UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
OCTOBER 11,1978
Library split unsound
It seems to be a forgotten notion that a university exists to serve the interests of its students.
At least, the University's decision to divide the art library between Watson Library and Spencer Museum of Art would seem to indicate this. There were few, if any, viable reasons given for the split.
No, the move would not make the art library more accessible for most students or faculty. In fact, the administration has said that the proliferation of branch libraries was wasteful and inefficient.
HOWEVER, that apparently mattered very little in the decision. The deciding factor was a commitment to the department of art history and to individuals who had donated money to build Spencer, according to Del Shankel, executive vice chancellor.
A dilemma was clear: break the commitment and serve the interests of students and faculty or keep the promise and promote library inefficiency. As usual, students lost.
The library move will be made, despite petitions from the faculty opposing the art library split. But the
precedent of a new branch library could have consequences that will not haunt the administration, but could perpetuate the inconvenience and inefficiency that students now endure with the branch library system.
ALTHOUGH the University has said it planned to consolidate the branches in the future, the inconsistency of the art library decision with the consolidation plan casts doubts on the completion of that plan.
The need for a central library, where all materials would be accessible to all faculty and students, is paramount.
Such a library would provide the most advantages, especially convenience, to the largest number of students and faculty. Just as progress toward that goal was beginning, the University has faltered and has reversed directions.
How can the University expect one department to give up its branch library if others are allowed to exist, or worse, are allowed to be established.
Apparently the University's commitment on the art library will be kept, but it's questionable whether the University can say the same for its commitments to students.
Technological advances are realistic, necessary
To the editor :
I wish to take issue with Bill Beeer's letter in the I.O. 2 Kansan. "Technology column lacked realistic view." Clearly, it was Mr. Beeer's view. At least, it is woefully shortsided. At the least, it is woefully shortsided.
Beems writes of the inevitable limit of "finite resources." I venture to suggest that this is an extremely tight viewpoint. Our advanced technology may not create new resource types, but we can make use of these resources which have been until now, inaccessible as the moon.
Those resources are deep in the earth's crust, on the ocean floor, and literally on the moon itself. While it sounds like science fiction, we have today the capability to build a lunar base into space, and to fuel it with raw materials mined in space. One good example is electric power. Solar power, collected in orbit and beamed to earth via maser, will eventually allow us to travel time, and at a price we can afford to pay—both financially and environmentally.
Myron Kayton's suggestion that 10 percent of the welfare budget be diverted to research is not callous; it is eminently realistic. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare has publicly said that more than 7 percent of its budget is wasted each year, and the rest is spent without noticeable result.
On the other hand, money spent on research has always paid high dividends. The space program, for example, has made a huge difference in cash. That doesn't count the innumerable side benefits such as medical developments, meal programs for isolated elderly people in Texas, environmental monitoring and research, and the devices to provide surrogate eyes for the blind, and a multitude of other developments in uncountable areas. A little thought put into this would mean which of our lives has been improved by advanced technology or its side effects.
Our high technology feeds about a third of the world. Our high technology has virtually eliminated smallpox, and proposes to end it. Our high technology crippled millions of human beings in recorded history. Our high technology gives us communications literally undreamed of before the invention of the printer; the poorest of us richer than the kings of medieval history, and has added years or decades to our lives. These are facts that Mr. Beemens simply cannot ignore, try though.
As Alvin Toffer writes in *Future Shock*, "Only romantic fools bake about returning to a 'state of nature.'" A state of nature is one in which infants shrivel and die for lack of elementary medical care, in which parents are called upon by Hobbes reminded us, the typical life was "poor, nasty, brutish and short." We cannot forsake our technology, even if we want to.
KANSAN letters
And I do not believe that most people want it.
Kenneth Mitchell Topeka senior
Anti-technology view is unsound argument
To the editor:
I would like to respond to a letter by Bill Beems (Oct. 2 Kansas) dealing with Myron Kayton's view that 10 percent of the federal welfare budget should be taken away from the unproductive poor and given to the needy. I have argued in my arguments against this view are unsound.
Bill Beems claims that the development of high technology will result in the depletion of energy and mineral resources and in the disfiguration of the land through mining and lumbering. Considering that consumption of resources has gone on for more than 200 years, these activities can not be attributed to the recently developed high technology
Furthermore, high technology will increase the availability of energy and mineral resources. High technology will increase energy resources by allowing the development of more efficient collectors of energy, and the development of hydrogen fusion.
High technology will increase the availability of mineral resources, as well, by allowing these resources to be recycled. Recycling will be done more effectively and less expensively using high technology methods.
Money should not be given to the poor at the expense of funding for research in science.
Medicine Lodge junior
Mark Cline
The question of "Prostitution and Feminism" was not even approached during the Oct. 5 lecture sponsored by the feminist group The Women's League. Rather it bordered on a tasteless, pathetic, and informative 'question and answer' about the varied aspects of a prostitute's lifestyle.
Jess D. Paul
A program of this nature does nothing to enhance the cause of the feminist movement. It seems that the Commission on the Status of Women would use more logical reasoning than a mere responsibility towards their goals in programming while using Student Senate funds.
Ocelot lecture failed feminist cause
Ingalls senior
To the editor:
The University Daily Kansas welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is after graduation, they should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansas reserves the right to edit letters for publication.
U.S. should reject Smith's aid plan
Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith was at a private estate in the Northern Virginia hills Sunday morning preparing for a last-ditch effort to enlist U.S. support to rescue his plan for a black majority government in Salisbury.
Letters Policy
Smith's visit is somewhat official, but barely so. He was invited by SEN. S.1. Hayakawa, R-Calil, and 26 other senators who oppose what they consider U.S. and British attempts to surrender Rhodesia to a leftist-dominated black coalition.
The Carter administration opposed Smith's visit because he has blocked an "alliances conference" the United States and France have signed toward establishing a black majority rule in Rhodesia. The conference would include leftist guerrilla leaders with whom Smith had worked.
Smith's arrival on the outskirts of the U.S. capital less than a month after Jimmy Carter's Mideast triumph at Camp David represents an embarrassment for the administration, which delayed for two weeks his request for a visa.
INSTEAD, SMITH has chosen his own route. His biracial transition government shares power with moderate blacks. He promised March 3 to reinpower power to black voters, and he agreed to the year, as long as guarantee are made for the safety and property of the 260,000 whites
Rick Alm
who have governed the country for the past 13 years.
Smith's position has never been more perilous. Black guerrillas are increasingly bold in the countryside, shooting down a civil warrior last month and massacring 10 men in the crash. White emigration and economic depression have become serious problems.
But the United States need not feel any sympathy for Ian Smith. He has, with his bullish recalcitrance, courted his own destruction since he unilaterally declared Rhodesia's independence from Great Britain in 1985 rather than accept Black
THE RACIAL policy angered and alienated every Western government. They forced black leaders to extremism and, eventually, into armed rebellion. Smith agreed to majority rule only when faced with the Nicaraguan war that threatened to bleed his country.
His regime, never recognized by the United States, has been guilty of the worst sort of racial policies. Blacks have been excluded from owning most of Rhodesia's better farmland, condemned to hard or mental labor, sent to grossly inferior schools and, until this year, absolutely forbidden any political voice.
Smith bungled successive opportunities to settle with black leaders on terms more favorable than those he can now get, each time offering too little, too little. He has twice twisted of agreements with Britain that offered advantageous to his white constituents.
Smith is at the end of his rule. The United States, in reality, cannot save him; it cannot perpetuate white rule. But the American right, including Hayakawa, has been cautiously advancing U.S. intervention in Rhodesia.
Smith, scheduled to travel to several cities and appear on television on his 7- to 10-day visit, will probably do all he can to make sure that the U.S. is locked into a no-win guerrilla war in Africa.
THE OTHER- and greater-danger involves the impact the trip might have in Africa. It could, as the English magazine Economist said, "leave Rhodiasis's whites
to believe that some kind of rabbit may yet be pulled out of the hat."
That rabbit is U.S. aid. If that impression emerges in Rhodesia after the Smith visit, it could stiffen the resolve of the bitter-ent white and convince them that some hope remains in the policies that have proved so disasterous.
A too warm welcome for Smith might, in addition, hinder U.S. efforts to enlist cooperation from the "front-line" African leaders—Kenneth Kununda of Zambia, Jilaluyne Nyerere of Tanzania, Samora Machel of Angola, and Mwana Mcheloi of Angola—in the transition to black rule.
These leaders, militant foes of Smith, could, if they mistake U.S. intentions, encourage Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, leaders of the Patriotic Front sign of harassment against Rhodesian whites, that will mean more deaths on both sides.
Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance will visit Smithville to hope that Russell Smith has hopes of U.S. intervention are futile; that negotiations with Nkomo and Mugabe, the powerful black leaders, must succeed.
If Vanceance, Smith's trip to the United States will lead him back to intransience. And it will mean a bloody birth country that will be called Zimbabwe.
MARBLE THE EXCLUSIVE WORLD LANDSCAPE
© 2018 BY CHICAGO TREASURES
Trade agreements would benefit all
N. Y. Times Feature
By ROBERTS. STRAUSS N.Y.Times Feature
WASHINGTON - In Bonn this summer the chiefs of state of the world's seven leading industrialized nations reached a consensus on a new global policy and significantly improve world commercial relations for the next decade. The states, including Washington and decisive voices in those discussions.
Our own seemingly self-sufficient nation has also found itself bound up in this growth of world trade. Today, one out of every three acres of farm land under cultivation is producing crops for export, and one of every three employing jobs is producing for markets overseas.
The decisions promise not only a containment of universal pressures of trade protectionism, but also support for a substantial package of trade agreements—agreements that can use the engine of world trade to create jobs, stimulate new growth and offer the world's consumers an anti-affluent range of product choices.
WITH THIS impetus from major industrialized nations, negotiators from 98 countries will meet again in Geneva in the coming months to conclude four years of negotiations to revise the rules under which nations trade with each other.
All of this appears rather remote to most Americans. World trade seems distant, but the fact is that the package of agreements that we can achieve will have an impact over the next decade on practically every one of us.
This management is no longer in the
BUT AS our current trade deficit shows, we also need to burrow in the world market 48 percent of exports or greater percentage of other raw materials and imports. There are many materials and foods that we need.
Thus, trade has become vital to our national and individual well-being, and how it is managed should be of concern to all our citizens.
World trade now exceeds $1 trillion each year. This staggering figure reduced to more understandable proportions means that international trade on mined or on earth is traded between nations.
private sector of the economy, but is in the hands of governments: Controls, practices and programs of various kinds greatly affect government activity, often causing distortions and erecting barriers.
It is such measures, far more than tariffs, which today restrain trade. Billions of dollars worth of American goods and services are processed through devices such as national purchasing policies, product standards, import licensing procedures, subsidized competition and tariffs.
THESE AND other non-tariff barriers are the major object of the so-called "Tokyo Round" of multilateral trade negotiations in which we are engaged and which are being encouraged at the highest political levels. We hope to come away from these talks with a new set of codes which reduce or eliminate trade barriers between countries which are fairer and freer and subject to objective review and impartial dispute settlement.
Still other elements of the negotiations are designed to revise existing trade rules that have proved unworkable and that have been honored more in the breach than in practice. One example is the so-called safeguard rules, which spell out what governments can
The key among our objectives in these negotiations is better access for American agricultural products on the world markets. Indeed, this is a condition without which there will be no agreement brought back for the Congress to ratify.
THIS NEGOTIATION will also encompass tariff reductions. Over the past decade the major countries of the world have successfully negotiated substantial reductions in each other's tariffs, so that the average tariff in the major countries is now only about 7 percent. All through the decade, we all will many tariffs that pose a substantial barrier to our exports, and we seek to reduce those remaining trade barriers.
By 1988, the average tariff will probably be around 5 percent. This result would be gradual, phased in over a period of eight years, which will smooth adjustments to new conditions and allow the community to make investments on the basis of an expanding world market.
to do limit imports temporarily when the rapid growth of imports in any one industry becomes a problem.
WE HAVE made outstanding progress in the negotiations, though some very difficult issues remain. Our these issues can be resolved on a reasonable and pragmatic basis, as they can be with the proper political will, we will have a good chance of achieving strong world trading system for the future.
The Tokyo Round presents us with a unique opportunity to succeed where generation of trade negotiators before us have improved, workable set of international trade rules that can help keep the main emphasis on trade expansion on a steady, even basis.
Experience has taught us that improved trading relationships can spur new investment, new jobs, healthy economic growth and improved living standards.
SOME OF THE world's darkest days have flowed from restrictions on trade and the introduction of new technology.
our greatest encouragement comes from the lesson that expansion of trade has helped in recovering from such depressed conditions.
The choice, therefore, is not a difficult one. But it will take the continued commitment of the strongest nations in the free world to achieve the goal.
President Carter's commitment to an enlightened leader has been a source of helpful help. Although there is still no certainty that a satisfactory agreement will be achieved, it is clear that Mr. Obama is making
Let no one misunderstand, we will bring back and present to the Congress an agreement that is in the best interest of the United States and of the free world or we will not bring one back at all. We will leave it on the negotiating table in Geneva.
Ambassador Robert S. Straus, a Texas lawyer, is President Carter's special representative for trade negotiations and a member of the Democratic National Committee.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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