Trust at Columbia
open dorms for dates
COLUMBIA LAST Saturday announced the end of its "open door policy." In the future, students having guests of the opposite sex in their rooms may keep their door closed.
THE CHANGE in the three year old policy came after the administration concluded, "on the evidence of the past three years that the students in the college can be trusted to honor a privilege and assume the responsibilities it implies."
AT KU the question of whether students can be trusted behind closed doors has seldom been raised, not because students are universally trusted, but because open houses are seldom permitted in the large dorms.
A FEW TIMES a year, chiefly after football games, girls are allowed in men's residences, but the practice is not really frequent.
COMMENTING ON the problem at Northwestern, the Chicago Daily News editorialized, "We wouldn't presume to know whether this offers an answer to Northwestern's problem. But it does speak well for Columbia's students and we would be loath to assume that Northwestern's are any less honorable.
"IN PASSING, we might also note that
young men and young women have always found ways of being alone together, with or without the sanction of their elders. Anyone who thinks that this state of affairs won't continue must be a recent arrival from Mars."
OF COURSE there are other than moral objections to dormitory open houses, chiefly that it would be an annoyance to dormitory students to have persons of the other sex often wandering around the halls. But if certain fixed weekly hours were set, most of these objections would disappear.
WITHIN A CERTAIN loose framework, dormitories should be allowed to establish their own regulations in this area. If students feel open houses are worthwhile, and can be instituted on a regular basis without upsetting normal dorm life, they should be allowed to do so.
BUT AS THE Daily News pointed out, the major issue involved is morality. "Can young men and women be trusted to behave properly when they're alone?"
AT COLUMBIA, and elsewhere they can be trusted. It takes little imagination to believe that Kansas students can also be trusted.
Justin Beck
"THAT'S TH' BOY I WAG TELLING YOU ABOUT WHO IS WORKING ON SOME SILLY SECRET EXPLOSIVE."
university forum
pressures, responsibilities,the university
(Editor's Note: James Gunn, administrative assistant to the chancellor, long has maintained a personal interest in the controversy surrounding "proper concerns" of the university. At the request of the Kansan editorial editors, he has written the following article. Gunn presents his personal views, and not the views of the university administration.)
"YOU SUCCUMB to pressures; he responds to influences; I fulfill responsibilities" —so the columnist Sidney Harris might illustrate three ways of looking at the same situation.
But this is not an exercise in semantics. Rather it is an attempt to discuss, as the editorial editors of the Daily Kansan have described it, "the pressures on the university." The difficulty in responding to this simple request is that here, on this pinpoint of terminology, are met basic differences of
opinion about what a university is or ought to be.
A UNIVERSITY is created by society and sustained by it. A university is a part of society, and it is affected by the same forces and stimulated by the same concerns. A university is a vital institution, responsive to the needs of society, or it is a museum.
But how does a university respond—and to what pressures?
EVERYONE WHO has had an interest in the University of Kansas is a potential source of pressure to adjust the university in some manner to that interest. The pressure is directly proportional to the interest. Although the term usually carries the connotation of "improper pressure," in my opinion the pressures are healthy, natural, inevitable, innocent, and a measure of a university's good fortune—and, consequently, the good fortune
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
THE UNIVERSITY OF
kansan
Serving KU for 76 of its 100 Years
UNiversity 4-3646, newsroom
UNiversity 4-3198, business office
Founded 1889
ONE CANNOT think realistically about universities in today's world—and particularly about state universities—without considering the many publics who have a legitimate interest in what the university can do for them. Among those publics are faculty, students, parents, alumni, taxpayers, legislators, donors, professional groups, schools, businesses, industries, local, state, and federal agencies. . .
of everyone connected with it.
EXECUTIVE STAFF
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York, N.Y. 10022. Mail subscription rates: $4 a semester or $7 a year. Published and second class 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.
MANAGING EDITOR Fred Frailey
BUSINESS MANAGER Dale Reinecker
EDITORIAL EDITORS Jacke Thayer, Justin Beck
NEWS AND BUSINESS STAFFS
NEWS AND BUSINESS STAFFS
Assistant Managing Editors...E. C. Ballweg, Rosalie Jenkins,
Karen Lambert, Nancy Scott and Robert Stevens
City Editor...Tom Rosenbaum
Feature Editor...Barbara Phillips
Sports Editor...Steve Russell
Photo Editor...Bill Stephens
Circulation Manager...Jan Parkinson
Advertising Manager...John Hons
Classified Manager...Bruce Browning
Merchandising...Linda Simpson
Promotion Manager...Gary Wright
Wire Editor...Joan McCabe
Moreover, pressure is what makes an institution move; without it, as Newton's first law of motion set down, a body at rest remains at rest. . . .
Without cynicism, I suggest that most of the motives which direct these publics toward the university are economic-or, at least, are shaped by considerations of advantage. Students, for instance, are recognizing that the lifetime value of a college education may average as much as $200,000. As a result, more than 50 per cent (in Kansas 54 per cent) of 1962-63 high school graduates went on to college in the fall of 1963.
AS ANOTHER example, society supports a massive system of primary, secondary, and higher education, in which one-quarter of all Americans are enrolled, basically in the belief that education pay for itself many times over in many ways.
After centuries of claiming to possess treasures of great value as well as the way to obtain more treasures, the university suddenly finds that someone has been listening. Now it discovers that it is in a new position—at the heart of society and its hopes. The pressures it feels—as well as the funds it obtains, the status that accrues to it, and its burgeoning popularity—are the result of its location. Peripheral institutions feel little pressure.
THE CRITICS of the relationship of the university to the society that sustains it misinterpret, I think, the basic function of a university and fail to recognize the unique character of the society. The American society may be the only one in history which has institutionalized change. It has given its allegiance to progress—which is to say, it has given prior consent, for the sake of a better life for more people, to its own alteration.
The university is the agency to which the American society has given much of the responsibility for creating change in an orderly manner. Every new idea, every research discovery, every student whose creative ability has been given the means of expression, represents a change in technology, the economy, the arts, the sciences, which may alter the basic relationships of the society itself.
FOR SOME this is not fast enough, but it may be as fast as anything can change without endangering the mechanism of change itself—the university and the society which incorporates the principle of change.
In this situation, the business of a university administration is to accept the pressures—both internal and external—and to maintain that uneasy balance between the instincts of any society to preserve the status quo and the freedom a university must have if it is to create something new. A university administration, if it is to obtain from society the essential fuel for change, must help society recognize that the future it faces will be better than the one it knows.
A UNIVERSITY administration, then, must interpret the institution to its many publics, must specify the conditions under which it can be most useful to all of them, and must arbitrate differences that arise.
If it is not successful—in specific instances or in general then higher education will suffer, either through insufficient
support or through surrender of the university's essential freedoms.
THOSE WHO long for the abandoned ivory tower might reflect that the alternative to a university centrally involved in the social and economic concerns of its times is no university at all—or a university situated peripherally to these concerns which can provide an education only to the approximately four per cent of the college-age population which attended in the early 1900s.
This is not to imply that the educational program offered at the University of Kansas or anywhere else is perfect. Changes can be made and will be made, and many of them will be improvements. But they will be made by guiding pressures into channels where they can work together for mutually desirable goals, not by direct confrontation and conflict.
IN MY OPINION there are no improper pressures; there are only improper responses to those pressures. The remarkable fact about external pressures is that there are so few of them, and I submit that, on the whole and on the record, to these the University of Kansas has responded in a way which protects the freedoms a university must have if it is to be creative as well as the support a university must have if it is to be effective.
They've got problems
In addition to run-of-the-mill campus problems, the University of Washington has to deal with another student occupational hazard: injuries resulting from equal parts vin rose and night skiing.
2
Daily Kansan editorial page Monday, February 14, 1966