Slow administration
Stanford University recently relaxed a 60 year old ban on liquor on campus that had been a source of contention between students and administration for several years.
Beginning May 10 students over 21 will be able to drink alcoholic beverages in campus residences.
Meanwhile, back in the Midwest, KU not only still forbids student drinking in campus residences, but also has just recently got around to considering the silly, although unenforced prohibition of liquor in students' off-campus residences.
We would hate to suggest, especially after reading last week's Time, that the state's Harvard on the Kaw is not progressive, but unfortunately in many respects it isn't.
The university is in the midst of change. Today's students are far different from yesterday's and find yesterday's restrictions on them out of place in a community where they are
supposedly sharing in a common pursuit of knowledge.
Yet one need not be a disciple of Paul Goodman to see that change takes place slowly in a community as heavily institutionalized as KU, often far too slowly in this period of rapid change in education.
The slowness of college administrations in general is certainly a source of conflict between students and the administrators. Students are usually quite impatient about the reforms they see as needed, a fact that administrators often lose sight of as they shuffle student proposals from committee to committee.
Hopefully such changes as those in closing hours which are now being considered, will be given speedy approval by the administration and hopefully the Council on Student Affairs will set a pleasant precedent of fast action on student reforms.
—Justin Beck
Congratulations
Congratulations are in order for Jim Ryun and the entire KU track team for their performances during the Kansas Relays last week.
Although Ryun received most of the notice in the press for his spectacular 3:55.8 time in the Glenn Cunningham mile, another sub-four minute mile earlier in the week, and a crowd-pleasing 47 second anchor quarter in the freshman mile relay, the rest of the team did more than
their share, setting a total of ten records, nine, including Ryun's mile by freshmen.
The meet was the first and last outdoor home appearance by this year's team, the squad's sole dual meet away at Southern Illinois, and only relays elsewhere remaining. Hopefully next year further home appearances will be scheduled during the outdoor season to provide KU students a chance to see their own top track squad in action.
Justin Beck
books in review
South, films, in month's books
There's a movie encyclopedia out this month. And a personal story about working as a student volunteer in Mississippi. Several paperback novels. Some fairly weighty volumes of undoubted scholarships. Still another about Theodore Dreiser.
Take the encyclopedia first. It's called The Filminger's Companion (Hill and Wang, $7.50), and it's by Leslie Halliwell. He's an Englishman. Now that isn't a bad thing to be, but it isn't really very good from the vantage point of the American film. He is a man of rather sizable prejudices, and when he says that "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Mrs. Miniver" and "The Best Years of Our Lives" have not stood the test of time he puts it down as gospel. His big passions are things like horror films and Tarzan, so there is an incredible amount of attention paid to such matters. Many films of some significance are not even mentioned. Best of all are his biographies of performers, though he offers little insight into relative merits of their work. Not a bad book to have around, but definitive? No.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
SALLY BELFRAGE WROTE Freedom Summer (Crest, 75 cents). It came out in hardback form last summer, and it is a moving story about a girl in the South. The episodes are receding into history, though we are likely to have new episodes each summer, and this personal account is history as well as journalism in a sense, too. Compassion characterizes her attitude more than anger.
Violence and hatred—and some success—are in the story she tells.
A name that has been considerable in sociological circles for a long time now is that of William Fielding Ogburn. His book called Social Change (Delta, $2.25) is now available in inexpensive form. Ogburn had a distinguished teaching and writing career; you may have used one of his text-books. This work is an old one, dating to 1922.
Also new this month is George Novack's Existentialism versus Marxism: Conflicting Views on Humanism (Delta, $2.95). The editor uses numerous writings to present this contemporary debate — Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Herbert Marcuse, Camus and others.
He demonstrates that there is a gulf between Marxism and existentialism that is growing wider.
SEYMOUR MELMAN has written a book called Our Depleted Society (Delta, $2.25) that is thoughtful and frightening and somewhat in the vein of modern-day muckraking. He calls the work "an economic audit of the price that America has paid for twenty years of cold war." He is dismayed by the long emphasis on guns over butter—his own words—and proposes alterations in this particular stress. The book is a critique and an exciting one, even though it will anger a good many persons. It, incidentally, is much more than the superficial kind of thing Vance Packard frequently peddles.
Another who blasts our contemporary attitudes is that man with the fascinating name, John Keats. His book called The Sheepskin Psychosis (Delta, $1.85) is now on the shelves of bookstores. In this grand and democratic land it is a cardinal belief that all should have a college education. Keats doesn't think so. And in the course of not thinking so he takes a look at a good many aspects of university life—teaching, liberal vs. "practical" education, sex—yes, sex.
If it weren't that the book is 15 years old you could ask, "Why another about old Dreiser?" Also, if it weren't by F. O. Matthiessen. If there has been an able commentator on American literature it has been the late Mr. Mathiessen, and his book Theodore Dreiser (Delta, $1.95) is the best literary work on Dreiser, "Best literary" because Swanberg's was a larger book at the whole man, though it stinted on his work. This is one of a series on American men of letters, books in extremely attractive format.
FOR THE RELIGIOUSLY learned there is Alexander J. McKelway's The Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich (Delta, $1.95). Tillich is one of the foremost religious philosophers of this century, and McKelway has drawn on Tillich's "Systematic Theology" to present an exposition of this man's beliefs. The book may help those persons who find Tillich, in the original, a bit heavy going.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
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The Daily Kansan, student newspaper at The University of Kansas. Is represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St, New York, N.Y. 10023. A graduate of the University of Kansas and postage paid at Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays. University holidays and examination periods. Accommodations, goods, services and employment advertised in the University Daily Kansan are offered to all students without regard to color, creed or national origin.
The opinions expressed in the editorial column are those of the students whose names are signed to them. Guest editorial views are not necessarily the editor's. Any opinions expressed in the Daily Kansan are not necessarily those of The University of Kansas Administration or the State Board of Regents.
And now to some lighter delights:
Glen Sire's The Death-Makers (Crest, 75 cents)—a violent tale of war. Kind of sensational and kind of corny and, despite cover boasts, no "From Here to Eternity." (But maybe another "Thin Red Line.") Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies (Delta, $1.55)—the celebrated near-classic of the early thirties, a biting satire about British high society going downhill.
2
Daily Kansan
Wednesday, April 27, 1966
"IN SPITE OF TH BURDEN OF EXTRA LARGE CLASSES, PROFESSOR SWARP GOES OUT OF HIS WAY TO BE HELPFUL TO HIS STUDENTS."
More to education than grade average
Often this year we have tossed the words "education" and "grades" around in our mind, trying to search out the correlation between the two.
If taken from a realistic standpoint, it is quite possible for us to find a vast bond between quality of education and grades. The businessmen prefer to hire college graduates who rank in the top fourth of their class. Often the businessmen, like many other groups, assume that the people who are real achievers, will work for and succeed in getting top grades while in college. In the same manner, they also assume that these very same people will achieve the highest standards in business.
This may possibly be true, but often we discover that far too many students are judging themselves merely on the basis of their quality point excess. It occurs often that students with high grade averages are either very smart or have out maneuvered the grading system. To the people who are very smart . . . that is commendable. But to those of you who are beating the system through sly maneuvers and other tactics, we would like to take issue.
It is our opinion that a three point system, in many cases, is not what it is frequently claimed to be. Quite early in life we tend to observe that many students find that society is not really too concerned with what they can actually do. It is usually a matter of whether or not you have the credentials for doing the job in question.
Too often we find little satisfaction in having the proper credentials for society's sake alone. We would like to see more students taking an opposite stand and forgetting about how well they can please the world and society in general. We would like to see what these individuals could do toward pleasing themselves for a change.
It would really be refreshing to see more students getting excited about learning things which they would really like to know more about. There is a great deal of knowledge available and of educational value which doesn't have to be learned simply because there's a test on it next week. We'd like to see more students taking advantage of education for selfish individual reasons. When this happens, students will be learning because they are constructively motivated and not because they are doing it for a high mark on a multiple choice test.
For the rare few of you who are getting an education that is of personal interest and use, we'd like to see you conveying this excitement to a few of the more materialistic minds on campus.
When more students start getting an education for valid reasons other than quality points, they will likely find that this is where the real grades will be handed out.
— East Carolinian
Who's afraid of vote?
Sen. Everett Dirksen is unhappy because his amendment to unify the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" doctrine has failed to pass in the Senate. Dirksen claims his opponents are afraid of the people and afraid to put an issue before the voters.
That's an interesting appraisal. He is claiming that senators who favor giving all voters equal influence at the polls are scared of the voters.
He is presumably not afraid of them, but then why does he oppose "one man, one vote"? -The Daily Iowan