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University Daily Kansan Monday, May 21, 1962
The Kansas Situation
Reapportionment
Gov. John Anderson, speaking before the Faculty Forum last week, said he is certain the Kansas Legislature will reapportion itself at the next session. He said the courts will not have to force this reapportionment.
From these statements, it can be assumed that the governor is not planning to call the Legislature into special session to take up this problem before this fall's elections. It can also be assumed that Kansas' five members of the U.S. House of Representatives will be elected under the plan approved by the 1961 Legislature.
The unfairness of the apportionment of the state Legislature is obvious. For example, the 343,231 residents of Sedgwick County will elect only one state Senator this fall. The 16,083 residents of Jewell and Mitchell Counties also will elect one state Senator. The vote of a resident of Jewell or Mitchell County, therefore, is worth 21 times as much as that of a resident of Sedgwick County.
The 1961 Legislature's Congressional redistricting is equally bad. In an obvious move to defeat Democrat J. Floyd Breeding, the Republican-dominated Legislature created a huge district comprising all of western Kansas, with a population of 539,592. At the same time, in an obvious attempt to neutralize the vote of heavily-Democratic Wyandotte County, the Legislature split that county between two Congressional districts.
THE RECENT U.S. Supreme Court's decision on reapportionment has prodded a number of states into action. The Court ruled that voters may bring suits in Federal courts to force reapportionment of state legislatures, and to forestall such suits, a number of state legislatures were called into special session.
The courts apparently are going to be satisfied with nothing less than completely fair reapportionments. In Georgia, the state legislature
modified the state's county unit system of primary elections, under which each county is assigned a certain number of unit votes. The units assigned gave the rural counties an overwhelming control of the state.
The modified plan gave the more populous counties additional votes, but not as many as their populations would warrant. The modified plan was struck down by a Federal court several days after its passage.
Such court actions no doubt will bring screams of anguish from many people. The old cry of state's rights has already been heard because of the Supreme Court decision.
SUITS ARE now pending which would force reapportionment of the Kansas Legislature and of the Kansas Congressional districts. If acted upon before this fall's elections, the state legislators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives would be elected on an at-large basis unless the Kansas Legislature takes reapportionment action.
However, the states have shown no desire to do the job unless forced to do so. The reluctance of the Kansas Legislature to reapportion itself, and the blatantly-political Congressional redistricting in 1961, shows that the powers-that-be are in no hurry to give up their power.
It appears that Gov. Anderson is in no hurry to put the Kansas Legislature on the spot unless forced to do so to prevent the chaos which would result from an at-large election. The only hope for this fall's elections, therefore, lies in these two court cases.
In any case, the recent Supreme Court decision and the resulting Georgia situation helps insure that the Kansas Legislature, when it finally gets around to acting, will give all Kansas residents—urban and rural, Democrat and Republican—their rightful voice in government.
—Clayton Keller
On Other Campuses
OBERLIN, O. — A recommendation, concerning what personal information on students should be kept in College records and whether such data should be released to the public, has been passed by an Oberlin College Student-Faculty Conference Committee.
The proposed policy advocates that medical, religious, and political records of students be regarded as privileged information with the College, and that this information be disclosed to employers, security agents, and the general public only with the consent of the student concerned.
EASTON, Pa. — Pennsylvania's recently established Fair Education Opportunities Act will make it more difficult to discover some of the young people who should receive a college education, according to President K. Roald Bergethon of Lafayette College.
The 1961 act forbids in general discriminatory college admissions
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"ON TH' CONTRARY I THINK HE'S A WOMDERFUL LECTURER
THIS IS TH' ONLY CLASS WHERE I CAN GET ANY DECENT SLEEP."
practices based on race, religion, color, anceistry or national origin, but accords religious and denominational institutions the right to select students exclusively or primarily from members of a given religion or denination.
LYNCIBURG, Va. — Students at Randolph-Macon Woman's College are going to have greater responsibility for their own education as the result of a major academic change announced here recently by Dr. William F. Quillian Jr., president. The change, involving a reduction of time spent in class, is designed to provide more time for independent study.
The plan was adopted by the faculty on the recommendation of their educational policies committee. Most classes now meet three times a week in 50-minute periods. Next year, under the new plan, they will meet twice a week, in 60-minute sessions. The exceptions will be in certain classes in languages, music, mathematics, and physical education, where the regular class time is needed. There will be no classes on Wednesday and Saturday mornings, a move aimed at providing solid blocks of time for independent study.
Dailu Hansan
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DEPTMENT
Ron Gallagher
Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEFFARTMENT
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Bill Mullus Editorial Editor
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By Robert N. Lawson
ROMEO AND JULIET, JULIUS CAESAR, HAMLET, and MACBETH, by William Shakespeare. Edited jointly by Oscar J. Campbell, Alfred Rothschild, and Stuart Vaughan, Bantam Books. 50 cents per volume.
The four tragedies published as the first volumes in this new paperback series are among the best known of Shakespeare's plays, including, as the descriptions on the distinctive covers remind us, "the most famous love story in the English language" and "the most discussed and celebrated of the world's great plays." They are familiar to us all and certainly do not require a reviewer's appraisal, but it is always of value to consider the nature and utility of a particular edition.
THERE HAVE BEEN many, many editions of Shakespeare in the approximately 370 years since his first plays were performed. Some editions were quite rigorous in adhering to carefully defined principles of textual accuracy and some used the text as a nucleus about which to accumulate an enormous amount of scholarly machinery.
These small volumes are by no means intended to compete with elaborate facsimile or variorum editions. The editors of the series proclaim their purpose is "to provide in a convenient and easily comprehended form as much guidance and information for the student and general reader as is reasonably possible," and it seems to me that they have hit the mark.
THEY PROVIDE VALUABLE introductory information — a concise and readable essay about the play, a chronological table relating events in Shakespeare's career to historical and literary events of his time and a short summary of what is known about the theater and audience that he wrote for. They also provide a conservative and respectable text, derived from the "Globe" edition, the long acknowledged standard, to which most reference tools are keyed by act, scene, and line number. Other useful features are a limited (two to three words per page) but adequate marginal glossary, an extensive selection of first-rate critical commentary, useful notes on obscure points in the text, and a bibliography of some forty items which would be hard to improve upon as an introduction to the important things that have been written about Shakespeare. Everything is indeed neatly packed to give the reader as much help in establishing rapport with Shakespeare's text as can be conveniently slipped into a hip pocket.
A large part of the scholarly apparatus — glossary, notes, table of chronology, and introductory essays — has been time-tested, deriving as it does from Professor Campbell's widely-used college edition of the plays, and the selection, abridgment, rearrangement, and modification of this material has all been done in keeping with the editor's stated purpose.
THESE FEATURES ARE concise, convenient and mark the edition as a professional product, but they are not particularly surprising in an edition of this kind.
The most interesting feature of this edition—the feature which makes it distinctive to my mind—is the selection of interpretive commentary which follows the text of the play and composes about one third of each volume. These are short passages selected from the Shakespeare criticism of some eight or ten of what may be called the classical commentators on the play, critics who have formulated important statements on crucial questions in understanding the text—like DeQuincey on the knocking at the gate in "Macbeth," or Coleridge on the character of Hamlet.
THIS SAMPLING IS quite rich in the thought which the reading of Shakespeare has provoked, and is a convenient way for the reader to be introduced to A. C. Bradley, Harley Granwille-Barker, J. Dover Wilson and others with whom he may well wish to cultivate a deeper acquaintance. Professor Campbell's brief comment on each critical selection is just enough to put the piece in perspective, and make of the whole section a critical tool worthy of imitation.
All in all this edition is an eminently sane job by editors who are able to provide "the student and general reader" with a great deal of guidance without being in the least condescending. And, of course, these books share the advantages of paperback editions in general; they are easy to carry for between-classes or during-commercials reading, and they are inexpensive. In fact, these four books offer the finest vintage literature, in a particularly assimilable form, for less than the price of a pair of six-packs-if your taste runs to good beer.
Worth Repeating
It is not as if the system required one to be a great scholar, or a good scholar, or even a scholar at all: it only requires that one produce research, which being translated means publish papers. Their contents should be in a certain form and they should be documented and if possible accurate—that is all. Thought, relevance to the interests of any other human being, engaging exposition or lucidity of prose are not mentioned among the specifications. The papers are merely asked for as evidence of professional discipline justifying one's existence—and promotion. And at the same time, "research" can be given as an excuse for neglecting the interests of students or of the university. The modern teacher flees to the library and cries "research" as the medieval thief fled to the church and cried "sanctuary!" Thereafter both are untouchable by law or society.—Jacques Barzun