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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Friday, Oct. 25, 1985
Wilt Chamberlain's admission last week that he received payments under the table while playing for the University of Kansas in the 1950s prompted a few raised eyebrows but no outcries.
Chamberlain wants the National Collegiate Athletic Association to revamp the codes so student athletes aren't forced to accept money from boosters. Instead, schools should be allowed to pay their players $300 to $400 a month for playing their sports, he said.
Although Chamberlain's off-the-cuff confession may be admirable, his suggestion that college athletes be paid a monthly salary so they aren't forced to accept money improperly isn't.
Most athletes that play revenue sports at KU, such as men's basketball and football, already
Athletes don't need pay
receive hefty financial support for their mini-careers.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta say AIDS can be contracted only through sex, contaminated needles or blood transfusions. But few blood transfusions and dirty needles will be found on campus. And the sex lives of students, faculty and staff members are a
They, too, can apply for federal loans and grants. They can draw on money from parents and sav-
ing from jobs when they are not in school.
And if some student athletes on full scholarship need financial aid beyond what their sports scholarships provide, they also have the same avenues open to them as other students;
In the face of increasing hysteria about AIDS, the University administration last week took a cool, calm and collected approach in dealing with the disease.
Students' rights could be violated if restrictions were placed on AIDS patients before health officials knew more about the disease, administrators said.
KU administrators said last week that they wouldn't make any policy about AIDS on campus until medical experts decide that the public's health is threatened. Then the University would follow the guidelines set by health officials.
In short, no one — alumnus,
booster or coach — can force a player to take improper payments. In cases, a player should not need to.
Chamberlain's suggestion really would not help the problem. In reality, he suggests that the universities become the boosters and that improper payments be called proper ones.
A calm AIDS decision
If supposedly intelligent college students equate the completely safe act of giving their own blood with the risk involved in receiving someone else's blood through a transfusion, the public really must be in the dark.
The American Red Cross was right, on the other hand, to begin screening blood for the AIDS virus during its recent campus blood drive. Like the University administration, the Red Cross based its decision on facts, not fear.
Unfortunately, much of the public hasn't. The campus blood drive fell 158 pints below its goal, which the Red Cross attributed in part to AIDS phobia.
matter of personal preference that shouldn't be regulated by the University.
That's why the University should continue to resist irrational reactions. Panic does not make good policy.
Panning the Pentagon
The $1.1 trillion that cascades into the Pentagon has not made the United States any more secure. At least that's the message of a report that surfaced in the Senate Armed Forces Committee last week.
The criticism is not new. But new voices have joined the chorus, notably Sens. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and Sam Nunn, D-Ga. Neither are known for giving the military short shrift at budget time.
The report charged that competition among the branches of the military had caused jacked-up prices for military hardware and had made successful joint military actions deadly and perhaps impossible.
The Joint Chiefs are plagued by divided loyalty—caught between the demands of the services they represent and their responsibility to give the president accurate and effective military advice. Service loyalty usually wins.
The report's list of 91 proposals included a call for breaking up the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the group of senior officers that advise the president on military matters.
This often means duplicated weapons programs and separate, often incompatible, lines of command and communication.
But both have ripped the military's current system of planning and command. And with good reason.
During the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the Army could not talk to the Navy ships offshore because their radios were not compatible. One soldier had to use his credit card to call North Carolina to ask for Navy gunnery fire.
In peace, this causes wasteful spending. In war, the results can be much worse.
President Reagan says increases in defense spending are needed to improve the military's ability to defend the country. The committee's report indicates that it will take something other than a few trillion dollars to do that.
Rob Karwath
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soft move
Grenada facts: two years later
"Freeze! American soldiers!
Friend or foe?!"
With those words, 800 U.S. medical students were rescued from a tiny island in the Caribbean two years ago today Prompt military action saved their lives
Those who still oppose the liberation of Grenada are in quicksand — and they're sinking fast. The quicksand is what has been called "the Grenada documents."
In May, the ABC-TV newsmagazine "20/20" broadcast a segment on the Grenada documents. The documents proved that if the United States had not intervened, Grenada would have become another Cuba under Moscow's control.
The United States recovered more than 17 tons of documents that not only showed in detail the massive bureaucracy of a company that was so efficient that the true intentions of then Prime Minister Maurice Bishop.
Fact 1: Grenada was becoming an important terrorist training base for guerrilla movements against nations friendly to the United States. Enough weapons to arm 10,000 men were found in warehouses. The war was further enacted by Grenada becoming a terrorist sanctuary and a stop-off point for drug smugglers.
Fact 2: Bishop was given the royal treatment when he went to
Victor Goodpasture Staff columnist
Moscow for money and arms. And everyone knows that when the Soviets give, they expect something in return — such as naval and air bases.
Fact 3: Cuba supplied money and manpower for a 9,000-foot runway which, upon completion, would have become a Soviet air base.
Fact 4: The KGB set up shop in Grenada, establishing a Big Brother system. They kept watch on all possible opposition. When they suspected someone, they arrested and imprisoned that person without any pretense of due process. Then they fortured.
Fact 5: Propaganda films were made to indoctrinate the people of Grenada into the Marxist philosophy.
Fact 8: The people of Grenada welcomed the U.S. and Caribbean forces. They refer to the events of the week of Oct. 25, 1933, as "the intervention" "the liberation" or "the war" They never call it "the invasion" They celebrate the anniversary of the liberation with postcards and murals proclaiming: "Thank God for U.S. and Caribbean Heroes of Freedom."
and "Thank you U.S.A. for liberating us."
Fact 7: In December 1964, Grenada had parliamentary elections and not one of Bishops' followers won a single seat.
Fact 5: Grenada is now experiencing its second invasion. The first was the invasion by the Soviets and Cubans, and the second invasion is by tourists. In 1984, 95,500 people visited Grenada — a 22 percent increase over 1983. This year, figures were running more than 30 percent higher than last year.
Fact 9: The U.S. medical students living in Grenada were in grave danger, Greg Brucato, who was one of the rescued students and who talked last year on campus about the liberation, said that 99 percent of the students were the American forces came and which they off the island. Of those 1 percent of being rescued, he said, "There's always someone like that in any crowd."
Grenada is a free and democratic nation because the United States resolved first to protect its own citizens by any force necessary and, second, to help restore order in its own back yard when so requested by peaceful democratic nations of the region.
Michael Ledeen, a scholar and author who helped the State Department analyze the Grenada
documents, said this on the "20/20" segment in May about what was going on in Grenada before the U.S. intervention:
"The bottom line was that the Soviet Union wanted to turn Grenada into another satellite, just like Cuba, just like Eastern Europe, with exactly the same methods. They wanted to indoctrinate the public, they wanted to bring them under control, they wanted to collectivize the whole economy, and they wanted to subject everyone to a totalitarian control."
With these overwhelming facts, it's hard to believe that some people still object to what the United States did. The left-wing "peace groups," as well as those in the media, clergy, Congress and academia have closed their eyes and ears to reality.
Whether they realize it or not, their complaints already echo those of Moscow. Why are these Americans Soviet apologists? They support the communist dictatorship in Nicaragua, yet Rebuke a rescue mission to save 800 American students from possible death.
Rep. Philip Crane, R-Ill., said it best when he said: "If the United States is guilty of anything, it is the attempt to restore freedom — an international crime only in the eyes of the communist world."
Measuring the morality of pleasure
Some people get into the swing faster than others. Here I am getting used to football season, and Student Union Activities is announcing ski trips between semesters and during spring break.
Actually, four years ago I got with it and went skiing with a group at Keystone. I got with it so fast that I tried the big mountain on the second morning, when the 9-year-old girl I was looking after dragged me onto the slope.
Eventually I made several good runs from top to bottom on the easy "green" slopes. I got very tired because I fought gravity's acceleration all the way.
Maybe I lack a go-for-it mentality. On one trip up the lift, I was paired with a woman who took my breath away faster than the thin air. She had long, dark hair and olive skin, a white outfit with baby-blue trim and brown eyes that could melt a snowplow.
Ski wolves dream of such moments, but I just chatted and let it end with the ride. Of course, that was on the beginner's slope, where the
ride lasted 44 seconds. My adrenaline apparently doesn't work that fast.
On the potentially cozy 12-or-somine rides on the big lifts, only twice did I share a seat with people outside my group. One of them was a nice enough Japanese guy from Denver and the other a girl about 12 years old who evidently wasn't supposed to talk to strangers.
Socially, I don't seem to find the fast track. The thing is, most of the time I like it that way. I like the freedom not to bother keeping up. I like starting from simplicity and adding where I like, instead of carrying 6,000 social expectations.
Being a step slow gives me time to ask questions that too many people overlook. I thought hard before deciding to make the ski trip because I doubted the value of spending money that way.
I had $185 for the trip. I just wondered what justified spending it that way. After all, I'm easy to entertain at no cost, and the money could go to a real need somewhere. Moreover, the high cost of skiing
Dan Howell Staff columnist
Really, I'm not against having fun,
and I love travel and the new experiences it brings. When D.H.
Lawrence wrote, "To the Puritan all things are impure," he meant somebody else.
compared to other recreation makes it a symbol of self-indulgence.
But just as I fought gravity's effort to control my descent, I fight social assumptions that try to control my decisions. How people spend their money says a lot about their values. I want my values represented well.
You don't just decide to be moral when you give $5 to leukemia research and then decide it doesn't matter when you spend $185 on a round of skiing. Morality isn't something to take off and put on like skis.
Mohandas Gandhi identified seven types of wrongs in living: wealth
without work, pleasure without conscience, knowledge without character, commerce without morality, science without humanity, worship without sacrifice and politics without principle.
The first two apply especially to our culture; a lot of people think they have no kind of responsibility for the use of their money. Pleasure is not wrong, but pleasure without conscience is.
I went skiing because it was a refreshing, accessible new experience, and I went about it as cheaply as a person can—chartered bus, group rates, 10 people in a condominium advertised to hold 4.8
I encourage people who haven't skied to try it, maybe with fewer people in the condo. The mountain was beautiful and the sport challenging.
But I also say not only of the pleasure, but also of the moral choice implicit in using time and money that will be earned, it will be after thinking it through.
So if you're making the skiing scene and you see a straggler fighting the slope and carting a sledful of morality, wave as you go by.
Mailbox
Gun laws not needed
The recent tragic suicide of a KU student and Jeff Miller's diatribe directed at firearms accessibility (Oct. 22 Kansan) struck a painful note in my memory of the similar suicide of a friend years ago.
Circumstances surrounding her death made it clear that once a person truly decides that suicide is the only option in case of emblem, no one will be able to stop them.
Miller is wrong in his pronouncement that "a gun has only one purpose." (Unless of course he was referring to expelling an aimed projectile.) There are thousands of law abiding, stable hunters and target animals. He can be a man who could debate that point with him.
Guns are neither the only lethal objects readily available in our society, nor the most lethal in terms of potential victims per unit time. But their strict control is often advocated under the guise of crime control.
similar groups long have advocated punishment of the misuse of firearms by a mandatory sentence additional to any other sentence for such misuse. Yet, any number of cases resolved by plea bargaining illustrate that those laws are being circumvented by the system charged with enforcing them!
The National Rifle Association and
Shall we accept that the solution is then the passage of more laws? Laws requiring any reasonable waiting periods before delivery of a firearm are no deterrent to a determined
suicide, though they may alter the means to that end. Such laws are crainty not deterrent to criminals!
I agree with Miller's closing sentiment: People solve problems, but not always with laws. And unless our laws solve any of our problems without needless impediment to the vast majority of law-abiding persons, they will fall unless ruthlessly enforced for their own sake.
George R. Pisani director of laboratories Biological Sciences