UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
SEPTEMBER 25,1978
At long last the University of Kansas Medical Center's Wichita branch has attracted the attention of state legislators, and none too soon.
Wichita branch suffers
Overshadowed for years by its larger brother in Kansas City, Kan., the Wichita branch seemed destined to second-class citizenship. It suffered from a lack of identity and was homeless—housed in rental property.
That is still true, but there are indications that it could soon change if University officials get their way. Last week provided another glimmer of hope as the Legislative Committee on Medical Education approved a report outlining the future of the Wichita branch.
THE REPORT, prepared by KU administrators and already approved by the Kansas Board of Regents, contains recommendations for the expansion and improvement of the branch school.
branches. Included in the report are proposals for the reorganization and expansion of the branch's residency programs and for a larger faculty. But perhaps the most important section concerns the establishment of a permanent home for the school.
The report recommends that the
University purchase and remodel a building for about $16 million. The building would provide badly needed laboratory space for research and would held the school meet upcoming accreditation requirements.
ALTHOUGH THE REPORT received general committee approval, it still must go before the full Legislature in January, where it will face a tough fight.
face problems. In the past, the Legislature usually has supported health care proposals, particularly when they were directed at alleviating the rural doctor shortage—as with the tuition scholarship program approved last year, for example.
But this year could be different. Legislators, some fresh from elections, will be filled with the spirit of Proposition 13 and reluctant to pump millions of dollars into a program that admirably has served its purpose.
admit to that THAT PURPOSE, however, must be expanded if the state is to meet its future medical needs.
In part, a lack of foresight has thrust the state into its current situation. One can only hope the legislature is now wiser and will agree that the Wichita branch has remained in the shadows for too long.
a mus is the first part of a two-part series on television.
The curtain rises on a new television season this month.
New TV season an old formula
And that awful noise heard in the background is the sound of the critics licking their fingers toward their orchestra of boos. They will rant and rave against the new season, dropping a kind word of praise here and there but not by the same means as exploring its manifold and lack of imagination.
That was the verdict for last year; for most years.
As in the past, there will be enough bad programs to prove the critics right. Some new offerings are hunted to catch as soon as possible are "Who's Watching the Kids": (NBC), "The American Girl" (GIB), (ABC) (ABC) and "Mork and Mind" (ABC).
The annual critical disappointment won't change television. No one pays attention to television critics. Again this year a good part of the American population will sit transfixed for hours in front of a television set—few of them sufficiently conscious to think about what's the matter with television.
THE CRITICS will note, too, that there is nothing really new on the small screen. Network program directors have, as usual, stuck with successful formulas: cops and robber shows in which the forces of law and disorder overcome evil in a squirming city. In other words, sexy and stolid, mawkish melodramas; variety hours with the same old faces.
What, whirls out? the man that television is run by a burth of bad men or by men who lack imagination. Television's problems are inherent in its commercial structure.
Well, what is the matter with television?
They won't be around long.
CRITICS AND VIEWERS make the same assumption about television; that it exists to entertain. An assumption's popularity is no surprise, given that most people exist to entertain; it is to move goods. The
Social excuses, discouragement hinder quest for higher education
By PAUL HARDIN
N.Y. Times Feature
NEW YORK-What is the wisdom of a social and educational policy that blocks access to both personal and professional fulfillment by denying qualified applicants admission to professional schools?
The television establishment shrugs off this criticism by saying it is only giving viewers what they want. Just look at the ratings, their story goes, they reflect viewer
instead of Hedda Gabler; Laverne and Shirley, not Romeo and Juliet.
We who admire the American system of education have often been critical of the British and other systems that impose tests along the way and direct students into vocational or academic programs, as do how they score - without much regard to what they want to do.
Bv PAUL HARDIN
IT SEEMS obvious that admission to medical school nowadays is too restrictive. If a young person is eager to enter the medical profession and is well qualified to do the work medical school requires, it strikes me as poor public policy not to provide the opportunity. If we are denying the opportunity or the expense of providing it, we need to re-examine our priorities.
Yet we have accepted, without much public criticism, a system that tests would-be medical students, admits some to medical school and tells others, in effect, to pursue another job. In many cases, such systems become physicians and are well qualified for medical study.
If we are denying admission because physicians fear overcrowding of the profession, we are thumping our notes at the wall.
The medical school issue is only one dramatic and highly visible aspect of a more general problem in the United States—a tendency to flinch at the cost of providing adequate patient care that does not rationalize paternalistic our failure to do the job.
LEGISLATORS, private donors, and all others who are asked to support higher education fall easy prey to the canard that there are too many college graduates these days and that we are becoming an over-educated society. We are all too tempted to cut back on educational capacity or to fail to expand it in areas of high demand—all the while pietastically advising eager would-be students of the nobility of callings that require less formal education.
BUT CHOICES are slim. Nelson records preferences between three different versions of the same product, not genuine viewer preference. Risky new programs that would expand the range of choice are usually avoided.
Do not mistake me. Taxi driving and stevedoring are honorable occupations that may be entirely appropriate for educated men and women.
Rick Alm
But if it is sound to warm young people that taking blue collar career earning advanced degrees can lead to boredom and discontent, it is negligent to omit the corollary warnings that failure to pursue higher education limits vocational flexibility and cuts off personal development and enrichment benefits that far transcend vocation and economic returns.
Television will not give viewers preferences over access and coverage of the bill. You pay the bills.
In the recently published book, "Investment in Learning," Howard J. Bennett concludes that our attempt to deny or limit funding for learning will fail.
For many, the solution may be public broadcasting on the model of the British and Canadian systems. But that leaves the viewer to the tastes of a cultural society.
Drawing on hundreds of studies, Bowen does not agree that an expansion of higher education will result in emplacement,
programs round up viewers for the main event—the commercial.
ALTHOUGH IT is very well to give accurate information about the difficulty of finding jobs, it is far less appropriate to foreclose the opportunity to enter a supposedly crowded job market. It is still easier to still oker to try, and is qualified for the requisite curriculum.
this argument. Brown writes, "assumes that the economy offers a more or less fixed inventory of jobs to which the labor force responds."
On the contrary, he argues, "The economy can and does adjust to the workers that are available."
Millions of menial jobs have been automated. The relative number of white collar positions has increased to the point where they now account for more than half of all employment, and their number is almost doubling at an astonishing higher than among people without a college education.
Only a system of subscription television, where viewers pay directly for the service, is required to sovereignty to viewer tastes and preferences. More about that tomorrow.
Advertising pays television's bills, with enough left over to provide profits of up to 50 percent at some stations. With that much money at stake, networks and station executives have an irresistible incentive to deliver the large audiences advertisers want. This is a very different objective than striving for the highest quality programs.
HIGH CULTURE does not have a large audience. The proven way to attract mass attention is to appeal to the lowest common denominator; offer programs that are mildly entertaining but so innocuous as to offend one. A top program's appeal is measured by its audience size.
Klein argued that people watched television, not programs. Quality mattered little. The key to keeping the large audiences advertisers were paying for, but would offering anything that could cause stations to turn off their sets or change stations.
Bowers does better economics and challenges the morality of such an investment. He writes that it "raises a serious moral issue, implying as it does that a large part of the population with the potential for personal development through higher education should be held down deliberately to lives of relative immorance."
Advertisers, as advertisers, are interested not in culture or program quality, but in the number of persons huddled before television sets, there to be washed over by the horrors of "ring around the collar" and the ecstasy of "great balls of comfort."
Paul Klein, an audience research executive for NBC in the 1960s, formulated a concept he called "Least Objectionable Programming," which has, consciously or not, become the dominant strategy of all three networks.
Paul Hardin, a former professor of law at Duke University, is president of Drew University, Madison, N.J.
Success involves getting enough people to talk about it, not just about anything. As long as they're there,
driving for the highest quality program
Ratings become television's driving force
good advice.
"Such an outcome," he says, "would be indefensible."
As a result, viewers get Mary Richards
No pat answers to global food crisis
Optimism usually is a good thing, but like anything else, it can be stretched too far.
Take, for instance, Chip Carter, the president's son. In San Francisco recently, Carter gave his views on the world hunger problem.
"If my father can go from being almost unknown to president in four years, we can certainly end hunger in 20 years," he told an audience attending a symposium sponsored by the Bunger Project, a group striving to eliminate hunger by 1997.
At least 10 million children in the United States are danger, according to a 17% report in the Scientific American.
Certainly Jimmy Carter's 1976 election was a miracle, but it will take a much bigger effort to win the presidency.
More than two billion people in the least industrialized, mostly rural regions of Central Africa, South Asia and South America live at substandard food levels.
Tackling that problem is a bigger challenge than electing an unknown candidate.
It is possible to start solving the problem, through food relief programs and conservation, but solving it will take more than 20 years.
That's about 200 times the population of the state of Kansas, 60 times the population of New York City, as much as the combined populations of the United States and Soviet Union and more than 10 percent of the world's population.
years STATISTICS ALONE show why.
AT LEAST 12,000 people die of hunger each day.
An estimated 455 million people in the world suffer from malnutrition, according to the World Food Council, a United Nations agency that monitors the global food supply.
Malnutrition and infection are so common that in Zambia and Bolivia, one-quarter of the children die before they're four years old. The number for Pakistan and India is around 150. Brazil's is 98. But in the United States, the number is 10, and in Sweden, it's only 12.
Four hundred million live on the edge of starvation.
at least 55 men, women and children starve each day in East Africa alone, according to a pamphlet called Crusade Against Hunger.
In India a million children die each year of malnutrition
Obviously there are many reasons why the problem hasn't been solved before now. The biggest is the growing world population, now more than four billion.
But family planning is a sensitive subject, both politically and culturally.
RY 1893 THE population is expected to reach between 4.65 and 5.03 billion. And by 2000 the population could be between 6 and 7.15 billion.
According to the Conference Board, an independent, nonprofit business research organization based in already densely deficient nations will be within the next 20 years.
And the Board maintains that the additional need for food in the developing countries alone cannot be solved in 20 years even with successful family-planning methods.
That doesn't mean, however, that the United States shouldn't strive for an eventual solution. Both the government and private organizations can help.
Much work, of course, already has been done. Some private companies have set good examples.
THE CONFERENCE Board reports that
General Motors is assisting less-developed countries by initiating production of simple trucks that can be built with limited labor. The products are used to improve distribution of goods.
General Foods has engaged for several years in developing higher nutritional and culturally acceptable foods that make it possible for existing crops to meet the nutritional needs of larger numbers of people.
Ralston Purina and General Mills also have worked on programs of a similar nature, synthesizing proteins from soebutes.
If examples like those are set, Chip Carter has good reason to be optimistic. But a good dose of realism needs to be mixed with his optimism.
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