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THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, May 2, 1968
What we have here.
The Chancellor has responded: he was not vague, evasive, nor hesitant, as many people like to think of the administration.
How many people who signed and supported the petition will react indignantly, and yet how many of these same people really expected the demands to be met immediately?
All that has essentially happened here is that the Chancellor indicated that he is not going to be intimidated. Fair enough.
But by virtue of the clear, prompt and straight-forward reply, he is also indicating a strong regard for the feelings of the thousand or so signatures which were collected and submitted to him to accompany the anonymous letter he received Monday. Also fair. This many students expressing concern have a right to hear more about their true role at KU.
There is a lot of difference between an anonymous letter and a letter which has forty-some pages of student signatures, and the Chancellor knows it.
And there is also a lot of difference between dealing with a group whose genuine concern for the issues stops whenever it gets impatient, and students whose goals are sincere enough to re-channel their active enthusiasm into the patience needed for striving toward, and accepting, some compromises. The Chancellor knows and respects this difference. He also respects the importance of keeping the channels of communication open; whenever concerned students want to talk to him, he'll listen. He won't necessarily compromise automatically to every suggestion, but he'll listen as someone who values continual dialogue. The administration cannot be dogmatic, however, in its attitude, and there will be a great many students and faculty who will be very interested in what agreements can be reached on the issue of student rights in the eyes of the administration. What we have here is a failure to communicate? So communicate.
—John Hill
Assistant Editorial Editor
Letters to the editor:
Salsich: minority vision
To the Editor:
A letter by Don Schmidt to the editor in Monday's UDK accused Hamilton Salsich and others who oppose the presence of the military on campus of "offering little more than another form of tyranny."
Even though Mr. Salsich's group wishes only to induce the University to take a moral stand on issues, they are only tyrants in that writer's eyes, for they "have never been officially delegated by KU students as their representative in matters relating to University policy."
In a democracy, however, the use of group pressure to force an administration to take a moral stand needs not be "officially delegated."
Minority groups, without official election, have brought pressure on the U.S. government in such areas as civil rights, and have undoubtedly influenced the populace to take a closer look at the morality of the Vietnam war. (Martin Luther King was no tyrant.)
I doubt that if the nation's voters were asked to vote on open-housing they would approve the bill, yet it was a minority group, without having been officially delegated, that convinced Congress that a moral nation could not let men be denied freedom and equality of opportunity.
Appearing below the letter, a Jules Feiffer cartoon provided a most interesting mixture.
An older man tells a bearded youth, "It's easy to be against everything," a typical accusation against radicals. "But what's your program?" asks the old man. The response included brotherhood, love, integrity, and freedom. "... hardly a workable program," according to the elder.
The youth then asks the man,
"OK what's your program?" "Kill.
—But then of course I'm a good deal older than you."
Hamilton Salsich and his group ask the University, "What's your program?" Even if they are a minority group, who has more right to ask such a question than the students?
Joyce Beard
Shawnee Mission junior
Jovee Board
To the Editor
In reference to the April 24,
1968 editorial, concerning the pass-
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sage of a limited pass-fail system by the College of Liberal Arts faculty.
Much surprised by the passage of this measure, I wonder just what real basis does this pass-fail system have. Since when has it been agreed on that learning, of all things, can be compromised.
Education used to be achieved by work and intellectual effort. Now it seems it may become the much feared "god of mediocrity," which students more than anyone today fear a threat to their individualism, by saying "Why work harder than anyone else, it doesn't pay?"
The editor strikes out at the "hypocrisy" of the grading system and says that a "true education(?)” and "not just a good grade" would be achieved by the pass-fail system.
Does the "true education" arise from just studying enough to get past the fail level in a course? Since when has competition in anything people do disappeared, and the improvement that the competition brings become unwanted? I think that, if a student really wants a true education, he is going to have to work for it.
If the University really wants to implement a system allowing students to take courses without working for their grade, then it should lower the required GPA standards for remaining in school. This would accomplish the same goal, only it would show what it really was doing—lowering the standards and the value of an education.
Kris Mazure
Lawrence sophomore
Drama review:
Jean Genet's 'Blacks' wonderfully enacted
By Jerry Balch
For those of us who, after "Crumbling Citadel" and "Payment as Promised" feared that the Experimental Theatre was hopelessly bogged in third-rate drama, Jean Genet's "The Blacks" is wonderfully reassuring. Like Baudelaire, Genet creates exquisitely beautiful poetry from ugliness, degeneracy, and virtual madness. His visions are always fantasies which are at the same time delicate and brutal. These fantasies are both theatrical and dramatic.
"The Blacks" deals with ritual murders committed or acted out by a group of Negroes inspired by a doctrine which finds strength only in the most vicious hatred.
Their re-enactment or rehearsal of the murder of a white woman takes place before an audience of Negroes dressed all in white and wearing white masks. The "audience" assumes roles representing colonial and religious authorities. They have been invited to see and condemn, but they remain to be symbolically killed.
What the play means I shall not presume to tell you. The symbols of the play will evoke various responses from the audience, perhaps as many different responses as there are people in the audience.
Although a play of this kind strains the resources of actors, the cast, a little stiff in places, battles its way through Genet's poetic prose admirably. The comedy of the play is particularly well handled. In fact, it is so successful that it weakens the horror and brutality which should accompany it.
Anyone who leaves the play feeling that he fully understands what it means has, I fear, shut his mind to the evocative quality of Genet's symbolic poetry.
The re-enactment of the murder of the white woman is the best dramatic performance I have seen at KU. Throughout the play the vitality and talent of Elnora Tellis and Candace Caruthers make one forget that the play is presented without intermission—sheer death for a less powerful play and production.
The set, stark and cavernous with spots of bright color, overhung by a white net reaching out to partially encompass the audience, is both esthetically pleasing and symbolically correct. The lighting, while not at all wrong, could have been more during.
Some have been offended by this violent play, but few would dare deny its dramatic effectiveness.
"Thank you, sir . . . Every signature counts!"
Faculty forum:
Fired for honesty
By Miles Coiner Assistant Instructor, Speech and Drama
Like Norman Abrams earlier in the year, Hamilton Salsich has been informed that he "most likely" will not be reappointed for the coming year. Salsich is an assistant instructor in the department of English and it will be interesting to see whether or not assistant instructors rise to the occasion in the same way that their elders did in the Abrams case.
There is an injustice involved in both firings and although the specific points at issue in the two cases are dissimilar, there is involved in both dismissals the central question of intellectual honesty.
Mr. Abrams did not apparently learn the standard technique of the university community, that is, to air complaints about the academic program privately, particularly if one's department chairman is nearing retirement.
It's better strategy to gather one's forces instead and make a power play.
Abrams was honest, open, and is now looking for another job. Meanwhile the valiant defenders of academic freedom, the AAUP, meet, and meet, and meet, finally, in all likelihood, to present a report which will keep the committee members in the good graces of the administration.
Mr. Salsich, too, is a victim of intellectual honesty. After publicly announcing his disaffection with the grading system and the difficult and even intolerable moral position which the college teacher is now placed in with regards to the draft, openly served notice that he, at least, refused to become a bureaucrat for Selective Service. Salsich was subsequently notified by the director of the freshman-sophomore English program that because of the reaction to his public statements, he would not be rehired.
Had Salsich not spoken out, and particularly had his views not been made public in newspaper articles, the director of the program intimated, the department could have tolerated his idiosyncrasies, but honesty has no place, apparently, in the university community; it creates pressures, and administrators are vulnerable to pressures.
In neither case was the teaching of the men in question, both are considered by their students to be excellent teachers. They may well be, in fact, two of the best teachers at the University
The dismissal of these two men, and the almost total lack of faculty reaction to the earlier firing, should at least give cause for reflection if not, God Forbid, action.
It is obvious to anyone who has been a student at KU that bad, even intolerably bad, teaching abounds here, and yet one rarely hears of anyone being fired on the grounds that he can't teach. He may be fired because he hasn't published, because he is socially unpleasant, because he doesn't have the right degrees, or because he is too outspoken, but not because he cannot teach.
It is a bizarre, if not totally idiotic policy for an educational institution.
Teachers who practice the intellectual stands that they preach are dismissed, while the many who supposedly affirm the principles of honesty and open-mindedness, but who in reality creep cautiously through the ivy halls protected by the tenure law—who rationalize, misrepresent and lie, and don't even have the courage of most common laborers to say that an injustice done one of their fellows is an injustice done them—seek, even demand the respect of their students.
It is no wonder that students practice the intellectual dishonesty that they see represented in front of the classroom, that they "slide by," that they cheat. It's no wonder that forces outside the University can hire students to spy on their friends, that students, faculty, and even the institution itself is open to exploitation from many quarters.
At a time when I am nearing the completion of a Ph.D. I am not at all sure that it is a profession I wish to be associated with. To have become a machinist would have been more noble it seems, and more honest.