Special Edition
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
The University of Kansas—Lawrence, Kansas
No.1
Campus 2
Wednesday, August 20,1975
1 LEARNED HALL ADDITION—15th St.
2 LAW SCHOOL—15th St.
3 FINE ARTS BUILDING—behind Lindley Hall
4 PEDESTRIAN UNDERPASS—Naismith D between Crescent and 15th streets
5 COMPUTER CENTER—Sunnyside Ave. and Illinois St.
6 ART MUSEUM—Memorial Drive (Mississippi St.)
Buckley amendment: games and confusion
By STAN STENERSEN
Kansan Staff Reporter
The first day of fall semester may seem a strange time to think about professors' letters of recommendation for graduate or professional school, but something called the Buckley amendment may cause many students to plan carefully how they will handle those recommendations later in the school year.
The amendment is named after its author, Sen. James Buckley, Con. Chairman of the provisions, you have the following requirement your files at the University of Kansas:
What does this mean for your decisions about professors' recommendations? The object of the game is this: to assemble the most impressive set of recommendations for admission to graduate programs by file at a University placement bureau.
First, you may see information, including professors' recommendations, added to your file after Jan. 1, 1975, unless you specifically waive your right to do so. Even if you waive your right to see the recommendations, you can still find out who wrote them.
SECOND, YOU may decide what companies or agencies will be allowed to see your file. Unless you give permission, the University can release only such information, name, address, major, dates of attendance and degrees and awards received.
If you retain your right to see your recommendations after professors have written them, you can see what they write about you and perhaps get the sour recommendations thrown out. But if you don't have another school, professors who would write negative references might refuse altogether because you can see them when you get to
Using your options under the Buckley amendment, let's think through some of the ways to make your plans work.
the other school. Either way will help your chances.
But professors keep saying that only frank and candid recommendations are considered carefully by employers or the university you can read his letter, perhaps he will play it safe and write a bland letter that does you no good. But if your boss or your wards wouldn't be bad, Hmmm.
AND WHAT about the people who read the recommendations? Will they put less faith in recommendations they know you can see? Perhaps you should waive your right to see them. On the other hand, what if one of the letters is bad? Aaaaaaag . . .
According to Herold Regier, director of the Educational Placement Bureau (EPB), students should consider their choices under the Buckley amendment carefully.
A student's decision to retain or waive access to his recommendations is important, Regler said, because prospective students must believe in faith in confidential recommendations.
"Only time will tell how people will react to it," said Regier, whose office handles the credentials of about 2,400 registrants for elementary, secondary and college teaching positions. "Let's say that there are 20 candidates for a position in English and that some candidates wave their right hand certainly in my mind as to what effect that will have. It might put those people on unequal grounds."
REGIER ALSO said that if a student restricted access to his file, he would screen out unwanted employers but might also lose a chance for a job. He explained that his office often received unscheduled or last-minute job notices from many schools. If a candidate elects to maintain control of his file, Regier said, the EPB can't release information from it, but files of qualified candidates hold their right to control can be released.
Regier said his office received about 50 such notices a year. As if to illustrate the
point, during the interview he received a telephone call requesting a list of candidates to fill a sudden opening for a school principal.
Addition, underpass, buildings alter KU look
Some professors are skeptical about the changes under the Buckley amendment, Regier said. Several professors have told him they would write recommendations only if candidates waived their right to see them.
University attorney Michael Davis said that although such a suit could be brought, judgment against a professor for an honest letter was unlikely.
One professor made his decision after talking with his attorney. Reeier said
Some of the professors told him non-confidential letters were meaningless, he said, while others said they even feared the barassment of a possible suit alleging that a negative reference deprived a person of his opportunity to earn a living.
"Label and slander, yes, but not an honest negative recommendation." Davis said.
REGIER SAID he thought the Buckeyn amendment would cause writers of the Constitution to be outraged.
Factuals or refutals to anybody who were questionable said for faculty members who were interviewed agreed with Regier. Most said they would more selective in writing recommendations.
of 1977. It will accommodate the school's 140,000-volume library collection, with room expansion and a large library expansion will provide classrooms, seminar rooms, faculty offices, administrative areas and accompanying facilities for a maximum enrollment of 360
The building boom $^{n-1}$ the University of Kansas is continuing. In addition to the usual confusion accompanying the first days of school, students this fall will be faced with finding new buildings and with the commotion continuous growth entails.
Margaret Arnold, assistant professor of English, said that although she usually didn't write totally negative letters of praise, she would probably wrote none at all in the future.
Plans for the use of Green Hall after it's vacated haven't been determined yet. However, the building has been designated as a structure of national architectural and historical importance. It has been entered in the National Register of Historic Places.
A new five-story law structure of 95,435 square feet should be completed in the fall
Fortunately, fall traffic on campus streets will be largely unaffected, according to Keith Lawton, director of facilities, of the North Carolina State University that the roads closed this summer, 15th Street by the new law building and Naisimah Street. We will be open when the fall semester starts.
The complements of Wescoto Hall, Moore Hall and Watkins Memorial Hospital merely signaled the beginning of additions to the main University campus.
The new law school, of en-reforced concrete with bronze trim and glass, will be built on the west side of the nain campus, north and slighly west of Allen Field House.
Major additions to the School of
"I don't want to water down what I say," she said.
See KU CONSTRUCTION page 2
At the same time, she said, she had
attended the amendment would not
affect the annulment.
Facilities at Green Hall were designed to accommodate 150 students and a library. In 1956, an addition was made to the building to house the rapidly expanding library with an enrollment of about 430 students, the law school is extremely overcrowded.
Engineering at Learned Hall are scheduled to be completed this fall. Work has been under way since early this summer on the School of Law and a new art museum.
wing will add 82,000 square feet to the existing 100,000 square feet.
Construction of a new building for the School of Fine Arts, temporarily stalled for financial reasons, will begin in about 60 days, when a new bid is expected to be accepted. Finally, construction of a new computer center will begin next year.
The construction of the underpass was prompted by the long standing need for a pedestrian route in the Daisy Hill area and the traffic increase expected with the completion of the new law school, he said.
The need for a new or remodeled law faculty was first expressed by Dr. Franklin Kruger, the director of the university's library.
Construction at Learned, a $3,750,000 project, was started in September 1973. The completion date is set for some time this fall. A two-story addition of classrooms and administrative offices is being built on top of the original structure. A five-tower wing is being added to the east end of the building to accommodate a laboratory. The
The new space is for the departments of chemical and petroleum engineering, mechanical engineering and the environmental engineering division of the civil engineering department. Those facilities include three other buildings. Present facilities at Learned house the departments of aerospace, civil and electrical engineering.
A pedestrian underpass costing $145,200,
which should be completed by the time
classes start, will pass under Naimsim
Drive, connecting Learned with the main
train tracks. The underpass had been planned
for completion several years ago, Lawton said.
Another professor, who asked not to be identified, said that he also would avoid negative letters but that the amendment would affect very little the substance of the rest of his letters. He already tells students what he will write in their letters, he said.
THE AMENDMENT will probably have little effect on the general quality of recommendations, which is often already poor. the professor said.
"There are so many vaucous recommendations that this won't make any difference," he said. "As a reader, you just have some recommendation more than others."
But William Griffith, professor of history, disagreed. The amendment will create more watered-down recommendations, he said, and "will do to recommend what I understand the influx of higher grades has done to academic records."
Griffith said the amendment would have an adverse effect on the best students, whose recommendations would appear less outside than when compared to other of students.
Although the amendment will guard against blackballing a student, Griffith said, he hadn't heard of any such incidents in his department.
See PLAYING page 3
life unruffled by Great Depression frenzy
By KEN STONE
Times are tough. You can't afford that new stereo component. Gas is so expensive that you have to walk to class in the morning. Job prospects are poor.
You're even considering skipping your annual Thanksgiving vacation ski trip. Indeed, today's college student really has it rough.
WOULD IT MAKE YOU feel less deprived to know that 40 years ago a group of students in school would stay in school by capturing and selling cockroaches to an entomologist and that in 1934 about 1,400 KU students applied for 420 jobs. The fact that the internship duties as little as 30 cents an hour?
Under Chancellor Ernest H. Lindley, a tall, silver-haired man who came to the University in 1920 and stayed for 19 years, KU during the Depression suffered from poverty and homelessness. Legislature, threats to its academic freedom and big losses in enrollment.
The recession of the 1970s, even with its zooming inflation and high unemployment rate, looks tame when compared to the Depression of the 1930s, when Midwestern farmers faced with banners reading: "TWOOVER WE TRUSTED, NOW WE BURSTED."
cent were wholly or partially self-supporting. Twenty-nine per cent of the male students and 16 per cent of the female students were entirely self-supporting.
BETWEEN 1920 AND 1930 University enrollment grew from 4,268 to 5,888, but, with the beginning of hard times, enrollment dropped. About 4,000 students attended KU in each of the first few years of the 1930s.
Some students had to drop out of school altogether. More than 500 students had to leave school in the first four years of the Depression, which began in 1929.
A headline in the Kansas City Star told the story well: "Not all the KU Students are blowing in Dad's Money and Raising Colleague Whoope."
In 1934, of the 4,434 students at KU, 60 per
ONE OF THOSE STUDENTS, Alan Coogan, returned to the University this
summer after a long journalism career to complete his requirements for a degree
Coogan, who attended KU between 1930 and 1933, had to leave school during Christmas vacation of 1933 because his family had run out of money to support him and his brother in school. When he left KU they only nine credit hours short of graduation.
In an interview last month, Coogan
this life was like in the days of the
Depression.
"The one recollection that I have, aside from the fact that my fellow students and I were all taken on a trip," she said.
PRICES FOR FOOD WE are so low, in fact, that the Memorial Union cafeteria would offer meals costing a dime each. In fact, we did offer students 18 meals, a week for $1.80.
"There was a store that had a special on lamb chops every Saturday. These were the most succulent and tasty lamb chops. They were just gems. We could get three dozen lamb chops a week. And the price was absurdly low."
we (uns family) were great lovers of lamb," Coqan said.
Many students, however, rejected such offers. Pride would allow them to accept what they felt was a form of charity. So some students not alone by eating less.
Archives photo
Hobo Day, 1934
In the notes that Clifford S. Griffin, professor of history, used in preparing his book, "The University of Kansas: A History," is the story of a student named Oryza Waltz, who lived with another student at day school room in the Unitarian Church.
Waltz and his roommate spent an average of six食每餐 the meals they cooked with.
"For supper they had meat or eggs, a potato or bread and h chocolate or milk."
"For breakfast they had oatmeal, milk, toast and a small orange," the notes say. "At lunch they opened a nickel can of soup and had toast and coffee again."
BEFORE HE "BE HAAN 'living' in" HM
Susan but died in an old car, Walz
bust lived in an old car.
Another scene of student poverty was described in "The Years on Mount Grace," 1960. In it, the author writes:
"I began looking about me, and what I heard was vividly in my mind to this day. Taft said."
and revised in 1955 by Robert Taft, a former professor of chemistry. Taft described a scene he saw in 1933, when he had been invited into a room of students to listen to the Notre Dame-Kansas football game on the radio.
"To my right, in the far two corners of the room, were piles of straw spread out to form two beds. Thrown over the straw were dripped and latter blankets and comforters.
"A meal was in preparation, for upon the
"ALTHOUGH I LOOKED, I saw no other food"
"Ttaid said."
burner there was a gallon fruit can, emptied of its original contents and now serving its purpose as a cooking pot for unpeeled potatoes.
"As I walked down the hall, I met the owner of the building. 'Good God,' I said, as he sat on a chair and looked alive in that hole?' Yes. "He, he replied, 'they were having a pretty hard time when they came here so I told them they could have a bath.'" He looked at me, keep the washroom clean." He paused. "The
See '30s page 4
Student workers during Depression