UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorslals
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kanan sediment. Stated columns represent the views of only the writers.
October 26,1979
'60s elusive, haunting
George Gallup told the American public in 1969 that 72 percent of the nation's 6.7 million college students had not participated in a demonstration. That meant nearly 1.9 million had.
It was a wild year on college campuses. Fortune magazine said 12.8 percent of those 6.7 million were "norally" or "radically dissident."
It was a troublesome year in a troublesome decade and it followed on the heels of the year in which seeming seemed to have gone wrong.
COLLEGE ADMINISTRATORS at San Francisco State, Harvard and dozens of other universities were forced to close down, leave their posts or just sit out the protests in cities like New York. We hope that the troubles would all end soon.
They didn't. College campuses didn't calm down for a couple of years, until the Union at this University had burned, until four students lay dead on the campus at Kent State University in Ohio, when students saw some hope for peace and progress in a world that seemed to move too slowly.
Compounding the problem was the surge in baby boom children entering the college ranks and an equal surge in the number of those who were
becoming part of the youth subculture and choosing alternative lifestyles.
IT WAS A confusing time, a time when youth seemed more in control of their lives than ever before, yet so unable to control the forces that were woven into their world, the time of both despair and a time of anxious hope for a better tomorrow.
Primarily, it was a period—just 19 years ago—that we don't understand very well. We don't understand because most of us have not been exposed to the realities of death, hatred and destruction that filled the lives of college students in 1969.
THE END OF the Vietnam War has left a legacy to the students of 1979. The anger of that war has been replaced by a restless fear of what the next war may bring. We try to convince ourselves that the fear is unfounded, that we have learned the lessons of those who came before us.
But the legacy remains. Indeed, whatever 1969 may have meant is perhaps an easier question than the one asked by face our successors 10 years from now.
One observation seems likely, however. That that is students of 1979 were primarily a complacent and secure group, who fell lucky that they achieved the time when that goal was not overshadowed by the problems of the day.
Lights dim, music slows as disco fades away
Discomania Discofever Discoflon
The rhythmic, pulating beat of disco, a music phenomenon that has been hanging around entirely too long, appears to have been released in the last few months. Street Journal report, the disco craze is dying out in all areas of the country and in most of the business of area that it has operated.
The entire disco scene appears to be plummeting from the top of the charts and from the top of the fashion scene like some polyester, flashing Skylab gone
THE REASONS for such a decline are many. The disco industry that has been created primarily over the past seven or eight decades of its history, industry. It has been as superficial as the lifesite it perpetuates. Although people of all ages can be involved in an attempt to step into the disco scene, they have not, for the most part, stayed long enough to give the lifestyle any shape.
The transient nature of disco music is the most telling sign of disco demi-ence. While there has been a huge increase over the past few years producing disco records, the business of doing so has not changed much.
Many singers who turn out one big-selling
music show have a special place in the
music is too close to be repetited. The
disc dancers can spend a night on the
plastic, flashing floor and never know who is
in the audience.
AND WHILE he thinks he is enjoying the songs, the dancer is in no way eager to run out and buy the album. Therein lies the problem for record companies.
Recording companies rely on artists who can invariably produce an album that the public will buy. There have been few, if any, exceptions to this rule. Donna Sumner has had some success at selling albums. Other groups have had fewer successes, and they have been飞 by-bight nights that have put sexy lyrics with a throbbing beat to productions attempts to produce widely accepted music.
People just aren't buying their albums.
"We developed a lot of hit disc records," said Stephen Meyer, an executive with Capital Records, "but very few disco hit artists with stairing power."
SUCH A MALI is not the only one facing the disco music industry. People have spent so much to accentuate their discography that they have not had the money to spend
david COLUMNIST preston
on disc records. Disc clothes, disc dates,
memberships to disc clubs and so on have
been a hallmark of the music consumer.
He will go out to his favorite club
and listen to the music and dance rather
than to the record store.
Disco is, of course, a group activity. The music is lacking in no many respects that it doesn't make sense to sit at home and listen to it on the stereo.
The record business executives who have watched the growth of disco create a new generation of disc jockeys, who watched it blow up in their faces. They have since stopped making money on them, and they are leaving.
DAVID LIEBERMAN, chairman of Lieberman Enterprises, one of the country's largest mass merchandising record companies, has set new records, even at discus's peak, to make up for its drain on disposable spending. Dice becomes a great sponge that soaked up everything.
The fad is, mercifully, going away. Radio Rations that changed to an all-disco format have been abandoned and unable to maintain a steady market. Attendance at disco clubs has dropped and attendance at club parties has varied in variety of music, incorporating rock and rhythm-and-blues sets into their eighty-seventh.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Even the hit disco records are losing some tracks, and the discos' record lists has dropped from 20 percent to a percent over the past three months. Ever summer has included rock songs on her list.
SO DISCO is going into a long-overdue swoop. All that the fad has given us as a superficial way to relieve sexual anxiety by publicly participating in dances as the "Sperm" and the "Dog." It has given us a sense of selfless clothes.
We may only guess what a new trend in music will bring us. Hopeably it will be something more sensible, something more legitimate.
But it is comforting to note that even though the question "Boobie ooie ooie, won't you get down?" is still being asked, country's response is now "No. thank you."
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Postmaster: Send changes of address to the University Daily Kannon, First Hall, The University of Kannon, Lawrence, KS8049
Editor Mary Hoenk
US$50,000 (USD48,000) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and December and Thursday and Sunday. Please call 212-696-3200 for details. Mail or email resume to US$50,000 (USD48,000). Resumes should be mailed by mail or are receipt on or next to a monthly or $75 per month in Deducted County and/or $50 per month in Not Deducted County for the dates specified. For additional information, visit us@usks.edu.
Editorial Editor Mary Errost
Managing Editor
Nancy Dresser
Business Manager Cynthia Ray
General Manage Rick Musser
Advertising Adviser Chuck Chowins
While soaking up beer and sunshine in front of a local tavern some days ago, a friend, who is a campus minister, men's club member, told me before the Kwaiis Chath that night.
Students of 1960s. today are unique
The Kiwanis Club had asked him to talk about college students today—their ideas and goals.
He hadn't decided what to tell them yet, so he asked me.
The sunshine and beer had loosed my tongue. I libly said, "Tell them we'd like to think that we are unique, but really we're not."
It will be a popular question, given the events of ten years ago and given our current view of the anniversary of the burning of the Kansas Union approaches. On April 20, 1860, the event was attended by over 100,000.
lynn COLUMNIST byczynski
**GOT THE laugh I was fishing for, and the conversation moved on to other things. One question stuck in my mind. Why did the Kivanna Club want to know about to
which was the high point of unrest, anti-war activism and anti-establishment feeling in Kansas.
The pages of this paper contain our staff's attempts to handle history. It's ironic that the writers—and a good number of Kansan readers—were bafles of seven, eight nine and eleven.
MANY OF YOU may think that such dissection is wasted effort. Why should we do it? We should avoid violence on campus? Why should we study the immediate past? It can hardly be called a lesson.
We study. I suppose, for many reasons,
we are curious, bored and uncertain.
Perhaps the events of the past hold us
impatiently, unremittingly, and unending,
never-progressing, fights against
inflation, recession, poor leadership and energy shortages.
Or maybe we think an answer lies in the past. People are always saying history repeats itself.
We do scrurtize the 1960s, looking for failures so we can point them out and say, 'See, we are not so radical because we don't want to fail?' or are we just lazy, selfish and insuree, planning for our futures, or old ladies who are afraid to take risks?
Maybe people are looking to the 1960s activism in the hope that the same protest-by-disruption tactics will work in the fight against nuclear power.
PERHAPS ALL this speculation is pure bunk. We study the 1960s' turbulence because we are uncertain about unrest now.
The answer most likely depends on one's age.
I wonder how we students can be so different from our elders of 40 years ago. I remember when I was a freshman that I have only felt once in my five years of school, and in Rahim's speech a year we disrupted by him.
In many ways, we are probably more of an anomaly than were those who preceded us. At least our surface complicity must be acknowledged by the army of problems staring in the face.
ECONOMICS IS a popular explanation for
So does everybody else. The students of the late 1980s thought they were like no other group that ever was or ever would be. And they were. So are we, in a different way.
It could be that the biggest difference is that our risks are more private, our tests of strength more personal. We'd like to think we are unique.
the difference between then and now, but
that only dissolves part of the mystery.
There really can be a valid comparison. The turbulence of that society has evolved into a fitfulness that is no longer to deal with. It makes worse a crime than is a nuclear reactor.
So, Kiwanis Club, what was it you wanted to know?
Harvard success stories never vary
N. Y. Times Special Feature
Bv JOSEPH F. DIMENTO
ARN ARBOR, Mich.—I recently received in the mail, first class, special delivery, a copy of the "Tenth Anniversary Report" of the Harvard and Radcliffe Class of 1948, written by me, not know, for the information in the document was not news.
I read the large red volume, 310 pages of graphs and biographical descriptions of some of the more self-important people on the planet, with some eagerness. But that emotion quickly waned. At first I couldn't explain why I wasn't excited or uplifted by the countless success stories they presented. After all, my roommates were all reportedly doing very well, and people whom I knew casually but whose creativity and ideas I had respected appeared to be propping.
TRUE, SEVEN Harvard men had passed away in 19 years since we all walked out of Harvard Yard together, and that seems terribly unfair. But that did not explain all my feelings. What affected me most was the similarity of the report to so many other red books that the president and vice president of Harvard College have copyrighted over the years.
The occupation by my classmates of University Hall in the spring of 1969, concern then with Harvard's relationship
introduction to grass and grass-roots movements such as the Students for a Democratic Society and experiments in agriculture, which would have been given to those not naive enough to believe in the 'greading' of books who left the established Eastern universities 10 years ago might be a bit different. They would pursue careers a bit unconventional; they would create a few new social institutions and give them training from those that their people had taken for so many years.
CLEARLY THE statistics in the Harvard Report do not totally describe this group of men and women but, they do provide a general overview of the graduates, which read like competitive curricula vitae, not leave no much room for greening time - spent on work or study.
These people are busy "serving on subcommittees of the police department," and "working with some of the top people in the field," "establishing private practice in the area," "building management consult firms" and "appearing on local television."
Sixity-one percent of the responding members of the class are doctors, bankers or lawyers; 98 percent left college to work in industry.
and 61 percent of these are fathers—only 2 percent divorced; 41 percent live in the major urban centers on the East and West Coasts. The teachers and librarians appear to be looking for new careers (more lawyers?).
THE SECRETARY OF the class of 1980, in his introduction to the report, summarized matter-of-factly: "Our biographies of five years ago stressed alternative lifestyles in alternative places. This report seems to show new occupations and interests which are far closer to the main themes of jobs we had previously and often strenuously rejected."
My former roommates are a good sample: two doctors, three lawyers, two bankers, a psychologist, an investment consultant.
The results must be read as good news to most of the graduates and to many who hire them. They suggest a stability in American institutions and a continuity in our society.
The report made me a bit sad. I disappointed, I guess. Perhaps my wife's observation at a recent alumni gathering was just too much for her. She looked around and insisted that one of the former class officers 'wearing his father's three-piece, pinned-tie dress' was wearing his father's three-piece, pinned-tie dress.'
Joseph F. D. DiMeio is visiting associate professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan.
Sorority rejection disheartening
To the Editor:
It becomes a subject of great concern to when students attending the same university meet in style that they refuse to let others enter their way of life, no matter how deep the water.
I am referring to the dishartening article in the Kansan, Oct. 19, concerning the negative attitudes of those residents of KI residence halls who so strongly object to the housing of Almiron Omiren Pi security officer of the campares residence halls next year.
I can understand that some students not affiliated with Greek membership do not take classes offered at our university, those who are members of fraternities and sororites and I can appreciate their wishes to attend.
please. But when contracting to live in residence halls, it is not realistic to think that everyone occupying space in the halls are going to be ideal living associates.
ALONG THESE LINE, if a group of women belonging to the same sorority need to live temporarily in a campus residence hall, it see no reason for them to be rejected.
I realize it may be difficult for two living
How can促要问 the AOPi's, who are Greek openly and are now beeted by other campus groups. And what this says for KU student unity is not something to be
Julie Neal
Overland Park iunior
groups to share living quarters. But not only is it necessary, it also would be beneficial to student relations.
I hope that the opponents of the AOP's move into residence halls will reconsider the possibility of welcoming AOPi back to the KU campus and wish them the best of luck in their endeavor.
I AM relieved to know that, because of prior arrangements made by residence hall representatives, the AOPI pledges will be representative, and this will enhance it. It is just my hope that they will benefit of a healthy, happy and comfortable living atmosphere because of unpleasant conditions.
Letters Policy
The University Daily Kanzen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typwritten, double-spaced and include the student's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is afraid to include the writer's name, address and should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kanzen reserves the right to edit letters delivered personally or mailed to the Kanzen newsroom, 112 Flint Hall. Because of space limitations, the right to edit letters for publication.