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Thursday, October 14, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment on The Future
Future almost now
Traditionally, Americans have been optimists. Their future has been one of Manifest Destinies and Pax Americana. Their fantasies of the future have usually been full of robot maids and weekends on Pluto.
Lately, however, more and more Americans have become pessimists, lattestly awaiting the coming of a new president, beginning of the Second Dark Age.
THEY ARE becoming pessimists because they are beginning to realize that the earth's resources are very finite. And we are using them up fast. They are beginning to realize that it will be impossible to maintain our present standard of living. If we don't raise eight per cent growth rate, let alone give the Third World a chance to fulfill its expectations.
They are beginning to realize that, although having four or five kids may be fun, it can also be a disaster. The world's population is doubling every 36 years and you can't just add on an extra room to a planet.
THERE ARE still optimists, of course, and they are still confident
that technology and science will come up with a solution. A nice, easy solution, preferably, that wouldn't cause much change in anyone's day-to-day life and wouldn't increase taxes.
The optimists have the advantage of seeming right until something goes visibly wrong—even if by them it is too late. The pessimists have an advantage in that it's possible for them to be pleasantly surprised.
In a few decades, both optimists and pessimists will know who was right.
The editorials on this page have, for the most part, avoided making predictions, either pessimistic or optimistic. For, unfortunately, neither Nostradamus nor Jeanne Dixon are Kansan contributing writers. And, if we tried to cut open an ox to check its entrails, the ASPCA would be on us in nothing flat.
I will, however, make one prediction that is both fairly safe and fairly important. Tomorrow will come. By Jim Bates
Editorial Editor
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
It's nostalgia time for class of 1987
It's the fall of 1986. Leaves from various parts of campus are blowing around the base of the soon-to-be completed law school, which has been in a soon-confirmed state for 10 years.
Two students, Lisa and John,
are walking down from Daisy Hill to the satellite union, known to most students as "Short's," for a beer. They have just met at a party. They are at universities as at the University of Kansas, and they are in a mood to do a little reminiscining.
"YOU KNOW," John says to Lisa, "I sure wish we could have lived someplace besides those dorms."
"Yea," Lisa says. "I know what you mean. I wish the University hadn't shut down all their sororites and fraternities."
"I guess they had to," John says. "When enrollment went down, they had to fillup the dorms some way.
"I wouldn't have lived in one of those firetraps anyway."
"AW, COME on now." Lisa said. "One of my aunts used to live in one, and she said they weren't all that bad.
"She said they just closed a few for them for some minor violations, and the newspapers made a big deal out of it. She
"I don't know about that," John says. "But it was the University that finished them off in the long run.
"HEY, DID you hear the latest? Somebody told me they
Carl Young Contributing Writer
"You mean they're going to make faculty members live in the dorms?" Lisa asks.
were going to make some of the faculty members live up there."
"Yea, a friend of mine on the "Student Senate said so. The way he gets it, enrollment is going down again, and there's some old University policy that says tenured faculty can either be moved to live in campus housing if enrollment gets low enough."
"IT'S SOMETHING called financial exigency. It seems there were a bunch of profs that foiled the whole thing up once because they couldn't ever agree and the chancellor got so upset he didn't do anything with them. I think it serves them right for being so stubborn."
"It sounds kind of silly to me," says Lisa.
"I guess you're right," John
says. "But who would get upset
about something called 'the
murder'? It sounds pretty
dull to me."
"Yea," Lisa says. "Really dull."
"OKAY, I can take a hint," John says. "I hope they have this thing done."
John and Lisa walk through one of the side doors onto the main floor of Shorty's. The main entrance has been closed since the beginning of classes and the other staircase is being removed.
"I never did understand why they built this place with three staircases," John says. "I would just as soon they would leave the things in, though. This place is a mess."
"Oh, I think those new picture windows will look nice," says Lisa. "But it does seem like a place to remodel the place."
THEY WALK downstairs to the Pizza Inn in Shorty's. A "Pardon the Inconvenience" to them. A "closed for remediation" sign.
"Oh well," John said. "We can always go to the 'Hawk'."
KU's future in funding
"That's okay." Lisa says as they walk out the door. "I hear the chancellor wants it done by homecoming."
Most of us probably won't be here 10 or even five years from now. Some of us will settle in Lawrence and perhaps will get jobs at KU. But for most, KU is a temporary home.
Nonetheless, the future of KU is a very important question. The value of education, in terms of human development and economic benefits, can hardly be overestimated. And no institution of learning in Kansas rivals KU in the depth and breadth of its search for knowledge.
SO WHAT is to become of our alma mater?
In general, the future is bright. Earlier this fall, a study predicted KU's enrollment would stabilize and then drop sharply in the early 1980s. Few dispute that KU's enrollment will soon level off, and that leveling will be a good thing.
KU's large construction program will be completed soon, and after that the program will be designed to worry much about space.
THE AMOUNT of money spent on capital improvements can be cut or shifted to other concerns. Having a new law school and visual arts center, and a stable education, KU won't have to keep searching for money to expand facilities.
the need for professors will quit grow. But for everyone else, this probably will be good. The University, which already has generally good teachers, can become even more selective.
Unfortunately for teachers,
Greg Hack Contributing Writer
Furthermore, one hopes that the funding will still be here to attract good teachers.
This is the one uncertainty about the future that concerns most academicians—money. A stable enrollment would be fine. The money coming in probably also would be stable, and some funds could be shifted from education to conversion to improving quality.
troublesome prospect of rapidly declining enrollments. A survey by Kenneth Anderson and George Smith, professors of administration, foundation and higher education, says KU enrollment will drop to 16,000 in the middle 1980s.
BUT THERE is the
But there is good reason to question this prediction. Prediction in the 1980s said KU would stop rising in the early 1970s.
This fall's enrollment of 24,372 - 22,553 for the Lawrence campus—is a record. This is the fourth consecutive fall that enrollment records have been broken.
CHANCELLOR Arch Dykes was probably justified earlier this fall when he said KU's enrollment wouldn't drop
drastically in the future. KU is doing an excellent job of expanding the Outreach Program, which serves older students who know learning should be a lifelong process.
It would be good, however, if the University did more to prepare for the future than to be optimistic. Expanding the Outreach Program is an imminent challenge. Beefs up enrollment, but because it provides real services to the state.
FOR A while, KU faculty groups pushed for state funding on a merit basis. But when gloomy enrollment predictions turned into the reality of the recent enrollment increases, many of the camps seemed satisfied with the funding based on enrollments.
But even that isn't enough. For too long, most state funding for colleges has been based on enrollments. This is an easy way to do it, but it isn't the best valueable than others, and few programs cost the same to educate a student.
It is time the faculty and administration resumed, or intensified, their efforts to get the state to provide academic funding on a more realistic basis than enrollment figures.
Then, even if enrollments did drop to 16,000, KU would be in much better shape to maintain high standards. The future of KU will look better if educational funding is based on keeping good education, rather than on a numbers game.
Soleri plans future cities
Futuristic architect Paola Soleri, former Frank Lloyd Wright protege and a philosopher-designer in his own right, is a man with ambitions to design buildings that would like to see built someday.
His ultimate goal is no less than "transfiguring the earth
Nuclear capability threatened
Nuclear capability, that marvelous secret that was supposed to energy, defend the United States, is in jeopardy.
For years, most of the United States has thought of nuclear capability as the savior that will take us out of the heathen world of oil embargoes, high electric bills and air pollution. We watch weaker nations test nuclear weapons and feel good knowing ours are perfected and plentiful. The government lauds big business for selling nuclear weapons and feels confident our balance of payments. Nuclear capability is, to many, the supposed key to our continued dominance of the world as it nears the year 2000.
OF COURSE, some warn that the mere mastery of such a potent secret can be a double-take to care not to make it a take care not to make it a
mainstay of our society before the quirks are worked out. Many think these quirks can be worked out before we become dependent upon our nuclear capabilities for survival, but as that day draws closer, questions are answered become more grave.
IN 1988, the United States negotiated a nuclear proliferation treaty that now accords to it the status of being inadequately, the spread of
nuclear reactors. But the ever increasing impact of nuclear capabilities on energy and defense have, at least, led the United States to recognize its awesome potential.
the safety of having nuclear capabilities in a world that seems increasingly hostile and violent. At this point, the United States would be absurd to try to negotiate for a world without nuclear power. Ours is an age without a nuclear bomb, and without an atom bomb, and energy systems are inefficient if they don't include operation of
Mary Ann Daugherty
Contributing Writer
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Dalton Duckworth
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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
without defiling or disfiguring its own cosmic aspects." However, he admits his designs for future cities will never be employed "until our society has cleaned itself of political, social and moral inequities," an admission that could of course preclude any hopes of his ideas being fully realized.
nuclear devices throughout the world. A lengthy document, the treaty has three main planks: Nations that have nuclear weapons won't give them to those who don't, nations who don't have them won't acquire them and, if both promises are kept, nations may sell nuclear weapons in a peaceful domestic operations
FURTHERMORE, the treaty is self-defeating. It has been estimated that reactors sold legally to Third World nations could produce enough plutonium by 1990 to manufacture about 3 million weapons annually. And it's to secret that defense designs as well as the very material needed to produce weapons aren't always kept under the tightest security.
Early this month, when fallout from a Chinese test blasted to eastern U.S. states, many residents lost their homes and disasters the future could hold.
The treaty, once hoped to be the solution to an array of problems, has serious deficiencies. Several major powers, including the United States and the Soviet Union, have signed the treaty. Among those who haven't signed are France, Russia, Greece, Rhodesia and China, all nations with unstable governments or governments that may be hostile to the United States.
The Associated Press reported this month that a Princeton University senior had designed a nuclear bomb that had one-third the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb, the AP said, was designed from information obtained by the United States. Clearly, the security of the United States and her allies remains in jeopardy, regardless of the proliferation treaty.
REACTOR safety, one of the most controversial of all issues evolving from the proposed effort to plant in Burlington, remains an issue for study. Several critics of the plant told of near disasters in existing plants as well as new developments in construction by waste water from reactor cooling systems. Of course, there's the constant uncertainty that nuclear wastes can never be adenine disposed of.
Until recently, then, our future in the nuclear age depended upon our ability to control the spread of nuclear weaponry and guarantee that nuclear reactors, which are now commonplace, would be the nation's rite from conventional fuel price hikes, can be safely operated. But an even more serious problem, a problem that challenges our very existence as a nuclear power, is released by the state department earlier this month.
THE REPORT said simply that we will run out of uranium, necessary for nuclear operations, in about four years if we continue to use it at the present pace.
The questions for the nuclear age ahead become even more grave in light of the report, for now we have more than just safety and friendly nations to worry about. We must secure more uranium, which, by and large, is exported to the United States by host countries and investments opposed to nuclear development. The question now is whether the United States, master of the bygone nuclear era, can be a nuclear power in the future.
However, Soler's ideas and designs are worth attention despite the obvious obstacles that may doom them to the drawing board. Dismissing the engineers and architects as "doodles on the back of the cosmic phenomenon" that produce squail, Soler concludes of cities as one-structure space that seek to reproduce the wholeness of a biological organism.
HE BELIEVES that man is acting in a suicidal manner and that the real problem facing the population of the environment. Antipollution measures, birth control and other palliative remedies are like treating people with a new medication and if present trends continue, a universal city could blanket most of the United States by the year 2000—the result of what he termed two-dimensional "spew."
Babelnah is a good example. It is one of the super-megastructures that Solei would build as a miniature alternative to today's urban landscape, anything but miniature. It would be more than a mile high and stretch across 18,000 acres.
He says the only alternative to a future in which even the last remaining natural areas will be "invaded weekly by waves of schizophrenic vacationers" is to turn to miniaturization and the merging of architecture with the environment. Soleri calls this merger "arcology"—an obvious conflation of the words miniaturism and fact, he sees miniaturization as the logical evolutionary progression for mankind. Man must miniaturize or die.
philosophisches on the problems and solutions facing society and architecture, but also includes and sketches of his future cities.
IN HIS book "The City in the Image of Man," Soleri not only
John Fuller Contributing Writer
The structure would house 6,000,000 people at home, work and play but would occupy only 10 per cent of the space of a modern city. Industry and agriculture underground, and residential and recreational areas would be contained on the upper levels. Light wells would go in the center of twin towers from top to bottom to provide light for who don't get an exterior view.
SOLERI doesn't restrict his designs to land, however. He has designed arcologies that could float on the sea, which can help digestive systems, taking water in through giant tubes and then expelling it ecologically safe after foodstuffs, chemicals or minerals had been trapped or arcologies could house 400,000.
The most fantastic of the archeologies is Asteromo, a space station that would house 70,000 people and enough farmland to feed them and replainish the oxygen supply.
Critics of Soler's concepts say that his designs test his credibility to its utmost limits. Some dismiss him as indulging in "fantastical erector set for futurism." One of the most
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common reactions to his arcologies is that they resemble ant colonies. One major arcology is to find the people in Soler's work.
SUCH COLOSSAL visions as Soler's, warns Soler's friend Buckminster Fuller, aren't going to be easily interpreted. Soler realizes that and doesn't expect instant understanding in an age when most people are architecturally ignorant. Soler's new options, even though they are never specialized and rely heavily on abstractions, have drawn enough followers so far to enable Soler to bring one of his projects to life.
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He is currently building a model arcology called Arceantii in Arizona, which will eventually house 3,000 people in a single 25-story, 10-acre megastructure.
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IT FOLLOWS the Soleri precept that the care of a city and its citizens is a first person role, and those who should be involved in. At Arcosanti, people pay for the privilege of building the city—a privilege that means Spartan leaders must hard work for the volunteers.
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Soler believes that when and if his designs are adopted, they'll bring about great social changes. People won't be promised greater comfort or security—but joy, the joy of experiencing stimulating environment and the feeling of working toward achievements that go beyond one's own limitations.
Perhaps Soler's designs, other than Arcsanti, will never be adopted. There are certainly countless social and technical difficulties and obstacles that can be overcome by see any Babelinsoo soaring into the clouds; that is, if we ever even want to.