UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editor's staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editorial team.
September 18,1979
Hiring needs scrutiny
KU administrators are calling the false Ph.D. claim of Calvin Williams an isolated case—not a big issue. But what the administrators should be saying is that they hope the Williams claim is, in fact, an isolated case.
The only way to find that out is to do what the administrators refuse do: make a big issue of reviewing the hiring process at the University.
Details are sketchy about how Williams was able to lie about a doctoral degree he had received from Temple University when he was being considered for appointment in 1970 as associate director of urban affairs.
BUT THE facts ring out clear as a bell that false academic credentials either slipped by University officials or worked at the time of Williams' hiring.
We, like the administration, would like to believe that this case, indeed, is an isolated one. One way to make believers of those who are skeptical of the hiring process and its effectiveness is to review a review that process at the University.
Chancellor Archie R. Dykes has the
option of putting the review issue before the Lawrence Campus Executive Management Group, an organization of KU administrators, for their conference workshop, will be able to come up with a useful review of the hiring process.
A thorough investigation of how this "isolated" case occurred and of the possibility that other cases may, in fact, exist is needed now, before we discover that the hiring process has malfunctioned now than once before.
IF THE University is to maintain the high credibility it now has with its students, the people of Kansas and other institutes of higher education, it must assure all of us that when an instructor or administrator lists certain academic credentials, he has obtained them.
It is important that KU administrators realize right now that their credibility has been put on the spot. It is also important that they make a big issue — a very big issue — reviewing their hiring procedure.
We would be more than happy to have them make believers of us.
Clinch River reactor a serious safety risk
Little good can be said about music power in general; even less good can be said about it. In short, a word of praise for the Climb River breeder reactor near Oak Ridge, Tenn., would be
And yet a hill authorizing more money for the Lincoln River project is asking him to present these rival channels, going almost unnoticed in the shadows of more sensational energy sources.
HR 300 contains authorization for an allocation of $18.8 million for the continuation of a project that even nuclear advocate Jimmy Carter disaffids.
The CLINCH River authorization bill was approved without fanfare last month by the House Science and Technology Committee, which ordered it to the House floor late this week or next.
AT THIS HURT, the hills around Oak Ridge
REACTOR, because White House officials
reject, because White House congresses in
the face of opposition by the president and
the public. Clutch River is fast becoming
1980 is not far away and the design stage of the Clinc River breeder reactor is only half a mile away. Congress already has kicked in $674 million for customers, including those of Kansas Power and Light, have—unknowingly, for the most part, spent $257 million to the Clinc River tilt.
"A technological dinosaur," President Carter calls it.
Since 1976, President Carter has openly opposed Clinton River, but Congress persists. The subject has been a touchy one, and the president's administration authorized funds that year at the urging of President Richard Nixon, who believed a commercial breeder reactor be used on the river.
Clinch River's problems don't end with its obsolescence. It also suffers from some multiple of the shortcomings associated with catastrophic radiation leaks, a potential for catastrophic radiation leaks.
lynn COLUMNIST byczynski
waste disposal hazards, great capital expenditure and a short life expectancy.
Add to those problems the fact that the breeder reactor produces more fuel than it consumes, which is touted as the breeder reactor's main virtue.
BUT THE fuel produced is plutonium, which is extremely deadly for an extraordinarily long time (its half-life is 24,000 years).
Furthermore, plutonium is the stuff of which nuclear weapons are made -made by politically unstable governments or mentally unstable terrorists.
President Carter, now known for his anti-nuclear stance, opposes the breederreactor for that reason. He fears the production of plutonium in nuclear plants will lead to nuclear arms proliferation.
A study sponsored by the Ford Foundation—again, not a group given to bucking the big nuclear power business—arrived at the conclusion about the breeder reactor.
"Our analysis of nuclear power convince us that there is no persuasive technical or political basis for moving to commercial breeder reactors within this century and probably for a decade."
The Clinch River breeder reactor project only has one reason for its continued existence: it is an answer to taxpayers who balk at the expenditure of millions of dollars for a power plant that isn't be useful much longer than present obsolete power plants. Uranium has its limits, too.
And, although Climch River may solve our legislators' problems with angry conspiracyists or the threat reactor are too great risks on the energy nation to the nation's energy problems.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
**10/25/2014** Published at the University of Kannada daily August through May and June ones are a free online publication. The other dates are paid for. All publications are subject to availability by mail or are $12 each or monthly or $7 per year in Designer City and $5 per month in Leeds City. **BUSINESS MEMBERSHIPS:** Buses are available for Rs 38,000 per month. For more details, please visit www.kannada.edu/school/membership.
Postmaster: Send changes of address to the University Dykas Kassan, Flint Hall, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS 68049
Tullah Education
Managing Editor
Penny Drescher
Campaign Manager
Associate Campus Manager
Associate Campus Manager
Assistant Manager Editor
Sports Editor
Associate Sports Editor
Gary Turner
Special Section Editor
Special Section Editor
Wire Editors
Wire Editors
Editorial Writers
Editorial Writers
Staff Writers
Photographers
Marketing Specialist
Staff Artists
Mary Hawk
Mary Ermert
Editorial Editor
Mary Ermert
Caitlin Goodwin,
Bryndy Higgins
Caitlin Goodwin, Tammy Tarney, Bryndy Higgins
Bhinda Hodson
Lyan Jain, John Logue
David Prenton, Mitsuhiko Thompson
David Eddie, Dougie Hiltons, Jeff Harring, Barker Khnoyt, Cherry Todd
Jan Cakterton, Stela Kirkshusher
Business Manager
Cymia Roy
Vincent Guasti
Caleb Crawford
Holley Cullen
Alain Reynolds
Aimele Reynolds
Jayce Jewell
Jayce Jewell
Tour sheet managers
Construction managers
Representatives
Cherrie Hurst, Judith Bonnan Damn, Benne Hickman, Kathery Triplett, Nick Wooden, Cathy Waycock
General Manager
Advertising Agent
that the reserves are building up at a faster rate than expected. In addition, at the current tax rate, income will exceed $10 billion in Social Security cost by $8 billion in 1981.
AS A RESULT, the 13-member Social Security Advisory Council has proposed that the rate be down considerably from the current rate and that the previously scheduled rate of a 65.4 percent rate be increased.
Social Security beats alternatives
Our nation's Social Security system long has been the target of criticism from all sides of the American political arena and has been used by many who view the system as a waste of money.
The council also recommended that Medicare, which is now funded with Social Security money, be financed from an employee income tax and a corporate income tax.
But across the nation, thousands of government workers have decided they would rather switch than fight and are voting to abandon Social Security.
However, the decision to abandon the system may cost them far more than they expected. While getting the tax break they desire, they also are sacrificing future benefits. And the break they sought from the government is all for Social Security subscribers anyway.
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES have the option of paying into the Social Security system like most other American workers, or breaking from Social Security and establishing their own benefit plan. Intent on saving money, more and more governments are trying to leave. More than 20,000 government employees deserted Social Security last year.
Just last week, the state government employees unions in Alaska vote to leave the system. In 16 other states, 88 governors and 49 senators are out of the program at the end of the year.
And 147 other agencies have said they will end their involvement with Social Security by 181. Dozens of others, including the city of Kansas City, Mo., have informed the federal government that they are thinking about leaving it. In total more than 100,000 workers may opt to leave the Social Security program during the next two years.
John COLUMNIST logan
THE REASONS for leaving the system are usually the same: taxes are too high and benefits might not be received.
Once out of the system, the various employees need to build up their own benefit programs. Money is given to the employees' salaries at a rate lower than the 6.15 percent Social Security tax.
THEERE ARE drawbacks though, Many of the programs set up by the individual companies have a higher risk than the Social Security system. And employees may have to choose between which type of program they want.
In Alaska, for example, the state is establishing five different benefit programs, from which employees can choose one or two. The Alaska program may not be much cheaper than Social Security, and the state has promised to match employee contributions. That money is going to have to come from increased taxes in other areas.
Even so, the battle cry of "low taxes" is-living government workers away from the Social Security system at an increasing rate. They may be choosing a bad time to retire. Their planned plans to drastically cut the Social Security tax already have been introduced.
So it appears that those government workers who have decided to leave the Social Security system any have jumped the ship prematurely. The tax cuts they received actually forthcoming from the federal government are made without any loss in benefits.
THE TAX CUTS have been proposed because the Social Security system has overfunded. It has more money coming in than it will be paying out.
these, the cash benefits program is delivered for the next 25 years. That's because the college wants to build up a surplus funds for the students after that, the years when the children are undergraduates. KU undergraduate(s) reach retirement age. (Untends a catastrophe occurs, predictions are possible.)
But government officials have discovered
Now those outside the system have leapt only all the money they paid into the system, and now they are investing in potential benefits, a predicament that is coating them almost as much as the Social Security funds.
Anti-nuclear movement not just a fad
To the Editor:
Be David Preston's Sept. 12 column on the anti-nuclear "fad": "Indicating an anti-nuclear activist for some time, I feel compelled to comment on Mr. Preston's unflattering, as unimposed, view of both the 'anti-nakes' and the nuclear controversy in general."
Mr. Preston feels that the anti-nuke position has come into vogue as a post-Three Mile Island and "China Syndrome" fancy. This is simply untrue. There was no nuclear power before it became a feasibility. Informed scientists have always been aware of the hazards involved in using nuclear power to heat substances. The media coverage, debates and controversy following the Three Mile Island accident did, however, help inform those who had not had enough information to understand regarding their position on nuclear power.
Mr. Preston asserts that Three Mile Island was 'not really an accident and that the laws of the United States that no one died as a result, (perhaps this is to mitigate for an accident) has he failed to prevent it.'
AS MANY people, short term exposure to radioactive matter tends to incite anemia and third generations or crops up in their blood. Lukemia and other cancers 10-20 years later course as cancer when they are dropped from lukemia, the likes of Mr. Preston will fail to make any connection because they cannot concern themselves with them here and there.
This selfish attitude is obvious when he states that nuclear power is worth the cost of storing wastes in dump sites around the country, because that waste must be completely recycled and the environment for more than 200,000 years? To put that in the "here and now," this means that if our Neanderthal ancestors had been using nuclear power, we would still be still trying to dispose of all of their wastes. And although the top scientists in the country have been working on the prob-
len for years, they still have no solution for safeguarding this deadly material for even $n \approx 150$ years.
THIS MAJOR issue is one that keeps me anti-nuke: "don't care to see my native land become a wasteland, and I don't think it is." It's an issue of deadly legacy on my great-grandchildren.
Another issue Mr. Preston seems to be unaware of that plutonium, oil like coal, is a finite resource. It is predicted that we will be able to build weapons though we'll still be dealing with its waste hundreds of thousands of years after that. Whereas we took the money being pumped into nuclear power development (which is, in turn, aided by the trilogy), and put it into two things Mr. Preston ignores completely—development of renewable resources (sun, wind, rain and plants) as power sources, and Conservation, as carbon sources of coal and oil within those same 50 years!
Yes, nuclear power is continuing in it," the writer and advance announcement, as Mr. Wren says. "We are at a critical power, there just isn't room for error. Call the anti-nuclear movement a bad if you wish, but I would suggest it to be a much easier alternative for us to suit uss. It is because we care enough about ourselves, our families, friends, futures and land that we fight to stop that which threatens us."
What is imperiling our nation is not the anti-mules, but those people such as Mr. Presston who do not care enough to become involved in these issues affecting our very lives.
To the Editor:
Jana Svoboda
Topeka junior
Major disaster may convince pro-nukes
David Preston seems to have overlooked a few things in his "Anti-nuke fad" article which appeared Sept. 12—as the two men who were killed by the rods rans from the reactor after a steam explosion.
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
explosion at all of the Navy reactors in Idaho. It would be hard to attribute their deaths to anything other than an accident at a nuclear plant.
Mr. Preston mentions that comparing the record of other developing technologies with nuclear power makes it appear safe. For a long time, the government has airline transportation. What about the dam that broke in Idaho a couple of years ago? The cargo hatch door on the DC-10? and the location of the control cables, again on the plane, is unclear. That that had not even been seriously considered; everyone was in theory perfectly safe, and yet hundreds are dead. If this is what we are comparing nuclear power to, and if there really major disaster hasn't happened yet.
ALSO, a switch to nuclear power for a major part of our electrical needs would be costly and only switch our dependence to yet another finite energy source, one that is, in fact, much more finite than coal. Much has been learned about nuclear power, but few are in operation.
It is probably that nuclear power will play a role in the coming years, but to think that it is the answer to the energy crunch is at beat naive.
In my opinion, coal, alcohol and oil shale should be the energy sources for the next few decades, while research on solar power and fusion proceeds full speed ahead.
Ron Holzwarth St. Francis senior
To the Editor:
Kansan mishandled coverage of assault
For several years now I have done a slow burn each time. I have seen some piece of literature that has given me the Kansas. Usually it has taken the form of things like misplaining someone's name (sometimes spelling it two different ways in English) or radically the facts of a story, or reneging on agreements to keep a certain part of a story. I don't consider any of these to be minor problems; I was taught better journalism in high school and I am more serious in its implications, however.
You recently printed a story about an attack on a woman student where you printed the woman's name! It happened when you were irresponsible in printing her name (not to mention some major errors in the facts of the story). What possible reason for that is that she was not type of information that the public "needs" to know; the story would have been just as newsworthy without it. And now that the secret is out, the people who assaulted her had no choice but to good old Kanstan. It seems to me that you have violated this woman's right to privacy for no good reason, while additionally you are to further harass and pose harm.
I don't hold any particular hope that my letter will change anything in Flint Hall. As I said, I've watched for four years while the quality of the Kanson's journalism has grown from one level of poor quality to another. The current level is apparently voversion.
oan Niekum
Lawrence graduate student