UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of other contributors.
OCTOBER 6.1978
Raise student wages
Pity the poor working student, that underpaid lackey of corporate America.
The working student often toils for a meager sum, usually less than the minimum wage. Unfortunately, that will soon be true for students who work for the University of Kansas.
Although Congress approved a minimum wage increase from $2.65 an hour to $2.90 beginning in January 1979, student workers at KU won't benefit. They must continue to slave away for $2.65, apparently not the equal of the average citizen.
At least that seems to have been the philosophy of the Kansas Board of Regents and the Kansas Legislature last spring when they refused to provide enough money to allow Regents schools to pay their student labor force the 25-cent increase.
IN FACT, the Legislature approved only enough funding to provide for an hourly wage of $2.65 when the minimum wage will be $2.90. Anything above that amount must be provided by the individual universities.
By paying lower wages, the Regents and Legislature said, universities will be able to employ more students.
But not content with such an unjust
system, the Student Senate Rights Committee has sent a resolution to the full Senate calling for its support of minimum wage for students at Regents schools. The resolution, which will be considered at the Senate meeting next week, states:
"THOSE WHO are a part of the student labor force have as much right as any citizen to a fair and liveable wage. The student labor force is at least competent enough to warrant wages equal to the lowest national wage standard."
There should be little argument that students, no different from other workers, deserve minimum wage for their labors. And so it is the problem of funding that remains.
However, the solution should fall upon the Legislature, where it properly belongs. Although holding down government expenditures should be an important concern of the next Legislature, to refuse to provide a fair wage for all workers would be inexcusable.
The Senate, along with student lobbying groups, must press hard for what is rightfully owed to student workers at Regents schools: $2.90 an hour.
'Failure to communicate tackled in qhetto school
By STANLEY WILLIAM ROTHSTEIN
FULLERTE  alf-Alan Sands stood at the front of his classroom and spoke urgently to his eight grade students. They listened, but no one asked him to be asked answer, they tried to answer it.
They used the language of the street to express themselves. No one seemed to understand one. The children talked the way they spoke in their ghetto communities, Alan Sands, their teacher, understood. In this classroom, students were trying to communicate with one another.
There were 30 youngsters present and many of them did not participate in the discussion. Being able to talk depends on the student's confidence and status in the class. Young people often say, "I'm a teacher said, 'you make it possible for them to use language to solve their problems.'"
THIS TEACHER is one of many who have been trained at a nearby university. He once attended public schools much like the one he now works in. But there is a difference: when he was a boy he went to alhawaii and when he was an adult he went to Hawaii. Now he is a teacher in a ghetto school and he is experiencing the other side of segregation.
THEERE ARE NO jobs in the white, middle-class schools and Sands has been denied the normal career path that progresses from an undesirable urban school to a better suburban one. He did not even try to transfer. He made up his mind that he was going to do his teaching in this inner-city school. He wanted to make a career, to face the challenge of educating children who seemed destined for failure.
Sands puts a great deal of time into planning his lessons. One of his classes is making a motion picture; the students read, write and study about things that are related to the making of this movie, which will be shown to the entire school.
IT ISN'T EASY to make the classes interesting, especially when many of the youngsters are turned off by school. Their feelings are the result of years of traumatic handling during which they have been told that they are incompetent and unworthy and that teachers then, is based on the results of the early experiences their students.
Sands has been at this junior high school
for three years, and his attitude has
changed.
"I feel like I'm doing a job here," he said.
"No matter what else is happen to these kids, something good is happening when they come into this room. But most of what
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they've learned in school is negative. They're not smart enough, good enough, proud enough. But there are so many good people in this school system. And there are so many students who could be so much better to be if we could give them a little more help."
SANDS UNDERSTANDS that the language of the ghetto is not the language of serious study. These kids have a language in which immigrants do. But no one looks at it.
"No one wants to attack the problems," he said.
Sands and other teachers in this school know that the best teachers still try to be great.
"That leaves us with a lot of new and inexperienced teachers each term," he said. He said he thought the problems begin in the home.
"That's where the kids pick up their ideas about school. From the time they are old enough to go back and where their relatives and friends have failed in the past. That's when they get the idea that they're going to fail. They need to be encouraged if try difficult
A BELL SOUNDS and hundreds of teenagers move to their next classes. There are other teachers in the halls and they direct traffic as best as they can. But for the most part, the students move noisily in two steady streams.
"COMMUNICATION," HE said, "is the key to solving disputes and learning to read and write. But we don't get much chance to talk to these youngsters. Our schedules are too tight. Our principal visits us only once a year. He writes up a lesson and tells us to do good work. What else can be? There are more than 18 staff members in this school."
"Especially adults who can listen to youngsters and understand what many of them are going through. But many teachers don't know how to say what they really feel. It confuses youngsters. In the junior high school, teachers have to know what's happening to these youngsters at home. You have to know that physical activity is necessary, physically and mentally. And teachers often do not have these kinds of understandings and skills."
"People who care about these kids are needed," Sandis said.
In the classroom again, Sands discusses a problem students are having with another staff member. Parliamentary rules are observed and a committee is formed to work
There were other classrooms in which inexperienced teachers stumbled through poorly prepared lessons. Some of them were instructors and some were just coverers. They were just covering the class for an absent colleague. There were the usual students who were bored, and bored and some of them were noisy.
The youngsters at this school usually do not go on to an academic high school. But Sands is spending his own time helping a group of them improve their language skills. Then, perhaps, more of them will be able to fulfill their potentials.
These inner-city schools exist in great numbers in every large urban center of the nation. They are the front lines where the promise of equal opportunity will either be fulfilled or cease to have meaning in our society.
No issue will be more discussed during the 1978 campaign. In the wake of California's Proposition 13, the two major parties have been working on a nomination of honor for voting the biggest tax cut.
Taxes taxes taxes.
Simple tax system could end inequitv
Stanley William Rothstein is associate professor of education at the School of Human Development and Community at California State University in Fulerton.
The Republicans, in particular, have pushed for tax relief. Their program promises a 33 percent tax cut over three years. At least one Democrat, Senate candidate Richard Bridley of New Jersey, has sought to out-flank the GOP by offering a $25 billion tax cut.
Such a wholesale cut in the tax base courts danger. Huge budget deficits—the fuel for inflation—are probable results, since no compensating cut in spending is promised
Taxes mean big money. A report issued by the Internal Revenue Services this week warned that nearly $250 billion to the federal government on their 1977 returns. And state and local governments are.
must citizens, however, realize those taxes are linked to the government services they receive. But when the political system gives them an inequitable tax structure they blindly rebel. That was the case in California.
Rick Alm
WHAT WE NEED is tax reform, not tax cuts. Reform has been taken many times, but it usually has been sabotaged by the tax code. The tax system are seeking to retain their tax advantages.
Reform must start with the federal government's progressive income tax. The idea behind a progressive income tax in that those who earn more can afford to pay
But, as the laws are written, many of the wealthiest people in the United States pay little or no taxes. What is the use of steeply taxed taxes if those in the higher breakouts don't pay.
We can screech and kick about how unjust that is, but we cannot deny it. Tax laws are written with loopholes to protect wealth. That's common knowledge. It is part of the relationship between money and power. In contriving a tax reform measure, we must
The first problem of reform is to skirt the influence of money. It cannot be left out; realistically, it must be placed. That will require a sizeable compromise.
first realize that in politics, as in so many other endeavors, money talks.
IT IS THE system of progressive taxation that fosters the self-protective instincts of wealth and gives it an incentive to throw its weight against reform. The abandonment of progressive taxes is the price that must be introduced the rich to give up their bonhouses.
As unpalatable as it is, it must be done.
Soak-the-rich taxation has not worked because high tax rates at high income levels create incentives toward evasion. The financial stake in loopholes is too great for anyone with wealth and political power to ignore.
one irrit thing in tax reform, then, is to bend the reality of politics and abandon steeply progressive tax tables that penalize taxpayers with marginal tax rates of more than 90 percent.
Then start simplifying. Rid tax laws of all deductions except those directly related with the cost of doing business. This throws out everybody's loopholes at once.
THEN, STILL, simplifying, tax all income
at the same rate, say 15-20 percent. As a possible compromise, some progressivity could be tolerated, but the highest rates should be no more than twice the lowest. The poorest taxpayers could be exempted by exempting the initial $4,000 earned.
Those who think such a straightforward system of taxation benefits the rich should look again. Under the present system, they pay much less than the tax-table rate. The wealthy can afford to avail themselves of legally legal evasions available through law.
What have we done? First, and most importantly, we have substantially reduced the incentive to evade. One with money and influence faces a 90 percent tax, looking at it, a 20 percent rate. The woman will find it less costly to pay taxes than evade them.
And the wealthy would still be paying more. Under a flat-rate system, those who earn twice as much will pay twice as much in taxes. If the highest rates are twice the lower, those in higher brackets will pay more than twice those in lower.
but the surpassing beauty of such a system is its simplicity. It is a com-
Non-smoker says he has rights, too
To the editor:
I would like to say a few words about Rick Aim's column, "Proposal is tyranny for Rick Aim."
Mr. Alm's line of reasoning on the subject contains little logic or precise thought. He writes, "In any community there are probably many personal habits that displease a majority . . . and asks if such a majority would have "right" to "ban" certain behaviors." . . . "if they found the "excesses of rock music unbeatable."
Mr. Alm seems to have forgotten most of the lessons he should have learned in high school government, the most important being the raison d'etre of the institution; defining laws to regulate situations in which there are two or more individuals are in conflict.
I answer this by saying that if the music were played in such a way so as not to disturb others who did not want to hear it, then let it play. Otherwise, I remind him that it is against the law to disturb the peace.
Mr. Alm misunderstands the basic issue. It is only when two acknowledgments are in conflict that the government has any authority to decide. In the absence of the two rights, is subordinate to the other.
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
California's Proposition 5 is an attempt, I shall not say a good or bad one, to resolve the conflict between two large groups of individuals—the smokers and the non-smokers. The former should be allowed to smoke whenever and wherever they wish. The non-smokers claim their "right" to clean and unadulterated air. The two claims are obviously antagonistic, or at least large parts of both groups seem to think so. This could lead to problems, and should be resolved by democratic process.
I think we would all agree that if it were conclusively proven that breathing someone else's smoke was harmful to your health then the smoker should share a space open equally to all of the public, then the right of the smoker to smoke would be subordinate to the right of the non-smoker.
The non-smokers have a very good case. There is medical evidence showing that breathing the smoke from someone else's room or pipe or can pipe damage a non-smoker's lungs.
His examples show bad laws indeed—they are laws which do not resolve a conflict, but rather rescind a right in absence of a conflict. His examples are off the point.
But the above is all legal positioning and formality. Most good laws follow from established courtesy—remember that? It isn't so easy to reinhabit a right to respect that of another.
It is my experience that most decent people who smoke recognize the discomfort they cause non-smokers and respect the non-smoker's right to smoke. It is the force of law and its punishments, however, can act as a deterrent to those boreshult enough to, as Mr. Alm put it, "be treated with no disdain." If you treat him to give you that sour look again, blow smoke in his face'.
Lawrence graduate student
Greg Wetzel
Health preservation key for non-smokers
To the editor:
One question—is Rick Alm a smoker or a non-smoker? It really doesn't matter, because in his column Monday, his bias was clear. I don't see where he gets off comparing Proposition 5 to blue laws, lengths of ladies skirts, or request of church at
Since when does the length of a lady's skirt affect the health of another? How does cooking on Sunday or any other day injure the membranes of the nose and throat of those who happen to take a whiff? Does Mr. Alm live in a plastic bubble? It is a secret to him that the side-stream smoke from cigarettes creates a hazardous gas! It is also a secret to him that when a cigarette burns, the smoke doesn't conveniently stay in one place? Rather, the smoke diffuses throughout the air. Therefore, the smoker's cigarette is not
only polluting his or her air, but the air of everyone around him or her.
THIS "SELF-RIGHTEOUS" majority, non-smokers, could better be described as "self-preserving." I am tired of having to breathe air that is polluted by cigarette smoke. I don't like the smell of my clothes burned by some careless fool's cigarette—1 prefer to call it a pacifier.
It is time non-smokers wake up and stick up for themselves. In many cases, cigarette smoke is not only foil-smelling, but dangerous to the health of a non-smoker.
Obviously, the smoker isn't too concerned with his or her health. Proposition 5 has been too long in coming. It is fortunate that we have not only one feeds up enough to do something.
I HARDLY see where a non-smoker can be called "fondness-hating." Quite to the contrary, there is nothing a non-smoker wants more than the freedom to breathe clean, unpolluted air. Don't it it? And all have to breathe air polluted by industry and automobiles?
Furthermore, if any smoker is defiant and disgusting enough to blow smoke in my face if I give a sour look, he or she should certainly be entitled to some of that cigarette back in the face; only it should be the lighted end.
Cheri Cox
Leawood Senior
Non-smoker wants smokers to 'stuff it'
No, Rick. I don't mind if you smoke. Do you mind in front of the fireplace? In front of the fireplace is a required alarm.
To the editor:
In reference to Rick Aim's column on smokers:
oxygen tent, or in an iron lung or with asthma.
You smokers feel it is your God-given right to smoke. It is, but not anywhere at anytime. The way you talk, you'd probably light up when you were visiting a man in an
Some people are bothered by cigarette smoke. Others are allergic to it. Their eyes can become red and irritated if they headaches; they can't breathe. Look, Rick, non-smokers have some rights, too. They shouldn't have to be subjected to all that when they go to a show, or to a restaurant or a bar.
You smokers refuse to believe that you have a nasty, annoying habit. Wouldn't you avoid someone who picked his nose all the time? It is time smokers were made responsible for their actions. They should be made to feel alienated from society the way they are now. The hatfulness are made to feel alienated—they smell bad, and they make life unpleasant.
And nobody is saying you can't smoke. You just shouldn't do it where it bothers others—the same way you don't yell 'Fire' in a crowded movie house; the same way you don't take off your clothes in school or the same way you don't defecate in public.
So, Rick, when; I— with aching head, swollen eyes, chapped lips and burning throat—ask the "chimney" next to me if he would mind putting it out, and he, in turn, asking the face; I feel no remorse when I stuff the lighted end of his cigarette up his left nostril.
Prairie Village senior
Susan Woodard
Editor's note: Rick Alm is not a smoker, nor has he ever been one.
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