KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL
VOL.101,NO.34
THE UNIVERSITY DAI KANSAN
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 10, 1991
(USPS 650-640)
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For KU students, 'coming out' was the right choice
By Rochelle Olson Kansan staff writer
When Rob Taylor was five, his brother went trick-or-treating dressed as Frankenstein. Taylor went as Little Red Riding Hood.
His Halloween costume was only a hint that Taylor might be gay. But when he "came out" to his mother last Christmas, she had known since he was in the cradle.
Tomorrow, Taylor will join other members of KU's gay and lesbian community in encouraging others to come out for National Coming Out Day.
Coming out is the process through which gay, lesbian or bisexual people accept their sexual orientation and freely discuss it with others.
Taylor said that when he told his mother he was gay, she looked at him and smiled.
She told him that he had been given a gift, a chance to live life in a different way.
He said he was not comfortable telling anvone about his sexual orientation.
I was the one she cried. Taylor said.
He said that his stepfather told him he did not care whether Taylor was gay as long as he was not a Republican
Taylor admitted to himself that he was gay during his freshman year at the University.
"I remember dropping everything," he said. "I just took over, was overwhelmed with it."
But a female friend changed that when she旧吧 him she was a lesbian. She let him go.
Jodi Darien, an Overland Park junior who came out last spring, said it was important for her to know that other lesbians were at the University.
During her freshman year at Kansas State University, she had a professor who
"That was my first introduction to someone who was a lesbian." Darst said.
She said that she first found herself attracted to a straight female friend last year. The friend confronted her, and for the first time she saw what feelings about possibly being a lesbian
"That was when I first started admitting it to myself," she said.
But she also had a boyfriend who she had been seeing for four years.
"Itwasnearly hard because Ireally cared about him," she said, "but I felt like I primarily wanted to be involved with women."
Darst said that her friends and mother had been supportive during the coming out process. But that did not make it easy.
"It's a really scary thing to think about because it's such a taboo," she said.
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be in the position she was in one year ago. "Coming out has changed my entire life and made me so much happier and more comfortable." Darst said.
Jamie Howard, co-director of Gay and Lesbian Services of Kansas, said she also was confident with who she was.
She spent the summer between her freshman and sophomore years living in Oakland, Calif., working at a lesbian cafe, Howard said.
"I met a lot of people who were significantly older and more comfortable with themselves," she said. "In California, I had access to one of the largest gay communities in the world and since then I've been out."
When she returned to school in the fall, she helped start a lesbian support group.
But Howard said she regretted that her sexual abuse was not part of her life, sexual and still were not part of her life.
"My mother is still very weird about it," she said. "But she's not as brittle as she used to be."
Patrick Dilley Oklahoma City graduate student, was 17 when he told his mother he
Dilley had run away from home, and the night he returned his mother asked him to help.
He said that for the next seven years his relationship with his mother was strained.
"She could not deal with it for a long time until she realized there were people in her own circle of friends who had friends, sisters, brothers and uncles, names who were homosexual," Dilley said.
He said his relationship with his mother now was good.
When Dillen arrived at the university he made no attempts to disguise his sexuality. He said he put activities he had participated in under a false name, gay and lesbian community on his resume.
"At KU it's a lot easier to be 'out' in the work force because of the protection afforded to gay and lesbian people," he said.
But he said that every day he faced a situation in which he asked himself, "Am I going to say anything if something offends me?" Usually he chooses to speak up.
"It's living a lie if I don't," Dilley said.
House approves drug bill
Legislation requires random tests for transportation workers
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The House yesterday overwhelmingly approved mandatory drug and alcohol testing for as many as 6.3 million transportation workers, as lawmakers responded to August's fatal subway crash in New York.
The legislation would require random tests for many workers in the airline, railroad, truck and bus industries, as well as for employees of local mass transit systems. Air traffic controllers and other Federal Aviation Administration workers also would be covered.
"People have a right to know that those to whom they're consigned in the area of mass transportation are free of substance abuse and sober," said Paid, William Hughes, D-N.J.
Hughes helped write the testing provisions along with Rep. Lawrence Coughlin, R-Pa., Sen. John Danforth, R-Mo., and several other lawmakers.
The drug-testing language, on which there was no separate vote, was part of a $3.2 billion measure financing federal transportation programs for fiscal 1992, which began Oct. 1. The
House approved the spending legislation on a 374-48 vote.
The measure is expected to be approved by the Senate as early as next week, and quickly signed into law by President Bush.
The bill contains about $600 million for road projects in lawmakers' home districts, $3.8 billion for mass transit programs and $2.4 billion for aviation equipment throughout the country.
A dozen drug-testing bills similar to the measure debated yesterday have been approved by the Senate since 1987, only to have been killed by the House.
Labor unions have vehemently fought the legislation in the past, and some—such as the Airline Pilots Association—still oppose it. The pilots group contends that the tests are an invasion of privacy and that there has never been a law to regulate airline caused by drug or alcohol abuse.
Nonetheless, union opposition has slackened since a speeding New York City subway train derailed Aug. 29, killing five people. Authorities had been drinking before reporting to work.
Since last year, government regulations have required random drug tests for aviation, trucking and bus industry workers whose jobs directly affect the public's safety. For example, airline pilots are subject to the tests but civil workers employed by an airline are not.
The rules also require drug tests in those industries before a person is hired, after an accident and when the person is suspected of drug or alcohol abuse.
The legislation would, for the first time, require alcohol testing as well, extend all of the tests to commuter bus and rail lines and give the existing regulations the force of law.
Lawmakers say the testing program could cover 338,000 aviation workers, 31,800 air traffic controllers and other FAA employees, 90,000 railroad workers, 5.5 million truck and bus workers, and 195,000 mass transit employees.
The bill includes **2.5 million** for bike paths in the Miami-area district of Rep. William Lehman, D-Fla., chair of the House Appropriation Committee's transportation subcommittee.
Taking the plunge
Practicing on the 3-meter diving board, Amy Graham, Blue Springs, Mo., freshman, looks backward to orient herself before entering the wafer. The KU swimming and diving teams were practicing yesterday afternoon in Robinson Center.
Task force will assess academic programs to eliminate duplication within Regents
By Alexander Bloemhof
Kansan staff writer
The University Senate Executive Committee formed a task force Tuesday to develop criteria and methods to evaluate the value and value of KU's academic programs.
The task force was formed in response to the Board of Regents wish to cut down on academic programs at all of its universities in order to maintain high quality for the rest of the universities' programs.
However, no consensus exists between University officials and the Regents about how to identify programs that should be eliminated.
The task force will develop standards to determine whether a KU program overlaps with similar programs at other Regents schools.
Tom Beisecker, chair of SenEx, said the Regents claimed that some of the universities' programs lacked quality and students.
He also said the Regents thought that some programs were unnecessary because similar programs existed at other Regents schools.
The Regents is pressuring its universities to review 20 percent of their curriculums.
However, those claims were based on limited inspections of the programs. Beisecker said in his proposal to form the task force.
"As members of the faculty, we are concerned that whatever assessments are made are based on a set of defensible criteria," he said.
David Shulenburger, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs, said no standards existed to determine which curriculated programs were unnecessary.
The Council of Presidents, consisting of the heads of the Regents schools, began in mid-August to review all Regents academic programs.
"Every program we have has been approved by the Regents at some time," he said. "So at some time, we thought the program was justified."
"We should not be creating a mediocre system by continuing to expand but make sure that existing systems are properly supported," Hammond-Paludan said.
The council asked deans and department heads at the six Regents schools to determine how extensive program duplication was, why they were duplicated and whether the duplication could be justified. Shulenburger said.
Martine Hammond-Paladun, Regents director of academic affairs, said the lack of state money required a review of the existing programs.
New programs have to fulfill certain standards for approval by the Regents, she said.
Hammond-Paludan said already.
Regents program requirements
New academic programs have to fulfill minimum requirements to be approved by the Board of Regents. The Regents want to use the same requirements to determine whether an existing program should be reviewed.
Enrollment
Masters' degrees: at least 20 majors and five graduates a year
Doctorates: five majors and one graduate a year
Undergraduate degrees: at least 50 majors and 15 graduates a
Undergraduate: at least three full-time faculty If the program offers a master's: three additional full-time faculty If the program offers a doctorate: two additional full-time faculty
Institutional Support
- If a program meets none of these requirements, the Regents sav it should be considered for review.
Source: Kansas Board of Regents
Melissa Unterberg / KANSAN
existing programs should fulfill the same standards.
New academic programs must have a minimum enrollment of 50 majors if they offer undergraduate degrees, at least 20 if they offer master's degrees and at least five majors must be enrolled in doctoral programs.
In new programs, at least 15 students also must receive a baccalaureate degree a year, five a master's degree and one a doctoral degree.
In addition, new programs must have a minimum of three full-time faculty members for undergraduate programs, at least six full-time faculty if it offers a master's degree and at least eight if it offers a doctorate.
Hammond-Paludan said the Regents considered reviewing 20 percent of the existing academic programs at its universities that, according to these standards, lacked enrollment or faculty.
Soviet Union needs help from West, report says
The Associated Press
BANGKOK, Thailand — The United States will escape recession slowly next year and the Middle East will grow the fastest of any region, according to the International Monetary Fund predicted yesterday.
It also said eastern Europe would creep its way into a market-driven economy, but the leading lender to developing countries said the outlook for the crumbling Soviet Union was uncertain.
Recovery from recession in the United States, Canada and Britain, the drop in oil prices and the end of the Kuwait crisis all will contribute
The IMF released its 1992 prognosis for the world economy in Bangkok, where members were holding their annual meeting, attended by leading bankers and finance ministers.
It projected that worldwide inflation would ease from 5 percent last year to 3.8 percent next year, largely because oil prices have fallen since jumping during the Kuwait- crisis.
The report concluded that the global economy would improve modestly in 1982, with output rising from $7.3 billion to $8.6 billion growing a percent from this year.
$ \textcircled{10} $stronger growth next year, the report said. This year's growth in output is estimated at 1 percent, the lowest rate in nine years.
But the IMF warned that the United States and Britain would have to be ready to tighten monetary policies, presumably through interest rates, if economic growth brings the threat of higher prices.
Japan's growth rate will fall from an estimated 4.5 percent this year to 3.4 percent in 1992, although industrial powers, there report said.
IMF officials said they thought the fastest growing region next year would be the Middle East, rebuilding after the gulf war, followed by Asia, to many of the world's most successful stories of the past decade.
After an estimated contraction of 12 percent this year, a far greater drop than earlier projected, eastern European economies will grow by 2 percent next year, the IMF said.
The outlook recommends technical assistance and financial support from the West to help the eastern Europeans and Soviets, but IMF officials refused to specify how much money was needed.
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