Page 4 University Daily Kansan, September 9; 1980
Opinion
Attorney dawdles a bit
A Kansas Bureau of Investigation report concerning alleged police brutality at KU's Commencement May 19 continues to demand that on district attorney Mike Malone's desk.
The KBI handed down the report more than two weeks ago, but its contents have not been made public. It appears the report may not have positive things to say about the ways in which KU police handled protesters at the Commencement.
A number of protesters displayed banners at the Commencement, defying a vague Regents policy. After an ugly scene with police, 12 people were arrested on charges of disorderly conduct or criminal trespassing or both.
Ron Kuby, a students' rights activist, then filed a complaint with Malone against KU police alleging that police used unnecessary force when leading him away from the ceremony. Although Kuby was not arrested, he suffered a hairline fracture in his left wrist. The KB's investigation is to provide a report
on the handling of the incident by KU police.
To be sure, there are some questionable circumstances surrounding the arrests. Kuby perhaps struggled with police more than any other protester. Yet the 12 protesters who were arrested received no bodily harm and they certainly couldn't have been more uncooperative than Kuby during the protest.
Kuby has certainly pressed serious charges against KU police. Malone asked the KBI to investigate, but he has been slow to determine whether Kuby's charges are valid.
In the interests of KU and the community, Malone should make his decision soon as to whether action should be taken against KU police. Granted, Malone needs time to seriously consider the report. But he must not hedge, lest the Commencement fiasco take too long to resolve.
After all, it would serve everyone's best interests to expedite the matter.
KU honors program breeds boredom, not academic pride
I really believed that the honors program would live up to its promise and provide classes
For several years I have thought that it was not much of an honor to be in the KU Honors Program. I didn't always think this way, and as I back look now, I realize that my first disapp point with the honors program was making the mistake of believing what I read about the program.
BRETT CONLEY
that would challenge and develop my abilities, and that being in class with other honors students would provide mutual intellectual benefits.
Because I believed the honors program's promises, I entered the Summer Honors Institute two weeks after graduating from high school. The institute supposedly was designed to provide outstanding high school graduates with a competitive atmosphere in the grazing atmosphere of honors work.
over several weeks in the institute, I began to realize that I was not receiving the benefits promised. My alleged reward for pursuing honors studies would be an enhanced intellectual competence and self-esteem in academic abilities. But in truth, the only lesson I learned that summer was perseverance.
I suffered through an English course taught by a professor who became outraged at the honors students only because they could not write as well as college upperclassman. I also survived a science class taught by a professor who could not present a well-organized, coherent lecture. Although he knew his field well, he could not effectively communicate the subject matter.
Finally, there was a more nebulous class dealing with the philosophical aspects of what makes a good education. Plato's Republic and John Stuart Mill's autobiography were the texts that we were supposed to read and draw ideas from. But the class actually became a sort of indoctrination of the professor's ideas about elitist education.
The professor tried to impress upon us that honors students were above the average college student and that they were an intellectual elite within the University. We should recognize our place and try to associate only with other honors students, he told us, and eventually we would
become the intellectual leaders of the University community while raising a ton of top education.
At the end of the summer I was confused. I did not have a broad enough perspective to realize that my bad experience was the fault of the institute and the honors program and not me. I had learned, illimited and bounded, educated, enlightened and intellectually broadened.
But I did not give up on the honors program entirely, even though I had plenty of reasons to do so. I learned that with careful choosing it is possible to take some outstanding courses taught by competent professors. But the students in my honors program do not come close to outweighing the negative aspects, and I believe the program is in need of great change and revamping.
David M. Katzman, professor of history, is the author of *The Spectacle of Hope*. I hope that those characters are a sorrow.
The biggest problem with the program is that there are too many mediocre or incompetent professors teaching honors courses. The honors program does not have any means of evaluating the courses that are offered, and because of this, professors who cannot effectively teach honors courses keep teaching them semester after semester.
Also, the honors program is less a program than it is an assortment on classes that can be taken. Individual departments offer whatever honors courses they want and students pick from the list. Students who have said to have completed a program. The honors tutorial, a one-hour seminar, can be a good introduction to the program, but there needs to be a more defined progression of classes that challenge, stimulate and educate students on a variety of subjects. There also needs to be a class that will pull together an honors student's intellectual experiences at the end of the program.
Finally, the honors program needs to disassociate itself with the idea that it is here to build an elite intellectual circle at the University. There is no doubt that honors students can benefit from a university-wide honors students should not be aggregated from other students and other University experiences.
Katzman has a difficult job ahead of him if he hopes to transform the honors program into something more viable and worthwhile. The task cannot be done in six months or even one year, but it is worth the time because the honors program and its classes provide more intellectual disappointment than academic stimulation.
Video space games screen victim
I've never been much of a fan of the "gifts"
modern technology has given us.
All those contraptions with miniature computer brains, digital displays and push button controls designed to speed everything up, more than often seem to slow things down.
The only advantage, for instance, I ever saw in touch-tone telephones was that they gave you an advantage in radio station call-in contests. But I've always been too clumsy and usually
BLAKE
GUMPRECHT
have ended up dialing the wrong number and
missed the call. mother rather than
winning any free tickets.
And I wonder whether I'll ever get through one of those "high-tech" supermarket checkouts without being delayed for several minutes while the checker repeatedly moves the items around in the store over the electronic eye in an attempt to get the electronically coded price to register.
Digital watches, though, epitomize the products of modern technology. I've never seen the point of having to push a button to find the address, or being in a dark, bright, good luck昌ing to make out the numbers.
But I must admit that technology's contribution to arcades and bar rooms is worthy of
Space Invaders and Asteroids, on the other hand, are almost totally skill.
I went to bars only twice in my first two years in Lawrence. There was never any reason to go. I've never been much for mingling or putting moves on women I didn't know. I'd play pinball occasionally, but it wasn't reason enough to make a special trip.
In Space invaders, descending rows of multi-colored aliens advance closer to the player's tank every two second on a video screen. The player tries to knock them off with laser-like player tries to knock them off with laser-like
space Invaders" and, more recently,
"Asteroidis" chaned that.
I now regularly go to the Beer Garden or the Crossing to play. My infatuation with the games—just ask anyone who has seen me at the bars—at times borders on madness. When I see you, I buttons I forget Law of Communications, Italian verb conjugations and everything else.
Oh, pinball's OK. But I have trouble getting excited when I shoot a ball in play and watch it fall cleanly between the flipping fippers and the shakers. There's nothing done with skill. It's simple bad luck.
The real reason for my craziness over video games, while pinball has never been anything more than an occasional diversion, is that success on the pulsing, colorful machines is nearly completely dependent upon skill. It's trivial but it's fun.
Pinball lovers tell me that the games are about 80 percent skill. I have trouble believing that. Even when I have a good game, I can't help but think I was just lucky. After all, the ball only hits a flipper every 15 seconds or so. The rest of the time the game plays with itself.
shots. Every 23 shots, a pulsating spaceship whisks above the field of aliens, giving the player a chance for bonus points if he can hit the ship.
A throbbing heat that speeds up as the game progresses compounds the tension.
The real goal in Space Invaders, at least to me, is not so much how many points you can ring up, but how many screens of aliens you can clear. That's what makes it addictive. Each time you get closer to clearing another screen, there's the drive to play until you clear it. Before you know it, you've used up $15 in quarters. No wonder video games account for 60 percent of the $200 million annual arcade business.
I've become a bit bored with Space Invaders laterly, thouh.
It's gotten to the stage where clearing three screens is easy, but clearing four screens seems almost impossible. With each new screen, the field of aliens begins close to the window. After you've cleared a few screens, the aliens are almost on top of your tank at the start.
That's where Asteroids, Atart's contribution to the video boom, comes in. I started playing regularly this summer. The goal in Asteroids is to learn how to use it because it's not hard to clear a screen of asteroids.
You get points by destroying the oddly shaped asteroids, which constantly move at various speeds from various directions across the screen. Bonus points are available for hil-
ting the beeping, rapidly firing spaceships that whirac across the screen periodically.
The challenge is to avoid the asteroids and rocks from the space ships while clearing the scrub.
There are five buttons in all. Two are for rotating the player's ship, another fires the laser and one thrusts the ship forward. A fifth is something of a futuristic ejection seat. When destruction is unavoidable, you punch "hyperspace" and the machine randomly flips up or down to the screen. But the move can often be suicidal if it places you in the path of an oncoming asteroid.
Asteroids also has an egistical attraction. This is particularly a machine that helps it put together on the screen.
Still, video games haven't transformed me into a science fantasy freak. I didn't hurry out to see "The Empire Strikes Back" the first week it hit the theaters. In fact, I still haven't changed my audience and Asteroids haven't even changed my views about the products of modern technology.
But Atari and Bally, the biggies of the video game industry, say that new model video games are on the way. Space Invaders mania has been so widespread that 60,000 games have been produced in the last 24 months. They're the rave all over the world—even in Tel Aviv. In Japan, there are entire arcades with nothing but Space Invaders.
You can bet that when the new models start popping up in the local bars, I'll be there.
Cabbies' murders difficult to understand
By ROBERT WHITAKER
New York Times Special Features
NEW YORK—Ever since I started driving a cab at night, the way I read the paper has changed. I used to turn to the sports first. Not anymore. Now I turn to the police notice.
One recent night, the news was worse than usual. Two cabbies went down the previous night. One cab driver, who was 24 years old, was stabbed to death in Long Island City. The other.
Salvatore Torres, who was 50, was shot three times. Luckily he is still alive. So how many does that make this year—10, 15, 20? Who knows? I’ve lost count.
I think about the murder of Paul Van Wyk, the 24-year-old victim. I don't imagine he was unwilling to give up the money. Think about it: $100 or so vs. 50 years of life. And yet how did he die. Stabbed to death, he was not the victim of a crime, but someone to death is a much more willful act.
I used to be the coordinator of a literacy
living program at Attica prison. There I saw the
few children in the classroom.
The men I taught to read were friendly, witty, kind even—at least with me. The witier wilt was especially disarming. It is hard to dislike someone who has a finely tuned sense of humor. And what most of the men wanted out of life seemed fair enough: a woman to care about, a decent home, enough money to have a good time now and then.
Several times when I worked at Atikka I had to give speeches to outsiders. Each time my speech was the same—most of the men in here are good speakers. But a few of them still think that persecution is basically a correct one.
Another thought. I knew a young man in prison, he was 22 years old, who grew up in what is now the Bronx. He was a "cabinet" etc—of Buffalo, N.Y. It's a particularly rough part of town, and one day he told me he was
afraid to go back out on the street. Look at my life, he said. Now I have plenty to eat, a roof over my head and my wife comes to see me every week. I get to spend a couple of nights with her every four or five months. I'm getting paid 25 cents an hour to go to school, pretty soon I'll get my high school diploma and then I can go to college. I get better grades every day. At night I smoke a joint and go to sleep. So what's the big deal? It's easier in here than out on the street.
Sl
An old-timer who'd been in prison for years put it even more succinctly. Most of the people in Attica, he said, are not being punished; they're being rescued.
of H stren to en
What did I read the other day? How in Iran they buried certain "criminals" up to their waists and then stoned them to death. Barbaric, to be sure, and not to be emulated. Still, I wont ask if they were, if such punishment might not cut down on the number of Paul Van Wykes who die needlessly.
KU educa Doug theas progr decli stude
I do not know how to reconcile these thoughts. When I worked in prison, I liked most of the men I met. I became good friends with two or three of them. Now, though, I am a potential victim. And I would like to share my experience with about another cabbage's death, I become more willing—may, eager—to take stone in hand.
He increa Unive possil
Robert Whitaker has been driving a cab in New York City since June 1979.
"I' year,
The University Daily KANSAN
[USPS 65048] 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 for delivery, Kansas Postmaster. Send addresses to the Student Subscriptions office or $3 a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are $2 a semester, paid through the student activity fee. Postmaster: Send changes of address to the University Daily Kansas, Flint Hall. The University of Kansas
Editor Carol Beier
Business Manager Elaine Strabler
Managing Editor                                                                 Cydi Hughes
Editorial Editor                                                                    David Lewis
Campus Editor                                                                 Judy Woodburn
Associate Campus Editor                                                   Jeff Spyre
Assistant Campus Editors                                                         Mark Spencer, Don Monday, Cindy Whitcome
Retail Sales Manager ... Kevin Koster
National Sales Manager ... Nancy Clauson
Campus Sales Manager ... Darla Light
Classified Manager ... Treya Coin
4-advertising Makeup Manager ... Jane Wendrobert
General Manager and News Adviser ... Rick Mussel
Kansan Adviser ... Chuck Chowins