UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
NOVEMBER 10,1978
Building woes linger
The jins of new Green Hall lives on. This week, out of a fear that some of the building's outer concrete panels could be a safety hazard, University of Kansas officials fenced off areas around the law school.
During the early stages of construction, a wall collapsed. There have been numerous questions concerning the natural soundness of the prefab panels.
The fencing is the latest in a long series of construction problems that have plagued the $5 million building since it was begun in March 1977.
THE BUILDING'S contractor, Casson Construction Co., Topeka, failed a final building inspection on Aug. 1, 1977, because of the faulty panels.
Construction problems with state buildings have become commonplace. Examples of problems abound at KU.
Robinson Gymnasium, Lindley Hall, the Printing Service building, the Kansas Geological Survey building and Summerfield Hall all had problems with leaking roofs last spring. Some of them have been repaired.
HOWEVER, THE Visual Arts Building has been troubled with ventilation and elevator problems since its completion, and the Orr-Major building at the University of Kansas Medical Center has had
problems with faulty heating and air conditioning systems.
According to a report prepared in summer 1977 for the Kansas Senate Ways and Means Committee, there were more than 100 defects in architecture and construction in 32 state buildings. The needed repairs amounted to more than $2 million.
Many of the defects in buildings are being investigated and settlements will have to be negotiated. But it is with these buildings that a greater effort is needed. Delays in proper repairs lead only to more inconvenience—again new Green Hall stands as an example.
The reorganization is under way. However officials say it will have little effect on buildings that now need repairs—new Green Hall, for example.
John Carlin, governor elect, has said that he was aware of problems with state building construction and that it was one of the main areas he would try to improve.
IN HOPES of helping to smooth state construction problems, the Kansas Legislature passed a bill last spring that would reorganize the state architect's office. The measure would abolish the state architect's position and would replace it with a seventeem commission.
Big government works for Swedish business
One can only hope that Carlin's statement wasn't just campaign rhetoric.
N. Y. Times Feature
By E. ELIZABETH WHITNEY
NEW YORK-While the Siren of lower taxes is luring Americans, we might well consider a highly taxed, rich country—that welfare state, Sweden.
So often people who fear "big government" point the finger at Great Britain as a horrible example. Britain has had her troubles. Having lived beyond her income, she has had to borrow heavily from the International Settlements. She has suffered disruptive strikes (though not so many recently) and business has stagnated.
But the Swedish government takes a very active part in its country's economy—with its economic policies nationalized so much business as Britain. More than 90 percent of Swedish industry is privately owned. The government, however, still owns about $1 trillion in the economy, and the nation flourishes.
Sweden has marital loans, free examinations for mothers and babies, free health care, children's allowances and free education. There are low rental housing for the elderly.
Why has Sweden succeeded so much better than Britain? The answer, according to some analysts, lies partly in the attitudes of management. The managers seem, both are equally impressed with the need for productivity. Management looks for new, more efficient ways of doing things. They work together in cooperation between the two groups, both of which realize that Sweden must export.
SWEDEN'S WORKERS earn the highest wages of any industrial country. The only Western country surpassing it in gross national product in 1974 was Switzerland. And in the same year it ranked first in quality of life, according to an Overseas Development Council index which measures literacy, infant survival and longevity.
SWEDISH WORKERS are 90 percent unionized, compared with about 50 percent in Britain and 25 percent in the United States. This centralization makes it easier for labor to speak with one voice - or at least with a discordant voices- and to act accordingly.
Between 1936 and 1938 the union federation, LO, and the management organization, SAF, worked out a basic agreement which has been followed by other agreements for many years. While an agreement is in force strikes are illegal for those covered by it
And strikes have been relatively few in Sweden.
Management and labor also get together between negotiations. In 1946 came an arrangement for Enterprise Councils in the British Empire to adopt health and welfare measures and ways to increase production. Swedish productivity increased an average of 4.1 percent in the years 1950-1974. During the inflationary period, these leaders advised against increases in wages.
SWEDEN HAS a good system for keeping down unemployment. It has a Labor Market Board on which labor, management and the government are all represented. This board keeps track of job openings in the whole nation and also has 50 trainers who are trained. It pays workers when they are re-training and helps them with moving costs and housing.
If a plant is shut down in a city, the Labor Board will work with the local government and employers to help it set up plants in regions, such as the Far North, where there are fewer people, but where industry is based on agriculture. It has been under 2 percent of the time.
until recent years, most matters that concerned the running of the plants were left to managers and not lawmakers, who were only advisory. But in 1972 the legislature passed a law requiring two workers with voting rights on each board of directors in corporations with 100 or more
The Swedes balked at the Meidner Plan, however, which LO endorsed in the summer of 1976. Accordance with the plan would have gained the unions ownership of industry in a few years. This plan is believed to have been largely responsible for the union-supported Social Democratic Party in Sweden in the last national election.
SINCE THE first of January, 1977, workers have had the right to negotiate with management on almost everything—workforce management, production, finance and organization.
The Swedes did not, however, back away from their welfare state, which other parties also favor. If taxes are high, so are the benefits the people derive from them. What happens may bring the Swedes can feel reasonably certain their physical needs will be met.
E. Elizabeth Whitney is a retired social studies teacher who received her master's degree from Columbia University.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Published at the University of Kansas daily through May and Monday through June 29, 2015. The $49.95 postpaid card is valid for up to four months and can be redeemed on any of the following websites: kukanu.edu/kenya; www.kukenya.com; and KUKANU.COM. It will accept any amount of money as a payment. For more information, visit www.kukenya.com.
Editor
Steve Fratior
Editorial Editor Barry Massey
Managing Editor
Jerry Sass
Assistant Business Manager Bret Millr
Business Manage
Associate Business Manager
Karen Wendrott
Prospects were undeniably bright for Gov. Robert F. Bennett when Kansas polls closed Tuesday. Public opinion samplings had forecast an easy victory for the governor, a Republican incumbent in a historically Republican state.
Advertising Adviser Chuek Chowins
State's Republican loyalties triumph
But John Carlin, the Democratic challenger, will be Kansas' governor for the next four years. He beat Bennett by 15,000 votes in a race that becomes more surprising because of results in other state races.
In those races visceral Republicanism asserted itself.
but Carlin, speaker of the House last year, still looked to be a sure loser until he launched a last-minute media attack that linked Bennett with increases in utility rates granted by the Kansas Corporation Commission.
The triumph of Republicanism must be shocking to state Democrats, who entered the 1978 elections with soaring hopes. The Republicans' long domination, they said, was doomed; Kansas was going to be a two-party state.
The Republican party, which has dominated Kansas politics since territorial elections, elected a U.S. senator, four out of five U.S. representatives and the attorney general, and 51 out of the state Legislature by capturing 68 of 25 seats in the House of Representatives.
Bennett was, however, to some extent his own problem. Never popular with traditional Republican voters, Bennett gained his margin of victory in 1974 from liberal Democrats disgusted with their party's nominee, Vern Miller.
Despite Carlin's victory, the defeats of Roy and Keys and the loss of the Kansas House have stung state Democrats. They clearly lost strength at a time when prospects for gaining seemed good. They cannot be too happy.
Students appeared to many to be an arrogant and a loot. His campaign floundered in Kansas, where it was the first. And thus, he became the fourth Republican governor in Kansas history to fail in a bid for office.
It was, however, mostly an election in which traditional loyalty triumphed. That vote was the key to a veto of the voter anger. With no issue to upset them, Kansas voters went to the polls Tuesday and won.
BUT KANASS looked like a one-party state as much as ever Wednesday morning, when the Democrats won their elections, in which they won a House majority for the first time in 65 years and elected two Democrats to Congress. They could remember a more successful campaign.
General Manager
Rick Musser
Rick Alm
far behind Bennett in pre-election polls before creeping nearer in final samplings
The strategy in the 1978 election was for Democratic candidates to sound like Republicans. Carl did and won. But so did the Democrat, who was the senator, but he lost to Nancy Landon Kassebaum, whose maiden name is Susan Kassebaum in Kansas Republican respectability.
That's what they have done every November.
Martha Keys' defeat after eight years of Democratic success in the 2nd District came as a surprise. She has worked diligently for her constituents, but lost because of a late swing toward her opponent in him Jeffries of Atchison, a political novice.
Another incumbent Democrat, attorney General Curt Schnelder, lost to law-and-order Republican Bob Stephan by an 86-point victory. The Republicans whispers of improprieties in his personal life, abandoned the governor's race to seek re-election. His too-visible ambition left a hole in the Democratic coffin.
The size of Roy's defeat—more than 10 percent and 100,000 votes—was astounding. He was an attractive candidate, an articulate spokesman informed on the issues and took a firm stand in Irish. At least one poll conducted the week before the election gave him a healthy lead.
The election began to slip from Roy when he welcomed President Carter and Sen. Rand Paul. As President Carter still raises the hakees of farmers, and Kennedy, although popular elsewhere, represents the big-spending Democrats from whom Roy needed to dissociate
Keys, who led in the polls, was targeted for defeat by Ronald Reagan's Citizens for the Republic, a conservative organization that helped plan and finance Jim Jefries' campaign. The out-of-state support proved crucial in Jefries' 5,000-vote victory.
WITH KEYS, Roy and Schneider meeting defeat, Carlin's slim victory was the Democrats' only bright spot, Carlin, a 38-year-old dairy farmer from Smolan, started.
Aussbaum, on the other hand, campaigned on banalties and homilies. She ran against a senator who helped the most by the fact that she was a Republican. The last Democratic senator was a Democrat.
HE ERED, too, in relentlessly attacking Kassebaum's wealth and, late in the campaign, assuming the anxious look of a loser. He lost votes on his record as a U.S.
representative, which Kassebaum used to portray him as a big spender and professional politician. Roy could never lose the smell of liberalism.
HOPE hardly enough for Bricker
I would like to make my own comment on the HOPE award—a comment made, perhaps from a different angle than the one I am giving in Nov. 7. Issue the University Daily Kansan.
To the editor:
The editorial to which I refer says the selection of previous HOPE award recipients by succeeding classes of seniors is "an academic redundancy . . . only confirming that past seniors were apparently correct in their appraisal of an instructor."
I think this state of affairs reflects a much more important point: that the seniors of any given year are voting for that man or woman whom the seniors feel has, at some point in their college careers, impressed or helped them on a personal level.
God knows that it is hard enough to think one has any kind of human contact with a professor when one is part of a class of 500, but that one has some kind of claim on a teacher's time as you have.
The HOPE award is as close as we can come to repaying this enthusiasm. I resent the idea that I might not be allowed to make mistakes, but I must make just because others have done it already.
And yet, Clark Bricker has managed to attain this feat, not once, mind you, but repeatedly, year after year. He has always given generously of his time and energy to help students learn and to convince skeptical students that (of all the strange ideas) he has been doing is Testing. So infectious is his enthusiasm for his subject and his students, he succeeds.
Pam Sturm
How many of you can remember even the name of your first semester—or first year—teacher in anything, four years later? But who, after taking a chemistry class from him, could ever forget our charming Bricker?
Lawrence senior
Exploding cannon in front of the class, or roaring up and down the aisles, asking questions, cramming ideas into heads that might cause trouble or for them before . . . we remember Bricker.
If any instructor can somehow achieve that state of affairs—well, the feat verges on the miraculous—the HOPE award is little reward for such dedication.
So tell me, who would you vote for?
Ethnic insults arise during soccer game
To the editor:
We would like to reassure our players that the sentiments expressed Nov. 1 represent
On Nov. 1, the Hill Championship soccer game was played between the SAE fraternity team and an independent team, the River Pirates. The River Pirates are a cosmopolitan team composed of a Nigerian, a German, a Spanish, an Englishman, a Canadian and four Americans. The SAE team is, of course, all American.
On this particular day, the SAE team showed their superiority by winning 2-0. The SAE team fans showed their superiority by treating our Latin and African players to a disgusting and embarrassing barrage of racially directed comments.
I think it is no coincidence that a American fraternity fan who removed the fun by demonstrating their true feelings to foreign foreigners is a place of ownership in intramural athletics.
It is true they showed their sportsmanship by ridiculing the efforts of the entire River Pirates team, but they saved their rudest player, resulting comments for our foreign players.
As everyone is aware, soccer is not a traditional American game. There would be little argument with the observation that the best soccer talents at the University of Kansas are non-Americans. Our foreign players are the ablest members of our team—that the reason they earned the abuse of the SAE fans?
It is worthwhile to note that the independent league survived the season without a hint of crime trouble and the final game was not marred by any actions of the players. The sport of soccer campus is one of the most enjoyable rewards of league play.
KANSAN letters
only an ignorant few, but it's hard to be sure because the voices were so loud.
W. Bruce McGillivray
O. Otis, University graduate student
Norman A. Slade
Associate professor of
systematics and ecology
Ford Motor ad unfit for a student paper
I would like to address to you one needing little inquiry.
What was the "insider" a disguised Ford Motor Company magazine 24 pages long, in the latest issue?
It took me a few minutes of reading "insider" to discern a clear underlying big business sympathy. It took another couple of minutes to figure out that "insider" was published by Ford Motor Company. By then I was getting angry.
To the editor:
only significant publication on campus, and since most of us see it every day, it is in a position of extraordinary influence around the world. It also comes with some audacious leadership and a little imagination the Kansan could lead independent student thinkers in some worthwhile direction.
I strongly believe there is no room for compromise with our student newspaper. Either it is dedicated to the students or it worthless, can see runaway ardentism or vertescentism. This was so to advertise Ford Motor Company bought its way into a half interest in Kansan stock, so that it could spread its great Big Brother philosophy and have a magazine disguised as the student's best friend and enclosed in the students' own newspaper.
Why did the Kansan people let Ford's money buy such a place in our paper? What gives you people the authority to give Ford not just an advertising page, but an enclosed magazine that was about as long as the entire Kansan？Above all, where do you get off letting Ford get in the paper behind the facade of an ordinary magazine?
I care a lot about having a good student newspaper. Since the Kansan is about the
But no—the Kansan showed on Oct. 23 that it isn't independent or devoted to the students, and that it is wasting its position of power. Come on out and show yourself, you guys who pull the Kansan strings. Tell me, whose paper this is? I want no less than an emphatic answer, that the Kansan is hereby purely for the sake of you to justify shipping that little package of Motor Company propaganda in the paper.
Better no student newspaper than a phony student newspaper.
Bernard Brown
Second year law student EDITOR'S NOTE: "Inspider" was included in the Kansan as a paid advertising insert. It was intended to reflect Kansan editorial policies.
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