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Tuesday, October 30, 1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN commer
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Language Use
You may not have noticed, but that old liberal arts sticker, the foreign language requirement, has been changed.
Hold on. No rejoicing yet. The change is hardly earthshattering, which is why it may have escaped your attention.
So what are the changes?
Despite attempts by serious minded academicians to alter the requirement and the burden, that 16 hour block remains on the books.
First, the 10-hour, year-long starter course is still required. But you now have the option of taking it twice, in different languages, instead of continuing with one language.
Or, if you want to stay with the same language, after the first 10 hours, you can opt to study other than the main literature for the last six hours.
How about a sociology course taught in basic French, or Latin American studies in Spanish? You can choose biology, anthropology, history or economics, all taught in a foreign language.
The idea of teaching subject matter courses in another language isn't novel. Several courses have been offered before, and those were designed for those already proficient in a foreign language.
Now, the beginner, whose interests may lie in fields far removed from literature, will be able to enjoy the course more and perhaps apply the knowledge gained from it to his major field.
Perhaps most significant in this change is the attitude of the modern foreign language departments.
For so long, the departments have demanded that a student interested in learning a language be enamored also with the study of literature. Such is not always the case.
Nor is every student who wants to learn a language well always interested in teaching that language and literature to other students, others or infinitum. But this has been the orientation of the departments.
To major in the language is to major in the literature. And to major in the literature is to acquaint with poets, philosophers and novelists.
Those who argue in favor of a foreign language requirement argue for the maintenance of a broad education. This is the aim of the liberal arts program and so it should remain. But this is not to say that the knowledge gained should not ultimately be useful.
Knowledge of literature and an ability to express oneself beautifully have their merits. But the drawbacks become clear when trying to discuss politics, politics, space flights or sports.
Woe to the language major who should seek employment as a translator in business or politics. You may be lost in the world of commerce.
Linda Hales
Discredit 'No Credit'
Happily, the changes in the foreign language requirement are evidence of a willingness among foreign language departments to their own studies, thus enhancing a true liberal arts education.
B be wary of credit/no credit. The story that the student is not harmed by using the option probably is a myth.
According to Jerry Lewis, associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and member of the Academic Procedures and Policies Committee of the University County some law schools and medical schools convert a "credit" grade to a "C," and a "no credit" to an "F," thereby lowering the student's grade point average. There is some evidence, he said, that in the selection of Watkins-Berger and Summerfield scholars students at Beta Kappa, students who have used the credit/no credit option at a disadvantage.
Lewis said that although these selection committees didn't convert credit/no credit grades to F's or C's, there was strong sentiment in those groups that good students didn't use the option. The actual harm suffered by individual students cannot be determined, he said, but in one case it was fairly clear that the use of credit/no credit on a college teacher had laughed a Summerfield scholarship candidate out of the running. Lewis said that some schools on this campus, including the School of Engineering, didn't approve of the option.
The original reasoning behind the credit/no credit option was that students in one field to study, education for example, should be encouraged to take courses in other fields, business perhaps. When no grade is given adminstrative experience among majors might not feel that they had to compete with business majors in a business course.
Many students probably don't use the option in the spirit in which it was intended, Lewis said, because courses often are
taken credit/no credit. However, he said, there is no hard evidence that students are using the option as a cop-out.
The Academic Procedures and Policies Committee recently issued a statement warning students about possible undesirable consequences of credit/no credit. The committee is to be commended for having taken such action once the disparity between stated University policy and actual decision-making becomes clear.
Perhaps the University is fighting a losing battle in trying to make its decisions be specified rules when so many people allow their prejudices and biases to take over. They feel justified in ignoring the rules on credit/no credit if they are in agreement with the assumptions on which the rules are based. They think they know that a student is lazy even though there is a legitimate reason for using credit/no credit.
In meetings of University or school governing bodies, a reason periodically given for passing a rule is that people already follow the rule, so it may as well be legalized. If the University could keep abreast of what is going on and legislate fast enough to make actual campus operations conform to stated policy, no one would be hurt by individuals who follow their own beliefs rather than the rules when judging the capabilities of others.
But such a task is impossible. So for the sake of justice and equity, why don't the decision makers who are unhappy with the rules try to change them rather than break existing rules? Not in all cases will the committee take the initiative and lead the students or faculty members that the official word isn't always the whole truth.
—Elaine Zimmerman
Saner Living from Avoiding Hassles
Noninvolvement Easy Out
First of Three Parts
By DAN MORGAN
The Washington Post
Going from the Balkans to the Washington of Watergate produces a special kind of cultural shock; the bugging, telephone tapping, "Mail covers," agents provocateurs, prearranged meetings in their offices, and the policy really makes one feel at home.
After this initial sensation, though, what strikes a homeowner after 8% years in and of Communist nations is not that this country has been warped by Watergate, but that Watergate has not penetrated very deeply. America is still a remarkably open society.
In a single day on the job in Washington, I collected about as many telephone numbers as I did traveling in and out of Budapest over three years. I talked on the phone with a general, a senator, a New York publisher and a high official of a huge oil company.
THE DIRECTOR OF an Oregon organization that works with migrant laborers, a subject of occasional FBI investigation, spokesfree to me for an hour and a half and never asked for a shred of identification. Farmers, students and construction contractors repeatedly described American politicians as "crooks," a candy bar and a place for Russians to hesitate to display even to close Friends, let alone to a stranger.
Naturally, Americans take such things for granted. But when you have been in a different world for so long, you can be amazed by the variety of cultures that speak out here, by the way they don't keep looking over their shoulders, by the crossing of cultures that makes America seem in some ways more classless, more militant, than "classless" communist land.
At the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, for example, I overheard doormen arranging an afterwork tennis game with a guest. And whereas people living under Communist regimes don't kid themselves about an ordinary worker having as much status as a white-collar official, a California carpenter or an old-school economist, nonprofessional college classmates who were "wearing suits and ties and making $12,000 in the financial world." He had opted out of that world, he said, because he had found more money and freedom.
THERE IS A PHRASE in currency from coast to coast that seems to express per-
An Army recruiter in Wyoming told me that young men came into his office, listened politely to his pitch for Army training programs, and then gave it to him; enlistment would be "too much of a hassle." The California contractor said he was "willing to accept" any changes changing hands and the union restrictions have become too much of a hassle.
fecitly the spirit of the times: "Avoiding a hassle." To a homecomer, that phrase appears to have become the credo of the age.
Personal involvement and commitment also seem to be out of fashion because of the hassles they can entail. A Los Angeles woman explaining local sexual relationships said, "The name of the game is to have a relationship with men whose mistresses sleep with other men because they can say, 'Good, I'm that less responsible for that person.'"
Noninvolvement similarly seems to be the guiding doctrine of the expanding singles culture, a movement that offers itself as an alternative to the hassles of marriage and even puts out its own national publication, the singles register.
AVOIDING HASSLES apparently can mean leaving behind either the obvious problems of urban living or the not so obvious ones of the counterculture. In both cases, the aim is the same: to find a safer life style.
Tony, a fellow in Wyoming, for example, opted out of the big city hassle about a year ago and headed for the wide open spaces. Several years before, he said, he received his degree in economics from an Ohio college and went to work at a Cleveland insurance company. He worked there three years and was promised a salary of more than $100,000. He needed headache but came to Jackson Hole, did some fishing until his money ran out and finally got a job floating tourists down the Snake River on a raft.
Tony explains his escapism without anologizing for it.
"I know I left all those problems behind, and maybe the guy who took my job is a better man than I am. But I wasn't improving the world in Cleveland. I think I'm doing more for the country telling tourists about it. I'd like to drop mountains that I ever was back East."
About the time that Tony was moving into the emigrant culture in Jackson, Steve and Cricket Smith were moving back into "the system" in Oregon. They had joined the
student protest movement in the late 1960s, quitting college and drifting into Oregon's hippie culture. Then came the shootings at Kent State, which made a deep impression on 28-year-old Steve because you "realized you could get killed."
STEVE AND CRITCHT STILL have friends living in a farm commune near Portland, "working so hard they never have any fun, and just waiting for the whole society to come out." Steve and Cricht were waiting for fire, tired of the hassles of the counterculture existence.
Last year they took a 95-dollar-a-month lease on a store front on Portland's Second Avenue, in the heart of the skid row district. They redecorated it with weathered timber paneling and used a photography studio on the Eyes that attracts some middle-class customers.
Steve, a first-year law school dropout, admits that the switch from hippiedom to entrepreneurship was the course of least resistance for him. He cajors, favoring a $50,000 limit on all personal incomes and rejecting the "competitive system" for a more "cooperative" one, he says he thinks that such changes would be much easier for Him, the revolution is clearly over.
HASSLES COME IN ALL SHAPES and sizes: big political hassles and smaller personal hassles, like the ones I encountered myself on coming home.
There was the push-it-youle luggage carrier that I wasn't allowed to push myself beyond the airport exits, which is labor union territory. One of the porters blocking the door behind me pushed them on his own carrier, wheeled it 50 feet to the taxi stand, and charged me $2.
America has more welfare-state elements than Communist propagandists would ever have.
There was the parking garage that was closed when I came to pick up my car; the Soviet-style wains in supermarket queues, slow moving because so many people pay with credit cards and checks that need validating; a three-week delay in the delivery of merchandise from a department store warehouse.
BY THEMSELVES, these may be acceptable hassles. But they become less and less bearable when combined with the job hassles and the political hassles and the medical hassles and the drug hassles and the energy hassles and the race hassles and the rest of the hassles list.
The result that a homeowner finds in the America of 1973 is a weariness with confrontation, a longing for saner lifestyles, withdrawal into less public, more private cubillennium, a certain rejection of the central work-ethic ideology of our capitalist society.
Perhaps most of all, what one finds are transition and confusion, a lost sense of who we are. Some communities are even unsure about how to honor their Vietnam War dead. A Veterans of Foreign Wars member in Idaho told me his chapter would like to be given three local boys who died in Southeast Asia that "we don't know what to write on it."
(The writer returned to the United States in July after $6\frac{1}{2}$ years as the Washington Post's Central European correspondent. He has since traveled across the country, stopping in many places where he had stayed on a similar trip 18 years ago.)
In Pursuit of Privacy
By Judith Martin
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON—With all the moral dilemmas piling in the inbox these days there's one which had seemed in danger of getting lost in the shuffle. Think how long it takes you to find yourself up into a righteous snit over the invasion of Jacqueline Onassis' privacy.
This used to be a popular occupation of goodthinking people. Great waves of information about intrusions made daily into this woman's private concerns. This gave them something to talk about after discussing her relationships with her children and her relationships with her children.
Fortunately, the opportunity for renewing the struggle has presented itself. Playmen Magazine, the Italian answer to our look-ierhe industry, has struck again.
PLAYMEN WAS THE PUBLICATION that demonstrated that enterprise in the pursuit of truth is not dead. Last year they taught that young students year under hazardous conditions to produce a journalistic breakthrough: nude pictures of Jackie sunshinning on her Greek island, apparently assuming that those strange figures up and down in the water must be dolphins.
The reaction was a chance to see the public at its best. People who grabbed copies of the magazine out of one another's bands talked of nothing but how they were "made." This was, of course, after they all said, "Boy, she sure is skinny, isn't she?"
Well, now we have the October 1973 issue of Playmies (that is, those of us who have thought friends in Italy have it), and it is hard to tell how much they care for Mrs. Danaiss look simply - well, play!
This one has—are you ready?~ photographs of Aristotle Onassis, the shipping magnate, naked as a jaybird. The poor man, so to speak, is caught unaware, wandering about his own island, dragging it and carrying baskets to the picnic table.
ONE CAN ONLY EXPLODE with indignation at the indignity of subjecting a human being, who is minding his own business, to outrageous scrutiny. Boy, he sure is tubby.
In these days of widespread bugging, spying, data-bank keeping, scandal-mongering and too many additives in bread, it is well to focus on what privacy means.
The Onassis family has done more than its share of acting as catalysts and test cases. (If you'd rather worry about government employees getting their phones tapped, go ahead, everybody has his own idea of fun.)
Think of Mrs. Onassis, with her children, in out Central Park, being watched every minute by Ron Gallela's camera. If you've ever wanted to swat a kid in the grocery store, but found everybody's watching, you can get an idea of what she goes through.
So we must all be vigilant in the protection of the basic rights of privacy to which we are entitled, in particular or social status. Boycott Italian magazines. For a quarter, you can look at mine.
Reader Responds
To the Editor:
'Richard III' Has Watergate Cast
In an effort to help stem the rising unemployment and crime rate currently rampant in the higher schools of the D.C. area, the Performing Arts at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts have decided to rehabilitate these people by employing them in theater. The natural choice for the play was Shakespeare's tragedy "King Lear," which is easily distributed by typecasting the roles.
The casting for the lead will control the success of the play, and if impeachment proceedings run on schedule, the director should be able to get just the man he wants. Jobs are scarce for a fired president—mainly the used car business is closed to him.
RICHARD NIXON HAS all the necessary qualifications for a good portrayal of RICHARD III. his has his evil aura, his talent for personal responsibility and his Machiavellian power politics style.
Neither Richards stop at anything to get what they want, whether getting it involves breaking a rule or simply not.
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff
The political tactics Richard III used to impress the Lord Mayor of London to bring mind Nixon's televised speeches and the pictures of him and Billy Graham praying together. (The producer has been押着 Graham to play the role of the bishops.)
THE ONLY THING Nixon lacks for the part is aunchback, but he compensates for that lack by his sour facial expression and stiff body movements.
doning friends when it becomes expedient. Hypocrisy also comes naturally to both of us.
King Richard was able to deceive even his brothers, and President Richard still has a legacies.
in traditional Shakespearean style, men will be chosen to play women's parts. Spiro Agnew will get the part of Lady Anne. At her wedding, no one could empathize more with her.
Like Anne, Spiro was chosen vice president purely for political purposes, he was forced out when he became a problem and association with Richard hastenger has
Like Anne's curse, "If ever he have wife, let her be made more miserable by the life of him," Spiro's law and order speeches boomeranged.
George McGovern and Edmund Muskie will be assigned the roles of the two little princes. Their fates stir a litre of the same emotion from the observer. As far as we know, all were innocents defeated by circumstances that had not candidates disappeared from the presidential race almost as quietly as the little princes died.
GERALD FORD MAY PLAY Richard's other love interest, Elizabeth, daughter of Queen Elizabeth. Everything depends on Ford's ability to, like Elizabeth, escape Richard's destiny and become queen of the new administration.
Hubert Humphrey could play George,
Duke of Clarence, on the basis of personality and relationship to the succession. Clarence seemed as simple-minded as Hubert="No, Richard couldn't possibly be doing this to me." Also Clarence was next successor to the throne, until the little prince came of age. Humphrey "was the president of England" holding the presidency for the Democrats until the public forgot Chappauddick.
MA
THE PRIMARY ADVISER who defects to the opposition could be none other than John Mitchell, former chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President. Both he and Kuckuckham could be termed "over-zoaal" in their efforts to help Richard along.
At a strains of neg side minist tempo mendia
The two zealots narrowly avoid destruction because of their illegal activities on behalf of the sovereign, but when Mitchell was denied protection he denied the Duke an eardrum and the President denied Mitchell protection from criminal proceedings—the shift to the opposition. Mitchell has been speaking out against Nixon and Buckingham helped prevent his arrest.
Catesby, Norfolk, Ratcliffe and Surrey, the king's chenchens, could be played by John Erichman, Haldeman, Jeb Stuart Magruder and Herbert Kalmbach. So many people currently floating around Washington answer to the hard faith that understudies and understands to the understudies will be provided.
J. Gordon Laddy and E. Howard Hunt could be cast as Tyrrel, the man who murdered the little princes, provided of course they can get out on probation in time. They should have no problem relating to the question posed by him willing to do anything for political favors.
As Krem into t puts mess:
JOINE DEAN III WILL PLAY Derby, the other man (besides Mitchell-Buckingham) who defects from Richard and saves his neck. Derby switched to Richmond's side in the end, as Dean turned state's evidence for the Senate Investigating Committee.
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The walk-on parts, the murderers,
messengers, soldiers, etc., can be played by
the players.
The man to play Richmond, Richard's successor to the throne, is up for grabs. The part may go to Carl Albert. But who knows, maybe Sam Evam will get it.
The role of Lord Hastings, the man who refused to go along with Richard and was executed for that refusal, has remained disturbingly uncaste for a long time, but now either former Attorney General Eliot Richardson or William Fuckelshaw will be excellent as the man who didn't go along. It is unclear if he would be subjected to government. As a citizen in "Richard III" remarked, "All may be well; but if God sort it, so. Tis more than we deserve or I expect."
Karen Leonard
Sophomore
Minneapolis, Minn.
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