OPINION
October 23,1984 Page 4
The University Daily
KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Dalman Kansan (USP$) 60640 is published at the University of Kansas, Staffer Fint Hall. Lawen, Kansan 60645, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods. Second class postage paid at Lawen, Kansan 60644. Subscriptions by mail are $1 for six months or two. Third class postage paid at the county Student subscribes are $1 and are paid through the student activity box. POSTMASAN addresses changes to the University Dalman Kansan, 118 Staffer Fint Hall. Lawen, Kansan 60643.
DON KNOX
Editor
PAUL SEVART VINCE HESS Managing Editor Editorial Editor
DAVE WANAMAKER Business Manager
DOUG CUNNINGHAM Campus Editor
LYNNE STARK MARY BERNICA
Retail Sales National Sales
Manager Manager
JILL GOLDBLATT
Campus Sales Manager
SUSANNE SHAW
General Manager and News Adviser
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Great Debate II
Somehow the ultimate debate was not quite ultimate.
Somehow the ultimate debate was not quite ultimate. The presidential debate Sunday night was supposed to be, depending on one's perspective, either the grand return of the Great Communicator or the culmination of a victorious Democratic effort.
Instead, the Great Communicator ran out of time for his closing remarks — maybe he's been away from Hollywood too long — and Walter Mondale came out sounding like more of a hawk than Reagan.
Reagan responded with the best single line of the night — "I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." Maybe Reagan does have a future in Hollywood after all.
President Reagan emphasized his desire for peace and tried to play down Mondale's specific attacks on his competence. Mondale stressed his desire for strong defense and ridiculed Reagan's abilities.
The debate was said to be crucial in that it would show whether Mondale could overcome Reagan's lead in the polls. Reagan failed to "dribble at the mouth," as Hugh Sidey of Time magazine put it, and Mondale seems to still be in trouble.
Mondale seems to be shifting his campaign from attacks on Reagan's positions on issues to criticism of Reagan's abilities. The dilemma that Mondale faces is that the public is not up in arms — at least not yet — over secret CIA manuals and defense programs in outer space. In just a few weeks of campaigning, Mondale faces the task of reversing public support for Reagan that has been formed in the past four years.
Honoring Higuchi
At a time when universities across the nation are watching their best professors in technical fields leave for bigger salaries in the private sector, the University of Kansas last week honored a man who came here as the leader in his field and has staved for 14 years.
takeru Higuchi, Regents distinguished professor of pharmaceutical chemistry, richly deserves the congratulations he received last week at a three-day international symposium in Lawrence. A group of research buildings on West Campus, including the INTERx Research Corp. building, also was renamed in his honor, and three of his former students announced a scholarship fund for the department of chemistry.
In a specific sense, Higuchi's work deals with the study of drug dosage and behavior by applying principles of chemistry and the laws of thermodynamics. Higuchi has been responsible for many advances in the field, and is considered the creator of pharmaceutical chemistry.
In a broader sense, Higuchi's work has brought several advancements to the University. He created Oread Laboratories to get ideas that originated at the University into commercial marketplaces so that the profits from those ideas would go to the Kansas University Endowment Association. Higuchi and his wife, Aya, each year give $10,000 grants for research in four academic areas. Some of the top students in the world come to KU to work under Higuchi.
After honoring the University with his work for so many years, Higuchi well deserves the praise he won last week.
Expensive scares
What has to rank high on the list of the most unprovable statements of the year is the following by Anne Averyt, safety director of the Consumer Federation of America.
"Indoor air pollution," she said, "costs the nation up to $100 billion annually in medical expenses and lost productivity, and it accounts for up to half of all illness in the United States each year."
That was said in behalf of a Federation pitch to pressure the government into boosting its budget to fight this unpublicized scourge. The one thing that's surely true about her claim is that it's impossible to prove — or disprove.
The truth of the matter just might be that the public has at last become fed up with the scare stories which some environmentalists and groups such as the Consumer Federation have circulated for several years about all manner of "dangers" to the national health and welfare—with it, often seems, the primary purpose of wringing funds
Boston Herald
Clarification
A letter on yesterday's opinion page identified the writer as "Benjamin I. Chan, Hong Kong graduate student, association president." The writer is president of the Chinese Student Association, not an association for Hong Kong graduate students.
End to torture requires caring, action
The local chapter of Amnesty International has designated today as Human Rights Day for the campus and the city.
In Syria, they have an electrical device called the "Black Slave" that probes a hot metal skewer into the victim's anus.
In Iran, they force children to watch as their mothers are whipped. In El Salvador, they whip the children.
"They" are the governments of nearly 100 nations around the world, governments that publicly condemn but actively condoe physical and psychological damage to political prisoners.
Our relative security in these United States is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, we have a powerful Constitution that guarantees our rights. Yes, we have the military might to be unafraid of a manned enemy invasion upon our land. And yes, we are defenders — and sometimes aggressors — of democracy around the globe. There are
Writing in Kansas about torture in the world is a painful experience. The prospect, the reality of torture in the world and how to move more is our response to torture.
However, we are also victims of geographical circumstance. We watch the evening news from the center of this country. We read the newspaper and occasionally find a report of violence, of torture in foreign lands such as Lebanon and South Africa. We cringe, cluck our
few reasons not to be proud and appreciative of national security.
tongues against our teeth, and turn to the comic strips. It is a shame, we say, but what can we do about it from Kansas?
We have a tendency to be unconcerned with what happens outside our region, be it the United States, the Midwest, Kansas, Lawrence, our education, our places of employment, our homes.
Call it human nature or a lack of national conscience.
Amnesty international was established to provide an alternative to indifference about these atrocities. This year the human rights organization published "Torture in the '80s," an exhaustive report that is hard to read — but not because it is difficult to understand. Instead, it is straightforward, graphic and harrowing.
I call it a tragedy.
As part of a two-year Amnesty International campaign to abolish torture, the report investigates those countries throughout the world that employ torture as a means to deter further political activity by prisoners of conscience. Prisoners of conscience are those who have been jailed for their beliefs, color, ethnic origin, sex, religion or language, provided that they have neither used nor advocated violence.
Forms of torture used — to name only a few more — are mock executions, cigarette burns, deprivation of sleep and light, rape, mutilation, and burning of the skin with sulfuric acid.
One incident tells of a man in India whose eyes were pierced with bicycle
spokes and then wrapped in acid-soaked pads. The same torture was done to 35 others suspected of crimes
Amnesty International's hope is to put an end to torture. This hopes with individuals around the world who write letters to national leaders that implore them to take action against their country's injustices. They ask governments to prosecute torturers, put an end to secret detention and help rehabilitate victims.
The Lawrence chapter of Amnesty International, Group 172, currently is focusing its efforts on Afghanistan. We are a small but necessary cog in the machine of half a million Amnesty International members and supporters in more than 150 countries around the world.
We have a human responsibility that goes well beyond any national, political or religious boundaries
Support torture or condemn it, but please do not cluck your tongue against your teeth and turn to the comic strips.
Give a damn.
Hal Klopper, Prairie Village
season, is a member of Amnesty
International.
'Macho' fails to describe concept of women
A recent poll by Glamour magazine showed that "women are becoming more 'macho' - drinking more beer, defending themselves more willingly in a fistfight and becoming more fond of sports cars"
A spokesman for the advertising agency that conducted the poll said, "Women still want to be women, but men want to be the concept of womanhood to change."
Our concept of women, and women's concept of themselves, seem headed for a leap into the ravine.
Femininity fascinates men, as masculinity fascinates women. We were created that way, to be different and to pursue the respective roles throughout the life process, but we did not have the same. What a mess we make of things when women take the role as the aggressive initiator.
The Glamour poll is disturbing in that it says women are becoming more "macho" — something inherently masculine, something that men already are. Do we really go into a bar and feel macho when we drink a cocktail, more importantly, do men go into bars to meet "macho" women?
A fine line exists between becoming the initiator and dogging a man for his affections. When we can't seem to make life work without a man around, do we want to take on his qualities, becoming more masculine, in order to prove that we can stand on our own?
Women have been struggling for years to become the equal of men. Womanhood, however, isn't some sort of concept that we change or manipulate, but it is, obviously, being what a man is not — not necessarily to be able to
— not necessarily to be able to accomplish the same things betteror worse than a man, but to be the one who is as a man complements a woman.
Womanhood consists first of having a healthy self-image. Reliance on anything but oneself can lead to disappointment and eventually the inability to go it alone. Women need that half of them that is "macho," but they will find it in a man, not in themselves. They must provide the other half of themselves and their femininity.
It is interesting that the spokesman for the ad agency noted that "women still want to be women." Femininity
is that home ground we know best,
even when that other half of us is
trying to figure out how to get some
of that masculinity without having to have a man to drive us crazy.
It seems perfectly normal to let the man be head of the household. For even as we are in a way submitting, we are also aware of an increase in his dependence — when the man is allowed to practice his masculine role, he acknowledges his need for his feminine half, and the importance of the woman in his life. If the man does not allow her to become his "partner," she will become dissatisfied and refuse submission.
Women becoming "macho?" All the beer and fistights in the world couldn't make a woman any more masculine than she is. What makes this survey so significant isn't that women are trying to get men's concepts of them to change, because men will always think of women in terms of aggression. But that women's tastes are changing as women discover that they can go for what they want, without having a man get it for them.
"Macho" is not the word for it. "Maturity" is.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Volleyball team's season not 'disgraceful'
To the editor:
I would like to know where Larry Thigpen (Oct. 15 letter, "Scozer missing") gets off writing sarcastic, derogatory comments on subjects of which he has little understanding". He rudely criticized the women's volleyball team and the amount of money involved in the Kansan's sports section.
Tighen needs to be informed that the women's volleyball team deserves every little bit of "drive" it can muster from the Kansas. A "poor record" should not be the criteria in which the sports editor determines the amount of space available for activities. If it were, we certainly not be reading as much as we are now about the football team.
When Thippen's soccer team becomes an intercollegiate sport, I will naturally expect to see it covered on a regular basis. In the meantime, let's not be guilty of selfishly supporting only the winners.
No one denies that the women's volleyball team has suffered numerous defeats, but Thipper was wrong
when he called its season "disgraceful." Any team, volleyball or football, whose athletes continually strive for victory despite its inexperience, lack of depth, exhaustive schedules, low morale and so on, would seem to be to be heroic, not disgraceful.
If Thippen would casually observe just one of KU's fast-paced, exciting volleyball matches, he might come to appreciate this terrific sport a little further. In summer Olympics, millions of people around the world are doing just that.
I sincerely hope that readers of the Kansan's editorial page will ignore Thuggen's nasty remarks and give their support to the volleyball team, especially their physical support in the Allen Fieldhouse bleachers.
Kathy Desch
Kathy Desch
Topeka graduate student
Senate action
In response to the front page story on the South Africa bill (Oct.18, "S
To the editor:
The emphasis of your story should have been that Senate, aware of the problems inherent in the bill because of the bidding system, acted properly. You paid the bill back to committee, before any such opinion had been released
The story gives readers the impression that the General Counsel handed down an opinion, and now Student Senate is responding to that allegation in correctly writing the legislation. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Africa bill would violate laws. KU counsel says"). I think that there are a few facts that students need to know, facts that were greatly misrepresented in the story
As well, Chris Bunker and I began rewriting the bill the previous Friday, modifying the bill to eliminate the problem with the state bidding system, again five days before the release of the General Assembly's bill that created the article to exemplify the wisdom shown by senators in this
Then you place a quote by the student body vice president in the paper, attempting to show that Senate does not know what is going on, and frankly does not care whether its actions conform to state law. Again, the facts are being handled loosely; the Kansan is not reporting the facts, it is twisting information to create an issue that reflects the Kansan's sensationalized view. This type of journalism belongs on the editorial page, not on the front page in a news story.
matter, wisdom that was proven with the release of the opinion, the Kansan has presented the issue as one that is difficult to deal with, and indeed, a highly inaccurate presentation.
In all fairness to the reporter, I do not know whether the fault lies with him, or with the unseen editing hands of the Kansan staff. I hope that future stories about the South Africa bill, and Senate, will be accurate.
Charles D. Lawborn
Kansas City, Kan., junior
off-campus senator