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Summer Session Kansan
Friday. June 25, 1965
Gals, Grab Your 1/55 Now!
"Pardon me, ma'am, but is this place approved?" Don't count on it, sister. The campus female looking for approved undergraduate housing is likely to find herself in sad straits.
According to the student handbook, "all undergraduate women students must live in organized houses or rooming houses properly chaperoned and approved by the dean of women." "Properly chaperoned" means no private entrance, a landlady who is resident in the house, enforcement of university regulations and closing hours, and appropriate safety and health standards.
LAST SPRING'S approved roster listed 10 houses, with spaces for 55 girls. I don't need a math degree to figure out that the hundreds of girls living off-campus are NOT all crowded into those 55 spaces—and neither does anyone else. And yet all but 55 of those girls faced disciplinary action and possible expulsion from the University if administrative sleuthing discovered their status.
Nearly half of KU's 13,000 students are coeds, many of whom are neither gung-ho about group living nor financially solvent enough to afford Hashinger and Lewis. The resultant housing shortage should preclude the kind of Victorian moralizing that finds only 10 houses acceptable for undergraduate women.
The most tragic part about this unenforceable—nay, ridiculous—situation is that the blame does not rest with the natural suspect, the dean of women's office. The culprit is the Board of Regents. In true passing-the-buck tradition, they have palmed off the responsibility of enforcement to Dean Taylor and her counterparts at other state schools.
I WOULD BE the first to concede the necessity of safety and health standards. For freshmen and immature sophomores, I can see the desirability
of the other regulations. BUT THERE I DRAW THE LINE. College juniors and seniors do not need baby-sitters. They are too fully aware that she who parties until 2 a.m. every night had better live it up now, because she won't be around next semester.
The standard argument for such regulations seems to be a supposed lack of maturity in college students. I would note the following concerning the student who isn't relatively mature by her junior or senior year;
(1) Regulations will not, per se, force her to grow up-or they would have had some slight effect during her freshman and sophomore years. (2) Morality, it has been shown, is a little hard to legislate. It is just as easy to be "immoral" before 11 p.m.as it is after that time, and (3) it's none of the Board of Regents' business anyway.
IT SHOULD also be considered that were the coed not at KU, she would probably be working or married. Not too many 19- to 21-year-olds live at home, under constant surveillance by parents or anyone else. Those few that do probably do not have an 11 p.m. carfew.
I can well imagine that the Board of Regents has been coerced into this position by the prevailing Bible-belt tenor of Kansas moralism. This is only more to their shame. It is the Board's duty to rise above societal and political pressures.
THEIR FAILURE to do so has infected our state schools with the ills of Kansas' puritanism and conservatism.
The Board of Regents, through the state educational system, should be the miracle drug. And it's time they start injecting long-overdue doses of common sense into housing rules for undergraduate women.
Jacke Thayer
The People Say...
The opinions expressed on this page are those of their authors, and not necessarily those of the Summer Session Kansan, the staff of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Public Information, or the University administration.
"The Winter of Our Discontent"
Editor:
As the past Vice-President of the Civil Rights Council and representative on the joint CRC-UHRC Negotiating Committee, I feel I must make a few clarifications on the press release given to the Kansan issue of June 18 by Dean Woodruff concerning the new policy on job placement.
The specific act that bars discrimination in employment practice in Kansas is the "Kansas Act against Discrimination 44-I009." This act makes it illegal for an "employer to refuse to hire a person because of his race, color." It also makes it illegal for a labor organization to "exclude or to expel from its membership" a person because of his race, color, etc. It also makes it illegal "for any person whether an employer or an employee to aid, abet, incite, compel or coerce the doing of any of the acts forbidden under this act or to attempt to do so." The policy recommendation that was sent to the Chancellor by the UHRC was based on the state statute requirements and the UHRC interpretation of the statute, that no state institution or state employer can place or refer a student to a business agency that is known to discriminate, since this would be "aiding" and "abetting" discrimination.
This policy was recommended to the Chancellor by the UHRC with the suggestions made by the CRC representatives on the Negotiating Committee. It was reported in the release that the new policy is, in fact, not new because according to Dean Woodruff, "Most of this was already in operation. In general, I would say we have been adhering to it." Also according to the Chancellor, "I think all of it has been in effect all the time. I don't think anybody has been discriminated against."
I do not believe that this was an uncalculated slip of the tongue; Dean Woodruff knows very well that even though this was the University policy all along, it certainly was not in enforcement at the time of the sit-in last March. This was, in fact, one of the reasons that the sit-in was necessary.
This policy existed, but as was told to the joint meeting of the
CRC-UHRC at one meeting by one head of a department here, he did not know whether he should allow a company or institution in Mississippi to use the services of his office in getting post-graduate students for jobs. Another head of another department agreed with this and expressed a fear that, in fact, he may have allowed some agencies to use his services, and all the time he did not know that he was aiding and abetting discrimination. Surely this policy must not have been enforced if these heads of departments did not even know it existed.
What is discouraging, however, is the fact that neither the School of Education nor the University administration could save us the trouble of having to prove that discrimination existed in the placement of practice teachers. The School of Education was aware of this discrimination and also aware of the University policy forbidding such discrimination as laid down by the Cancellor and as accepted by the Board of Regents and the governor of Kansas.
Last semester, it was also reported to the University Daily Kansan that the School of Education had no way of identifying Negro students when it made placements for practice teaching in the Kansas City area or in any other participating school system. To the surprise of all those concerned, the CRC found that, actually, this was not true. A letter "C" was placed in front of the names of the Negro students to identify them. These students were then placed in all Negro or predominantly Negro schools, while white students were never placed in Negro schools.
This was made public through a press release by Prof. Landsman (philosophy) to the UDK; neither the School of Education nor Dean Woodruff's office denied it. It was true.
At the time of the sit-in, the Chancellor said that since November 6, 1961, when a Housing Board was formed to hear complaints from students who were discriminated against in the rental of rooms or apartments, he had never received any complaint. He was immediately told, however, that Miss Grolla Correlo had lodged such a complaint three times and that
nothing had been done about it. It was pointed out, in addition, that those houses and apartments which were known to refuse Negroes were still allowed to have listings with the Housing Office and to advertise in the UDK. The Chancellor was surprised and said that there must have been a break of communication between the Housing Office and his office. This does not rule out the fact that Miss Correolr had been unjustly treated and nothing had been done about it despite what we all assumed was a rigidly enforced University policy in regard to housing.
What I am trying to say in essence is that if what the Dean of Students says about the policy on job placement as it existed in the past is true, then he must admit that such policy was not enforced to the satisfaction of all those concerned. I will, for example, be shocked in the future to read that fraternities did not discriminate against Negroes and/or members of other minority groups when and if the University and the Board of Regents finally make it a policy to ban the de facto discrimination in these old institutions.
Yet one should not really be surprised with such a report since all indications point out that it is intended to discredit the students who made last semester the "... winter of our discontent . . ." as the Chancellor called it in the Commencement exercise. I don't believe, however, that it will ever be "... Made glorious summer by this sun of York . . ." if those who point out the discrepancies between idle policy on paper and policy in action are branded as irrational, "fastest guns in the West."
I hope those summer students who are coming here for the first time do not think that the CRC was not aware of the existence of many such policies. The CRC was concerned, first, with making policies where they did not exist and, second, asking that the University enforce them where they existed. That is why the UHRC was formed: to "hear and adjudicate whenever students lodged complaints." This is an active role previously unknown here.
-Walter Scott Bgoya
Tanzania graduate '65
The Other Ascent Into The Unknown
BOOK REVIEWS
STUDS LONIGAN, by James T. Farrell (Signet Classics, 95 cents).
Big, harsh, brutal and ungainly—these words characterize James T. Farrell as they characterize Theodore Dreiser. Perhaps they characterize the "literary naturalists." Farrell gave us a depiction of life in America, of social forces, of the environment that shaped these tough young Chicagoans, and all of these were too shapeless for a tight little characterization.
"Studs" was a real shocker in its time. For three decades it has been read, once being greatly influential on a young generation of readers. We see the Chicago south side in the prohibition era, where the confused boy, Studs Lonigan, seeks (as Farrell was then seeking) his destiny. The story progresses to the early death of the youth.
The reader's sympathy, unfortunately, does not go out to Studs Lonigan. In this lies, perhaps, the failure of Farrell. Studs was a white Bigger Thomas. He was a victim of urban society, but there were those who surmounted society—like James T. Farrell—who lived in the era of Studs Lonigan.
MAN, NATURE AND DISEASE, by Richard Fiennes (Signet, 75 cents)An examination of diseases in mankind and their relationship to nature and wildlife. Fiennes, a zoologist and veterinarian, examines the great killers, such as leprosy, malaria, typhus, and sleeping sickness. He studies the effects of disease on mankind throughout history, describes how disease originates in nature, and deals with how disease may be curbed in the future through environment.
THE PROTESTANT MYSTICS, edited by Anne Fremantle (Mentor, 95 cents)]—An anthology of writings designed to disprove the contention that there are no Protestant mystics. Anne Fremantle, and W.H. Auden, who has written the introduction, present the writings of 67 persons, from Luther to e. e. cummings. You'll also find Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson and Stark Young, as well as Thoreau, Whitman and Kierkegaard. Each of the "mystics" records the individual experiences that have resulted in his perception of God and the universe.
THE NATURAL, by Bernard Malamud (Dell, 75 cents)—A decade-old book by one of the newer and mightier names in American letters. Bettern known for "A New Life" and "Idiots First," Malamud is a young writer who has emerged recently and received great attention from the "little quarterlies" and from such critics as Leslie Fiedler, "The Natural" is a witty, irreverent and probing story of the dream of success in America, and of a young man who pursues that goal.
KINGFISHERS CATCH FIRE, by Rumer Godden (Dell, 60 cents)—A novel of more than a decade ago by a writer who is presently catching fire herself because of interest in "The Battle of the Villa Fiorita." Put it down as largely "for women only"—a soapy story of a beautiful dame, desire, and the ambition to break out of the life which she is living.
OUR FACE FROM FISH TO MAN,
by William K. Gregory (Capricorn,
$1.65).
The subject of this interesting little book is why we have a face and how we acquired it. It is an anthropological journey upon which the author takes his readers.
Summer Session
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