Page 4 University Daily Kansan, October 1. 1980
Opinion
Whisper louder, please
The selection of KU's next chancellor is either going to be conducted with whispers or completed in an open, efficient manner. The decision rests with the chancellor's search committee.
Obviously, the committee's selection of finalists for the position will affect the entire University community. That is precisely why the KU chapter of the American Association of University Professors is trying to establish an open forum before the finalists are named.
In the past, the University community has wallowed in speculation concerning the finalists. The candidates' names usually have been divulged, despite the committee's devotion to secrecy. With this in mind, it seems wrong to deprive the University community of a chance to participate in the selection process.
If the search committee accepts the AAUP's idea, the University community would have a chance to meet the candidates and raise questions that may have been overlooked.
When the final decision was made to select former Chancellor Archie R. Dykes,
the community knew virtually nothing about him. Instead of coming to KU with a familiarity with the issues and needs of the University community, Dykes arrived almost a mysterious figure.
This would not occur if an open forum was held.
The duties of the chancellor are to serve the entire University community. The new chancellor's actions will have a big impact on KU students and faculty. The University community should not be left in the dark.
As the selection process stands now, the committee will whittle the field of candidates to five and then will send its recommendations to the Kansas Board of Regents, where the final decision will be made. All will be done in whispers.
The process shields the University community to a significant degree. Although the committee of 12 is made up of alumni, student and faculty representatives, it now is deprived of valuable insight from the University community.
The open forum would serve the University's best interests. Besides, a little more openness, not to mention fewer whispers, never hurt anyone.
A new liberalism will return when conservatism calms
By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE New York Times Special Features
PROVIDENCE, R.I.—it has become fashionable of late to comment on the demise of liberalism. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's speech at the Democratic National Convention, a Time magazine article commented, "may have been the last great liberal call to arms" and "the final chapter" of liberalism. Many political analysts have expressed similar opinions.
What made the same word applicable to both systems of thought was a common objective. Jeremy Bentham stated it most successively; the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Such assessments are based upon a failure to perceive two important points about American history. First, the United States has always been a generally liberal nation. Second, the country's political history has been one of periods of liberal reform punctuated by conservative breathing spaces. Third, we have been immedied with the term "liberalism" has been used in the past to designate two distinct approaches to the proper relationship among individuals, society and government.
The deffersonian liberalism that dominated the republic's first century was grounded in the notion that governments were the foremost dangers to the liberty and well-being of individuals. Unfortunately, by the late 1800s it was becoming plain that the laissez-faire approach, while somewhat successful in curbing government abuses, was ineffective against private interests and hence was not producing the common good.
Early in the present century, liberals changed course. Big government began to arise to control big business and to protect the public. Franklin D. Roosevelt later brought to fruition the paternalism that began under his cousin Theodore. Although the methods were diametrical, the 19th century liberal counsels the fundamental liberal goal remained. Hamiltonian means were used to reach Jeffersonian ends. The culmination of this trend came in the 1960s.
It is now apparent that paternalism, like
this, can therefore it, has not achieved the
elusive liberal end.
The problems associated with the big-government approach have led to an increasing distaste for liberals. But the attacks on laissez-faire at the turn of the century did not herald the collapse of liberalism and neither does the current onslaught against bureaucracy.
We are in a period of reaction. Throughout our history, Americans have alternated between periods of reform and times when people tired of thinking of social problems and withdrew into more personal concerns. The peaks of reform during the revolution and in the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras, the Abolitionist crusade and the Civil War, populism and progressivism, the Great Depression and World War II have taken place between times of inaction or reaction: the Federal Era, the "Era of Good Feelings," the 1840s and early 1850s, the Gilded Age, the 1920s and the 1950s.
It is clear enough that people grow weary of the activism of such leaders as Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Wilson, Kennedy and Johnson. It also should be noticed that some organizations become accustomed to the Adams, Fillmores, Harrisons, Coedidge Eisenhowers and Fords.
Neither of the major-party nominees seems capable of boring the people to the point where reform will again be popular later in the decade. But when reform does return, it is not likely to be liberalism as it has been known since Theodore Roosevelt's days. Instead, we are now in a transitional period like the one at the turn of the century. Means that have proved inadequate are being rejected. The goal of liberalism in its new form will remain unchanged, but the exclusive reliance upon bigness appears already to be ending.
This in no sense means a return to Adam Smith, even though some of those supporting Ronald Reagan would like nothing better. Rather, the new form of liberalism is likely to emphasize ways in which Jeffersonian men can be made more effective; these measures include greater government encouragement for employee-owned companies, a federal incorporation statute placing limits on the market shares of corporations and ensuring competition, re-thinking the welfare and tax systems and placing a stronger emphasis on citizen participation in decisions affecting their lives.
We may confidently predict that by the election of 1988 or, at the latest, that of 1992, liberalism will, like all of this year's leading candidates, be born again.
The contours of the new liberalism are far from clear; what is definite is that we are now experiencing not the death of liberalism but rather a combination of a pause between reform eras and a period of transition between liberal approaches.
Robert S. McElvaine is associate professor of history at Brown University.
City's retail woes can be solved
an audible "Hey, you can't do that!" rags across Lawrence two years ago when an Ohio developer laid plans for a suburban "cornfield" mall at the city's feet.
Businessmen and the public agreed that the mall, to be located near the corner of 37th and Iowa streets, would cut a swath of devastation through Lawrence's downtown. A弘华小庙, full of major department stores and specialty shops, would leave Massachusetts once history has been forged—abandoned by shopping seekers better busy and selection.
What is now a place of commerce, of interesting faces shopping at a wide variety of stores, would be a scar of boarded windows and chipping paint.
The city's outrage forced the Cleveland developer, Jacobs, Visconsi and Jacobs, to prosecute in July an alternative downtown mail office in Oakland. The city of Massachusetts and Rhode Island streets.
As part of the $38 million package,
Lawrence would provide $10 million for site
SCOTT FAUST
improvement and parking. Yet the proposal did not include extra funding—as much as $10 million—needed for land acquisition. If federal grants were not available, the city would have to pay heavily on tax increment revenue bonds to finance its share of the project.
The value and necessity of such a massive plan have been justifiably questioned, and now the city commission is examining a third option. The commission assumes that doing nothing is no practical way to solve the problems the dollars are flowing to many monstrosities in Topeka and Kansas City.
The city's third option, to entice two major department stores into downtown and avoid building a mail, is the compromise plan that Lawrence needs. It would meet the demand for more retail space without having a mail to go out. In contrast, it would invreovably change ins complexion. And it would not wreak havoc on life in the surrounding neighborhoods.
After conducting its first study of Lawrence's downtown retailing quandary, the Chicago firm of Meliphan and Associates presented economic statistics constrasting sharply with those presented by JVJ and by a Downtown Lawrence Association study.
The Meliphany study reports a need for 254,164 additional square feet of retail space, including 91.826 square feet of general retail space that translates into two major department stores.
According to Lawrence Mayor Ed Carter, JVJ also could use the city's inaction as a basis for legal action to fight any zoning decisions against them. And, he said, the duttoning approach might only mean post-temporal enforcement of zoning deterioration of downtown became widespread.
JVJ's downtown mall would have a total of 479,440 square feet, of which 207,752 would be general merchandise. The DLA's study, made by two KU professors, says only 60,000 square foot of new retail space is needed, but not before the year 1990.
Growth awaits Lawrence
In the economic impact study done by a firm hired by VJJ, an annual Lawrence population growth rate of 1.62 percent and retail sales potential growth of 20 percent from 1979 to 1987 are optimistically predicted. The firm also claims that a mall would provide hundreds of new jobs, both during and after construction, as well as some rental income for municipal property and sales tax revenues for Lawrence. But freestanding downtown department stores also would provide the city with some of the same benefits.
The mayor said the commission would make a decision on which tack it wanted to take in downtown development by the year's end. Assuming the commissioners accept Meliphane's recommendation and try to lure major department stores into downtown, their problem will be two-fold. First they will have to prove wrong those who say that the chain stores only want mall projects, and then they will have to legally prevent rezoning in Lawrence and Douglas County that would allow the building of a "cornfield" mall.
Don Jones of JVJ has said that freestanding downtown department stores are a pipe dream because the stores are located in mails for security and for maximized retailing.
Jones, who said early this month that his company might resurrect the suburban mail proposal if support for the downstreet mall did not surface "so soon" as they hoped, the companies could be made to feel that freestanding stores are the only way for them to tap the Lawrence market. Besides,
Lawrence's downtown is like an open mall itself, and new large stores facing Massachusetts Street would fit in if well located.
The city's financial burden would still be significant in the case of freestanding stores because land would still have to be acquired, improvements made and parking provided.
Preventing rezoning that would allow the "corrifice" mall that JVJ is evidently ready to push on an unwilling populace is crucial. The city and county commissions have control over zoning decisions and thus may theoretically stop any attempt by JVJ to impose a mall on La Jolla, but the Cutter's office has no interest in JVJ and probably uses the city or county if their zoning decisions were not justified by the pursuit of some other kind of retail development.
Lawrence doesn't need a mall. Not downtown. Not on the city's southern edge. It doesn't need a mall's suburban, energy-wasteful, congestive and artificial undertones. And it doesn't need any children. Holding child-related meetings that permit mareses Lawence. But neither can it ignore the retail outflow, or the frightening prospect of a suburban mail if nothing is done.
There are other factors that will have to be considered as downtown development is pursued, such as what kind and what amount of public funding will be used, whether an investment or the city alone will take development steps and where the development will occur.
Letters to the Editor
Reagan's simplicity reflects his intelligence
scott Faust's recent column, in which he showed us how John Anderson's "intellectualism" in the televised debate with Ronald Reagan alienated all but the most erudite viewers, was a house of cards with no bottom story. The entire argument rested on a fact that simply wasn't there, namely, that Anderson's "intellectualism" existed in the first place. Anyone knows, except Faust evidently, that using words people don't understand does not constitute "intellectualism," but instead, often only the semblance of it.
To the editor:
If anything, "intellectualism" was on Reagan's side. The views he espoused were and are backed by such thinkers as economist Arthur Laffer of "Laffer Curse" fame and Nobel Prizewinning economist Milton Friedman, not to mention members of the Hoover Institute, a political tank-kind based at Stanford University. That Reagan was able to explain these views in layman's terms should hardly be missed. But even the backing. Indeed Reagan's ability to reduce complexities to their simplest and most applicable principles is itself not only an indication of a strong intellect, but also the necessary and transcendent step beyond "intellectualism."
Well, at least we can agree with Faust that Anderson has been brave. Indeed, I myself got all choked up when I read Faust's pre-eulogy: "Anderson's habit of saying the things people say is hard to hear, but his instinct for bravery may end in his being martyred in a paly Nov. 4 showing."
But when what turned out to be a spontaneous epileptic fit on my part subsided, the reason for my uncontrolled spasms became all too clear.
Fraust had switched the roles on us again. Reagan, not Anderson, has been the brave man, and he is the best of them.
Reagan has had the courage to adhere to his basic ideological convictions, most notably, those about abortion and ERA, despite their political unpopularity. He has held fast to them up to and through the present presidential campaign. Anderson, on the other hand, has
allowed his "convictions" on such matters to change over the years in accordance with changing public opinion. His supposedly "brave" stance on the 50-cent gasoline tax was taken when he had nothing to lose and everything to gain by it, while the remainder of his positions
have been comfortably in keeping with the present socially liberal, fiscally conservative status quo.
Faust,52 pick up!
Eric Brende
Topeka sophomore
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