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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, May 16, 1962
The HRC Report
The Human Rights Committee presented its report and recommendations on discriminatory fraternity and sorority clauses to the All Student Council last night. The report was 14 pages long and covered many aspects of the discriminatory clause problem.
The most important thing contained in the HRC report was necessarily its conclusions and recommendations. There were four conclusions, the two most important of which were that discriminatory clauses are "a stigma on our campus that should be removed" and "We do not feel that punitive action in this particular instance is the answer to the problem." One of the other conclusions was a passage pointing out that discrimination and prejudice are not the same thing and that a change in attitudes is necessary or "nothing will actually be accomplished." The remaining conclusion pointed out that in securing the rights of some people the rights of others should not be abused.
THE THREE recommendations of the HRC report were that moral suasion should be used to persuade fraternities and sororities to end discriminatory practices, that no punitive action should be taken and that at the end of two and one-half years the All Student Council, the HRC and the University administration should evaluate the action taken by the fraternity-sorority system. In regard to the last point, the HRC report says that if action "above and beyond suasion is then deemed to be necessary, it should be taken; but only after all other methods have been exhausted."
A point that should be brought in here is that since last night's meeting of the ASC was the last one of the semester, it will not be able to act on the HRC report until this fall.
THERE ARE two key points in the HRC's lengthy report. The first is that discriminatory clauses were condemned. The second is that the
HRC is reluctant to recommend action by either the ASC or the University administration to end the clauses. The committee prefers to let the fraternities work out the problem themselves.
Since only two fraternities of the entire fraternity-sorority system at KU have discriminatory clauses, the problem of actual clauses is relatively minor. The big problem, as the Kansan pointed out in an editorial several months ago, is the existence of the prejudice responsible for the clauses.
But the clauses are an eyesore and a block to the elimination of discrimination. They cannot be overlooked.
IN MAKING its report, the HRC has taken the same position that the administration has. It has recommended that no punitive action be taken and that moral suasion be used to persuade the fraternities to remove their clauses. Since there are members of both fraternities who disagree with the discriminatory clauses, it might seem that moral suasion could be effective. However, neither fraternity can change its clause without permission from its national office. This permission, as the HRC report points out, is usually granted "only in cases of extreme pressure by the University Administration."
There is one other way in which the clauses might be removed. The two fraternities hold national conventions which have the power to remove the clauses if they wish to. The trend in the last decade has been removal of discriminatory clauses. The two and one-half year waiting period recommended by the HRC would give the national conventions time to remove the clauses.
Giving the fraternities an opportunity to remove the clauses themselves is a fine idea, but the University administration and the ASC should take the clear stand that they will act if the fraternities fail to remove clauses.
William H. Mullins
Brazil's Biggest Headache
The Alliance For Progress is preparing to help develop Brazil's Northeast at a time full of risks and opportunities.
Under the clamor for land reform in key areas of the vast region, entrenched political groups are being uprooted. Left-Wing activists and other Roman Catholic priests, are stirring up change. Among the Left-wing activists, the Communists are the most pronounced.
Many Brazilian political leaders used to view the drought-ridden Northeast as a nuisance area. Now they see it as a national problem of prime importance. There is a general view that, unless economic improvement and political representation are moved ahead rapidly, there will be violent upheavals in the territory.
IT IS VIRTUALLY certain that the Alliance for Progress, the United States aid program for Latin America, will come under a steady propaganda attack in the Northeast from Leftist groups.
Governors will be elected in October in five of the nine states that make up the Northeast region. All the states will elect member of Congress and Senators.
In an indication of the extent of Left-wing agitation in certain areas of the Northeast, the Federal Agricultural Extension Service has ruled against sending volunteers from the United States Peace Corps into Pernambucon state. The Peasant
Leagues in that state are the most widely organized in the Northeast. The volunteers are being assigned to other states of the area.
The cautious attitude of the Agricultural Extension Service in Pernambuco stems from the Leftist influence in the Peasant Leagues. In a campaign against the Extension Service, the Leftists are calling it an instrument of "Yankee Imperialism."
The United States will apply $131,000,000 to the economic and social development of Brazil's Northeast in the next two years. A cooperative agreement was signed in Washington Friday following the visit to the United States of President Joao Goulart.
A regional office of the United States development agency was opened in Recife, Pernambuco, last week by Bruno Luzzato, the newly appointed regional director. Mr. Luzzato said he expected to have the office staffed with key personnel by the first week of May after a recruiting trip to Washington.
THE AGREEMENT stipulates that the United States Agency for International Development will be working in the Northeast in cooperation with the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Economic Development of the Northeast.
The Brazilian agency, not quite two years old, also has its headquarters in Recife. It is headed by Celso Furtado, the economist whose
meeting with President Kennedy in Washington last July marked the origin of the current program.
In the initial stages of cooperative effort for the Northeast, the United States and Brazilian contributions are entirely for social and economic projects. Monetary stabilization measures are not involved.
Brazil's five-year plan for the Northeast covers various phases of development from industrialization to public health and education, as well as basic research on the economic potential of the millions-square-mile area.
THE UNITED States' cooperation with the Brazilian agency is based on a special report prepared by a mission headed by Merwin Bohan that was in the area for two months.
The report concentrates the United States effort on public health, education, rural electrification and community water-works, agricultural and credit extension, trunk highways and the development of water resources.
Copies of this report, which has not yet been made public, are circulating among Leftist Deputies in Brazilia, the capital. As a result, attacks on the United States proposals have appeared.
The people of the Northeast, with a population of nearly 25,000,000 have only a vague notion of the plans of the Alliance for Progress in the region.
Daily Hansan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Telephone Viking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
A recent trip through three key states of the Northeast indicated that almost no information was available on the Alliance for Progress even in the fairly large interior towns. Its aims were lost in public apathy or confusion.
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press, Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
At Marcelino Vieira, a municipality of 6,000 people in western Rio Grande do Norte state, a group of townspeople and farmers were gathered at the general store. Asked if they knew what the Alliance for Progress meant for the Northeast, some of the people shook their heads.
(Reprinted from the April 17 New York Times)
By Mark Dull Kansas City graduate student
A CONCISE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF EUROPEAN PAINTING, by Pierre D'espezel and Francois Fosca. Washington Square Press, Inc. 90 cents.
An abridgment of "The Pageant of Painting" (Abrams $15.00) containing essentially all the text and 64 examples, half of them in color, of the original 250 illustrations.
This discussion of painting and artists, from the early Christian painting decorating the Catacombs through contemporary painters, mentions an amazing number of artists that occupied the various art movements through the ages. Although it has been impossible to include detailed studies of the most renowned artists, a sufficient amount of material has been included to at least acquaint the uninitiated with the development of painting and the different schools that flourished under their masters' guidance.
THE READER becomes aware of Byzantine Art, early religious mosaics, frescoes, and murals, Renaissance and Gothic painting, the Italian and Venetian Masters, Flemish, French, English, German, and Spanish painting, Classicism, Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, Pest-Impressionism, Pointillism, and so on through the more contemporary Fauves, Cubists, Futurists, Surrealists, Modern Primitives, Expressionists, and nonfigurative or Abstract painters.
The fact that it has been necessary to delete from the paperback many of the illustrations that supplemented the original edition of this annal detracts from its value as a succinct, workable history of painting. Also the illustrations become very easily unfastened, perhaps by design, from the binding.
The last chapter of D'espezel and Fosca's manual, entitled Trends In Modern Painting, points out the main characteristics that influence today's art: "... art has become an international phenomenon, ... daring no longer has any bounds. ... (there has been an) increased influence of ideas and social developments on painting."
THE AUTHORS' observation, "The first half of the twentieth century saw the factor 'artist' gradually assuming greater and greater importance, at the expense of the factor 'nature,'" gives the unenlightened a clearer insight into current painting trends.
Franz Marc (1880-1916) a member of the Blaue Reiter painters in Munich (Expressionists), explained before his death in World War I:
Nowadays we are shattering the undefiled and ever illusory phenomena of nature, putting them together again according to our own will. . . . Matter is something that man may just be able to tolerate, but he is determined not to admit it."
This aphorism seems to be the philosophy of today's nonfigurative painters. The authors' prediction of the prospective success of the many-sided world of painting: "The future will make its choice."
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
Meanings, spelling and pronunciation—these are the central concerns in this volume. For these the book is recommended.
COMMON ERRORS IN ENGLISH AND HOW TO AVOID THEM,
by Alexander M. Witherspoon. Doubleday Dolphin, $1.45.
Many students should rush right out to get a copy of this guide. It is too bad that Alexander Witherspoon hasn't learned, however, that you don't put commas and periods outside quotes. When this blunder appears in a "guide" it isn't likely to help those of us who have been fighting these errors like these many years.
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
YA TH
The dom maga semi publi wide
"ANOTHER THING--DONT BE TARDY--HE HAS A WAY OF
EMBARRASSING YOU WHEN YOU COME IN LATE."
R D