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Wednesday, September 10, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
Being young is not enough
There is an incredible sense of our own mortality that seems to accompany the news of almost any death.
But that feeling is perhaps never stronger than when a young, vital member of our own community is snatched from our midst by a freak happening or tragic accident that makes death seem all the more painful.
Such was the case with Paul Childs.
Mr. Childs, a KU senior in pre-medicine, died early yesterday morning from injuries sustained when he collided with a truck Sunday during the biking portion of the Baptist Medical Center Triathlon in Kansas City, Mo.
He would have celebrated his 21st birthday Friday. Instead, his funeral service will be this afternoon.
It is hard to imagine death ever seeming more unfair than in the case of Mr. Childs.
His friends paint a picture of an athletic, intelligent and active human being that enjoyed spending his weekend nights helping high school kids from his church stav out of trouble.
But painful as it may be, Mr. Child's death can also serve a noble purpose.
His fatal accident came at the end of a stretch of accidents that have seemed to plague students and other members of the community since the fall semester began. There have been several wrecks, a serious head injury, a dangerous motorcycle collision and doubtless many other unreported near tragedies.
Opinions
College students, in the prime of their lives with a sudden dose of freedom on their hands, often feel more than a little confident and perhaps slightly invincible.
But we aren't. If Mr. Childs was not, surely none of us are. Let's be careful out there.
Selectivity important
The University is one step away from raising its academic standards.
Under a plan proposed by a University Council committee in March, students who are dismissed from their school for academic reasons would not be re-admitted to that school for at least one semester. In other words, if students enroll under the classification of 9Z, the classes they take and pass won't count toward their graduation requirements.
The proposal is creating quite a fuss among the student members of university governance. Give people a fair chance, they say, everyone makes mistakes.
But the 9Z status was not created so students could make mistakes. Originally, the 9Z classification was created for people who wanted to take college classes for personal enrichment — namely Lawrence residents.
Students who are dropped from their school for academic reasons often join the 9Z classification and stay there,
The angry students also point out that 92 students pay their fees to the University like everyone else. Therefore they should be allowed to enroll in whatever classes they want.
sometimes for a long time
But what's the purpose of having a selective admissions policy if everyone with enough money can enroll in classes and work toward a degree, no matter how long it might take them to get there?
The University is a state school, so admission policies may be a little less selective than those of other universities. Nevertheless, they are selective. When students with poor academic records are allowed to earn credit in the 9Z status, they take places in classrooms that otherwise would be given to regularly enrolled students.
The University should continue to stand firm on the 9Z issue. The University will maintain its reputation as a credible institution of higher education only if it is as selective as it can be about admissions.
Better now than never
Through the work of four KU students and a concerned faculty adviser, the National Organization for Women has arrived at the University of Kansas.
The new KU NOW chapter's organizational meeting was last week, just days before the state NOW conference took place in Lawrence over the weekend.
Both events should be hailed as important for women and men throughout this area, and particularly in the University community.
Founders of the KU chapter said they thought the campus could use a women's support group. They also said they would not be as politically oriented as their Lawrence or national counterparts.
Those are important observations. Membership probably can only be helped by the group providing support and information instead of political indoctrination.
The political problems can probably be best handled by the Lawrence NOW chapter, which has existed since 1966 and has the power and funds to have influence in Topeka.
Comparable worth, date rape, affirmative action, sexual harassment and women's roles in religion were just some of many issues discussed by the group last week.
Such an exchange of ideas, with a concern for women's rights as a basis of discussion, can only be healthy for the University community.
News staff
News staff
Lauretta McMillen ... Editor
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David Silverman ... Editorial editor
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Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
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Violence won't end terror cycle
Once more, Europe has been shattered by the cracking of submachine guns, grenades and the helpless cries of the wounded and their families. Once more, Jews in the world are mourning the innocent victims of a terrorist assault.
In less than three days (in Karachi and Istanbul) 40 people were killed in attacks by groups claiming their involvement with the strife of Islam against Zionism and the Western world that supports it.
Too many people around the world seem to believe that the solution to the Middle East problem rests with violence. Innocent human beings have been murdered in the name of a war that has plagued the world for decades and has thrown shame on the human race. Saturday, the Secretary General of the National Council on Islamic Affairs called the gunmen who killed 21 in an Istanbul synagogue "mad persons."
Certainly the solution is not found in President Reagan's decision to bomb Libya. That is well proven by these most recent terrorist assaults. As a European, from the Mediterranean basin, I witnessed at home what
Many solutions have been proposed, but none has been successful in stopping the bloodshed caused by the seemingly endless list of terrorist attacks.
U. S. newspapers said it was the typical reaction of a weakened and destabilized government. But it was too early to judge.
Libya's reaction to the U.S. bombing of their main city: the Libyans shelled an Italian island south of Sicily
As an Italian, and one who has always been sensitive to political issues, I know quite well the terrible consequences of terrorism. We have
Daniele Fiorentino
Guest Shot
had our own terrorists and foreign ones as well — mainly from Arab nations — who have been raiding our country for about 20 years. Unfortunately, we have been forced to learn the extent of terrorism's short- and long-term consequences.
I can hear the cries and see the tears of the families of those killed and wounded in Istanbul.
year old boy who was killed in that October 1982 attack.
I left the United States three years ago and have just returned from Italy to finish my degree at the University of Kansas. During those three years, not much has changed in the politics of the unstable Mediterranean area. Terrorism has been as strong and as bloody as ever, but something new has happened. The United States has intervened in the Gulf Of Sidra and offered it as a solution to the problem of terrorism in the Middle East. Was that a solution?
Judging by the most recent events, it was not. The day we got news of Reagan's decision to bomb Tripoli I feared that the United States' action would do nothing but stir even deeper and aggrier emotions in the Arab world. In the long run, I knew Europe would carry the scars of those emotions.
I firmly believe that the way out of the killing craze that has stained the Middle East and Europe is not in arms. It is in the peaceful settlement of the Palestinian question. It will come through a general understanding between Arab countries and
Israel that will require a monumental effort on both sides. But this appears to be the only solution possible in the shaken international arena of the southern Mediterranean.
I am involved in the tragedy of that area and have witnessed the events of the past three years. I cannot see the solution to these terrible happenings in the armed intervention of a foreign country that tries to fight violence with violence.
Europe is the area most directly affected by the war in the Middle East, yet, Europeans do not see armed intervention as the solution to this guerrilla war that is based on terrorism. European governments know the dangers of such actions and prefer to move toward peace talks in the Middle East.
The tragic events of the past week will reinforce this conviction in Europe and will make European participation in a punitive action in North Africa or the Middle East even more unlikely. The real hope is that Europe will take the lead in fostering talks for a peaceful settlement to the delicate issue at stake and that the U.S. government will follow suit.
Daniele Fiorentino is a graduate student in history from Rome.
Chitchat won't bring 'spy' home
The Soviets are doing something terrible. They're treating a U.S. citizen the way they treat their own people. By all outward signs, Moscow has decided to subject a U.S. correspondent, Nicholas Damloff of U.S. News and World Report, to an ordeal normally reserved for Soviet dissidents — complete with falsified charges and arrest.
Danioff was handed some top-secret Soviet documents by an acquaintance in Moscow and then was immediately arrested by eight KGB men who happened to be nearby. It's a classic trick that hasn't changed since Russia's secret police used to be called the Okhrana and reported to the czar. As an outrage, it has everything but originality.
The motive is as obvious as the frame-up. The United States had just arrested a Soviet employee at the United Nations on charges of buying classified documents from an FBI informant; the Russian suspect doesn't have diplomatic immunity and is being held for trial. If the Soviets nab a U.S. citizen, they can hope to trade him for their man now in U.S.
custody. It's a familiar ploy — for every real spy the U.S. government can catch, the Soviets are willing to hand over a false one.
Moscow should initiate the actual negotiations any day now. It will probably use its time-tested, three-stage approach, which has been summariz
Paul Greenberg
Columnist
Proceed to Soviet demands. In return, the U.S. Embassy will make the strongest representations, also known as paper protests, to the Kremlin. There is no use pretending they'll work.
Instead, the U.S. response should be in proportion to the outrage, which is considerable. Instead of filing the usual protests, word should be dispatched that those U.S. groups involved in the kind of cultural exchanges the Soviets keep pushing
won't be heading for the Soviet Union unless Damiloff is heading out. The message would be particularly appropriate if it came from any U.S. newsman planning such a trip.
Cultural exchanges of this sort are far more important to the Soviet Union, which is the isolated country, than to the United States. If the Russians wish to continue them, they should be told to stop framing U.S. citizens. Why should this country go on supplying Moscow with hostages for the future? Not all the polite chitchat in Intourist's vocabulary is worth subjecting U.S. citizens to this kind of risk.
If Washington were serious about protecting U.S. citizens, the high-level Soviet delegation due here this week to discuss arms control would be told that the time for such talks is not propitious as long as Darniloff is being held on trumped-up charges.
The word from Moscow is that the Soviets are planning to conduct a 10-day investigation of Daniloff before pressing charges against him; that would seem about the right amount of time to postpone any arms
talks with the Soviets. The delay should be even longer if Moscow dares put Dailloff on trial as though he had no rights, that is, as though he were a Soviet subject.
The only benefit of this latest outrage is that it strips Mikhail Gorbachev of his "nice guy" mask and reveals the Soviet leader as another clumsy Stalinist. He may never again be quite so credible as a symbol of the new, liberal Soviet system — which seems to exist largely in the mind of the western gulls.
In short, now is not the time for diplomacy as usual, which tends to mean another exercise in U.S. suckerdom.
Please no more polite, ineffectual protests.
Please, not another compromise that adds up to the Soviets getting what they want, which in this case is their spy in exchange for our journalist.
And, please, spare us the usual explanation about the need to tolerate the intolerable, and to respond to brutality with subtle diplomacy
Mailbox
Point to the right
Come on, Victor. The states' rights issue you harp on has been coming from Ronald Reagan for the last six years. In your column, "Time to curb national speed laws," you blame the national drinking law on the "bureaucrats in Washington (who) don't think the states can handle a simple task like setting the speed limits on their highways." For the sake of clarification, let us put a name on the "bureaucrats." The same Ronald Reagan who harps about states' rights is the same person who thought it was in our own best interest to impose a national drinking age on us.
Anyone who reads your column knows how much you love Ronnie Raygun. It is now time for all good columnists to admit that Ronnie is the one who imposed the national drinking age. By referring to the "bureaucrats," you were hoping
readers would believe that they were Washington, liberal, pinko Democrats who imposed the national drinking age.
Ronnie, "Mr. Conservative, less government," himself, signed the bill.
What's your opinion of Ronnie's ideological purity now? Can you spell fat Washington "bureaucrat?" I can
- R O N N I E R E A G A N.
Charles Shirley
Charles Shirley
Rules don't change all
Drug testing and Proposition 48 have been described as needed for the integrity of football and other sports. I won't argue their need. However, in the history of big college football there have been only two black head coaches. This year there are none. The reasons — racial discrimination and "buddvism."
The myth that blacks can't think
and that their athletic ability is only natural has led to the belief that they can play but can't teach.
The best way to define "budydism" is to consider the following scenario. In the 1960s and 1960s, many of the college football powers, such as Alabama, Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma, were predominantly white. Former players from such teams were frequently hired as assistant coaches and were thereby placed in the pipeline to later become coordinators, head coaches and athletic directors.
As these former players move up the ladder, they remember their
If you listen to a game, you will frequently bear black athletes described in the following ways: "He has so much natural ability . . . You don't coach what he does . . . He was born to play this game." On the other hand, gifted white athletes are described as giving 110 percent, and being "intelligent players."
"buddies" and either hire them or put in a good word for them. This cycle is then repeated; effectively excluding blacks from serious consideration for the more sought-after coaching positions.
The absence of black head coaches at the major college and professional levels casts doubt on the integrity of the sport.
In recognition of this deplorable state of affairs, I are calling for a nationwide show of concern. I strongly encourage football players, black and white at all levels, along with their fans and bands, to wear black arm or wrist bands at all football related events taking place on Oct. 4.
Don Allen
Oklahoma City, Okla.
Editor's note: Don Allen lives and works in Oklahoma City. In addition to the Kansas, he has sent copies of this letter to more than 200 newspapers and colleges.