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Wednesday, September 30, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Bungled benefits
Employees expect to be paid for their work.
This simple notion is being forgotten by the state of Kansas. Instead, the compensation package for University employees, both faculty and classified staff, is being chipped away.
boln tienity i consenser sidan is vending bene.
Looking at the trend of trend and benefits, there is little in need to work here.
Now the benefits are dwindling, too.
Pay? Well, there is that "cost of living" increase scheduled for January — 2 percent for six months for classified employees and 3 percent for six months for faculty.
Now the benefits are dwindling too. According to a proposed health plan announced last week, employees' share of premium costs will rise. The state would no longer pay the premium for employees with "single" coverage, which it has done for 10 years, and rates would increase for family plan coverage.
Classified employee will be harder hit than faculty members because in general classified workers have lower salaries.
Let's say an employee made $10,000 last year. That employee got a $100 raise for 1988.
With the proposed health plan, he would pay about $180 more in 1988 for traditional Blue Cross Blue Shield family coverage including dental.
That's an $80 loss.
That's all $0.05s!
Chancellor Gene A. Budig says he hopes that the Regents will step in. They can convey concerns to Gov. Mike Hayden about the proposal. We hope the concerns are addressed.
Employees expect to be paid.
Political purposes
Former Gov. John Carlin raised more than $300,000 in contributions in the four years after his 1982 election. This, in turn has raised questions in some Republican circles about Carlin's political fund.
The controversy recently has arrived at the doors of the Kansas Public Disclosure Commission, which is examining the state's campaign finance laws. The commission plans to propose changes in the laws to the Kansas Legislature.
Carlin added more than $300,000 to the $21,000 that was in his political fund after the 1982 election. Carlin has said that most of the money was used to pay 1982 election debts. About $10,000 remains.
The Constitution limited Carlin to two consecutive terms in office. Although he has repeatedly said that he has no plans to seek office again, the money in his political fund naturally raises questions about whether that's true.
The contributed money was given for a political cause, and it should be used for only that purpose. If Carlin is sure that he won't run for a political office again, then he has no need for the money. If he has future political aims, then he should hang onto the money.
Either way, he needs to make some decisions about the money. It shouldn't just sit in a bank account. That's not what it was contributed for.
Strike two
Maybe football seasons run in cycles - that is, every five years there's a strike.
regardless, devoted fans may once again find themselves on Sunday afternoons in the bathroom regreating tile instead of in the living room perched in front a TV set.
Team owners, however, contrived a plan to keep the pigskin in play. Substitute players will now swarm onto the field to satisfy the athletic appetite of throngs of spectators. TV networks are also relieved to fill the afternoon air with football rather then reruns of "Emergency."
Perhaps these substitute players — referred to as scabs — will add a new twist to an old game. Recruiters soon learn that the best tactic is to pick the best scabs, so to speak.
The Chicago Bears, the 1986 Super Bowl champs, may find themselves groveling for touchdowns. And weak teams, such as the Kansas City Chiefs, may soon be the proud owners of those garish championship rings.
Editorials in this column are the opinions of the editorial board.
News staff
Jennifer Benjamin...Editor
Juli Warren...Managing editor
John Benner...News editor
Beth Copeland...Editorial editor
Sally Streff...Campaign editor
Brian Kablerine...Sports editor
Dan Rustellmann...Photo editor
Bill Skeet...Graphics editor
Tom Eblen...General manager, news advice*
Business staff
Bonnie J. Hardy...Business manager
Robert Hughes...Advertising manager
Kelly Scherer...Retail sales manager
Kurt Messeramith...Campus sales manager
Greg Knipp...Production manager
David Delfeff...National sales manager
Angela Crichton...Classified manager
Ron Weems...Director of marketing
Jeanne Hines...Sales and marketing adviser
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Author closes mind to America
Whether you know it or not, you are the topic of a very hot debate.
Many think you've been ripped off by America's higher education. They argue that you've been taught the wrong things.
Allan Bloom wrote a current best seller, "The Case for Being Human," in a very busy book on American intellectualism.
The thrust of Bloom's argument is that America, because of its universities, has become a society of trendy relativists. It's a society where one opinion is no more valid than another, where there is no good and no evil, only one truth. It is the truth today might not be the truth tomorrow.
Disguised as openness, we accept everyone's new view of the world. Slowly and mindfully that has that privilege not open,
As a result, we have become a baseless society, a society so compromising as to admit responsibility.
Our refusal to condemn another's views, he claims, has imprisoned us in the fad of the day.
Fads such as feminism, for example, have enslaved women to a double life of family and career. Desegregation, another example, only has an adverse effect on race relations. Even the Bible is now taught as literature and not as a source of truth.
America's modernism, he argues, has yielded the empty society to which we've become addicted. Instead of debating Plato, we watch MTV, a "pre-packaged masturbatory fantasy" for the feeble-minded. We have, in effect, traded Eternal Truth for the Beastie Boys.
Bloom blames society's disintegration on the attitudes of college campuses of the 1960s, an attitude from which we've not recovered.
In the '60s, students demanded classes that would help them compete and survive in society. Colleges have since, in Bloom's view, crumbled into stepping stones to employment.
Bloom doesn't want college to be a vocational school, he would prefer it be the ivory tower it was in 19th-century Europe, where people came to work as part of the practice what they would do the rest of their lives.
Though he raises some valid points, Bloom leaves much room for argument.
Surely, this is my bleeding-heart, relativist mentality showing through, but whose Eternal Truth is he talking about? How nice it must be to have such a firm grip on reality.
Many also find his position on feminism and desegregation debatable. Bloom makes a huge leap of reasoning to suggest that simply because equality has yet to be resolved in this country women were better off in the kitchen and blacks were better off in the back of the bus.
But Bloom's largest fallacy is his attitude
about America. Bloom believes that American culture is only a cheap facsimile of Europe's. Everything it thinks or stands for wallows in the shadow of European intellect.
But Bloom spends his whole book describing and denying American culture at the same time. He criticizes American tendencies like progressism, the importance when, in fact, those are its virtues.
America is, in Bloom's words, a peculiar hybrid of "Nietzsche's nihilism with a happy ending." It accepts nihilism its disregard for tradition but churlies in the face of the eternal
In the final analysis, America is not without culture, as Bloom suggests, it just has a culture
In the book, Bloom gives an account of a cab driver he met who said Gestalt therapy, the psychological treatment of the whole, had cured him of his drug addiction. Bloom lambets the way a European philosophical theory is now used in America something completely different in America.
As Robert Pattition, a book reviewer, wrote, a culture that can turn an abstract German philology "into a common vocabulary for the redemption of dope dealers and give nihilism a happy ending" has found something beyond philosophy. It has found experience. Maybe Bloom just isn't experienced.
But it's all in the wav you look at it.
Portable phones prey on privacy
Jim Farquhar is an Olathe junior majoring in journalism.
A man named Kent, who works for Motorola, was nice enough to send me a note about one of their space-age products.
"You know the importance of deadlines," Kent said, "and the importance of being able to be in immediate contact with people and they with you.
"Consider a Motorola factory direct mobile or portable cellular telephone or combination of the two."
I have to admit that I am a wondrous-device freak. I have a wristwatch that is a combination calculator, data bank, stopwatch and alarm clock.
However, I'm not going to call Kent from Motorola, because if there is one wondrous device I don't want, it is a portable telephone.
Sure, I know the importance, as Kent said, "of being able to be in immediate contact with people and they with you."
But I know something of greater importance — being able to hide from people. And to do that, you need to be a good listener.
Life was better before telephones became common. Back then, if some nuisance wanted to say something stupid to you, he had to sit down and make sure he was at the streetcar and ride several miles to your home.
This took considerable effort. And there were defenses. Even today, if someone rings my
doorbell, I can peek through a hole in the door and see who it is.
But now, because of the telephone, all he has to do is hit seven numbers and he can come crashing into your life. He can keep ringing dozens of times or call back every five minutes.
And Kent from Motorola wants to make a phone my constant companion?
Consider just one terrible consequence of owning a portable telephone and people knowing your number and being able to make immediate contact.
You are sitting in a bar after work, rewarding your frayed nerves for having earned another day's pay
Suddenly your portable phone rings. You answer it and the familiar voice says: "I was about to put dinner on. Are you on the expressway?"
"What's that noise?"
"Yes, yes, that's where I am, on the expressway, but traffic is terrible. Must be a big accident up ahead."
"What noise?
"All those voices. I thought I heard someone shout 'Bartender, another round.'
on, that? Yes, traffic is so jammed up that drivers are leaning out of windows and shouting things like, 'We better go around.' "
"I hear a juke box."
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"Hello. hello, I can't hear you. Goodbye."
Life is so less complicated, relationships are so much more stable, if the bartender answers his phone and simply says: "No, he ain't been in this year."
So I wish Motorola or someone would invent the kind of phone I've been wearing for.
It would work this way. It would have a little screen on it. And after one ring, the screen would show the name of the person making the call. It would also have a button. And when I pressed the button, the caller's phone would emit an ear-shattering obscurity.
Call me, Kent, when you put that on the market Better vet, drop me a brief postcard.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed