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University Daily Kansan Monday, April 20, 1950
Good for the Engineers!
We would like to congratulate the Engineering Council for its decision not to elect a queen for this year's Engineering Exposition.
This act shows individuality in an age when every organization on a university campus feels it must select a queen if it is to maintain its self respect.
To be chosen as queen of something is supposedly an honor, but with so many queens roaming through these vine covered buildings,
most of them get lost in the shuffle. A queen has only a few short hours of glory before a new one steals the spotlight.
One of the reasons given for not choosing a queen is the lack of work for her to do. We wonder if any queen has any really essential duty to perform or if it is not really more work trying to find work for her.
The men of Marvin proved themselves by putting on another excellent esposition—without the aid of a queen. —Martha Crosier
Forgotten Men
This weekend several thousand persons watched the KU Relays and parade, attended the Engineering Exposition and danced to the music of Les Brown. And despite the rain the weekend was a success.
Many persons worked hard to get things ready. Yet let us not forget that the main persons who should have been honored were the members of the track team. The relays dance should be considered as a celebration—a celebration for the track team.
Yet this year, due to the fact that many fraternities were having parties on Saturday, it was decided to have the all school dance on Friday. This may have met with the favorable approval of the fraternities but the change in days made it impossible for the trackmen to attend since they had to perform the next day.
Next year's Relays committee should consider just how many couples would really attend if the dance were on Saturday when the track team could attend. —M. C.
Tin Eagle
Editor:
When Sam Smith wrote in the April 15 issue of the Daily Kansas that student editorials have been abusing the bird symbol, whose "caricature stimulates immediate recognition of our institution," he has, in my opinion, tripped on his own words.
This is the fate of our symbol, the Jayhawk, whose spirit lies hidden somewhere in midst that tinnagle.
When an idea, whose manifestation is a symbol, is forged into the concreteness of words or bronze, it can either be enhanced and immortalized by human power or maimed and immortalized by human limitations, or both.
Con Henderson Stanberry, Mo., junior
Editor:
Greek Bias
Editor:
I am a citizen of Leavenworth and I have followed your student discussions concerning the lack of democracy in the Greek housing at KU. Might I, not as a former KU
student but as a present resident of the Jayhawker state, make a comment concerning this.
To me the significance of the national fraternity and sorority organizations deleting the racial and religious clauses from their constitutions has little meaning. The problem is that the local chapters still include such restrictions in their initiation rituals and oaths!
This Greek group will not pledge someone because he is a Negro; another because he is Jewish; another because he is white; another because he is protestant; another because he is Roman Catholic, and so it goes, on and on.
I think that a Greek group would do three things to show good democratic faith:
1. Remove restrictive clauses from their national charters, as many, many groups have already done.
2. Remove restrictive clauses from initiation rituals.
3. Invite members of other religious and racial groups to participate in rush week and if one or more of the "special" groups are satisfactory in every way, but in
their race or religion, ask them to pledge.
This old idea of individual selection and living with whom you wish is fine as far as it goes but it does not go far enough. I hope we realize that the last bastion of Greek strength is in the Middle West and if we don't make the Greek organizations totally democratic we will be censored right out of existence.
The question is, is my Greek fraternity or sorority worth keeping?
Harold C. Applegate
Students Unaware
Many reasons are given at various times for the lack of student interest in school politics. I think that one important reason was found in yesterday's paper.
Quoting your article on page eight of the April 15 Daily Kansas, I find these phrases referring to the elections; "too much mickey mouse," "elections are amusing," "I think they're a farce because they aren't democratic," "shady dealings," "undue accusations and false information," and "trash mail."
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS BY BIBLER
"WELL WE CAN'T PROMOTE TH' WHOLE FACULTY-GET ME A LIT OF THE TEACHERS WHO OWN A HOME, HAVE A LARGE FAMILY AND CAN'T AFFORD TO MOVE AWAY."
John L. Herring Muncie Senior
If this year's elections are going to be perpetrated in a like manner in the future, the student governing body had just as well be abandoned.
It is obvious that many of the students are aware of the true nature of KU elections. They are a lot of sound and fury by a few people seeking to add to their prestige and school activities list.
Poetry Corner It's Hail and Farewell
By Geneva Mendenhall
It takes time to know a man, time To get acquainted, time to think. Right now.
I'm fascinated with Mark Twain,
Intrigued with Eddie Robinson, and
Enamored of Bob Frost. But here
Comes my professor with C.
Sandburg! What's a poor girl to do?
About the time I begin to get
Emotionally involved, someone
Else comes along!
Talk about a split personality— Man, I'm fairly splintered!
New Hampshire's state legislature is the largest in the United States with 400 representatives and 24 senators.
By Alexandra Mason
THE YOUNG CAESAR, by Rex Warner. New American Library, 1959. 50c.
Any fictional autobiography of a Roman must invite comparison with Robert Graves' superb "I, Claudius," and come out the worse for the comparison. The Young Caesar stands up to the test remarkably well, much better than, for instance, Hadrian's Memoirs.
Warner's task was made both easier and harder by the large body of Caesar's writings which are extant. The problem of presenting a convincing and interesting character who is consistent with the man who wrote the Gallic and Civil Wars, and at the same time explains that man, is not inconsiderable.
The attempt has been remarkably successful. If Julius Caesar had, disturbed by vague prescience of his death, composed his autobiography on the night of March 14, 44 B.C., he might well have written the book that Warner has given us.
This Caesar may perhaps lack some ordinary human dimension, but not a dimension which such a man could be expected to concern himself with in his autobiography.
He is a clear-sighted man, a man of logical and practical mind. He looks at himself as he looks at other men, with cold consideration of his own advantages and disadvantages. He does not deny either, but makes good use of the one set of qualities and keeps a careful eye on the other.
He does not make the mistake of assuming that he always acted as dispassionately, or turned his passions to such good use, as he can at 58, but neither does he make the companion error of considering all his youthful acts either charming folly or juvenile madness. He evaluates each act of his political life and judges it for efficacy and fitness in its immediate place as well as in the larger universe of the changing Roman political and social pattern.
He reveals himself, intentionally, as an ambitious and ruthless man with a strong desire for personal advancement, but also as a far-sighted man with a great concern for the survival of his country and people. These characteristics, acting in concert, produce his deliberate construction of that dictatorship which, in the hands of following Caesars, became the Empire.
Whether we consider this admirable or dastardly is of little import. It is drawn clearly and undeniably here, with its genesis in the bloody riots of Marius-Sulla feud, in the hideously corrupt government and taxation of the provinces, and in the great egoism and undeniable genius for power of Caesar himself.
Stylistically the book is certainly admirable. Warner has given us a quiet, sardonic narrative with no wasted words, though a trifle more expanded than Caesar's highly compressed war notebooks. It is extremely readable, quite Caesarian, and lends itself easily to ruthless character sketches as well as to the exposition of political events.
The descriptions of Cicero ("He has always seen himself as a character intruded into a history book.") and Cato ("Though still under thirty years of age, Cata had already acquired an important and indeed unique reputation. He had done this by his extreme pig-headedness, and by his affectionation of what he imagined to have been the ancient virtues—an affection so consistent and intense as almost to deserve the name of sincerity.") demonstrate its aptness for a dry and delightful humor.
The Young Caesar ends with Caesar's forty-third year. Since he lived to be fifty-eight we are left with the possibility that Mr. Warner may intend to publish a similar account of Caesar's last fifteen years. I sincerely hope so; it should be worth waiting for.
Worth Repeating
In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
—Geetrude Stein in "The Geographical History of America"
***
It is sometimes the man who opens the door who is the last to enter the room.
—Elizabeth Asquith Bibesco in "The Fir and the Palm"
***
Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty. —Sir Anthony Eden
Dailu Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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