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University Daily Kansan Monday. Feb. 9, 1959
'Pud' or 'Busy Work'?
"I signed up for three pdu courses, so I ought to make it through my two tough courses okay."
to make it through my two tough courses okay. That was a remark heard in the Hawk's Nest after enrollment.
That statement was re-echoed many times during the three-day enrollment period. And in many instances the so-called pud course had little or no relationship to the student's major field of study.
Why do students spend valuable time and money taking courses which are of little worth to them?
In many cases students are forced to do so because of the many hours of preparation needed for other courses as compared with the little time needed for the pud courses.
What is needed in many departments is a reevaluation of courses in terms of credit given. One student, when asked why he signed up for a 2-
hour course on "the birds and the bees," replied that he was taking another 2-hour course that demanded 12 hours of outside preparation each week. The two would average out, he said.
Another student confessed that in one 3-hour course last semester he had to spend two hours on outside preparation. Another 3-hour course required 12 hours of homework. He received an "A" in both courses. The former, he said, was a pud.
There is no slide rule available that will evaluate all courses so that it would take the same number of hours of outside work to prepare for all 3-hour courses. But many of the inequalities could be reduced.
If a re-evaluation were made it also would tend to eliminate some of the vying among some instructors to see who can pile the most "busy work" on the students. —Harry Ritter
Call for Tobacco Prohibition
Sometime during the winter, a South Dakota chain smoker and senator suffered a hot flash. The result of this twinge developed as one of the more interesting vagaries in the history of legislation in the wheat and cattle country.
This senator, too far gone to curb his own vice, apparently felt the surest path to salvation lay in warning the youth of his commonwealth against the evils of Nicotiana tabacum.
He forthwith sponsored a bill in the Dakota Senate which would: Put a skull and crossbones on every pack of cigarettes sold in the state; add a warning that use of cigarettes could cause cancer and heart trouble; admonish that the state does not recommend use of the product.
The Senate passed the bill, less the cancer-cardiac warning, 18-16.
But the forces of health, purity, and the Reader's Digest did not prevail. The House of Representatives, clearly composed of Thinking Men, defeated the bill.
It seems a pity the bill was beaten; it had so many possibilities. For instance, how would the
Pure Food and Drug people react to a "poison" label on cigarettes? How would DeWitt Clinton feel about a constrained vis-a-vis with the Jolly Roger? Would a prescription be needed to buy filter-tips?
But discriminatory labeling (someone in the tobacco industry would be sure to call it that) is not the answer.
I propose, in its place, Prohibition. We have the mechanics of the system all worked out, through our experience with the 18th Amendment. And the nostalgic longing for the Jazz Era and the hectic Twenties would provide popular support for Prohibition. We simply take the rum fleet out of mothballs, develop kitchen drying sheds in place of the gin-making bathtub, and we have the Twenties back again.
As a matter of fact, I was disappointed to see the bill fail. I was all set up with a fleet of fast cars to run in unstamped cigarettes from Minnesota.
Anyone want a matched set of 12 Stutz Bear-cats? —Al Jones
Advertising Works for Us
Around the campus this week you will be seeing signs with the slogan "Advertising Works For You." They are part of the observation of national Advertising Week which began Sunday and will run through Saturday.
Why should we be celebrating Advertising Week? Because as the slogan says, advertising works for us.
How does advertising work for us? It makes shopping easier, keeps prices down by stimulating
competition, and makes jobs more secure. Advertising creates mass markets, which in turn calls for the mass production of goods upon which our economic system is largely based.
As President Eisenhower said, "Advertising makes a constant and creative contribution to our national economy. With persuasive power it alerts our people to certain needs, informs them of opportunities and helps them in their decision-making." —Martha Crosier
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
"WE SEATED YOU HERE IN TH' BACK, REMEMBER?"
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904,
trieweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Dailu Hansan UNIVERSITY
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Member Inland Daily Press Association.
Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 420 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y.
Represented by national. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $4.50 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and special events. Offered as second-class letter September 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan., post office under act of March 3, 1879.
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Douglas Parker ... Managing Editor
Al Jones, John Husar, Jack Harrison,
Irwin Jones, James Treadwell,
lorsers; Jack Morton and Carol Allen,
Co-Clity Editors; George Bord and
Carol Dillon, David Holmes;
Harry Ritter and Coo Poiler, Assistant
Sports Editors; Saundra Hayn,
Society Editor; Donnel Nelson and
Nancy Whalen, Assistant Society
Editors.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Feitz Business Manager Robert Lida, Advertising Manager; Howard Young, Classified Advertising Manager; William F. Kane, Promotion Manager; Paul Nielsen, Circulation Manager.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Pat Swanson and Martha Crosier, Co-
sultant and Harwil, Associate
Editorial Editor
By Calder M. Pickett
Assistant Professor of Journalism
ANGRY VOICES, by Donald R. McCoy. Kansas Press, S4.
Donald R. McCoy, assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas, has told an absorbing and important story in "Angry Voices."
Here, although he subtitles the book "Left-of-Center Politics in the New Deal Era," McCoy presents the story of protest groups—from left to right, though chiefly of the left—who could accept neither the methods nor the end of the New Deal.
Those of the staunch right, who think Roosevelt and his followers took a sharp turn toward Communism from which the United States will never recover, should read "Angry Voices" to refresh their memories about that period. It was an era of experimentation more than reform, of conciliation rather than alienation
Roosevelt and the New Deal were not out to destroy—nor did they harm—capitalism, which seems to have recovered from the NRA (though some Lincoln Day orators would scarcely concede as much). The groups which McCoy discusses in "Angry Voices" thought the New Deal far too mild. They wanted social revolution, not just slight social change.
One such group was the League for Independent Political Action, founded in September, 1929, by persons who were satisfied with neither major party—John Dewey, Zona Gale, Oswald Garrison Villard, Robert Morss Lovett, Reinhold Niebuhr, and others including a young professor of economics at the University of Chicago named Paul Douglas.
The LIPA opposed "unequal distribution of the national income," a stand which came to have more meaning and to become more apparent as Americans saw the level upon which many existed in the depression.
The discontent of the LIPA was one political current of the early '30s. To the LIPA, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt was not cause to cheer. The organization continued to work not within the Democratic party but independently, striving for a third party that could achieve enough strength to win its own elections.
It saw hope in the successes of the Farmer-Labor movement in Minnesota, in working with the revolutionary organization known as the Farmers' Holiday Assn., which applied the boycott and picketing to gain prices equal to costs of production.
In California there was the old muckraker Upton Sinclair, frightening conservatives with his EPIC—"End Poverty in California." In the Pacific Northwest, traditionally a hot spot of political radicalism, there were the Washington and Oregon Commonwealth Federations.
In Wisconsin there was the Progressive party of the LaFollettes, who had been seeking reform for years before Roosevelt and his college professors came on the scene. In Minnesota there was the Farmer-Labor party. Even in the South there was ferment, in the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.
As for the factions of the right, these McCoy labels "God's Angry Men." They were Father Coughlin, a Roosevelt supporter at first but gradually a leading spokesman for American fascism; Huey Long in Louisiana, followed by his lieutenant, Gerald L. K. Smith.
These are the "angry voices" of Donald McCoy, voices so different, as he says in his conclusion, from today's heroes of liberalism—Dean Acheson, Alben Barkley, Adlai Stevenson and Harry Truman.
It Looks This Way...
By George DeBord
It is quite easy to prove that winter is here. The group of girl watchers has disappeared from in front of Strong Hall, and all the campus dogs have gone inside.
The Congressman who introduced the bill calling for a simplification of our language can expect a lot of support from those on the hill who recently flunked the English proficiency exam.
An acquaintance on the debate team had this explanation for the team's recent loss to the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary debaters: He said:
"They have a lot more time to prepare."
That magnificent stone building being built to house mice will probably be greeted with enthusiasm by the members of the faculty who while away their hours in the drafty confines of Strong annex.
But the mice are for scientific research. And science is pretty important. In fact, we're all taking an abundance of science courses these days. Apparently, it is becoming increasingly more important to know precisely how we will disintegrate when our scientists develop a super cobalt bomb.
You can't blame the members of the Kansas State Board of Review if they don't wish to say exactly why they banned the Swedish film from the campus. After all, it is hardly proper for people in such positions to go around discussing dirty pictures.
American women are reported to be more insulted than flattered to overhear nice things said about them. This apparently means that men are to arm themselves with insults if they want to be popular.
Instead of greeting a choice chick with the old wolf whistle, this new Romeo will probably approach her something like this:
"Hey you, your socks are baggin'."