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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, March 26, 1963
With Good Intentions
It is easy to understand that University of Kansas officials would happily divorce themselves from responsibility for students, except as pertains to classroom activities.
That is the situation at European universities. These universities accept no responsibility for the outside activities of students. If the student commits a crime against society, no one expects the university to take punitive or corrective measures, and it doesn't.
BUT IN the United States it is different. A university accepts responsibility for housing and feeding many of its students as well as creating and maintaining a healthy moral climate.
Given the declining influence of the family in American society, the student is cast free of traditional moral guidance when he or she leaves home for school. When a student does something wrong, parents hold the university responsible.
While university officials might wish this responsibility were not theirs, they accept it and try to make the best of a situation not of their own making. It is natural that in accepting responsibility, the officials should have authority.
THE QUESTION is, what should be the range of the university's responsibility and what measures are reasonable in exerting authority.
There can be no reasonable question of the university's right to punish students for unlawful acts committed on university property. The same is true of students officially representing the university.
But what authority or responsibility exists for the university when a student commits an unlawful act which by any stretch of the imagination is not a clear extension of his role as a student?
UNDER THE existing rules, any KU student accused of committing a felony is automatically suspended from school. His guilt or innocence will be determined according to law in a duly authorized court. He is innocent until proven guilty, in the eyes of society.
This automatic boot without benefit of a fair trial is a dangerous practice. The danger is obvious: a student charged with a felony might be suspended from school and later be proven innocent.
guitry. Not so, at KU. Out he goes, regardless of guilt or innocence, if he is charged with a felony.
BUT AGAIN we must return to the fact that as long as the university is held responsible or feels it is held responsible for the non-academic activities of students, it must have authority to regulate these activities. This naturally implies the power to punish.
But automatic expulsion of students charged with a felony is a case of well-intentioned university officials needlessly extending their authority. Rules and procedures of law evolved over several centuries provide for the punishment of anti-social acts. They have been carefully molded to provide protection to the accused, so that justice is not a one-way street.
Imperfect as the system of jurisprudence practiced in our courts may be, it is the very best available. There is no need for summary measures by other authorities to supplement the action of authorized courts. — Terry Murphy
Harding Sensed the Doom
(Editor's note: This is the last of two articles on the administration of President Warren G. Harding.)
By Dennis Farnev
The "return to normalcy" prompted by the Harding administration appeared to be going quite well in its early days.
BUT BEHIND the scenes, there was the sense of impending disaster, the ominous feeling that evil forces, as yet undefined, were at work, corrupting the administration from within, pulling it slowly and certainly toward catastrophe. Harding sensed that his friends were betraying him. There were rumors of corruption within the Veterans' Bureau; finally, the director of the bureau, one of Harding's Ohio friends, had to resign. There was noisy criticism in Congress of government leases of federal oil lands to Harry F. Sinclair and Edward L. Doheny, private operators. Could it be that Secretary of the Interior Fall was repaying Harding's appointment by stabbing him in the back? Was it possible that something was amiss at Teapot Dome?
The nagging questions bothered Harding and now, amid it all, his once robust health began to fail. He looked tired; he suffered from acute indigestion and high blood pressure. The presidency — a trying office, even for better qualified men who had gone before — was killing Harding. The job was a strain; to compensate for it, Harding had plunged himself even more deeply into his familiar, small town pastimes — poker with the boys, golf, whiskey and cigars. Now the combination of hard work and harder play was beginning to tell. It was time for a rest.
In June, 1923, Harding decided to take a trip to Alaska. It was originally to be a long, lazy trip with little work and even less speech-making, but once Harding hit the road, a strange thing
happened to him. His better judgment disappeared, and the trip turned into an orgy of speech-making. The President struck out across the heart of the nation, speaking in St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City and smaller western cities.
HARDING EMBARKED for Alaska amid definite signs of strain, mental as well as physical. William Allen White, a newspaperman along for the trip, later recalled that all during the trip Harding "kept asking Secretary Hoover and the more trusted reporters who surrounded him what a President should do when his friends had betrayed him."
Harding seems to have decided to make more speeches, to go before the common people, whom he liked and trusted, and perhaps find there the reassurance he craved. On July 27, the day of his return to Seattle, he delivered a strenuous speech under a broiling sun. It was to be his last. That night, his personal physician was called; Harding appeared to be suffering from food poisoning. He was hurried to San Francisco, consultants were called in and for a time he appeared to recover. But on Aug. 2, while his wife read to him from a magazine, he was stricken by apoplexy and quickly and painlessly died. The nation mourned.
In time, the nation would reverse its opinion. Harding, eulogized now as "a majestic figure who stood out like a rock of consistency," and a fallen hero who "taught up the power of brotherliness." would become Harding, the President whose administration may have been the worst in American history, whose secretary of the interior was indicted for conspiracy and bribery, whose attorney general would be removed from office by President Coolidge under a crossfire of charges of conspiracy
to defraud the government, and whose director of the Veterans' Bureau was later estimated to have wasted more than $200 million during the two short years he held office.
THE CHARGES, countercharges and Congressional investigations would go on. Finally, historians in the 1950's and 1960's would rank him at the very bottom of the scale of American presidents.
Where did Harding fail? The answer seems simple enough. It has been said that each President plays five primary roles: Chief of State, Chief Diplomat, Chief of the Armed Forces, Chief Legislator and Chief Executive. Harding played all but the last of these roles with at least an average competency. Unfortunately he failed utterly as Chief Executive, and this failure has come to overshadow all else to become the symbol of his administration.
Allen has noted that Harding was nothing more, nor less, than "a common small-town man... the sort of man who likes nothing better in the world than to be with the old bunch when they gather at Joe's place for an all-Saturday-night session, with waistcoats unbuttoned and cigars between their teeth and an ample supply of bottles and cracked ice at hand."
The real tragedy of Harding, it seems, is not so much that his administration was probably more graft-ridden than any since Grant's, but rather that a genuinely likable, trusting and sentimental man was seduced by the glamor of an institution too demanding for his simple nature.
UNLIKE other small-town men such as Lincoln and Truman, who grew to great stature within the institution of the Presidency. Harding could not—and the demands of that institution killed him.
Sound and Fury Wrong on Cuba
First, the right-wing cries for a U.S. invasion of Cuba and expulsion of all traces of Communism are patently ridiculous. It would very likely precipitate a war. Even if it did not, the precarious nature of the forces in contemporary international politics no longer allows such flagrant uses of power.
I have heard so much discussion about Cuba lately that I am impelled to submit my view of the situation in several brief comments.
THE WORLD STRUGGLE is being fought over the one billion people somewhere between the iron curtain and the dollar apron strings. The use of military force arouses the greatest imaginable indignation among them. The use of force by the Soviet Union in Hungary in 1956 irreparably damaged its international position. An invasion of Cuba by U.S. forces is one sure way to alienate forever the rest of Latin America.
Second, the left-wing cries to ignore Cuba because it is no threat, because its loss would embarrass an inherently benevolent Khrushchev, and because we can neutralize Castro by isolating his nation, are equally ridiculous. We cannot ignore the presence of Soviet troops in Cuba, because they are an obvious strategic threat in case of war. They certainly would be a significant obstacle to consolidating the security base of the Western hemisphere.
Moreover, Soviet troops can aid Castro's repression of counterrevolutionary movements, if not by force then by their very presence. The Cuban people would naturally hesitate to attack Soviet nationals, even if the Soviets were not in overwhelming force. It is very likely that the deaths of Soviet soldiers on Cuban soil would so arouse the Russian people that they would insist on instant, massive retaliation. For these reasons I think the Kennedy administration is correct in using every possible and reasonable means to get the troops out of Cuba.
CUBA CAN NOT be isolated. There are too many long coastlines and backwoods areas in all parts of Latin America to stop the two-way flow of Communist communication. The fact is that Cuba is an enormous base for the training of 1500 or more revolutionaries a year, the massive dissemination of communist written and broadcasted propaganda, the ready harboring of Communist activists, the Socialist educating of Latin American youth, and myriad other activities. The fact is also that Cuba's geographic position is a tremendous asset to the Soviet Union.
I would not deny either that Khrushchev has considerably liberalized Soviet society, or that he sometimes acts like a good-natured country bumpkin. But the fact that he is humorous does not make him less dangerous.
I doubt that Khrushchev will be overthrown if the U.S. forces Soviet troops out of Cuba. Even if he were, and another Stalin rose in his place, the U.S. could not let this possibility influence present policy. It is impossible and dangerous to attempt to formulate foreign policy on projected effects on Nikita Khrushchev. It would soon become impossible to draw a clear line between where one's policy stops aiding Khrushchev against his domestic antagonists and starts fighting Communism.
THIRD, I THINK the goal above all is to use whatever resources are available, wherever possible, short of nuclear war, to resist Communist expansion and influence. This probably rules out a total blockade of Cuba.
But, I think we must get the complicating presence of Soviet troops out of Cuba. We must actively aid by funds, organization, weapons and information, whatever counter-revolutionary forces are available in or out of Cuba. We must support (making our support well-known) reasonable alternative paths to social and economic reform, such as that presented by the Juan Bosch government in the Dominican Republic. We must try to get Cuba back into the American system, with Castro if necessary, but without Russia, and build the system so strongly about it that its influence is contained.
We should never have made the clean severance of relations in the first place that gave Castro carte blanche to do as he pleased. We must actively pursue the Peace Corps, USIA, Alliance for Progress, and other economic aid projects in Latin America with every possible resource. They can be a significant factor in the social revolution which can defeat Communism.
I think that the people of the United States need to re-examine their attitudes and convictions. There is no place for a cynical apathy — or an estrich — in the struggle against anti-democratic forces. We must be convinced that we also have many answers to offer Latin America. We must use our greatest strengths to the best advantage. A conviction in the rightness of our cause is essential for our victory.
Alan B. Reed Graduate Research Assistant Department of Political Science
DailijTransan
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16, 1912
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, daily Jan. 16. 1912 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.
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