TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2002
NEWS
4A - THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
OPINION
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 2002
TALKTOUS
Jay Krall
editor
864-4854 or krall@kansan.com
Brooke Hesler and Kyle Ramsey
managing editors
864-4854 or bheslen@kansan.com and
kramsey@kansan.com
Laurel Burchfield
readers' representative
864-4810 or iburchfield@kansan.com
Maggie Koerth and Amy Potter
opinion editors
864-4924 or opinion@kansan.com
Amber Agee business manager 864-4358 or advertising@kansan.com
Eric Ketting retail sales manager 864-4358 or advertising@kansan.com
Malcolm Gibson general manager and news adviser 864-7667 or mgibson@kansan.com
Matt Flahar
sales and marketing adviser
884.7666 or mfflahar@kansan.com
KANSAN EDITORIAL BOARD
H.O.P.E. award deserves publicity, student input
The Honor for an Outstanding Progressive Educator Awards, or H.O.P.E. Awards, are an annual honor given to a professor selected by each year's senior class. The award, established in 1959 by the graduating seniors, represents a unique opportunity for students to acknowledge those professors who have provided a special addition to the University of Kansas.
According to The University Daily Kansan, roughly 5,700 seniors were eligible to vote, but only 192 did. With a voter turnout below 4 percent, there is a desperate need for promotion of the award.
This Saturday at the KU-Oklahoma State football game, seniors selected mathematics professor Bozenna Pasik-Duncan as the recipient of this year's H.O.P.E. Award.
Unfortunately, few seniors are aware of the award, and even fewer voted on it.
The problem is further exacerbated by the voting process. In order to vote, seniors had to cast their ballots during a four-hour period Wednesday afternoon in front of Strong Hall. Perhaps students are less to blame for low voter turnout than the process of voting is.
In addition, the selection process itself is flawed. The process is multitiered; ballots are cast by seniors to select the finalists from a list of nominees.
This year there were 17 nominees, and seniors were able to select three of them. Of the seven finalists selected, only one is then chosen by the senior advisory board.
The advantage of this board is its fairness and ability to place a professor who has classes of 1000 students on equal footing with a professor who has classes of eight students. In reality, this balancing effect is compromised because the student body selects the finalists before the board can select the winner. Both nominating and selecting the winner for the award should be decided primarily by students.
But these problems do not suggest the award is without hope.
The award should be promoted and voting made more accessible. Allowing for a longer voting period or electronic voting would be a first step. It would only take small simple steps to raise participation numbers dramatically.
In the selection process, emphasis should be shifted from a relatively unknown, anonymous senior advisory board to the senior student body.
The entire senior class should be a part of the selection process for the H.O.P.E. Awards, and action should be taken to ensure that they are involved.
Greg Holmquist for the Editorial Board.
Call 864-0500
Free for All
Free for All callers have 20 seconds to speak about any topic they wish. Kansas editors reserve the right to omit comments. Slanderous and obscene statements will not be printed. Phone numbers of all incoming calls are recorded.
For more comments, go to www.kansan.com.
Our roommate never leaves the couch,
and we're a little concerned about this.
So we're asking for everyone's opinion. A:
Find him a job. B: Find a new roommate,
Or C: Sell the couch.
Well some day when your kids ask you to save the world, you can tell them the republicans did, because they disarmed Saddam; and the democrats didn't do obey.
Once again, Mizzou sucks is out, freestyle is in.
To the guy in my astronomy class who sits in the front row every day and picks his nose, I'd appreciate it if you'd quit because it makes me want to hurt. Thank
you.
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I agree that Missouri sucks, but the part about them being rednecks and hillbillies, that is wrong. Kansas has more rednecks and hillbillies than any state in the nation.
图
My friend's an idiot. He just asked me what is Free for All.
Whoever has to listen to all of these,
thanks.
So much anger, so much hostility. Have some sex, and let it go.
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I just found a set of keys in front of Berkeley Flats apartment complex, which faces the east side of the football stadium, like on the 50-yardline. And it had a bottle cap opener with no face on it. I put it in the Berkeley Flats lost and found, so if you lost some keys out there.
Toto, I don't think we're in Alabama anymore. We must be in sweet home Alaska.
Studying sucks. My professor sucks. I suck. But college girls are cool.
It was a kernal of cottage cheese, I'd pretend to be a Dipin' Dot.
In the Nov. 13 paper, the headline reads 'Alaska town struck by storm.' Carbon Hill is in Alabama.
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Final projects are the spawn of satan
STAYSKAL'S VIEW
ON THE KANSAN ON-LINE
Go to kansan.com and click on the opinion section to check out the weekly online poll. Click on forums to post to the discussion.
kansan.com
Gene Stayskai/Knight Ridder
Opinion Forum
Opinion Poll
What are you doing for Thanksgiving? Does your family have any special traditions for this holiday? If you eat anything other than turkey tell us why?
Which is a more hazardous on the road, pedestrians or cars?
Cars rule the road and pedestrians need to get out of the way.
Pedestrians are much smaller than cars and cars need to keep an eye out for them.
I don't know.
PERSPECTIVES
Too many voices spoil the talk for the sports show genre
ketball and football are all on at the same time.
This time of the year is any sports fan's fantasy. Pro football and basketball as well as college bas-
But unfortunately now, it means that there are more issues for sports columnists and sports analysts to argue on a daily basis.
Sports commentators and pundits can be entertaining, and they certainly add life to the sports world, but now anyone can become a sports "expert" and make a decent living arguing about sports.
COMMENTARY
Now, you can't read a sports section, watch ESPN, or listen to the radio without getting the opinion of some 300 pound sports columnist who played special teams on his junior varsity high school football team.
They talk to us like they know what it is like to be in the huddle, the locker room, or in the playoffs when the closest they have been to any of those situations is when they manually adjust the volume on their televisions.
What I find most ironic is that some of the people who tell us what is going on in the sports world and what should be done are people who have never participated in sports past the high school level.
I love sports. But nothing ruins it more for me than having every single person alive analyze and break down every single
Eric Borja
opinion@kansan.com
sports related issue.
Sports is supposed to be a diversion from life's travails and not the cause of them.
Case in point. I am so glad the KU football season is over so I can quit reading all the columnists playing arm chair quarterback and writing about how the team should be run and how the players should play.
Pro sports are even worse.
There are so many sports commentary shows out right now that every issue gets beaten to death.
Pardon the Interruption, The Sports Reporters, The Best Damn Sports Show Period, The Jim Rome Show and Around the Horn all debate sports issues. Now when a pro athlete loses his temper, a college player takes money from a booster or when someone wins an award, these shows all argue about it like it is some pressing national affair.
When Terrell Owens signed a football
that he caught for a touchdown, it was talked about so much you'd think he punted the ball to the moon instead.
I don't mind a healthy discussion about actual sports topics that have real world implications like Major League Baseball contraction, the Bowl Championship Series, and salary caps. I do respect that these guys have the cajones to call out athlete/ thugs like Allen Iverson, Randy Moss and Mike Tyson on national TV.
But to argue for hours about who is going to win a game or complain about who should have won an award is pointless.
As you read this, four more guys have started their own AM sports radio show and are discussing such pressing issues like Anna Kournikova not winning a tournament or how Maurice Clarrett should be allowed to leave college early for the NFL.
Because I have no basketball or football background either, I think it's only appropriate that I play sports columnist for one paragraph.
Miami will win the national championship in football, Kansas will win the national championship in basketball,and who cares about pro sports? They are just playing for the money and the fame.
Borja is a Springfield, Mo. senior in journalism.
Planning for future events and crises only works so well
Yet past weeks have shown the limits of planning ahead.
College is about foresight. Quite simply, students earn degrees in order to improve their futures. Planning ahead becomes apparent at this point in the semester, with seniors applying to graduate school or beginning to search for jobs.
On Oct. 25, Minnesota senator Paul Wellstone, campaigning for re-election, died in a plane crash.
No one could have seen it coming. In Moscow, Chechen separatists seized hostages in a theater. After Russian security forces stormed the building, more than 100 of the hostages were dead, people who never dreamed anything so terrible would happen when they decided to go to the show.
No one could have seen it coming.
This question borders on the ludicrous, because changing technology and economics render it impossible to answer.
Where will America be five years from now?
Jared Diamond, author of a book that offers a theory to explain why human history developed as it did, spoke at the Lied Center on Oct. 24.
Because his theory addresses thousands of years of history, one questioner asked him to project what the earth would look like a few hundred years into the future.
Joe Pull
opinion@kansan.com
COMMENTARY
Adeptly sidestepping the question,
Diamond replied that the real question was where the earth would be in 50 years, saying that unsustainable development was creating an environmental crisis that must be solved by that point.
He was clearly saying we needed to plan ahead, yet he simultaneously declined to predict what the future
His caution against guessing is probably wise.
The changes in the world between 1950 and 2000 were enormous; who can say what revolutions another half-century will bring?
But his circumspection is also frustrating; it becomes difficult to plan ahead when we have no idea what conditions to plan for.
But, the recent tragedies in Minnesota, Russia and the East Coast call attention to one situation where we do know enough to plan ahead; the ques-
would hold based upon his knowledge of the past. He claims to explain millennia of history, but declined even to guess at the future.
tion "Where will you as an individual be in 100 years?"
The answer to this is the same for nearly everyone currently working or studying at KU; in the ground.
It's a sobering thought, but an important one, for one strategy for solving problems is starting from the end and working backward to the present.
Just as college is an important way of planning ahead for life, so is answering the question "With the end in mind, what do I really want to do with the time between now and the year 2102?"
Pull is a Colfax, N.D. senior in history and political science.