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Wednesday, September 3, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
Say no to drug tests
Scores of applicants today are facing more than job competency exams. They need to pass a drug test. This exam is considered an invasion of privacy by employees, but employers see it as insurance against accidents and waste.
Urinalysis is one of the new, more intrusive ways to search people for drugs. But asking people to produce a urine specimen if they want to apply for a job, or if they want to keep the job they have, is an outright invasion of privacy.
Employers claim the test will prevent the accidents, absenteeism and low productivity that they blame on the use of marijuana, cocaine and other substances ranging from angel dust to prescription medications.
But studies are beginning to show that the tests are not always accurate. Earlier this year, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the worst laboratories indicated false
positive results as much as 66 percent of the time.
Aside from the questionable results, do we want to spend millions of dollars to ferret out drug abusers when state and federal budgets are already pressed to the limit? What about the deficit, unemployment and poverty? Are these now secondary to our drug paranoia?
A year ago, professional baseball was humiliated when the Pittsburgh trial of a drug dealer included extensive testimony about cocaine use by major league players. Baseball commissioner Peter Uebere Roth asked all 650 players to take tests. But the players' union balked, arguing that all players should not be made to comply if only a few have a drug problem.
Rather than firing weed smokers, the government or private employers ought to discipline, treat or fire those who perform poorly at work — and leave the little glass jars at home.
Budget ax slices Soviets
Federal budget cuts are once again claiming a valuable program at the University of Kansas.
Since 1975, the University has brought writers from the Soviet Union to the plains of Kansas to participate in the Soviet Writer's Lecture Series. Ideas, customs and cultures have been shared through the exchange.
The program was sponsored by the department of Soviet and East European studies and financed by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education. The KU program has been slighted as more universities compete for fewer federal grants.
KU's agreement with the Soviet Writer's Union, by which the Union pays for the writer's transportation from Moscow to Kansas, is unique.
But if the federal government's budget ax brings an end to the program, KU students lose more than the opportunity to hear famous Soviet writers - they also lose the chance to gain an understanding of a society that often is confusing and frightening to Americans.
These are the kinds of exchanges that both U.S. and Soviet leaders have been calling for. Now, at a time when such a program seems more necessary than ever, it is being dismissed as waste. A negotiating table in Geneva is not the only place where improved relations begin.
Last spring, three administrative offices worked together to help bring Soviet author Sergey Zalygin to KU. They fought for the financing and were rewarded for their efforts.
But times are tough throughout the University. Funds for anything are hard to find.
Unless the federal grant can be regained, the program will be cut and a unique opportunity for KU students will be lost
Misdirected policy
Starting this fall, all new firefighters in Lawrence must sign a no-smoking contract.
That, in itself, is not so unusual. Such policies are becoming quite prevalent in American life. But this one has a few different kinks in it.
first, the policy applies only to new firemen. Not only are present firemen able to continue smoking, they are free to do so in the fire stations.
The fire department says that smoking is dangerous for firefighters because it affects their physical fitness and therefore can affect their ability to safely perform their duties. But apparently, smoking only presents a danger to
any new firemen who will be hired.
The second problem is that the fire department overstepped its bounds in requiring that new firemen not smoke on or off the job.
To control smoking in the work place, and thereby protect the rights of non-smokers, is one thing. But to invade a person's private life is another.
If the fitness and safety argument is used to justify controlling firefighters' lives away from work, then it should apply to all firemen, not just newly hired firemen.
Physical fitness and the ability to perform one's duties can be measured and observed. If a firefighter's off-the-job habits are interfering with his work, he should be disciplined.
But a contradictory policy is not the way to handle the problem.
News staff
News staff
Lauretta McMillen...Editor
Kady McMaster...Managing editor
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John Hanna...Campus editor
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Opinions
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College is too wonderful to waste
At the beginning of World War II, Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his war journal that he felt himself to be on the way to self-discovery, but only in the sense that he was "thinking now without looking over my shoulder at certain injunctions" but with total freedom and gratitudiness, out of purely disinterested curiosity.
Christopher
Cunnyngham
Columnist
In a way, he was transformed into the perfect college freshman.
Except for the quality of the food, there can be no comparison between the collegiate life of a freshman and World War II. And it is not my intention to prove one. I would, however, like to hold up Sartre's statement as an ideal thought for someone beginning a college career.
College freshman take the first step toward what your parents so lovingly called "the real world." Remember, they also told you that
Sartre attained a certain mental freedom from such social restrictions as peers and their expectations. He worked his thought process down as smooth as he could get it.
you would end up as a garbageman if you didn't get your grammar school grades up (as if being a garbageman was somehow less important than paper pushing).
He was beat, baby
That's one of the primary gifts or advantages of college. The sense of liberation is not merely a figment of the mind, reeling in its new found freedom from the spectre of parental "guidance." It's a tangible commodity that can almost be tasted (and, if tried, would have a vagely alcoholic taste). It is as if all the doors, walls and windows were blown out of the tiny room you had been forced to live in and all the opportunities crawled in to sit on your lap.
College is the most lenient and forgiving environment in which to broaden your horizons beyond your wildest imagination. You have the chance to make and make yourself as many times as you wish, subley.
gradually, or overnight like a freak storm.
You can alter what you were — a product of an environment with limited options and influences — now
It is as if all the doors, walls, and windows were blown out of the tiny room you had to live in and all the opportunities crawled in to sit on your lap.
ly. No one will open their long coat outside of the Union and ask "Hey want some enlightenment?" How about a little self-discovery? Maybe a quarter bag of self-edification? It's good stuff." You can study with your face in a book for four years straight
that you have entered an environment with many different cultural influences. You will probably never have this opportunity again in your lifetime. Limiting yourself to chatting parties and mindless routine seems a shameful waste of human potential.
But this process does not come easi-
and there will be no neon light blink-
ing at the end that reads "YOU
HAVE ATTAINED ALL
KNOWLEDGE".
I don't mean to sound trite, but most problems in life arise out of misunderstanding, whether it be another person, race, system, different set of values, cheese puffs or the trickle down theory. If a person can get behind and inside opposing cultural or political poles, he or she has a much better chance to understand or interpret the problems that have been raised (except, of course, the trickle down theory).
your four years at KU will be over very quickly. Look ahead at the things you will be able to do during them and the opportunities you will have. Find your sweet spot in time to enjoy it like an extra-large box of Raisinets.
Subtleties escape computerized eye
As a source of comic insight, the eternal Battle of the Sexes slowly gives way in this century to the Battle of Man against Machine.
That match awaits only its James Thurber, or maybe its Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, to bring out the full range of ironies and cross purposes involved. In the meantime, one must make do with periodic reports from the battlefront.
Those rooting for man may recall the distinct if perhaps unworthy thrill engendered not long ago when once again the best chess-playing machines in the world got beaten by the best chess-playing humans. It was a small but satisfying victory in a continuing match.
Well, make that Man 2. Machine 0. The new computer software that assays to out-write man also seems to have gone down for the count. For the time being, the editor's occupation, like the calling of chess whis, sees safe.
These new writing programs, like all computerized approaches, are as simple as one-two. They are designed to outperform the old-fashioned human nervous system, with all its complexities, by constant attention to basics that tend to bore and therefore trip humans.
For example, the computer writer is a whiz at spotting misspellings, offering lists of synonyms at thesaurus length, flashing red at every use of the passive voice, spotting the 1,000
best-known clichés and sounding the alarm at sentence fragments
It all sounded like a good idea at the (computer-worshipping) time. Indeed, the idea may benefit poor writers, just as computer chess programs can teach poor chess
Paul Greenberg Columnist
Plenty. When to use a sentence fragment. When playing chess, the computer may do very well as long as the problem remains routine or can be solved by complete, idiot-like concentration on the simple, or even on an agglomeration of simplicies. But the computer's approach to language is arithmetical, not poetical. It may be very quick and intelligent, but it doesn't have enough sense. Or sensitivity.
players a lot. So what's wrong with writing by computer?
A computer can master 101 or even 1,001 openings, whether of a chess game or an essay, yet lack the intuitive grasp or the stroke of imagination needed in the end game. It doesn't know when to break the rules. It can't tell the difference between a sentence fragment that's the result of sloppy
writing and one that makes a point.
It may not be able to appreciate a great failure, preferring the kind of mediocrity that obeys the rules of grammar, spelling and syntax — rules it tends to contuse with language. (Like too many English teachers) In short, the software was high on the prosale qualities that don't add up to good prose.
For example: one program — TurboLightning by Borland International — was a whiz at spelling but couldn't tell whether "effect" or "affect" was the proper word to use at the time, which doubtless gives it something in common with many humans.
Another, Grammatik, gives Abe Lincoln low marks for saying,
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war . . . " Too weak.
Lincoln does no better when he's graded by RightWriter, which has a thing about negative constructions and would tinker with his sentence: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here."
John Updike's prose rates a snappy warning: "complex and may be difficult to read." And of WrongWriter questions Mark Twain's fanciful style. ("Is this appropriate?"
All of these programs would probably flunk Thomas Wolfe's stuff (certainly in the unedited hunks he submitted to Maxwell Perkins for editing) and give high marks to
Army training manuals.
Those machines programmed to spot sexist words nag a lot. Grammatik, for example, questions every use of words like "him" or "her". Surely it would disapprove of the headline Man 2, Machine 0—being unaware that Man, in time honored tradition, embraces woman.
How would you program a sense of humor into a machine? Or program this deus ex machina to use humble judgment when it has so much speed and intelligence? For there is at least one human quality this software can imitate convincingly: hubris.
Is it really a victory for man if he cannot yet design a machine that will write its creator? Or is it a defeat for man the inventor and user of tools?
For to outwrite man is, in important ways, to outthink and outfeel a remarkable creature. One wonders what RightWriter would have to say about these sentiments: 'What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action like an angel! In apprehension how like a god!'
Would Hamlet's speech be penalized for repetition, sexism, poor grammar, too many exclamation marks and questionable enthusiasm? Would Will Shakespeare rate a 0.38 out of 1.00? O brave new world, that hath such computerized creatures in 't!
Mailbox
Disoriented facts
A friend of mine pointed out a piece of information in the new edition of "Disorientation" that might be misinterpreted. So, I would like to make a public clarification.
The article on drugs states that the overdose level for LSD is 50,000 times the normal street dose. This is the lethal overdose level. Bad trips, though infrequent, may occur with a normal street dose or less. Taking more than one or two normal street
doses at once is not generally recommended.
Boog Highberger Lawrence graduate student
Please, take it back
The remarks made by Thomas Docking in Manhattan on Thursday concerning the sale of grain to anyone with the money are understandable given the dire farm problem. However, South Africa is a special case.
regime"
"Equally bizarre is Mike Hayden's opposition to the sales on "moral grounds." The leader of his party, President Reagan, has done everything he can to delay sanctions
I have no doubt of your aberrance of the South African government's apartheid policies. Mr Docking, but it strikes me as bizarre that a Democratic candidate in the state of Kansas, a freedom loving and racist-hating state, could find himself supporting the sale of grain to a Nazi-like regime.
that would hasten the fall of the Pretoria regime.
As with divestment, no practical effect in economic terms may be felt by refusing to deal with South Africa.
I respectfully ask you to reconsider your position, Mr. Docking, and make it clear that Kansans of both parties do not want to profit, no matter how dire the farm situation, from the misery of black South Africans
John DeVore
John DeVore Lawrence sophomore
.