---
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan
writers. Signed columns represent the views of only the
writers.
September 13, 1979
Rule favors injustice
It was an irony of the worst kind.
The Kansas Legislative Coordinating Council, acting in the absence of the full Legislature between sessions, adopted an anti-discrimination policy that contained loopholes that might allow groups with discrimination membership policies to use the Kansas statehouse.
That action was taken Monday by a vote of 5-2, despite an emotional cry from House Leader Wendell Lady. He urged the six other members of the council to look at the policy for what it really was — a chance for discriminatory groups to use the statehouse, one of the state's greatest symbols of the democratic ideal of equality, for their own purpose.
The new policy would allow groups that restricted their memberships on a discriminatory basis to use the legislative chambers and committee rooms as long as the program they supported at the studehouse was not discriminatory.
THAT MIGHT allow the Kansas Jaycees, businessmen's organization, to use the statehouse in its model legislative program for students, provided the program was not restricted to men only.
Although the Jaycees' educational program is open to both men and women, the organization itself is not affiliated with any business that does not belong to a group of businessmen
who are supposedly interested in community improvement.
The Jaycees and their auxiliary, the Jaycee Janeys, are founded on the belief that women should belong in an auxiliary, not in the organization itself.
TO ADOPT a rule that would allow those groups to use the statehouse in an exercise on how government works is an injustice to those people who have worked so hard to show us how our government truly can be a champion of justice.
And it is hypocritical of the coordinating committee to allow such discriminatory organizations to use the stautehous as a result of an anti-racist policy.
Senate Majority Leader Norman Gaer, who voted against adoption of the policy, told the five who eventually voted for it, "You will be properly reported as being in favor of condoning it" before indicating if you vote in favor of that policy.
Indeed, Senate President Ross Doyen, Sen. Jack Steinger, and Reps. Robert Frey, Frever Weaver and Bob Arbuthnot have done just that.
They have shown how government, in an effort to correct injustice, has provided a loophole that supports discrimination in justice and notions of group superiority.
They have shown us how government can help the cause of discrimination and injustice — all in the name of democracy. They have fulfilled the fulfillment of democratic ideals.
Hidden images used to manipulate thoughts
There are people in America who want to play with your mind, literally. They want to whisper little messages into your ear of them and let them understand. They want to control you subconsciously.
The procedure they use is called subliminal communication, which can involve soft, repetitive speech that is barely audible quickly flashed images on television
Subliminal messages are designed to register with our subconscious mind. These messages, some with images, somewhere deep within the mind they register, and they can affect our feelings.
The IDEA of subliminal communication has been around since the mid-1950s. It was first used to stimulate hunger for popcorn among theater-goers by including single frames of the message, "Hungry" Eat popcorn in a movie. The frame flashes awareness of the message, and it, but the message was understood by the brain, triggering hunger pangs.
Subliminal messages also have been used in films and television shows. In one episode of "Mission: Impossible," for example, a heavily guarded criminal boss was forced out of the theater and watched the film being watched. The frames containing the subliminal message showed a barren desert broiling under a sorrowing sun, which made the criminal feel hot and thirsty. When the criminal left the theater for a drink of water, he was naked by the door.
AND RECENTLY the makers of "The Exorcist" inserted a frame of a death mask to frighten audiences.
One toy manufacturer's television commercial flashed "get it!" at viewers until the Federal Communications Commission banned the ad.
Subliminal messages also have been used to condition football teams, discourage shoplifting and improve employees' work.
The effect of subminimal communication is perhaps most evident in stores that use a microphone. In stores repeatedly "I will not steal." In stores using the recording, shilipating has decreased by 60%.
All of these examples raise a basic question. None of the subliminal messages were expected or asked for. And they were not anticipated, and we are unsuccessful, over which we have little control. So it is right for persons unknown to us to be able to play with our minds without our permission. And if they are allowed to interact, their minds will be set, and who will enforce them?
On the other hand, subliminal communication could be tremendously beneficial. It could be used to help people lose weight, quit smoking or quit drug use. This technology could also be useful in psychiatry. Even its current use as a deterrent to淋病 is useful.
OVERVIOUSLY THE potential for abuse is tremendous. Political candidates could use them to entice voters to buy toys of the toy company and urge us to buy all sorts of items. And, as in a futuristic nightmare, a government could use subliminal communication to influence behavior.
But there is a thin line between use and abuse. It would be relatively easy to change the command in line 5 but that says "I will not steal, but I will buy a 30-ounce bottle of outlawed American forces in United States troops in Iraq."
Subliminal communication can be a useful tool. But in the hands of the wrong persons it also can be a dangerous weapon.
Faculty evaluations are useful tools for students
The recent article on faculty evaluations left us surprised that people actually question the value of such an important tool. We were especially surprised by Professor Salivanu's remark that the only effective way to evaluate teachers is through their published works.
Creative thinking is not the sole criterion for effective teaching. The ability to communicate course material through lectures, the patience and time required to teach and the enthusiasm for teaching are also necessary attributes. What better way is there to judge these qualities than student evaluation? After all, only the student who understands the content of a course was successfully conveyed.
There is no doubt that there are some times in the present evaluation system. In the past, when teachers are given feedback by the most effective teachers, since it is the loss competent ones who need to be evaluated,
tions should be made mandatory for all teachers in all departments.
At the present time it is difficult to judge the success of a course because teachers fail to carefully define the content of the course and therefore create. Thus teachers should be encouraged to use syllabus and/or course outlines whenever possible, to ensure that students are well prepared, deficient in the criticism of textbooks and other class materials, future questionnaires should provide more consideration for the course.
Lawrence Volker
Overland Park senior
Dave Soshiinski
Kansas City, Kan., senior
Nation's temperament depressed
Frightened, apathetic, distrusting—those are just a few ways to characterize the nation's mood.
The country is unsure of itself. Even president Jimmy Carter, long known as an authoritarian, admitted that it was the country, noted in his last public address that the nation was suffering from "a drought."
Out of the disappointment of leadership of the country has come a great lack of trust among the American people in each of these nations they previously have so depended on.
In the void left by that vanished trust has settled disillusionment *a*' disillusionment America that is probably more uncertain of its future than ever before.
THE CAUSE of this disease can be traced to an ineffective and spineless government that developed after World War II. Major social legislation since then has been sporadic, often because of unrestricted presidential presidents or by shugerCourtesies.
The power and importance that some legislation might have carried has been
blight, the public elected new officials who vow to resolve the problems and get the government to act again at full speed. But the public is only further disillusioned in the government and in leadership by their representatives in the claims of ungrating the government.
John COLUMNIST fischer
It is only understandable, then, why Americans do not trust or respect Washington and why they are beginning to question American values. If the people represent elected officials, they will represent them and do their job, who can trust they?
THIS LACK of trust has now spread to other areas, such as business. More seriously, it has led to a situation where those who can trust you, whether they can even trust one another. A feeling of helplessness and pessimism has pervaded nearly every segment of American society.
watered down by bureauarers more interested in their own re-election than in the greater welfare of the country.
A decline of morality and religion is a decline of the crisis of trust and confidence in our society. It is also a part of our society. Minorities and the disadvantaged continue to suffer the pain of this crisis.
multifaceted personality crisis—a crisis not only of trust and confidence, but of morality, religion and patriotism as well.
The american public is tired of hearing about the same old problems of nagging taxation, financial ruins and financing energy problems and high taxation. The public is sick of new about political animals, run-offs by the taxpayer and government and judgment of government affairs.
THE PEOPLE are fed with over massive bureaucracy and red tape. The want to be told what you should do, they want to see results—something that has been lacking in government for many years.
MORE AND more, it seems, people are using others for their own personal benefit rather than working together for everyone's benefit.
In an attempt to cure the country of this
These crises have produced an American society that is factioned and dumfounded. We have come to doubt American values and the stars and stripes appear to be merely a symbol of what we are standing for as patriotism continues to say.
How long will this mood that blackens the country last? That answer will only be for now, and a crisis will come soon, perhaps in a new strong leader or in a controversial issue, before it is over.
Currently, the psychological stability that had characterized the United States has been lost in time as America suffers a
Leadership can cure U.S. malaise
By Stephen D. Young
N.Y. Times Special Features
Bv Stephen B. Young
AMCBRIDGE, Mass.-The United States feels anemic. Impatient about our public power cops from day to day over the past decade.
The president finds substance in symbols, and Congress has concluded that this year the passage of legislation is more urgent.
Since 1960 a regulatory law has compound the self-imposed bureaucratization of institutions to create a new white-collar class of programmatic managers in government, the military, industry, the unions and academia.
...uns new America, the basic political and economic institutions are in place and the felt need is for management
called upon to change its habits in energy consumption, the public preferred to blame the oil companies and James Schlesinger, the former energy secretary, for fabricating an energy crisis.
thirty years ago, David Riesenman in "The Lonely Crowd" diagnosed the malaise that has now produced this inchoate crisis of national petulance. The character style of the author's work is a tribute to "the ad-directed" has become the national norm.
RIESMAN OBSERVED that other-directed politics is a "place where the manners and mood of doing things is quite as important as what is done." He stated that other-directed politics is "the most important, the professions become highly bureaucratized."
Thus, approval of oneself by peers becomes "almost the only unequivalence in good this situation; one makes good when one is approved of. Thus all power . . . is in the hands of the actual or imainarray anrowing group."
Politics under these circumstances become part of mass consumption as fads, both material and ideological, are fed back into the economy.
IN SUCH a society, contemporaries, especially ones given prominence in the news media, rather than parents or internal values, become the source of direction for individuals.
training.
Social success and mobility (one thinks of John Dean's
"Blind Ambition"), as Riesman wrote, depend on "how competent one is in manipulating others and being oneself manipulated." The social product demanded by society now is the right personality.
IN TUNE, with the times, Jimmy Carter has given America its first other-directed administration.
He is the president for everyone—above the special interests but replicating within himself the mutually inconsistent desires of many disparate apper form his authority. He cannot offer cannot project his own authority. He has no internal core of purpose, as James Fallowes reported in The Atlantic, because to be his own man would prevent him from fully responding to the directives of his advisers.
He ran for president after listening to the people. Knowing what they wanted enabled him to become in separate moments the perfect peer for each group. The opinion politics have set his policies. A balanced budget, SAIT 7, sniping at corporate and professional pressure to be more interested in interpreters of popular will. Caddell orchestrated the recent Camp David consultations and the "I am listening to you" speech on America's crisis of confidence.
CARTER'S RESPONSE to political decline was to take notes as leaders of various important groups told him how to be president. On learning that leadership was desired, he instructed his staff members not to impress his power over his Cabinet officers. He does not seem to understimate that leadership comes from within one's own character, not from mirroir responsiveness to others.
Carter's Cabinets embody other-direction. Most of his department secretaries gained their reputations by successful ascent in the bureaucracy that constitute the managerial elite. They are people pleasers first and foremost.
He is seen as one who can be relied upon not to be other-directed. Rich and willful, he is comfortable giving leadership to others. Chappaquidick and much, much more will be forgiven Kennedy as long as he presents himself as a fulcrum by which society can be drawn. Drawing on his own purposes, he can restore a country that is in need of help from the former Texas governor, similarly rich and willful, can rival Kennedy in providing the leadership America needs.
We have come to a watershed. Behind is a completed but stagnant other-directed, post-industrial society. It is not enough. Inner-directed leaders alone can show us the way to something better.
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, a Wall Street lawyer, knows how to avoid self-sacrifice. He was once described as "a man who leaves no footprints." His foreign policy, including the treatment of people power, so they Russian, Iranian, Saud and or Chinese.
Joseph Califano, the former secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, originally a Vance protege, worked for Carter but kept in close touch with other opinion makers, mostly liberal, and with Sen. Edward Kennedy.
W. MICHAEL Blumenthal, the former Treasury secretary and chief of staff to President Clinton's Charles Duncan Jr., confirmed as energy secretary, and Graham Clayton, the secretary of the Navy, became not only captains of industry but corporate managers before moving to Washington.
Stephen B. Young is assistant dean of student affairs at the Harvard Law School.
Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Schlesinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser, rose in the defense-affection combination of analysis and memorandum. The men was in doing well what other people wanted done.
sty being so much to so many the administration has last confidence of the people in its ability to lead this com-
Other-direction fails when everyone becomes other-directed. With each looking to another for a sense of purpose, a vicious circle, endlessly arises. All notions of social vector, of fundamental direction, disappear. People desperately turn in on themselves or look for gurus, eliminated other-direction leads to compulsive social anarchy.
This brings us to Kennedy's unsolicited popularity
Letters Policy
The University of Kansas welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typed in a standard font and include the writer's name, address and telephone number. If the writer is at home, please indicate. You should include the writer's class and home town or faculty or staff position. Please refer to the right to edit letters for publication.
**KSU 6540-640** Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May. Monday and Thursday during June and July except Saturday, Sunday and Holidays. Second-day college paid post at Lawrence, Kansas 6540. Subscriptions by mail are $1 for every month or $29 in Daidung County and $4 for an amount or $4 outside the county. Student subscriptions are $2 per although, through
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Footnote: Seed changes to the University Idyll Kansas, Flint Hall, The University of Kansan, Lawrence, KS0046
Managing Editor
Vancy Dressler
Editor Mary Hoenk
Editorial Editor Mary Ernst
Business Manager
Cynthia Ray
Retail Sales Manager
Clinical Research Manager
Director
Visual Council
Cybersecurity Manager
General Manager
Administrator
District Counsel