UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan
Signed columns represent the views of only the writers.
August 29,1978
Workers need OSHA
Conservatives and anti-government politicians wanting to raise the public'sre against. Washington bureaucrats often have found an easy target in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
To be sure, OSHA needs to straighten the kinks in its sometimes picayun regulations. Critics have found ample fodder for ridicule in OSHA regulations that specify the type of toilet seats to be installed in workplaces or in employee booklets that warn farm workers to beware of slippery cattle manure.
But three recent, similar construction accidents—one of which killed a University of Kansas football player and injured another—show, unfortunately, that the free enterprise system has gaps that require the intervention of a government agency like OSHA.
But too often the voices of change simply demand less government intervention. Too few call for effective intervention that is timely and wellaimed.
The Kansas OSHA office has levied nearly $10,000 in fines for serious and willful violations of OSHA regulations related to the ditch cave-in that killed KU football player Dennis Balagia and injured John Mascarella, a former
player. OSHA issued another $5,000 fine for another summer trench cave in that killed a man working for an Olathe construction firm.
And just yesterday a Newton man died after the walls of the trench he was working in collapsed.
No determinations of guilt or innocence have been made in the three cases. No fines can begin to compensate victims—or their relatives—of job-related activities. And no fines can adequately punish the employer who ignores his workers' health.
But such fines are a necessary warning to profit-blinded employers.
Employees in hazardous occupations must have faith that the majority of employers can see beyond OSHA's red tape to realize that workplace safety pays in the end.
The sheer volume of shallow outey against OSHA, however, indicates that a minority of shortsighted employers need to be impressed by the issuance of fines, which would change their minds about the expense of safety precautions.
Whatever OSHA's occasional excesses, it remains the best available remedy to counter continuing job accidents and the relative shortage of public support for thoughtful progress toward worker safety.
Though it's never been a big secret that most doctors lead financially sound lives, recent indications are that, at least at some private medical schools, those studying to be doctors aren't strangers to luxury either.
A transcript of a trustees meeting at Boston University published by that university is quoted BU President John Silber: "When we facilitate (an) admission there's no reason why we shouldn't go to the father of someone who doesn't talk to him about major gift to the school."
Med School payoffs hurt academia
Silber later confirmed the accuracy of the transcript and said that of the 6,000 students who apply for the 85 year openings in BU's graduate programs, they have their outstanding academic records. The remaining 35 are selected to balance the class in terms of race, sex and geographic origin.
In a prepared statement Silber added, "Finally, we will be very concerned to be on the lookout for potential gifts to BU from wealthy students or their families who can afford to make a gift to BU and whose gift provides a reason for selecting their fully qualified students." The students fully qualified but not better son or daughter who could not make this contribution."
Despite the administrative double-talk, the message was clear: If you want to get into med school, money talks—and its voice is not limited to Boston.
Of course, in the time-honored tradition of string-pulling, the enticement is not always money. Ramona Mrak was one of 4,000 applicants to the University of California School of Medicine at Davis. She was also one of the 100 students who were accepted, and the score was more than 30 points below the line normally required for accentance.
Bribes totaling several hundred thousand dollars were paid by parents in Pennsylvania in a case that landed two prominent Pennsylvania politicians in prison for bribery. Similar cases have been reported from Chicago to California.
Fortunately for Maik, however, at the time of her admission father-in-law was a native American.
Nixon boomerangs once more
If there's one thing you can count on, it's Richard Nixon.
No matter how hard Americans try, we can't rid ourselves of the former president. If he has any say in the matter, we won't be able to for a long, long time.
Maybe he's a slow learner. After eight years as vice president, Nixon didn't get the message in 1960 as he lost the presidency to John F. Kennedy.
And he didn't get the message in 1962 when he ran for governor of California and then
He's like a boomerang. He keeps coming back, no matter how hard he toss him.
most pronounced thought he had it made in 1968 when he was elected president. It was a close election, but he still probably thought people were on his side.
He probably didn't realize that Lyndon Johnson helped him get votes. Without Johnson, Nixon might have left public life. He might have faded away.
But that didn't happen. In 1968, he was ejected president in what was called a coup.
Thus, Nixon resigned in 1974 and we thought (or so he once told us) we wouldn't have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.
His illness didn't have anything to do with another political comeback but people began to suspect Nixon would be back when he made a trip to China after his resigna-
But it did not last long. He came back into the hall, after his resignation in a bishop with blithship.
They knew Nikon wasn't destined to spend the summer as life walking the beaches of San Clemente.
Things seemed to go his way for a while, but then came Watergate. Nixon's popularity began to slip to what his opponents probably called a miraculous political death.
Last year, Nixon was back in the spotlight when David Frost interviewed him on
television and tried, without much success,
to get him to take the blame for Watergate
In the past few months, however, Nixon's
enemy began to multiply. He may be
cannot outspend his opponent.
First, Nixon's memoirs, "RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon," were published. At approximately $20 a copy, the book has sold well.
Then, earlier this summer, Nixon vurnured from his San Clemente estate to Kentucky, where a recreation center was named after him. The crowds loved him.
And, of course, daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, gave him
publicity this month when their first child was born, making Nixon a grandfather.
Perhaps he hasn't made his full comeback yet, but what's frightening is that Nixon is not going to be the first time he may soon be getting more and more Richard Nixon. He'd like to be around for at least a week.
"I told to live in the next century," he told the San Jose Mercury-News on Sunday. "I'll be only 87 years old. I have a fairly long lifetime on my mother's side. My grandmother lived to be 94. My great-grandmother lived to be 96."
...an that, Nixon told the world he is back.
To top those plans, Nixon says he'll write a book on the long-term future of the free world and warn it to give the free world a sense of the future.
“... What I want to do is take the readers onto the mountain and look down the road to the house.”
The boomerang is back. When we hit this time, we just have to figure out how to move it.
Lowman said that panels consisting of four members each judged every application to the school and conducted inquiries with applicants before making a decision.
At the University of Kansas there were 1,145 applicants for the 200 positions in the class entering school this year. However, because the students had received Medicine, said he had not heard of donations being offered in exchange for a spot in the program. A spokesperson at the process at KU discouraged potential bribes.
For many students, that is motivation enough. Whether driven to med school for humanitarian reasons or a lust for the dollar, students are deluging med schools across the country with applications. They intend for each available spot is intense.
"There is no one person in charge of deciding on applicants here, so I think it would be very hard to entice somebody with an appointment. Our procedure is as near fail-safe as it can be."
"There is no way to say it could never happen here. I suppose that if somebody was determined to be bribed and was willing to commit this crime, But I doubt whether it would work even then."
Federal statistics list the average annual income for doctors at $7,000, the highest income for any occupation listed. For some specialists, the average is more than $100,000.
If the end, such payoffs would make professional schools nursing more than $400 million in rewards for those secure in the knowledge that they have the money to buy their way.
"It (bribery) is a very poor criterion for
demand to, to obtain, or to mglw and
mglw to depend on the law."
But the situation is not going to get better. The large sums of money being thrown around in attempts to get into med school are now falling off the radar, available to those who manage to graduate.
Yet, in a society for its passion or keeping up with the Joneses, and considering it too hard to offer can offer, it's doubtful that the practice of buying one's way into medical school will lose its popularity soon. And that tends to explain about academic standards look a little silly.
"There is really no way that would ever happen here," he said. "Most of those cases who mentioned were private schools that are heavily dependent on contributions. We are financed by state money so we have other means of getting along."
We are currently experiencing a political paralysis on so wide a range of critical problems, with a president unable to elicit sufficient congressional support either for positive programs or needed restraints, and urgently needed, as to invite disaster.
BY SMITH SIMON
N.Y. Times Feature
NEW YORK—It is becoming clearer every day that a better way must be found for evoking a strong, effective yet leadership in our national government.
The problem of energy conservation, the most critical facing the nation—and the world-is a case in point. It continues to be the victim of legislative stalemate. The executive branch pleads for a serious address and congressional inability to respond has created damaging inflationary pressures at home, an erosion of the dollar, a loss of American trade, all the while sapping the confidence of allies and friends around the world and caijing our own citizenship into thinking no crisis exists.
Better way for finding leadership imperative
Safe driving still is no accident
I will never forget Bob Godfrey, but I remember him for the wrong reason.
and its appalling waste, yet both the executive and legislative branches, organized in a system of checks and balances rather than one of joint and responsive leadership, are powerless to effect the needed chance in direction.
The imposition of effective budgetary restraint is another problem whose evasion invites disaster. A citizens' storm is building against the size of government, its spending
A myriad of previously legislated expenditures, a veritable wildwood of mandated outlay, complicates this problem, frustrating every administration's effort to make good on its promise to balance the budget. Divided power and responsibility imposed by a checks-and-balances system would have been easier even to suggest the revision and overhaul of this wildwood, yet without it the budget is unbalanceable.
Gedfrey was a 22-year-old senior in the School of Journalism last fall, and, I said, he had never been on the police reporter at the Kansan at the time. When he was killed in an automobile accident, I wrote the story. I didn't know him and not particularly miss him, but I did.
Hence, in comparatively good times, as in the past few years, national budgetary deficits—instead of diminishing or disappearing so as to permit the scaling down of a national debt whose servicing annually exceeds 50 percent, to soar higher and, higher, to ever more empire heights. There is no visible end to this under out present system.
The separation of powers provides an open plain on which Congress can wage its outrageous battle for more and more excused power, obliged to back off and sue for comcomise.
He was the first dead person I wrote a story about.
Writing the story was depressing for me, but I can only imagine the grief suffered by her.
Another KU student died after a car wreck later last fall and two more died this summer in another wreck 10 miles south of Lawrence. A fifth student was one of nine persons killed in accidents the weekend before enrollment.
I these tve persons had more in common than in car wrecks. They shared a life expectancy of 60 years had hopes, plans and dreams that will never be realized. And none of them expected to be dead before retirement.
Another school year is under way, and one need not be a KU student to know it. One need only try to turn left onto Iowa Street or Sixth Street or dare walk across them to know that we have returned, and with our cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles.
By SMITH SIMPSON
If this year's enrollment and vehicle registration figures resemble last year's, more than half of us will have some type of motor vehicle. Last year, 14,728 vehicles were registered to fewer than 24,000 students.
Similar irresponsibility besieges our conduct of foreign affairs. The executive branch cannot conduct those affairs—e.g., that it should not congressional pulling and biding this way and that, all with vociferous hullabaloo and unaccountable leakages of secrets, rendering all but impossible a thoughtful, integral pursuit of the national interest.
The crowning fallacy of our system has been made painfully patent in the election of our prime national leader from outside all national and international experience. This is one, unadulterated folly and we have underlined its effects each passing month.
The quiet, methodical, sustained strategy demanded by the challenge of a resolute, focused leader.
A parliamentary system would preclude such nonsense, for the prime national leader would rise from the ranks of the legislature, a situation that is not the case with some familiarity with national and international affairs, be regarded by his party not as an arch-ribbit but as its leader and most likely the prime minister.
A very real danger exists that the con-
timation of our present political system will perpetuate paralysis, leading to such ineffectiveness and frustration as to jeopardize more than the system. The possibility should not be poob-poob; that it might cause a drift to disaster as to invite dictatorship.
(Smith Simpson, a retired Foreign Service officer, is research professor in diplomacy at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Washington.)
Because, as a practical people, we do not want a constitution which is" but a bledged halo hovering 'round decay," I suggest the assembling of a national convention to draft a constitution based upon the parliamentary system, which I believe will come closer than our present checks-and-balances system. The current system, a united, decisive, responsible national leadership capable of moving expeditiously to meet the challenges which confront us.
The world is not exactly a seminary of democracy and the seed plot is beng narrowed and defertilized progressively by the increasing magnitude and complexity of problems demanding decision. Our best remedy is to develop an entity simply is to effect in good time a rational one.
Unfortunately, more traffic usually results in more rolling stops, screeching tires and competition with other drivers as we jockey for pole position and turn roadways into raceways. More traffic, much of it ours, also results in longer lines and shorter tempers at four-way stops and more homing and obscene features between drivers.
More traffic, unfortunately, also results in more accidents. Lawrence Police Department statistics for July, August and September 1977 showed 24 non-injury accidents. In July 1977, 128 non-injury accidents and 30 injury accidents occurred within the city limits. Those figures jumped to 142 and 45 in August, coinciding with the resumption of new and increased to 149 and 46 last September.
Certainly, KU students are not solely responsible for the increase in accidents or their severity, but we must bear part of the blame. Similarly, the rise in traffic and the selfish and self-righteous drive this seems to foster is hardly unique to us. But we are often treated with little try to beat shad lights, just as we kill ourselves when we call car wrecks “accidents.”
Vastly more wrecks are "caused" than occur "accidentally." They should be called incidents, not accidents. Driver error is the most common cause.
Lest this be interpreted as an indictment of students who drive, it is not. If anything, a reminder to students that they are prepared to do 24-doll prosperous years that we are expected to live after we graduate. It is also a reminder that we are not entitled to own a car and that we should take the right of way, or someone else's life.
We, as drivers, know our own strengths and weaknesses. Our reflexes are supposed to be at their peaks, and our minds among the best. Yet our age group still pays the highest insurance premiums. We do so partly because we are often called on to catered at the wheel and subsequently drive faster and more carelessly than other drivers.
Too often we forget that we also have more to lose than other drivers.
Too often occasions arise in which we have to deal with a situation through an intersection before oncoming traffic reaches us. We all have seen it; we all have probably tried it and somehow been able to do so.
Most of us make it. Body shops and junkyards are full of cars that didn't copastepant or use a wheelchair, so who didn't make it—or who collided with people who knew they would make it.
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Editor Steve Frazier
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