VIP decision
The implications of today's University Disciplinary Board will affect much more than the fate of three students.
The Board, composed of five faculty members and six students, will decide whether or not the University should bring disciplinary action against three students involved in a anti-ROTC demonstration May 23. The charges are expected to include disruption of a seminar for Kansas law enforcement officers, damage to three tables in the Kansas Union and interference with student elections.
While campuses across the nation have been torn with dissent and violence, KU has remained relatively quiet. The demonstrations have been non-violent.
Suspension for a semester or an indefinite amount of time is the most serious punishment the Board can hand out, but its decision will determine in a large degree, the course of KU's action towards student demonstrators.
Comparatively speaking, the April 23 demonstration, even with the breaking of ballot boxes and Union tables, was only faintly troubling to the University calm.
The KU student handbook hasn't any regulations concerning student disruptions or procedures to follow in the event of one. The University Disciplinary Board hasn't even been busy in recent years.
But now the Board must decide whether to give the three students involved in the hearings total amnesty or to dole out some sort of punishment.
No matter which course is taken, the student reaction will probably be vocal and possibly widespread.
The Board's decision of either a hard-line approach of punishment or a soft-line of amnesty could plot the course of student action and reaction at KU. More than the fate of three demonstrators but the future of student dissent at KU is on trial today. (AMS)
Letters to the editor
Credit given to others
To the Editor:
I found your article on the New Jersey Street project failing in one major area. As a member of the Advocacy Planning class, which organized and coordinated the work on New Jersey, I was embarrassed to see my name appear throughout the article—when in fact I played a very small role in the work.
Please give credit where credit is due. The entire group deserves recognition for the success of the project. These students worked very hard. They are: Linda Boone, Ward Colemeen, Peter Davis, Louis Fisher, Nick Gerren, Iras Humpreys, Mike Jackson, Tim Jacobs, Ralph Johnson, Cynthia Kriyazias, Joe Mattei, Danny McDonagh, Mark Seferovich, Craig Shaw, Sutipah Smithipong, Harriette Stallworth, Bill Tankersley, Rick Zingher, Connie Poff, Randy Hodges, Jake Mumford, Mylene Rucker, Prof. Miles Stevens.
Credit is also due to the many
volunteers who gave much time and effort to the project.
Sincerely,
Frank Zilm
To the Editor:
To the Editor:
Re letter to the editor from Kathy Hall in last Wednesday's UDK.
It appears as if Miss Hall feels that stories about the social phenomena occurring on our college campuses should not be reported on. Perhaps she feels newspapers should report only on the goodie, goodie aspects of college life. Like the KU Christian club and the Jewish Community Center met last night and sang Rumanian folk songs for the inmates of the county home for the deaf.
If she is so inclined, perhaps she should get a job (she did say she was a journalism major, didn't she?) writing church bulletins for a church in Greaseneck, Montana. She
obviously doesn't want to offend anybody.
I say "good for the UDK." And although I don't have the siglest idea of what an ACP All American rating is, I'll be willing to bet Miss Hall that the UDK will win hundreds more if it continues to show that it has enough guts to report the news and the world "the way it really is."
I never used to read the paper because it was always filled with nothing news. It was an extension of high school journalism and said nothing. This year, I have seen more stories of relevance in the UDK than I have seen in all the years of reading my hometown paper.
I say, "keep it up" despite the criticism from the "shocked, old maid types."
J. Kelly Cherokee, Okla graduate student
Lunar folly
By MIKE SHEARER
America may well be ready to land man on the moon one day, but there is little reason to hope man will be ready by the time scientists are ready to send him.
Next to the war in Vietnam, no other American mania has milked unquestioning American taxpayers of as much money during the past eight years as has the exploration of space, more specifically—the invasion of the moon. And all in the name of progress.
Progress, alias American superiority over the Soviet Union and alias an overturned priority list, has cost America $24 billion since eight years ago when President Kennedy launched America on its drunken pilgrimage to the moon.
Kennedy gave as the reason for the desperate pursuit of the moon. "Because it is there."
There are two reasons why America should end its lunar orgy:
Firstly, the moon will undoubtedly remain conveniently adjacent to the earth for some time to come. In the meantime, America has more pressing needs: poverty, racism, education, overpopulation and crime.
Twenty-four billion applied to studying criminal psychology, applied to replacing out-dated education facilities and techniques or applied to finding new methods of feeding the world would be worth much more than the base value of the money. $24 billion applied to a project which could wait in light of pressing human needs is worth much less than one cent which is applied to the relief of any human anguish.
Secondly, America is not ready to fund a manned lunar landing because of the widespread distortion of investigative purposes. Undoubtedly, most Americans and American publications support the space program because we want to beat the Russians! One simply does not spend $24 billion during a sociologically starved era merely to beat the Russians.
When will America be ready for the manned lunar landing?
When it has taken care of its hungry, its oppressed and its ignorant: when it has begun to make a contribution to the problems of other nations, not through militarism but through distribution of material wealth in an atmosphere of equality between nations; when it has agreed to work with other nations in the examination of what is unknown to man with the goal of increased knowledge and not the goal of increased national stature; when America can find a better reason for going to the moon than "because it is there"—America will then be ready to go to the moon.
President Nixon has called the space program "both indispensible and of major importance to our country," when, in fact, the space program, at the present, is most dispensible and quite unimportant.
While Egypt starved, her government built the pyramids with the help of the starving themselves.
In an age of sociological starvation, America is trying to build a new pyramid, one to reach the moon, thus reenacting Egypt's historic folly.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN An All-American college newspaper
Kansan Telephone Numbers Newsroom UN 4-3464 Business Office UN 4-4358
Published at the University of Kansas daily during the academic year except holidays and examination periods. Mall subscription rates: $6 a semester, $10 a year. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kan. 66044. Accommodations, goods, services and employment duties not covered to color, creed or institutional opinion. Opinions expressed are not necessarily those of the University of Kansas or the State Board of Regents.
Executive Staff
Editor-in-Chief Executive Stan Ron Yates Business Manager Pam Flaton