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University Daily Kansan Friday, September 17, 1965
Up, Periscope
An education is no longer a luxury reserved for the favored few. It has become an expensive necessity, an invaluable tool for making a living and the essential auger for forging ahead.
Higher education is as important to us as a periscope to the submarine. In a sense, education is our periscope. With the instrument of knowledge, we can raise our intellectual vision above the wall of pseudo-truths, generalizations, prejudices and myths that are the obstacles in the path of understanding, the path which we must take today if we are to realize our ambitions.
This has been a long, hot summer. We are participating in a war which, though geographically far from us, comes closer every day. We are furnishing weapons for both sides in another battle. On our own soil, we have seen bewildering fierce riots all across the nation, and increasing restiveness forecasts more.
Here a lack of education is evident. But a wealth of education in some areas has also been manifested. Two men cruised in space for eight days this summer; we have machines that can do our thinking for us; automation makes even long distance dialing effortless.
THIS PATH OF understanding is vital for the simple reason that we must at all costs avoid annihilation or partial destruction of the world man's knowledge has built.
Education made all of these technological strides possible, and it is the stumbling block which has caused most of our failures.
WE BELIEVE THAT THE opportunity for education is available at KU on a scale with every respected university in the U.S. Kansas has a tradition of solid foundations in education, and our University is continuing that tradition. KU provides not only the solid foundations, but chances to explore and experience intellectual adventures in fields as diverse as radiation biophysics and studies of Communist China.
In his annual State of the University address, Chancellor W. Clarke Wescoe described a seat of learning as having four legs-students, faculty, facilities and programs.
Student enrollment is increasing at close to 1,000 each year. Faculty, facilities and programs are tailored to meet the demands of students with
the implicit idea that the student demands excellence.
Included among the 750 member faculty are 11 endowed professorships, a Regents professorship, seven University distinguished professorships and a visiting distinguished professorship.
OVER $10 MILLION per year in research grants finance studies at the KU Medical Center and on the Lawrence campus.
A long-range campus plan and building program has been developed to ensure growth of housing and classroom space to keep pace with a growing student body.
Academically, KU's College Honors Program has been described as magnificent by the national director of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation.
Testimony to the strength of KU's academic program is shown by the university's claim to five Rhodes Scholars in seven years (only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, West Point and the Air Force Academy have more); 88 Woodrow Wilson Fellowships in five years and awarding a Danforth Fellowship for graduate study in the U.S. and a Marshall Scholarship for study at Cambridge University in England to two 1965 graduates.
CULTURALLY. KU can be as proud as any university community. The Museum of Art, aside from a distinguished permanent collection, brings great art from all over the world to KU in several exhibits each year. The University Theatre's major production series makes both contemporary and classical drama live for KU students while the Experimental Theatre explores new dimensions in modern drama. For the past several years, the Theatre has participated in exchange programs under auspices of the State Department, bringing actors from behind the Iron Curtain to KU while performing American drama in Iron Curtain countries.
Each year the Concert Course, Chamber Music Series and university concerts bring visiting artists to KU to interpret the world's great music.
The periscope is here to be lifted. It is each student's responsibility to heft its weight and in turn receive the advantages and benefits from the mighty tool of knowledge.
— Karen Lambert
So Now You're Freshmen...
You are at the university now, a full time student. Summer school doesn't count; it's not the same. You are full of hope or cynicism or nothing, full of big ideas or little ones, full of false impressions or bristling enlightenment.
You are all impressed by different things—the incongruity of the new buildings and the seediness of the old students, perhaps. Almost anything you are looking for you can find here, in some form or other, if you are fortunate enough to know what it is you seek.
By now you have heard those questions too many times—what's your major and where are you from? Those questions brand the freshmen, almost everything does.
YOU ARE GOING TO be swamped with labyrinths of all descriptions—enrollment, class schedules, professors and university living in general. I hope in most ways your life becomes a little unstructured for you.
I hope you meet some very disturbing people. I hope you disagree with them on almost everything and I hope you learn from them.
I hope you broaden yourselves, and not just superficially. Many of your classes will seem pointless; the duties in your living group will seem ridiculous. They probably are. Learn from everything.
There are easy ways out of almost everything here. Learn which short cuts to avoid. Most of them eventually are the hardest way through.
YOU ARE ON YOUR own now. Exciting as it may sound, it can be terrifying when considered in every aspect of your new situation. Not very many people here really care what you are doing
I hope you do not narrow yourselves by laughing too soon at the things you will see here. Most of them can be of inestimable value to you merely as an observer if you shy away from participating. Most of them are seeking the same thing you would like to find.
You are still wonderfully young, old as you certainly feel. Now is your chance to test yourself in ways you will never have a chance to try again. But, be judicious. The biggest labyrinth here in the huge conglomerate is grouply labeled activities.
or why. This can also be a thrilling environment in which to live when approached maturely.
SOMEWHERE IN THIS quagmire of red tape, ludicrous parties, and intellectual snobbery you can find a worthwhile experience. It will come in many forms—that of a professor, a roommate, a book, a phrase caught in passing at the Kansas Union, a humanities lecture, a classical film or from some very concentrated digging inside yourself.
That thing is a way of living. The focal point of everything here should be life, although much of the time it is lost in all the superfluous flim-flam in which any large university must by necessity become involved.
Thus, finally, I hope you learn to live. A more correct wish is that you become aware of life in all its facets. Regardless of your orientation, approach life sensitively. Experience everything that way.
I hope you approach this university with such a voracious appetite that no one could hope to fulfill it.
Janet Hamilton
Campus Impressions
KU is a good place to return to. We wouldn't want to live here 12 months a year, the pace gets frantic after two rounds with semester exams, but for a nine month stay, there are definite advantages.
Three months removes that jaded outlook that seems to envelop blase college students and the old and familiar becomes the new and inviting.
Our minds won't automatically genuflect to venerable old Fraser as we stroll up Jayhawk Boulevard, but now we can bow to the future. Old Fraser was a glory in her heyday, but, like any proud beauty, she faded with age, and it was better so. There is nothing more pitiful than a faded beauty trying to conceal her age to keep up with a fast paced younger set.
THE OTHER BUILDINGS along the boulevard are unchanged, with the possible exception of a few new ivy leaves. In a few weeks, the hue of a good, vintage burgundy will dapple the leaves as autumn spreads over the campus.
The residence hall complex on Daisy Hill commands attention, if only because of its overwhelming size. To us, it is reminiscent of a sprawling urban renewal project, lifted from a blueprint for the Great Society. But the trees and shrubs now taking root there will, in time, soften the sterile appearance of those brick behemoths.
The sound of hammer against nail is now as accepted as the carillon bells. In a race against time, new buildings take shape almost before they are a gleam in the state architect's eye as KU prepares for a projected enrollment of 20,000 in five years.
A UNIVERSITY IS PEOPLE new students, bewildered but expectant; old students, easy and confident and new and old both scurrying to stand in yet another line. The ropes are learned swiftly, and students are already assuming their September-to-June roles with a stoic attitude that will eventually change to a slightly harried outlook or just plain panic.
The Navajo Indians have a phrase which we believe best expresses KU's impression—"the land of room enough and time." Time to seek, time to study, time to savor, and time to grow.
The Editors
A good buy among the new paperbacks: the Oscar Levy translation of Karl Schlecha's new German edition of The Philosophy of Nietzsche (Mentor Philosophers, 95 cents).
You'd have been bumping into Nietzsche frequently had you taken Western Civilization at KU a few years ago. He had an extraordinary effect upon modern-day political thought, particularly upon Adolf Hitler, who distorted the Nietzschean concept of the Superman. This volume is edited by Geoffrey Clive, who has tried to include that which will represent the poetic beauty of the controversial philosopher.
BOOK REVIEWS
There are two new volumes in the "Readings in the History of Mankind" series—Guy S. Metraux and Francois Crouzet's The New Asia (Mentor, 95 cents) and the same authors' Religions and the Promise of the Twentieth Century (Mentor, 95 cents). The first of these describes 200 years of change in the Orient, where much of the big news of today is breaking. The articles were published originally in the Journal of World History. The second of the books permits scholars and theologians to review recent changes in the Judeo-Christian and oriental religions. Another new volume is Monroe Upton's Inside Electronics (Signet, 60 cents), which is a semi-technical interpretation for the layman.
Another interesting new volume is Dale Every's The Final Challenge, The American Frontier 1804-1845 (Mentor, 75 cents). Van Every thus completes his four-volume history, "The Frontier People of America." He begins with the Louisiana Purchase and carries the work to the completion of the American continental domain on the Pacific.
Numerous historical figures are found herein—Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, the guide Sacajaewa, Astor, the Mountain Men, Tecumseh, Jackson, Washington Irving, Pike, Fremont, Kit Carson, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett. Van Every tells his histories at all times as entertaining as though he were writing a novel; let us hope the critics will not shoot him down for this.
Dailij Hänsen
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