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University Daily Kansan
Monday. Oct. 3, 1960
Topeka Smoke Screen
IN A SHOCKING DISPLAY OF POLITICAL charlatanism, Gov. Docking last week attempted to obliterate as a campaign issue the very real question of higher education in Kansas.
Gov. Docking blandly asserted that his opponent, Atty. Gen. John Anderson, was in agreement with him that sufficient funds had been provided by the executive and legislative branches to insure growth and progress in the state's colleges and universities. Mr. Anderson has said emphatically that he does not agree with the governor.
Why does Gov. Docking attempt to hide this issue under a blanket of half-truths? Why the attempt to nullify it as a campaign issue by falsely claiming that his opponent holds the same views toward it as he does? Part of the answer can be found in the now noticeable shift away from Docking that political polls have shown in the past few weeks.
IT MAY BE THAT THE TRUTH HAS FINALLY been brought home to the governor — that the people of Kansas do care about the education of their sons and daughters, and care enough to take action at the polls to insure that pennypinching by the executive cannot ruin the futures of their children.
The governor's statement was a desperate gamble. Certainly he must have known that his opponent would refute it. The significance of the statement lies in the fact that the governor means to hew to the line he has already drawn — no comment on the question of higher education until after the general elections, and, in the meantime, an all-out attempt to sweep the question under the rug, to wipe it out as an issue of importance. Perhaps the governor thinks that if he tells the half-truth and the outright lie often enough, this issue will disappear like a puff of smoke.
IN THE SAME SPEECH CONTAINING REFERENCES to the Attorney General, the governor tried, with a series of incomplete and misleading statements, to buttress his assertion that higher education in Kansas is in fine shape.
Referring to the Board of Regents, he said: "If there is any validity to the charge that higher education has become a political football during this administration, these regents have set it on the tee and kicked it off."
THE GOVERNOR FORGETS — OR WOULD like to forget — that he has appointed the majority of this same Board of Regents he now attacks. Furthermore, if any political influence has been exerted, it is more than probable that it has come from the governor's chair. When W. Clarke Wescoe was chosen Chancellor of the University, the official vote of the board was split, a condition so unusual in this sort of selection that it is worthy of curious inquiry. The dissenting votes all came from Docking appointees.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
No proof exists that the governor did use his influence in a vain attempt to pick the man he wanted as chancellor at KU, nor can it be said fairly that the men who voted dissent did so with anything but the best motives. Still, this incident is sufficient to raise doubt in the minds of many who have noted the governor's seeming antipathy toward higher education. Is the governor as lily-white as he presents himself to be, or has he been responsible for political interference in an area where politics has no place?
THE GOVERNOR ALSO SAID THAT PROFESSORS' salaries in state colleges and universities have increased 30 per cent during his administration. This much is true, but the governor has certainly not been responsible for the rise, as he implied in his speech.
The fact is that in every instance where funds have been suggested by the Board of Regents, the governor has slashed the requests. The necessary funds have been allocated by the legislature over the governor's veto. This applies to building funds as well as to teachers' salaries. Were it not for the action of the legislature, the state's schools would be facing the enrollment boom with absolutely inadequate facilities, both in physical plant and faculty. How then can the governor dare to imply that he has been in any way responsible for what has been done over his protests?
BUT IN REFUSING EVEN TO COMMENT on his position toward higher education and his plans for the future regarding it, the governor has performed his greatest disservice to the people of the state. He has shirked an obligation and has run from a responsibility so vast that it embraces every citizen.
In mouthing the half-truths and worse he is using as the education plank in his platform, the governor has grievously insulted the intelligence of the voters. We can only ask — and not for the first time — what is the governor's program? What will he do for higher education if he is reelected? It is his duty to tell us.
— Bill Blundell
Political Differences
Editor:
An illuminating example of basic differences between the Democratic and Republican parties in Kansas was seen by many as the student body went through enrollment. While the Young Democrats had a booth open for membership from the time the first student was enrolled until the last straggler went through, the Republicans displayed their usual tendency of staying at the beach by setting up shop around noon and closing about 4:30 p.m. It is this very significant phenomenon that has accounted for the rise of two-party government in Kansas. It will continue to
flourish in a state where the majority of people are registered Republicans, for the Democrats are not letting down one iota in organizational activities.
It is this very point that explains why Karsas may possibly go Democratic this year. The undecided vote on the presidential race will probably be swung by the party that displays the greatest campaign effort. The Republican vote-getting machine became accustomed to effortless victory during the 1940's and early 1950's, and the membership consequently became lethargic. Republican leaders have lost touch with the Kansas voter, a man who likes to be asked
for his vote.
The Young Democrats at KU shall continue to out-work their political adversary. The leadership is depending upon a smaller but more issue conscious and politically mature core of members to help get out the vote and swing it away from tradition. Membership and organized activities in the KU Young Democratic organization is strictly voluntary. It is also interesting, for 1960 should be an election year full of surprises and excitement. If the Republicans do not cease their "beachmanship," it will be a disappointing year for them.
Name withheld
Daily Hansan UNITED BRITT
University of Kansas student newspaper
Nazis
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Telephone Viking 3-2700
Extension 711, news room
Extension 375, business office
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 Sundays 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.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ray Miller
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
John Peterson and Bill蒲陆
Ray Miller Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
**John Peterson and Bill Blundell** ... Co-Editorial Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Mark Dull Business Manager
I am not a Jew, and I do not deny the Jews" "right" to execute the Nazi mass murderers.
The Nazis, however, are human beings. Therefore, to say, as Mr. Podhoretz does in "Execute the Nazis?" in the Daily Kansan Sept. 28, that the Nazi crimes were so totally inhuman that they defy all our moral categories, is to deny our knowledge of evil in ourselves and others. To say that, in this case, forgiveness is also inhuman is to deny the profound human capacity for imaginative moral judgment.
To be sure, the Jew is the only one who can forgive, because it was his family that was destroyed.
Our hopes rest with him.
Judson E. Trax Jr.
Oil City, Penn., freshman
"I WISH HE COULD BE LIKE OTHER PROPS AN' JUST LAUGH AT THE WRONG ANSWERS"
From the Magazine Rack-
Ike's Good Will Trips
"In these last fleeting months of his Presidency Mr. Eisenhower is leaving a curiously dangerous legacy compounded of the best intentions and the most amiable of 'good will.'
"It is an inheritance, moreover, that nobody can really reject. The nation is being committed to an issue, 'peace,' which cannot be critically and effectively examined—neither within the Republican party nor by the opposition. The President opened his tenure seven years ago by 'going to Korea' and ending a hot war there. He is now ending that tenure by going to the whole world, more or less, with yet more airliner diplomacy—based upon a sunny trust in others rarely known in modern history.
"Peace is undeniably wonderful. Tradition and precedents are undeniably dull. All the same, this towering fact remains—even though any man raising it risks being labeled a warmonger: Never before in modern history has so powerful a nation been so committed to so much that lies beyond any possibility of effective debate...
"Neville Chamberlain trusted a potential enemy long ago because he had to, and Britain had to. Not even the sourest of analyses, however, really suggests we have got to, to any such degree, at least. And the West's hulking antagonist, the Soviet empire, remains notably lacking in the quality of kindly faith.
"The moment General Eisenhower made his 1952 campaign promise to go to Korea he committed himself, in advance, to a fixed position which left it impossible for him really to bargain with the Communist aggressors. Once he had done what he did, he simply had to have an armistice, and well they knew it. Now, as the Eisenhower Era draws to the close, he is again committing himself in advance to positions in which our bargaining power is largely cast away. And again the other fellow knows this perfectly well.
"I do think that Mr. Eisenhower's quest for the grail of good will ought to be scrutinized sharply, just in case the current massive public opinion which apparently supports it might be wrong after all.
"Our grand policy has passed from one based upon strength and a reserved mistrust of the Russian to one based upon 'good will'—and hope. The old policy was endlessly denounced as negative and 'sterile', and to an extent so it was. At least, however, it stood upon objective and thus measurable considerations. But the new policy can hardly be criticized at all, for it is as gossamer as a moonbeam over a meadow. It rests upon the indisputable proposition that peace is better than war. But it doesn't leave much room for fruitful maneuver in the vast areas of negotiation and choice that normally would surely lie betwixt such polar opposites...
"We have here the unfolding of a situation which, given our recent past, was perhaps all but inevitable. The Eisenhower Administration set out with the deep (if unacknowledged) consciousness that it had come to power in part through a campaign of extreme irresponsibility—specifically about Korea. Its first Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, no less than the President, bore an inescapable share of what might be called an awareness of guilt.
"Thus for years under Dulles' leadership the Administration moved to repay its debt to the containment of Communism by taking a 'hard' and 'inflexible' line...
"But once 'inflexibility' had fallen, something that was all too flexible replaced it—the policy of 'good will.' The Democrats—who are now committed, too, along with all of us—can make now no real attack upon it. For as a party they offered no significant, concrete, or useful criticism when Mr. Eisenhower set out on the road that has now taken him and all of us so far. And long before this, it was mostly Democrats who howled to the heavens for more and more 'flexibility.'"
(Excerpted from "Public & Personal," a column in Harper's Magazine by William S. White, March, 1960.)
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