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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
PAGE 5A
TUESDAY, APRIL 5, 2011
apps.facebook.com/dailykansan
My boyfriend has been on the front page of the UDK twice - I'm practically dating a celebrity.
Let me have reality sit on your face and wiggle.
My skin 100% rejects melanin.
Con: I can't tan. Pro: My sunburn
after being in the sun for 7 hours
yesterday is totally gone.
You're married, I wish you would stop calling me and telling me how much you wish we could have hooked up.
When you watch Jaws backwards it's a story about a shark throwing up so many people they have to open a beach!
Dear resident halls, you make me want to climb to the top of Fraser and plummet to my death. TURN THE DAMN AIR CONDITIONING ON!
Kids, I'm going to tell you the story of how I met my mother. It all started as another dark, warm day in the womb...
I hate when people post a family picture from when they were basically a fetus and make the caption say "Back in the day." REALLY? I thought that you turned into a child overnight. How weird.
My irrational fear of thunderstorms doesn't go well with living in Kansas for the past 18 years.
It was 90 outside yesterday. Today, I can't feel my fingers walking to class.
WTFWEATHER.
We make an Elite 8, and we "fail". Others make the Elite 8, they print T-shirts and sell DVDs.
Best part of spring: The abundance of hot ass. Worst part of spring: The abundance of hot ass that I will never get with =(.
Why can't women put on mascara with their mouth closed?
I used to be worried I would get electrocuted in middle school because I had braces.
I thought I was the only one who thought the guy who appears towards the end of the song "Friday is like a pedophile. But even the spoofs on YouTube seem to agree with me.
Facebook isn't as fun now that they have all this security stuff.
Live it up, folks. No where else other than with a therapist will you spend $300 and hour to be bored out of your mind.
My roommate asked if Kansas gets tornadoes.
My phone leaves me more than a dead beat dad leaves his children.
Watson stacks is an allergy attack waiting to happen, so damn dusty.
To whoever stole and/or damaged the movie "Aladdin" from the local Blockbuster: I will find you.
People . . . people . . . the Free-for-All is for witty and snarky comments; it is not for insight into your relationship.
GOVERNMENT
Wisconsin professor rightfully practices freedom of speech
The Wisconsin Republican Party strikes again only this time something that we hold dear as scholars and students is on the line. The current battle being fought between Wisconsin Republicans and University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor William Cronon reminds us, as students, not to take our professors' freedom of speech for granted.
On March 15th Cronon wrote a public blog post concerning Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's policy agenda and the sway of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative group in the state. Producing nearly half a million hits the blog post shed light on the not-so-obvious connection between the Governor and the interest group. Unsurprisingly, the Wichita based Koch Industries' Koch brothers play a role in this saga as one of the main financial supporters of the American Legislative Exchange Council.
In response to Professor Cronon's provocative blog post, the Wisconsin
BY MEGAN ADAMS madams@kansan.com
Republican Party requested the University of Wisconsin-Madison to hand over copies of all e-mail communication to or from Cronon's university account that included terms such as "Republican," "Scott Walker, " and "union." They claim their demand is legal and justified based on the Wisconsin Open Records Law and the fact that the contents of his public university e-mail account are public property.
As the president-elect of the American Historical Association, Cronon is clearly a reputable figure in the field of history. Cronon claims on his blog "Scholar as Citizen" that the Republicans' request will reveal
nothing incriminating and that he does not use the account for personal use. However, the real story here is the chilling effect requests such as these create in the academic world
Don't get me wrong, I fully support the use of the open-records laws such as Wisconsin's but only when they are used in the appropriate circumstances. There are incidents, such as with Watergate, when the public ought to have access to internal government communication. But in this case the Republican Party of Wisconsin is misusing the open-records policy to intimidate and, in a way, coerce, a influential scholar from sharing his opinion on a public issue.
I can only hope that these scare tactics will not scare academics like Cronon from enlightening us on other issues such as what is happening in Wisconsin. Luckily, this chilling effect has not yet reached KU.
As Cronon writes in his blog, "... this particular request demonstrates that they also have the potential to be abused in ways that discourage dissent and undermine democracy." Open records laws were originally planned to do the exact opposite of what Cronon warns. They were intended to ensure governments at all levels were acting in a lawful and
democratic manner and that citizens could enjoy full transparency when needed.
As our own Kansan reports, members of the University faculty intend to participate in the protest of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach's speech on illegal immigration issues on April 12 at the Lied Center. I'm proud that our professors feel motivated and passionate enough to join students in raising awareness on a social issue. I'm even more proud that they are allowed to freely express their opinion. This makes me, for now, proud to be a student at KU and even more proud to be a Kansan.
Adams is a junior majoring in international studies and political science from Overland Park.
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COMMENTARY
This anniversary, remember the Civil War veterans who died preserving our country
Saturday, April 9 marks the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War. The war took countless lives, abolished slavery and converted our country from a loose collection of states into a unified nation. It was a transformative event on par with the American Revolution.
To commemorate this momentous event, many Southern states are celebrating Confederate History Month, which is exactly what it sounds like. In addition, Confederate Memorial Day is celebrated in one form or another eight states, including North and South Carolina, and twice in Texas. This makes perfect sense, because nothing shows that you love America like honoring a group of people who actively fought against it.
The celebrations in these states tend to forget that slavery was the major cause of the Civil War and instead focus on how awesome guys like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were. The championing of Confederate heroes like Lee and Jackson and the omission of slavery are part of an ideology known as the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy"
If you think I'm exaggerating, look at the Civil War in popular culture. Hardly any movies about the civil war feature Union protagonists. From "Birth of a Nation" to "Gone With the Wind" to "The Outlaw Josey Wales" to "Jonah Hex" to "Cold Mountain" to AMC's upcoming TV show "Hell On Wheels", pop culture regularly cast Confederates as the
It's an intellectual movement that attempts to portray the Confederacy in a more favorable light. Slavierung is no longer the cause of the war, but states' rights. Confederate leaders are portrayed as chivalrous gentlemen, while Union heroes are casually dismissed. U.S. Grant is portrayed as a boozehound, the abolitionist John Brown as a psychopathic killer. The North is portrayed as a gang of bullies encroaching on Southern freedom. They attempt to retell the Civil War with the Confederacy as the heroes and they've been very successful with it.
BY LOU SCHUMAKER
lschumaker@kansan.com
heroes of the story.
The Confederacy wasn't some quirky aspect of Southern culture that needs to be appreciated. To borrow a phrase from Aaron Sorkin, they weren't wearing wooden shoes; they were fighting a war that would literally destroy America.
Robert E. Lee is a celebrated war hero and an undeniable genius on the battlefield. Confederate supporters like to point out that he detested both slavery and secession and only served in the Confederacy due to his loyalty to Virginia. However, people did not always feel that way. Fellow Southerner and staunch Unionist Montgomery Meigs hated Lee so much, he established the new national cemetery in Lee's front yard at Arlington so he could never return home.
Henry Adams wrote "I think Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man... It's always the good men who do the most harm." The fall of the Confederacy led directly to the establishment of the KKK, as famously depicted in "Birth of a Nation" and since then, supporters of the Confederacy have been chanting "the South will rise again!"
So, when the anniversary of Lee's surrender at Appomatax rolls around, honor those who died preserving our country, not the traitors who tried to destroy it.
I don't think the Confederates were evil men, but they were the antagonists in a war to preserve america
Schumaker is a junior majoring in film and media studies from Overland Park.
POLITICS
Cutting education budget only digs economy into deeper holes
Around the country, labor is under attack. In Ohio, Wisconsin and several other states, for example, lawmakers are trying to push anti-collective bargaining bills through. In Missouri, a senator proposed repealing child labor laws. A group of Republicans in the national House are trying to pass a bill that would deny food stamps to any family where a family member was engaged in a strike. Women, children, students, immigrants, the disabled and now labor and teachers—in other words, the nightmare of our destructive current government continues.
In Wisconsin, there has been an enormous outcry over the last couple of months at the attempts of Gov. Scott Walker and his Republicans in government to strip public-sector unions, including teachers' unions, of their collective bargaining rights. Walker says that this is necessary to fix a state budget shortfall. The unions have capita lated somewhat by agreeing to accept a decrease in benefits, but they refuse to give up collective bargaining.
Think about this. Walker claims that the solution to his deficit is denying employees their right to speak for themselves and have a say in the terms of their employment. First, when you want to fix a problem, you look at what caused the problem and change that. As I've argued before, Republicans don't seem too keen on that and instead of examining tax breaks for millionaires and other truly wasteful expenditures, they are tearing at the bits to destroy their favorite scapegoats in the name of deficit reduction. In this case, it's unions and those lazy, lazy public school teachers. Collective bargaining did not cause this recession. Collective bargaining is a way for adults to have a say in the circumstances of their work.
Second, to borrow one of my favorite phrases from the Simpsons, won't somebody please think of the children? When public sector pay is being discussed, we're also talking about education and those who provide it. It may sound soft or trite, but a good education is fundamental to a democracy and individual success. A proper education builds agency, critical thinking, and creativity and has the power to raise people out of their circumstances to something better. In other words, this is not something to mess around with lightly.
BY ALI FREE
afree@kansan.com
There are certainly problems with public education and teacher compensation. In "Teacher Quality, Teacher Pay," published in the Hoover Institute's Policy Review, Frederick Hess points out that overall, the issue isn't that teachers are underpaid. It's that the most-deserving and hardest-working teachers, those who put in the most hours or work for the worst districts, for example, earn the same or less than the average teacher. There is yet no reliable standard of performance that encompasses the various responsibilities and individual circumstances of each teacher and classroom. This often discourages the best potential teachers from pursuing a career in education.
So if we want to work on education and improve the quality of our teachers and the intellect and agency of our students, let's do that. There's plenty of room for reform, and far more perspectives than mentioned here. Attacking teachers and their unions in the name of deficit reduction, however, is precisely the wrong way to go about it.
Some teachers get paid too much, some too little, so money should be moved around and plans created to make sure this is done fairly, before taking a broad swipe with questionable motives at education in general and scaring away even more talented potential teachers.
As I've said before, we ought to focus on less potentially devastating ways to fix our economy—fixing the corporate tax code, for instance, or stopping the practice of giving out contracts for unnecessary technology for the military or NASA. Regardless of the problems within the education system, chopping benefits and pay to public sector unions won't help anyone.
Free is a sophomore majoring in women's studies from Blue Springs, Mo.
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