4A
Thursday, October 10, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Bogus charges detract from victims' credibility
The recent instances of sexual harassment charges in elementary schools are ridiculous and irre-
In elementary schools are ridiculous and irresponsible. Not only is the idea of a child in elementary school perpetrating sexual harassment with the malice and intent of an adult absurd, but the attempt to pin sexual harassment on children is demeaning and detrimental to people with valid sexual harassment complaints.
Perhaps the most graphic example of abuse of sexual harassment crusading is that of the suspension of 6-year-old Johnathan Prevette in Lexington, N.C. Prevette kissed a classmate on the cheek, and school officials, citing a sexual harassment policy, suspended him.
Arguably, this kind of vigilance may in some cases be warranted in workplaces and other adult situations. However, it is ludicrous to believe that a 6-year-old child could be aiming to demean or belittle his classmate by engaging in sexually harassing behavior.
This case sets a dangerous precedent in the adult world, in which sexual harassment is a very real problem. By making groundless — and indeed, poorly thought out — charges against individuals incapable of perpetrating the acts they are accused of, school officials undermined the laws designed to protect adults.
If women cannot seek protection from harassment without being dismissed as overreacting, then all the gains the women's movement has made regarding equality in the workplace will be lost.
By blindly following an unbending doctrine against sexual harassment, the school officials in Lexington — and others in their position — are doing irreparable damage to laws designed to protect people with legitimate problems. This kind of irresponsible action cannot be allowed to continue.
GERRY DOYLE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KU staff, students will benefit from basic literacy program
Sadly, some KU employees who cannot read this column. That is why members of Classified Senate are leading the effort to revive a basic literacy program for KU staff. About 150 staff members at KU lack a high school diploma, the Lawrence Journal-World reported last week.
The mission of the new literacy program will be to offer a basic literacy course to any staff members who want it. Employing KU students as tutors, the program will raise the reading proficiency of the staff members to the sixth-grade level.
This program is long overdue. It is unfortunate that there are people in society who cannot perform basic everyday functions because they cannot read. This inability not only hurts them, but also their families and co-workers.
The Students Tutoring for Literacy program states that national literacy efforts have reached only 4 percent of the illiterate population, but also that a startling 35 million Americans are functionally illiterate — that is, their basic skills are less than what is needed to fully function in society.
But the good news is that this problem can be solved. With only 35 to 45 hours of personal tutoring, the reading level of an adult can be raised a full grade level.
A similar program exists at the University of Kentucky, where Chancellor Robert Hemenway formerly was employed. It is encouraging to know that the Chancellor is continuing his commitment to promoting literacy.
With the help of students, staff members can learn more and be more productive. And the increased skills of KU staff members also will benefit students.
ANN MARCHAND FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSANSTAFF
AMANDA TRAUGHBER
Editor
CRAIG LANG
Managing editor
MATT HOOD
Associate managing editor for design
KIMBERLY CRABTREE
CHARTY JEFFRIES
News editors
DARCI L. McLAIN
SARA ROSE
Public relations directors
KAREN GERSCH
Business manager
HEALY SMART
Retail sales manager
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
JUSTIN KNUPP
Technology coordinator
Campus      Susanna Löf
... Jason Brait
... Amy McVey
Editorial     John Collar
... Nicole Gannery
Features    Adam Ward
Sports       Bill Petulia
Associate sports  Carlin Foster
On-line editor  David L. Teeka
Photo        Rich Devilkin
Graphics     Mishael Moore
Andy Rohrbach
Special sections  Amy McVey
Wire        Debbie Staine
Campus mgr ... Mark Ozmek
Regional mgr ... Dennis Haupt
Assistant Retail mgr ... Dena Contento
National mgr ... James Tolley
Production mgr ... Heather Valier
Production mgrs ... Dan Kopeo
Lisa Quebbaman
Marketing director ... Erlo Johnson
Creative director ... Michael Weiss
Sales manager ... Shelly Wachter
Mass Impact mgr ... Dena Piscotla
Steve Manger ... Internet Mgr
Jeff MacNelly/ CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Every year my parents sign my birthday card the same way.
Parental ties get twisted after leaving for college
LOVE
MOM & DAD
I never can tell if it's a benediction or a command.
I'm discovering that parent-child relationships get no less ambiguous as you get older. I think my parents were looking forward to my adulthood so that we could drink grocery-store wine in comradeship and discuss trends in suburban literature (i.e., John Grisham and Danielle Steele) or dissect Who's the Boss? reruns.
Instead, they're simply getting old and crazy and needy, I'm getting more put-up and things are getting more obtuse every second.
Sociologists claim role-reversal strain occurs as children attempt to assert intellectual superiority over their aging parents. This is not true in my case: I've known I was smarter than my parents since about the age of four. So have they.
As far as practicality goes, well,
that's a different story. My parents
and I have an unwritten agreement:
I get intelligence, they get practicality.
In a completely unexpected development, they also turned nice. But it's an opaque, extended-family kind of nice. They don't yell because their visits are so short that there's no time for it.
So we were spared profound psychosocial upheaval. Fulfilling a more typical scenario, I ran away to college, and my parents turned into giant plaid-and-denim ATM machines, spewing cash and doom in equally measured doses.
I don't know many people whose relationship with their parents changed for the better when they
Fundamentally, nothing has changed.
STAFF COLUMNIST
went away to school.
This probably is because few people have a real relationship with their parents to begin with.
For many of us, the problem is not that situations change too drastically but that they fail to change at all. Miles of distance
The most profound change comes as parents are stripped of their watchdog tags. Now, they don't necessarily know what you're doing, so they call to whine about how much money they're spending on you. Or about not being involved in your life, in which they were never really involved in the first place.
tend not to heal divisions that began under the same roof.
The distance created by moving out of the house loosens physical bonds but somehow manages to tighten the emotional tourniquet.
Luckily, guilt cuts both ways. Last month, I told my mother I had to sell my thumb to pay my telephone bill and I needed $50 to buy it back (not to mention the skyrocketing costs of reattachment).
Guilt now glides stealthily through fiber-optic connections, stowed away in envelopes and care packages like viral warfare.
Unfortunately, guilt works in another dimension. I'm starting to feel it. Now that I'm older, I think that I should tell my parents that I appreciate them. But when? How?
The check arrived almost instantaneously. Love is best sent Next Day Air.
Sitting down and attempting to communicate as adults seems forced and synthetic and only serves to magnify that we've never really talked before.
Instead, we compensate by making wisecracks. My parents joke that they don't really need to eat, in light of the money they lend me. In my best Nurse Ratched voice, I joke about eventually holding the keys to the nursing home: "Do you think you deserve another diaper, Mrs. Martin? Better pipe down or we'll put you in isolation again."
My parents and I have a typical Catholic relationship: manic and full of spectacle. Pass the collection dish.
When can I tell my parents how I feel about them? I don't want it to ring false. I don't want to send it in a box. I don't want to say I love you.
Why? Because it's the most heinous of cliches; because it's an expression on a birthday card hidden behind a check; because I'm not sure that I do, I mean, I do, I just need time to figure out where they belong in my life. I'm using college as a period of parental detente.
For the time being, I wish that my relationship with my parents involved more than the exchange of currency.
Or maybe I don't. Because then I would be much poorer. And besides, I'm facing the disturbing revelation that I know them too well already.
In any case, they've got one up on me this time. My parents simply have to toss a comma (or an exclamation point) into the sentence describing their feelings. I haven't written the first word yet.
Michael Martin is a Lonexa sophomore in English and theater and film.
HOW TO SUBMIT LETTERS, GUEST COLUMNS
Guest columns: Should be double-spaced, typed and fewer than 700 words. The writer must be willing to be photographed for the column to run
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The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject submissions. For more information, call John Collar or Nicole Kennedy, editorial page editors, at 864-4810.
OUT FROM THE CRACKS
Print media will survive computer age
I like newspapers, so I always am searching for reasons they will survive amid their more sophisticated news delivery cousins. I found a reason recently while reading the business page of The Kansas City Star.
Leaning back on the hind legs of a dinner table chair, I was peacefully flipping through the familiar pages
— absorbing headlines, reading a bit of the stories, eating chips intermittently. My serenity, however,
STAFF COLUMNIST
was dressed studen-
ly by the barnstorming
antics of a fly.
Quickly enraged by its repeated passes, I fashioned the business section of the newspaper into a flyswatter. After I had delivered a decisive blow to the tiny swashbuckler, I uncrumple the section and
zeroed in on some mutual fund numbers.
But I suddenly took pause, unsettled by a rare buzz of discovery: Maybe newspapers will survive because they are useful in a way that other media are not.
Can you imagine how costly my reaction would have been if I would have been reading the Star's online newspaper? And, cost aside, a computer monitor is a far less effective tool with which to silence flies.
Clearly, I would have taken chunks out of walls, cut troughs into linoleum, knocked over lamps and brought trauma to the head of my girlfriend in my effort to smash the fly.
So I wonder whether the forecasters of newspaper doom, who have predicted that Internet online newspapers will supplant printed newspapers, have been a bit severe.
Newspapers are profitable, market-driven products that a huge number of people believe are valuable. Online newspapers are unprofitable and only of interest to people interested in the novelty of online news.
Newspaper executives continue to invest money in web pages because they believe that some day online newspapers will be profitable for advertising.
I'm not arguing that they won't, but I don't believe that online news will cause the destruction of printed newspapers.
To eliminate newspapers, online products will have to find a way to do what newspapers do and do it faster, easier and at a lower price. As communications evolve, they have broadened the spectrum rather than eliminating existing mediums.
It has been argued that the problem at the turn of the century was information shortage and that the problem now is information overload. While new media compete to get people news the quickest, a newspaper can find its niche byifting through everything and helping people understand what is important and why. The newspapers' format and the ease with which they are read can solve the information overload problem.
And the best, most relevant news and analysis, printed on a portable page, should keep a grip on the newspaper audience.
And should tiny insects get in the way of this process, newspapers have a solution for that, too.
Scott Worthington in a Kansas City, Mo., graduate student in Journalism.
By Jeremy Patnoi