4
Friday, August 31, 1973
University Daily Kansas
KANSAN comme
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the writers.
Cause to Rejoice
You may not have noticed it (the Kansasan didn't publish the text), but Chancellor Archie R. Dykes made a truly radical speech after his installation Monday. If the freshman chancellor's words were an accurate reflection of his educational philosophy and in connection with the direction he intends to lead the University of Kansas, students, teachers, alumni and state legislators have cause to rejoice.
This unlikely revolutionary from Tennessee proposes a concept of the role of the University that would undermine and overthrow what have become traditional priorities not only in these parts, but at nearly every level if Chancellor Dykes intends to translate his words into policy, he may return KU to the root of education.
The heresy Dykes proposes is that the University of Kansas focus its energies toward the teaching of undergraduate students.
Surely Dykes understands that the priorities around here have always been, in rapidly descending order, research and publications, graduate teaching, teaching undergraduates in their major areas of study, orienting lower-division undergraduates and service.
Read the list backwards and you
will see the text implied in Dykes'
*informal* address.
If the Chancellor thinks he can proin an insular, provincial faculty and administration into being responsive to the aspirations of the people of the state, he should be wished all the best. Outlanders don't refer to Mt. Oread as Snob Hill for nothing. But if Dykes can肩 a 10 per cent faculty salary, increase from the legislature, it will put him in a position to start making demands of his own on the faculty.
Consider the amusing notion of a professor—seersuckered, khakiied and huspuppied—chatting about Milton with a group of bankers and shopkeepers at the local Chamber of Commerce for utilizing the Crimson and Blue.
which Dykes has propelled KU's continuing education program is any indication, with more clout he may make it difficult for faculty members to hide behind even an inbred tenure committee.
Regardless, the highest service this university can perform for Kansans is to provide a faculty dedicated to undergraduate teaching, a faculty that doesn't mold students into its own image as eternal critics of society with no personal values. That urbane attitude doesn't return students to rural Kansas.
If Chancellor Dykes is serious in his intention to reorder priorities here, he might turn his attention to the only program at KU which has succeeded in making an impact on quality undergraduate education, the Pearson Integrated Humanities Program.
The success of the Pearson Program, taught by three distinguished teachers whose abilities are acknowledged by even their most severe critics, and witnessed by the enthusiasm of parents, alumni and students, has not been encouraged.
In fact, the Pearson Program, recipient of KU's first (and now probably the last) project grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was vehemently discouraged by the College Assembly last spring when the Pearson Foundation Praexemption from freshman-sophomore humanities requirements.
That action not only ran counter to the principles Chancellor Dykes embraced Monday, it mocked academic freedom itself.
Academics who are interested in research are not going to like Dykes' emphasis. Perhaps the Chancellor himself doesn't realize how serious the changes he made were when he feel it will take nothing less than a miracle to alter the course of this institution.
Dykes' speech deserves applause and it is hoped that he will not only continue to encourage quality teaching, but also will reward it.
—Don Ashton
Grumbling Gourmets?
While housewives gingerly pick over the short supply of bloated-priced meats in the groceries, more and more dinner-table meals are being eaten, eating situation was certainly much worse during the depression.
These optimists tell harrowing tales of what tightening the belt reams means and argue that American food fed than anyone in the world.
The beef-loving American consumer can only sigh and wonder if these grim oracles have an appetite for casseries.
A point of the history lesson is that Americans are spoiled and indulgent eaters. Yet any way you carve the casserole, it is undeniable that the unavailability of some food for most families heralds a new decline in the quality of American life.
The wealth of a nation is measured by the quantity and quality of the goods and services available to the people. If the population be well as they are in the recent past, the nation must be poorer.
The problem promises to become worse and worse in coming months. After the food price-freeze was lifted July 16, prices immediately rocketed to new peaks. Treasury Secretary Randy Reagan is expected to expect an "astounding increase in the wholesale price index for August."
Wholesale prices for farm products are expected to soar by an increase of 22 per cent in August. The price will be passed along to the consumer.
It is unfortunate and unfair that the brunt of the price increases falls on American food consumers. Rich or poor, everyone must eat, but we still have fast commodity to serve as a discouragement to spending.
Nevertheless, prices of non-food goods increased only five per cent in the first half of 1973, while food prices rose 21 per cent.
Another insult to the average consumer is the fact that corporate
executives have less and less trouble filling their own grocery baskets. The Commerce Department reported that Corporate profits before taxes in the second quarter of 1973 reached a record rate of $130 billion, an increase of 37 per cent from last year. Wage increases, however, increased by only six per cent.
The Nixon administration cannot be blamed entirely for a food price increase that is world wide. Yet, with the abandonment of the food budget, we must that the administration has no plans for protecting food consumers.
Food is a basic necessity forall and its availability should not be arbitrarily determined by supply or demand as a means of halting infall.
By LEROY AARONS
The Washington Post
(First of three posts)
Civil Rights Decade A Mixed Bag
Floyd McKissick called it "the last great picnic."
-Bill Gibson
Malcom X called it "the farce on Washington."
Julian Bolt spent the day serving Coca-Cola to celebrities like Sammy Davis Jr. and Alicia Keys.
John Lewis spent the day trying to force
through a speech that was deemed too
sensitive.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said: "No, we are not satisfied and will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream . . ."
Tens of millions of Americans watched as their television sets gave living testimony to the power, the depth, the explosive energy of the movement for equal rights in journalism.
That was a decade ago, a decade that seems more like a century. And where are they now?
The letter suggested my story was part of a perennial脉 through the Kansan columns. Of over 50 stories written by me, two only have dealt with foreign students.
McKissick, who was a founder of the now-moribund Congress of Racial Equality, is in North Carolina attempting to create an independent black city with the help of the Nixon Administration, which he supported in the 1972 election.
Bond, Georgia's first black legislator since Reconstruction, is in the South trying to forge a political coalition based on the views of former educators, boards of education and sheriffs' offices.
I did not blame anybody in my story. I did present every side and gave those criticized a chance to counter the charges made. How much more objective could you get?
Lewis, a founder and chairman of the defunct Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), is also in the South, a voter registration and education project.
MALCOL M X died two years later of an assassin's bullet.
King died in 1688 of an assassin's bullet. The decade after the march is so rich in history that a memorial can be put in punishment that it defies assessment in the near-sighted perspective of recent history.
I stand by my story, duly armed with notes, tape-recordings and off-the-record statements by many people in the story. The question now is whether we are to profit from such communication gap between Americans and foreigners or, by rejecting it, continue
But my own happy lot has not made me insensitive to the lot of other foreign students, and if in reporting their unhappiness I have erred. I stand chastised.
Blacks now constitute 23 million of America's total population, approaching 15
To the Editor:
Readers Respond Foreign Students, Integrity
Bravo for Mavis Wiseman and her letter in Wednesday's Kansan. With adversaries
Her letter, studied alongside my story on foreign students, shows spirit, loyalty and dedication to the work she has been doing for so many years, outrage at the suggestion that the great experiment has failed and an attack on my integrity as a teacher in which I shall leave to the judgment of those who have gone through the story.
I merely reported what I found, and I must confess I was disturbed. My own stay at KU and Lawrence has been very happy; a leg of friends, a host family as affective and close as my family back home and a happy relationship with the dean of foreign students, who has done me many favors.
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letters policy
per cent, the largest minority in the country.
HOW CAN one encompass in any coherent way the mosaic of Selma, '65 Watts, 65, the Johnson era, Adam Powell, James Meredith, the war on poverty, the explosion in the black communities, "black power." Her assassinations, her assassinations, the Black Panthers, the police crackdown, the conspiracy trials, Angela Davis, George Jackson, the rise of the black middle class, the Muslims, separatism, segregation de facto and de fiction, the Black Jesus, Baysaworth, and Carswell, the Black Congressional Caucus, Thomas Bradley?
Two things are certain: For most of the black Americans in whose name both whites and blacks converged on the country's capital a quarter-million strong, justice still seems but a trickle and righteousness a humble rivulet.
running the treadmill of unhappiness.
Only an ostrich (poor bird) can be *excused* for sticking its head in the sand to avoid looking at something that disturbs it. As human beings possessed of superior intellect and with aspirations toward a higher man, we are different, or we so request
I do not apologize for not glorifying the attempts at international "understanding." In doing so, I would have perpetrated the blind bloning that has characterized so many relationships between Americans and their alien guests.
From what I have heard of Mrs. Wiseman's involvement with the much-appreciated Small World program, I would hope that after having ventured her spleen on me, she will reappraise my "grossly unfair" story to understand why things have been so difficult. Her letter, I choose to turn the other cheek, more strong to her arm—and back off.
Graduate Student Dacca, Bangladesh
Ed. note: Zahid ibgal was the Kansan's associate editor this summer.
But, also, that civil rights decade, tumultuous and cataclysmic as it sometimes seemed, unleashed a social force that has been called the moment it is now seem to be, it can no longer be contained. Its energy was great enough to spawn and feed the movements against a thankless war and for equality for Puerto Ricans, Indians, women and homosexuals.
For all its failures, it profoundly affected the self-perception of a people, gave them an insistent, proud visibility no longer to be shunted aside, laid the reality of deprivation before us. It is this conscience that conscience of a country and shook it to its very roots. It could be called a revolution.
IF SO, it was a revolution filled with contradiction and paradox. Keeping in mind that the 1963 event was called the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, consider this 10-year report card compiled from various official studies:
Jobs-One-third of all black employees today are in white collar jobs, and black upward mobility outstrips that of whites. Only 1 percent of blacks are blacks as among whites. Black teen-agers have a 35 per cent rate of unemployment. In the area of federal employment, blacks represent 15 per cent, but the overwhelming majority is concentrated in the lowest-level
living in officially defined poverty, compared with 9 per cent of whites. Additionally, where more than a million people lacked access to food in 1972, blacks in poverty increased by 30 per cent.
**Income--During the 1960s, income for black families doubled, according to a study by analysts Richard Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg. Thirty per cent of all black families now earn more than 10,000 dollars a year. But, 33 per cent of all blacks are still
Housing—Although the number of substandard dwellings occupied by blacks declined nearly one-third in the 1960s, the percentage compared with whites increased by more than one-quarter. The number through 800,000 blocks moved to the suburbs in the last decade, nearly three million migrated to overcrowded central cities.
Education -Sixty-five per cent of all blacks in their twenties are high school graduates, and the number attending college has doubled in five years. Yet, nearly 20 years after the U.S. Supreme Court's desegregation decision, 63 per cent of black children still attend predominantly black schools.
Legislation—Congress and the courts have compiled in the last decade an impressive array of measures making illegal voting, voting booths, in public accommodations, in housing and employment. But, as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission pointed out in 1970, enforcement of many of those laws has been a major breakdown" in implementation.
In short, a mixed bag. In the opinion of most knowledgeable observers, the story of the civil rights decade has been one of momentous gains on paper, a major breakthrough for a small percentage of the population.
Politics—Black elected officials throughout the country exceeded 2,000 as of April 1973, an increase of more than 120 per cent in just four years. Still, they represent less than half of one per cent of all elected officials.
But, by and large, the great nun *n* in the black constitutency has been left behind. The urban ghetto is still the repository where, according to Dr. John Mosell of the Michigan State University, thick, toughly resistant . . . where the social dynamite is packed away."
(Washington Post staff writer Aaron rode a bus from New York to Washington, on Aug 26, 1963, with one small segment of the crew. He was on March on Washington. In succeeding years he was frequently on the front lines as an observer of and commentator on the events of the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s. He is now the Washington Post's West Coast correspondent.)
Headhugger Blues/
(C) 1973. The Washington Post
Bv ALAN M. KRIEGSMAN
WASHINGTON—Have you sent for your Headhugger yet? Or maybe you haven't received the exciting three-color blurb which arrived in my mail the other day, courtesy of an oil company credit card campaign.
The Headhugger is a truly ingenious device; "The a miracle of modern electronic engineering," as the ad has it. It's nothing more or less than a solid-state, FM-steroid radio, with this distinction: the whole thing is built into a stereo headset.
Unlike the more portable transistor radio, with the Headmugger, "You can't disturb others around you. . . others can't disturb you." In your own private music chamber, "You into" your own private music chamber.
THE CRUCIAL entitlement of the Headhudgers is spelled out in the ad in large black letters: "Escape into your own private world of supreme stereo sound." It's personalized Muzak, an electronic blanket. You'll never be alone again.
By the same token, you'll never be together again, if things keep on going this way. The more inventive and efficient man becomes in his communications technology, the less he communicates, or so it seems and the less men are able to exchange thoughts and feelings with each other on a one-to-one, two-way basis.
The telegraph, the telephone, radio and television have each made enormous strides in linking people together, across networks which bridge vast chasms of
There was a time when the radio (and later the television set) was a focus of multiple attention. The family gather at home for a dinner watching (was "shared", in some sense. The same was true of the automobile in the early days: it was typically a conveyance for the whole family, on an outing, an extended expedition, a trip to Aunt Minnie's place.
BY NOW, each of these has become primarily a solitary mode of activity. The car has gotten smaller and less room. The "sport" job barely fits a driver, and he's trussed up in his bucket seat like a nut in a shell. Air pollution is exacerbated as a way people drive to work, and that's most of the driving we do, travel one-to-a-car.
The radio, with the help of microcircuitry,
is now diminutive enough to fit in your
change pocket. Or else, as with the
headhudger, it becomes a clip-on. Either
way, it services one customer at a time. The
trend in television sets is no different.
space and time. At the same time, they have drastically altered the very nature of communication. We don't communicate with each other anymore. Instead we traffic in private, electronic phantasmics which we have learned to accept as a kind of vicious person. In increasingly, the process becomes more and more an isolationist exercise.
The movies, too, have largely lost their role as a socially cohesive force. The big theater where the whole gang met on Saturday has it been torn down or up to depersonalize. In some cases, one hurries in and hurries out. The ultimate is Jonas Mekas' anthology film archives showcase, where each spectator tucked into a booth with a view of his visual awareness of his fellow viewers. This may have some esthetic validity, as a means of insulating the image from distraction, but it puts movie watching into a more immersive kind which is the province of the Headhugger.
Many of us, however, seem to be eagerly helping the world along to its solpisitic conclusion, merrily bricking ourselves into ever-more-impenetrable, air-tight crypts. The whole drug scene is a part of it, cutting us off from each other and from actuality.
IN SHORT, the more sophisticated our means of signaling each other becomes, the less need we seem to have for actual contact. Yes, we've got an awful lot to retreat from, we moderns, ranging from the computer and the machine prospects to the abrasive conflicts of class, race, sex and sect. So it's no wonder this is the age of alienation.
A scientist by the name of Ralph Keyes had a fascinating piece in the New York Times recently about how our new sexual mores are symptomatic of the flight from deep and lasting contact. It used to be, Keyes maintains, that sex 'ratified an intimacy achieved through attachment already long cemented emotionally and by other kinds of sharing. Now, Keyes argues, with the breakdown of durable relationships, sex itself has become a surrogate for that intimacy, an appealing one precisely because
New Device For Escapists
it is 'disposable' contact 'closeness
entrapment national resource
natural national resource
One wonders just how far in this direction matters are likely to proceed. The video cassette looms ahead, threatening to "advance" as beyond the Headhugger to what? A Facehugger? Maybe a Bodyhugger.
At any rate, a totally wired, self-contained cocoon, an electronic womb fulfilling the individual's every need and desire without recourse or reference to other beings, except as they may be captured in audiovisual figments.
There has been, of course, and continues to be, a considerable backlash. Not just in the whole encounter-sensory, awareness-enhancing world, but also among lots of people who are scared that communication as we once understood it is a dying phenomenon, and who are trying in their private ways to uphold the value of human connection through love, friendship, conversation.
But it's getting late. I note at last in passing that one of the unexpected revelations of the Watergate hearings on TV was the realization that given sufficient grounds, the nation could once again feel like a family.
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