Opinion
Page 4 University Daily Kansas, October 9, 1980
Searching for excuses
One of the justifications given by the chancellor's search committee for closing its meetings was a Regents policy. There's only one problem with that excuse—the policy is nothing but a fragment of the committee members' imaginations.
Despite pleas from the University community and an OK from the Regents to open the meetings, the search committee has maintained its infatuation with secrecy.
John Conard, Regents executive director, has said that there is no written policy concerning closed search meetings and that the committee has the power to conduct the search in any manner it wished.
Obviously, the committee has abused its power.
The KU chapter of the American Association of University Professors recommended last week that forums be held so the University could raise suggestions and meet the candidates.
The committee responded with idle excuses.
Besides citing a fictitious Regents policy, the committee said that candidates needed to keep their nominations confidential. That excuse, once again, was feeble.
First of all, in past searches the names of the candidates always have been divulged despite the committee's desire for secrecy. Candidates who are experienced and qualified for the job probably realized this before they applied.
Second, the committee isn't choosing just any University employee; it is choosing the person who will be KU's most important figure for a long time.
All students, faculty, classified employees and alumni should have the right to participate in the selection of the new chancellor.
If the committee wants to snuff that right, it shouldn't stop so low as to use a nonexistent policy to make legitimate its secret actions.
'Citizens' and 'Libertarians stand on unusual platforms
Two fleddling political parties have each caught some fringe group leaders and iconoclasts as alternatives to the two major candidates and independent John Anderson.
If you prefer nationalization of the oil industry, dismantling of nuclear power plants and lower military spending, the Citizens Party candidate, Barry Commoner, is for
Or if you prefer private ownership of all roads, abolishment of the court system and
TED LICKTEIG
sharp tax cuts, the Libertarian Party offers Ed Clark.
The Citizens Party is basing its hopes on the disenchanted voters turned off by politicians. Commander is a professor of environmental science and advisor of several books about the energy shortage.
The Libertarians want to draw 5 percent of the vote by attracting voters turned off by the enormousness of government that laid the foundations for the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the Iraq war. Inflation. Clark is an ant-trust lawyer for the Atlantic Richfield Corporation in California.
Commoner collected a cast of ant-establishment types and formed the Citizens Party in August 1979. Among them is the publisher of Mother Jones, the chairman of the Gray Panthers, a former Republican congressman from Maine and Studs Terkel, an author who strongly favors "economic democracy."
In addition, the Citizens Party nominated LaDonna Harris, an Indian rights activist and wife of former Oklahoma Senator Fred Kendall, who served during its convention in Cleveland this year.
Both parties say that the major parties are imminent urgent issues facing the country.
The Citizens party led by Commiter, who founded the party, wants what Commiter
calls "citizen control" of corporations in the energy resource sector, greater reliance on energy resources source.
Commonser's buzz line is: "Our system today no more needs enterprise than an enterprise that does a dirt road."
The Libertarians also like to talk about roads. Every single one would be a toll road maintained by a company in the business of maintaining roads.
Clark, who describes himself as a "low-tax liberal," propounds on the value of government non-intervention in the economy and foreign countries and all that entails.
Clark advocates the legalization of prostitution and marijuana, withdrawal from the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the abolishment of courts and public libraries and the establishment of fee-charging arbitration companies, and an end to anti-trust laws, the military draft, oil price regulation and political boundaries between states and localities.
Clark drew 5 percent of the vote in the 1978 California gubernatorial election and has a New York City lawyer, David Koch (no relation to the mayor), as his vice president.
The Libertarian Party has refused federal election matching campaign funds from the government although by law the party is entitled to them.
Both parties do not have the same intentions as previous third parties. They want to become part of the permanent political coalition and they expect the major parties into action on their issues.
And unlike Eugene McCarthy, George Willace and now Anderson, both parties are well-known politicians.
Both parties maintain they have a base on which to build. The Citizens Party says it has 4,000 members paying dues, and the Liberators say its followers, primarily lawyers, businessmen and the like, have contributed generously to Clark's presidential campaign.
But only the American voters can decide whether the parties will make a dent in the voting totals or whether the parties will become political stringbeans like the Communist Party and the Socialists Workers' Party.
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The legend of James Dean lives on
Take one. A sweat-shirted pyramid of kids flashing Kool-Aid grinds its youthful audience for the first time, Oct. 3, 1985, with the soon-to-be-unmistakable call, "M-I-C (pause) K-E-Y (pause) M-O-U-S-E." This is the premier of Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Club, dishing out with the year-old Disneyland a fanciful television double dip.
Take two: With Bunny and Mister Greenjeans at his side, Bob Keeshan debuts as CBS's Captain Kangaroo, Oct. 3, 1955. Twenty-five years later, he appears in "The good lord and CBS willing." Are still at it.
Take three: Inside New York's Astor Theater,
past the madly flashing marqueur, "Rebel
Without a Cause" premiers, bursting onto the
silver screen Oct. 26, 1955.
Take four: James Dean is dead. (Enter stage left, fallible, hard-assed legend in blue jeans and white T-shirt, slouched in his sleek Porsche, cigarette limp on his lower lip. Enter stage right unsuspecting college kid. Two collide. Legend dies.)
But Sept. 30, 1958 was when the legend's legend was born. Torn in with the other new candyland pitches to American youth, Dean's team, the Yankees, were to become a most influential curve ball.
We were born in the IKE days, tossed into the placid optimism of the two-car-poio-vaccine-Uncle-Millette with a coonski cap and a Barbie Doll, floating with Dick and Jane in the stardust of seemingly endless, careless youth. We didn't know this rebel Dean yet, and we
Twenty-five years—one more than Dean lived—have now moved. The Mouseketeers are gone, but the real-life Disneyworlds carry on the fantasy. Captain Kangaroo is still feeding Bunny the carrots. "Rebel Without a Cause" gets an occasional late-show airing or campus booking. And the post-55 babies are entering center stage.
couldn't yet know the adolescent whirlpool churning just below America's unpluried sur-
True, James Dean long before we arrived.
In fact, he swept across the American scene so fast and so hard that what he was all about is only now becoming clear. He made only three
AMY HOLLOWELL
full-length films, "East of Eden," "Rebel" and "Giant," which he had just completed when he died. Surge, he did some bit parts and some stage work, but the Dean that America saw was the most insignificant all-di-covered cast, feet propped up, hat tipped down, on the verge of becoming a Texas giant.
This man was confused. He was young but he was old. He was good but he was bad. He was hard but he was soft. He was a living antithesis. He was good but he was bad. His coherency to owen the eyes of America's youth.
The dreamy blindness of an early 1960's childhood was so confusing because at the same time young adults were riding the countryside. Parents were yearning for a gingham world with happy little children who never grew up and played on the front lawn all their lives.
There was Mickey Mouse and Peter Pan and Saturday matinees to keep us wanting to stick around, to keep us believing that we wouldn't ever really grow up, to keep us dreaming. We were told, and then we would all live there in space ships and space suits. It was all fantasy.
But then James Dean came to the matinee. He was bigger than life up there, bigger in his
wildness, in his tears, in his drunkenness, so slick in that red windbreaker. He was a presence more potent than the Moustekees because he smelled as if he was crying and stumbling just like we were.
It was much more than an identification with a guy 10 years dead that was swimming in our heads. He was only the beginning; Dean gave us the fundamentals.
From his ability to fail, to cry, to do wrong, we learned that success didn't mean, as our parents had stressed, never failing. And we began to see, that we had been great, that we were us, that this included both men and women.
In his rebelliousness, and that of our older brothers and sisters rebelling on the campuses, we saw courage and conviction. But we also were confused by the challenge they were presenting to what we had always thought was supreme authority.
In that cool youth Dean embodied, we felt the necessity to maintain, to stroll and roll while living the fast life slowly. We had a non-social guy doing it on his own in the messy adult jungle.
The jungle came to us daily on the evening news. The television beings that we were, we watched soldiers boy in combat with the Vietnamese and college kids in combat with the local police. We saw riots and assassinations, real life stories—no more of this Mickey mouse stardust.
Suddenly we found ourselves in an all too real never, never land, far, far away from the candyland they had kept spooning us. We didn't know what to eat, but OK to skin your knee? No one seemed to know.
We lived the James Dean antithesis. If it was possible to laugh, then it was, thanks to him, possible to cry. If it was possible to fail, then it was possible to succeed. If it was possible for James Dean to live fast and hard then it was, sadly, very possible for him to die the very same way.
Letters to the Editor
Jesus Christ is our Savior, not His own
To the editor:
I am not writing to comment upon what has been said about the preachers on campus. Rather, I am writing to point out some flaws in Kevin Helikier's Sept. 29 letter to the editor on Jesus of Nazareth, because they are rather commonly held. His seemingly logical arguments on Jesus on hinge on the assertion that Jesus was his own savior. A savior is needed only when there is sin. Even Jesus' most bitter enemies could find NO SIN in him.
"Which of ye convicteth me of sin?" (John 8:46). Why did he have no sin? Because, contrary to what Helliker states, Jesus was God. When Jesus showed himself alive again to Thomas, after Jesus had died, Thomas knew the imminent death of Jesus. And then he, his mother, 'My Lord and my God.' (John 20:28) Do we sin? "For all have sinned, and come short of the alzar of God." (Romans 3:23)
If we have ever lived, or cheated someone, or even considered doing something like it, we have sinned. So, because God's justice demands payment for sin, we can try to pay it, or we can have a substitute pay for it: a substitute provided by God's love. That's what Jesus did by dying and rising again; he paid the price for our sins.
Why should we believe that Jesus' claims were accurate? Because of his credentials. In the Old Testament, there were more than 500 prophecies about Jesus' birth, telling of such things as: the savior would be born in Bethlehem (Micha 5:2; about 500 B.C.), his hands and his feet would be pierced (Isaiah 33, about 700 B.C.), that they would have been martyred (Psalm 22 about 1000 B.C.) and much more.
Historically, all these prophecies were fulfilled through Jesus of Nazareth. In P. Stoner's Science Speaks, the odds of just eight major prophecies being fulfilled by any one man ever
Finally, I do agree with Helliker's recommendation not to look to "a mindless blob of protoplasm" for salvation. Look instead to Jesus Christ of Nazareth for your salvation. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hey my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and he with me." (Revelations 3:20) All you have to do is ask him into your heart.
on earth were considered. They were conservatively estimated to be the equivalent of having a blindfolded man, in one try, pick a marked silver dollar out of a pile of silver dollars two feet deep and the size of Texas. To add to Jesus' credentials, more than 500 eyewitnesses saw him alive again after his death (I Corinthians 15:5-8).
Richard Berry
Richard Berry Overland Park sophomore
F O doing good job
In reading the letter from Jim Tyrler about Facilities Operations, I'd like to write in its favor. I was an employee at Facilities Operations this summer, and it was difficult to work in a comfort index of 120 degrees-plus while pulling weeds, watering dying shrubs, and grass, much to the indignation and unappreciative attitude from many of the students.
I'm also a student, and I never appreciated the beautiful campus that we have that is due to the efforts of the grounds crew, until now. If one only knew about the overtime many workers put in to keep things alive and green. Perhaps we would have had no plants. Then we wouldn't have to water at all, would we? Also, if one understood the mechanics of a sprinkler, then one would realize that it isn't so.
To the editor:
simple to keep from spraying water on sidewalks or streets.
Facilities Operations spends a lot of time and hard, sweaty work to keep things beautiful. They also shovel snow and meet ice at 6:30 in the afternoon so they can class. I believe they deserve a pat on the back.
Jodell Josserand
Johnson City junior
To the editor:
And more preachers
In response to Kevin Helliker's objections to preachers and their "mindless listeners", I would like to point out what human "capability" amounts to before God. The name Jesus is called by the Christian Christ was so named because it is he who is to save people from their sins (Matthew 1:21).
Why do they need a savior? Because even with their active, educated minds, they are fallen creatures. The Pharisees went to Pontius Pilate and Christ with a Roman seal and watch guard up!
After Christ rose, some of the guards fled to the Pharisees with their account of the resurrection. The Pharisees, using their intelligent minds, paid the guards to tell everyone that the body was stolen by the disciples. Why did the Pharisees perpetrate such a lie? Such callousness toward the Creator is at the heart of the human condition.
Pride is the great fault of the ages and we cannot be saved by it. We must be saved from it. We can merit status and prosperity but still be fallen before God. That is why the Bible commands everyone to repent and bow the knee to Christ as Lord (personal boss) and Savior (substitute in judgement). That includes you and me both, Helliker.
Willy Peterson Lawrence junior
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