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University Daily Kansan Thursday, March 16, 1961
'Closed Meeting' Defined
There is a great deal of confusion concerning the point at which a newspaper can cover a meeting and when it cannot.
Just what does the term "closed meeting" mean? Does any organization have the preagative or the right to gather its members together to conduct its business at the exclusion of the press?
The answer is yes.
Any group may meet formally or informally and keep its business to itself without having the proceedings publicized. This happens every day, in dormitory bull sessions, fraternity chapter meetings, independent caucuses, coffee katches, ad infinitum.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS COUNCIL met last night. In their meeting last week, the members voted to close this week's meeting to the press. This group felt it had private business to discuss, information for its members' ears alone. They did not want this information published.
A reporter from this newspaper went to the meeting with the knowledge of the group's decision and, once there, was told he could stay but that he could not report the proceedings. As it was obvious that business would not be conducted while there, he left.
Did this organization have the right to exclude the press from its meeting?
THE ANSWER IS NO.
Why? How is this situation different from the one where the press has no right to record the event?
Because this was an open meeting of an organization whose activity concerns everyone in its community. Their private discussions can only be held in an executive or private meeting —not in an open meeting.
It had announced, prior to this meeting, that anyone was welcome except representatives of the press. This is a paradoxical duality of standards that has no precedent in a democratic society. The meeting was for everyone except the media by which the majority learns of the organization's activities.
The news columns of a paper are merely for the amplification and recording of daily events that concern the public. Nothing more. Everyone
in this community has an interest in what the CRC is doing. Everyone has a right to know what the CRC is doing. Everyone is welcome, but 8,000 people are certainly not going to be able to attend. Then the meeting concerns only those persons who are willing to attend? No. Again, because the council affects everyone.
IF THE PRESS CANNOT report a public meeting, what then are the alternatives? There are three:
- One: For the organization to draw up a report of the meeting and release it to the press after the meeting.
- Two: For the paper to get the information from those who attended the meeting.
- Three: To send several representatives of the paper who cannot be identified as such to the meeting to observe and report on the proceedings.
- * *
The first is completely unacceptable and violates the very precept of freedom of the press. It amounts to censorship and suppression, for in this way the public learns only what the group thinks it should know.
The second is equally bad, for it is secondhand information that inevitably distorts the information.
The third is the only alternative the press has. It is only slightly better than the other two because the representatives would have to rely on memory instead of notes.
But this is the means that would be used. It is a fundamental principle of a democracy that the public must have the information that concerns it. And, through the press, it will have the information. Any newspaper that does not fulfill this function, fails to fulfill its obligation and the reason for its existence.
This, then, is the basis of reporting events: any activity that is of public interest, that affects the majority and the minority, will be made common knowledge.
The Daily Kansan, therefore, will report the proceedings of any open meeting of the Civil Rights Council and will obtain the information by any means possible.
The Editors
Tests Not Good
Regarding the recent guest editorial, "Tyranny of Tests" (UDK March 8), I would like to suggest a means by which "hour exams" and "final exams" could be eliminated from the majority of courses taught at Kansas University, namely, "papers" — "themes" — "research reports." They come in all shapes and sizes, and go by all sorts of names; but whatever you call them, they are definitely to be desired over all kinds of "tests."
First: they not only test the student in that they provide something for the professor to stick a grade onto, but they also benefit the student in that he learns about the subject through writing on it. He learns while he is being "tested."
Second: these papers need not be written under pressure, as is the unfortunate case with exams. The deadline for papers can be set as much as sixteen weeks in advance; the student has time to assemble
Dailu Transam
University of Kansas student newspaper Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904 triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
John Peterson ... Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Frank Morgan and
...Letters ...
all of his facts, consider them, and carefully plan the best method of presenting his idea.
Third: the mention above of the student's "idea" presupposes, of course, that the student will do some independent thinking. It also requires that he do some acting. This touches on a very important theory used by teachers of foreign languages: it's one thing, they say, to be able to hear a foreign language and understand it, but this is only a "passive knowledge" of the language.
Much more difficult is an "active knowledge" of the language, which requires that the student be able to draw on his knowledge of vocabulary and grammar, and come up with an understandable reply in the foreign language. Similarly, it is one thing to be able to guess intelligently on a "true-or-false" question; but it is quite something else to be able to comment intelligently on an array of facts. Yet this is the difference between a man with an A.B. and a man with an education.
Unfortunately, too many students graduate with an A.B. instead of an education, and one is tempted to conclude that this is due to our present method of "testing." I, for one, would very much like to see our professors adopt a more intelligent means of testing the growth of intelligence.
John Swogger
Toneka senior
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University Research Necessary Editor:
In the paragraph, "Worth Repeating," on the editorial page of your issue of Tuesday, February 28, 1961. Mr. Jacques Barzun is quoted as speaking in bitter terms concerning the "mania for research" in centers of higher learning.
Although I cannot here refer to specific instances, I have a distinct impression that the University Daily Kansan has on previous occasions printed extracts from authors who took a similar derogatory attitude toward research at the university level. Whether or not my memory is correct in these matters, I wish to take issue with the ideas expressed in the paragraph referred to in the Tuesday, February 28 issue.
It is my considered judgement that no teacher can really be worth his salt as a university professor unless he exhibits the natural curiosity that would drive him into research, and has the energy and orderliness to follow his discoveries with suitable publication. Only rarely if ever, can a university teacher instil in the minds of his students any desire to probe the unknowns on the frontiers of knowledge unless he himself is interested in doing likewise. The University should be dedicated, not only to teaching, but also to the general advancement of knowledge, to the exploration of the unknown, and to throwing light into dark corners. If the University is to function in these areas, it must foster research programs initiated by its own staff members
Admittedly, some staff members may become so engrossed in their research efforts that they neglect their teaching, but if so they constitute the exceptions to the rule. Even these men, I feel, perform a better service to the University than those who do no research and teach from the time-hallowed lecture notes they wrote in 1927.
The bitter comments by Mr. Barzun suggest to me that he may be in this latter category and finds himself unhappy there.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
A. B. Leonard Professor of Zoology
A review of QUILL (Spring issue, 1961)
Touch-Football,Touch-Poetry
The spectator-arts, unlike the spectator-sports, are more likely to be fashionable among campus intellectuals than are the participant varieties. "Art" at a university still connotes for many the art-museum, the dead-art-film series, jazz-without-dancing, and ossified Mozart by the Finno-Ugrian string quartet. The giant bronze jayhawk outside the Union Building may yet turn out to be a culture vulture.
By Arvid Shulenberger
BUT EVEN AMONG THE artists, there is another big problem these days. Both pro football and pro literature suffer from a surplus of interchangeable parts. For every Johnny Unitas (the e.e. cummings of pro football), there are forty faceless bureaucrats available for platoon substitution. So too with the pro novelists and verse writers—who the devil can tell them apart without a library card? Ironie, symbolic, ambiguous, sophisticated, soigne, they are as standardized as Rambler station wagons, and as well publicized.
THERE ARE OTHER STUDENTS, however, who spend their time daubing paint, chiseling rocks, dreaming poems, telling lies on paper, designing bridges, inventing cyclotrons, and making touchdowns. These are the artists, in the purely classical sense of the word.
QUILL writers appear to be the sort of persons who might stay home from the Symphony-of-the-month in order to practice scales on their own ocarinas. In other words, artists. Artists are people who may not read very much, or know much, or think much, but who spend their time making things. They would rather make things than join Si Hayakawa in a scheme to expose 10,000 Cossacks to Yankee psychiatry.
Touch-football, on the other hand, still shows a lot of spontaneity, freedom, and variety. This issue of QUILL is full of touch-poetry and touch-fiction.
The writing in QUILL has to do with matters which have been treated before: chiefly love, war, and death. The authors celebrate or criticize traditional values which have also been dealt with before: God, home, and country. A jaded professor like the present reviewer is likely to be struck by the youth and freshness of it all; and may then be sobered at the thought of the dull sophisticated years which lie ahead for several of the writers.
A FEW PIECES IN this issue of QUILL might have been written by Grandma Moses when she was a teen-ager. On the other hand, several of these writers have come in off the reservation, have put on shoes, and have taken off their war paint; they are now sophisticated enough to organize a sit-in demonstration demanding equal rights for symbolists.
The writing in QUILL is less commercial than the Post, less sick than Partisan, less slick than Harper's, less tired than the New Yorker. In general it is not as good as Hemingway, or as funny as Wodehouse, or as crooked as C. P. Snow, or as pretentious as Sartre. It is interesting and lively.
Anyone who is not currently making a poem, a straight flush, a term paper, or a nuclear reactor should go out and buy a copy of Quill, and find out what the other students have been making lately.
If a man has a talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and he learns somehow to use the whole of it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.—Thomas Wolfe