Opinion
Kansan
Published daily since 1912
Julie Wood, Editor Brandi Byrum, Business manager Laura Roddy, Managing editor Shauntae Blue, Retail sales manager Cory Graham, Managing officer Dan Simon, Sales and marketing adviser Tom Eblen, General manager, news adviser Scott Valler, Technology coordinator
Wednesday, September 15, 1999
Seth Jones and Jeff Heiman / KANSAN
Editorials
Kansan report card
PASS
Brown Bear — City Commission decides to give downtown brewery a second chance
give downtown brewery a second chance.
Chancellor's faculty convocation speech — Hemenway reaffirms KU's commitment to science in the wake of the Kansas Board of Education's changes to science standards. The chancellor's evolution into a vocal public figure is welcome.
Junior high activism — Southwest Junior High students circulate a petition against Lazer's format change. If teenage girls aren't listening to Ricky Martin and the Rockstreet Boys, who will?
MegaVision at Memorial Stadium — Great color. Great replays. Great idea.
FAIL
- Faculty salaries — A new cost of living survey shows that one of the old arguments against pay increases may not be so valid. Lawrence isn't such a cheap place to live after all. Note to faculty: Students feel your pain. Two words: Ramen noodles.
- Student Senate personal agendas — A couple self-serving student senators are failing to keep their priorities straight. You know who you are.
Clementy to Puerto Rican prisoners — President Clinton grants clemency to Puerto Rican terrorists. Residents of Leavenworth Penitentiary must be wishing Hillary was running for Senate in Kansas ...
■ MegaVision at Memorial Stadium — Replays weren't exactly instant. Watching the replay caused us to miss some of the action on the field. It's new, though, so we're sure it will improve. Faculty salaries — A
Senate should nix travel spending bill
Last week, the Student Senate Finance Committee voted to allot $2,500 to the University of Kansas mock trial team for the year. Tonight, this spending bill will advance to the full Senate for final approval. We urge the Senate to defeat it.
Student groups generally request $300 to $400 for a year's funding. This money often is used to cover the cost of postage, advertising, copying and general office supplies. Senate funding regulations expressly forbid groups from receiving travel expenses.
But Tara Kelly, president of the mock trial team and Panhellenic senator, wrote the mock trial team's funding request to include just that — travel expenses.
Kelly, who also is a finance committee member, originally asked for $2.956. Her proposed bill stated $2.198 would be used for travel expenses, even though
Student fee funds are too scarce to meet travel requests of student groups
groups are typically expected to raise their own money for travel.
Kelly and the finance committee suspended Senate rules and eventually approved $2,500 for the mock trial team, a large part of which will be used for travel.
Kelly said that her organization had made numerous unsuccessful attempts to raise funds elsewhere. Finance committee member Casey Connealy also pointed to other travel exemptions that have been made for groups such as KU Bands and KU Forensics.
tions. Other organizations often have to struggle to obtain funding of $300 just for operations, and allocating $2,500 to one group sends the wrong message.
Furthermore, the mock trial team receives funding from the pre-law society, Phi Alpha Delta, which pays the group's registration fees at tournaments. These funds already provide outside support for the group, and it is not too much to expect the team to cover the rest of its travel expenses without Senate help.
Nevertheless, Senate should not allow this favoritism or go down the road of making additional travel funds exemp-
The KU mock trial team may be a fine organization with important academic qualities, but it should not be above Senate rules by which other groups must abide. Nor should the group receive special treatment because a group member holds a key Senate seat.
The Student Senate should send this resounding message tonight by defeating this proposal.
Kansan staff
Rupali Limave for the editorial board
Chad Bettes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editorial
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Broaden your mind: Today's quote
“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
How to submit letters and guest columns
**Letterers:** Should be double-spaced typed and fewer than 200 words. Letters must include the author's signature, name, address and telephone number plus class and hometown if a University student. Faculty or staff must identify their positions.
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All letters and guest columns should be submitted to the Kansan newsroom, 111 Stauffer-Flint Hall. The Kansan reserves the right to edit, cut to length or reject all submissions. For any questions, call Chad Bettels or Seth Hoffman at 864-4924.
If you have general questions or comments, e-mail the page staff (opinion@kansan.com) or call 864-4924.
Binge drinking not part of all 21st birthdays
celebrated my first on Sunday last week — a mellow affair in this country where the age means nothing. Instead of downing shot after shot, I spent the night with the other students and friends from Golifto, Costa Rica, at a bar where we played darts and
celebrated my 21st birthday last week
ion@kansan.com) or call 864-4924
picked songs from the well-stocked Latino and U.S. CD collection.
Perspective
While some might consider our relatively sober night a letdown, its the norm here. Costa Ricans drink, but drunks are rare. The drinking age is 18, but in Golfito, IDs aren't checked.
Matter
Merkel-Hess
columnist
opinion@kansan.com
In Golfff, there are two things to do at night if you want to leave your house — go to a restaurant or go to a bar. Scattered throughout the town are
bars and clubs that serve the national beers, Imperial and Pilsen, the sweet Costa Rican rum Centenario, or gauro, a sugar cane liquor which is the equivalent of Mexico's tequila. Also present are some imports and Heineken, which is brewed in Costa Rica.
Many bars also sell bocas, small plates of food that may include fish, beef, chips, some salad or bean dip and plataines — fried plaintains. Bocas and drinks usually start around 200 to 250 colones, or about 70 to 85 cents.
Sunday night is a big night in Golfito because the largest employer in town, the duty-free port, is closed on Mondays. About every two weeks the largest nightclub in town, Club Latino, is host to a touring act.
Our first Sunday in town was a salsa and merengue band complete with three vocalists, bass, guitar, keyboard, drummer and auxiliary percussion. During set breaks, a disc jockey played dance music.
Two weeks later, there was a video tour put on by Derby, a national cigarette brand. Upon entering the club, everyone was handed a 5-pack of cigarettes by women clad in Derby red and blue pleather, or plastic leather. Inside, a projection screen and two Televisions added a visual element to the bass of a low-quality sound system.
Between the video and dancing were minishows by two pairs of Derby Dancers. Their lack of coordination left me unimpressed. I preferred the non-dancing breaks — two guys on stilts, a guy juggling fire or two people in very large, comical masks. The night was well worth the $2 ticket.
Songs that didn't have a made-for-television video had a fascinating, computer-generated video from Derby. The animation was slow but fluid with strange stuff like statues in Roman ruins coming to life, or circular blobs floating down a pulsating tunnel.
One other interesting night was the International Show de Patry. Patry turned out to be two cross-dressers that also happened to be some of the worst dancers I've seen. Not that they didn't try. About every 45 minutes the two Patrys would interrupt an otherwise normal dance night with their wigs, dresses and lip sync to bad Spanish love songs. Everyone clustered around the dance floor just watched. If found it kind of boring — these guys had nothing on KU's Pride Week fashion show.
Although there are lots of bars here, most of them are small and dismal. It would be nice to have some other options like a movie theater or more live music, but that's the reality in this small, out of the way town.
In any case, I didn't come here for the nightlife. They'll be plenty of time for that when I get back home. After all, I'm legal.
Students treated only as marketable workers
Merkel-Hess is an Iowa City, Iowa, junior in journalism.
Usually I only think of this episode when someone asks me what I'm majoring in, and I say sociology and American studies, and then
Have you ever seen that episode of The Simpsons in which all of the school kids have to wear uniforms? There's a great scene where the superintendent is walking through the playground with the principal, and he says something to the effect of "these drab uniforms create the perfect atmosphere to prepare our students to take jobs in tomorrow's manufacturing and retail sectors."
they look at me like "oh, you poor thing." But most recently this scene popped into my head when I saw a Listerine advertisement that read as follows: "Stress, all-nighters and a hectic schedule can increase your risk of gingivitis. Yet another reason to major in sociology."
I am not railing against Listerine and their insult to my chosen field of study but rather to point out that we have fully internalized the idea that the only reason we are in school is to make ourselves more marketable. A perfect example of this mentality comes from last Thursday's Kansan that contained an article about the chancellor's faculty convocation address and the need for everyone to be scientifically literate. Within that article is a quote from the director of career and employment service who said that the stronger we make our students in scientific literacy the more marketable they become.
Aaron
Major
columnist
Is that really how you want your worth as a human being to be measured, by how marketable you are? We as students are no longer seen as human beings but rather as human resources — more cogs in the economic machine. We live in a world where technology is king, where your worth as a human being is
measured by the worth of your paycheck and where the quality of your education is directly proportional to the number of job titles that match the name of your major (i.e. a pharmacy student becomes a pharmacist, a journalism student becomes a journalist, etc.). People who don't fit the student-to-worker mold — like the sociology student in the ad — are ridiculed.
It really is a sad state of affairs. If you just think of all the purposes higher education could serve, it's really disappointing that our institutions of learning have gotten so wrapped up in trying to make us better tools for the system that they can easily leave the human spirit at the door to the admissions office. Your passion could be art, but it's only OK if you call it graphic design and want to design advertising layouts. History could fascinate you, but that's not very practical so why don't you throw in a business degree to fall back on?
In its own brilliant way, that episode of The Simpsons makes this same point. Curiosity, imagination and (God forbid) intellectual radicalism are all thrown away by our employment-focused curriculum.
Call me a hopeless idealist, but I would like to see a better world before I'm too old to enjoy it, and I think a lot of other people would, too. How do we even begin to make the necessary changes when we're being molded to fit the existing structure? There's more to being human than climbing the corporate ladder or building a Web site for someservice.com.
As individuals, we are overflowing with highly specialized technical knowledge, but when it comes to seeing the big picture, to understanding the course of history or for appreciating the lives of diverse groups of people, we truly are ignorant. Our institutions of learning — at all levels — can take a major step in promoting a more humanistic education by ceasing to view us as the future tools of America and by starting to treat us like people.
Major is a Deerfield, N.H., senior in sociology and American studies.
Feedback
Women's sports gaining strength
I was not angry after I finished reading Derek Prater's article entitled "Local ballers could defeat women's pros." I was disappointed.
The article is not fact. By having the article on the front page of the sports section, he is saying that women's basketball sucks. With Prater's disgust with the WNBA being shown, he is discrediting the KU women's basketball program.
I don't know if Prater actually watched any of the WNBA playoff games or not, but if he had, he would have noticed Tamake Dixon in three semifinal games.
by KU's own Marion Washington for four years and has been a member of the Sparks since the inception of the WNBA. I have seen Tameka Dixon and other KU women's basketball players at Robinson, on the basketball courts, whipping up on the guys. Tameka Dixon isn't a center. She isn't the best player in the WNBA. However, she can grab four other players and compete with anyone that enters Robinson.
Tameka Dixon was coached
I don't want to say that Prater has not attended a KU women's basketball game, but his article is only allowing students another reason not to attend. Considering what a strong basketball background KU has, it is amazing to me that KU students will wait for days to see the
中
men's team, but they won't attend a women's game. The women's games are free with a KUID. You don't have to arrive two hours before the game starts. You can sit anywhere in Allen Field House no matter what time you get there. And usually, they throw cool stuff into the stands. Why wouldn't the basketball crazed fans want to attend the games?
The popularity of women's sports is growing. The dunks will come. And even if hell freezes over, you could not coach a team of Robinson basketball players that could defeat any five WNBA players.
Jenny Beeghly-Hills Burlington junior