Our demands may have been too modest—
Post-mortem on an education bill
GOV. WILLIAM H. Avery signed the $117.4 million education bill earlier this week. It's a little late for innovative suggestions on the bill, but certainly some post-mortem comments should be made.
KU WILL RECEIVE only $15.2 million this next year—or approximately half of the total $30 million 1157 university budget. Since this is a state university, that $15.2 million is a pathetic social comment.
THE UNIVERSITY'S enrollment increases from 1,100 to 1,600 each year and it has virtually doubled in the past 12 years. By 1973, enrollment is expected to reach 21,000. For a university with such a high growth rate, the legislative requests were extremely small.
PERHAPS PART of the blame rests with the university because its demands of the state legislature were so modest this year. An additional appropriation of $74,880 was asked to expand the research program in the areas of business, economics and government. No new building authorizations were asked and a paltry six per cent increase for faculty was requested. Funds were asked to hire 65 new faculty members so the new faculty-new student ratio would be 1-17, and small increases in operating expenditures were requested.
THE PRESENT faculty-student ratio is one faculty member to each 15-16 students, but for the past two years legislative reluctance and the demands of other educational programs have caused the ratio of new faculty to new students to drop to 1-25. This year's request for 65 new faculty members would have raised the latter ratio to 1-17. The legislature hedged, and money was allotted for a 1-20 ratio. This ratio is unrealistic for a university with extensive graduate enrollment.
THE EFFECTS of a reduced faculty-student ratio will not be as immediate as effects from the low faculty salary increase. The legislature granted the unive sity's request for a six per cent increase, but it is difficult to understand why KU's request was so low. Certainly our faculty wage scales do not rank in any top ten.
A BOOKLET ON the 1966 legislative program, prepared by the Alumni Association, contains a chatt comparing KU with 17 other universities with whom we compete for faculty. In 1962-63 the university ranked 15th among the 18 institutions, trailing all but Iowa and Iowa State. The four per cent salary increase in 1963-64 worsened our relative position and we fell behind both Iowa schools. The 1964-65 increase of six-and-one-half per cent did not improve KU's position. Another four per cent increase for the current year
will not appear in American Association of University Professors comparisons until next summer, but national increases have been averaging 1-2.5 per cent more than KU's four per cent.
FEDERAL CIVIL servants and many groups of manual laborers have climbed at higher rates, yet university professors are more in demand.
IN ALL, AN INCREASE of only $1.5 million was requested from general revenue for the Lawrence campus.
THE POINT OF MY ramblings is this: KU is a sta e university. As such, it should be financially supported by the people of this state. It should not be forced to depend on private contributions, especially since most prospective contributors probably figure the sate should be paying the bill.
KANSAS HAS GONE over its financial head by adopting six schools into its higher education system. A state of two million people can't afford to foot that kind of bill. But the state has accepted that responsibility in theory and should begin assuming it in practice. Fi fifen million dollars for a school of 15,000 is a poor start.
—Jacke Thayer
Dutch elm disease is grave threat
Like Dutch Elm disease in Lato's Academy, hidden dangers at KU are forever threatening the academic life of this institution.
FORTUNATELY, the All Student Council is on guard. At the last meeting of that August body, one member noted the danger of illness at an academic institution. Sick students spreading elements around campus would be injurious to the university program, this legislative watchdog said.
BUT WE aren't too worried as yet about this problem. Now that the Deans' offices have been warned, undoubtedly they will develop a university policy to meet the challenge. After al., at I.U there is a policy for every problem.
Justin Beck
beard stand needed!
KU students should be more concerned about who uses their facilities.
THIS POINT has been brought home heavily recently by a pretty silver-blonde coed who swivelled into the foyer of the raised portion of the Hawk's Nest and announced to her equally pretty companion: "That's where all the kooks sit!"
THEN, BEFORE departing to her worldly discussion of hairdes and purse styles, she added, "They're the ones who play chess and do all that protest marching."
IT SHOULD be immediately recommended to the All Student Council that a beard check-stand, complete with barber and conies of the Farm Journal, be installed at all the doors of the Union to eliminate, if possible, the appearance of this hideus aspect of University sub-life.
Alan Miller
2 Daily Kansan
editorial page
editorial page
Wednesday, February 15, 1966
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS
'ONE OF THESE DAYS YA BETTER BUY A TEXT—TH BOOKSTORE MANAGER IS GETTIN' KINDA 'ID OFF.'
Krehbiel will be missed
The loss of Clayton Krehbiel from the fine arts faculty is a devastating one for KU. Krehbiel was an active contributor to Lawrence as well as to the university community. He conducted numerous choral clinics, aided musically-inclined high school students and, in recent years, conducted the choir at Plymouth Congregational Church.
HOWEVER. HIS greatest accomplishments came with individual students. He inspired them; he pushed them toward excellence. Students reciprocated by enrolling in University Chorus in unprecedented numbers, and by awarding Krebiel the first Honors for Outstanding Progressive Educators (HOPE) Award in 1859.
One could not expect an instructor to pass up an opportunity to direct the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus. But perhaps it is val d to wonder how many excellent teachers can be snatched from a university which offers only a six per cent salary increase each year.
—Jacke Thayer
Have you heard the one about...
At a recent Associated Women Students (AWS) committee meeting concerning the upcoming rules convention, the following exchange took place:
"Have you ever stopped to think that the (AWS) House of Representatives isn't really representative? a member asked.
After a short, stumed silence,
another member brightened, "My
gosh! You're right—we ought to
maybe they
—Jacke Thayer
Batman once again
A University of Oregon newspaper advertisement read: BAT-MAN 7:30 tonight—wrong again! YR debate 7:00 tonight—that's where you're right!
Barg.
ug. —LSU Reveille
books in review
Nobel prize-popularity
WHAT A NOBEL PRIZE in Literature can do for a writer's popularity! Mikhail Sholokhov has been around for a long time. In the forties his novels of the Don were regarded as virtually modern classics. He has been greatly admired, and not just by those who admire the system under which he lives. Now he has the Nobel Prize. The unknowing consider it a concession to Russia. They are wrong. It is deserved recognition, late, perhaps, but deserved. And Sholokhov likewise deserves the new fame that will come from reprints of his work.
Reprints like, for example, two handsome paperback volumes of "And Quiet Flows the Don" and "The Don Flows Home to Sea" (Vintage Giants, $245 each). These are magnificent books. Most readers will find them more enlightening and much easier going than "Doctor Zhivago". Compare them, rather with "War and Peace," though they also are easier to manage than that one. Big, gusty, enlightening stories of the Cossack people of the Don region of Russia, of World War I and the Russian revolution and the twenties.
"THERE'S AN EDITION of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (Modern Library, $2.45), too. The first American edition of this novel appeared in 1948, a book which takes the famous Faust legend and gives it a modern treatment—the story of a creative musician, Adrian Leverkuhn. One of the world's greatest creative geniuses himself, Mann understeed the creative mind, a fact that has made "Doctor Faustus" one of the great bocks of mode n times.
And not at all doctrinaire. You can't go wrong on these.
RUSSIAN LITERATURE abounds in new volumes this week. Forty stories by Anton Chekhov have been collected into one called The Image of Chekhov (Vintage Russian Library, $1.55). In both short stories and the drama there is no name that resounds more than that of Chekhov. Tolstoy, too; volume two of his short Novels (Medieval Library, $2.45) has appeared. It includes "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "The Devil," the ubiquitous "The Kreutzer Sonata," "A Talk Among Leisured People," "Walk in the Light While There Is Light," "Master and Man," "Father Sergius," "Hadji Murad" and "The Forged Coupon."
Added to a recent paperback volume of short stories by this newly popular figure is Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Selected Short Stories" (Modern Library, $2.45), edited by Irving Howe. These have been acclaimed for their Yiddish feeling, and for Singer's mastery of the Jewish materials and backgrounds. Andre T. Embree has assembled a volume called "The Hinzu Tradition" (Modern Library, $2.45), a collection of basic Hindu writings.
The other new one is Maurice Friedberg's edition of "Russian Short Stories" (Vintage, $1.95). Tolstoy's "Father Sergius" shows up again here, plus stories by Dostoyevsky, Vsevolod Garshin, Dmitri Mamin-Sibiryak and Nikolai Leskov. Now there are some names for you to drop.
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