Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Spencer Duncan, Editor Sarah Scherwinski, Business manager Lindsey Henry, Managing editor Brian Pagel, Retail sales manager Andrea Albright, Managing editor Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser Justin Knupp, Technoboy coordinator
Friday, September 5, 1997
Kevin T. Frost / KANSAN
Ranting
Changes in Spanish department to benefit students and teachers
For those of you who hate the department of Spanish and Portuguese, it has given you a reason to like it. The new reorganization of the department will make classes more appealing and more applicable to student's occupational choices.
Changes are in the air for the classes that many avoid and instead take at Johnson County Community College. Starting next spring, Spanish 104, the first class in the sequence, will be taught in a lecture-discussion format, said William Blue, chairman of the department of Spanish and Portuguese.
A professor will lecture once a week on grammatical concepts, and gradu
ate teaching assistants will lead discussions on these concepts four days a week. While the lecture will be large, with about 350 students, the discussion groups will have a maximum of 24 students each.
The same format will be implemented for Spanish 108, although not until Fall 1998. Meanwhile, Spanish 212, the third semester class, will become an intensive review of concepts learned during the first two semesters.
Spanish 216, the fourth semester course, also is getting a face lift. Instead of a single course plan, GTAs will design different courses in an attempt to create interesting choices
for students. Some likely course ideas are a Spanish business class, a course focused on the use of Spanish in media outlets, a popular fiction in Spanish class, and courses focused on different Spanish-speaking countries and their cultures.
Why the sudden change?
Blue said these changes will make Spanish classes better for students. The goal is to make students proficient quicker and to give some options for the fourth semester. Blue hopes the changes would make courses more appealing and more interesting.
If all goes as planned, students should be the benefactors of the department's changes.
Nicole Skalla for the editorial board
City residents getting a free ride
Every year the issue comes up: When will Lawrence develop a public transportation system? While the "Kansan" interviews students who almost unanimously support such a system, the "Lawrence Journal-World" quotes Lawrence residents who insist since only students would ride the buses, only students should pay for them.
But KU on Wheels' financial situation leaves it barely able to provide services to the University. Without some sort of partnership with the city, the system won't be built. Lawrence residents hold the key to public busing.
What many Lawrence residents don't understand is that public transportation offers benefits for people who never set foot on a bus.
First and most obvious is reduced traffic. If even a few hundred students could leave their cars parked and ride buses
around town, traffic headaches would drop. No more waiting through three or four cycles at the stoplight before finally making a left turn at 23rd and Iowa.
Fewer cars also means fewer accidents. When people aren't risking others' lives and limbs to make a tight lane change, it much soer to drive around Lawrence. Also, since traffic flows more smoothly, fewer people have to speed to get to their destinations on time. That also makes driving less dangerous.
With fewer cars on the street, fewer police officers are needed to keep things running smoothly. That frees up manpower to take care of other matters like burglaries and vandalism. The overall crime rate can be reduced.
because of the city's topography. But all those cars — some of which were manufactured before the first Apollo moon landing in 1969 — rolling and backfiring around town does influence our air quality. Taking some of them off the streets might let us all breathe a little easier.
Finally, public busing is easier on our roads. For anyone who has been an unwilling participant in the Dance of the Orange Barrels, this benefit is a major plus. Roads wear out faster as more wheels roll over them. Fewer cars make those roads last longer, saving tax dollars and construction headaches.
Another benefit of public busing is reduced pollution. It doesn't seem like such a big issue in Lawrence, mainly
All these benefits affect every Lawrence resident, even those who never use the bus or drive a car. That makes the public transportation project worthwhile.
Andy Rohrback for the editorial board
THE SPIN
Our take on news events, issues and personalities and how they affect students
Coca-Cola
Four-Day Week
Subject
Labor Day should be every week. Someone should petition the University to make four day weeks the standard, not the exception.
There is never any Diet Coke and half the time the bottles are warm. And can anyone really finish 20 ounces?
Smith Hall
Reason
The air conditioner is on the fritz. Seems that after taking six years to build Budig everyone was too tired to fix the problem.
The football team
Michael Martin
opinion@kansan.com
At least for one week we can proclaim that the team was undefeated. After Saturday that might change.
Princess Diana's death
The KU Campus
The biggest death to effect a college campus since Kurt Cobaln's.
Thanks to less recycling opportunities trash is popping up in trees and making things look less than pleasant.
Winner and Loser of the week
Starting next week the "Kansan" will print a winner and loser of the week.
If the Chancellor sells Strong Hall to a corporation and you think he deserves to be nominated for loser of the week, lets us know.
The catch is that "Kansan" staff members will not make the selections: Students and staff will.
Morbid curiosity lives despite Diana's death
Reflecting
figure who was shown so little respect during her life.
If someone saves a cat from a tree and you think they should be the winner of the week, let us know.
Those who receive the most nominations each week will be selected as the winner and loser.
E-mail nominations to editor@kansan.com or send letters to 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. All nomination must be in by Thursday morning.
In Paris last Friday, Princess Diana died as she lived — in a Molotov cocktail of pomp and press, fueled by romance, spiked with tragedy, and swallowed straight by a worldwide audience of millions.
On both hemispheres, many of those millions now queue up to lay flowers in her memory, to sign condolence books. Some stand in line for hours, many in tears. Television programs and magazines offer somber tributes. It is nearly gratitious, this death-provoked outpouring of respect to a public
There is a line separating real news we need to know about and fluff we want to know about, yet that line is thin and constantly changing. Any government attempt to distinguish between the two would be on one hand, impossible, and on the other, a possible infringement of the First Amendment.
— a fiction — we revealed in the stories of her isolation, her marital troubles and her affairs. The more her perfect life seemed a fraud, the less comparatively imperfect our lives seemed.
It is understandable that many want to put a Diana's Law on the books, to wring progress from tragedy. The accident that killed Princess Diana was needless, as most accidents are. Yet it was probably unpreventible by law. Unauthorized photographing of public figures is illegal in France; so is drunken driving.
We mourn Diana's death as we regarded her in life — on our own terms, for our own purposes. Images of her storybook wedding and life injected glamour and escape into lives, comparatively unglamorous. When the storybook was revealed to be just that
Perhaps the hardest fact to face: Diana was partly to blame in her own demise. She used the press as she was used by them. Her image gave good face to a monarchy that many Britons felt was an absolute waste of tax money. Diana also required that there be publicity for her humanitarian causes. In return, she learned that the lamp of celebrity is lit and extinguished by a process more complex and elusive than a simple switch: Harder to turn off than on.
Simply: Government officials and public figures don't always feel photogenic when they're involved in activities the public needs to know about.
It is nearly gratuitous and completely hypocritical.
France has laws that regulate the photographing of public figures, laws that are tougher than those of the United States or England. In France, photographers are required to get written permission from the subject they wish to photograph. Not only are these laws ineffective — as is now obvious — but they could be an impediment to legitimate journalism and the pursuit of real news.
The only true progress that can be made from Princess Diana's death would be a general public commitment to stop buying publications that pander to lurid curiosity and gather information by abusive means.
She was not the "Queen of Hearts" as many in the press have dubbed her. She was the Queen of Catharsis. She was loved only in the way one can be loved through binoculars.
Following the accident, nearly as soon as CNN picked up the feed from the scene, knees began to jerk all over the world: The paparazzi was to blame.
Many believe Diana's life was a land mine that the paparazzi couldn't resist throwing themselves upon, challenging her to crack, to explode. Her frequent complaints about a lack of privacy and last year's well-publicized scuffle with a photographer failed to deter them. "I always thought the press would kill her in the end," Diana's brother said.
This impression lingers, days after other contributing factors were revealed: a driver with a blood alcohol level in triplicate, driving 90 miles over the speed limit. Eyewitnesses reported that the paparazzi stopped following the Princess' car well before the crash.
Now there are outcries: Regulate the
paparazzi. Say, like France?
Yet it would be overly optimistic to hope that our lurid curiosity will be laid to rest with Princess Diana. It is part of the human condition and existed long before the invention of the modern celebrity. Our curiosity is larger, more powerful than the image of any famous person, and more real. It can create celebrity and, as it is now obvious, very literally destroy it.
Martin is an Lenexa senior in English and journalism.
Quirks of old roommate gone but not forgotten
living by myself isn't as wonderful as I thought it'd be. I love my new-found freedoms that come with a one-person habitation, but I find myself. surprisingly.
missing days of fighting about utility bills and even my old roommate's girlfriend perpetually lounging on the couch.
Bradley Brooks brooks@kansan.com
For the first four years of my college career, I lived with the same guy—Mikey. Our freshman year here, we lived on the same residence hall floor. He was one of my few neighbors who didn't own a beer bong, so I thought he was a reasonably sound person to live with.
At the start of our junior year, we could set a clock to the other's schedule. He knew exactly what I'd be doing at 6:37 every night: rolling whatever leftovers I had into a Mama Lupe's flour tortilla. I knew that at 10:30 p.m. he'd be watching "Welcome Back Kotter" and pretending that he was Vinnie Barbarino. (Mikey is, after all, an Italian kid from New Jersey). We were like an old married couple who easily could, and often did, know what the other was going to do or say before it was said or done.
So we decided to spend our sophomore semesters under the same roof. By the middle of that year at the University, I knew that this kid would always leave the lights blazing when he left the apartment, and he knew that my toothbrush would never be neatly placed in the medicine cabinet.
During that year, I also discovered that he had a closet full of clothes cooler than mine. This resulted in many confrontations. They usually started with him saying, "Hey, fatboy. You're stretching out my clothes."
By the time our senior year rolled around, we could read each other's minds. We didn't have to leave notes for each other or anything like that. I knew who had phoned or how much I owed for the electric
bill bv looking at him.
It was this predictable life that I wanted to escape. I looked forward to the day when I could come home to my own, empty apartment. An abode that contained only my items. My own books on the table. My own messes to clean up. Everything mine.
And that is what I now have. My stuff. The problem is, my stuff is driving me crazy. I can't stand any of my compact discs. The sight of my plants, pictures, candles — even my cherished lamp carved in the shape of a Scottie Terrier dog — is about to make me sick.
I've found that even though Mikey's stuff was entirely familiar, in many ways it was an exotic stockile of articles to me.
I'll never again see in my cupboard 33 plastic cups that were lugged home from Jayhawk basketball games. The boy had a love for yard sales, and a bigger love for the tacky items he could find there. I never knew how much his seemingly every-day acts and objects had really intrigued me.
It is easy to think fondly about a time when you are removed from it. If placed back into a situation in which the Kenny Rogers' ballad, "Lady," were lipsynched every Friday night (he did this), I'd end my life. But I lament the fact that someone else is now witnessing his odd behavior, such as decorating entire apartments with whatever was in the neighbor's trash.
Now, Mikey is back in New Jersey trying to make it big in the film business. I'm here trying to finish up, and it is fitting that if he isn't my roommate, no one is. I never thought I'd miss living with him, but I do.
I enjoy the instant peace and solitude I can get while living alone, but I wouldn't mind having his Food Club cookies around to steal when I need a snack.
Sometimes when I go out, just for the hell of it, I'll even leave all the lights on. Just like Mikey.
Brooks is a Hill City senior in journalism and an editorial page editor.