September 11, 1984 Page 4
OPINION
Published since 1889 by students of the University of Kansas
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily KANSAN
The University Daily Kansas, USPS 60-640 is published at the University of Kansas, 118 Staffer Flint Hall Law. Kansas 60-640, daily during the regular school year and Wednesday and Friday during the summer session, excluding Saturday, Sunday, holidays and final periods Second class postpaid at Lawrence, Kansas 60449 Subscriptions by mail are $1 for six months or $2 a year in Douglas County and $18 for six months or $4 a year outside the county. Student postpaid at Lawrence, Kansas 60449, includes address changes to the University Daily Kansas, 118 Staffer Flint Hall Law, Kansas 60-640
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
SUSANNE SHAW General Manager and News Adviser
JILL GOLDBLATT Campus Sales Manager
JOHN OBERZAN Sales and Marketing Adviser
Help wanted
A valuable educational opportunity at the University of Kansas is currently going untapped. The experts are at a loss to explain why.
It's not a closed section. Room is currently available for more than 250 students. Furthermore, the tuition costs are nonexistent. In fact, students are actually paid to take advantage of this opportunity. That's because it's not a class
it's a job.
The student employment division of the Office of Financial Aid reports that many jobs available to students are not being filled. A quick glance at the job board in the basement of Strong Hall indicates that more than 250 jobs are up for grabs.
Both on-campus and off-campus jobs are open, as are work-study and hourly wage positions. The skills that are needed vary widely, too; some jobs involve physical labor while others require clerical and computer skills.
Employers have offered possible explanations ranging from financial security to scheduling problems, but one thing is certain. Students are missing out on a potentially valuable opportunity.
College work experience is, in the vernacular, good resume material. Job recruiters look for evidence of responsibility and maturity on a resume. Few things can provide evidence as convincing as work experience.
Moreover, working one's way through school forces a student to budget his time. A student who is employed often grips about the demands on his time but discovers a semester later that his grades have improved because of more efficient time utilization.
In short, holding a part-time job can contribute substantially to the university experience. A wise student takes advantage of this opportunity to pad the pocketbook and bolster the resume at the same time.
In search of input
Student body president Carla Vogel and vice president Dennis "Boog" Highberger took to the streets Friday to bring their office closer to the students.
Vogel, Highberger, their pink flamingo mascot and a couple of musicians set up an informal "office" in front of Wescole Hall to talk with students. They also distributed material about Student Senate, Associated Students of Kansas and some international issues.
Friday's streetside gathering was the second time the leaders have tackled the problem of little feedback from the students.
If the students won't come to them, they will go to the students.
Although some of the students who watched them thought their unorthodox office was slightly odd, and although chances are slim that the lunch-hour meeting will yield more student input and subsequent Senate action, the leader's attempts to reach the students is commendable.
Since the beginning of their campaign, Vogel and Highberger have demonstrated that they know the meaning of the "ol" college try," and seem to be trying to change the Senate's reputation as a group that has not actively sought student input.
Welcome relief
As almost any upperclassman who has taken a math class at the University of Kansas knows, the classrooms on the third floor of Strong Hall have until recently been unbearable hot during the early fall and late spring.
Now, however, thanks to the addition of some room air conditioners, this year's freshman class will not have to experience the agony of integrating functions in the steam-sauna conditions of those classrooms.
Minor building improvements can often, as in this case, yield major benefits to the quality of the learning environment at KU.
Here's to present and future "minor" improvements.
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten and double-spaced and should not exceed 300 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and hometown, or faculty or staff information. The Kansan also provides individuals and groups to submit guest columns. Columns and letters can be mailed or brought to the Kansan office, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit or reject letters and columns.
LETTERS POLICY
Pole gives world view to Americans
Sitting in a sauna at Robinson Gymnasium after his karate workout, the scholar from Poland drew praise from surrounding Americans when he spoke of his hatred for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Young Russian soldiers are dying in an unpopular war, he said, and the Soviet actions are doomed, ultimately, to failure.
Their faces glowing, the Americans nodded in agreement.
book — to be written in Japanese — about the influence of Genghis Khan and the Mongols on Japan and other East Asian countries. He is now back in Poland.
The outspoken traveler of the world, however, surprised and provoked his conversation partners when he turned the table and leveled equally harsh criticism at the U.S. government for its invasion of Grenada.
The United States must be desperate, indeed, if it has to prove its military strength by overrunning the Western itemshe said.
The episode in the sauna was typical of those experienced by the scholar from Poland.
His name was Slawomir Szulec, and he was doing research in the spring at the University of Kansas. Szulec also went to KU, at KU, he contended his work on a
When he spoke impassionately about the progress of the Solidarity labor movement, Americans listened
CHARLES BARNES Staff Columnis
attentively, proud of their nation's support of that just cause.
But when he tried to tell Americans that President Ronald Reagan's vocal support was just empty rhetoric and that Reagan, in light of his actions against the striking air-controller unions, was not a defender of lawless government that people dismiss him as anti-American.
These same Americans could not understand why the citizens of
Poland think that they cannot count on the United States when push comes to shove.
A recent example, the scholar told me, was the trade sanctions that Reagan imposed against Poland in late 1961.
They did not realize that in the shallow world of superpower politics, the Polish people have been burned once too often.
One effect of the sanctions was that supplies of beef and poultry to the average person were severely curtailed. Farmers who were fortunate enough to get their animals fed survived the animals for a source of protein. A shortage of eggs resulted.
A joke soon began to circulate among the Polish people, and the president was dubbed the great "chicken killer."
Communist Party officials weathered the shortages in style and continued to eat beef and cake.
In the end, the only people who suffered from Reagan's actions were the common people. the people for whom he said he had initiated the sanctions.
its policies, he said, but the Polish people have learned also to distrust the United States.
Perhaps if I went to Central or South America, I would find that the United States was hated the most and Soviet Union second most, he said.
The scholar did, however, have a number of positive things to say about the United States.
The Constitution guarantees the people many freedoms, he said; in general, he said, he would rather live in a country with a free-market system than one with a socialist economy.
His chief complaint was that at a time when many people around the world were looking to the United States as a beacon of hope, most Americans were unconcerned about world affairs and disinterested in how U.S. government policies affected other countries.
Many Americans are spotted and complacent and live on a very superficial level, he said; they are unwilling to look beyond their short-term, narrow self-interests.
Egypt ponders modernization's effect
NEW YORK — Will the stampede toward the consumer society cause unbearable strains on Islam? Everybody in Egypt keeps watching for signs
Suddenly a television set is in every mud but along the Nile Migrant workers, mainly going to the Arab country, are selling their $2 billion to $4 billion a year.
These remittances go to buy land, homes, pumps, tractors, livestock and farm machinery in villages where cultivation methods have been preserved by those who still believe that the earth is faint watch "I Love Lucy" reruns.
Mosque attendance is way up Holier-than-thou piety is not unknown, in May, 14 members of the long illegal Muslim Brotherhood were elected to the 448 seat Parliament, sending a chill down many spines. They would create an Islamic state.
You might think that this is a ridiculous idea — who would want to stay in a house just because the house is depicted on television? — but I have no doubts that the plan will work. I base this on personal experience, not statistics. News, and whenever I am out with a camera crew putting a story together, I hear one question from people more than any other.
In the Sudan, where the Brotherhood grew powerful by skillfully taking over universities and banks, they already have. Egyptians seem
RICHARD CRITCHFIELD
This new move in Texas, it seems, might be the logical extension of our television mania
Cairo asks itself. Can it happen here? Besides being the cultural center of the Muslim world, Cairo is the world's most densely populated city.
Yet nobody goes hungry. The average Egyptian gets half his daily calorie intake from three loaves of heavily subsidized Arab bread that cost the equivalent of one U.S. penny each.
New York Times Syndicate
appalled by the Sudan's descent into floggings and amputations.
I suppose he has a point. There was a time when tourist attractions became successful because they had the good fortune to be located on an especially beautiful portion of the Earth Either that, or because some enterprising businessman had constructed amusement facilities.
Vacationing with J.R.
As you might have heard, South fork Ranch, near Plano, Texas, has been sold to a real estate developer for more than $1 million.
The ranch is undoubtedly a very nice piece of property, but the factor that sent the price so high had nothing to do with the objective value of the land. It happens to be the place where the 'Dallas' television series is taped.
He also will construct a 20,000 square foot party building that will hold up to 2,000 people.
Trippet said he would convert the main house — an 8,000-square foot house that has become so famous on television into an exclusive three-bedroom hotel that would be a minimum of $2,600 a night.
Terry Trippet, the developer who purchased Southork Ranch, said he planned to turn the property into a hotel-and entertainment complex.
When asked why he had purchased the property, Tripp replied, "Well, wouldn't you want to own it, too?"
People all over the country want to sail on that boat, just as people all over the country will want to stay in the house they have seen on "Dallas." It doesn't matter that the great majority of the scenes from "Dallas"
"Could you get me a trip on the Love Boat?"
BOB
GREENE
Syndicated
Columnist
aren't even shot at Soughtfork. the property is used mainly for exterior pictures of the house.
When the Southfork attraction does, indeed, succeed, you can be there will be more and more touristic attractions put together around the islands of course are obvious, such as the Hawaiian estate in "Magnum, P.I."
But there are even more intriguing, imaginative possibilities. How about a slumber party on Johnny Carson's couch?
a marshmallow roast in the "Monday Night Football" broadcast both?
This probably does not bode well for the future of America's vacations. I would think more deeply about it, but I'm in kind of a hurry I should have stayed home the weekend in the ring from "Georgia Championship Wrestling."
The thing you should know is that some people have just read each of those suggestions, and thought, "That would really be fun." It's impossible to employ parody when I write about what we see in many ways, become as we see in real life.
Unlike the new rich peasants, virtual serfs until the 1952 revolution, Egypt's post-1976 economic boom has passed by iow-paid, government salaried civil servants, junior army officers and public-sector factory workers. They might swell the Muslim militants ranks. In contrast, unskilled workers have seen an annual 9 percent rise in income in real terms over the past eight years.
Workers' remittances are now more than Egypt will get this year from such items as oil exports ($2.6 billion) and foreign economic aid ($2 billion), half of it from the United States and worthily being spent on getting food production up and the birth rate down).
The villagers seem to be torn between wanting all the new consumer goods while sticking to their older values. They want the TV set, but they want to watch Muslims praying on it, Or, as the writer V.S. Naiapul once put it, they like the West's tools but not its ideas.
The late President Anwar el-Sadat, in a 1976 interview, warned those who had tried to Westernize too
Richard Critchfield, who lives in Washington, D.C., writes on rural development for the Economist of Spain and often spent four months in Egypt.
They also see that Confucianism, by subordinating individual interest to group interest, has played much more impact in East Asia's economic growth.
quickly to "look to our community, our people and our Muslim heritage."
Until Islam finds its Calvin or Contucus, it may be fated — doomed, one might say — to keep battling the process of modernization that happens in the villages when those new appliances wear out 't.
Thoughtful Muslims — and this includes a good many Muslim Brotherhood members — would like to reconcile Islam as far as possible with modern science and technology. They recognize that Islam has never had its version of the Protestant faith, but has embraced the environment through hard work and a more scientific control of matter and energy.
To the editor:
In recounting the rise to power of Adolph Hitler, so as to allude to the rise of conservative politics in the country, Hitler engages in considerable tabling.
For openers, he ludicrously compares Germany between the world
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
In his column that unabashedly equates Republican politics with Nazi ideology (Sept. 5, "Fable tells story about leadership"), Mike Robinson shows himself distressingly ignorant of the functioning of a pluralistic democracy and that of an absolute dictatorship.
Columnist fables on history
For instance, he says that he first became enamored of Beirgan back in 1980 because "he talked tough on defense and national security, talk that was refreshing at a time of Afghanistan and hostages in Iran." Apparently Hess still finds this gibberish refreshing, even though nothing's changed in Afghanistan and the now-forgaten Beirut debacle makes the hostage crisis seem like small potatoes.
Fuzzy on Reagan
Jordan Stump Lawrence senior
Vince Hess' column of Sept 5 ("President shows worth in actions") displays exactly the sort of fuzzy non-talking characteristic peculiar to many knee-jerk conservatives his defense of President Reagan is based on not facts but on anecdotes that say absolutely nothing about Reagan's putative abilities as a president.
To the editor
I assume that Hess has a brain. He should practice using it
Hess mysteriously concludes from this down home witticism that Reagan would not "lose his head in a nuclear confrontation" So this is the kind of reasoning ability it takes to become the Kaiser's editorial editor.
Hess is also impressed by the fact that Reagan was once a broadcaster and an actor, leading us to believe that we can all look forward to Hess whole-hearted endorsement of Col Rilly in 1988.
Finally, Hess presents us with Reagan's touching words to Nancy after the assassination attempt he forget to tuck. "He has what a card!
Then, in the midst of a zany rewriting of history, Robinson barely masks his astonishing and amusing accusations. According to Robinson:
wars (an economy in ruins, crushing war reparations owed the Allies, and a destroyed monarchy with no history of democratic institutions) with post-Vietnam America (a nation at the center of recession, and 200 years of bicameral legislation, two-party government and free elections.)
- Germans didn't oppose Hitler's "excesses" (like dismantling the Bundestag, or the annexation of Czechoslovakia) in Czeckland; they feared "affected" by them.
- Reagan's acknowledged personal charisma actually "controls" public opinion — perhaps through those good old organs of Republican propaganda, CBS and the Washington Post?
- - Complaining minorities in Nazi Germany were either "ignored or scorned" (I suppose annihilation is a form of scorn.)
- President Reagan somehow orchestrated the display of patriotism at the Olympic Games
It is trite that Robinson attributes Reagan's popularity to the fact that he, like Hitler, communicates by breaking "everything down into terms the masses (can) understand." Robinson's entire column is called "The People of Race" because racism best exemplified, in course, by Reagan equals Hitler.
I suggest that Robinson take a freshman history course or, better yet, read a book
Tim Williams
Tin Williams Teaching assistant
Department of French & Italian
Who's a bigot?
To the editor:
If I assume for a moment that Chuck Vanasse (Aug 30 letter) is, as he claims, not a bigot, then I must conclude that whatever God his worships is, indeed, a bigot, and that the folks like Vanasse who lovingly cower to this supreme phony are merely misguided
Dong Humphreys Great Bend senior