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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, March 27.1963
Justice Needs Equality
Yesterday, it was suggested in a Kansan editorial that it is unnecessary for a university to duplicate the punitive actions of duly authorized courts when a student is accused of a felony.
Considering the importance of maintaining two-way traffic on the avenues of justice, the job of determining guilt or innocence is best left to legal experts—which university officials and student members of the Disciplinary Committee are not.
THE SUGGESTION of a hands-off policy by the university in disciplinary matters is confined to cases where a student is charged with a felony. Instances where a student is accused of misconduct—of any nature—arising from his role as a student is another matter; the university has the right to punish such infractions.
This is just plain common sense. While there are duly authorized courts to handle cases where a student commits an unlawful act as a citizen, the university is the only institution in a position to make a fair judgment of misconduct in affairs that are strictly school matters.
BUT UNDER the system now used by the university in disciplinary matters, an essential element of fair judgment is missing. This missing element so necessary to fair judgment is consistency.
Now, when a student is accused of misconduct, his fate is determined arbitrarily. Not arbitrarily in the sense of calculated injustice, but arbitrarily in that no hard and fast rules for conduct are established or followed.
Two students accused of the same misconduct may receive different punishments. One of the more important considerations under the present
system of determining punishment is the student's grades. The student with good grades is more likely to be given a second chance than the student with average or below-average grades.
THIS IS UNFAIR. Presumably, both students are being judged for the same misconduct. Equality in the eyes of the law is the basis for justice. That means that the poor have, in theory, the same chance in court as the rich, the less-than-brilliant the same chance as the genius.
The same should apply to students. A Wilson Fellow who kicks down a dormitory door is just as guilty as a straight "C" student.
The Disciplinary Committee is in operation to determine punishment for social misconduct. The misconduct should not be changed by degrees of intelligence. In fact, the student who works like the devil for his C's is more deserving of special consideration than the student who makes above-average grades with a minimum of effort. But this is not true, presently.
IF JUSTICE is to result from deliberations by the Disciplinary Committee, standard rules applying to everyone must be the working basis.
All students have the right to know exactly what punishment to expect if they commit an offense. The student whose grades suffer because he must work part-time should not face stiffer punishment than the student who is in a position to devote the time necessary to maintain a high grade average.
The present system places a premium on a student having benefit of certain circumstances and assets. Justice, if that is the goal of the university in disciplinary matters, must be based on equal treatment of all. — Terry Murphy
Editor:
Education
... Letters ...
Occasionally an instructive letter appears in the Kansas. Mr. Newcomer's letter on methods of education is just such a letter. Since I must comply with the editor's policy on the length of letters (which I confess I don't much like), I will make only two comments.
1. Apparently I do not understand the following statement: "I cannot see how any SCHOLAR can judge a course too easy or too hard." Certainly Mr. Newcomer does not intend a trivial comment on either his vision or his apprehension of a particular situation. But then what does he intend to assert? Much must hinge on the meaning of SCHOLAR, for it is not hard to find a case where a student might justifiably say, "That course
was too hard for me." The statement seems justifiable on either of two grounds (there may be more, but there are at least two circumstances); (a) Student A took a course which required certain abilities which he doesn't happen to have (e.g. A lacked sufficient quantitative ability to survive a physics course), or (b) Student A took a course without an adequate background (A didn't have all the prerequisites for a course). Perhaps a SCHOLAR isn't a student.
2. The informal definition of EDUCATION also bugs me. What is this "seeking knowledge for its own sake" bit? Who seeks knowledge for its own sake? No one I know, I hope. In ordinary discourse this phrase seems to be an emotive expression. It induces an aura of added approval around something dear to our hearts, giving a second
and superfluous stamp of approval to something already approved of. The phrase ought to be exorcised from the English language. Its only function in common parlance is to obscure issues with superstitious nonsense.
Paul Schaich Topeka senior
☆ ☆ ☆
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"I GOT AN 'INCOMPLETE' IN MATH 24 " WITH DRAWN "
IN ENGLISH II — " CONDITIONAL" IN SOC. 14 AN'
'A'D' IN PHYS ED - BOY IIDENT FLUNK ATHING THIS TERM"
Off-Campus Speakers
According to an article on the front page of your March 20 edition, the Senate Advisory Committee of this university is preparing a "written statement of policy on off-campus speakers." From the tone of the article, I gather the statement of policy is intended to deflect theire of certain critics of the university who feel that various speakers might, by their presence or words, poison the simon-pure minds of the student body with undesirable doctrines. The obvious way to do this is, of course, simply to not allow campus appearances by anyone of unpopular views of whatever social, political, religious etc. slant the committee may care to proscribe.
Hopefully, I am wrongly interpreting the article. Perhaps there are justifiable reasons for limiting freedom of speech under some conditions. But, surely, not in a university! Do students come to this Kansas Alp for indoctrination in "Americanism" — however that elusive thing may be defined — or do they come for education? Surely education includes, even requires, the right to hear and say things not universally approved. If the "cream of the crop" of Kansas students cannot be trusted to distinguish truth from error, then we have no need of university training at all, nor have we much hope.
If this is really a university, and if the Senate Advisory Board and the people of Kansas want to keep it that way, then I urge the committee to report as suggested policy a brief paraphrase of the words engraved above the head of Thomas Jefferson in his tomb in Washington, D.C.: "I have sworn on the altar of God Almighty eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
Jack D. Salmon Lawrence graduate student
Enchantment Lost
It's springtime again, stately springtime. The afternoons stretch longer, as usual, and the grass grows and the sap flows, as usual, and all our incipient young thoughts and deeds and excuses swing back round again, to the usual. Certain things seem to be immutable
The winter edition of the Athens-on-the-Kaw humor magazine has hit the stands, on customary schedule, and we've all seen it and had our laughs in one way or another. It costs $100 a page, I'm told. With a tag like this, and contents like that, you boys and girls really have an item to hang onto in your declining years. Show it to the kids and all that.
AND RECENTLY OUR own guardian of liberty in times sore and oppressed, the venerably Grecian ASC, has been called naughty names by an unfeeling, unthinking, unbeholden and unwought editorial writer—and has been avenged with a blinding blaze of charge- account rationale and rhetoric. All in God's infinite justice, I suppose.
And so on and so forth, ad nauseum.
It's springtime all right, and though the sap may be flowing to beat hell, I can't see that our happy little university family has budged one inch from the accustomed pattern. All the happy little Independents are out of humor with all the happy little Greeks, and vice versa, for one reason or another, as they probably have been ever since the invention of higher education. And I for one am getting slightly tired of watching both.
THE GREEKS I can easily do without, as can a lot of people. In measure of their factual significance they are best ignored. But there are those who would fain wrest this campus from the Greeks, and there are those who would be content merely to continue voicing their grievances against the Greeks; and these are the ones who, purposefully or not, make possible this ping-pong tourney of baloney throwing. Unfortunately, man does not live by baloney alone.
It costs the state of Kansas a fairly pretty penny to move one young citizen through four years of school, and to this degree, that young citizen is morally obligated to make a showing on the investment by at least learning something. That's all. Where he lives, his political affiliation, who he wants to associate with, or whose apples he wants to polish—these are all his individual concerns, and as such have, or should have, no reasonable bearing on the quality of the university or upon his obligation to those who finance the university.
THE POINT IS that our young citizen's personal convictions, as long as they don't stand in the way of his academic mortgage, have no real consequence here. They will have consequence, granted, in his later and personal life, but his later and personal life is under bond to no one but himself and owes nothing to the institution or to the supporters of the institution where he takes his schooling.
Setting platitudes and alumni releases aside and considering that the average student is under the spell of this university for approximately four years of his life, of how much actual importance is it which side has the yearbook or the ASC or whatever in its side of the sandpile at any particular moment? If the question of possession rankles the other side, then I suggest that the other side either take the toys away or pick up its shovel and go home. Throwing sand at each other only louses up the playground. It doesn't do much for the toys either.
If the yearbook rubs the independents the wrong way, to put it mildly, then why bother to give it sanction in the first place? Simply withdraw from it altogether and let the thing pursue its natural course. The same holds true for the ASC. If the Council is as useless as it often seems, I fail to see why everyone would care to trifle with it. The Independents owe these organizations no support. There is no reason why they should continue to underwrite, even partially, something from which they receive little and to which they have incurred no debt.
IF, ON THE other hand, the independents would prefer to try their wings, there's plenty of wild blue yonder to be had for the asking—if the asking is loud enough to be heard over the normal din. True, it costs no one a dime if he doesn't play ball as he's told—which is obviously a drawback as far as expediency, if not dignity, goes—but then no one should need to be ordered to do something he wants to do. This is the point where the Independent organizations such as they are, the MRA, IRC, and AURH, should need no prompting, being the purpose for which they were designed. The essence of course is the individual, the same individual who provides the distinction between the Greek and independent systems.
While I find the utility of the ASC and the general worth of the yearbook and the value in the resurrection of the Parthenon dubious to say the least. I assume these things must have significance, one way or the other, to someone. My only wish is that this someone, whomever he may be, come out and either shackle or nurture them to the point where they and their immediate opposites can afford to stop kicking sand at each other, and if not live in harmony then live in quarantine.
This playground is a mess.
M. D. Nossaman, Mulvane junior
University of Kansas student newspaper
Daily Transan
HC
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