Page 4
University Daily Kansan, October 22, 1982
Opinion
Students' voice silenced
The Associated Students of Kansas — a student lobbying group — presents itself as the voice of university students in this state.
Whether students at the University of Kansas think that statement is true may never be known, because the Student Senate has chosen to silence their voice.
The Student Senate Rights, Privileges and Responsibilities Committee Wednesday voted 9-1 not send to the Senate a proposed referendum that would have let students decide whether KU should stay in ASK. A move by Paul Busirkh, the student senator who backed the referendum, to by-pass the committee and get the issue to the Senate failed.
Buskirk told the committee that the Student Senate had decided for the students to stay in ASK. Last year, the Senate paid more than $14,000 in membership dues — that money came from the students, each of whom paid 40 cents from their student fees for ASK.
"How many student senators went out and solicited an opinion from their constituents on ASK prior to voting to continue financial support?" Buskirk asked. It's doubtful that many did, judging from the position the Senate has taken.
kins and ASK Executive Director Mark Tallman both argued against the proposal, but their arguments fade when compared with the argument that KU students should have the right to express their opinion.
Student Body President David Ad-
Adkins said he did not want the issue to be used as a political football, which it could turn into if placed on the ballot alongside the Senate elections, favoring instead a non-binding referendum that would not force a decision without the oversight of the Senate.
This puts the Senate above the students, in a position to veto any decision that it may not like. Rather, the Senate should be below the students, in a position to serve their needs and demands.
Tallman argued that the proposal singled out ASK, even though the Senate financed other groups. That is true. However, of all the groups that get money from the Student Senate, only one - ASK - claims to represent all college students.
He also argued that the proposal, if passed, would have given ASK only a month "to justify our existence to our largest member."
But if the Senate and ASK had been doing their jobs all along, the students at all the member schools would have been aware of what ASK was and what it was doing.
Day in the life of Gene Budig
It was early in the morning. Gene Budg flipped on the switch to his bathroom. Nothing happened. Budg fumbled in the dark, looking for the light bulb. He couldn't find it.
"Honey," Budd called to his wife, "where are
the ball pugs?" There isn't a bau in the socket here.
"Oh, I forgot to tell you, a couple of guys from Operations came over and took out the light bulb."
Well, dear, they said that the bulbs were
TOM GRESS
needed in Wescoe. Something about classrooms having no lights. I just figured it was the budget cuts again."
"Honey, don't pout. You'll wake up the baby. Besides, not shaving will give you a rough and tumble look. You'll look like you have the great smell of Brut."
"They can't do that. I'm a chancellor. How am I supposed to debate? It's still dark out, and I have to be in the office by 7:30. They're taking pictures of me for the yearbook today."
"Well I don't like it. We gave up the air conditioning for the summer, and that was enough. Remember? You still can't get the sweat stains out of the armpits of all my shoes."
"Deer, get dressed and have some breakfast. You'll feel better."
Budig got dressed, went downstairs and ate. He did feel better. Then he asked his wife whether he had to take Mary Frances to school. "Well, um, no, not exactly. At least not for a
"What do you mean, not for a while?"
"What? Why?"
"Well, Gov. Carlin called and said we had to cut back another 4 percent, one of the children had to go I just thought that because Mary Frances was older, she could handle it best."
"They've got her moth-balled in a state warehouse outside of Topeka. If the severance tax ever passes, we might get her back." Perkins & Davies
"I'm going to the office," he said, "and I'm calling Carlin. This is too much. First the light bulbs, then our oldest daughter. They can't see you, and they're not connected, I worked for a Rockefeller once."
Budig sprinted out the door, jumped into his car and headed for his office in Strong Hall. He danced furiously, nearly running over four sorority girls on their way to an HDFL class.
Bunged parked his car behind Strong, ran up the stairs and bounded into his office. Twenty stu
"What is this?" A takeover? Look kids, the '60s were over a long ago time, so let's move along. I've got to call the governor, and then they're just go back outside and sit in front of Wendy.
"Uh, sir," said one of the students, "we're waiting for our class to start."
"What?!"
"We went to where they usually hold the class, but the building was closed and a sign said, 'All Classes Moved to Chancellor's Office Because of Budget Cuts.'"
"What class is this?"
"Sex Education. Stick around, we're seeing a movie today."
"You mean to tell me you're in college and still need to take a class to learn how to . . ."
'That's right. sir.'
"What's happened to our high schools? First they can't teach you guys how to read or write, and now they can't even teach sex. Okay, youve got ingy of pics like that you can stay, but don't get in gy of pix pictures."
Budig started to sit down at his desk, but it wasn't there.
"Somebody get von Ende up here. My desk is missing."
Seconds later, Richard von Ende, executive secretary to the University, came running into
"Von Ence, where is my desk!" My light bulb,
my daughter, my office, my desk! Everything is
mine.
"Well, Gene, I don't know how to say this, but,
well, they were freezing in the English depart-
ment. Much of professors in jackets with corduroy
patches took off with it early this morning."
"I suppose they have tenure."
on well.
The phone rang. Budig answered.
"Kid, you've got the wrong number. You want 864-2700."
"Yeah, I need to get Molly Marpel's phone number."
"Gene, it's not that bad. Buck up. By the way,
FamBroumb is moving into the office next week."
"Gene," von Ende said, "I forgot to tell you. The stair made us put in a party line yesterday."
"That's what I dialed."
Athletics system perverts education
By EDWARD T. FOOTE II New York Times Syndicate
CORAL GABLES, Fla.-Big, far from home and 18 years old, he arrives at college, a freshman. For him, there is scant welcome, except that offered by coaches. Three weeks later, his classmates will arrive on campus. By May 2015, he will have run 250 miles for his new college.
On the Saturday after his classes begin (sometimes before), he dons football armor and, with 94 other young men, trots for the first time into the stadium. If it is an away game, he has cut classes and jetted part way across the country.
Home or away, to the roar of 75,000 fans, the freshman has entered the frantic, exciting, exhausting and increasingly topsy-turv world of big-time intercollegiate football. By the time he gets to sleep that night, he will have spent 30 to 40 hours on football since the work began.
His story could be told of student-athletes in other major sports. It is a story of growing — and falling, as well — during the sport.
Win or lose, playing or warming the bench,
this young man is constantly tempted to believe
that he is in college primarily to play football —
not, like his classmates, primarily to learn.
Astonishingly, educators themselves now debate
whether he is there primarily to learn.
Fueled by TV mebagbacks, the distorted system of intercollegiate athletics occasionally reminds one of Alice in Wonderland, not lear- **t** articles of educational faith on their heads.
Some go so far as to suggest that we pay them a salary for this labor of entertainment and waive normal rules of full-time study, grades and other boring academic impediments.
Some, for example, suggest that we should succumb to "reality" and accept a permanent sub-class of student, the intercollegiate athlete, whose purpose is to amuse us first on the college football field, later (for the very best two percent) in the National Football League.
It is a sorry drama. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, for seven decades the accepted, if controversial, regulator of intercollegiate athletics, is under challenge from many sides.
Among its most vocal critics are many of the more than 100 universities most in need of regulation: the big athletic powers. A court
recently invalidated the TV bargaining agreement negotiated for universities by the NCAA and designed to keep at least an uneasy balance of economic power.
The danger is deeper than subverting the education of a handful of young men, sad as that. It is the greatest threat, because it is masked in hype and money, is to the academic enterprise
Poisonous notions, curiously unchallenged, have backed up into the hearts of our colleges and universities, even into the high schools and colleges that are wooing them with swelling the wrong budgets, inferior facilities.
The problem is not intercollegiate athletics. Competitive sports can enrich university life as well as athletes' lives. The problem is not the NFL or TV, both profit-making ventures to be forgiven for dangling dollars before the unwary. Nor is it any particular universities, most of which hard to play within the rules, nor any hard student-athletes, most of whom do so.
The problem is the system that colleges and universities have come to 'accept'. It is the corrosive absurdity of a system created by a system that has been shown to foster enders perversion of education.
The University of Miami is on probation for football-recruiting violations committed from 1976 to 1980. The University of San Francisco recently shocked the sports world by abolishing its respected basketball program rather than triving to reform it.
Winning, always more fun than losing, is now so much the measure that scandals sprout like weeds. In extreme cases, transcripts are doctored, non-existent courses taken, grades fudged and athletes steered through paths of least academic resistance. For such transgressions, 17 universities are on NCAA probation. Few of us can throw stones.
Happily, not many would declare defeat and relegate student-athletes to gladiator status. And, for the first time, the American Council of Education has created a committee of 28 university presidents and chancellors to examine the problem.
Proclaiming athletes to be students first, we lowered admissions standards and made freshmen eligible for the varsity *new years ago*, so their first and lasting exposure to college life is their first and lowest pressures of football — not an easy challenge. We had a hard time. Then we lament that so many fail to graduate.
The solution is so simple it is embarrassing to describe, if more difficult to enforce. Beginning in elementary school, the solution is an absolute requirement that our athletes be students first, not just those who take courses, suffer the same exams and meet the same academic standards as other students.
We do no favors to the fabled poor-bur-
coordinated child if we pass him along grade
by grade through high school because he graces
playing fields, then slide him into college on
the hopeless side of predictable academic success
because he runs the 40-yard dash in 4.5 seconds,
then avert our gaze as he flounders for two or
three years before failing out.
In college, if student athletes do not meet normal academic requirements, they should not play. We should also abolish freshman eligibility for varsity sports, so that at least for one year a student could concentrate primarily on his studies.
A key to change is that those with responsibility for the academic missions of universities—faculties, deans, provosts and presidents, not coaches, athletic directors and alumni associations—must lead. Universities exist for teaching and research, not winning games, and at the center of that existence is the obligation to students as students.
Such ideas are neither new nor impossible to implement. The embarrassing part is that the present system is so bankrupt that the obvious needs such emphasis. As the problem needs such, so must be the solution. No isolated efforts or examples, noble though they be, will suffice.
Ironically, among the biggest beneficiaries of such reforms would be student athletes. They may just find that learning something about Plato, Shakespeare, biology and art is as much as blocking passes. And whether they do or not, greater education is of greater use over the long run.
If one effect were a decline in the quality of intercollege athletics, so be it. Such a decline, if perceptible at all, would be a modest price to pay for a return to educating our students. Athletes who prefer otherwise should work with other teams, rather than professional sports career. It is an eminently worthy call, but not one that should be allowed to distort higher education any further.
Edward T. Foote II is president of the University of Miami.
Letters to the Editor
Faculty should remain on tenure committee
To the Editor:
I am disturbed about the proposal to take away from a faculty-chosen committee the duty to appoint, essentially, the most important faculty member at the University Committee on Promotions and Tenure.
In 1967, the American Association of University Professors approved a document, "Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities," that acts as a set of guidelines defining the responsibilities of the governing board, the administration and the faculty. This document was also approved by the American Council on Education and the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges. I quote some relevant sentences:
"Faculty status and related matters are primarily a faculty responsibility; this area includes appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure and dismissal . . . Agencies for faculty participation in the government of the state have been established at each level where faculty responsibility is present . . . Faculty representatives should be selected by the faculty according to procedures determined by the faculty."
Professor of music history
Freeze based on hope
Paul Longbach (letter to the editor, Oct. 15)
is mistaken if he believes that people who are working for a halt to nuclear weapons are acting wrongly.
need not stop us from acting to end the threat of a nuclear holocaust
Certainly, every person alive today — "freeze" activists and non-activists alike — lives under the threat of nuclear annihilation; the threat of nuclear war is real and must be faced. However, these feelings
People working for nuclear disarmament are doing so in spite of their fears, not because of them.
Sara Martin
Lawrence graduate student
The University Daily
KANSAN
The University Daily Kansas (USP 650)码是 published at the University of Kansas, 118 First Floor Lawrence, Kann, 69042. daily during the regular school year and Monday and Thursday during the summer. Subscription fee is $15 per month for six months or $27 perDOUglas County. Lawrence, Kann, 60044. Subscriptions by mail are $15 for six months or $27 perDOUglas County. The studentlecture fee is POSTMASTER. Send address changes to the University Daily Kansas.
Editor
George George
General Editor
Editorial Editor
Campus Editor
Campus Editor
Assistant Campus Editor
Assistant Campus Editor
Sports Editor
American Sports Editor
Entertainment Editor
Retail Sales Manager
Sales Manager
Campus Sales Manager
Classified Agent
Classified Agent
Artist/Photographer
General Manager and News Advisor
Business Manager
Susan Cooky
Steve Johrahn
Max Czeeman
Mack Zieman
David Levinson
Cullen陈国英
Gini Grippi蒋
Ann Wyllie
Bar Balmur
Jenny McKee
Matthew Langan
Laurel Sarmoniel
John Keeling
Paul Jen
Joel Jennison