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Monday, September 8, 1975
University Daily Kansan
COMMENT
Opinions on this page reflect only the view of the writer.
A hospital case
The issue of racial discrimination at the KU Medical Center has been in the news recently, specifically concerning Nolan Jones, a black physician who recently graduated from the KU medical school.
In 1973, while Jones was still a medical student, he made a racial discrimination complaint against the Med Center with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He was also a member of a group of black students that filed a complaint with the Med Center administration that charged Dante Scarpelli, chairman of the department of pathology, with racial discrimination and asked for his removal.
Scarpell firmly believes that academic performance standards should be the same for all medical students. An article he wrote for the April 17, 1975, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine presents his position on this quite clearly. According to the article, different standards for minorities for admissions and academic performance would result in the tacit admission of a second-class status for minority students.
Instead, Scarpelli points to reeducation programs for minority students in college and in the beginning of medical school as a better method for increasing the numbers of minority physicians.
Jones' stand on the lowering of standards for minority students hasn't been made clear. Jones apparently thinks that Scarpelli's strict adherence to traditional academic standards has proven discriminatory. However, Jones, in reference to Scarpelli, has said, "Don't tell me you are lowering your standards to let me in. Let me learn like the others."
The two ideas expressed by Jones seem to me contradictory.
In short, the problem of increasing the number of minority physicians is difficult and has roots in the earliest levels of education. Some major changes should be made in the educational programs and programs that have been started to provide health care in minority areas until more minority physicians are available.
Even if the schools were upgraded so that most minority students had adequate learning abilities, there would be a time lag between the upgrading of the schools and the appearance of more minority students on the college level who could meet the present medical school academic standards. In the meantime, perhaps for minority physicians could be established, maybe by the National Health Service Corps. These clinics could provide health care until an adequate number of minority physicians become available.
While there is a crying need for minority physicians, the lowering of academic standards for one particular group of medical students isn't a good idea. However, Scarpell's concept of reeducating minority college and medical student standards doesn't go far enough. Academic problems usually start at a much earlier level and by college, the damage is difficult to reverse.
Paula Jolly
Contributing Writer
Bias roots deep
What is needed, therefore, is a basic improvement in grade and high schools attended by minority students, especially in grade schools where learning and reading problems begin. Unfortunately, until school districts are well integrated and until minorities have a strong voice on school boards, the problem of poor quality schools in minority areas will probably continue.
Adam Oelberg entered a hospital in Anni Arb, Mich., to have surgery on an arthritic hip on Aug. 15. His heart and lungs were in perfect shape. Ten days after the surgery was scheduled, Oelberg was dead of a respiratory failure and possibly the tenth victim of a psychopathic killer.
The facts of the case are frightening:
—Since July 1, 10 persons who entered the Ann Arbor hospital with sound
communication were killed or mortally injured of unsurprising respiratory failures.
—There have been more than 51 unexplained respiratory failures there since
—Both Oelberg and another patient who died, Benny C. Blaine, suffered three unexplained respiratory failures each before their deaths.
—A mysterious blue substance was found in the breathing apparatus of another patient. The apparatus should have contained only a clear substance.
—The cause of Oelberg's death was determined to be an overdose of a paralyzing drug, Pavulon, which is a powerful muscle relaxer.
—FBI agents believe that someone intentionally administered the paralyzing drug to unsuspecting patients.
I find it extremely frightening to think that within a two-month span, 51 respiratory failures and 10 deaths could occur within one hospital and the public
could be kept totally in the dark. Until
all of the bizarre deaths were released.
It is even more frightening to think that law enforcement officials have no suspects and that the deaths have continued to occur.
When law enforcement personnel are dealing with ritualistic murders, such as those committed by Jack the Ripper, the Zodiac Killer or Charles Manson, it's not hard to see how they could be difficult, if not impossible, to solve. Those killers struck in various neighborhoods, cities and states, leaving only the gruesome similarities of their executions to link the crimes.
When 10 identical deaths (a few too many to be accidental or coincident) occur within the confines of one hospital, however, it seems odd that more progress hasn't been made toward solving the crime.
The thing that puzzles me the most about the whole nightmare is why people with friends or relatives in the real world would allow them to remain there.
It's almost a sacrilege to American health care institutions to think that the authorities in Ann Arbor and Washington can stand by helplessly in the face of mercy and healing, can be turned into a slaughterhouse. Jain Penner
Contributing Writer
WASHINGTON--The man's voice on the telephone was low and strained. He gave his name, but asked that it not be printed. He wanted to report that, after a lapse of three years, he had been visited by the FBI again twice since last fall.
No rest for draft evaders
Mary McGrory
"My son was indicted five years ago for violation of the Selective Service Act," he said. "He went to Canada. Last September, his five years as a landed immigrant were up, just as the clementry program was announced. He called up and sent me a letter, and it was now or never for Canadian citizenship. He decided to become a Canadian citizen.
"Before, the FBI used to come around every six months or so, very polite and nice-looking young men. Last fall they were back, and then just three weeks ago,
"I said to them, 'Why are you guys coming around after five months?'" he asked. He was a client of theirs and asked me if he had applied for clemency and if he had become a Canadian citizen. I wouldn't
"My son got his draft notice four months before his 26th birthday. I'm a veteran, I was in the artillery in Europe and the Pacific both. He said to me, 'Dad, I hope you don't think I'm a slacker, but I will be damned for it.' I said to anybody over nothing. 'I told him I agreed with him, and he took off.
"He has a poor-paying job up there. He's an English major and they've got a lot of them. He works in a VISTA-type program. He reads to blind people. He likes doing it.
"We've seen him once in the five years. We're going up next month. He can't come home from the hospital on the indictment list. And you know they have this policy of exclusion. My son is an undesirable alien. The Canadians he was a desirable citizen.
On Aug. 7, the Toronto Star printed a story about the FBI
FBI spokesman Tom Harrington at first vehemently denied the existence of such a list, insisted agents were trying to get the information later. Later, he called up with an amendment to this account.
calling on families to compile a list of draft evaders who have become Canadian citizens, the list to be disseminated to border points to bar their re-entry to the United States.
Agents who find out from their house calls that draft evaders have become Canadian citizens report them to the U.S. government, which decides whether the evader can come back. Sometimes he will decreme that the indictment will be dropped, but that "the fellow accused shall be sent again." Or he will decreme that the indictment will not be
dropped and that the fellow will never come to the U.S. again.
Copies of such reports are sent to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department.
"It is a fair assumption that those names go into the watchbook at the border," the FBI spokesman said. The watchbook is a list of people to be excluded.
aliens who fled the United States to avoid military service.
Even a ic_or from the attorney general attesting to dropping of draft charges is no guarantee against exclusion. Bill Landerman, a Canadian lawyer, was hired by a fernbacher, who had such a letter, was held up at the border in Calais, Maine, by a hardened official who told him he would have to answer questions which would determine whether he could determine. If the official said he went to Canada to avoid the draft, he would not let him in.
Landerman the call Don Marks the War Resistency Information officer and was advised to answer no questions, sign nothing and come back. He did, and entered into a fight later at another crossing.
The compiling of the attorney general's list of indictables is in a scandal. It was drawn up arbitrarily and varies widely from one state to another. Francisco dropped 92 per cent of the cases, 15 juridictions dropped none, indicating the kind of review or none at all.
President Ford's clemency program is aimed at excluding those who fled out of conscience. He doesn't want them back in the country, and landscape in an election year. He's letting U.S. attorneys and border guards carry out his stated purpose of "healing the wounds of war." He knows it's still being bought at the center of the message he is: "You can't come home again."
(C) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
Parking permit perils
She told me I had nothing to worry about.
Ticket commences Catch-22
"You say you have a medical permit, Mr. Goldman?"
I looked at her flustered face and tried to believe her. Anna, the girl in front of Parking window, pale before a crush of students which threatened to grow nasty, was looking at Goldstein's name right.
I ignored the ominous beginning, including the lock on the office door, the bars on the window and the security
I turned again to my clerk.
camera—all shouting "Man the barricades!" to the harried troops within.
I turned again to my clerk.
“Are you positive that I'm not on a bad check list and that my
Debbie Gump
Associate Editor
credit rating will live a long and happy life?"
"Well, we don't keep bad check lists as such so I don't think you have anything to
worry about. But why don't you come back when things calm down," she said with an eye toward the girl at the window.
She was having no better
permit for a Goldman, she told
the hapless Goldstein, who by
passing the war cars and had a hupster.
I wanted to believe my clerk.
The check had been caught in the middle of a bank switch, so there had been no attempt to put a fast one past the department. There was no reason to end
The only serious quarrel arose last semester when an appeal on one of my several tickets was denied. I thought it a mute chirchil of them not to enter the parking lot, and a parking in a frozen, deserted lot when further travel meant certain disaster on ice.
Readers Respond
Ho hum. Another semester,
another shortage of textbooks,
and another letter to the Karans
from David Kowalewski lec-
'To the Editor:
what had been an untroubled relationship.
Book practices defended
turing us in the arbitrary abuse of bookstore bureaucrats.
Enough is enough, David. Thirty-eight per cent of the 50 faculty interviewed are "dissatisfied." So what? A good political scientist might have learned that the survey and identified areas of constructive improvement before flying figures around.
Did Mr. Kowalewski realize that book orders are turned in late, books get caught in transit and departments are forced to open new sections of classes for students? Does his book腕手们 are_requested? His letter whips up visions of sadistic bookstore employees reaching orgasms from purposefully under-ordering books.
Books are expensive, as any student knows. It is correspondingly expensive for the bookstore to continually over-order books only to later return them. If an instructor consistently over-orders by 20 per cent of students, then instructors consistently over-order (or underorder), adjustments are made to instructors' estimates. It saves the students money.
But how many times are books missing because of this practice and how many times are shortages due to overstocking? How was the study made of the question during the spring of 1974. Let's look at Mr. Kowalewski's department (political science)
just as an example. Out of a total of 201 different titles ordered by the department, reorders were necessary for 29.4 percent of the books due to over-employment and only five were due to the bookstore inventory control. The department ordered a total of 6,808 texts, 5,337 were purchased; therefore, 16.6 per cent of the books ordered were unused. In some departments, even with the bookstore's inventory control, over half of the books ordered went unused. In other departments, amazingly many books are made with little waste.
I believe that very little can be done about the present problem. The system is implemented at KU so that textbook demand can be measured more accurately than by a survey of sometimes rough estimates.
But even this will not solve all problems. Last year I investigated a complaint that the bookmaker, the complaint being that too few books were ordered for his class. A quick check showed that he had failed to order and his texts were on the shelves all the time. Students had falsely informed him that the bookstore was out of stock.
Jon Jossserand
Johnson Senior
Memorial Corporation Board
Member
However, the department has generally been kind to me. They didn't squawk when I registered my three-wheel government-surplus mailcarrier as a two-door hardtop car and took it away when my permit expired before my parking habits did.
But they didn't take too kindly to a bad check. A hold was clamped on my registration materials until the matter was cleared up. Peewed, I stormed up to Strong Hail to point out to her that he should ensure that the bad check had long since been covered.
Unfortunately, it was Catch-22. Another unpaid, unrelated check awaited.
I took the setback in stride,
but another look at the hold card
sent a chill through my checkbook.
"MUST PAY IN CASH. INSUFFICIENT FUNDS CHECK."
I looked at the clerk and asked, "Does this mean I'm labeled at an early age as a bad check passer?"
"Sort of, I guess," the clerk said, a little taken aback. "But don't worry about it. It doesn't mean anything."
"You know that and I know that, but the next clerk I run into isn't going to know that."
"Don't worry. If it really bothers you, and it shouldn't because no one takes it seriously, come back after enrolment and we'll get it straightened out."
Doubting her faith in the system, I began to write a check for the unaid ticket, but the clerk began to cough nervously. I glanced up and saw her look of anguish.
"Can't you pay for it in cash?"
So I left Parking and Security two weeks later, halfway assured that there was nothing to about. But told that to Goldman.
"No, it's not Goldstein. It's Goldman ... Goldman ... Goldman ... . . ."
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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