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University Daily Kansan Thursday, April 30, 1964
New Tradition:
Congrats, Seniors
Today the editorial page of the University Daily Kansan breaks with precedent.
THERE HAVE BEEN HOWLS in the news-
room. "But it's an unbreakable tradition!"
Someone is draping black crepe around the editorial desk. Dark armbands are being passed around.
For a hallowed custom of Page two is (at least temporarily) at an end.
CRITICIZING, with neither sympathy nor mercy, the senior gift.
What ancient tradition do we bury today?
Past editorial writers have blasted such acts of senior beneficence as the relief map of the KU campus, the silver tea service for the Art Museum, and the eight 15-inch loudspeakers for the football stadium.
Not that these comments were unjustified. In fact, we agree with their criticisms.
BUT THE CLASS OF 1964 has broken tradition; and we are forced to follow suit.
Last week the senior class voted to donate $3,000 to the library for a special collection of rare books. In what the co-chairman of the gift committee called an "intellectual choice," the class defeated proposals for a piano for the Forum Room, a commemorative marker, spray nozzles for the Chi Omega fountain, and pomp outfits.
THE BOOK COLLECTION will be a valuable addition to the library and to the improvement of intellectual facilities at the university. We congratulate the senior class for its choice.
Hopefully, the seniors have established a new tradition of worthwhile contributions to their alma mater.
— Margaret Hughes
The People Say..
No Parking
We would like to offer our suggestions for modification of the proposed new parking regulations for the university campus. As we understand it, the new plan would end the present "closed campus" for vehicular traffic at 4:45 rather than 3:30, raise parking fees from $4 to $10, and extend present parking restrictions on "central campus" zones from the present 3:30 to 11:00 p.m.
We have no information regarding expenses, so we must assume the fee raise is justified. Nor do we regard the extension of "closed campus" hours to 4:45 as particularly important, although we fail to see any particular gain from the extension. The point we wish to modify is that of parking zone restrictions extending until 11:00.
From our own experience and that of others, we contend that the various secretaries, administrators and professors who occupy these central zones during the day do not need nearly so much space in the evening hours, since most of them have the good sense to stay home.
Students, however, find the library and laboratories most attractive in the evening hours. Most of them have already made the
trek from outlying dormitories at least once or twice already during the day and appreciate the chance to drive onto the campus in the evening. Many of the coeds in particular appreciate this, since few are partial to long walks on a dark campus in the late hours of the evening. For those of the student body, including a large proportion of the graduate students, who may live several miles from the campus, the ability to hunt out a parking place in the evening is quite important.
We suggest accordingly that rather than extend parking restrictions on all central zones, extend them on only one or two—small ones. We suggest the zone behind Strong Hall and perhaps one of the "F" group. This should meet the needs of the staff who do work in the evenings and at the same time allow the needs of the students to be met. There may be certain administrative difficulties involved in such a plan, but we believe they would be no more difficult than those of policing the entire zoned area.
Jack D. Salmon
Lawrence graduate student
Louis Mallavia
Lawrence graduate student
Teacher Evaluation
Recently the New York Times took up the question of teacher evaluation at the college level while considering the case of an unproductive philosophy professor soon to be released from the faculty of Tufts University. To be sure he had published, but his sole book was considered outside the range of relevant professional work. His teacher performance was evaluated with the statement, "effective in the classroom."
After bringing the Times article to the attention of a Kansas faculty member I commented that published material (considered in volume) and personal characteristics (considered in terms of affective relations with fellow department members) were the only apparent criteria used by academics and faculty administrators for the evaluation and concomitant hiring, firing, and promoting of fellow professionals.
To my surprise the faculty member agreed in essence with what I had considered a facetious remark. He added that the excellence of published material was sometimes important, but that sheer massiveness in a resume of accepted articles and books usually had a highly beneficial impact upon evaluations.
Teaching prowess, he went on, meant "next to nothing" since no one—including a department chairman—would "presume to evaluate a fellow professor and thereby violate the sanctity of academic independence and freedom." He concluded that classroom incompetence was often quite general even in the best of institutions, and could many times be found in the seminars and lectures of "guys who are famous and secure." The sane recourse, the KU faculty member advised, was cynically to "accept their little game" and to make the best of it, a role best adopted by most professors and "all graduate students who want to make it through."
What ubiquitous "they" was he talking about? I am tempted to think he meant others like himself, without courage to leave the playing field and imagination to invent a new and better game.
As a student spectator with a stake in the outcome of a coming struggle over the issue of the meaning and nature of preferred scholarship in different types of academic communities, I suggest we debut with an immediate search for intelligent procedures with which to rate the teaching performances of professors. One expedient, which has already been put to limited use, is the anonymous, unsolicited student evaluation.
Arthur M. Harkins Ottawa graduate student
Photographic Death Stalks 'Time' Party
Headlines are another sort of death. It was hard not to be reminded of the mortician's train of funeral cars as the somber limousines crawled past the portal of the fiftystory hosterly so discretely discharging — black tie and the girls in glory — the invited guests who in some past incarnation had been the subjects of coverstories in this weekly magazine of national — nay international — circulation.
"I saw your picture in the paper."
IMPECCABLY GLADHANDED the guests throng room after salmontinted room where waiters, who left their own faces behind in the pantry, deftly circulate cocktail trays. The aroma of luxury. Every alcoholic exhalation: gin, vermouth and zest of lemon, warm-sweet of bourbon, smoky reek of scotch, all buoyed on rafts of toasted cheese, caviar canapes, fat gooseliver, anchovies, olives...
Camera men abound. The camera men neither eat nor drink. Tirelessly they snap famous faces, twisting in and out between eminent waistcoats, squirming with dervish whirls under brassiered bosoms, converge on politicians whose eyes roll come hither at the nearest lens.
The photographers are mad for angles. They crouch behind their cocked cameras, shoot up, shoot down, back off on all fours. They teeter on stepladders, they balance on mantels, they crawl up the walls.
A DOZEN CAMERAS pin down each front page phiz. Lens stares into lens. Say cheese. Flashlight blanks out flashlight, making eyes blink behind the glare on glasses, picking out a swollen ear, shiny pores on a nose, creases in a woman's neck, or the peevish wrinkle at the corner of a mouth smiling that public smile.
The public image is the photograph.
In the flicker and flare, face stares into face. There's a phrase that freezes unspoken on every tongue: "By God I thought you were dead."
Posycolored ladies and their whitefronted escorts throng every box. The dancefloor is all tables. While spotlights cut satin swaths through the smoke-blue air, trays glitter as nimbly the waiters pass brook trout in aspic, some marvel of soup, rare roast beef veiled in sauce, pour just the right wine. . . Nebuchadnezzar never feasted so the day he spelled his doom off the Babylonian wall.
Can it be that the Arabs are right, and the dour pueblodwellers of our own Southwest, when they say the camera takes something away that can never be recovered, skims some private value off the soul?
WE MUST LISTEN TOO. Public address. These tidings are all glad. Keep it light. Informal. Let's not get stuffy. Penguin figures talk and teeter behind the distant mike, extolling, explaining, wise-cracking why and how
each of these poor humans:
bundles of nerves, hearts resolutely pumping blood, anguished tubs of guts, congeries of interacting braincells, suffering nocturnal despair, rejoicing in inexplicable morning aspirations,
became.
out of all the infinite possibilities of human kind,
Material for a Cover Story.
PALMS STING from clapping. On a screen above the stage the enormous simulacrum shines while a tiny black and white figure
nons up to humble and now behind his table.
That simp on the screen can't be me. Where? When? A case of mistaken identity. No never. Least of all in a photograph redrawn and tinted by the art department. Maybe some inkling of a former self now long since scraped. It is today's self that lives. The dead selves linger on as photographs.
"Wouldn't it be funny," I ask my neighbors, "if it turned out that we were really all dead, and this Hall of Fame was an ingenious Hell?"
NOBODY SEEMS the least amused by the suggestion.
The Greeks might have thought so. For the Greeks the spirits of the dead were simulacra, very like a photograph, bereft of blood and brain and nerve. Those ghosts, that Odysseus, at another famous banquet in the royal hall of the rich Phaeacians, told Alcinous about. —
who crawded so fearfully around him when he cut the ram's throat on Ocean's shore that he had to draw his sword to cow them. —
were mere images of men, antique celebrities crowding out of Erebus to drink of the live blood. Achilles hissed he'd rather be a slave, a poor man's slave on earth, than king of all the celebrated dead. When Odysseus' own mother's ghost rose up before the pool of blood he tried to take her in his arms, but like smoke she drifted through his fingers: the image has no life.
The party lasted till long after midnight. Then we all went home to search out our pictures in the morning paper.
- John Dos Passos, describing the anniversary party of Time magazine in Atlantic Monthly.
DailijYfänsan
University of Kansas student newspaper
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.