a
Opinion
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University Daily Kansan. August 23, 1982
Just holding our breath
New classes, another year. Today marks the opening of a new semester, to be met with promises of studying more and procrastinating less. And in spite of the inevitable midterms and finals—and the accompanying long nights spent studying or grading—faculty and students alike approach the coming weeks full of expectation. Tempered optimism might be a good way to describe it. It would also be a good way to describe prospects for the rest of the semester.
With this morning's convocation, Chancellor Gene A. Budig begins his second year, still promising to put KU among the top 10 public universities in the country. The biggest obstacle he will face is financial.
In the midst of an otherwise peaceful summer, Gov. John Carlin announced that state revenues were $47 million less than projected. The Kansas Board of Regents voted to cut 4 percent from its budget. KU's share of that was $3.17 million for the Lawrence campus.
Despite administrators' attempts to preserve academic programs from the cuts, hundreds of students are waiting for openings in Western Civilization and computer science courses. Salaries were left untouched, except for a hard-won merit raise for classified employees that has been delayed. More cuts appear imminent, perhaps in January, that could mean layoffs among unclassified faculty, administrators, research assistants and scientists. Meanwhile the University continues to lose talented faculty to private industry because of pay.
Things are not all bleak, though. The Legislature is putting up $14 million for a much-needed addition to Haworth Hall. And the K.S. Adams Center at 13th and Oread should be ready next fall.
Academically and otherwise, the coming semester should prove a challenging one. We anticipate a semester full of new experiences, and however troubling the future may appear at times, we can only go forward, holding our breath till we see what's to come.
Modern computer system will aid new Kansan staff
Those stories also will have been edited and set in tween on another terminal.
This fall, the Kansas will complete its transition to a modern newsroom by switching to a new location.
By the middle of this week, after a couple of hectic days of training, the stories you will read have been typed into a computer via a video display terminal.
The coming of the VDT system marks the end of the extensive renovation of Flint Hall,
We've been in the new offices in the back of Flint, which were built specifically to house our staff.
But the sense of newness still remains—and likely will for a while longer. It will take some.
GENE GEORGE
Editor
time after we learn the basics of the VDT system to develop its full potential.
However, this system should give us—and you one advantage almost immediately: Because production time will be cut, the paper could be distributed much earlier in the day.
This system eliminates the need to re-type copy that has been marked up beyond readability—such as "dirty" copy in the past has been changed in typesetting, and therefore many delavas.
The system also eliminates the need to have our copy set at the print shop in the early morning hours. All we have to do is transmit our copy electronically directly to a typesetting machine, and the type spews out the other end.
For us, the challenge of breaking new ground could not be more exciting, because we have every intention of retaining the high standards of reporting that has won the Kan-
san many awards while in the old newsroom
We plan to bring you news from around the world and around Lawrence, but we will concentrate most of our efforts on what's going on at KU.
As a journalist, I am interested in finding out what kind of people to KU, where they work.
The Kanman will try its best to give comprehensive coverage to the campus, but we will only send students from this location.
If you have a news tip, feature image or photo call, call the newsletter at 864-8148, or just call the number on your phone.
If the idea has to do with the arts, music or entertainment, see Ann Wylie, the entertain-
Zieman heads the desk of four editors that supervise the reporting staff, who are responsible for handling almost all of our local coverage.
B Rebecca Chaney, editorial page editor, can take suggestions about our opinion page. Rich Sugg, chief photographer, can handle ideas for photography.
Any other idea that doesn't hit into the ground can be directed to Mark Zegna, echelons editor.
When submitting an idea, you can help us by including the name and telephone number of a person who could give us details of the story.
If we have done something you think is wrong—or something you do not under-stand, or something you do not know.
Of course, this policy of wanting to hear from you soes double for complaints.
Call me or come to my office to see me. If I am not available, Steve Robrahn, managing director of the
In the event that no editor is available, write your name and phone number, and I will accept.
If we have made a mistake, we will want to correct it, because we think honesty is a good trait.
Good riddance to archaic enrollment
Friday morning, the last day that students would ever stand in long lines bargaining for classes or pulling cards for friends, Gary was able to do it. He decided that he wouldn't miss a bit of it.
"What am I going to miss? The getting up at 6 a.m. working until 5:30 at night, the heat, the complaints, the noise?" asked Thompson, straining to be heard over a John Cooper song banding from a tape碟 on the floor of the Field House. "Westerday I was here from 6:15 to 5:30, and when I got home I realized that I didn't even have time to go to the bathroom during the day."
Thompson, as director of student records and registration, has spent a good part of his last 12 years preparing for and supervising the Field House portion of KU's enrollment adventure. But in November, Thompson will start having a little talk about it. KU will finally begin early talking about it.
While just about every other university in the country has computer engrillment, KU has slumbered along with the old enrolment maze of stations, class cards, and closed classes that aren't really closed yet. The process was frustrating not only for students, but for enrollment officials who could think of a lot better things to do than camp out at the Field House.
Beginning in November for three weeks, Thompson will supervise 15 computer terminal operators, instead of the legions of students and faculty needed to work the old system. A student will come to 111 Strong at a specified time, sit down with a terminal operator and, in what Thompson expects to be a maximum of six minutes, decide his or her schedule for the spring semester. You cannot make a specified time, then a makeup time will be scheduled. No more stations, no more class cards and no more closed classes that aren't really closed yet.
"I think this is one of the most advanced enrollment systems in the country," Thompson said.
Letters to the Editor
Space offers means to safeguard resources
To the Editor:
While I agree that the Reagan Administration has not been very responsible, I must take issue with the basic tenets of Joe Bartos's "An American Gothic Horror Story" (July 29). Specifically, "We are encountering limits . . . finite supplies of natural resources . . . ." and "'and' . . . we may be witnessing the passing of Jesus Christ." If we are minded idea that we are facing a future of less pie for more people and that nothing can be done about it.
How ironic that in 1969, while America was landing two men on the moon, an international conference met with the theme "Only One Earth." The so-called "Club of Rome" has produced trend extrapolations which indicate that within a century there will be more than two million of few natural resources. Chaos, rioting and general collapse are forecast. Your basic "no-win" situation.
But the basic premise on which these doomayers base their predictions is exactly that on which they falter. They believe that trends are destined to continue indefinitely. Such Muslims predicted a few hundred years ago that now we should be knee deep in horse manure. They did not realize that the automobile and riverboat would replace horses as transportation. To paraphrase a famous statement, "Only when it's steamboat time do people steamboat."
Today it is spaceship time. People in Europe, Japan, India, the Soviet Union and the United States are space shipping. No longer do we need to be limited by one planet's resources. We have access to six, as well as to 40 odd planets and thousands of asteroids. We have had them form a form of a football roster only 83 million miles away which will last for a few billion years.
In essence, to avoid the "no-win", we simply Kirk around it by rewriting the program. By
Those who see this as a pie-in-the-sky venture with no application to today's problems, I refer to G. Harry Stine's "The Third Industrial Revolution" or to the works of Gerard K. O'Neill. As well, there is a campus group, Ad Astra LS, which supports the space effort and provides an international organization dedicated to mankind's next step along the evolutionary voyage: space.
developing an industry based around minerals mined from the moon and products made in orbit, we not only avoid industrial collapse, we also can eliminate industrial pollution on earth.
I am optimistic, but I am also aware of our potential for stupidity. Without having to blow up the world, we can guarantee our demise any number of ways. One is to continue our current exploitation of the one planet where we can still breathe without wearing pressure suits. I hope we will not be shortsighted much longer. Should this country choose to eliminate its civil space program, and allow it to not mean doom for anyone this country, I just hope to be speaking English one day soon when I board the world's first space factory to begin work in orbit.
James E. Davidson
Lawrence sophomore
at Columbia University
New York City
Figures not distorted
To the Editor:
In the Thursday, July 8 edition of the Kansan,
two figures—$1.93 billion and $2 billion—were
quoted as the projected price for the Wolf Creek
Nuclear Power Plant.
The discrepancy in figures was quite notice able. But why the mix-up?
Kendall Simmons (Letter to the Editor, July 19) thinks the discrepancy resulted from a "willingness to exaggerate one's facts and figures." Kendall, nothing could be further from the truth.
In my guest column, I asserted that Wolf Creek would cost at least $2 billion. That figure was taken from the June 10 edition of the Burlington Daily Republican, which stated, "the most recent estimate by KG&E is that Wolf Creek will cost $2 billion."
The $1.93 billion price tag for Wolf Creek was quoted in reference to a May 23 article in the Wichita Eagle-Beacon which forecast a 69 percent rate hike for Kansas Gas and Electric customers. The $1.93 billion figure was one of the criteria used in computing the rate hike.
Charles Barnes
President,
Kansas University
Nuclear Diversion Association
In the same article, Richard "Pete" Loux, chairman of the Kansas Corporation Commission, stated that he and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission forecasting team believed that Wolf would cost the months behind schedule. He also predicted that the additional $20 million will be added to the cost.
So far, KG&E has denied that its timetable is inaccurate, but the last time the NRC team recommended a revision, KG&E eventually had to admit that it was a year behind.
So, Kendall, the figures quoted weren't conjectured by an anti-nuclear imagination. Furthermore, you shouldn't have assumed that the lower estimate was the more accurate of the two.
Indeed I sincerely wish that the $2 billion or $2.3 billion price tag for Wolf Creek was an exaggeration.
being used at the University of Iowa, and theirs is considered to be one of the best.
"The best thing about this system is that it eliminates the class cards and that you get to sit down with the terminal operator and see your schedule on the screen. At Iowa you face the operator, but you don't get to see the screen. The operator could tell you that the class is closed
TOM GRESS
when it really isn't. With our system you get to
the screen in case we which classes are open
and the screen is blank.
The computer gets rid of those green enrollment cards on which, invariably, some part of the student population ends up scheduling classes at the same time.
When the student sits down to pick his or her schedule, a time-date grid will appear at the bottom of the screen and, as the student picks courses, they will appear on the grid. In the top half of the screen, the computer will analyze the student's schedule and determine that are open to the student. Not only are conflicting schedules eliminated, but cheating becomes a moot program on the computer.
one you want. You just won't be able to get both." Thompson said.
"Let's say you want to pick out a class for a friend at 10:30 am on Mondays, Wednesdays and Friday. You also want to get a class for yourself at that time. Both both classes and the operator will ask you which
Eighteen students will be able to enroll at a time in six-minute intervals instead of the 500 who came through every half-hour under the old system. The last three digits of a student's identification number will determine when he or she enrols.
"We want to create a low-pressure, low-anxiety situation." Thompson said. "Right now you come into Allen, and you feel like those 500 people are all after the same card you are. It's hot, the lines are long and you just want to get done and put out. But in November, you'll walk into an office that is carpeted and airconditioned, and you won't have another student leaning over your shoulder while you are deciding which courses to take."
As for Thompson, the new enrollment system will give him a good deal of job satisfaction that was nearly impossible to find under the old enrollment system. Thompson has degrees in business and industrial design, with an emphasis on designing processes. While Thompson could always tinker with the old enrollment process, there was no way to make it run smoothly.
"This new system is so much more efficient, and I really get a lot of personal satisfaction out of it," he said. "We've always wanted to find a solution, and now we've got the most advanced one."
"And finally we will be able to go to meetings and speak up a little bit. I think we are the last major university to go to early enrollment. If there are others, they are being awful quiet about it. We used to go to meetings and listen to talk about their system. Now we can talk a little."
V
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