UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
NOVEMBER 14, 1978
Court counsel needed
From all indications University of Kansas students will have a prepaid legal services program by next semester.
semester.
But it's not as clear whether the program will offer all the services students want. For the first year of the program, there's a good chance it won't.
A final recommendation to the administration outlining the program's services must come from Mike Harper, student body president. And he, it seems, favors a program that would not provide legal representation in court during the program's first year, in accordance with administration preferences.
HARPER SENT letters to members of the Legal Services Governing Board last week that said he disagreed with a board proposal to include court representation in the first phase of the legal services program.
The program's attorney, Harper says, will be busy with administrative details during the early phases of the program and will not have enough time to devote to proper court representation.
Harper says he is concerned that the program could be harmed if the attorney botched a lawsuit because of a lack of time to prepare for a case.
Although the program's first few months will be hectic, it seems unlikely that it will take the program's staff a full academic year to become accustomed to their jobs.
AT THE LONGEST, it should take only six months for the staff to settle in and for the administration to evaluate the program.
Moreover, court representation will be a key element in making the program valuable to students and thus successful.
According to an October 1977 survey for the Student Senate, only 43 percent of the studentry would be able to pay a fee for a legal services program that did not provide court representation. But 60 percent of the sample said they would back a program including court rerepresentation.
The student voice seems clear and Harper should take heed. Without court representation, a $54,000 legal services program will be nearly worthless.
If the program is to gain creditability from students, it must offer services they want. Harper should know that court representation is a desired service and should push to include it in his proposal to the administration.
Successors alter Mao image
The news from Peking last week was that the Red Guards, the zealous vanguard of the Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, had finally been disbanded.
They were, in truth, the chairman's hatchet men, who assailed the party's moderate elements. But it was the leader's success that he never had to disguise his legend.
The Red Guards, students organized as Mao's ideological shock troops, rampaged over China 10 years ago, creating mayhem and havoc by attacking so-called bourgeois enemies within the Chinese Communist Party.
THE RED GUARDS had languished in recent years. Schools and universities, the bastions of their strength, are no longer part of our history of revolution. Now learning is stressed.
China watchers found the dissolution of the Red Guards between the lines of official reports of a recent Communist Youth League conference. The report failed to reveal any attempt to remove the Little Red Soldiers, was referred to by its original name, the Young Pioneers.
The Red Guards contribution to China was chaos. Their influence was eclipsed in 1969, when their marauding and pillaging of the countryside millions of students were banished to the countryside to work on communes. But the Red Guards continued, with the Mao's commitment to continuing revolution.
to quietly abolish the Red Guards two years after Mao's death, his moderate, pragmatic successors signify their relationship with his romantic theory of revolution.
And his theory of government.
The new leaders take a new course for China, one that departs radically from Mao's philosophy. Chairman Kuo-keng Foo has shown that a plot a course that includes an emphasis on efficiency over ideology as well as cooperation with the technologically advanced capitalist countries in India and modernization in the Chinese economy.
Metric switch too slow better attitude needed
"It shall be lawful throughout the United States of America to employ the weights and measures of a metric system; and no contract or dealing, or pleading in any court shall be deemed invalid or liable to objection since the weights and measures expressed or referred to therein are the weights and measures of the metric system."
A recent law? Not really. It's the "Law of 1866."
The United States has been inching along toward a conversion to the metric system for many years. It's time to speed up
Americans live in the only industrialized country in the world that has not switched to metric or is not in the process of an official changeover. And the longer we wait, the more difficult the switch will be.
Congress gave its official OK to the metric system three years ago by passing the Metric Conversion Act. Since then, some progress has been made toward conversion, but not enough. Weathermen now feel compelled to give the temperature in Celsius as well as in Fahrenheit, and soft drink companies are also producing the 2-liter bottle. But the list doesn't much further.
IF. AS we've told so often, the United States is really going to convert to the metric system, that conversion should be easier.
The country is supposed to be converted to metric within 10 years of the enactment of the 1975 law, but total conversion by 2000 was delayed.
Because Congress' conversion bill called for a voluntary switchover, the country is taking its time. A recent survey by the General Accounting Office indicates that most Americans still are opposed to a metric conversion.
One nirr note has been that government agencies were authorized to switch, and they may be doing so in the next few years. But the GAO study indicates some reluctance on its part to switch. The report says it isn't too late for the United States to change its mind about going metric. The cost of conversion could be high and practical advantages could be limited.
FOR THE PRESENT, that could be true. Obviously a switch to metric isn't going to be of much benefit for a few years. But the switch will make all weights and measures easier to compute and uniform with the rest of the world.
For some unknown reason, metric is a frightening word to
some people. But it shouldn't be — there's nothing difficult to understand about the system. Metric makes sense.
How long is a meter? 100 centimeters. Metric is not meant to be converted back and forth between the custom U.S. system of measures. But, if you want to complicate things, a meter is a little over a yard, which is three feet, which is 38
Temperatures are easy too. In the Fahrenheit scale, 32 degrees is freezing and 121 degrees is boiling. What kind of sense does that make? In the metric scale zero degrees is freezing and 100 degrees is boiling. Simple.
**HOW COLD** is 10 degrees Celsius? Ten degrees above freezing. Obviously it will take lake, but it's easier to learn to "feel" Celsius than to learn how to convert it. Again, if you want to find out why 10 degrees Celsius is equal to 50 degrees Fahrenheit and make things complicated, subtract 32 from the temperature of five by multiples. or multiply Celsius nine-fifths, then add 32.
The trick is to learn that 10 millimeters equals one centimeter and that 10 centimeters equals one meter. After it
Of course, the switch is going to take time. But if businesses get behind the switch, the changeover could come more quickly. Some leaders in the area have been General Motors, Ford, International Business Machines and Rockwell Inventor.
Companies like those should be more than willing to change, using the metric system will aid them in international trade. Companies that want to buy or sell in a country must
Unfortunately, the attitude many persons take is, "Why can't they switch to our system." The answer to that question should be simple enough. The United States is the only industrialized nation using the customary system—an outdated, confusing one. The metric, or international system, is just that—international. And it's much less confusing.
FIRST MAO must be deposed—or, better still, adjusted to the needs of the new men in
Remaking the Mao legend must be tricky, especially after decades of inundation by Western powers. In towering presence, a political and spiritual leader. A librarian and despot, his domination of China from the end of the revolution in 1948 until his death was unbelievable.
And of course their was that book. More than a billion copies of his Little Red Book of revolutionary slogans, which the Red Guards brandished as a talisman during their reign, have been printed in 36 books. It is still widely available in China.
But the Little Red Book and the Red
THE PEOPLE'S DAILY, the party's mouthpiece, said earlier this year that the Red Guards were more often than not a target of Mao's anti-target—a splash of mud on Mao's peasant coat. It was Mao who formed the Red Guards in 1968 and sent them after the war.
Guards are out-of-step with the new leadership, have been devalued and,ification.
To those moderates, the demise of the Red Guards follows a broad campaign to alter the popular impression, created by the warlord Francis Fitzgerald. Mac's titanic role in the Chinese revolution
The Chinese press quotes the late premier, Chou En-lai, as telling delegates to a Youth League conference in 1940 that Mao was a man who had never been a member of the Chinese revolution, but only one of many.
ultimate truth—something Mao had encouraged when he was in power. The People's Daily, however, said the book dismembered Mao's thought and reduced it to maxims that had neither inner links nor historical context.
Mao's former her apparent, Lin Piao, and Mao's widened purge, Chiang Ching—half of the infamous "Gang of Four"—have been a major part of his chairman as a god and an infidel ennui.
"Their create-a-god movement," the Kwang Meng (Enlightenment) Daily said, "repeated the brutality, darkness and the terrors of the Middle Ages."
As China pushes Mao into his past, his memory is to be erased, diluted or adapted to fit new conditions. He will become an adjunct to the authority of those who succeeded him, employed to carry out tasks that required it proceeds, or ignored, if his memory cannot be exploited.
THEY HAVE been accused of presenting the Red Book quotations as the literal and
Mao created China's closed, party-
dominated political system and his legacy
will be corrupted by the system he fathered.
death, he be con-
victed. In the maturation after death was
probably far from Mao's mind when he said
in a 1955 speech that "people must adapt
their thinking to changed conditions."
Things have changed in China for Mao fse-tung.
To the editor:
Glickman victory overlooked by Alm
Much neglect by the Kanas is of benefit not the citizens of Wichita nor to KU students. We should remember that this is supposed to be, so they say, the University of Kansas, and not the University of Johnson, Douglas and Shawne counties, although it is often difficult, no doubt, for many to master this fact.
I read with pleasure Rim Alm's satis- analysis of the recent election in Friday's University Daily Kansan. There was, however, no overt oversight which I feel needs correction.
Alm stated that "With Keys, Roy and Schneider meeting defeat, Carlin's slim victory was the Democrat only victory he ignored the rejection of Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Wichita, who won over his national backed contest by collecting 70 percent of the vote.
This neglects the dynamic political and economic effects which the city has on the state. Witness the election of Nancy Kassebaum.
In other words, Glickman got more than twice as many votes as his opponent, a remarkable feat in a major election for national office.
Glickman, a moderate, is a remarkable man. Even the Wichita Eagle-Beacon dubbed him a "model congressman." He is extraordinarily able and extraordinarily responsive to matters—more so, in opinion, than any opposition on the scene today.
No offense to the fine citizens of Winfield, of course. Much of what happens in Wichita is of vital importance to many KU students, for whom it is either the city of their origin or the city of their employment after college.
It seems inexplicable that such a resounding Democratic victory in the congressional district which includes the state's largest city would go unnoticed by
Indeed, it has often amused me that the knowledge which many KU students have about the city can be summed up in the sentence, "It's somewhere near Winfield.
Alas, this is but another manifestation of a shortcoming in the Kansan's reporting which has afferenced me throughout my years at KU. Coverage of Wichita and its issues has often been inadequate, not to mention Hutchinson, Salina and the rest of the state.
Urban plight exists here as well as KC
To the editor:
to the center
Cops, winos, transvestites struggle in city.
I had geared up for an Armageddon with society's fringe groups locked in mortal combat as the framework of western civilization collapses.
Imagine my disappointment upon learning that it was merely a field trip to examine the hardy unfortunate in his suitcase, the author's own. The article was devoid of thrills and chills. Solizentynn has not packed so much into a single day. Abandoned with only seven classmates in the wasteland of River Quay, he is embarked upon an adventure few of us envy.
However, it is not necessary to go to all that trouble. The same effect can be achieved much more conveniently within the familiar confines of Lawrence:
(1) Leave your credit cards and money at home when you go to school. Concentrate on being a "have-not." Go to the cafeteria and watch others eat while you must go without. Struggle with the loneliness of knowing you lack the 10 cents to call your roommate.
(2) Hang around the alley behind a jewelry store at 3 a.m. to simulate police activity.
3) Lock yourself in your room all day and pretend you're in its confinement.
(3) Lock yourself in your room an all day and pretend you're in solitary confinement.
(4) Turn off the heat and sleep on the floor.
(5) Budget yourself $10 for the weekend and stay up all night worrying about how to spend it. (May I recommend a gallon of muscatel.)
(6) Do some manual labor.
A regimen such as this, harsh though it will be, will prove rewarding: You may need to draw on your reservoir of inner strength, but not the fullest extent, or blench. Then you will be better able to feel
sorry for those who lack your sense of decency.
What future pinnacles of journalism await readers of the University Daily Kansas? What about those who are more likely to review, review, and sexist cartoons or educate by an expose such as "Middle Classes"? How much does it cost?
Keep up the good work. Will Madden
Lawrence law student
To the editor:
Rights are inherent; 'grant' is not needed
It's surprising to read a list of physical injuries suffered by the University of Kansas football players. What is the purpose? Daily or weekly on the Kansas knocks their ability on and off the field and lists game predictions as negative.
It was my understanding that a school newspaper functions to support school spirit, or at least present both sides of the story. Yet the Kansan has stressed the weak points of our team and has not addressed the strengths of the team's progress in the last few years.
It's easy to play quarterback from the bench. But let's see Leon Unruh do a better
The time and effort our players put forth means a lot of their feelings are wrapped up in the game. Believe it or not, our players have feelings too.
If we expect them to perform on the field to our satisfaction, against well-reputed competition, we must give them our support rather than psychological injuries.
It is hoped that in the future the Kansan sincerely will be aimed at supporting the Jayhawks' effort rather than criticizing their attempts.
Laura Trimble
Milwaukee, Wis., graduate student
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