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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, Nov. 13, 1957
Rattles In Russia
The Russian youth is restless. According to the American Committee for Liberation, a private organization to aid people within the Soviet Union in self-liberation, the youth of Russia has gone through three phases leading to the present.
This organization says the first phase was roughly from the 20th Party Congress in February 1956 until the early fall of 1956. During that time students limited themselves to raising questions concerning Stalin and his "cult of personality."
The second phase began immediately following the Hungarian revolution. At that time the Russian students circulated magazines in which they attempted to express their views. These periodicals were printed throughout Russia.
During the Hungarian uprising one paper even carried such illegal matter as BBC news bulletins on the Hungarian situation.
The Committee feels that the third stage was reached with the emergence of large-scale political meetings.
These meetings began in Moscow in November and December of 1956. It is felt that most of
these meetings originated as official gatherings begun by the authorities, but were soon dominated by the students.
The official subject of the meeting was quickly sidelined and questions were asked concerning the foreign policies of the Soviet regime.
It is curious to note that major party leaders, such as Shepilov, were heckled and shouted down by the students.
It seems that the Russian youth is becoming more curious. This curiosity has led them to ask embarrassing questions concerning the Soviet satellites and about their own future. Maybe the flush of revolution is finally running out.
Now, when the Russian leaders are so self-sure, would be an ideal time to call their educational bluff and press for an elaborate exchange program for college students.
Maybe the present youth are more concerned with their own lives and less concerned with an abstract and fuzzy political theory.
Six months or a year in the U.S. or Western Europe would answer many questions for an inquiring young Russian.
—John Eaton
Ouch!
I've Been Stabbed
I've been stabbed, shot, poisoned, pushed in front of speeding cars, brainwashed, and bludgeoned. I watched television for 30 minutes last night, and narrowly escaped with my life!
Television drama has developed into a school of skulduggery and mayhem. The hyperactive imagination of the television writer could, in the course of time, convert our society into a vast Murder, Inc., bent upon neighborhood destruction and given to clandestine meetings between the eternal opposites.
The insidious reaction to television's romp with reality can be seen even here on our wind-lashed campus. There isn't a student enrolled who hasn't in his imagination, plotted, and executed, the diabolical murder of a favorite professor.
In our mildest dreams we have all invited some professor to sip from our cask of amontillado.
Television is our teacher. We learn how to scale a fire escape, Jimmy a window, and lustily assault the unsuspecting victim, paralyzed by the electric blanket we cleverly short-circuited as we entered the window.
Getting rid of the body is no problem. In our imaginations the floor of the Kaw River is literally lined with these unfortunate pedagogues, encased in cement. Tweed cement.
Every night the existing faculty is diminished, creating a peculiar administrative problem.
Visions of fatherless children do not deter us from our course. We have been hardened by hours of television carnage.
Mind you, this isn't occurring just here; it is the scourge of the nation. Everywhere, in every
city, town, and hamlet, people are, in imagination, biting the well-deserved dust.
The beauty of this social arrangement lies in the variety of ways the victim is done in. For this diversification we must again applaud television, with a slight nod to the originator of motion film, the cinema.
Your choice of methods can run the gamut from swordthrust to ray guns to poison to psychological torture to pistol whipping. There is no end to the possibilities; let your imagination run wild.
Suppose we let our hair down. For example, if your victim is a biology professor, imagine that you, in your private secret laboratory, have discovered a hitherto unknown bacteria growth that, when exposed to a professor, will grow to King Kong proportions and gobble him up so he disappears without a trace.
Or if your antagonist is an English professor, you search for a weakness. Suppose he is a fanatical perfectionist. Suppose he has an intense hatred for the comma fault. Your course of action is obvious—pepper him with comma faults. Write extra themes with comma faults, leave him notes with comma faults, dig up his master's thesis and find a comma fault, scratch a sentence on his desk with a comma fault. Then when he is on the scholastic ropes thrust home with a split infinitive. No professor has lasted more than a week under this assault.
These are just a few suggestions to guide you on your way to happiness. And remember, if you ever weaken, you can flick the set on any minute and get a refresher course in 20th century mayhem.
—John Eaton
... Letters ...
Blasts Conformity
Hooray for your boy, Dick Brown ("Conformity-A Law." The Daily Kansan Nov. 4). His attitude toward the conformity scene at KU is the finest. Upon reading such articles in The Daily Kansan I can't help but wonder what the reactions of KU's John and Jane Q. Socialelimber are.
Editor:
This attitude is understandable when we realize that the University is fast losing its value (for most students) as a center of higher learning and becoming a high school
The majority of students would probably agree with Dick. The frightening thing is that the majority of this majority would be afraid to admit it. I don't believe that most students really want to conform anymore than they really want to listen to Rock and Roll. They feel, however, that they must in order to maintain a large group of psuedo-friends which they feel are an essential part of college life.
Hats off to Dick Brown and those who think like him, for the problem of which he tells us, though somewhat unimportant in itself, hints at an unremedied sickness in the U.S. social scene.
extension, wherein most students are shielded from the practical world just as they were in high school and before
Ron Allerton
Short Ones
The Associated Press reports that a man and wife have volunteered to be the first to be launched in a Sputnik. Keeping house in a Sputnik would have certain complications. Imagine the problem involved in putting the cat out.
Hiawatha senior
Wee! Isn't higher education wonderful when it finally asserts itself? This time last week we had named no queens. Now we have two. Next week?
Daily Hansan
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Bob Lyle ... Managing Editor
Marilyn Mermis, Jim Banman, Richard Brown, Ray Wingerson, Assistant Managing Editors; Bob Hartley, City Editor; Patricia Swanson, Lee Lord, Assistant City Editors; Leroy Zimmerman, Telegraph editor; Nancy Harmon, Assistant TroubleshooterEditor; Gary Colm amplegate, Sports Editors; Mary Beth Noyes, Society Editor; Martha Crosier, Assistant Society Editor.
Hooray! Our theater correspondent reports that the "late-conners" were few at Tuesday's performance of "Henry IV." One good soul was over-heard saying, "Boy! I'm going in early. I don't want to be one of those persons The Daily Kansan was talking about."
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Harry Turner ... Business Manager
Kent Pelz, Advertising Manager; Jere Glover, National Advertising Manager;
George Pester, Classified Advertising Manager; Martha Billingsley, Assistant Classified Advertising Manager; Ted Winkler, Circulation Manager; Steve Schmidt, Promotion Manager.
Yesterday, All Women's Day, was the only time we've seen the proper ratio between men and women in the Student Union.
Those who scratch in a public place. Seldom wear silk or lace.
Coeds that wiggle. Frequently giggle.
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