UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorslals
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the Editors.
October 9,1979
Waste route disputed
The news that radioactive waste from the cleanup operation at the crippled Three Mile Island nuclear power plant will be shipped to Hanford, Washington via Kansas on Interstate 70 is not welcome.
Tons of the radioactive waste, collected from the purifications of 250,000 gallons of contaminated water at the plant, are scheduled to pass along the Kansas turnpike sometime early next year.
The waste, described as a "gelatinous residue which has a consistency comparable to caviar" would be shipped in single 6-foot cylindrical casks, each capable of carrying 250 lb of the resins that would be hauled by specially designed 80,000 pound low-slug trailered tractors.
17-0 was chosen over more direct northern routes because the waste would be shipped this winter. Officials for Metropolitan Edison, the company that owns Three Mile Island, said that trucks on more northerly roads stood a greater chance of encountering bad road conditions.
OFFICIALS of the company say they are consulting with officials of both Kansas and Missouri for permission to haul the dangerous cargoes through the state, but they say they expect no problems.
Company officials are insisting however that even the most elaborate precautions are unnecessary. The containers in containers is almost absolute, they say.
"Those casks have withstood some pretty dramatic tests," one official said. "They have been dropped 30 feet on spikes and concrete. The casks could withstand the impact of being hit by a speeding freight train."
Some special considerations may be imposed however. Missouri Governor Joseph Teasdale has asked that Missouri be given three weeks notice before a waste shipment comes through. He also has said that shipments of the waste would not be allowed to enter the St. Louis or Kansas City areas during rush hour. There has been no word from state officials in Kansas on restrictions in this state.
PERHAPS SO, but as the accident that produced the waste indicates, sometimes even the best precautions fail. Our state officials owe it to the city of Rochester to ensure a strict possible rescissions and safeguards on the transportation of the waste.
Accidents may happen, but state officials could do a lot to make sure they do not happen in Kansas.
Universities advertise academic gimmickry
By FRANK WOLF
N.1. Times Special Services
NEW YORK—Running universities is becoming harder every year.
The decline in the birth rate in the early 1960s is making it tougher to find qualified students. Many institutions find it necessary to hire more teachers and to keep applicants to keep afloat. A variety of techniques is being used to reduce the cost of instruction: the increased use of cheap, part-time faculty members, freezes on tuition fees, training for new teachers, early-retirement "sweeteners," and increased class size. But the most prevalent response to the new financial pressures has been the development of programs to attract students to the "frugalist adult student" market.
Many of the new " lifelong learning" programs smack of academic buckstering.
COLLEGEES ADVERTISSE the liberality of their policies for conferring credit for life experience in an effort to attract adults. The college offers a crediting instruction offered in the armed forces and in business organizations. The continuing-education unit of credit is gaining acceptance as a device for adult learners. The continuing-education programs are typically designed by marketing-oriented academic bureaucrats, not faculty members or faculty committees. Continuing-education programs are not always meet high academic standards.
ONLY THE MOST SECURE and clear-headed institutions are resisting the impulse to make a quick killer in the adult student market. To the extent that universities are able to provide such a shady, shoddy academic goods, they dernure themselves—and the educational process.
Some enthusiasts for "non-traditional learning" would fault university institutions, especially the so-called elite institutions, for their failure to imagine themselves imaginatively to the changing learning needs of the larger society. However, it is far more important to challenge the higher-education community for its recent willingness to offer anything people will pay more.
Below are 16 ways to which universities, in the words of the College Entrance Examination Board, "are taking new initiatives to serve adult students today."
They have been extracted from a longer list of 356 such suggestions collected in a survey of 50 "representative institutions" and disseminated in a booklet by the College Entrance Examination Board's "Future Teachers for a Learning Society" program.
1. STATE IN advertisements that you will develop a class for any 15 people interested in a particular subject.
2. In deciding what courses to offer, try to identify what books people are borrowing from the local library and what shows they are watching on television.
3. Develop undergraduate and graduate degrees with no on-campus requirements.
1. Offer a mini-course do emergency medical procedures for ambulance drivers.
2. Develop special courses for widows and divorces.
6. Offer packages that include charter flights and combine vacations in foreign countries with courses for credit.
7. Seek instructors for distance learning courses who do not mind a lack of personal contact with students, as most give-and-take is by mail.
8. RENT BILLBOARD space in key locations and advertise, "If it is educational service you want, call us."
9. Set up booths in shopping malls with posters, slides and representatives to describe your nourram.
10. Remove limits to the amount of credit that can be earned by examination.
11. Increase the amount of credit granted for off-campus experimental learning.
12. Allow non-credit courses to be taken for credit through negotiations with the department head and professor.
13. Establish storefront posts staffed by professional counselors to advise drop-in about career and educational needs and opportunities.
15. Overload popular courses to cover the costs of those that attract fewer than the minimum number of registrants.
14. Create a lottery sponsored by a private or public organization with one prize: free enrollment in your program.
16. Establish a policy that when courses do not cover their costs in any one year, they will not be offered the following year.
These are 18 ways to destroy a university. Frank Woll is associate dean of the School of General Studies, the college of liberal arts for adults at Columbia University.
These are 16 ways to destroy a university.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Footnote: Need changes of address to the University of Hawaiian, Flint Hall, The University of Kaua'i, Lawrence, KS5040
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The demonstration in Seabear, N.H., last weekend could be the fence that stopped the rolling snowball.
The anti-nuclear movement was moving along, gaining credibility, press coverage, and, most important, supporters.
Editorial Editor Mary Ernst
Editor Mary Hoenk
It had left the domain of long-hairs and professional malticcontents. It had the support not only of the students in Boston but also of an increasing number of housewives in
High Point
Navy Dept.
Campus Editor
Associate Campus Editor
Assistant Campus Editors
THESE TACTICS are scary, too far on the fringe for most of middle America. They relegate the anti-nuclear movement to the province of "kooks."
Violence threatens anti-nuke cause
The polls showed it—a slight edge for nuclear power became a slight edge against it after the accident at Three Mile Island in March.
More than 1,500 protesters were repelled from their assaults on the fence at a federal courthouse in the hundred state troopers and national guardmen best back the demonstrators.
Managing Editor Nancy Dressler
But enter violence, as it did last weekend at Seabrook, and the anti-nuclear movement lazes its anceal.
Advertising Adviser Check Chowns
Business Manage Cynthia Ray
Engineers who have been taught that anything can be made mathematically fail-safe cannot be expected to believe in the inevitability of human error.
Assistant Managing Editor
Sports Editor...
Associate Sports Editor...
Connie Couch...
Attica may have had some impact upon prison reform. Kent State may have helped
And the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which, without a nuclear industry to regulate, would be out of a job, cannot be trained to find the fatal faults of nuclear power.
THAT IS WHY it is so important for every citizen to get informed and get involved.
And that is exactly what was beginning to happen.
pected to see the failings that would void their vocations.
It's too late now. The protesters from Boston have made their mark.
The anti-nuclear forces were able to cause their attack on the level-level-basis. But if the movement must turn to tear gas and billy clubs, the level-level and sensible unit will have to fight.
But maybe, if nuclear activists across the country see violence for the threat to their lives, it is important to be peaceful and symbolic protests of the past, the mark left by a weekend of violence at the Camp Nou.
Another group began a mass-massailing campaign to discredit the spokesmen of the campaign, and wrote an article writing and money-contributing colour in a battle against the "log cab mentalities" of the movement.
In Philadelphia, a group of nuclear supporters manned a table in the airport almost all summer to promote their cause.
THE PRO-NUCLEAR movement, while it may seem to endanger the anti-nuclear movement, is actually a boon.
Right now, nuclear power is in the hands of those who can be the least objective about it.
The issue belongs in the streets. It needs to be debated and, finally, decided by those who stand to lose the most.
It's important that nuclear power be taken out of the corporate boardrooms and congressional committees.
General Manager Hick Musser
Scientists who have devoted their lives to the study of nuclear energy can't be ex-
stop the Vietnam War. Rioting in Watts may have caused an increase in funding for anti-poverty programs.
This change of strategy in the campaign against nuclear power-from peaceful but highly visible protec t to flanker an enemy under the law-came at the worst possible time.
BECAUSE, WITHIN the past few months,
not only has the anti-nuclear movement
been gaining supporters, but it also has
been encouraging it to merit a backlash of vocal opponents.
Posters, chants and incendiary speakers decried the "no-growth muggers" who were suddenly threatening the nuclear status quo.
lynn
COLUMNIST byczynski
Last month, nuclear advocates gathered at the Rocky Flats nuclear arsenal near
Denver for a rally that was indistinguishable from the anti-nuclear protests there almost monthly.
The anti-nuclear movement is going to fail on its face if a nuclear allows it to get mixed up with violence now. It simply doesn't have the will to try to try to physically tapple the powers that be.
But, in those cases, the causes had the support of the neoel involved.
To the Editor:
I am sorry that instead of responding to the issues raised in my Sept. 21 Kanser letter, I should have addressed them personally, maliciously and with wanton disregard for the truth throughout their "humanities" class period Febs. 29, Sept. 30 and Oct. 15. The nature of their attacks, (2) to offer to appear in class to answer their attacks, and (3) to respond to their response cooperatively will have serious consequences. I am sending a copy of this letter to the University council in case the committee is not satisfied.
Professors' attacks ignore issues
First, the preposterous nature of the attacks. The professors first expressed disappointment that so many in their class had read my letter in the Kansu. The prosecution said that they hoped that by now students would have stopped reading newspapers.
THE PROFESSORS evidently find it important to teach their students that I fear Homer and wish to ban the Odyssey because it is dangerous. This lends support to their view that I am attacking the remnant of civilization they single-handedly are trying to destroy, or actually I revere Homer and have also taught Homer to humanities classes.
They say I want to censor the classroom. In fact, by excluding others with different views, by discouraging students from reading other texts, even newspapers; by demanding their colleagues in calling most of them "trash"; by forbidding notaking so a critical examination of their classroom performance; or difficult to make; they are the censors.
If they do not permit me in class, this point will be even more obvious.
Second, an offer. While I suppose one might consider it flattery that a hall class should have thought better use of the students' time could have been found. I do believe that smacking snacking students who cannot know better, but I believe the students have a right to be able to do so.
MY VIEWS WERE systematically distorted on a variety of other issues.
Third, a warning. My real concern is not for my reputation—Who cares very much what Vern Barnet thinks about Homer besides these professors and their students? I don't think they should be students to see how, in the guise of inspiration and protection of a cultural treasure, theprofessors have cheapened and degraded the classics for their own sectarian and religious reasons. In the history of HIP could speak—how some students are unwillingly being led into a dangerous cult. If the professors do not offer me equal time, the absurdity of these "humanized" professors is worth it.
The Rev. Dr. Vern Barnet Overland Park
Kansan commentary unfair to Birchers
To the Editor:
The Kansan's Sept. 28 commentary titled, "Bircher-Nade器 a charade," dared to overlook any factual errors in the article titled, "Ralph Nader, Rip-up Artist." 2,000 copies of this book about body as a public service by members and friends of the BIR Church Society.
Unknowingly, members of the audience had their attention drawn to Nader Alam's book *The Mysterious Subject* about Dright E. Dosenberger, in particular, and the beliefs of the 2000-10 cohort in the University of Kansas who can find one in Robert Wohl's book *title*, The Politics.
On the subject of TRIM (Tax Reform Immediately), the author of the Kansan commentary fails to provide readers with specific quotes from the TRIM bulletin in question and ignores the Congressional authors who are included in every reported TRIM vote.
ON THE SUBJECT OF the John Birch Society's "heretical, anti-C communist attitude," the author ignores the fact that nearly 30 percent of our earned incomes go to all levels of government; that the american federal defends itself against national chaos, evaporating savings for those on fixed incomes, and skyrocketing prices; that one-third of the globe
has been beaten into bloody submission to Communism; that more than 100 million people have lost their lives to Communism (see pages 384 of the 1970 Gutenberg Book of American History) and Socialism now is portrayed as the hammer and sickle of World Socialism; that David Rockefeller has been busy establishing his gold-bronzing, paper-money temples to finance his New World Order through education, Chase-Peking and Chase-Panama.
The Kansan's uniformed, shot-gun declarations about the John Birch Society suggest that its editorial judgments are more important than information and deliberation.
Is it possible that a Big Eight newspaper like the Kansan chooses to remain ignorant? Or, is the Kansan counting on the ignorance of the student body?
Dick Fatherly Tonganoxie
Fairness questioned in local rape trial
To the Editor:
In the Sept. 27 issue of the Kanas, Mr. Brown was convicted of the kidnap and rape of an 18-year-old Lawrence woman on the night of May 19.
Jurisprudence has once again laid down the heavy hand of fate on yet another member of society. This being the person of Robert W. Brown.
If there were any crime that would construct a sound argument for the return of the death sentence, rape would be that crime. There could be no comparable predation suffered by both the payche and physical body than that of the rape victim.
AMERICA, WHERE every criminal is innocent until proven guilty, and judged by a group of his peers—or is that always the case?
custom of castration. But alas, my purpose in this letter is not to impersonal on the sentencing of a convict rapist. I think that question the fearfulness of this particular case.
PERSONAL SENTIMENTS pertaining to the sentencing of a person convicted of a rape would lean toward the ancient Arabic
It appears as though, while remembering a few cases of recent years, that it is not the crime committed that dictates a particular sentence, but the amount of money paid to a law firm. Law, being one of the most noble crimes is also one of the most lucrative.
THIS WE arrive at the dilemma facing a "criminal" without sufficient funds, the court-appointed lawyers. Every city has a criminal defense attorney to volunteer to represent clients. These lawyers are paid by the state at a rate considerably less than they would receive if not appointed.
Although sworn to the oath that they represent their clients to the best of their abilities, sometimes that oath comes to be the burden of the lack of profit and other personal gains.
SUCH MAY have been the case with Brown. How could any lawyer allow his client to enter a courtroom being tried for rape and face a jury that consists of 11 jurors, many of whom are in a statement that a woman cannot render a fair and impartial verdict, but dealing merely with the assumption that the women jurors could be more easily persuaded to the side of the prosecution, the lawyer having done nothing or jury selected, should not have allowed it.
When asked for a comment, Brown's attorney could not be reached. Perhaps the proceedings could make the ordeal of dealing with a court appointed lawyer a real challenge.
Brown's new court date has been set for Oct. 18, at which time he will request a retrial. With some luck, the same justice for Brown would prevail and somebody be the justice for all.
Brian K. Hanks Manhattan junior