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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, June 12, 1962
'Good Old Summertime'
Several days ago the nation's number one song was "No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher's dirty looks." From that there was a short stanza of "The Good Old Summertime," and now we hear "School Days, school days, dear old golden rule days."
It seems almost impossible that school is in session again. After a rugged nine months, students are ready (if not, just willing) to hit the books again in a short, accelerated session in which they are required to gain the same knowledge that they would over four or five months during the regular term.
This is a big undertaking and there will be temptations galore that the "Good Old Summertime" will present. On those lovely summer days (Kansas does have a few) in which the temperature is not too hot or it isn't raining (we've had enough of that the past two weeks), the summer session student will be tempted to discard the books aside and enjoy the day.
Summers present a great challenge to the college student, the graduated high school student and the teachers. College students may speed their trip through college by getting those several "needed courses" out of the way during the summertime when there is more time to study. Some students, however, will have to take advantage of the summer to catch up with their class because of work failed during the regular school terms.
books are nice and enjoyable.
It's these temptations that weed the men from the boys, or the mice from the men, or whatever cliché one might like.
High school graduates may ease into college studying and college life by attending summer school where the pressures are great but not quite as great as during the fall and spring semesters.
Then there are elementary and secondary teachers across the state who will return to KU to work on master's degrees or even Ph.D.'s.
Many of the KU faculty will embark on another road of learning, that of research. The University of Kansas is being awarded more research grants every year and as a result KU professors will seek, and we hope, find knowledge that may benefit mankind.
There are also others learning at the University of Kansas besides the KU student. The high school juniors attending Girls State will acquire new knowledge or have the opportunity to apply knowledge already acquired about government.
Students attending the Midwestern Music and Art Camp will have an opportunity to become more proficient on their instruments or in the field of fine arts in which they have talents.
Summer is not a time for waste and retrogression, but it is a time for productivity. A wellspent summer can mean more happiness for the student or teacher when he returns to school in the fall.
Summer at KU offers an extra opportunity for productivity. The University of Kansas is one of the highest acclaimed universities academically in the nation. The nickname "Harvard of the Middle West" certainly applies.
The quality of instruction is excellent, and KU students have an opportunity to receive much from their courses if only they apply themselves. If enough effort is put in, the rewards will be great.
It has been the custom for many a year that the Summer Session Kansan editors offer greetings and salutations during the first week of school. We can see no cause to break tradition, so "Greetings and Salutations."
With this rich tradition continued we can now wish our readers the best of luck in their summer endeavors and hope that they do make this a productive and progressive summer.
After all, it is the "The Good Old Summertime." —Steve Clark
It Looks This Way. . .
On Jan. 3, more than three weeks ago, The Tribune invited Izvestia to send one of its editors to Chicago to write a column a day for us in exchange for a column a day in Izvestia to be written by a Tribune editor in Moscow. Both writers were to be published uncensored.
The first response from Moscow was an unofficial statement by someone on Izvestia's staff, saying that no formal offer had been received. Accordingly, we sent a formal offer to Alexei Adzhubei, Izvestia's editor. Again no reply was received directly from Izvestia but we were told, thru United Press International's correspondent in Moscow, that Mr. Adzhubei was in Cuba and the decision would have to await his return.
WE ARE still waiting. To newspaper men the world over, accustomed as they are and must be to making decisions speedily, it will seem strange that Russian editors must take so long to come to a conclusion.
We make no secret of our belief that the Russian government that controls Izvestia and all the other means of communication in Russia is afraid to let the Russian people read anything but the Kremlin's dogma. We made our proposal, in part, to test this thesis. The longer Mr. Adzhubei remains silent the more probable it becomes that he and his father-in-law, Mr. Khruschev, do not dare risk even one column of dissenting opinion a day for fear the Russian people will be subverted by it.
IT ISN'T as if the communist regime were so new in Russia that its leaders wished to prove their worth to their people before subjecting themselves to a little criticism. The bolsheviks have been in power, now, for 45 years, during which they have built a huge army and police force, increased the country's economic power, killed off tens of thousands of former comrades who were, or were thought to be, unfriendly to the regime, and exiled hundreds of thousands of others. You'd think that by this time the regime would not quake in its boots at the mere thought of an exchange of contributing editors with a foreign newspaper.
Worth Repeating
We thought there was at least a slim chance that the offer would be accepted. The long silence of Mr. Adzhubei suggests all too plainly that we were wrong.
(An editorial from the Jan. 25 Chicago Tribune)
It is tempting to think that (college flunkouts) should never have gone to college at all. However, one authority says that they are actually a cross-section of the entire student body. Thirty University of Miami failures were tested not long ago. Fifteen of them ranged in intelligence from bright to normal to superior. There are some statistics for the educators to ponder."
The Reporter (May 11, 1961)
The Truth About The World's Fair
SEATTLE — (UPI) — How does one start a world's fair?
Rochester, a former city councilman and still the unofficial "Grover Whalen-type" city greeter, smiled at his own joke, then added: "Come to think of it that's not far from the truth."
"It was quite simple," said Alfred R. Rochester, Commissioner of the Seattle World's Fair. "About five years ago someone was using a martini glass for a crystal ball and here we are."
He explained that a group of Seattle businessmen were lunching one day when they began hashing over the idea of promoting an observance of the 50th anniversary of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition which did so much to put Seattle on the map in 1909.
"Eventually, the idea evolved into a Space Age World's Fair," Rochester said.
Short Ones
Saint: a dead sinner revised and edited.-Ambrose Bierce
For prying into human affairs none are equal to those whom it does not concern.-Victor Hugo
A married philosopher belongs to comedy. — Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
It is said that God is always for the big battalions. Voltaire
** **
Marriage; a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two—Ambrose Bierce
Blessed are the forgetful for:
they get the better even of their
blunders. — Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche
SUMMER SESSION KANSAN
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Steve Clark and
Karl Koch ... Co-Editors
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT Bonnie McCullough and Bill Woodburn, Co-Business Mgrs.
THE TIME OF MAN, by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Signet Giants, 35 cents.
There is relatively little new here for the reader who has been subdued by Ma Joad of "The Grapes of Wrath," Harriette Arnow's "The Dollmaker," the back country folk of "As I Lay Dying," and the doomed Georgians of Erskine Caldwell's short stories. Little new, that is, unless one can admire poetic style and feeling for people. "The Time of Man" goes back to the twenties, and so much good southern writing has come along since then that it has been almost forgotten.
It is the story of the yearning of a girl for a home of her own. Her father deeply resents being tied to a piece of share-cropping or tenant-farming for very long, and when he gets ready to move, he drags along his wife and his daughter, Ellen. But Ellen sees vistas beyond the hill country of Kentucky, and she finally has her home, though it is scarcely a home to cherish.
Nature is an overpowering force in this lovely story, and the yearnings of the little lost people of the world are always here to remind us of our own needs, and desires, for roots. Ellen recalls "the numberless places she had lived or stayed and the pain she had known, ...It had seemed forever that she traveled up and down roads, having no claim upon the fields but that which was snatched as she passed.-CMP.
***
AN ALMANAC OF LIBERTY, by William O. Douglas. Doubleday Dolphin. $1.45.
Here is a splendid book to have on one's shelf and refer to daily. Justice Douglas compiled this volume several years ago, and now it is available in inexpensive form for many readers.
It would not make the far right happy. Liberty, as William O. Douglas defines it, is not a word that belongs only to the fat cats. It belongs to all the people, and liberty can be extended through programs that the lunatic fringe would call creeping socialism, or worse. So Douglas celebrates, on one day, the beginning of the program of soil conservation and on another day the beginning of social security.
social security.
He reminds us of unhappy days in our past, such as the Palmer raids after World War I. He reminds us of Elijah Lovejoy, of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, of the Bill of Rights, of opposition to the Stamp Act, of censorship and obscurity laws, of Sacco and Vanzetti and the growth of labor unions and the Nuremberg trials and Anne Hutchinson and the beginning of public schools.
THE REPUBLIC AND OTHER WORKS, by Plato (Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45)—a comprehensive paperback volume of the great philosopher's writings. His "Republic" is the classic statement of government; included are the "Symposium," "Euthyphro," "Menides, and the Apology," "Crito," and "Phaeod," dealing with the trial and death of Socrates.
BEFORE YOU GO, by Jerome Weidman. Cardinal, 50 cents.
One must say, reluctantly, too, that Jerome Weidman is a minor talent. He is a perceptive observer and reporter. We get a feeling of the America of the thirties and forties, and the people of New York, especially the Jewish-Americans and Italian-Americans.
But his stories tax one's patience. I suppose that when his heroine, Julie, finally realizes that she not only loves Mr. Benjamin Franklin Ivey, big wheel of the New Deal, but also admires him, the reader is supposed to say to himself, "Great guy. Wise choice."
Sorry. My reaction is different.
I can believe that Julie might have decided Mr. Ivey was worth it all, despite the way he'd trod on her and on all hands throughout the story. There are people as dumb as Julie and men as smooth as Ben Ivey. But what is Weidman trying to say to us. Is it just a story? Is there a point? Just what has it all been about?—CMP.
THE MIDDLE OF THE JOURNEY, by Lionel Trilling. Doubleday Anchor, 95 cents.
We don't have many books in American literature that capture the idealistic mood of the 1930s when so many dedicated intellectuals were being caught up in communism as a response to the failure of American capitalistic enterprise, as they saw it. There is much more to Lionel Trilling's "The Middle of the Journey" than this one theme, but this does give special interest to a relatively little known novel.
Trilling's work, though it appeared in 1947, as the United States was all set for its postwar witch hunt, deals with a situation of a decade before, when the Molotov-Ribentrop pact had not been signed, and many Americans considered communism a logical answer to their problems. Its hero is a writer, an expert on housing named John Laskell, who, recovering from scarlet fever, (which still claimed victims back in that pre-penicillin era), goes to the Connecticut countryside to recuperate.
Laskell has been torn not only by disease but by the to him unnecessary death of his sweetheart and the switch of a dedicated Communist friend to a position on the far right. Laskell is personally disturbed by his seeming inability to communicate on such matters as death and politics with his friends, a young couple near whom he has moved for his convalescence.
***
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE, by Vincente Blasco Ibanez. Dell, 60 cents.
This, as you probably know by now, has been made into a movie again. It was the film that gave Valentino to the world, and perhaps MGM thought new movies could be worked in 1962. As for the book, it is a studiedly humorous story of World War I, dealing with a wastrel Argentinian whose father fled the Franco-Prussian War. The youth cannot escape, and he is swept up in the new war and dies a hero.
and does a trick.
Aside from the movie angles, one may question why "The Four Horsemen" might be good reading today. It really isn't, though it does have scenes of considerable power. Ibanez has the father of the hero practically trapped in the middle of the Battle of the Marne, and the carnage is dreadful.
ONE ALSO MIGHT read the novel as a document of propaganda. It has vivid and grisly descriptions of German treatment of the Belgians, and we know in our sophisticated world that such descriptions were blatant propaganda.
***
THOMAS MANN, THE IRONIC GERMAN, by Erich Heller (Meridian, $1.55) - a criticism of the great German writer which first appeared in 1958. Heller is professor of German at Northwestern University, and his book was praised as "the best book written about Thomas Mann."
***
POEMS AND SELECTED PROSE, by John Milton (Bantam Classics, 95 cents)—a valuable book for all it contains from the great poet. "Paradise Lost" is the most important of the poems included here, but others are "Paradise Regained," "Samson Agonistes," etc. There also are prose selections, including the celebrated statement on freedom, "Aarepagitica."
****
FATE IS THE HUNTER, by Ernest K. Gann (Crest-Fawett, 60 cents)—a story about men in war by a best-selling author. This, however, is not a controversial novel, but is Gann's own story and own reminiscences of men in the sky.
☆ ☆ ★
ENGINEERS AND IVORY TOWERS, by Hardy Cross (McGraw-Hill, $1.50)—a work by a teacher of engineering who has been an inspiration to many students through the years. This is a philosophical approach to engineering education.