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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, March 11, 1959
You Asked for It
Last week The Daily Kansan received a letter from an independent student asking that it avail itself to answer questions concerning student government at the University. He felt this was the only way most independents would learn about the All Student Council's functions.
The Daily Kansan editors agreed that it would aid in any way possible and asked independent students to let us know what questions they have.
Since then we have received one question concerning the two campus political parties. The story in answer to this will appear in a few days.
However, since we received only one question we are left to assume that either the students know all there is to know about student government or that they just don't care.
That the students know all there is to know about the ASC and campus politics is extremely dubious. Only those students who have read the ASC and political party constitutions, the
many reports and spent time actually working in student government would be able to meet these qualifications.
Our only choice then is to assume that students aren't really interested.
Why don't they? It isn't because the Greeks are dominating them completely. It is because they just aren't interested.
Independent students out number the Greeks on campus. They could have a very powerful voice in student government.
ASC elections will be held in April. Some independents will wonder why they don't have more delegates on the ASC. The number of representatives elected is in proportion to the number of ballots cast. The number of representatives the independents have will depend on the number who vote.
How the independents fare in respect to the ASC will depend mostly upon them.
—Martha Crosier
Curious Cleanup for Classes
A bill has been introduced in the Missouri Legislature which would bar teaching of evolution as a fact. "If you teach a boy he comes from an animal, he'll act like it," one of the sponsors of the bill told a legislative committee.
Teachers would be subject to dismissal for saying that man is descended from the apes. Textbooks which accept the theory of evolution would be barred.
But these protectors - of - innocent - children should not stop with evolution in their campaign to clean up the curriculum.
How about those nasty old literature courses in which students read about that murderer and thief, Ruddy Raskolnikov? Might students not be tempted to re-create the crime?
It is rumored that some history books quote Thomas Jefferson as saying "A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing in the political world." We had better burn such books quickly,
or the students will soon be rioting in the streets.
While we're cleaning out the dangerous stuff they're teaching in schools nowadays, let's get rid of the words of that wild Englishman, Tom Hobbes, who said that man is basically selfish and warlike.
This is certainly no way to talk. We defenders of truth, freedom, motherhood and apple pie won't hear of it. We can't have these dissenters messing up this best of all possible worlds.
There are many more vicious, degrading and unhealthy teachings existing today under the protection of our schools. But I'll leave it to the gentlemen from Missouri to take care of them.
They will be doing the students a big favor by eliminating the study of evolution, and so forth. This will leave more time for extracurricular activities—such as beer-hall loitering, dragging and rolling drunks. —Jack Harrison
Editor:
Available for the Greek Week Dance, March 21, are thirteen rooms with allotted tickets. For the use of these rooms twenty-eight fraternities have the right to vie. The policy on what fraternity receives which room has been, "first come, first serve." On Tuesday last, fraternities had responsible representatives lining the activities
area of the Student Union, in response to this policy, at 6:15 a.m. The ticket sales were scheduled to begin at 7:00 p.m.
Why is it then that when a fraternity requests a room that has not been taken by a fraternity holding a higher position in line, they are told that the room has been reserved before ticket sales ever began, and there is no action
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
that can be taken on the matter.
Where then have ethical standards disappeared to? Do others feel superior to the fraternity system under which they live? Or are they too lazy to compete with the other fraternities for the choice of rooms! It is this type of action that condemns fraternities and leads to the malfunctioning of one of the few prominently active organizations on this campus.
"T UNDERSTAND WITH THE RANK OF COLLEGE PRESIDENT GOES THE RIGHT TO DESIGN YOUR UNIFORM."
Greek Week, especially, should be a highly cooperative undertaking among all Greek houses!
Due to the intricacy of this matter. I request that my name be withheld.
John Jacob Aster was cut off without a cent of the family fortunes when his brother Vincent died in February. It just proves the old axiom, "you can't take it with you," but you sure can tell it where to go.
Short Ones
Dailu Hansan UNIVERSITY
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By Stanley Solomon Assistant Instructor of English
THE WRITER AND HIS CRAFT, edited by Roy Cowden, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, $1.25.
Under the misleading title of "The Writer and His Craft," Roy Cowden has assembled twenty miscellaneous lectures on literature which have been given annually in honor of the Hopwood Awards for creative writing presented at the University of Michigan.
Many of the "big names" of modern scholarship and writing are represented here: Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Carl Van Doren, Mark Van Doren, Louise Bogan, Henry Canby, Robert Morss Lovett.
This collection, however, is disappointing. For one thing, the reader is left with the impression that the book is a hodgepodge of unrelated, sometimes contradictory, and often vague lectures that are perhaps worth listening to but somewhat tedious to read.
Some of the essays are considerably dated, dealing with topics that are no longer important, e.g., Henry Hazlitt's attack on socialist literary criticism, Morley's evaluation of Don Marquis as the successor to Mark Twain.
Since no lecture is typical of the others, I would point out a few of special interest. F. O. Mattihessen, in "The Responsibilities of the Critic," advises the young critic to turn away from purely textual considerations (new criticism) toward a wider awareness of the social content of literature.
Walter Eaton's "American Drama versus Literature" expresses an unusual viewpoint and is apparently written for the purpose of revealing his startling lack of taste. In the essay he attempts to show that a forgotten American play about Rip Van Winkle is better than the "Duchess of Mali" and "The Way of the World."
In "Literature in an Age of Science," Max Eastman separates literature from the realm of truth, which belongs to science. It is all right to read poetry, says Eastman, but you will find in it only the writer's experience, not his vision of truth, which is worth nothing.
The crowning piece of insight occurs in Robert Penn Warren's lecture on the themes in Robert Frost. Commenting on the poem "Come In," the critic notes these lines:
Thrush music—hark!
I meant not even if asked,
I would not come in.
And I hadn't been.
The poet does not enter the woods, says Warren, because "we have the implication that the bird cannot speak to the man. It has not the language of man."
Very little can be found in "The Writer and His Craft" that is new, but some of the lectures might serve as a general introduction to various schools of critical thought. After all, an anthology of twenty more or less reputable scholars and writers must have a few pages that will reward the patient reader.
Worth Repeating
"Life is the only thing we have to live. We owe it to ourselves that the generations coming up to our colleges and universities and technical schools and institutes are given something more than methods, philosophies, professions, languages, apparatus, and friendships.
"They must learn that individual taste is but a changing pattern of constant values,but they must first learn what those values are. In acquiring good taste they must learn to weigh and to discriminate.
"They must learn to use, to honor, to enrich, to love and not to mutilate, the marvelous language which they have inherited. They must learn, as Edwin Arlington Robinson and a hundred other poets have said, that in the end man mostly goes alone.
"They must fear only what Anne Morrow Lindberg calls 'spiritual isolation.' They must assimilate all they can from the companionship of their own collected books and pictures, the inspiration of noble architecture, music, and great art, the pleasure in such things as Colonial silver and the drawings of Claude Lorrain, and the precision of a beautiful face of type.
'They must learn instinctively and immediately to judge and to recognize the first-rate as above the second-rate. They must strengthen their Virgilian inheritance to delight in the landscape, the sea, the stars, and all the skymarks of the night, and the physical world in which they live.
"They must be able to distinguish honest sentiment from senti- mentality and to inform the exactness of scholarship with the inexactness of poetry.
"They must learn the true meaning of culture; and above all that 'scraps of information,' as Professor Whitehead has said, 'have nothing to do with it.' They must learn of other men's companionship with rivers and the tops of mountains.
"They must be like the Greeks when Thucydides said of them that they possessed 'the power of thinking before they acted, and of acting, too.' They must believe in something deeper than themselves, and we must help them intimately to that belief."
—David McCord, in an address to Milton Academy Chapter of the Cum Laude Society, May 1958.