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Opinion
University Daily Kansan October 18, 1982
An ugly callus lingers
America may think it cleansed itself of racism in the painful years following the end of World War II. But every once in awhile, the spectre erupts in a magnitude that is unbearable.
Two such cases have happened this fall: one in New Mexico, the other in Louisiana.
Two hundred students at the University of New Mexico marched last week on the student newspaper office, protesting an editorial concluding that minorities were academically inferior to whites.
These cases serve as examples of a callousness that certain members of a society can have toward other members. Instead of a callus on the soul, it is a callus on the senses.
And in Louisiana, Susie Guillory Phillips is fighting a court battle against the state to force the state to recognize her as a white. The state, referring to a law peculiar to Louisiana, insists Phillips is "colored," because her great-great-great-grandmother was a black slave who married a white farmer.
In the New Mexico case, Mark Blazek, managing editor of the New Mexico Daily Lobe, wrote an editorial headlined, "Discrimination is sometimes desirable."
"For 11 years the College Board that administers the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) has refused to release
racial and ethnic scores," Blazek wrote. "This month, however, the board reversed its policy, opened its books and proved that everyone knew all along — minorities are academically inferior to whites."
The subsequent protest from Hispanic, Indian and other minority students caused Blazek to resign. In his apology, he said the SAT scores showed only that some groups had lower exam scores than others, and nothing else. The ironic twist to the story is Blazek's statement that he personally abhors racial and ethnic discrimination.
Phillips' plight in the Louisiana courts has been highlighted in an editorial in the Portland (Maine) Press Herald.
"The Louisiana law is nonsense," the newspaper said. "What motivates a state to invest its time and money in two-century pursuits of genealogy? We can think of only one."
"It ought to make no difference whether Mrs. Phillips is black or white. That it does is a blot on our past."
The editorial poses a question and offers an answer that applies not only to a woman in Louisiana, or a group of minority students in New Mexico, but to everyone.
"Who is Susie Guillory Phillips? She's an American."
University slow to clean up property around Med Center
Imagine a huge weed covering 50 acres employing 5,100 people and having a budget of $100 million.
The residents of south Kansas City, Kan., don't have to — they are forced to deal with the unchecked growth of such a weed in the University of Kansas Medical Center.
The Med Center does many fantastic things for the residents of Kansas. Treatments for serious diseases, advanced research projects, as well as health professionals goes on at the Med Center.
Despite this great reputation, the people who live close to the Med Center feel saddened because
TOM HUTTON
of the University's lack of concern for the residential areas bordering the hospital.
The residents contend that the properties are blights to their middle-class neighborhood and that the University purposely refuses to improve the properties.
In particular, residents have complained about the upkeep of several properties on the south side of the Med Center. These properties, most of which are owned by the Kansas University Endowment Association, include the dormitories incidentally zoned areas and unpaved parking lots.
The residents, through various neighborhood associations, have expressed a belief that the University left the property in shambs so that the property could be bought at deflated prices.
The fight, which has been going on for more than six years, finally emerged on the battlefield last spring. In May, public hearings were held to decide whether special zoning permits should be issued to the Med Center. The permits would allow the Med Center to open classrooms in two Endowment Association housed houses at 4100 and 4606 Francis, one block south of the Med Center.
But at these hearings, several important facts were disclosed. The city commission learned that the Med Center had already been using the houses — one for more than four years — as offices and classrooms. These houses had been kept up, crumbling walls, broken fences and illegal parking lots were found on other properties.
City officials denied the University permission to use the houses as classrooms on the basis of these violations. They were also upset by the lack of an apathetic attitude toward caring for the property.
It was a standoff — did 'be city or the University have more power?
A compromise was finally made. The University agreed to meet with the neighborhood groups, and the city granted the zoning permits for the houses on Francis.
All should have been well. The University agreed to sell one of its dilapidated properties, to pave the dusty and dangerous parking lots and to mend several fences.
However, six months after making the pledge to renovate the property, little has been done to
Jay Spier was instrumental in getting the University to respond to the neighborhood complaints. And, by looking out his back window, he can assess the University's efforts.
Spicer has lived in the Rosedale for six years and has worked through the Rosedale Coordinating
But working to solve the problem has not been easy, he said recently.
"When we would talk to the Med Center people, they would tell us the property was Endowment's responsibility. Then when we called the Endowment Association, they would tell us it was the Med Center. It's like inflation over "circular tissue." Snorer said.
Improvements that the Med Center agreed to were: paving two parking lots, repairing several fences and selling the dilapidated house next door to Spicer.
The house, according to Martin Henry of the Endowment Association, has a sales contract pending. Henry would not reveal the sale price until the sale should be completed by December.
Other items were not so rapidly dispensed with. One parking lot was paved, but another is still only graveled. And the wood fence enclosing the parking lots still has only half its alum.
But it still seems ironic that the University continues to buy private homes near the Med Center when property in commercially-zoned areas is readily available.
But even slow progress is better than no progress at all, contends Spicer. And he views the chance for the Roedele Coordination Unit to meet with the University a strong plus.
As Spicer said, "It may be cheaper, but it sure doesn't make sense."
LIVE-THE WORLD SERIES!!
Letters to the Editor
Arguments against nuclear freeze flawed
To the Editor:
The recent attacks on the nuclear weapons freeze movement by our nation's conservative wing have labeled the movement's goal as sincere but unrealistic. One such attack, titled "Freeze proposal irresponsible," by Jeralr Keating of the KU Conservative Forum, is another such attack filled with irresponsible opinion and distorted interpretation of the arms race.
Keating's Oct. 13 claim of "dangerous deficiencies in its (the United States) nuclear armament" is not backed up with any supporting statistics. If this fact has been "confirmed and reconfirmed by Senate and House investigations," why did an August 1982 House vote on a freeze resolution loss by a more two votes? The fact is that the United States has 2,000 more weapons in the Soviet Union, as stated in the Department of Defense Annual Report, Fiscal Year 1982.
Another flaw in the article's argument stems from the author's confusion of defense reductions and nuclear warhead production. During the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations, our nation had more warheads more than doubled. This increase felt as undermined of SALT I and the strategy of deterrence.
How much deterence is necessary? It is a misconception that a balance in warheads, fire power and launchers is synonymous with deterence. In testimony before the Senate Armed Service Committee (February 1981), Gen Lew Allen, Chief of Staff, U.S. Air Force, stated "We are still able to do that (counter-attack) with all of our acceptable." A bilateral, verifiable nuclear weapons freeze would lock in any deterrence that the United States requires.
Keating spent more than one-third of the article discussing a universally accepted fact: We cannot trust the Soviet government. Within this argument is the attempted link between the Soviet freeze propaganda and the freeze movement in the United States. Although the apparent "peace" campaign in the free world, where there are no nuclear weapons publicly endorses, a nuclear weapons freeze. Many other American military experts are also supporting the freeze.
The majority of the freeze movement proponents in the United States are average taxpayers who are fed up with huge sums of money being spent on programs that don't improve delivery systems. Tax dollars are needed to strengthen our economy, create jobs and nurture America's greatest resource: people! Christians are no longer finding security in nuclear reactors and are turning inward in search of our only security.
It is ironic that Koeating found the good taste to quote Albert Einstein. This is the same man who said: "We must never relax our efforts to arouse in the people of world . . . an awareness of the unprecedented disaster which they are also accustomed to bring on, unless there is a fundamen- tion to their help."
The nuclear weapons freeze movement is just the start of a positive change of thinking in our country. Please expand your mind and vote with us now on Nov. 21 in Lawrence's vote亦同尔论。
The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything our way of thinking."
Mark A. Widdowson
Dayton, Ohio, graduate student
The University Daily Kansan welcomes letters to the editor. Letters should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. They should include the writer's name, address and phone number. If the writer is affiliated with the University, the letter should include his class and home town or faculty or staff position. The Kansas reserves the right to edit or reject letters.
Letters policy
'Red scare' absurd
To the Editor:
When Jerald Keating awoke from his 30-year slumber, he obviously didn't realize that things change with time. His misinformed and contradictory attempt at attacking the red scare is not approved of, and his argument against the nuclear armament freeze is so full of holes that perhaps it's time he pulled it over himself and went back to bed.
Keating argues that freeze proponents are dwelling on the emotional side of the nuclear arms argument. However, not to be outdone in emotionalism, Keating proceeds to tell us how the Soviet Union is at this moment "lying, cheating and murdering" for the advancement of communism. If that isn't plucking at patriotic heartstrings, I don't know what is!
Perhaps it's time Keating was awakened to the realities of American foreign policy (the kind his mother never told him about), such as the American-invested overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953, and all of those nasty CIA political assassination plots, not to mention the constant sale of arms to countries that "lie, cheat and murder" with U.S. weapons. In this light, the Soviet Union doesn't look much worse than the United States.
Similar in absurdity to the aforementioned contradiction is Keating's use of Albert Einstein in his argument. Einstein was extremely opposed to the proliferation of nuclear arms (thus fitting Keating's label of "naive and intellectually paralyzed") and Keating's use of his quote in his argument is rather self-deafing.
Keating convicts not only anti-nuclear proponents of mental deficiencies (when he 'labeled them "intellectually paralyzed"), but the opponents as well. Despite the fact that "no one in his right mind could possibly desire a nuclear war," both our country and the Soviet Union are billions of dollars on the possibility that surviving, and winning, a nuclear war is possible.
American-Soviet nuclear strategy has evolved from that of the Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD theory, as mentioned and supported by Keating, to one of counterforce that examines the potential threats to the enemy's retaliatory abilities to such an extent that the risk of launching a first strike is validated.
The basis of Keating's argument is that if we have as big a nuclear arsenal as the Soviets, neither will start a war; but that argument is losing validity quickly.
The stockpiling of nuclear arms is abused.
Children playing with matches get burned, and
they end up in the water.
even worse A freeze on nuclear weapons represents it as the only safe, same way to destroy a nuclear weapon.
I would like to argue the point further, but my naive, intellectually paralyzed brain has already been overtaxed in my attempt to understand an argument as foolish as Jerald Keating's.
Eric Torskey
Omaha, Neb., freshman
To the Editor:
Arms strength needed To the Editor
Congratulations to your guest columnist, Jerald Keating, for a thoughtful and detailed presentation on the danger of the nuclear freeze movement. I fully agree with Keating.
The emotional brushfire started by freeze proponents well could burst into the very backyards they hope to avoid, if the Soviets become convinced Americans will not defend their country.
One leads from strength, not weakness.
Marjorie Gromiger
Norgier
Marjorie Gromiger
To the Editor:
I would like to respond to the guest editor, Jerald Keating, headlined "Freeze proposal irresponsible." While I object to many of his statements, including those concerning the presumed intentions of the Soviet Union and the freeze proponents and the claim that the Soviet Union has broken every treaty ever made with Russia. My conclusion is that the freeze would 'lock our government into a very vulnerable and disadavantageous position.'
U.S. hardly vulnerable
After making this statement, Keating fails to substantiate it. How are we vulnerable? The United States currently has enough nuclear weapons to kill every Soviet citizen 40 times over. Just the number of nuclear weapons on one continent is more than the number of nuclear weapons) is sufficient to (total damage the Soviet economy and disastrously disrupt its military canavibility.
The truth is that if security is a chance for survival, we must work to reduce this excess of security.
Yet the United States alone, not to mention England and France and weapons controlled by the United States based in Germany, has almost 50 times this number of nuclear weapons. How is failing to add to this grim total going to make us very vulnerable?
Professor of systematics and ecology
The University Daily
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