Candidates review issues
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following is the second installment of the complete transcript of last Thursday's University Daily Kansan-sponsored debate between the presidential and vice-presidential candidates in the upcoming campus election.
The candidates are Mark Edwards, Emporia junior, and Rick von Ende, Abilene, Tex., graduate student, Progressive Student Alliance (PSA); Dave Awbrey, Hutchinson junior, and Marilyn Bowman, Merriam junior, Independent Student Party (ISP), and Rusty Leffel, Prairie Village junior, and Frank Zilm, St. Louis, Mo., junior, Campus Coalition (CC).
Moderating the debate were Ron Yates, Shawnee senior and Kansan editor-in-chief, and Tim Jones, East Aurora, N.Y., senior and Kansan editorial editor. In the first installment published yesterday Edwards had responded to a question from Yates. Below are Abwrey's and Leffel's answers to the same question.
YATES: I would like to ask, first of all, do you have, right now, a full contingent of
ISP
Dave Awbrey
senatorial candidates on your ballot or running in your party, and if you do, how do you plan to organize these senators into an effective group within the University Senate?
How do you plan to promote attendance. How do you plan to promote attendance to the senates which are traditionally long-winded and time consuming affairs? Do you plan to initiate some kind of a discipline in the rank so that these people will show up and be able to give the student body a full 15 per cent representation?
AWBREY: The best way I can answer this question is to ask you to look at the ISP candidates. There are 57 of them—twice as many as anyone else. They are 57 people, most of them political amateurs. Most of them are not hard and experienced ASC Mickey-Mousers. They want to do something for this University, they want to do something for themselves, too.
Therefore, we are not worried about attendance next year. We are not worried about attendance from our people, from Mark's people, from Rusty's people, or from the independent people, because we're going to initiate so much legislation, investigate so many problems, plan so many programs that those senators are going to have to be there. I personally am not going to carry a club over any senator, they are responsible people, they are adults.
However, you people, being the University of Kansas
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students, have got to be responsible to your representatives. We can't sit up in the executive office and call up each senator every night and say "A committee meeting tomorrow, you got to be there." That's not our job.
Our job is to make student government effective, because it is the people in the government that make it effective. Not the system, not the structure It is you. We cannot fail, we cannot succeed if only four per cent of the electorate turns out. If you and your friends do not vote, we cannot succeed. We know that, everyone does. The new senate code will be meaningless unless you get your representatives there and check them, influence them. Tell them your decisions, tell them your attitudes, and the Student Senate will work like a miracle, like it should.
LEFFEL: One of the most disappointing things I think about the ASC was to go to a meeting and have something like 16 or 17 people there and call a forum, then say, the end of the meeting.
This has been our student government for the last several years. We've almost had no student government.
When you look at this, you have to ask why. And I think everyone at the University of Kansas has demonstrated why, the people who have turned out at elections and who have supported student government. The reason why nobody has come has been simply because there has been almost no reason to come. No faith in student government. They found that their time was better spent someplace else, whether it was studying or out drinking a beer.
I firmly believe that student government can be worthwhile, that's why I'm even standing here.
The student body officers, though, have the responsibility to make the organization efficient so that the organizational aspects of the meetings work to get to the meat of a question.
We don't want to get so tied up in meaningless trivia that none of us are interested in. We're interested in action, we're interested in goals, we're interested in getting things done. And this is what we have to do.
Now, let's be very specific. The student senate will have 95 people. It will meet three or four times a year. The University Senate will have over 700 people, and that's going to meet three times a year. How much really can be done there? The most efficient senate meetings will happen when a lot of calling is done ahead of time. This is the role of the student body officers, the senate executive committees, and the role of the senate council. By efficient planning of a carefully allied agenda, by submitting reports to everyone on the senate head of the meeting, by having speakers outline who's going to speak pro and con, have more or less, an organized debate planned.
There will be organization planned by which the real ideas, the arguments can be brought forth and decisions can be made.
We are interested in decisions and action, not just in sitting around and talking about what student government ought to be.
The question, Tim, that you also asked was on the various parties and their development. Last December, Frank and I decided to run for student body officers. We thought then that the new senate code would be passed and that there was some cause and some reason and some potential in student government. If the ASC were still existing, we wouldn't be here today. We didn't feel the ASC had that
much to offer. But we do now. The Student Senate can do something.
We realized at that time that it would be a hollow victory if we were to just run, and possibly get elected and not have any of the people to serve on the senate, which is actually the representative body of the student body.
So, we developed the concept then, of the Campus Coalition. The only reason we have a formal title or anthing like this is to lend some credence to an organization that was purposely designed to get responsible people involved.
We are very happy with the success of the Campus Coalition. You know, you don't see a lot of people going, "Campus Coalition, Campus Coalition." We didn't want that, because we have been upset with the other political parties on the KU campus, and I think they have been detrimental to student government.
The Campus Coalition is actually a group of coalitions in independent schools. When we organized it, we called key people in each of the schools that we felt were the type of people who should be in student government. We asked them to develop their own coalitions. They have done this in many schools. They have developed their own platforms, they have developed their own candidates.
So, it's not a front party for a couple of guys who are interested in doing something for student government and are seeking student body offices. No, the Campus Coalition is the party of the people in every school, and we feel the emphasis on this new student senate has to be put on those schools and these people, because they're the ones representing us.
JONES: Our next question is, what do you feel are the two or three top priorities to be put through the senate in the beginning? Dave, I believe it's your turn.
AWBREY: That's very difficult. We have put out seven position papers in the last two weeks. Every one of those position papers has specific programs that we feel need to be implemented immediately—at least research done or started on right now.
CC Rusty Leffel
I think the first thing we should do, and I am in agreement with the other candidates on this—we have got to get a more effective election law. The cost of campaigning now, especially for the student body president's office, is fantastic. It's hurt me a lot, and I know it has hurt all the other candidates. So therefore, we feel we must open up student government to everyone, regardless of ability to pay so everyone can have a chance. That would be the first reform I would want.
The second one is, I think we ought to face the racial problems of this school. We must seek to
implement our black tutorial program which we have introduced. There is already considerable support of it on this campus. It will hopefully go into effect in 1970.
The third thing I think we ought to introduce is to look at ways to save student money. The main thing that we think we can implement very quickly, if not next semester, is the idea of a cooperative book store and a file system which we have said would be very easy for a student who wanted to buy a book, a used book. First, let me say that the bookstore does not like to deal in used books, they are a headache to them, and we also do not like to rush over there and get our books returned and so forth. The bookstore pays back to you half the price of the books and sells them at 3/4 of the price. We seek immediately to implement an idea about which if you had a chemistry book that cost you $5, you could take this book, fill out a file card so someone could buy it from you.
So we feel that these three programs can be implemented right away, and we feel they are most relevant.
EDWARDS: I think it's interesting to note that the only thing we have put out is our platform, basically because we think it pretty well explains what we want to do and that's the reason we didn't expand with any position papers.
On this platform, if you'll recall, the first point was to point out academic failures. We feel the thing that is most important to implement next year is to be able to establish representation on all the departmental committees.
I don't know whether you are aware that this year, the department of political science has four graduate students helping to make the decision on on who the new departmental head is. Through efforts of undergraduates, six undergraduates will sit down, and have a total of 10 students sitting down with 20 faculty members next year in that department helping establish curriculum decisions.
So this is the first thing we want definitely to do, and we feel it is on the top priority list.
Another thing is, we definitely have a problem right now as far as getting black professors to come to the University. We feel that through the idea of an exchange program with black universities, that we can bring black professors to the University. Kansas right now, with their pay salaries, cannot compete for the top black Ph.D's. We feel we can bring them to the University through this exchange program. Definitely, this has to be started.
It is being done at other universities.
The third thing we feel is we have a definite injustice being done toward the foreign students on campus. Right now, they have no guaranteed place to live when they come here. The case I use is a person who lives in my living group. He came to this country with a boy from Peru.
The boy couldn't speak any English at all when he got to this country. When he got to the University, all he received was this packet, and all they said was, "Good luck," and he spent three nights in the Eldridge Hotel before he finally found a place to live.
We feel that if we are going to bring foreign students to the University, the first thing the student senate could do is to implement a program where at least we give them temporary housing until they can find a permanent place, because it's
very difficult for foreign students to come here the last part of August and the first part of September and find a decent place to live. We think we ought to guarantee them this.
PSA Mark Edwards
Those are the three things I have listed that I think we can put into effect immediately and ought to start working on.
ZILM: Briefly, the following are the three major things which I personally think are the most important right after the election: organization, university
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