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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Monday, Nov. 25, 1985
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Toxic time bombs
The University has set up a campuswide "bomb squad." Its mission is to establish a policy to deal with potential time bombs — in the form of hazardous wastes — ticking away in various laboratories across campus.
Most large universities have a special office to coordinate the storage and disposal of hazardous wastes and to deal with possible health and safety problems such waste poses. The University of Kansas Medical Center has had such an office since 1977 and an industrial hygienist since 1978.
Because the University has no standard policy for complying with federal and state laws about storage of hazardous materials, this stuff lurks on scattered lab shelves. It is often the legacy of some departed faculty member.
Now KU is cleaning up its act on the Lawrence campus. The Task Force on Hazardous Materials created this semester will recommend a
comprehensive plan for handling hazardous substances.
Last month, a central storage site was set up on West Campus to keep the hazardous materials used and created in University laboratories. This site will gather the hazardous substances from their scattered pockets around campus.
In an age when everything from eggs to VDT screens are considered health risks, it's easy to ignore warnings about potential hazards. The daily handling of hazardous materials also tends to blind users of their dangers.
The task force also is pushing for an office of safety and hazardous materials. Such an office moves KU beyond mere compliance with the law to anticipation of potential safety problems.
But the growing number of industrial diseases warn that we can't afford to treat hazardous wastes casually, even in the relatively non-industrial setting of the University.
The coiness reached its peak in the case of Rita Lavelle of the Environmental Protection Agency and her friendly lunches with industrial polluters.
In the 1970s and early '80s, state and federal regulatory agencies gained notoriety for their too-close ties to the industries they were supposed to regulate.
Regulating Wolf Creek
But to its credit, the Kansas Corporation Commission broke this pattern with recent rulings against rate increases requested by the utilities that own the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant.
The KCC not only held the utilities to a third of their requested rate increase, but when the utilities came back asking for a new hearing the KCC turned them down.
The close ties between the regulators and the regulated also showed up in the rate-setting process. The industry would approach the agency asking for twice its desired increase. The regulatory board would grant exactly half of the rate request.
The utilities — Kansas Gas &
Electric Co., Kansas City
Power & Light Co. and a consortium of rural electric
cooperatives — had argued that they were caught out in the cold when the regulatory climate changed after the near-disaster at Three Mile Island.
They wanted consumers to pick up the extra costs for complying with the new regulations. For KG&E customers, this would have meant a 101-percent increase in their electric bills.
The KCC saw it otherwise. Through a complicated regulatory formula, the commission's legal staff valued the power plant the same as if it were coal-fired rather than nuclear-powered.
It was this part of the ruling the utilities appealed this part the commission held firm.
The appeal process, of course, hasn't ended; the utilities are expected to take their case next to the state's courts.
But regardless of what the courts decide, the commission deserves praise - for its original tough stand on the rate increase and for standing up to the pressure for a repeat hearing.
But then, the commission was just doing its job.
McCollum's art collector
What a humble thing a trash bin is.
Except at McCollum Hall.
A squat, metal box, its two main occupations in life are to collect the refuse of mankind and to rust. The trash bin is somewhat of an necessary evil, an ugly object to be ignored.
Except at McCaucas Hall.
There, a trash bin has become part of the avant-garde. Color splotches, splashes, slashes and drips across a metal surface that once was a dull, uniform rust. Patches of green, blue, tan and orange cover the metal.
Mike Stevens, a sophomore in the school of fine arts; is the author of the work on the metal
canvas. He said he wants to do his work in public.
The office of student housing and the city of Lawrence gave Stevens permission to paint the bins, apparently the first such request. A housing official said he was receptive to the idea because trash bins are not attractive.
So McCollum boasts a trash bin that is colorful, interesting and a little less humble. Reactions to the design as well as interpretations of it may vary, but one thing is certain. The work on McCollum's trash bin and the idea behind it required imagination. That is something that should be encouraged.
Rob Karwath
Editor
Duncan Calhoun Business manager
John Hanba Michael Totty
Managing editor Editorial editor
Lauretta McMillen
Campus editor
Susanne Shaw
General manager, news adviser
Brett McCabe Sue Johnson
Retail sales Campus sale
Megan Burke
National/Co-op sales
John Oberzan
Sales and marketing adviser
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Private contractors eye president's job
Private contractors have been picking up America's garbage and repairing the street lamps for many years. When Ronald Reagan took office as one of the most conservative presidents in recent history, "privization" had already begun to gallop across the national landscape.
Now, the president had better watch out. The forces of privatization have become so zealous that they are taking aim at his job. Privitate the presidency? Put the job out to the biggest bidder? Nonsense, surely.
Not really, say a pair of privatization zealots. They would put the whole executive branch out to bid, and those 535 jobs in Congress would not be far behind.
There are now privately operated prisons and immigration detention centers, municipal air traffic control
Before we consider the merits of selling off the functions of the entire federal government to private contractors, it would be helpful to see how the privatization movement has mushroomed throughout government in recent years.
What had been limited to garbage collection, streetlight repairs and a handful of other municipal functions in private hands has become a new American economic sector.
Oakland Tribune
towers, hospitals, golf courses, public parks, sewer treatment plants and a law firm that handles the prosecution functions in a Southern California town.
The great tax revolt of the 1970s forced municipalities to find cheaper ways of delivering city services. A recent federal study, vigorously contested by public employee unions, found that privatization, on the average, saves a city about 20 percent of the cost of doing the same job itself.
Contractors, says Fortune magazine, get more out of employees because the government gives more vacations, holidays and sick leaves and tolerates more absenteeism. The contractors also play more to the supply-and-demand rhythms of the marketplace by paying less than governments for some jobs and more for others.
Add the economic savings to the conservative climate Reagan has fostered, and you get a wave of new
ideas for functions that can be taken private, much to the chagrin of the service employee unions.
Labor organizations have been pumping out reports filled with examples of disasters that came in the wake of privatization. The stories include service lapses, neglect of the poor and unfortunate, corruption and abuse of citizens.
Nonetheless, privatization proceeds apace. The U.S. Army is talking with large engineering firms about creating and maintaining an important infantry base. The successful bidder would find the financing and then design, build and operate the base. All the Army plans to provide are the soldiers.
That's where Alan Pifer and Forrest Chisman come in. They don't see any reason a private company should not be running the Army. The Air Force, Navy and Marines, too, for that matter.
And they don't plan to stop there. As far as they are concerned, Pifer and Chisman wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, there is just about nothing the federal government does that private enterprise couldn't do better.
Why not turn over the Social Security Administration to a good
data management and payroll company, say Pifer and Chisman, who run the Project on the Federal Social Role. Before you know it, they have taken the unlikely leap to having federal contractors poised to fire the nation's missiles and conduct our foreign policy.
If privatization dreamers can go that far in their imaginations, what could be left? Why not the presidency? They argue that the presidency is actually two jobs, one ceremonial and the other managerial.
Ever so kindly, they would leave the ceremonial function in the hands of the elected president, but they would look to the ranks of American business for a top-flight executive with a proven record for handling big bucks. He or she would become the national version of a city manager.
Would Congress escape the privatization revolution? Not a chance, say Pifer and Chisman. They would put the job in the hands of Roper or Gallup to conduct a national daily poll. Under such circumstances, who needs a congressman, they ask. Democracy would be direct.
Verbatim
nocracy would be direct.
Could this all be a joke, a put-on?
Remember the one about a Hollywood actor one day becoming president? You never know.
Classified research
New policy would change little
A proposal from the Center for Research, Inc., to change KU's classified research policy has caused heated debate in the University Council. The proposed change would loosen the University's restrictions on classified research. Frances Horowitz, president and acting director for CRINC, recently talked with Kathy Flanders, staff columnist, about CRINC and the policy change.
Frances Horowitz
What exactly is CRINC and what are its functions?
HOROWITZ: CRINC operates like research foundations on many campuses — it is in essence a research foundation. It is to facilitate the conduct of research for the people it serves. In this case, it serves the engineering and engineering-related faculty.
How does it serve the engineering faculty?
HOROWITZ: It processes proposals and provides services for their grants. It does all the business accounting for grants, helps in the purchase of equipment and employs people who work on research grants.
HOROWITZ: Engineering and engineering-related research is done. At the present time there is no classified research going on. The same policies that cover the research done at the University are now the same policies used for CRINC. It's not a separate research facility — it's an accounting facility. The policy changes are before the University Council now.
What kind of research is done through CRINC?
So does CRINC do any research?
HOROWITZ: The faculty does the research in their own facilities.
CRINC has no research facilities.
What kinds of changes are being considered?
HOROWITZ2: The proposal before the University Council is concerned
with the acceptance of grants and contracts that would allow a propriety period, which is the period material cannot be released, presently one year, to be extended to three years.
The second part of the proposal would permit the acceptance of grants and contracts in which an insubstantial portion of grants and contracts might be classified.
What types of material would be classified?
HOROWITZ: It would be determined by each grant or contract. They could be government or industrial contracts.
What changes do you see for CRINC if the proposal is passed?
HOROWITZ: I don't know. We are in the process of looking at that now.
Do you think it is the role of the University to get involved with classified research?
HOROWITZ: There is a philosophy that a University should be a totally open society where all ideas and material should be open for public inspection.
We now permit classification of what we call primary source material. If someone does a biography and the family says you
can look at a family letter but not publish it so as not to reveal certain aspects of the letter, we permit that. So it's not true that we don't classify all material. Humanists can use classified material in their research as much as they wish and have agreed not to publish material.
Will there be a checks and balance system to deal with classified research and material?
HOROWITZ: There is a checks and balance system in the proposal. There are several checks. The first is that nothing that is proprietary or classified could serve as a basis for student work. A student couldn't do a thesis or dissertation with the material.
The third check is that anything not publicly available could not be used by a faculty member for promotion or tenure consideration or for a merit salary evaluation. Therefore, it would not be to the advantage of the faculty to engage in very much of such activities.
The second is that we wouldn't accept a contract that had an substantial portion that was classified or had two to three years of propriety. And we couldn't accept it unless the faculty committee reviewed it and said it was in the best interest of the University.
Mailbox
Harmful stereotype
I am writing after listening to a program on KJHK that surprised and angered me. At about 3 p.m., Thursday, Nov. 21, the station played a supposedly humorous sketch about "Aunt Suzy" and her lisping, campy male guest from San Francisco. The two prepared "swish steak."
The sketch was no more than a long faggot joke. It relied on and perpetuated the stereotype that gay men are effeminate and inconsequential people.
That stereotype is factually inaccurate and hurtful to a great number of men. The homophobia in the Aunt Suzy program is just as unfair as the blatant racism in programs such as the old "Amos 'n' Andy."
I also would like to add that immediately after the program, I called the d.j., and expressed my concern with the program. The d.j. did not apologize to me on the phone or, more importantly, to his other listeners over the air. Business continued as usual without concern for the ramifications of what he had broadcast.
My impression of KJHK to this point has been that it was fairly accepting of diversity. This program, however, exposed a different sympathy, one which should be considered a major foul.
Jeff Thomas Lawrence law student
Proper etymology
About Dan Howell's thoughts on the bill "more which we toll";
the hill "upon which we toin :
If "Oread" comes from the Greek word for mountain, and if oreads were nymphs of the mountains in Greek mythology, then it's perfectly clear that the word "Mount" in Mount Oread isn't a proper noun but a copulative verb.
"Some days, that says a lot
Some days, that says a lot about studies in a university."
Toil on, Dan.
Paul Stephen Lim lecturer in English