldly calculating person, unashamedly a man on the make, who is determined to get himself ahead in the world no matter where he may get others. But the phrasing I have just used for Nixon is taken verbatim from an appraisal of the character of Kennedy by a correspondent for The Economist: 'Egotism and istics. In the service of his own ambition, he is wily and coldly calculating, but not hypocritical. . . Senator Kennedy is unashamedly a man on the make.' If these words seem to be too sharp in their judgment of the Senator, they may be matched with the milder, but no less precise, dictum of another liberal observer: 'Kennedy admits that he has found in politics as in no other pursuit a purely selfish happiness.'
"IN ALL THESE respects—coolness toward passion and principle and concentration on the self—the two men differ from all the men who have been President of the United States in the 20th century. Not of McKinley, nor Teddy Roosevelt, nor Wilson, nor Harding, nor Coolidge, nor Hoover, nor Franklin D. Roosevelt, nor Truman, nor Eisenhower, could such things be said."
"BOTH MEN are cool to passion. So William Costello speaks of Nixon's ability to 'turn his feelings on and off,' and collects for us some of the notable utterances of the Vice President. 'The only time to lose your temper in politics is when it's deliberate.'...
"And James MacGregor Burns reports of Kennedy that 'he has never been seen—even by his mother—in raging anger or uncontrollable tears.'...
"Both men are cool to principle. In this respect each reflects the opportunism and the ethical relativism which are so profoundly a part of the temper of the times. Adlai Stevenson said in 1956: 'Nixon's deportment and views are not the product of principle or conviction but of ambition and expediency'..."
"JAMES RESTON reports that the Harvard liberals from the beginning felt confident of Kennedy's stand on questions of economics, but he always seemed to them to be somewhere else physically or spiritually when the battle was raging over civil rights or Senator McCarran or Senator McCarthy. And one wonders what to make of the curious criteria by which Kennedy passed judgment on Jimmy Hoffa—'no discrimination or taste or style.' These are esthetic judgments, not ethical ones.
(Excerpted from "A Cool Cat for President" by Robert E. Fitch in the June 6, 1960, New Leader.)