Convention offers rare opportunity
The big day is Saturday. The triannual AWS Rules Convention will convene to discuss closing hours, sign-out procedures, women's hours in men's houses, men's hours in women's houses and other areas of regulation.
It's a one-day affair, which immediately cramps its style, but it offers an opportunity that comes only once every three years to revise and change women's rules. And heaven and the campus coed know how much they should be changed.
CERTAIN IMPORTANT areas of regulation do not fall under the convention's jurisdiction—e.g., justification of the "double standard" in regulation (why not for men, too?) , provisions for undergraduate off-campus housing, and revision of the AWS constitution. The convention delegates can make resolutions concerning these rules, however, and it is expected that they will do so.
Interest meetings have been held in dormitories, sororities and scholarship halls during the past month to encourage discussion of the rules. Some of the results were discouraging. Average attendance in Ellsworth and Hashinger was 15 to 20 girls. Meetings for off-campus girls drew approximately the same number, although percentage-wise they were a greater success. Campus-wide interest did not pick up until
this past week. Hopefully, interest will not have come too late.
THE CONVENTION is a rare opportunity to change regulations, but to obtain effective change certain actions will be necessary. Because it was felt that members of the House of Representatives knew more about AWS operating procedures. House members automatically were placed on the delegation from their living groups. For a less-understood reason, House members also are chairmen of their delegations. Delegation chairmen are determining the agenda and standing rules of the convention (a two-thirds vote of the delegates would be needed to change the agenda or to suspend the rules).
You see the pattern. House members, generally, tend to be fairly conservative since they are so intimately connected with the functions of AWS. It's no sin to be conservative; perhaps you like the rules the way they are. But if you don't, your AWS representative and the other elected members of the delegations are not going to know what rules you want—if any—UNLESS YOU TELL THEM. If you haven't attended any interest meetings, or didn't speak up at house or floor meeting Monday night, see your delegation members personally before Saturday.
MEMBERS OF RESIDENCE halls should be especially vocal—for the votes of those delegates are weighted twice. (You see, Ellsworth and Hashinger
each only had three representatives in the House. But the convention delegates were to be elected in proportion to the number of residents in each hall. This meant that Ellsworth and Hashinger each should have six delegations. But this just wasn't feasible because then there wouldn't have been an AWS house member to chair each delegation. And that, I suppose, says something about how representative the House is...
Women living in off-campus housing and married women should be vocal, too. This is the first time these women have been represented at the Rules Convention—and they are not represented in the AWS House.
IF AWS IS TO BE made a viable organization, not continually ensnared with the technicalities of unnecessary rules, the changes need to be made at this convention. Women of the campus, unite—it's your only chance to have YOUR say for another three years.
Liberalization of rules to allow coeds to become responsible women is a national trend, and if KU is to continue to attract intelligent, mature women, we cannot continue to cloister them as damsels potentially in distress. Make yourself heard—the time to act is Saturday.
Friday: More about the Rules Convention, and what's been happening at other schools.
—Jacke Thayer
The other viewpoint
No, it's your pigeon!
Anyone wishing to visit President Paul Miller at his office is confronted with an obstacle.
No, not his secretary. Pigeons.
These prolific and seedy-looking relatives of the peaceful dove sit above the Administration Building's august portals and exercise their social habits in a fashion that would quickly get a human into chains.
ALLOWED TO PURSUE their unesthetic ways by a society that apparently values tolerance more than fastidiousness, the pigeons continue their endless disfigurement of anything beneath them.
Stories that the pigeon is protected by municipal ordinance are groundless. There is no local law prohibiting the apprehension and prosecution of these dirty birds, but the majesty of the law has intruded other problems.
According to the local police, it is illegal to discharge firearms
within the city limits, illegal to possess or use an air rifle, and illegal to set out poison.
PERHAPS LITTLE remains as an anti-pigeon weapon other than strangulation or the bow and arrow.
A campus poultry specialist says that the abominable excreta of pigeons is not much of a health hazard, although histoplasma capsulatum, a very unpopular ailment, can be caught from contact with old pigeon mess.
Unfortunately a disgusting sight just doesn't become any more attractive because it is relatively harmless.
Since time immemorial, the pigeon has heaped its own form
2
Daily Kansan
editorial page Wednesday, March 9, 1966
—Illustration by Richard Geary
of nonchalant abuse on mankind's edifices, just as it is doing this very minute all over campus.
The Daily Athenaeum West Virginia University
Ramblings
We noticed in a Daily advertisement the other day that a Dinkytown shop has received a shipment of 300 pounds of candles.
Without waxing overly eloquent, we can only marvel at the variety of merchandise. The ad describes the colors of the tapers as "Peacock Blue, Coral Celadon, Scarlet." And the styles include "Scented Candles, Mushroom Candles and 'Bottle Drips' for Bistro-type parties."
But upon reviewing the list, we noticed that one kind of candle is missing. With finals approaching, it would be only appropriate to import a batch of candles that we can burn at both ends.
* *
The Small Voice
request.
Our foreign aid, knowing best,
Replaced the 1956 election,
With natural selection.
Do let's raze Viet Nam on its request.
* *
He liveth best who killleth best,
Through night and all day long,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He hates the Viet Cong.
—all from The Minnesota Daily
* *
AWS is also under attack at Oklahoma State University. The Daily O'Collegian remarks, "My, but OSU has a thorough Association of Women's Students. For each step forward the AWS takes, it just as carefully takes two steps back."
* *
"Computerized mating might top the pill as the best means to overpopulation. Sociologists can just unplug the computers and watch the species become extinct.
"The Great Society's government would do well to look into the project. One never knows when the power might go off accidentally."
—The Kansas State Collegian
Liberality needed
... AWS still insists on playing the role of the long arm of in loco, parentis, a role neither Dr. Oswald nor the Dean of Women feel the University should play in guiding the lines of students.
It is extremely ironic that while administrators are willing to grant more responsibility to the women students. AWS prefers to climb behind the strong tradition of "a barrier of protection" for the campus woman.
NOWADAYS, it is the administrators who are liberal, and the AWS members who indecisively decide maybe a curfew is really best after all. Vastly superior juniors and seniors of AWS, and the few lower division members submissively backing their stands, decide that freshmen and sophomores are really "too immature" to use a late closing hour wisely.
Yet we wonder how these same students would react if a parent or the Dean of Women put down a finger and said, "You are too immature to use time out of the dormitory after 10:30 p.m. wisely."
Many students are appalled to come to the "liberal, mature center of learning" to find they are put under much stricter confinement than they ever were at home.
- The Kentucky Kernel
This clinging to the cradle and all its traditional confinements by AWS is indeed ridiculous. AWS should reexamine its role in terms of the purposes for which it was founded and strive to make women equal members of the University community and drop the new-found role of an overly-cautious, overly-strict parent.
BOW-WOW
A boy and his dog, Texas style
What with computers that confuse schedules and the renewed bombing in Viet Nam it seems that the hard-core news is often overlooked. Here's one that we can't pass by.
It seems that the White House occupants have a new dog.
And the President named it Ho Chi Him.
Only a learned political columnist could do justice to implications of this . . . just think of the diplomatic overtones of this move.
Washington correspondents will move even closer to the dog
house than they are now, and will watch breathlessly. Will Johnson pick Him up by the ears or will he throw him an occasional bone?
Will he feed him atomic war or stock-piled wheat? Will he be kept in the doghouse or will he be allowed to contaminate his fellow canines?
And think what a trend this could start. Maybe in 1968, as a result of this clever move, the Democrats will name their party symbol LBJ. . .
With a hot branding iron on the derriere.
The Colorado Daily
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