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Page 4 University Daily Kansan, November 17, 1980
Opinion
Free speech falls again
The disruptive actions of Moslem students at a scheduled speech last Wednesday were sheer hypocrisy. And to be sure, KU officials' half-hearted commitments to free speech haven't helped
The story at the Satellite Union last week was all to familiar. Ehud Gol, consul for information of Israel for the Midwest, was to speak. The event prompted about 75 Moslems to demonstrate.
Certainly the Moslems have a right to protest.
Because of fears that the Moslems would interfere with the speech, b'nai B'rith Hillel, sponsor of the speech, held the lecture in a private home.
We all are guaranteed free speech. Yet many groups—the ones that demonstrate constantly—are often the first in line to stifle the free speech of others. Hyporiscity
of this kind has no place at the University of Kansas.
Maybe Gol was going to espouse a contrary opinion. Yet if one remembers correctly, the rules say that everyone is entitled to free speech. Not just Americans. Not just Moslems. Not just Israelis. Everyone.
Those who think otherwise are warped.
Truth is, many are just that—warped.
With a stronger commitment to free speech, KU could avoid many of these hassles. If KU buckles down to the protests of any group who makes signs and distributes literature, then no one is going to have much of a chance for free speech.
Perhaps that's where the problem lies. If the administration isn't committed to free speech, then it stands to reason that the students won't be, either.
Leban's Judiciary squabble highlights unfair court rule
Some of the more interesting things that go on at the University of Kansas are things that never really see the light of day, but could potentially affect everyone on campus.
A good example recently occurred with a bit of intramural squabbling between Carl Leban, associate professor of East Asian studies and hill iconoclast, and the University Senate executive committee. The matter may go no further than the mention it received at a recent SenEx meeting, or it could have far-reaching ramifications.
The issue is the use of Law School faculty members to decide cases in the University Judiciary. Judiciary rules stipulate that certain cases in the Judiciary be filled by law faculty members.
One "law member," for example, must serve as chairman of the Judiciary's Hearing Board—the final authority in most grievances brought to the Judiciary.
Since the Judiciary's inception many years ago, this system has worked like the
BILL
MENEZES
journey of a terrapin—slowly moving from year to year, without much change in direction, while gaining weight.
Enter Professor Leban. Last spring, Leban got some firsthand experience with the Judicary by filing a grievance alleging that his rights, and the rights of everyone on campus, had been violated by former Chancellor Archie Dykes' use of Norman Forer and Clarence Dillingham.
Forer and Dillingham, you may recall from ancient history, were the two KU School of Social Welfare teachers who decided to take a hiatus from their campus routine last December to help them reorganize. The school doubled. Dykes suspended them without pay and without due process, Lebanon said to the Judiciary.
Leban's case was dismissed for lack of standing by J. Hammond McNish, ad adjunct professor of law who was the Hearing Board chairman at the time.
Now, several months later, Leban has brought to light some information that he figured could make such a system obsolete. Apparently still smarting from the questionable Judiciary decision of last spring, he sent word to SenEx OCT. 16, in accordance with a Public Employees Relations Board decision from 1975, that the law faculty were no longer members of the University faculty. As such, it was unreasonable for them to continue to sit in judgment of people such as Leban, whom they no longer considered their colleague.
This, however, is not the only interpretation of the PERB decision regarding the role and status of the law faculty with regard to the rest of the University's faculty.
George Worth, SenEx chairman, said the ruling's only effect and significance was for collective bargaining purposes. As far as SenEx is concerned, the law faculty are members of the
Jerry Powell, executive secretary of the PERB in Topeka said the agreement, battled in district court and in the Kansas Supreme Court, professors should be a separate bargaining unit.
"It created a unit for the other professors," he said. "It did not create a special unit for the law department."
Raymond Goetz, KL law professor, presented the case for the law faculty in 1975. He said he did not think the final ruling and the concern about its inclusion in the Judiciary were related issues.
And that's where the matter rests. The way it is viewed by some of the participants is quite varied. Worth view the decision as non-divisive, or no split except for collective bargaining.
The reasoning behind the PERB decision is explicit, citing differences in contracts and teaching methods, among other things. Leban's view that the law faculty should not be considered his colleagues for the purpose of passing on him in the Judiciary is not ridiculous.
Although the presence of legally knowledgeable members boosts the Judiciary's effectiveness, there is no reason, particularly in cases where judges have more power of judgment than the faculty.
Even SenEx seems to agree. But proposals to revamp the Judiciary, which do not require "law members" to be law faculty members, have been held up in SenEx for weeks.
So why all the fuss? Well, Lebanese seem to think that fairness is an issue worth wishing about, and one would be inclined to agree. The idea of having complaints that could drastically affect one's life at the University decided by people who do not even consider themselves part of the same working group is absurd. Although the university has always regarded its ramifications go further. The law faculty must have realized that when they fought so hard for the PERB ruling.
The University Judiciary was intended to present judgment on University matters in an in-house fashion. Sen.Ex, with its proposed intention, apparently decided to make this intention a rule.
And that's the story. Will Carl Leban accept the will of the SenEx? Will the Judiciary become a more representative body? Can fairness triumph at the University of Kansas?
The campus may never know.
The University Daily KANSAN
(UBSF 569-440) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and Thursday during June and July except at Saturday, Sunday and holidays. Second-class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas or $3 for postage to Kansas City or Washington DC or $8 year outside the county. Student subscriptions are a $2 semester, paid through the student activity fee. Postmaster: Send changes of address to the University Daily Kansas Flint. Flint, The University of Kansas.
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General Manager and News Adviser Rick M*
General Manager and News Adviser... Rick Mussel
Kansan Adviser... Chuck Chowin
Lesbians lead wimmin's power play
By PAMELA JOHNSTON
Sometime during the past decade, the media, academics, liberals and reformist feminists renamed the movement and deleted "liberation." We are left with an amorphous women's movement which embraces everything from the police to the press for success to freedom from male violence.
What winmim's liberation is really all about is power-personal power and political power: power to make our own choices free of coercive violence or social conditioning.
Power can seem threatening, especially power in the hands of a dispossessed and oppressed 35 percent of the population; especially in the hands of winnim, the ultimate, awesome source of all life. Just how threatening winnim's power can be is evident in the Kanans' reaction to K.U. It will be an awful page which at its worst blazed insult and contempt, and at its best shalloken, token feminism.
This movement to regain power and control over our own lives has taken many avenues. We are not alone.
the system, hoping to make legislative changes. While these efforts are important and even essential, their success will not, in the long run, truly liberate winnim.
There is another winnimin's revolution happening that the straight media doesn't talk about. It is a cultural revolution in which winnim are reclaiming our herstory and our religion, and creating a culture which celebrates life and personal power and love of ourselves and our sisters. It is a movement unfinchingly dedicated to eliminating all oppressions. It is a movement which condenses the exploitation and destruction of the earth with the same passion as the exploitation and destruction of its sisters and most significant thing about it, liberal movement, this cultural revolution, is that it is led by lesbians—lesbians of all races, classes and
When a woman chooses to live as a lesbian, she chooses power over privilege. The heterosexual woman holds a greater chance of privilege: better jobs, social acceptance, family approval. But this privilege is an illusion—tenuous at best for white, middle class winnim, and inherently gained at the expense of someone else. As frightening as it is to the lesbian face hostility,
insult and discrimination, she can rejice and draw strength from the power she has claimed in her speech.
The ERA is an important symbol to American wimmin, but will it leave still powerless the thousands of third world wimmin consuming unsafe birth control devices dumped in their countries by U.S. drug companies, will leave powerless the rage victim and the battered wife, or powerless the love Canal mothers watching their children die of poison dumped in their schoolyard.
There's a lot more to winnim's liberation than a few token winnim in high government positions. Winnim's liberation is a revolution which is creating something new to replace the present patriarchal system, which is catapulting toward its own destruction. It is separating our lives from our previous existence and inertia if illusory privilege, lesbians are creating and reclaiming a culture separate from the male values which have erected a world in which even breathing is hazardous to our health.
Pamela Johnston is the coordinator of KU-Y. Ann Jochems, K.E. Edmisten and Maggie Cloud also contributed to this column.
Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
Columns display ignorance, racism
More and more I am convinced that the whole notion of journalism as it is practiced at KU is spurious. The School of Journalism adds nothing to the frontiers of human knowledge. One does not need to know something in order to write for the Kanasi. One need only know how to compose readable English sentences. The only role of the Kanasi is to permit novice know-nothings their pursuit of Mammon, i.e., obtain a job and become a hack.
Amy Hollowell's editorial on Richard Nixon was an abomination. To suggest that Nixon forged a foreign policy respected by the world is difficult to fathom. It is enough to recall the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile, the Vietnam War and the bloody Pol Pot distorsion brought to power in the aftermath of the bombing of Cambodia. Clearly, Hollowell is either very ignorant, or she admires the foreign policy of a president that led to such suffering abroad as well as four hundred years ago. Kamran Brett Conley's editorial on South Africa has brought the paper to a new low.
Congley begins his article by expressing doubt that the KU Out of South Africa Committee is a noble cause. He uses the phrase, "may be a noble cause." Indeed, perhans Congley is a racist.
Conley goes on to argue that of the $26.8 million invested by the Kansas University Endowment Association, only a small percentage of the $8.1 million invested in companies with investments in South Africa is actually invested there. Such a proportion of the funds in South Africa that the Endowment Association has an obligation to invest its funds in the safest and most profitable manner. Next he argues that the University itself is not investing directly in South Africa and that this exacerbates the University of Kansas's financial problems. Conley divested itself of the stocks in question that this would fail to help the black South Africans.
First, Conley, if a large sum invested in South Africa is bad so is a small one. To say that it's only $80,000 worth of murder (1% of $8 million), is not an argument. Secondly, I agree that the University must obtain money. However, does this mean that an institution espousing liberal ideals must deal with those companies taining themselves with blood money? In my opinion, it doesn't matter. I don't care about this stock a form of protest against these companies' policies? Yes. Finally, wouldn't the pressures exerted by the University on these companies and their withdrawal from South Africa further isolate the racist apartheid regime? Definitely it would.
The problem is that Conley does not understand the dynamics of a campaign that could end with black majority rule in South Africa. No doubt he 's also already black. Black majority rule has also been called for such a campaign of withdrawal. We at KU must begin where we can. KU Out of South Africa.
Karl Shepard
Karl Shepard Kansas City, Mo., senior
Wimmin's self-hatred
To the Editor:
Once again, the real reason that the "feminist" movement is going nowhere slowly has surfaced as winnim's self-hatred. It took a blatant act of misgery by the Kansas for a group of winnim to wake up and get angry. They got one page in the Kansas to speak their views on women and girls. Winnim refuses to acknowledge and accept the truly radical act a woman can make: to love herself, to be a lesbian. Actually, most of the winnim are lesbiles but they are afraid to claim the power of self-defining. They are still tied into male-approval/male-defined roles. They believe their winnim is afraid to peep on their winnim's face, afraid of turning people off, afraid to admit that there is another way of life. Sure, people are turned off by lesbians. We're so threatening because we don't conform, we don't give our souls to serve as mindless servants for the phallacology. We respect ourselves too much and have better relationships. The fact that between winnim has been perpetuated too long means 'we stop worrying about what men think of us and be ourselves?
Maggie Cloud 1977 KU graduate
Misused sex
To the editor:
I'm sorry to see student couples who think that religion is freedom. It's not, really. I'm more like detente.
Sex is like roses. Drag them in the mud and throw her a mess. Lovely flowers deserve a graceful吻.
Going all the way includes marriage, whether performed in church or in a judge's chambers. It means complete, permanent and exclusive marriage. It's beautiful and it's a picture of the relationship
between Jesus Christ and his bride (born-again believers).
Misuse of sex turns gold into brass. Young boys are encouraged for anything less than the real thing.
And for those of you who regret your actions of
the past, I am not according to the past, but as we are now!
*
Ira Bond, electrician Facilities Operations
Reply to Seymour
To the editor:
Todd Seymour, president of the K.U. Endowment Association, is a "pure" capitalist. That is to say: Money has one and only one purpose, which is to make more money. He cites the law of fiduciary duty as requiring this single yardstick of competent investment. As a lawyer, I know he is right. As a human being, I know he is wrong.
A dollar invested will bear the fruits of interest, dividend, capital gain on face value and evil or good for living people. A capitalist, per se, can buy a million dollars of the whole human being cannot—or had better not.
The Mafia turns a dollar better than IBM; Let's invest. The Soviet arms build-up is going, pardon, "great guns." Let's invest. Heroin. Motors could only dream about. Let's invest. Motors could only dream about. Let's invest.
The point is that, as a matter of pronounced public policy and law, we do draw a line somewhere. We do stand for something. Do we have to wait for the State Department to tell us it is wrong and immoral to subsidize a regime that exploits, dislocates, disenfranchises and virtually enslaves a whole people before we figure it out for ourselves?
Seymour's highest duty is to his investors. The stock market is his final arbitrator. For him, matters of mind, heart and conscience have absolutely nothing to do with it, and he will not speak to them. Only an ethical zombie can be satisfied with that.
The German judges at Nuremberg whined, "We only work here." The allied victims were not assuaged. Seymour says, "We only invest here." I am not assuaged. It is thin ice, and we are not well-advised to be left standing on it when the sons and daughters of South Africa, Namibia and Angola win their struggle, as they will, and turn to ask who was a friend to their liberties.
Jack Klinknett
Lawrence resident