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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Sept. 24. 1964
Once Again To A Freshman
Dear Freshman:
In entering college you have no doubt been looking forward to four years of immersion in the knowledge process, in which your mental horizons will be broadened, your parochial background will feel the cool breeze of social, cultural and ideological diversity, and in which you will become an individual well-educated and well-prepared for your role as community participant and good citizen.
Forget it
Unless you are one of the rare ones, unless you are either so equipped that college will not cripple you or so cynical that you are unburdened by the illusion of Academe, these four years will be more dull grey markers on the road to comfortable mediocrity. And the sooner you realize it, the better off you will be.
Your four years will be spent in the company of little minds on both sides of the classroom lectern. You will be scribbling notes in the company of "students" whose capacity for questioning and inquiry ends with the material on a final examination, and whose world is bounded by clothes, sportscars, the football games and a shallow, mechanistic obsession with sex.
Your comrades are the Takers—the generation spawned by prosperity and complacency, for whom obligations do not exist, commitment is a joke, and concern for others a waste of time.
Their lives revolve around themselves, defined as narrowly as possible, and their universe, which ends with what they can possess. The thrill of dissent, the sparks of intellectual challenge, the lust for inquiry, is absent—because it cannot be hung from a wall, worn, driven, or shown off at a dance.
Your teachers are a breed of men too often forced to an obsession with the trivial. Plagued
by the need to publish for the sake of publishing, untutored in the responsibility of offering value in what they write, the guardians of your minds are themselves men who delight in artificial constructs, in clever word games, in artful presentation of buncombe swathed in the mystical jargon of verbiage.
The classroom, for many of them, is a way-station between the library and the faculty club, a whistlestop where they cast their artificial pearls. Discussion and critical inquiry are a bore, a nuisance, and an interruption of the almighty syllabus.
And yet . . . somewhere in this desert of Summer Proms, Pep Rallies, Kampus Karnivals, Greek Weeks, Fall Proms, final papers, Fiji Island Romps, Winter Proms, mid-term examinations . . .
... somewhere a teacher will strike sparks in your mind ... somewhere you will stay up all night and probe your own motives and goals with a friend ... somewhere the myriad injustices of the world will set your soul on fire with indignation ...
And somewhere you will read a book you have not read before, and wonder at a new though fully phrased by an extraordinary thinker, and you will in spite of yourself be driven to question what you have believed all your life, and you will search . . .
And before you plunge back into the inanities of American college life you may perceive what education is about and see why men spend their lives teaching others.
May those moments in the arid wasteland you are now entering be many.
(Copyright 1964, USSPA)
Sincerely,
Hoopla In Britain
By Phil Newsom
UPI Foreign News Analyst
LONDON —(UPI)— Britons, whose respect for tradition includes a generally restrained approach to politics, are getting an introduction to political whoop-la, American style.
Labor Party leader Harold Wilson gave the country a taste of it at Wembly at the party's national rally kicking off a campaign which will end in general elections Oct.15.
It could have been the Democrats in Atlantic City or the Republicans in San Francisco.
Spectator seats rose tier on tier to the cavernous roof of huge Empire Pool.
Spotlights played upon the stage where African dancers performed and Humphrey Lyttelton's band played a blues number entitled "Thirteen Wasted Years."
IN THE EYE OF THIS POLITICAL hurricane stood the round and slightly crumpled figure of Wilson who hopes after the elections to take over the prime minister's job from his Conservative opponent Sir Alex Douglas Home.
What this country needs, he boomed over the auditorium loudspeaker system, is a government of men with "fire in their bellies and humanity in their hearts."
Remarked London's Sunday Observer".. " an unashamed imitation of an American convention."
Wilson's speech it described as "presidential style." But if British newspapers could compare the rally and Wilson's style to U.S. politics, there remain important differences.
**IN BRITAIN, a candidate "stands" for office. He does not "run."**
And those two words alone mark a sharp contrast.
For by tradition, the British candidate avoids personal slurs against his opponent.
Sir Alec set the stage for the Conservative campaign by saying:
"I shall not indulge in personalities, nor do I challenge in any way the sincerity of the Socialist leaders."
But then the dig: "But their manifesto is a menu without prices. . ."
British political analysts say it was Winston Churchill's violation of this unwritten rule of fair play which helped cost him the election in 1945.
Churchill, the hero, lost and was replaced by Attlee at the Potsdam Conference of allied war leaders.
CHURCHILL HAD JUST LED his country through its greatest war. But he inculded in personal attacks against Labor leaders Clement (now Earl) Attlee and Ernest Bevin.
How Britons are to react to Wilson's new campaign techniques will have to await the final proof of election day. Probing the new technique, this was the comment of The Financial Times of London:
Party Quotes
"Labor has stood for many things in the past but never quite gaiey."
"PRESIDENT JOHNSON looks his worst when attempting to echo the Kennedy style, and a song called "Hello Harold" could also have a hollow sound."
Comparing it again to the American style, the newspaper concluded:
Editor's Note: The following quotes are taken from the 1961 Guide to Conventions and Elections. This handbook, published by Dell, was prepared by the Colurabia Broadcasting System's News staff.
Democrats
"The Democratic Party has a vested interest in depression at home and war abroad. Its leaders are always troubadours of trouble; crooners of catastrophe. Public confusion on vital issues is Democratic weather. A Democratic President is doomed to proceed to his goals like a squid, squirting darkness all about him."—Clare Booth Luce
"The Democratic Party is like a mule. It has
neither pride of ancestry nor hope of posterity."
—Ignatius Donnelly
"The Democratic Party is like a man riding backwards in a carriage. He never sees a thing until it has gone by."—Benjamin F. Butler
Republicans
"The trouble with the Republican Party is that it has not had a new idea for thirty years."—Woodrow Wilson
"Hut, 2. 3, 4 . . . Right, Moderates, Right . . . "
BOOK REVIEWS
THE RIDER ON THE WHITE HORSE, AND SELECTED STORIES, by Theodor Storm (Signet Classics, 75 cents).
Here, for the first time in English, is a collection of the writings of Theodor Storm. The writer was particularly influenced by folk tales and by stories of the supernatural, and these themes are important in this collection.
Storm became one of the most respected of German authors in the 19th century, but is relatively unknown in this country. This is difficult to understand, for his short novels have fascination, frequently of an eerie quality.
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THE WARDEN, by Anthony Trollope (Signet Classics, 50 cents).
This is the first of Trollope's Barsetshire novels, and this volume is based on the London edition of 1855. Geoffrey Tillotson of the University of London has written the afterword.
The story concerns a battle of wits between two men of the cloth—the warden of the title, the Rev. Septimus Harding, director of a charity home, and the Rev. Theophilus Grantly. It is a charming and comfortable kind of story, which the editor regards as a variation of the David and Goliath tale.
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ARK OF EMPIRE: THE AMERICAN FRONTIER, 1784-1803, by Dale Van Every (Mentor, 75 cents).
Frontier history has been told entertainingly and wisely by Dale Van Every, who also has written novels of early America. "Ark of Empire" is the third volume which Van Every is calling "The Frontier People of America." It is the story of the battle in the West when Indians, allied with British and Spanish, nearly kept the American people from conquering the new land.
The American Revolution had ended in 1783, the year before the start of this particular history, but the people of the former 13 colonies were a straggly confederation as yet unequipped to handle many problems. Van Every describes the movement of farm peoples over the Wilderness Road of Daniel Boone and into the Ohio country. The culminating year of this history is 1803, when Jefferson purchased the Louisiana territory and assured American control of its own continental limits.
Van Every writes like a novelist, but his scholarship is always evident. This book is likely to appeal to the growing audience of enthusiasts about early American history.
DailijTransan
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