Faculty authority vs. Student opinion:
A Timeless TUG OF WAR
Story by Nicole Kennedy Illustration by Jeff Steinhouse
KU students and faculty were embroiled in a debate 80 years ago. At issue: professors who were forcing students to stay in class after the whistle blew to listen to them tell jokes.
"Education isn't entertainment; it's hard work. Foreign students understand that because they haven't really been spoiled. That's the American mentality that starts with Sesame Street."
Robert Minor, professor of religious studies and a member of SenEx
Stories appeared in the Jan. 5 and 6, 1916 issues of the University Daily Kansan, accompanied with a list of the guilty professors' names.
One Kansan article painted a picture of helpless students, too polite to leave classrooms while professors were speaking.
"The admiring students laugh vociferously at every pause — and are then held overtime to listen to another chestnut," the article reads. "When grades are not yet turned in, it is unwise for a student to assert his rights in regard to working overtime."
Faculty members were quick to respond.
A Jan. 13, 1916 article reads, "Uncle Jimmy Dean of the School of Law feels mighty bad because his name appeared in the Daffy Kansan's Dishonor Roll Monday for keeping class over time."
Although this squabble may seem trivial, it shows that students vs. faculty conflicts are nothing new
Today, students and faculty members are engaged in a tug of war about faculty evaluations, and key leaders on both sides say a compromise won't be reached until some time next year.
Early this semester, Scott Sullivan, Leawood junior, demanded that administrators release past faculty evaluations to the student body. He claimed that students had a right to know how other students had rated the performance of their professors.
Administrators resisted.
Sullivan then filed an open records request under the Kansas Open Records law on Feb. 5. But administrators denied him access, citing an exemption in the law that allows the University to keep personnel files, and thus faculty evaluations, closed.
Sullivan announced on Feb. 8 that he was hiring a lawyer and planning to sue the University. Now he says he is ready to work out a compromise agreement with administrators, but little action has been taken since his initial requests.
Sullivan said he thought that students had a right to see professors evaluations and that publicity surrounding his actions had sparked student debate and had forced faculty and administrators to listen.
Both Sullivan and Grey Montgomery, Junction City senior and a member of the Senate Executive committee, said the faculty evaluations issue had taken on new importance because linear tuition will be in place this fall.
In the new tuition-payment system, students pay by
the credit hour. Faculty members have said the new system would reduce the amount of class shopping by students. Student leaders have cited the change as one more reason why students need to know exactly what they're getting into when they enroll in a class.
"Our sheer size and even our financial stature grants us some power over the administration," Sullivan said. "One duty of student government and one duty of the faculty is to keep each other on their toes and not let each other get too comfortable."
"For students, it's a tremendous tool for them to figure out which class is best for them to take," Montgomery said.
But administrators and some faculty members say releasing the past evaluations invades the privacy of students who completed the forms under an umbrella of confidentiality and invades the privacy of professors.
Robert Minor, professor of religious studies and a member of SenEx, said he was offended by the consumer mentality that students often displayed.
"They want entertainment," Minor said. "Education isn't entertainment; it's hard work. Foreign students understand that because they haven't really been spoiled. That's the American mentality that starts with Sesame Street."
Minor said students and professors were just approaching the issue from very different viewpoints.
"A person becomes a professor because they like to study," Minor said.
Students,however,believe professors are supposed to adjust to them,he said.
But despite his frustrations, Minor said he would support a faculty evaluation system if it didn't release past evaluations, but created a new system.
"I'm not against an evaluation system that students can publish," he said.
Minor said he was just opposed to releasing past evaluations because it would be a betrayal of students who thought their comments would be kept private.
William Linkugel, professor of communications studies, said he also was not opposed to having his evaluations opened to the public.
"If there is a convenient way of making them available to students and the cost is not prohibitive, then I wouldn't have a problem with them releasing evaluations to students." Linkuel said.
Members of University Council have established an ad hoc committee to examine the faculty evaluations issue. But no decisions or agreements have been made.
Sullivan said he expected to present a compromise to SenEx this summer.
For now, as in 1916, the tug of war between students and faculty continues.
"Our sheer size and even our financial stature grants us some power over the administration. One duty of student government and one duty of the faculty is to keep each other on their toes and not let each other get too comfortable."
Scott Sullivan, Leawood junior
OUTCASTSEXDRUGSJAZZBOOZEART 'Beatniks'remembered in Washington exhibit
The young rebels came along after World War II in a movement fueled by disaffection from what they saw as a materialist society. It was set to the sound of jazz and its brash new baby, bebop.
WASHINGTON — Members of the "Beat Generation," those outrageous and outcast young Americans who began their rebellion against conventions half a century ago, are being treated to a revival.
Jack Kerouac, author of the beats' best-known book, *On the Road*, said: "I'm the bop writer." He also gave the group its name.
"After World War I, you had Eremet Hemingway's lost generation," Steven Watson, an expert on the era, said in an interview. "These people came after World War II, and they got the word 'beat' from the drug and carbine world it meant 'robbed' or 'cheated.'"
Watson is curator of a new show about the beats at the National Portrait Gallery, following one at the Whitney Museum in New York. Exhibits include books, paintings, photographs, recordings — some of them with music — of authors reading their work, as well as other memorabilia.
What's not there is Kerouac's raincoat. Actor Johnny Depp bought it for $50,000 at an auction.
The exhibition comes as Francis Ford Coppola, director of the Godfather movies, reportedly works on a film version of On The Road.
Kerouac died in 1969 at the age of 47, a victim of alcohol and Dexedrine, an amphetamine.
Some beatniks grew up in alcoholic or abusive families, Watson said. Although some went to Harvard and Columbia universities, they felt cut off from society.
That led them — like other young rebels of the past — to shock their elders with uninhibited use of alcohol and drugs and equally uninhibited sex.
The beats also were fascinated by what Kerouac called the "wild form" of jazz and bebop. The Beatles, who had nothing to do with the beats, and the heavy beat of rock 'n' roll came later.
The term beatnik was coined because the beats were getting publicity at the same time as the Russian Sputnik, the first man-made satellite to orbit Earth.
The most spectacular of the beatniks' young leaders, the poet Allen Ginsberg, now is 69. He won the National Book Award for a volume of poems in 1973.
Watson says that Ginsberg sees his friends' legacy as liberation — spiritual liberation, sexual liberation, black liberation, women's liberation, liberation from censorship and even "gray panther liberation" for the elderly.
Critics say no American poet has been as recognizable as Ginsberg or as popular in his own time.
He is expected to appear April 27 at a reunion sponsored by the National Portrait Gallery.
Another survivor, at 82, is novelist William S. Burroughs. He also published a book, a kind of fantasy memoir, in 1995. He lives in Lawrence and does not travel often.
As the most affluent of the beats — his grandfather invented the Burroughs adding machine — he was on the road a good deal. It was in Mexico in 1961 that young Burroughs killed his wife, trying to shoot a glass of water off her head at a drunken party. He spent 13 days in prison.
Burroughs' best-known book, *Naked Lunch*, appeared in France while he lived there. It was in a series called *Travellers' Companion* which included
Naked Lunch was the subject of the last U.S. trial for obscenity in a book. It was cleared by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in 1966.
both pornography and serious novels in English that could not be published in the United States or Britain. Another in the series was Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.
The painters in the show are not directly linked to the beats, though painters and writers alike of the period set great store on spontaneity.
Some knew one another and frequented the same Greenwich Village cafe, the San Remo. The most prominent painter was Jackson ("Jack the Dripper") Pollock, who spread his canvases on the floor and allowed paint to drip on them.
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Rebels: Painters and Poets of the 1950s will be at the National Portrait Gallery through June 2.
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