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University Daily Kansan Friday, Feb. 9, 1962
To an Anxious Friend
You tell me that law is above freedom of utterance. And I reply that you can have no wise laws nor free enforcement of wise laws unless there is free expression of the wisdom of the people—and, alas, their folly with it. But if there is freedom, folly will die of its own poison, and the wisdom will survive. That is the history of the race. It is proof of man's kinship with God. You say that freedom of utterance is not for time of stress, and I reply with the sad truth that only in time of stress is freedom of utterance in danger. No one questions it in calm days, because it is not needed. And the reverse is true also; only when free utterance is suppressed is it needed, and when it is needed, it is most vital to justice.
day is in more danger from suppression than from violence, because, in the end, suppression leads to violence. Violence, indeed, is the child of suppression. Whoever pleads for justice helps to keep the peace; and whoever tramples on the plea for justice temperately made in the name of peace only outrages peace and kills something fine in the heart of man which God put there when we got our manhood. When that is killed, brute meets brute on each side of the line.
Peace is good. But if you are interested in peace through force and without free discussion—that is to say, free utterance decently and in order—your interest in justice is slight. And peace without justice is tyranny, no matter how you sugar-coat it with expedience. This state to-
So, dear friend, put fear out of your heart. This nation will survive, this state will prosper, the orderly business of life will go forward if only men can speak in whatever way given them to utter what their hearts hold—by voice, by posted card, by letter, or by press. Reason has never failed men. Only force and repression have made the wrecks in the world.
William Allen White
William Allen White Pulitzer Prize Editorial July 27,1922
U.S.Aid for Welfare Research
American aid has moved into other vital areas abroad. Abraham A. Ribicoff, U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, announced last week that the United States has offered to assist six foreign countries in studying their health and social welfare problems.
The offer has been extended to Burma, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, Poland and Yugoslavia. Government officials said that it was possible India would be added to the list of countries.
THIS PLAN for international cooperative research is the first of its kind. The studies would be financed with counterpart funds—that is, foreign currencies derived from sale of agricultural surpluses and credited to the United States. Last year Congress authorized the Social Security Administration to utilize the equivalent of $1,607,000 in these counterpart funds for research projects.
Health and social welfare problems are vital and basic. No nation can progress on a sound basis if its people's health and social welfare are not taken care of.
HEALTH STUDIES would deal with prevention and treatment of children's diseases, growth and development, ways of improving health services, epidemiological studies of congenital defects, etc. Social welfare studies would include medical care for the aging, juvenile delinquency, welfare for individuals and groups social problems, etc.
Financial and technical aid from the United States to make cooperative research in these fields would greatly benefit the countries that have such problems.
(From the Jan. 20 Asian Student)
Thoughts on Faith and Non-Belief
With rare exceptions, Americans assume that Universities should be defenders of Faith. Three other unnoticed yet supporting assumptions are usually taken as self-evident truths: to wit, that it is more difficult to believe than to doubt, that believing is spiritually "higher" than questioning, and finally that faith has been more creative in human culture than skepticism. A reexamination of these three underlying assumptions is necessary if we are to reconsider the relationship between the University and Faith.
IS IT IN FACT more difficult to believe than to doubt? Small children do not find it so. Indeed, up to a certain age they almost never doubt anything. Only slowly does the child learn to question, and not to take on faith everything which happens to and around him, as well as everything which is told to him. That the small child takes more than words on faith has a special relevance to this problem. Thus he accepts without question the dimly perceived events which occur within his own body and his sharper perceptions of equally mysterious external events. How things move and sound outside of him, and how he feels inside his own skin, are fused together. Long after he becomes articulate, none of this seems to him perplexing enough to stir him to ask questions. Things happen because they happen. He conceives of nothing else. He does not even ask whether they always happen in the same way to everybody, it is enough that they happen to him. The small child is the only perfect Existentialist. At a later age he might call it the Divine Order of Nature.
We must recall that to a young child the everyday events of life are actually as far beyond his grasp, as difficult to explain as ghosts or fairy stories, gods or devils. Yet, the fact that he accepts unquestioningly those natural phenomena which are far beyond
his comprehension makes it easy for the same small child to accept the supernatural without explanation. In fact for the child there is no dividing line between the two, just as he knows no difference between animate and inanimate objects. This is why all religions are so insistent on Sunday Schools for small children. They know that the earlier they start the easier will they find it to indoctrinate, whether gently or with fear.
THE UPSURGE of how and why comes later, after the child begins to make comparisons. It is this first dim awareness of differences which launches the slow and difficult process of skeptical wonder and initiates questions. Yet even after the child has begun to ask questions, he continues for years to accept any answer, however spurious, provided only that it comes from one of his own adults, and provided also that it causes the recurrent stirring of uncomfortable anxiety. Since his adults seem to him to be omniscient, nothing that they tell him can be doubted. He is not disturbed by vagueness or inaccuracies or inconsistencies. An unquestioning acceptance of the words of his own adults is the child's first act of faith, and implants a tendency which in most people persists through life: namely, to invest the Word with greater reality than Facts.
Thus as he emerges painfully from that blind faith in everything which permeates his early thinking, the child's slow growth towards maturity requires first that he develop the courage to challenge the words of his omniscient adults, and then to take the equally difficult step of making a comparative reexamination of events and experiences, his own with that of others. None of this is easy.
INDEED EVEN after the child has begun to ask about the world
around him, he tends to silence these questions by reaffirming the authority of the adults, however uninformed they may be. He can persist in questioning only as he overcomes guilt and anxiety, usually spurred on by an embryonic rebellion. For the small child, as for that grownup child whom we euphemistically call "adult," accepting remains easier and always seems safer than doubting. Since to slide back is easier than to climb a difficult slope., unquestioning acceptance remains throughout life the attitude to which there is a tendency to return.
Many grow old without going beyond this; continuing to accept words without question. In the face of these observable facts of daily life, it is remarkable that the "adult" world ever accepted the claim that believing is difficult.
(This is the first in a series of articles from an article by Lawrence S. Kubie, "Faith, Culture and the American University, in the Oct. 28, 1961, Harvard Alumni Bulletin.)
Dailu Hansan
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Ron Gallagher Managing Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Bill Mullins  Editorial Editor
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Charles Martinache .. Business Manager
"OH, HE'S OUR MOST POPULAR HISTORY TEACHER ALL RIGHT. BUT I HEAR HIS STUDENTS DON'T LEARN MUCH FROM HIM."
the took world
By Calder M. Pickett Professor of Journalism
THE STATUS SEEKERS, by Vance Packard. Cardinal, 60 cents.
This was quite the thing to read a few years ago, as "The Hidden Persuaders" had been previously and "The Waste Makers" later. Social scientists—or some of them, at least—scoff at Vance Packard. Yet he raises interesting questions and dilemmas, and he tells us disturbing things, as long as we recognize that essentially he is a popularizer rather than a scientific investigator.
Is status-seeking really what the trouble is? Might not Vance Packard—or somebody else—suggest instead that a good education is desirable for all, within limitations, and that wanting a college degree is not necessarily an example of conspicuous consumption, 1960s-style?
Packard has annoying views on education, I must say. He bleeds for the high school graduate who is annoyed because he can't move up in the factory hierarchy because he has no college degree. He bleeds for the poor kid who gets trouble from the old man at home because his school teachers are teaching him good grammar and international understanding.
Some of his assertions are startling. His five classes of American society, for example. Obviously these are not rigid, and there is much more mobility than he suggests. A reader may be able to fit himself into two or three of the classes, and he may be able to fit his immediate family into as many as three or four.
A reader who has a nice empty garage but parks his big long car in the driveway may be startled to learn that he does this for reasons of status. He will be surprised to learn that he is really low class if he and a friend ride in the front seat while the wives ride in the back.
* *
THE PRINCE AND THE PAUPER, by Mark Twain. Doubleday Dolphin, 95 cents.
It's rather difficult to believe that Mark Twain wrote this book. Somehow it seems more likely that his wife, Oliva, who thought it a splendid tale, wrote it. It's a boys' book, all right, and anybody knows that Mark Twain wrote boys' books, but it has none of the humor of "Tom Sawyer" or "Huckleberry Finn."
It is not devoid of interest; it just doesn't enthrall one as it did in 1935. In fact, it's probably quite ridiculous for an adult to read the thing at all, and even more ridiculous to re-read it. What it is, simply stated, is the old yarn of two people who greatly resemble each other who change places (Twain did this with variations in "Pudd'nhead Wilson," a better novel).
TOM CANTY, THE PAUPER, AND YOUNG EDWARD TUDOR trade clothes. And that proves the undoing of Edward, for while Tom is living high on the hog and getting ready to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, Edward, the rightful king, is rooting around the English countryside, getting into one scrape after another. He has a kind of protector, an Errol Flynn type (possibly it seems this way because Errol played the part in a 1937 movie), named Miles Hendon. There are encounters with thieves, cutthroats, knaves, a crazed hermit, lady Baptists who are burned at the stake, and a scurrilous brother who has tried to displace Miles at Hendon Hall.
Old-fashioned stuff like that, it is. Though "The Prince and the Pauper" has little humor, it does have incident. It is incredibly contrived, but the bitterness of Mark Twain was coming through, and he was able to vent his hatred of injustice and pompousness and poverty. This helps to make the novel something that is likely to endure, though it is minor Mark Twain.