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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, March 17, 1964
Party Platforms
Spring Ritual
Still confused?
But surely almost all of you have already decided for whom to vote in the campus spring election.
There are so many criteria for making an intelligent decision:
LIVING GROUP AFFILIATION. Actual command or social pressure alleviates the student's distress in making voting decisions. How easy to vote a straight ticket for the party your house endorses.
PARTY PERFORMANCE. Any party which has carried out more than 10 per cent of its last platform gets an automatic edge. Or figure out which party has stolen more candidates from the other.
THE UNDERDOG. You Yankee-Johnson-Liston haters can follow suit by supporting the underdog party (whichever one that is).
PATRONAGE. Those of you lucky chosen few who have already been promised positions don't even have a decision to make.
Now there may be one or two who still can't make up your minds. Perhaps you can decide (imagine!) on the issues.
And so we come to the platforms—those recently-published masterpieces of complex sentences. Here are set down the stands and programs that each party will so vigorously support. What better way to decide on candidates than by evaluating their platforms?
VOX POPULI proposes to alleviate lack of
But hold on. University Party would set up an ASC service by which students could "anonymously and objectively" tell his last semester prof just what he thinks of him.
student employment by replacing Pinkerton men with students at all athletic events.
UP, OBSESSED WITH the concept of leadership, would establish a Freshman Leadership Program and a Campus Leadership Day to bring together student and faculty leaders to discuss "common campus leadership problems and responsibilities."
Then Vox directs the University Daily Kansan to publish actions of the disciplinary and social committees, something the Kansan would gladly do if the committees would furnish the information.
And Vox plans to investigate all methods of pre-enrollment. Fine, but the registrar, who knows much more about the whole problem, has been working on plans for pre-enrollment for quite a while.
UP, not to be outdone, wants every ASC member to spend half his life attending committee meetings, to "better understand the workings of the committee system."
Well, this week brings the first day of spring; the Independents are Flinging and the Greeks are Weeking; and the young man's fancies—if he's of a political nature—turn to platform writing.
— Margaret Hughes
In the Name of Progress
Nose to the Grindstone
It has been said of 19th Century university students in Germany, during the rule of the Iron Cancellor Bismarck, that one-third failed, onethird of the students cracked—either mentally or physically—under the pressure, and the surviving third were graduated to be the shapers of Germany.
IN THE United States today, certainly more than one-third of the students who start school are being graduated. However, in the drive for excellence, students are being subjected to tremendous pressures, some of which may be doing more harm than good.
The country's educational system took a turn for the serious, following aeons of slumber, when we found that the Russians could push a metal ball into orbit and we couldn't.
Coupled with the crash program in space exploration came a crash program in education. It seems that people looked around, asking what could be done, and decided that the first thing would be to make school tougher.
THIS PART OF the solution to the education problem fitted in nicely with the Puritan heritage, for many Americans see something intrinsically sacred about hard work. At any rate, some schools and departments have dished out work—even if it is only busy-work—by the basketful.
The aim of the work load is unquestionably noble, presuming that it is designed to build a population equipped to cope with the awesome problems of 20th Century life.
Despite the good intentions, the doctrine of hard work may in some cases be a hindrance to solving the basic problems—for the basic problems seem to be how man can live with his fellow man, control his scientific genius, and adjust to the tensions of an industrial and technological culture.
LOOK AROUND YOU. In one sense, much of a university could be described as a community of physically ugly—and more important—psychologically ugly people.
How many people, here on the KU campus, are caught in the mechanics of the doctrine of hard work to the point where, in the process of staying alive, they have forgotten how to live?
How many students feel so driven that they have reached a point of alienation from themselves and from their fellows? have no time to sit down and consider themselves, those they love, those with whom they want to communicate.
HOW MANY students are scarred by the exertion—the scars ranging from baggy eyes and itchy scalp to profound psychological problems resulting in, say, suicide.
Admitted, a grinding work load may turn out students highly trained and highly skilled. But what good does the skill and training do if it comes from people who are unbalanced, unhealthy, and who lack a reasonable perspective from which to work.
Tom Coffman
The People Say . . .
Last month during the KU-K-State game, my car and about 20 or 30 others were towed by the campus police from C-lot south of Lindley Hall. The reason given for towing the car was that they were blocking the drive.
Kampus Kops
It seems that sometime during the last few weeks, these venerable officers of the law had erected three small signs near the entrances to the lot saying: "No parking in center lane." The signs are the same size and shape as signs which say, "C-lot parking by permit only." The signs are also
placed several feet off to the side of the entrances, and at night are practically invisible to the uninitiated. The question, then, seems to be: Are students expected to know by instinct when a rule has been changed?
When I asked a patrolman in the lot where my car was, he replied, "I don't know; that's your problem." I then asked why it had been towed away. He replied, "You'll find out soon enough. Go up to Hoch." A second question then arises: Can students expect courtesy from officers of the law?
My date, a friend, his date, and I then went up to Hoch and waited for nearly an hour while an elderly gentleman typed out release forms with one finger. A third question: Can we expect police officials to be efficient?
After parking in practically the same spot during basketball games for three years, I was amazed to find that it was wrong. But then when the "KU Kampus Kops" strike with the swiftness of the blitzkrieg, some new rules can hardly go unnoticed.
Allen Monasmith Wichita junior
Ruby, Hoffa, Libel Trials Made Week Memorable
By Roy Miller
A surprise victory in the first presidential primary . . . new evidence in a Senate investigation. . . a heightening in the Cyprus crisis . . . a U.S. official's survey in Viet Nam. . . flooding in the Ohio River valley . . . the opening rounds in a civil rights legislative battle . . . international intrigue.
All these were elements in the news last week. But three results of the American process of justice were the most dominating factors that could make the last week one of the most remembered of 1964.
In the historic and highly publicized trial in Dallas, Jack Ruby was condemned to death in a jury's swift verdict of murder with malice.
WITH THE NATION watching, just as it had watched Ruby's shooting of accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, Judge Joe. E. Brown read the jury's verdict, which flatly rejected the main plea of the defense—that Ruby was temporarily insane when he shot Oswald.
With the verdict handed down, the judge protested that a television camera remained in operation longer than it was supposed to. Defense attorney Melvin Belli called the decision the result of a "railroad kangaroo jury" and said he would enter a motion for appeal.
JACK RUBY sat in the courtroom as if he did not realize what was taking place. Even hours later he talked as if no decision had been made on his fate.
His fate, too, was far from being decided. With an appeal expected—Belli contended the court made 30 reversible errors—the case of Jack Ruby could continue for years.
In another court, this one the U.S. Supreme Court, a decision was hailed as a constitutional landmark for freedom of the press and speech.
THE NATION'S highest court reversed a decision on a libel suit against the New York Times in connection with an advertisement for which an Alabama court awarded a half-million-dollar judgement to the police commissioner of Montgomery, Ala.
The Supreme Court ruled that a public official cannot recover for libel damages of his official performance unless he proves that the statement was made with deliberate malice.
The Topeka State Journal commented in an editorial regarding the Supreme Court decision, "The decision is dramatic evidence that a press virile enough to publish unpopular views on public affairs and bold enough to criticize the conduct of public officials must be free to do so without the threat of laws that might threaten its very existence."
Hoffa Appeal Overruled
JAMES R. HOFFA, convicted on charges of jury-tampering, was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $10,000 in U.S. District Court in Chattanooga.
U. S. District Court Judge Frank Wilson told the president of the Teamsters Union that Hoffa had been convicted "of having tampered with the very soul of this nation." The court later overruled motions for a new trial.
Nothing Positive In Lodge Victory
Henry Cabot Lodge won the New Hampshire presidential primary, first primary of the season, in a surprising write-in vote.
"THIS WAS A BIGGER upset than the Clay-Liston bout," the Milwaukee Journal said in an editorial. "Two top contenders all but got knocked out of the ring by a man who wasn't there."
Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona had spent weeks campaigning in New Hampshire while Lodge stayed in South Viet Nam as U.S. ambassador there and kept saying he was not a candidate for president.
Lodge's smashing victory was interpreted by Jack Williams of the Kansas City Star as a victory for President Johnson: "The lanky Texan scored more heavily in the outcome of the GOP voting than he did in his own Democratic party primary. . ."
(Continued on page 3)
BOOK REVIEWS
OLIVER WISWELL, by Kenneth Roberts (Crest, 95 cents); ARUNDEL, by Kenneth Roberts (Crest, 95 cents).
And now we have parts 3 and 4 of Fawcett's publishing coup of 1963—the works of Kenneth Roberts, one of America's best historical novelists. As with "Northwest Passage" and "Lydia Bailey" it is necessary to state certain reservations, that today's sophisticated readers probably will not be as swept up in these vast epics as were the simpler folk of the thirties and early forties. But those who love a gusty—and reasonably accurate—historical yarn will love "Oliver Wiswell" and "Arundel."
America in revolutionary days was the stage on which Roberts' people performed. And famous Americans and Englishmen dart in and out of the forests and the battles. Such real people, usually, come through better than the heroes and heroines, for Roberts normally had a story-teller who was in the center of the stage but somehow out of things. And the heroines are unbelievable.
In "Arundel," Roberts gives us mainly the long march on Quebec, an expedition in which Benedict Arnold was to prove his courage and heroism. Roberts was an Arnold partisan, and he starts to tell us in "Arundel" the chain of events that led to the Arnold defection. His hero is Steven Nason, and his clown is Cap Huff, the same chap who shows up in several other Roberts novels and distinguishes himself with his manufacturing of hot buttered rum.
"Arundel," by the way, has like "Northwest Passage" a simply tremendous long march. Roberts excelled at such depictions. There is action, and excitement enough for any boy-as the moviemakers saw, of any age.
"Oliver Wiswell" further reflects the somewhat inconclastic approach to history that marked Kenneth Roberts. For Oliver Wiswell is no conventional patriot fighting the British. He is a Tory, and he undergoes patriot repression that must shock those of us raised in the Parson Weems tradition of colonial history.
We see here the narrow-mindedness of many colonials, and we are treated to depictions of prisons, tar-and-feather incidents, destruction, invasion of civil liberties and so on. This is a long, detailed, indignant, sometimes frustrating, action-filled story of the Revolution.-CMP