4.
Friday, October 26,1973
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
The Chill of Crises
High crimes and misdeemers have been committed here in Lawrence—yes, on this very campus.
Held in contempt are those who, in their concern for the quotidian activities of student life, have ignored nature at its fleeting best.
Gully are all those who have persisted in flocking to the cavernous confines of the indoors in outright deserts of the beauty of summer.
These are glorious days. Leaves float from their perches to land in clusters on sidewalks and crunch beneath trampling feet. Look down at them. More hues are to be found in their midst than in any paint box and more patterns than on any imported cloth.
The grass is still green and cool to the touch. Just now it begs one last chance to tickle bare feet. Soon, too soon, it will fade to brown.
Around every corner is a tree whose leaves have turned to Chinese red. Each tree's leaves rustle in the breeze and make it stand apart. All others are pale in comparison, and a Kodak is powerless when trying to capture its color.
The cloudless Kansas sky, infinite and electric in its blueness, is unequalled. Who could question man's yearning to fly since the beginning?
These are wonderfully good days for riding in the country and waxing cars before the winter's cold sets in. These days are tailormade for watching the rippling waters of lakes from the grassy banks, for following parades or for wearing skirts or bright colored shirts to salute autumn's morning sun.
It's hard not to give way to dreaming, not to be gay on these days, while strolling leisurely, lazily down the boulevard.
But people carrying signs are there, and others are sitting at tables calling for signatures. They are petitioning in support of the President's impeachment. And it's a deadly serious affair.
Someone else is handing out leaflets about a war that won't quit.
leaflets about a war that won't quit.
The colors suddenly pale, the
colors realities can take
the wind in single sails,
even on so fine a day.
—Linda Hales
Phil McKnight
Efficiency Cult Lingers
In my last two columns I have discussed the causes and effects of the educational cut of efficiency in America in the first part of this volume, and the ways in which the cut of the cult were profound and pervasive.
There was a mania for recording "h. d data" about schools' efforts, as illustrated previously. Such practices as teacher and student observations can to fortunate concentrations of the schools.
One of these was the idea of the school as "America's Service Station." I presume that such schools would offer regular courses for the average, premium for the advanced and nothing for those who take too long to fill.
THE TRAEGEDY of the cult of efficiency, according to Callahan's book "Education and the Cult of Efficiency," was in "... adopting values and practices in discriminately and applying them with little understanding of educational values or purposes.
"It was not that some of the ideas from the business world might not have been used to advantage in educational adoptions, but because of adoption of the basic values, as well as the techniques of the business-industrial world, was a serious mistake in an institution of primary purpose was the education of students. The educators had sought 'the finest product at the lowest cost' . . . the results would not have been unfortunate. But the record shows that the emphasis was not at all on 'the finest product' but on the 'lowest cost.'
THEUGH THE RESULTS of the first cult of efficiency may be evident, they may not be visible or important enough to preclude the use of a high-sulfur sympathetic to misduced efficiency efforts.
For example, we might point out that while it would seem useful from a cost effectiveness standpoint to be able to describe its strengths and weaknesses (it's it), it would be inappropriate to do so.
The current enthusiasm for educational accountability could provide the impetus and vehicle for a second cult. Thus, we need to understand the efforts of attaining educational efficiency.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
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FOR ONE THING, we need to keep as many options open to students for as long as possible. They are not here primarily for them, but for ways of dealing with information.
If the only purpose of the university were to convey information efficiently, there would be no need for a campus. A campus is too complex to come together with the information.
But to do so requires time—and just as crucially, it requires varying amounts of time for different students. Such diversity should not be labeled "inefficiency."
FOR ANOTHER THING, our society has never been adept at forecasting and preparing for disasters because many of these occupations do not present exist. Though it would be more efficient now to prepare people for specified jobs, precisely the ones that are most in need to new opportunities.
The kinds of curricula needed for this kind of liberal education are more likely to be inefficient in terms of measuring how they influence their graduates' occupational skills.
Regarding the advancement of knowledge in general, it can seldom be scheduled in advance into distinct modules of time. If that were so, cancer would not exist. The important issues of life take much time and much inefficient bumbling.
AS ANY HONEST RESEARCHER, whether in the physical, natural, or social sciences will admit, research is messy. Even when most of the parameters have been ascertained, the interplay of the variables sedum lends itself to efficient use. The lack of robustibility from the university because of its "inefficiency" would be tragic.
President Richard Lyman of Stanford University sums up the problems of striving for efficiency in education: "...it won't do us much good to have the whole system beautifully organized and transformed into cool, cozy spaces." And so soul has been squeezed out of it.
For example, a suggestion was made recently to the National Commission on the Financing of Post Secondary Education that the commission draw up national guidelines for the training calculating persistent educational costs. The terms here have a haunting familiarity.
I would like to close on an optimistic note, but it is difficult when one considers that the original cut of efficiency in education was not overcome by reason. It collapsed of its own trivial weight. Some go so far as to say that it had become but became a permanent phenomena.
AT ANY RATE, the possibility of a re-
creation of cut efficiency must be
taken seriously.
it is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in numbers and influence, and by 1960 one may expect it to become an even more new civilization, a civilization larger and brisker and purer."
Lewis describes "Winnemac University" as being "like , . . . a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play games and learn," and are not expected to have time to read them.
CONSIDER THE POSSIBILITY of what we will get be a university of the kind described by Sinclair Lewis in his novel "Arrowsmith."
As I previously stated, we must be sure of what we want, because we will probably get
Phil McKnight, assistant professor of education and director of the Office of Instructional Resources, prepares a regular training with issues in teaching for the Kansas.
The Case for Daylight Savings
BY CHALMERS ROBERTS Special to the Washington Post
WASHINGTON—On Oct. 28, when we turn our clocks back an hour to end Daylight Saving Time (DST) for 1975, darkness will come an hour earlier. Given the energy problem now facing the United States, and other problems as well, it will be a suitable time to consider year-round Daylight Saving Time.
Rep. Craig Hosner (R-Calif.), has been trying for years, fruitlessly, to get Congress to institute year-round DST. But the other day he threw in the towel. He did so because of a lightdaylights out of my daylight saving bill," he said. The bureaucrats turn out to be the Department of Transportation, which has legal control of the Uniform Time Act of 1968, and assorted other agencies that had offered Hosner introduced his proposal.
DST has been an issue, usually highly emotional, since Benjamin Franklin thought up the idea 200 years ago. As Hosser has put it, "Beno awake one morning to his hotel room bathed in sunlight. Despite the fact that he was a记otterally late riser, Franklin decided... with a cue that he would be sleeping when he was washed while he was usually sleeping and would be better used later in the day."
UNTIL THE 1966 LAW, the DST argument pitted farmers against city folk. Members of Congress fought bitterly about putting the District of Columbia on DST and the annual battle became ridiculous. The same thing occurred in many states, too. In 1982, for example, a Virginia statute asked us to "let's keep it the way our mothers and fathers raised us on. Let's keep it conservative." DST, he said, "would break the natural laws of the
Confusion was monumental for train travelers, airline passengers and
There were two major exceptions.
During both world wars Congress enforced year-round DST. "Fast time," as it was called in World War I, ended when Congress overrode a Wilson vetot of a bill passed in 1945. The version lasted three and a half years. Truman signed a repealer five weeks after the war ended with Japan.
businessman. The Washington Post editorialized against "a babel of contradictory clocks" and the "annual confusion that descends on the nation each spring." The 1966 act at least set a national policy.
IN EACH CASE DST was enforced to save electricity. So, given today's energy problem, why not year-round DST again? Hosmer has raised that issue, along with the data from DST and "get people home before day and night greater protection against crime."
Rep. Harley Staggers (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, asked the view of the Department of Transportation on the Hosmer bill. The bureaucracy reply, signed by DOT general counsel John Rivers, said that the department and bureaucracy, DOT, it seems, has been "examining" the matter and it provided staggers with "preliminary observations." Among them are:
—DOT, the Federal Power Commission, the Office of Emergency Management and private organizations have concluded that year-round DST "would reduce nationwide demand for electricity by not more than 1 or 2 per cent," varying by region. The World War II-era program, "Intractably pertinent" because then demand reacted to lighting loads whereas now peak demand relates to heating and air-conditioning. And there are other applications needed, more electrical appliances today.
—The Agriculture Department reported that from a scientific standpoint year-round DST would not have a significant effect on production but it might have varying effects on individual farmers because bureaucratic dodge have been invented?
—The Justice Department advised that it was difficult to quantify the effect of year-round DST on crime. The department concluded that criminals who work in darkness would accommodate themselves to the later darkness.
It was noted that Britain tried year-round DST from October 1988 through October 1971. The British report showed a reduction of 3.3 per cent in automobile fatalities and serious accidents. But DOT's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that they were insufficient statistical information in the British report to say whether DST here would produce the same result.
FURTHERMORE, THE BRITISH conducted a social survey that showed, although those interviewed did not feel inconvenienced by DST, they thought others might be. So DOT concluded that there ought to be a study here. The reason for the dodge may be found in this comment: "From our experience in administration, six years, we would expect this to be a very contentious issue." Unspoken conclusion: don't poke sleeping dogs, energy crisis or not.
2. "Available traffic safety statistics suggest that the institution of year-round Daylight Saving Time would decrease driver safety, and increase serious accidents." Why? "Most homeward-bound commuting by automobile is done in darkness, which is more dangerous than in daylight." Drivers are more fatigued and under the stress of the evening than in the morning." Thus, even if year-round DST meant more morning
driving in darkness, the fatality rate would increase less than it would drop in the evenings. In short, though DOT did not have a fault with DST DWT could cut the hdwai slaughter.
There is more in the Barmum letter to Staggers, mostly about recurrent rows over where the time zone boundaries should be in the United States and how these would avoid the yearly amounts. DOT's is this way, you study (three-year type) may be needed.
—THE Department of Health,
Education and Welfare reported that it did not have any information on the effect of year-round DST on school children. DOT counsel Barmum said the result would seem particularly acute for those children. But in the next sentence he wrote, "We've elevated by postponing the time school begins so children would not have to travel to school in darkness."
THERE ARE, OF COURSE, many facets to the energy crisis. We are deluged with advice to put up storm windows, turn down the thermostat this winter, and keep the basement buses and so on. Please President Nixon will even get around to turning off the White House lights the way President Johnson did. But that is about the level of leadership this administration seems prepared to give. Interior Secretary Merrick Scott said we were cold or stranded this winter really depended on Old Man Winter.
I suppose that winter brown-outs, schools closed for lack of heating oil, factories shut down and other such challenges to the administration. Right now, however, the Department of Transportation's response to the Hosmer year-round Daylight Saving Time proposal is as reflective as anything can be. That means we need to cause to do nothing as long as the leadership is sitting on its hands.
Readers Respond
Foreign Students An Asset to Universities
To the Editor:
I would like to respond to the (Kansas, Oct 23) letter from Larry Bridges and Brad Rusher in which they offered contingency plans that implied interrupting the education of certain students and deporting them from the United States if they happened to be from the Arab nations using oil as a weapon against the United States.
The letter proposes this as a counter threat to Arab countries who threaten to cut off oil to the United States because of U.S. military aid to Israel.
Bridges and Raiser try to make their plan sound credible by pointing out that
the top priority of Arab nations is to create
more favorable of life for their
people, wishing
But then they say, "The drain (this places) on our educational system is ob-"
I WOULD Like to point out in response to Bridges and Raiser that although the supply of oil may be finite (and what one might say is deprived of) the sumly of education is not.
In fact, the presence of a diverse student body just might be an improvement of the educational system in making it more universal at the university level. Its
- VERY FUNNY! *
In Opposition to Ford
By WILLIAM RASPBERRY
What analogy makes the point? A surgeon facing possible malpractice charges for botching an operation naming the doctor to patch the patient up? The suspected wife telling his wife who her next husband should show off divorce? Nero appoints the fire marshal?
The Washington Post
Should Rep. Gerald Ford, the President's
should vote, vice president be confirmed by
Congress?
LONG BEFORE any of us knew of the Agnew gagrant allegation, we had heard persuasive evidence—much of it from the President himself—that Nixon had com- plained hunked at or covered up offenses that well might lead to his own impeachment.
I SAY NO. Not because the President made a bad choice (although the Michigan Republican is by no means a distinguished choice), but because it is questionable whether Nixon should be making any choice at all.
But it wasn't just Sipro Agnew. The vice president's scandal was only part of a larger, more pervasive scandal, of which Nixon is the centerime.
After watching the recent televised congressional response to Richard Nixon's light-hearted nomination, it's impossible to imagine that he won't be.
If Spiro Agnew's troubles were the only thing involved, then the only fair criticism of the appointment would be that it was too quick and too jocularly made. The circumstances that created the vacancy were, after all, both historic and tractic.
But should he be?
YOU CAN'T STOP the president from
making the nomination, of course; the Constitution allows for that. But there's nothing in the operative 25th Amendment to stop Congress from disapproving this or any other Nixon nomination to the vice presidency.
Let House Speaker Carl Albert remain as potential successor; if the emergency occurs, let him assume the presidency. And if he is big enough, let him and his colleagues then choose a new vice president and let Albert resign and go back to being speaker.
Don't bother memorizing that scenario. Ford will be quick and easily confirmed, partly because it's not important for a car to be partly because its members are along with Gerald Ford.
Which isn't the point at all.
graduates might thus be less apt to swallow half-baked assumptions about each other.
The statement of Bridges and Raisser that foreign students take university seats at the expense of domestic students is only an assumption. It simply is not the case.
It should be pointed out that foreign students are not allowed to ride the bus unless they are underpaid and under contribution.
THE TUITION THAT a foreign student pays is more than twice that paid by an american citizen, and the foreign student pays less. The tuition of his tuition to the U.S. economy each year.
These extra-university expenses of foreign students are profitable to taxayers and alumni. In fact, several hundred million dollars from foreign capital sources is spent each year in this country by foreign students.
Stating that the U.S. universities are subsiding their own energy crisis bols
A THREAT TO DISMISSI a certain group of students from all U.S. universities because of a change in the policies of these students' countries' governments is, contrary to the official position, an indulgence of all foreign students, including American students in the Mideast.
It implies an indictment for failing to control one's home country's policies toward one's host country. If one group can be indicted, why not another group?
The central theme of the letter seems to be that an embargo on education will meet an embargo on oil. The country will need for oil the Arab nations will have no market. This hardly seems likely, since 90 to 94 per cent of Mid east oil now goes to markets outside the Arab countries.
THE LETTER GOES ON to imply that the United States can do without Arab oil, that Arab oil will shortly become "nothing but water," and that we need a system." Then why the need for threats in the form of contingency plans implying the dismissal of students? Then why threats to inhibit people from creating "a more educated life" for their people, with education?"
I think it is unnecessary for fear of an
student to prompt threats to fellow
students.
*Perhaps the authors of the letter should read a quote from their own last paragraph: "To continue to expand these threats ... (only serve to multiply adverse connotations)."
John Solback
John Solback Morganville graduate student
S
A Plea for Fairness
To the Editor:
One can, of course, easily disagree with Eric Meyer's editorial (Kansan, Oct. 18) about the Arab-Iraeli war. But when one's disagreement takes the form of Jonathan Jordan's unwarranted attack on Meyer, saying that "Meyer's answer would be better if it appeared in a Nazi publication," that's something entirely else.
Jordan's letter seems to confound his own purpose at every turn. Presumably, he is against blind hatred of anyone. Yet when Meyer makes the relatively reasonable assumption that he are a strong political force in America," Jordan unreasonably twists and distorts it.
Meyer did not say that the Jews are the financiers who are the root of all evil; he did not say that they are the radicals who are the root of all evil; he did not say that they control foreign policy.
MEYER MERELY SAID that Jews were a strong political force, but Jordan cannot see past his emotional reaction to realize that.
Obviously, Jordan opposes discrimination. Yet when Meyer tosses off a point to the effect that we should not automatically assume Israel has a darker and less progressive people," Jordan says, "Meyer's comment that Israelis are lighter than Arabs is almost as ignorant as it is disgusting." It remains that had been the main point of the paragraph.
When Jordan explains why some Israelis are lighter than Arabs past mass rapes of Jews, he is unnerving. "They've coached with 'So' if you see a blue-cyed Jew, just remember, it's the Christian in him, that comes dangerously close to proposing the religious hatred that he imposes."
ONCE AGAIN, Meyer's editorial can be disagreed with. But a person should have the right to voice a minority opinion without having his views distorted and without having it implied that he is racist. That is one of the nastiest terms in the English language, and is not used in formal notations, which should be used far less freely than it was implied by Jordan.
(Editor's note; the above letter was endorsed by eleven students other than the writer. Space limitations prohibit running around a course, and has received regard Jordan's letter.)
Valerie J. Mevers
Valerie J. Meyers
Overland Park sophomore
Griff and the Unicorn
by Sokoloff