4A
Friday, March 1. 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Out-of-control spending shapes greeks-only revue
For 46 seasons, Rock Chalk Revue has been a tradition at the University of Kansas, but it is a tradition that not everyone can experience. Participation in the variety show is open to all students at the University, although in recent years competition usually has been dominated by the Greek community.
The financial issues associated with the revue have been a long-standing debate. Many support a spending cap because once the shows are accepted into competition, spending is out of control and overwhelming. Others argue that participant groups should be able to spend as they please; the problem is that unfair competition arises as a result. Because of the huge sums of money spent on each production, the revue is not accessible to other living groups. Groups outside of the greek community find it virtually impossible to compete because of a lack of funds.
The competition in this
THE ISSUE:
Rock Chalk Revue
charitable event is fierce and unfair. Every year, with more elaborate costumes and sets and outrageous amounts of cash being used in all aspects of the show, the revue becomes more of a professional production than what it is supposed to be, a charitable event to raise money for the United Way.
Even though the show raised a commendable $29,000 for the United Way this year, the money used to create the elaborate productions also could have been donated.
The revue is an important tradition of the University and a great asset to the Lawrence community, but all students should have the opportunity to get involved. Spending within the competition is excessive, and it takes away from the primary purpose of the event, donating to the United Way.
TARA FITZPATRICK FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Conference title proves that women's team deserves support
About 4,100 fans watched the Kansas basketball team overpower Kansas State to win the last Big Eight Conference championship last weekend. Fans support a winner at the University of Kansas, and Allen Field House always rocks on game days.
Why only 4,100? It was the women's team that played in Lawrence on Sunday. The Jayhawks clinched the Big Eight title, finished the regular season at 18-8 overall, 11-3 in the Big Eight and ranked 24th in the nation. Junior guard Tamecka Dixon was named conference player of the year and coach Marian Washington named an assistant coach for the 1996 U.S. Olympic team.
This year, as most, the success of the men's team has overshadowed the women. The men were ranked third in the latest USA Today-CNN Top 25 poll and clinched the conference title with a victory on Saturday in Manhattan. They are 12-1 in the conference and 24-2 overall. Point guard Jacque Vaughn and the rest of Roy Williams' team have carried on the tradition of
THE ISSUE:
Women's basketball
excellence that has brought the program national titles. Final Fours and All-Americans.
The men's success deserves the support it receives from the students, alumni and even the nation. Games routinely are s sold out, and a second trip to Lawrence this season by ESPN's top color commentator Dick Vitale shows the program's national reputation.
But the women also are winning, and they deserve student and alumni support and recognition. Only 4,100 fans for a championship winning game is hardly impressive. Colorado averaged more than 5,500 fans per game last year while winning the title, and drew more than 9,000 for their last home game.
The University has the best men's basketball fans in the country, but the University could have the best fans in all of college basketball if more fans turned out to see the women play.
JOHN WILSON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Jeff MacNelly / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Buchanan's early surge pushes other Republican candidates
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery. Moreover, it confirms something I have maintained all along, that Buchanan IS a Jesse Jackson of the right.
I hope Jesse Jackson was listening to Pat Buchanan's victory speech after the New Hampshire primary. Jackson should have been pleased to hear Buchanan call himself "a voice for the voiceless." That line comes straight from Jackson's descriptions of himself in his 1984 and 1988 campaigns.
At the same time, Buchanan and Jackson are lightning rods, unabashedly arousing as much anger as approval as they battle for "the heart and soul" of their parties. At full tilt, they do an excellent job of ripping their parties apart and they don't appear to care, as long as they can push their parties off center and toward their respective extremes.
Or vice versa, inasmuch as Jackson energizes a liberal Black base, Buchanan energizes a conservative Caucasian base. Most of Buchanan's success on the Right relies on the same concerns Jackson raises on the Left, rising working-class anxiety in the face of declining manufacturing jobs, wage stagnation and a growing gap between rich and poor.
Jackson took charge of what is left of America's left with his two runs for president in the 1980s.
Buchanan has upstaged Newt Gingrich's conservative revolution with his two presidential runs in the 1990s.
Most important, each has been written off as too extreme to be elected president. yet each is forcing
Each makes a populist us-againstthem pitch to working-class Americans against corporate elites. Each opposes NAFTA. Each has been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks, which each denies, although only Jackson has apologized.
KANSAN STAFF
Worker discontent crosses racial and party lines, making odd bedfellows out of Buchanan and Jackson, as Jackson begrudgingly acknowledges.
It could happen. Buchanan's solutions are simplistic, but a simplistic solution is better than none at all. None pretty much describes what the other leading contenders have been offering.
Dole, for example, offers his résumé and the promise of one last mission for the 72-year-old World War II veteran, which is just another way of saying, "Hey, it's my turn. Give it to me already."
Buchanan is forcing Dole to earn the office, and Dole's lack of ideas is showing.
Lamar Alexander offers a fresh face, but few ideas besides school vouchers. Steve Forbes hangs his presidential campaign on one idea, a flat tax proposal that would offer a fat tax break to the very rich and very poor, but to few of the middle-income earners who are listening most eagerly to Buchanan.
"The deck seems stacked against working people and they are looking for a fairer deal." Jackson concludes
That's why I think moderate Republicans should stop wringing their hands and gnashing their teeth about Buchanan's early surge. Instead, they should consider the lessons offered by a certain citrus fruit: When life hands you a lemon — to coin an old, yet still quite serviceable phrase — make lemonade.
their parties' leadership to listen to a popular discontent in grassroots constituents.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune
With conservative power still dominant, Jackson has pulled together with President Clinton and other Democrats. But the Republicans, flush with victories, are divided by winner-take-all
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Actually, it is Republicans who need to hear the message. I've been hearing a lot of people rejoice about Pat Buchanan's early surge into front-runner status in the Republican presidential nomination race. Trouble is, they are all Democrats.
President Clinton must be delighted by Buchanan's ascendance. Buchanan's isolationism, protectionism and anti-everythingism are frightening enough to ensure a Clinton landslide, one-on-one.
struggles between supply-side moderates and arch-conservative militants.
Oroke did not give landscape a chance
Jackson, in his own syndicated newspaper column, crowed at the notion of Dole beating up corporate irresponsibility. Talk about biting the hands that feed the GOP. But Dole is running scared, and so should a lot of other people who have been asking working Americans to take all the risk of changing economic times while asking the business sector to share virtually none of it.
Even Sen. Bob Dole, trying to salvage his rattled presidential campaign from the onslaught by the "Buchanan brigades," is sounding like a class warrior.
"Corporate profits are setting records and so are corporate layoffs," he said in New Hampshire, days before the primary. "The bond market finished a spectacular year. But the real average hourly wage is 5 percent lower than it was a decade ago."
his column. "Buchanan understands that. Democrats better get the message before it's too late."
Kudos to the landscape unit for their use of stones for Old Fraser Hall in landscaping near Watson Library and Stauffer-Flint Hall. As I walked past it Monday afternoon, I was struck by the juxtaposition of old and new, the understated beauty that it added and the overall aesthetic and artistic improvement to the area.
ASHLEY MILLER
Editor
VIRGINIA MARGHEIM
Managing editor
ROBERT ALLEN
News editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
HEATHER NIEHAUS
Business manager
KONAN HAUSER
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
JUSTIN KNUPP
Technology coordinator
to appreciate rules and regulations more than art and independent initiative
they were going to move the stones back anyway, couldn't they have waited a few weeks to gather community opinions about it?
SYNDICATED COLUMNIST
It could have been called a trial landscape project. Instead, it simply was unilaterally and immediately dismantled.
I'm truly glad I had the opportunity to see the improvement before it disappeared. I only wish I'd brought my camera.
Unfortunately, bureaucrats seem
Campus mgr ... Keran Gerach
Regional mgr ... Kelly Connelys
National mgr ... Mark Otkmek
Special Sections mgr ... Norm Blow
Production mgrs ... Rachel Gahli
Marketing Viller ... Resheb Valler
Marketing Director ... Pamela McKeen
Public Relations dir. .. Angie Adamson
Creative director .. Ed Kowalew
Classified mgr .. Stacey Weingarten
Internship/co-op mgr .. T. J. Clark
The stones immediately were removed because Rodger Orokе was upset that there was an improvement made without his knowledge, and Mike Richardson was more concerned with prior authorization than positive effect. Therefore, the improvement was eradicated.
Dale Miller
Why couldn't Facilities Operations have looked at the project with a more open mind? Because
Campus ... Joann Stirk
... Philip Brownlee
Editorial ... Paul Todd
Associate editor/for ... Craig Lang
Hawes ... John Wilson
Sports ... Tom Erickson
Associate sports ... Bill Petula
Photo ... Matt Fluker
Graphics ... Nath Mucser
Institutional sections ... Trevor Ternary
Wire ... Tara Ternary
Illustration ... Micheal Leakner
Bonner Springs graduate student
But then I saw
the words under
the logo: "Proudl-
y Presents Day
on the Hill 1996
With..."
In case you didn't know. Phish is
"Great," I thought with a feeling of nausea. "There's going to be a Phish listening party in the Ballroom."
a band with a following that has been increasing rapidly. Often associated with the Grateful Dead, hordes of fans follow the band faithfully from city to city.
Chaos indeed was caused by whomever this was, and it doesn't seem as if a lot of damage has been done, except to the voice boxes of those answering the phones at SUA and the University Information Center.
Both the SUA and Phish logos are faded and blurry-looking. Taylor said that she thought the logo was taken from SUA's home page on the Internet. Give me a break, people. How hard is it to photocopy the logo directly from another flies? However, the more I complain, the more I realize that I was tricked.
And if one really thinks about it, Phish would be very difficult for SUA to get anyway.
No, it wasn't the one that said "Vote No." It was a fluorescent half sheet of paper, which had the logo of the rock band Phish on it.
To put it bluntly, Lawrence and the KU campus would be over-run by thousands of transients. There would be bands of freaks everywhere and there is no way that security for this kind of event would be justifiable to the administration. Basically, it would be a weekend of chaotic madness.
I started thinking about what would happen. A huge percentage of the students would show up, not to mention a few thousand from the Kansas City area. Plus, everyone following the band on tour would be at the show.
He said that didn't necessarily give random people the right to use the loo@ at their discretion.
Besides, everyone knows that Jane's Addiction and the Pixies were scheduling reunion concerts together. The first stop on their tour? Day on the Hill.
Needless to say, I was excited.
Then, of course, after calling SUA, I found out that the whole thing was a farce.
Fake SUA fliers stimulate some entertaining campus chaos
"We would love to get a band like Phish," said Leslie Taylor, music coordinator for SUA. "But Phish is probably $23,000 more than we could afford."
One thing is for sure, though. Whoever made these fliers needs a lesson in the art of photocopying. The thing looks bad.
As I figured.
Glancing again, I saw the Student
Glance
Union Activities
logo across the
top of the flier.
The other night when I was getting money from the Kansas Union's ATM, I noticed a flier on the wall beside me.
STAFF COLUMNIST
There's been some tricky things taking place on campus.
Paul Vandertuig, KU licensing administrator, said the SUA logo wasn't trademarked, making it very hard for the organization to act on a statute against the antagonizers.
But did these tricky monsters do something illegal?
So we are dealing with some tricky hooligans. On Wednesday, more than 200 people called the SUA office inquiring about the filer.
lan Ritter is a Leawood senior in English, history and journalism
THE COMPLETELY POINTLESS ADVENTURES OF BRIGG AND FRO