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Wednesday, August 27, 1986 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Don't forget the students
Thanks to some creative planning by the University of Kansas Athletic Corporation, about 600 more fans should be able to attend Jayhawk basketball games in Allen Field House this season.
That fact undoubtedly came as welcome news to some loyal Jayhawk followers who had to listen to games on the radio or watch them on television when the 15,129 seats in Allen were consistently sold out.
But it will be even better news if KUAC remembers to include students when tickets for the new seats are sold.
It's the screaming, chanting student sections of the field house that have charged the swelterting field house for the Jayhawks during the last several years.
Head coach Larry Brown repeatedly has praised the student fans, while opposing coaches have grown to dread a trip to Lawrence. They are always forced to play in an almost bewareable din.
We're suggesting a 50-50 split.
On the other hand, Williams Fund members and other nonstudent ticket holders also provide a lot of the support for the Athletic department in many different ways. So it makes sense that they, too, should have some of the new seats made available to them.
Williams Fund members usually can provide more monetary support than students, and every program needs money.
But students provide a different — and much needed — form of support, and 300 more student voices in the confines of the field house couldn't hurt.
KHUM tower is bad plan
It's hard to understand why a radio station would want to build its transmitter tower near an airport landing strip. After all, planes would be sweeping the tower at all times of the day and night.
It seems like the station would only be endangering its investment.
But officials of KHUM-FM in Ottawa think their tower, scheduled to be built only nine nautical miles from Topeka's Forbes Field, will be safe.
Scott Davis, vice president of the station, admitted that the station didn't want to look for a new site. Repeating the review process to approve a new site, he said, would no doubt delay progress on the tower's construction.
But the real questions are: why did the station want to build the tower near the airport in the first place; and then, why did the Douglas County Commissioners and the Federal Aviation Administration approve the tower without first consulting the airlines that land their planes there?
Supporters of the tower site say that the FAA's approval is enough and that the planned location for the tower should not be changed. Opponents say the site was approved before United Airlines began service to Topeka.
The radio station concedes that the construction of the tower will force United pilots to make a 200-foot adjustment on dicey, inherently dangerous instrument-only landing approaches.
Instead of having the pilots make adjustments, and possibly force United to discontinue service to Topeka, why not just find another place to build the tower?
Army study is dirty work
The University of Kansas has joined the Reagan administration's chemical warfare bandwagon.
The United States stopped production and development of chemical and germ bombs in 1969 because of their potentially horrible effects. President Reagan, citing Soviet advances in chemical warfare, lobbied to have the 1969 ban repealed — and won.
The result has been a flood of Army grant money to study neurotoxins and their effects. The Army also plans to build a new generation of chemical bombs that will bring us in line with the Soviets.
Researchers at the Med Center won't talk about the studies. However, Elias Michaelis, biology professor and coordinator of the research in Lawrence, said the studies were focusing on finding the most potent toxins and
Two million of those Army dollars are being spent by KU researchers at the Lawrence campus and at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kan., to study the effects of natural and man-made neurotoxins.
evaluating the body's ability to defend against the chemicals. They also will look for ways to reverse the chemical's effects. He said the study would not evaluate the toxins' military application.
But what will prevent the Army from using the researchers' findings, which will identify potent and possibly incurable toxins, to create their new generation of chemical weapons?
While the researchers may not intend for their results to be used for aggressive purposes, what is going to stop the Army from doing just that?
Research is an important function of any university. But when it is possible that the research results will be used to create an arsenal, the project should be rejected. It appears that it is too late for anything to be done about the University's decision to accept the Army money.
We learn from our mistakes. Accepting the grants was a mistake.
In the future, officials should look at all the possible uses for research results before they step into the lab.
News staff
News staff
Lauretta McMillen ... Editor
Kady McMaster ... Managing editor
Tad Clarke ... News editor
David Silverman ... Editorial editor
John Hanna ... Campus editor
Frank Harrell ... Sports editor
Jacki Kelly ... Photo editor
Tom Eblen ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
David Nixon ... Business manager
Gregory Kaul ... Retail sales manager
Denise Stephens ... Campus sales manager
Sally Depew ... Classified manager
Lisa Weems ... Production manager
Duccaita Calhoun ... National sales manager
Beverly Kastens ... Traffic manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
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Opinions
Call back McCallum's double play
It cost the taxpayers a hefty buck to give Napoleon McCallum a very fine college education.
he went to the U.S. Naval Academy for four years at a cost to the government of about $140,000.
At the end of four years, he graduated, and that's when the taxpayers are supposed to get a return on their investment.
McCallum became a commissioned naval officer and is obligated to spend five years on active duty. It was a commitment he accepted when he went through Annapolis and took his commission as an ensign.
But because we are a sports-crazed society — and that includes the Pentagon — the taxpayers are going to get something else for their money
Besides being a naval cadet, McCallum was a football player, and quite talented. He set several records as a running back and was named an All-American.
We are going to get a somebody who is paid handsomely to run with a football.
He is so good that the Los Angeles Raiders drafted him to play pro ball even though he has that obligation to serve in the Navy. The football sharpies clearly thought some kind of deal with the Navy could be worked out.
And they guessed right. Navy Secretary John Lehman is allowing
McCallum said he had talked to the Navy brass and "they've said it would be great to use you for something you're better suited for -- public relations and recruiting for the Navy."
McCallum to be a professional football player and a part-time naval officer.
Naturally, McCallum is enthusiastic. Although life as a naval officer isn't bad — especially if you're an Annapolis man — there's far more money to be made scoring touchdowns. And I suppose running back a kickoff is more exciting than going on deck to see if the enlisted men have given it a proper mopping.
But as a taxpayer, I'm not sure that I want my money spent to provide the National Football League with still another twinkle-toed running back.
I assume that the Navy needs well-trained young officers, and that's why we spend $150 million a year on the Naval Academy.
vesting $140,000 on the education of a young officer, the Navy's brass could find something more useful for him to do.
Aren't these the same people who keep rushing to the White House and Congress, pleading for more and more billions to keep the Russians from our shores?
They should explain how our national defense is made more secure by Napoleon McCallum running back a kickoff in Los Angeles.
And I would think that after in-
Public relations and recruiting?
Just who is he going to recruit? His offensive line?
Professional football is a business, with franchises worth up to $100 million. And the highly paid athletes who clobber each other on the field are part of this business.
So I don't understand why McCallum should be permitted to work in another business when he already is paid by the Navy to work for them. And after he has been educated at our expense to do just that.
If McCallum can work in the football business, why can't some ordinary swabby swabby in and say: "Hey, admiral, my uncle has a furniture store, and business is pretty good, and he can use me to sell living room sets. Pays pretty good. How's about if I do that for six or seven months of the year and swab decks for you the rest of the time?"
When I was an enlisted man, I might have told my commanding officer: "Say, would it be OK if I go home for six months and help my old man run the family tavern? I promise to try to recruit any of the customers who are still on their feet at closing time." But I doubt if my C.O. would have gone for the deal.
When he was still chief of staff of the Army in 1947, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't go for a similar deal.
At that time, the most famous college football players in America were Felix 'Doc' Blanckard and Glenn Davis, both all-Americans at West Point. When they graduated, they asked the Pentagon whether they could have a few months off from the Army to play pro football.
Ike told them to pin on their second lieutenant bars and had them shipped overseas.
So, since the Navy decided that Ensign McCallum should serve his country by playing pro football, I'd appreciate a tax rebate.
Putting my kids through school cost me a bundle. I don't think I should have to finance the education of someone who might end up doing Lite Beer commercials.
Professorial optimism is misplaced
Archie Brown, an Oxford scholar, has a gift for irony, even if it be the unconscious sort. His article, "Change in the Soviet Union," in a recent issue of "Foreign Affairs" is a stock response from the West to a new Soviet leader — cautious hope. And it ends, "though the fate of Gorbache's policy innovation will be determined essentially within the Soviet Union, it requires something more from the West than the stock response."
Mikhail Gorbacev today sets off the same warm fuzzies in certain Western precincts, notably university classrooms and editorial offices, as Yuri Andropov once did.
Comrade Andropov also was going to revamp the system and introduce practical reforms. The Soviet Union was finally going to have a leader with the muscle to attack corruption, sloth, and an irrational economy. There was little more in Comrade Andropov's background than an old KGB man to encourage such hopes. But that was brushed aside. It was
explained that, once given power at the top, he would reform the system.
Brown now says of Gorbach,
less-than-dashing success as com
missar for agriculture: "The fact that when he was the Central Committee secretary responsible for agriculture such changes were not instituted on a wide scale is sometimes cited as evidence of a lack of reforming zeal for Gorbachev's part.
"It should be more correctly interpreted as a reflection of the strength of political and administrative resistance, which Gorbachev was in a position to overcome only when he had the resources of the general secretaryship at his disposal." This
is where many of us came in.
Archie Brown is nothing if not an optimist. Anybody who can be upbeat about Soviet agriculture can be upbeat about Soviet anything.
In this piece for Foreign Affairs, he writes that "perhaps a more surprising obstacle to the sale of American grain to the U.S.S.R. than the deterioration of superpower relations may yet emerge — a significant improvement in Soviet agriculture performance."
But even before the article saw print, he had to add a cautionary footnote. "The accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant could provide unexpected complications for Soviet agriculture, but the extent of the setback — how much of the surrounding Ukrainian farmland has been rendered unusable — is at the time of this writing unclear."
Not even Chernobyl, and more relevant, the Soviets' same old heavy-handed handling of the aftermath may be able to shake the faith of the West's Pollyannas in a new
Soviet premier.
Let it be said that Gorbachev is a notch or two above his immediate, semi-comatose predecessor as a diagnostician of what asks the Soviet system. That is, he can point out the obvious. He did so in the spring of this year when he told a meeting of automotive workers: "Can you manage an economy which runs into trillions of rubles from Moscow? It is absurd, comrades. Incidentally, it is in this — in the fact that we have attempted to manage everything from Moscow up until very recently — that our common and main mistake lies."
Well, he's getting warm.
The main mistake of communism is communism. But one can't expect the general secretary of the party to admit as much, even if he should come to suspect it.
After Russia's new leader had made his cogent diagnosis of overcentralization, what did he propose to do about it?
Nicaraqua more akin to Cuban fiasco
Congressional critics of President Reagan's $100 million aid package for the contras fighting the Marxist-led government of Nicaragua warn "no more Vietnams," but Cuba may be a better test case.
Fidel Castro, a charismatic revolutionary in Havana, frustrated President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the closing years of his two terms with Cuba's leftist policies and ties to the Soviet Union. Ike turned over the problem to his youthful successor, John F. Kennedy.
The CIA program Kennedy inherited was far along in recruiting, training and arming a group of Cuban exiles to invade their homeland and topple Castro's government.
The covert plan, held secret from congressional scrutiny and public opinion, ended in disaster at the Bay
or Pigs. Kennedy rejected the CIA's call for critical air cover for the disorganized invasion force, and it founded.
Units of the U.S. Army are in almost constant exercises with the
E. Michael Meyers
UPI
troops of neighboring Honduras. U.S. servicemen are building landed strips and storing arms near the border. A Pentagon official says U.S. forces could invade Nicaragua as easily as "rolling off a log."
Like the Cubans of 25 years ago, the Nicaraguaans fighting the government of President Daniel Ortega are largely recruited and advised by the CIA. The CIA has had little success
with the contras and Congress shut them out of the program in 1984 over concerns about deepening U.S. involvement.
The CIA will be unleashed again under the new aid program awaiting expected passage in September. But this time the training program will include special military forces such as the Green Berets. It is intended to sharpen up the contrast into a disciplined, effective fighting force
If they indeed can be molded into this force, the contras must find what the Cubans were seeking and the CIA promised Kennedy — a widespread, popular uprising. It never arose in Cuba.
The Ortega government in Managua threw out a despised dictator, Anastasia Somoa, who had been tolerated by Washington for
years. There is a deep resentment in Nicaragua about the Yankee to the north.
U. arms and advisers can fuel the fire of the Nicaraguan conflict — as do Soviet arms and Cuban advisers — but cannot easily seize victory.
the contras must find and nourish local support. Without it their cause is hollow and the next, dreaded step in the conflict is the entry of U.S. combat troops.
conflate troop.
Washington must decide whether the contrasts are on anybody's side other than the CIA and some exiles who lost their wealth in the revolution.
Within months it should be decided whether the "freedom fighters" are a legitimate force backed by the people or a misguided and ineffective group of mercenaries who cannot win alone.