4
Thursday. September 18, 1975
University Dally Kansan
A seasonal crime
School days, school days
School days, school days
Shining through the tear gas haze
Striking and riots and National Guard
Brick-throwing crowds in the school.
house yard
Teachers are stalking for higher pay
You can't be any school today
Oh what the heck—we'll go out and play
'Cause we're just a couple of kids
When I was a little kid, fall was my favorite time of year. I could hardly wait to start school and find out who my new teacher was, who was in my class and who I got to sit by. I passed idyllic days, learning the alphabet, painting with watercolors and playing kickball at recess.
Life isn't quite so simple for some grade schoolers these days. For children in New York, Chicago, Boston and Louisville, in fact, life is quite complex. These children are learning hard and fast the harsh realities of racism, inflation, violence and civil disorder. They are reading picket signs instead of primers and learning new four-letter words from crowds of protesters instead of the words in their spellers.
FOR 350,000 children in Chicago, school didn't start on time this fall; 27,700 teachers were on strike. In it were other teachers went on strike as well.
Demands of 80,000 teachers in New York finally were met this week, barely dispelling thoughts that there would be no school for 1.1 million children, a fact that prompted an attenuation a strike, which would have virtually closed down the city's schools.
Although the children in Chicago and other areas weren't able to readily resume their studies this fall, perhaps they will off than some of the students who did.
In Louisville, protests over busing raged on, marked by demonstrations, picket signs and violence. At Valley High School in Louisville, an angry mob of about 10,000 people began throwing rocks. One rock smashed through a car windshield, severely injuring a small girl when it hit her in the face.
The Valley High incident seemed to be a catalyst that sparked a chain of violence. A crowd of about 1,000 people then damaged 37 school buses, burning two of them. About 40 policemen were injured in that incident.
IN BOSTON, the atmosphere is tense and charged with apprehension. Fearing a repeat of the riots that marred the last school year, officials mobilized a force of 1,600 city and state policemen and 100 iot-trained U.S.
marshals to maintain order during the first days of school.
Who is suffering from the chaos in the schools? Is it the teachers who want more medical, dental and sabbatical benefits? Is it the protesters who don't want their children bused or don't want the schools integrated? Is it the politicians and school administrators who are concerned about their images?
No. It's the children who are suffering—the boy in Chicago who can't go to school because his teacher is absent and the little girl in Louisville who must attend class in public, or ride across town, only to be met by the insults of ieering crowds of protesters.
THE CHILDREN in these cities are victims of a crime. It is a crime that is being committed by thousands—striking teachers, protesters, administrators, riot squads, legislators who wage busing battles in Congress and countless others. That crime is robbery and these children are being robbed of a very valuable asset—the right to get an education.
It's a very sad reflection on the state of the nation when children aren't able to go to school without fearing for their lives.
The right to an education is a right that no one should be deprived of. For children in the ghetto of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and Louisville, it may be the only hope for advancement.
Busing will probably remain a controversial issue for some time. It's unfortunate that other cities didn't adopt the plan of gradual integration used so successfully in New Orleans. The children are the ones who have to suffer long rides to strange neighborhoods on uncomfortable buses.
IT'S UNFORTUNATE that busing must be the means by which integration is achieved, but if it must be used, every school should be made to quell riots at schools.
The problem of striking teachers could perhaps be more easily resolved. According to National Education Association figures, there are presently about 500,000 unemployed teachers. If striking teachers refuse to go back to work, there is an ample supply of other teachers, some of whom will work.
It's sad indeed that these children are being forced out of the simple, innocent world of childhood into the complex muddle of adult society. And it is truly a crime that the thing at stake is an asset of unmeasurable value—an education.
Contributing Writer
BOSTON—W. Arthur Garrity Jr., the federal judge whose radical busing order has put Boston to the test, says that the "crus and magic" of his plan is the "magnet school," which will offer such attractive possibilities as possible pupils will粘牟 be bused out of their neighborhoods to attend them.
Mary McGrory
Education attracts all kinds
THE TONE OF Girls' Latin was set in its forbidding entrance. Around the hall stood plaster casts of the Caryatides, and they were covered with a temple porch on their heads. We often felt comparably oppressed. Many of us threw up before the mid-years and some girls had nervous breakdowns or a threatening threat of "funking out."
I went to a magnet school, which was not called that, in Boston during the Great Depression. Girls' Latin School taught me because its certain classical training held out the hope of passing the College Boards, or even a scholarship to Radcliffe. We traveled there by street car. At the end of the line, we hoped, I would job as a school teacher in the Boston School System.
But we were unabashed elitists and were sustained by the fact that a small group who went to their local high schools where the "standards" which were constantly held up to us were not so high—or so we
THE SCHOOL WAS founded around 1857, and the curriculum never changed. At 12, those of us who took the six-year course were drudging through Gai with Caesar and the ablative absolute. Later, Virgil introduced us to Dioe and Aeneas, and they learned of their chumy translations of their passions.
Relevance was not known. In our French class we memorized and recited in unison Charlemagne's language of origin. It wasn't much training for Paris, where we never expected to go anywhere. But for the College Board that were never out of mind.
IN OUR CLASS, there were two black girls—"colored" as we then called them. One was Corinne Howe, who was tall and smiling. The other whose name I have forgotten was delicate and graceful. They were always in motion, but smugly tolerant and, I suppose, treated them like mascots. They were a novelty. We never saw colored people except as we hurried down Columbus Avenue, a grim section of the city, on our way downtown.
Besides, the bigotry fashionable in the lower middle-class suburb where I lived was directed against the Jews. I was a victim of the complaint—I think it was the usual “international conspiracy”—they own all the banks, theaters, movies” variety. But it was prevalent regardless almost as a social grace.
I REMEMBER AN otherwise pleasant woman, a devout Catholic like so many of our students, the kitchen table to take a cup of tea, announcing, "Of course, I hate the Jews." It was as if she had offered a proof of her unassailable as a calling card.
Such attitudes filtered down to us children. There was only one Jewish family in our neighborhood, a quiet, gentle couple with two daughters, who played with us and belonged to the little neighborhood. He made the house across the street from mine. I inevitably, I guess, a move was made to expel them—"because they're jaws," as one of the members put it. In my 8-year-old soul, I felt queasy about it. The night the vote was cast, he did not come. I done, I merely begged off. I sat to do the dishes, which was not true.
AT GIRLS' LATIN School many of my classmates were Jewish. They were, it was at once apparent, stupiduous and ironic. They never groaned like the rest of us when the assignments were given out. They saved their allowances for tickets to the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Theater Game plays.
They set the pace and they came closest to meeting those attainable standards that we were measured by. I think even then, in our silly adolescent way, we perceived that they were responsible for education as our demanding teachers.
Later in Boston, antisemitism took an explicit, public and virulent form. In the early war years, synagogues were defaced and two were burned down. A friend of mine named Isabel Currier put aside a promising career as a novelist
to work for the Frances
sweeney Committee, one of the
first organizations to rise in
opposition to that sort of thing
Antismettism has gone out of style in Boston now. I dare say it slammed off at the advent of the great-breasted man of God, who great-breasted man of God, who
let it be known that charity was something more than a big contribution to the Coal Collection.
The children of the people I grew up with in Boston are now brushing up against another person almost unknown to them, and there is much anguish among blacks and whites.
Judge Garrity's magnet schools, with their intricate racial balancing formulas, are slow starting. But he may be on the right track. Education is a matter of progress in school, you learn more than what is set out in the curriculum.
(C) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
BY IAN KENNETH LOUDEN
'Breach of Faith' best of lot
BREACH OF FAITH by
Theodore H. White. Athenum
Publishers, 1975. 373 pages.
Bargaining should be avoided
Guest Writer
By JACK FISCHER
Under Kansas law, faculty members at the University now have the right to organize for collective bargaining with the administration concerning salary, working conditions and related issues. At hearings on these matters in summer the procedure to establish such a bargaining unit was begun.
But hold your cries of "More power to the faculty" and "Down with the insensitive administrators" for a minute. The law allowing this isn't, by its wording, designed to ac
commodate faculty or the University structure in general. Many professors play a straightforward common body of interests and for whom no formal form of representation exists.
It's not hard to see that finding common interests between the department of microbiology and, for example, the department of interior design would be a difficult task indeed. When you want to accomplish other disciplines at the University, it becomes apparent that one bargaining agent could only distort individual faculty needs or bewilder the administration with endless exceptions and stipulations.
Even assuming that more than one bargaining agent were to be established and that the other person expressed, why should a route so obviously ill-suited be taken when procedures of grievance and government, tailor-made, are administered, already exist?
Beyond the difficulty and lack of a need for collective effort, guidelines can lose in several ways. Guidelines designating the
jurdision of the faculty and that of the administration would clearly be set forth. This formalizing of procedure would obviously restrict than facilitate the University's operation.
The students, too, who somehow escaped mention throughout the hearings, have something at stake. They are collective bargaining. If faculty salary increases were given on a uniform basis, as would be likely with collective bargaining, they that comes from increases based on merit would be lost.
The quality of education would undoubtedly suffer.
LESS IMPORTANT, but nonetheless significant, would be the loss of professionalism for the faculty engendered by the adversary notions of collective bargaining. William Mitchell, associate special collections librarian, wrote a letter of dissent to participant at the Haitian embassy it this way: "The thing that will be lost, far more important than money, is the family feeling that we're all in this together."
Even without collective bargaining the state legislature has been increasingly responsive to the needs of the federal general. This responsiveness has been largely due to the efforts of Chancellor Dykes and it seems unlikely that a bargaining unit representative could develop a similar rapport for the Board of Regents, to whom the final decisions fall.
IF. AT SOME point in the future, any faculty members feel they are being dealt with by the University's administrative ministration, their first recourse should be to turn to the University's internal systems of government for redress. If so, they would use Streamline them. Unlike collective bargaining, they were made with the University in mind, and they will work for a better future. Energy and energy are gut into them.
For the faculty to rally in support of collective bargaining among employees, the administration would be unfortunate and shortsighted. What no one at this University needs is an extension of the time required by law in a form that was new intuitively for KU.
Since the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon more than one year ago, there has been a barrage of literature about Nixon and the Watergate scandal, including a gamut from the self-proclaimed innocence of Jeb Magruder to the brahuahe of Jimmy Breslin, and from an exciting, poorly written book by Woodward and Bernstein to a well written memoir by William Safire.
None of these books is satisfying. One reason is that it is still too soon to write a novel, but it will be on the Nixon and Watergate. However, Theodore White's "Breach of Faith" manages to overcome the prematurity of its subject, and a result it is the best of the lot.
SINCE HIS DAYS as China correspondent for Henry Luce's "Time," White has matured into what can be termed a trained philosopher. For years he has produced a creditable collection of books, from "Thunder Out of China" through the "Making of a President" series to "Breach of which is possibly his best."
In all his books, White maintains fair detachment and objectivity, yet he avoids blase neutralism. As much as that he does not fail to main problem with his book is that too much has yet to be told. There are too many gaps. In addition, White even questions his own ability to report on events. When he was involved so deeply
ONE REASON FOR THE success of White's book is his centrist political philosophy. He has a sage-twisted Safire twins right, White gives a fair evaluation of Nixon and the men around him. White isn't afraid to praise Nixon's accomplishments in foreign affairs but not to forget them. He also praises the loyalty of the often maligned Alexander Haig, who had the difficult job of holding the country together during the Vietnam War of Nixon's administration.
White respects the characters in his book. He never digresses into undue familiarity or condescending hindsight, even though he was occasionally a Nixon confident. White's treatment of the people involved contrasts with Satire's, who assumes that because he is a liberal, he can refer to Henry Kissinger as "Henry the K."
YET RESPECT AND understanding don't stop White's darning accusations. The title of the book outlines its theme and Richard Nixon's accusation. Richard Nixon was guilty of a breach of faith.
At the beginning of his lasa chapter White says, "The true crime of Richard Nixon was simple: He destroyed the myth of America together, and for this he was driven from power."
White apparently had access to more information than other journalists, and the first book that I read is knowledge makes the book worth buying. The chapter is a quickly moving, highly intensive narrative about actions of the principal characters involved
The myth is that the President is superior to all other men in America, that he can stand pressures and strains that other men can't. White believes that politics in America is the binding and secular religion. The Republican religion. Without the essential belief in politics the nation starts to come apart.
"BREACH OF FAITH" is literate and informative. It begins with a coverage of the last few days of the Nixon presidency. Much of White's material is new.
with Nixon at the end of his administration. White gives new insights into Nixon, his family, his staff and other figures such as Sen. Barry Sanders, who served as Executive Council James St. Claire.
IN OTHER chapters, White examines Nixon and American politics. He goes back to 1952 to find what penumbra of events finally led to the fatal breach. He describes the complexity of Nixon, the quirks of the country and the intricacies of the Republican party. The book is straightforward and White is straightforward in his reportive approach. No matter how much one may know about Watergate, White maintains the reader's interest.
One quality of White really stands out. He admits to sometimes being speculative about the answers to questions such as the effect of Watergate on America and the presidency. He points out the gaps in his book in another author will fill them.
The public will hear more about Watergate. More of the President's men will try to prove their innocence. Others will use the publishing industry as a means of paying their taxes. They can get on the bandwagge as Breslin did, and eventually Richard Nixon may even tell part of the story.
Maybe in 10 years someone will be able to put all the stories together, separate the fact from the fantasy and finally write the story. If you succeed until then "Breach of Faith" is a worthy alternative.
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