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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, Sept. 21, 1965
Editorial Policy, A Study In Responsibility
A daily college newspaper is many things. To you who read it, it is a link with the rest of the campus community. To those of us who work on it, it is our life, and also a link with the future we hope to have.
Admittedly to those on the outside the tasks and privileges here may seem enviable ones. They are, but not in the way they are often considered so.
When those of us who work here first arrived, the newspaper was already created. We are, seemingly uninvolved in its financial success and have no stake in what happens to the paper after we move on to bigger and better things.
AT THE ONSET OF our hitch on the Kansan, we may or may not understand the meaning of freedom in connection with responsibility. We may bring with us good judgment and maturity or the remnants of our adolescence.
Irregularess of these factors, a free college press without restraint by the administration or the college community is essential for a college newspaper to have any reason for existence.
Where would any learning institution be without the inexperienced and the immature? If we all, at the exalted age of 18, had reached a height of sophistication derived from experience and emitting maturity and knowledge, the university would serve only as a stagnant pool of facts, theories and equations.
THE CAMPUS NEWSPAPER is a learning tool, a very vital part of the learning experience of students in this discipline. It only serves this purpose when permitted free editorial expression. Any publication in such a situation can only carry as much authority and influence as those who work on it.
Journalism is not a trade, as it is often called by misinformed and prejudiced readers. It is a profession.
And, like any other field of study, the best results are gained by trial and error.
A staff of professional writers and editors might seem to be the perfect situation. But, if we were all experienced journalists, a newspaper laboratory would serve no purpose. Ironically enough, those aspiring to this profession whose greatest stock in trade is accuracy and objectivity must learn their most vital lessons from the mistakes they make.
John S. Dickey, president of Dartmouth College once said, "In these institutions of higher education we are constantly seeking at the same time to develop in the same individual the somewhat contradictory qualities of vigorous independent inquiry, responsible thinking and action, and even, hopefully, the beginnings of honest humility."
WE MUST LEARN TO USE that basic ingredient of freedom, and the best method we know is to practice and observe it first hand. We cannot learn uses and repercussions of freedom or responsibility through strict supervision and censorship. An administration or a student body that directly or indirectly censors and supervises their campus newspaper must take full responsibility for everything that appears in that paper.
As result of this type of action, you, the university, help to produce a tame, meaningless, stagnant and irresponsible press, and we become nothing but puppets in your hands. We, then, have no purpose here.
The University Daily Kansan has been called a two-headed monster. Its two heads, one as the student newspaper and one as the lab paper of the school of journalism are seldom in conflict, but they are large heads for any monster to bear.
In the past, one head has overpowered the other, and the Kansan became a means of serving the personal goals and vendettas of those who worked on it.
Its responsibilities as a campus newspaper were frequently forgotten.
ON THE OTHER HAND, some of you have misinterpreted our role to the other extreme. You have complained that your newspaper was filled with irrelevant tripe merely because it did not concern your interests or hold your view. Both of these views are wrong and must be fought.
The Kansan begins this year with a resolution and a promise—maybe the same old promises of a better newspaper, but this time a resolution that will be kept.
The Kansan begins its new year in a unique position. For the first time in the Kansan's history approximately 70 per cent of the news-editorial executive staff are women. This factor will not make this newspaper a catchall of gossip columns and female human interest trivia. We have ideas. We have enthusiasm. We have the will to work, to do better.
YOU'VE ASKED US FOR one more thing: to have guts.
How does a college paper, or any paper, get guts—the courage to begin a fight, to stand up for what we believe in, to buck the administration and student opposition? The Kansan will try to get its guts through work, through honest writing and study.
As is often the case in college, we feel futile. We feel no one listens to us. The college newspaper can be a soundboard for ideas and a link between student and administration. We do not want to feel our time and ideas are wasted. We want backing from the student body. This backing, can, we feel, carry our ideas to the administration, and in turn, help us all to profit by an improved university.
Karen Lambert, Janet Hamilton, Judy Farrell
Television Scrapes Bottom
Last week the nation's television audience, that precious progeny of papa Nielsen, was treated to a shabby assortment of tripe, trash and sundry trivia wrapped up as the fabulous new teeeve season.
NBC Week (a week so big that it took eight days) and the premiere on the other networks amounted to a brilliant feat of mass mesmerization. The network directors deserve an Emmy for their significant achievement in broadening posteriors and narrowing intellects.
THE NETWORKS MADE an herculean attempt to conceal their deficiencies by presenting the majority of programs in color. Color me pea green after having endured some of them.
There was wonderful variety in the new season—a veritable Barnum and Bailey of video vistas. We had old westerns (Bonanza, The Virginian), old westerns in new chaps (Rawhide), new westerns (Shenandoah, The Big Valley), all of which amounted to boring westerns.
VARIETY BEING THE spice of life, viewers had a respite from the inspired performances of stoic cowboys and Indians in the lighthearted fare catalogued as situation comedies.
From Petticoat Junction to Green Acres, viewers gamboled in a buccal atmosphere of fun and frolic. The sight of Eva Gabor waltzing in her Jean Louis gowns was a real side-splitter, not to mention her acting.
But there was much, much more—the soaps,
the surgery, the spy and the spy spoof shows.
The soaps needed a thorough cleansing with household ammonia. Peyton Place is a hypocritical hotbed of incest, licentiousness and hushed
Doctor Kildare and Ben Casey are still performing medical miracles each week. Richard Chamberlain is almost exciting as milk toast and Vince Edwards is as wooden as ever. A sharp scalpel applied to both programs would be the best remedy for both shows.
For people who take a vicarious enjoyment in spy tales, there were The FBI, a slight improvement over The Untouchables, and I Spy, whose only contribution was an integrated cast.
scandals all dressed up as a searching look into the life of a small town.
The spy spoofs offered such impalatables as Get Smart (get it?), whose producer would be smart to yank it off the network before the 13 week trial period ends to prevent a real trial for the viewers. And there was Honey West (not a private eye, but a private eyeful). Ann Francis as Honey doesn't even bother to pretend that she can act.
SOME TALENTED WRITERS who allowed their work to be used for television probably learned the art of hari-kari last week. The adaptation of Jean Kerr's amusing Please Don't Eat the Daisies was frankly terrible, albeit the studio laugh machine practically fractured itself in an attempt to prove the show was funny.
To give the network program directors their due, they did manage to fill every hour of the day, but that is all that can be said for the new season.
Network directors have turned an opportunity for presenting educational programs, concerts, opera, documentaries and drama into a cheap side show of trash that isn't worth the effort required to switch on the set.
Letters
For the sake of convenience, we request that letters be concise, typed, and double spaced, when possible. All letters must be signed. —The Editors
The Daily Kansan has a long standing policy of allowing students, faculty members and people outside the University to use the editorial page as a forum for personal opinion through letters to the editor.
The Daily Kansan editors welcome letters of opinion, which will be printed as written, when space permits. However, the editors reserve the right to edit letters which contain obscene or libelous statements.
- Karen Lambert
Dailij Mänson
111 Flint Hall UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom UNiversity 4-3198, business office
111 Flint Hall
Founded 1889. became biweekly 1904. triweekly 1908.
founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press,
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York,
N.Y. 10022. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates:
$4 a semester or $7 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the University Daily Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed, or national origin.
Janet Hamilton, Karen Lambert ... editorial editors
Photographers: Bill Stephens, Harry Krause.
The People Say...
Dear Editor:
BUT FOR ONE THING, the above named editorial about KU's academic status in the United States today would have been very complete. What has been left out is KU's large body of foreign students which now number more than 500. Few universities in the United States can claim such a large body of foreign students. When you know that hardly a day passes in the life of the average KU student when he does not run across one or more foreign students—be it from Viet Nam or India, France or Great Britain, Poland or one of Africa's many new nations—it is hard to believe that this amazing fact has been totally discarded in the editorial.
From the start, a university is a universal seat of learning to which students from all parts of the universe flock eagerly to drink of the fruits of knowledge from the world's leading thinkers. To this day that concept has not been lost, and it is not a great university that does not boast of students from all over our universe, or having such students, fails to both recognize them and take due pride in them.
NO DOUBT YOUR editorial is more than a little disturbing to me. For where then lies the meaning of the word university, where is the concept of a kaleidoscope of cultures, of the liberal flowing of conflicting and sometimes, though not always, contradictory ideas but in the diversity of backgrounds among a student body of universal origin; and where is that diversity richer than among our university's large number of foreign students who stand by daily as they see their age-long beliefs and traditions violated by fellow students who know no better, fellow students who also stand by incredulous as they see a foreign student unknowingly violate their own code of living. Where, I ask?
Sincerely,
Swaebou Conateh
(Gambian student)
BOOK REVIEWS
MIRAGE, by Howard Fast (Crest, 50 cents); THE IPCRESS FILE,
by Leen Deighton (Crest, 60 cents).
What's better for sales than a motion picture tie-in? Especially for hot weather reading and hot weather entertainment? And in the days of James Bond and those bungling clowns on "The Man from U.N.C.L.E."? Crest offers here two suspense novels that will provide you some tingling evenings. "Mirage" appeared originally as "Fallen Angel," and it offers you a story about a cost accountant in New York City who learns that someone is trying to kill him—and he doesn't know why. (Amnesia stuff.) "The Iperess File" is a story of international espionage, about a Kremlin-financed plot to build a spy apparatus in England. It also has enough style and meaning to put it in a class with those fine tales that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene wrote two decades ago.
SPELLING FOR THE MILLIONS, by Edna L. Furness (Signet, 60 cents)—A comprehensive self-guide for the student who has trouble with "accommodate," "benefited," or even "carrot." The book is designed for the person with a long-time spelling problem, and it is in scientific yet highly readable form.