UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editor.
September 17.1979
Equal spending rule threatens all athletics
The future of both KU men's and women's athletic programs is riding on whether the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare adopts a recommendation by a federal civil rights commission to implement immediately equal per capita spending for men's and women's programs.
The United States Commission on Civil Rights recommended to HEW that Monday that it demand immediate legal action against S. women's and women's interacial sports.
Commission officials have said that the ruling is based solely on the constitutional issue raised in Title IX guidelines adopted in the 1974 Education Armments, which say that athletic departments must spend the same amount for each male and female athlete.
THE COMMISSION, bowing from pressure from some women's groups, reversed its January ruling, which said that athletic departments should have five years to phase in football when figuring per capita spending.
But that pressure may do more harm to women's athletics—and men's non-revenue sports at the same time. The problem is that considering football and basketball spending with all of the real-life sports results in an unrealistic figure.
The football program here has a budget of $1.2 million (of KU's total $3.5 million), but receives about $1.5 million more in revenue. There is no doubt that football spending inflates the distribution figures.
IF HEW adopts the commission's
ruling, which officials in Washington have indicated they usually do, it will be asking athletic departments to give unequal funding, in effect, to the women's programs. And the end result will be that cuts will be made in both the men's and women's programs to take on the slack.
KU officials and coaches have accurately noted that they are going to need help, and lots of it, if the ruling is adopted.
The women's program is still behind the men's in terms of funding of non-revenue sports. KU's athletic director, Bob Marcum, says it will cost $400,000 to achieve expenditures for men and women in nonrevenue sports, but at an annual $1.1 million would be needed if football and basketball figures are added.
ALTHOUGH THE WOMEN's program still trails the men's, it has made some big advances in the past few years. To halt that progress by a ruling that looks only at the strictest reading of the law, Mr. Obama signed a bill of the law, would be a serious mistake.
The intent of Title IX, after all, was to create equal opportunity and funding for men's and women's athletics.
The intent never has been, nor should it become, to force financial havens upon both programs by including them in the professional sports when computing spending.
The improvement of both women's and men's athletics at the college level will be better advanced if football costs are figured in over a period of five years, as the commission originally recommended.
Ethical questions are often the by-products of medical advances, and it is the practicing physicians who are left to wrestle with the monstrous creations in the research lab.
Such is the case with the newly-found ability to preselect the sex of children.
THE REASON? They fear that the fetus might be aborted if the parents don't like what they hear.
The procedure was considered a boon for women over 40 or couples with a family history of genetic abnormalities.
But amnicipentesis also tells a doctor the sex of a child, information most doctors have refused to pass along to the prospective infants.
Amincenicec, a relatively safe and simple method of tapping the amniotic fluid from a pregnant woman, was developed to test new methods, such as Down's Syndrome, in a fetus.
Sex selection causes moral quarrel
But some doctors, like John C. Fletcher, have said that information should not be withheld for that reason. Fletcher "came clean," as he put it, in a recent article in Health, think
"It is inconsistent to support an abortion law that protects the absolute right of women to decide, and, at the same time, block access to information about the fetus because one thinks that an abortion may be less moral than basis of the information." Fletcher wrote.
"If you take the position that the Supreme Court takes . . . You would have to hold a big contradiction in the middle of your head. I just couldn't hold it adverse."
I SEEM TO have no trouble holding that contradiction in the middle of my head. In fact, it hardly seems like a contradiction at all.
A woman either wants to have a child or she doesn't.
If she does not want to have a child, but becomes pregnant, she may choose to have an abortion—that is the Supreme Court's position.
If she does want to have a child, and she becomes pregnant, she has the child, male or female. You pays your money and you takes your chances,
Fletcher described the controversy that is brewing over the issue: "The first moral response of most who think about the issue is close to uneasiness."
My moral response to the news that a woman could abort a fetus because it got the "wrong" sex chromosome was closer to disgust.
PRESELECTION is sex discrimination in its most basic form. It is depriving life on the basis of gender.
But legislating against the use of abortion
Things don't look too good for grain shippers these days, or, really, for any foodstuff shipper.
Everyone loses in rail strike
It's a real shame because things were looking so good.
With the continuing Rock Island clerks' ski, the Santa Fe shoemaker's independent trackers, shippers probably are beginning to feel the way consumers do everybody's shoes.
So, the truck strike meant a lot of new
The scarcity and high price of fuel, plus an effort toward improved service, made the raills look good next to fluctuating truck rates and fuel surcharges.
During this summer's truck strike, many foodstuffs shippers turned to the rails to move their produce before it rotted in the fields.
True, they were looking for a way to avoid millions of dollars in insurance and shipping rates equal or cheaper than truck taxes. And, more importantly, the trains were run
THE PRICE hasn't always been so attractive. In the past, rail boxcar and piggyback (trailer on flat car) traffic was cheaper and more fuel efficient, but the service was bad. It couldn't handle truck delays, for example, because transport delays and faulty refrigerator cars would carry to rot before they arrived.
melissa COLUMNIST thompson
business for the railroads, especially because it coincided with a change in Interstate Commerce Commission rules on produce hauling by rail.
The ICC told the railroads that they no longer had to publish rate changes; they could compete outright with truckers in raising or lowering their prices.
This has given railroads a more positive image in public and governmental eyes, especially since the COVID-19 evidence will be shaken if Rock Island's troubles are settled before the truckers can leave.
Shippers are going to panic again if they can't move their stuff out. Grain is already piled high in different parts of Kansas while shoppers wait for a free car or an empty truck. This time, however, shippers may have any alternative if trackers strike.
WHILE NOT all rail traffic is disrupted by Rock Island's troubles, there has been a shift to take up slack from the quiet Rock Island tracks. With cars so close to the road that they likely switch to trucks and may prey that Sept. 15 comes and goes without a strike.
But, if this dilemma blooms, who'll suffer alongside the shippers? Consumers, of course.
It's a foregone conclusion that food packages, clothing, furniture and the cost of moving household possessions, to name a few. You see, according to statistics compiled by the Consumer Bureau, 90 percent of all fruits and vegetables, 80 percent are responsible for shipping about 90 percent of all fruits and vegetables.
THERE IS, perhaps, a lesser known evi- that might result from a shift of new rail business back to trucks. Because of the cheaper rates and the ICC ruling, some companies have contracted to tempt growers and shippers into investively in rail transport.
The railroads naturally want to keep
If the railways can't resolve their lab troubles, then it may damage these experimental contracts. Santa Fe, incidentally, has such a contract.
A less peripheral worry, however, is that railroads can't afford to jeopardize any of this new business. Their record as an industry is not good. The federal government has given millions of dollars to the railroad companies, and an popular, fuel-efficient shipping choice.
Regaining the lost business and the positive image won't be so easy a second time.
KKK revives memory of '60s
By MARCIA KUNSTEL
SELMA, Ala—Uncomfortable feeling, something akin to gait, attaches to elegant dress in full view of the imposing steel chair.
N. Y. Times Special Features
It is part of the riverfront restoration, the new Selma for a new South.
But you cannot escape the bridge and history there. Wrought-iron rafts and gossamer ferns not better hide the symbol of a people's past than the bridge itself.
THE RIVER surges below; the bridge looms above, squared black letters blaring out its identity on the narrow sign up top. It is the same sign that civil rights marchers passed under 14 years ago, just before troops of state and county police, some mounted on horses and some bearing whips and shirts, viciously turned them around. Side shifts in retreat spilled blood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
The restaurant is called The Crossing. Its name and its place are unintentional reminders of that day in 1965 written and spoken of so vividly that it is a memory for those who were not even there. The restaurant's open recently was marked by another crossing, with the same sign, but these "evil rights" demonstrators, as their leader described them, tried "White Power! White Power!"
Chief LaForte had asked the Selma City Council to grant the Klan a parade permit, which it did on a 43 vote split down racial lines—whites for, blacks against. He wanted to give the white supremacists a parade permit to trouble, without creating a "w-national memory." He succeeded.
SELMA POLICE CHEF, John LaPorte, explain the Ku Klu's intentions. "They're trying to trace the route Martin Luther King's movement."
WHAT OF THE untold legal battles that defined modern civil liberties, settling precedents that the Klan is now trying to shape to its purposes? They must have howled when Judge Frank M. White, a former judge for the state could not arbitrarily hurl the 1965 march for voting rights.
As for erasing memories, Bill Wilkinson's Invisible Empire of the Kaia Klinn Kian only recalled the visions of 1653 that were etched on his tablet.
Now, the name of that very judge, who did more to crack segregation than any other white person in Alabama, is invoked by the Klan. His decision, Klannman said on route to their peaceful city, has caused a rift among Montgomery County and stop it from the parody of 1965 for want of a parade plea.
One debt is the mass march itself, a tactic refined, made essentially safe and acceptable by activists of the '50s and '60s. Their toll was bashed skulls, public scorn and threats that sometimes turned into action.
THE MARCH "for white people's civil rights" pointed out much the Klan and the country owed to the pioneers of the real civil rights movement.
A final charge to the Klan's account is a spontaneous and innocent gesture borrowed by some Klaners. As such, it stood a mere foot away from a movement, epitomized in the assurance to cross-burning zealism of overcome. This debt accrued when policemen ended the march outside Montgomery and led the Klaners, who had no parade and no rides, to attack and flush the flush of a righteous exhilaration that rewards arrest for a cause. They silently raised bailed fists in the black-pulse salute. It was more than a man can genteel restaurant in a restored riverfront bliss.
Marcia Kunstel is a reporter for the Atlanta Journal.
for sex preselection would be nearly impossible. Enforcing such a law would be impossible. That makes it the responsibility of the employer to ensure their professional knowledge.
lynn COLUMNIST byczynski
While doctors decide the issue for themselves, researchers continue their quest for other methods of sex preselection.
My moral response to this news is not as extreme—it has changed from disgust to more耻辱, accompanied by the detached affect about the effects of towing with nature.
Researchers at the fertility unit of the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center in Chicago have turned another medical advance into a method of choosing sex.
PREVIOUS RESEARCH had found that some couples were infertile because the
man's sperm was not vigorous enough to fertilize the egg. If putting sperm in a woman's ovary would increase vigorous sperm from successive ejaculations, they were able to successfully inseminate
But, as it turned out, Y sperm—those that confer the male sex upon the egg—are faster swimmers than X sperm. The result is more Y than X sperm were collected
The method has been used successfully to presect male babies at the Rees Hospital. And, in the interest of fair play, another interest was established with commitments to isolate the female-caring sweep.
Numerous studies, however, have $^{136}$ shown that female births are popular than male births, especially in the United States but also here in the United States where the sexes are almost considered equal under modern conditions.
IN AN EXPERIMENT in China, for example, 100 women were told the sex of the fetus they were carrying. Thirty decided to
In another sex preselection experiment at a Singapore clinic, 900 of 1,000 women indicated that they preferred to have boys.
The normal birth ratio of boys to girls is 105 to 100. The reason for the natural equality of numbers is obvious; propagation of the species.
abort. Twenty-nine of those fetuses were female.
With fewer women around, the female's reproductive capabilities could become too highly valued. In other words, women could be remanded to the position of sex object.
The example is a simple extrapolation and is, of course, highly improbable. But dangers always exist when the natural order is disturbed.
If you want a boy, Aristotle advised, limit our lovemaking to days when a north wind blows. For a girl, wait for the wind to come out of the south.
Sex preselection need not be such a morally troubling and clinical experience. It can, in fact, be a rather poetic adventure.
KU Audubon Society troubled by apathy
To the Editor:
In your article published Sept. 11, concerning local environmental organizations, you neglected to mention the Jayhawk Audubon Society. Jayhawk Audubon was chartered in 1970 and has been constantly in the local environmental area ever since.
Lawrence senior
Fortunately,it won't work
Kerry Altenbernd
Everyone should be aware that these and other problems have as root causes poor environmental management and the attitude of others toward it. In this way that these and other problems can be solved is for all of us to become active and use humane solutions for workable and human solutions.
We have experienced many of the same problems as other local groups with apathy towards climate change and environmental concern that occurred during the early 1970s has slackened it. Offers that today people are too busy to give attention to such incidents at Three Mile Island seemed to cause only temporary concern. The fuel industry is not aware of any things that people are concerned with.
President, Jayhawk Audubon Society
Give aid to people not Turkish military
To the Editor:
I wish to make clear from the beginning that I am not against giving aid to Turkey, provided this aid is given to the people and is used for and by the people and not by the Turkish government for military operations in expense of small defenseless countries.
I agree with Fischer's view that Turkey is in shamies, facing political, economic, social and educational unrest. But simply saying that Turkey will be a recipient of the Turkish government comes to realize its obligations to Cyprus, Greece and the United States and to its own people, of
I come from the independent Republic of Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Sea about 45 miles from Turkey. Almost half of my military is under Turkish military occupation.
I would like to make some observations in reference to John Fischer's editorial on "Turkey needs democratic aid," in the Sept. 12 Kisanan.
Turkey, a country of nearly 40 million people, invaded Cyprus, with about 500,000 people, on July 20, 1974, after a fascist coup overthrow the elected government of Cyprus.
Turkey's expansionist policy became obvious, and at present she insists on partitioning the island with the sole aim of bringing the northern part whenever time allows.
TURKEY OSTENSILLY used as a pretext her right to restore constitutional and safeguard the rights of Turkish Cyprus. The pretext would not have attempted a second invasion- while negotiations were going on in Athens, there was a cease-fire-on Aug. 20, 1974.
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
Turkey continues to violate U.S. laws and fundamental human rights, which President Carter shows great interest in when violated in other countries.
OF COURSE, there hasn't been much consistency to Carter's promises. The embargo was lifted and last May an盟 aid of $30 million in Turkey was passed by Congress.
By resuming aid to Turkey, apart from doing justice to her on the Cyprus problem, the U.S. makes remote all hope for keeping the Southeastern Flank of NATO together allowing Turkey to become more intrusive in issues in that area of the world.
Since the American people base their glory on justice, property freedom, security and health, they should demand only this post-payment of all aid to Turkey until she returns from Afghanistan and the Aegean questions, until Turkey withholds from Cyprus and then stops violating its treaties.
Carter said in his pre-election campaign that no aid to Turkey would be granted under the US mandate made in the Cyprus problem, unless Turkey complied with the U.N. mandate for Turkish troops from Cyprus and the return of all refugees to their homes and for the resumption intercommunication.
Maria C. Hadjipaulou
Lawrence graduate studen
Oil profits necessary to finance research
To the Editor:
Just as it is irk Ronald Bain to see a student condaining free enterprise, it infuriates me more when referring to his poorly researched, highly misleading letter of Sept. 6 accusing the oil minister of failing to control emissions.
First, the comparisons he makes about society are all sound. In fact, he argues. Bain interrupts equate the school and highway system, et al., with socialism. This is ridiculous. The public sector must provide services that the private sector cannot. This is why we pay federal, not state funding.
BAIN'S NEXT contention that the on industry has been reaping windfall profits for years at the "expense of the American consumer" is that it implied falsehoods that he sounds like
Socialism is defined as government or state control of industry that at one time was private. It pretends to equalize and give the same power to all those with ability and giving freely to those with no ability whatsoever. The welfare system is designed so that everyone are socialist; the highway system is not.
another headline-grabbing politician. I present Mr. Bain with some facts and figures, which he cannot seem to provide to back his argument.
The argument that the oil industry is manipulating supply and demand factors for its benefit is simply not true, and the economics student would dispute this "fact."
First, the average weighted return equity (the common, accepted ground on which companies judge their profit) in the Muni index is 12.5 percent, compared with an even 13 percent for all other industry-hardy extents of the standard's barely andbeat inflation.
True, supply and demand factors do not exist in the oil industry. They cannot and will not until total deregulation takes place. How can supply and demand work when it is impossible for any of who gets how much gasoline and at what price with their insane allocation regulations?
As for the windfall profits tax, most oil profits are plowed back into research, exploration and development of energy resources. In fact, the petroleum industry accounted for 30 percent of the total refinishing industry relation to all other industries combined.
THE WINDFALL tax (really an excise tax) will simply remove needed funds, incentive and research to develop more engaged citizens so that the government's already obese coffees.
There will be no free enterprise or supply and demand economics until the government removes its huge, inept paws from the industry.
Understand that profit and industry work together for everyone's benefit; the go-buy-go-sell cycle is a time when profit and wave an American flag at the same time is either a hidden Mamast, a
Doug Gentile
Doug Gentile Olathe senior
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