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University Daily Kansan Friday, May 14, 1965
Teacher Troubles
Oklahoma teachers, backed by a National Education Association sanction against the Oklahoma educational system, have voted to boycott the state schools next fall.
In essence, this sanction would warn out-ofstate teachers not to accept positions in Oklahoma, caution Oklahoma college graduates against teaching in the state and make wide-spread publicity on the subject available to the general public.
Oklahoma's governor, Henry Bellmon, calls the action "disgusting, distasteful and disgraceful." I disagree. Oklahoma's teaching pay scale is $1,000 a year below the national average and it has been for many years. It is past time for action.
The teachers' action was prompted by the defeat of the recent one cent sales tax increase proposal. Legislators had promised this tax increase would bring the teachers their $1,000 raise from the present average of $5,160 to nearly meet the national average of $6,235. Bellmon was opposed to this tax raise.
THE TEACHERS SAY their vote to boycott was merely an effort to get a consensus of opinion among themselves. It does not indicate further action. Their action is not rash: it is merely an effort to make their opinion known.
Bellmon, in turn, boycotted their meeting Apparently the teachers were right in taking such
severe action. Likewise the Oklahoma Education Association board of directors adjourned without taking a stand on the matter.
A number of the Kansas counties bordering on Oklahoma look to that state for many of their teachers yearly and have for several years now, Herold Regier, head of the Teacher Placement Bureau here at KU, says. Regier predicts an average of $5100 for beginning KU education graduates here in Kansas. This is almost as high as the average salary for all teachers in Oklahoma.
Kansas itself, however, has a low pay average of $5,672 a year. Among the fifty states, Kansas is ranked approximately 31, according to the National Education Association research report for 1964-65, Oklahoma ranks 37.
REGIER'S PREDICTION is based on the fact that most KU education graduates go to the Kansas City area where starting salaries are from $5,000 to $5,200 for a first-time teacher with only a B.A. degree.
Bellmon accused the teachers of deliberately aiming to damage Oklahoma. Oklahoma's sales tax is presently $0.02 on the dollar, one cent lower than the Kansas rate. What is more important to Oklahoma—re-election of a governor who runs on a no tax increase ticket or a better educational system?
Janet Chartier
U-2 Incident Carries Lesson
It has been over five years now since the U-2 incident shocked the world, and, most of all, the United States. Its present importance, however, is certainly not as great as the headlines of May 1960 indicated it would be.
The U-2 incident, the collapse of the last Summit Conference which resulted in part from the incident, and the trial of Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the plane, seem to have been lost in the continual series of incidents throughout the world.
On May 1, 1960, the U-2 was shot down over Russia while on a spying mission. But, it was not until May 5 that Nikita Khrushchev announced that it had been shot down. Toward the end of a long speech to the Supreme Soviet, he made lengthy comment denouncing the flight, but gave little detail as to the actual shooting down of the plane.
On the same day, the U.S. State Department said a weather research plane was reported missing since May 1. The press statement said, "It is entirely possible that having a failure in oxygen equipment, which could result in the pilot losing consciousness, the plane continued on automatic pilot for a considerable distance and accidentally violated Soviet air space."
THE NATIONAL Aeronautics and Space Administration released detailed flight plans, the pilot's report of difficulties, and the purpose of NASA's atmospheric research. Khrushchev had the United States where he wanted it.
On May 7, Khrushchev again spoke to the Supreme Soviet saving. "Comrades, I must tell you a
secret. When I was making my report I deliberately did not say that the pilot was alive and in good health and that we have got parts of the plane." The United States was caught in one of the biggest lies in history.
What's more, the United States was to bungle again.
That evening, the United States issued a statement to the press which did at least two things. For the first time in its 184-year history, the United States admitted publicly it had deliberately lied, committed espionage, and violated the territory of another country. Secondly, the statement attempted to take the responsibility from Eisenhower, saying the flight was not authorized in Washington.
Here, Eisenhower, under the advice of the secretary of state, made a basic tactical error. How could a responsible world leader, the President of the most powerful country in the world, allow a matter as important as this to go on without his knowledge? While this error cost his own political reputation, the major cost was to the United States as represented by its leader. The error allowed Khrushchev to charge that the country and Eisenhower were being run by "aggressive imperialist forces" and "Pentagon militarists."
OVER THE WEEKEND. Eisenhower saw what was happening and decided to take the complete blame. Monday afternoon, May 9, the administration announced that the President had ordered measures which included penetration of the Soviet Union by aerial surveillance to protect the United States and the
free world from surprise attacks. Specific missions, such as the one on May 1, were not subject to Presidential authorization. Thus the President became responsible for the flights.
The next major result of the U-2 incident came in Paris on May 16, where the four major powers of the world were meeting for the Summit Conference. For whatever motive (few are really sure what the motive was), Khrushchev chose to sabotage the conference by delivering a tirade against the United States and demanding an apology from the President. The conference did not reconvene and the leaders went back home wondering if this meant a new freeze in the cold war.
Because of the secrecy involved in the incident and in espionage, it is impossible to tell exactly what results the incident had on U.S. fact-finding operations. Assuming that the United States has competent officials in the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the White House, it should be assumed that a definite plan has been worked out for dealing with a similar situation. The handling of the incident once found out was just as disastrous as the fact of the spy flights.
This incident, together with others, has pointed up the inadequacies of Eisenhower's type of White House organization. Entirely too much power of decision was delegated to subordinates. Only the President is able to see his organization in total, and more basic decisions should lie in his jurisdiction. Both presidents since Eisenhower have taken more active roles in decision making.
Daili'llfönsen
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EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Leta Roth and Gary Noland ... Co-Editorial Editors
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Don Black...Managing Editor
Bobbie Bartelt, Clare Casey, Marshall Caskey, Fred Frailey, Assistant Managing Editors; Judy Farrell, City Editor; Karen Lambert, Feature-Society Editor; Glen Phillips, Sports Editor; Janet Chartier, Telegraph Editor; Harry Krause, Picture Editor.
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
A major result of the U-2 incident also has been the change in the approach to negotiation. No one has seriously proposed a Summit Conference since Khrushchev destroyed the one in 1960. Negotiation has been by foreign ministers of the various countries. For instance, it was the foreign ministers who signed the nuclear test ban treaty. Under summit-type negotiations, the leaders of the states would have signed.
Tom Fisher Business Manager Nancy Holland, Advertising Manager; Ed Vaughn, National Advertising Manager; Dale Reinecker, Classified Advertising Manager; Russ Calkins, Merchandising Manager: Bob Monk, Promotion Manager; Gary Grazda, Circulation Manager.
ANOTHER EFFECT the U-2 incident had was on the Atlantic partnership. As Lester B. Pearson said in July, 1960, before becoming prime minister of Canada, the strength and unity of the coalition of the Atlantic partners had been weakened by the weakened position of the United States.
He said, "If the Atlantic coalition is to survive, it must reduce these centrifugal disturbances to a minimum." Certainly, if an incident such as the U-2 affair would come up again, with the Atlantic coalition in its present state of affairs, things would be much worse.
—Greg Swartz
HERBLOCK
THE WASHINGTON POST
“Take Me To My Leader”
Student Sees Marines
Editor's Note: The following article is the first of a series of dispatches from a former KU student now in the Marine Corps. The articles will be directed at enlightening students on the basic training of the Marines who are now so much in the news. The next dispatches will come directly from Paris Island.
It has begun! Finally, after all the tests—basic mental and extensive physical—a lumbering DC-7B is carrying me to Paris Island, S.C., to what I can only see "now" as the severest test of my physical and mental fitness.
The cares and worries of Lawrence and KU are behind me. No outstanding details—bills, appointments, etc.—clutter my mind. It's all before me now.
And, brother, I can see some pretty hair-raising experiences ahead, to say the least. The ole imagination has been working overtime.
Yet. I'm optimistic and plan to make the best of it knowing that my physical condition will never have been better once Boot Camp has been licked.
LACKING A GREAT DEAL in personal self-control, I look forward to bringing back with me what it is John Glenn had been so thankful for—complete control of body and the top hand over mind.
If this does not violate a Corps regulation, I plan on writing weekly or bi-weekly to inform KU's many draft-age fellows of just what it is like. I'll pull no punches and embellish none of the accounts. These will be factual and forthright.
So here's to success—and a butterfly-less stomach. Here's to "Esprit" and self-discipline. Here's to the unfolding adventure in the Corps.
- Charlie Corcoran
BOOK REVIEWS
THE NECESSARY ANGEL, by Wallace Stevens (Vintage, $1.45); FAULKNER IN THE UNIVERSITY, edited by Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Vintage, $1.65); IN DEFENSE OF IGNORANCE, by Karl Shapiro (Vintage, $1.95); NOTEOOKS, 1935-1942, by Albert Camus (Modern Library, $2.45).
Students of literature have some interesting examples here of what is being made available in relatively inexpensive editions. Two poets, two prose writers, all of the top order, are represented in interesting collections. Wallace Stevens we think of primarily as one of the significant recent American poets; "The Necessary Angel" is a set of essays on reality and the imagination, as it is subtitled. The essays make an effort to present definitions of poetry, and he treats individual works as well as considering poetry and painting, the meaning of imagination and the meaning of analogy.
Stevens writes that "The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man's truth is the final resolution of everything. Poets and painters alike today make that assumption and this is what gives them the validity and serious dignity that become them as among those that seek wisdom, seek understanding."
"Faulkner in the University" is a kind of literary curiosity, the sort of thing one seldom encounters in a book. It consists of the author's class conferences at the University of Virginia in 1957-58. For a brief time Faulkner was writer-in-residence at Virginia, holding 37 group conferences and many individual
office meetings with students and staff. Most of the group conferences were placed on tape, and from this has been gleaned the collection now available in a book.
The Karl Shapiro volume also is a collection of essays by a poet. These are essays much more comprehensive and detailed than those of Wallace Stevens. Shapiro's basic point will delight many readers, one of his aims being "to restore the respect of the ordinary reader for his own judgment—he who has so long been cowed and intimidated by the self-appointed guardians of Culture." Poetry is his subject; he tells us that he makes no apologies for the excesses of opinion; after all, he is his own man.
Hear this: "What modern criticism does not take into account, respecting the audience is that there is not one audience but innumerable audiences. It seems painfully obvious to point out—but there is a difference between the Punch and Judy audience and the opera audience. There is a different audience for ballad poetry than for epic and tragic poetry. All appreciation, however, rises from the bottom and does not descend from the top."
The Camus notebooks began in May 1935 and continued, for the purposes of the Modern Library volume, until 1960. These were not intended for publication, but in 1954 the author permitted publication of the notebooks through 1942. This was the formative time of his life, and much is revealed about his thoughts, little about his political views. There are fragments of description, excerpts of conversations, insights into the books he was reading.