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University Daily Kansan Monday, March 25, 1963
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
Duplication in Education
The guarantee that the WU curriculum would not be cut was killed by a two-vote margin last week in the Kansas Legislature.
After the attempts to kill the bill by crippling it with unacceptable amendments, it would be easy to say that this is just another maneuver by the faction against admitting WU into the state school system. But anything more than a superficial examination of the move reveals that it is basically sound. The guarantee originally proposed was a protection of waste.
Hopefully, Wichita voters will see that this guarantee was really no guarantee at all. The real control over WU as part of the state system would be through its budget. A guarantee that no part of the WU curriculum would be cut would hardly guarantee that enough money would be provided to support all courses adequately. WU's reputation will not be built on the number of courses in its curriculum but on the quality of these courses. If the quality of some courses can
GRANTED, IT was more than this. It also gave the citizens of Wichita some assurance that their investment in the state school system would not be rewarded by making WU an extension in fact if not in name. But the guarantee would have been justifiable only if it were the only way the Wichita voters would allow WU to be taken into the state system.
be boosted by cutting out other courses duplicated elsewhere, then the duplicate courses should be eliminated.
This principle applies not just to WU but to all the schools in the state system. If WU, KU and K-State each have a small, mediocre department in a particular subject, then these departments should be combined at one school if the result would be one strong department. The school that gets the department should be the school that has the most to offer in that area.
This does not mean that there are not examples of necessary duplication. The departments of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences are dependent on each other to provide the liberal education the College is supposed to give. But duplication of professional schools and departments can be justified only if there are enough students and enough money to make each of the duplicates strong.
AN EXAMPLE of this idea in action is the School of Agriculture at K-State. KU has no School of Agriculture, and there is no reason for it to have one. The Agriculture School at K-State has an excellent reputation and offers adequate facilities for the state's agriculture students. The same curriculum at KU would only drain away funds needed at K-State.
— Dennis Branstiter
'WELL, I'LL TELL YOU WHY I'M DROPPING OUT OF SCHOOL — I M
DROPPING BECAUSE ALL THIS UNDIE EMPHASIS ON ACADEMIC
SCHOLARSHIP HAS KILLED MY INCENTIVE TO LEARN.'
Harding Administration Began on Optimistic Note
(This is the first of two articles on the administration of President Warren G. Harding.)
By Dennis Farney
It was March 24, 1921, and in the air there was the expectant, almost heady feeling that a new era was beginning. The war had been over for more than two years, the League of Nations had been rejected, Prohibition was entering its second year.
chiring its second year. Speakeasies were beginning to appear, bootleggers noted that business was picking up, "respectable" citizens were worried about the flappers and a growing relaxation of moral standards. The nation had crossed the threshold of the Twenties, and already the winds of change had begun to blow.
IT WAS strange, but nothing could have better symbolized the contrast between the old and the new decades than the ceremony of inauguration that March morning. A tired, defeated Woodrow Wilson — heartbroken by the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles — was ending his term in office. He was an idealistic man crushed and broken by the realities of
partisan politics and an isolation-minded America. He would die within two years.
Taking his place was a new President — Warren G. Harding — and the contrast was striking, Wilson, tall, stern and aloof, had been the embodiment of the intellectual. To friends, Harding frankly admitted that he was unqualified for the Presidency, but where Wilson had been cold, Harding was all warmth and affection — a genial, sentimental man, naive and with a heart of gold. Harding trusted people. "He seemed to like everybody, he wanted to do favors for everybody, he wanted to make everybody happy," wrote historian Frederick Lewis Allen. That was Harding's fatal flaw.
The new President was everybody's average man, and in a way, a personification of the American dream. Born and raised in rural Ohio, he had settled down in Marion, married an ambitious, wealthy widow, become owner-editor of the local newspaper and then had risen to success through politics. Although he had served as U.S. senator from 1914, he lacked any real political experience and was
"almost unbelievably ill-informed," to quote William Allen White. And Allen wrote: "His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own."
HARDING'S FRIENDS, unfortunately, were not all as simple, direct and naive as he; place these friends in positions of influence, trust them, and the results could be disastrous. Harding did just that—and the story of his subsequent betrayal is the tragic story of his administration. To old friend and political backer, Harry Daugherty, went the attorney generalship, and to fellow senator, Albert Fall, went the position of secretary of the interior.
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Fred Zimmerman
Pred Zinnerman...Managing Editor
Ben Marshall, Bill Sheldon, Mike Miller,
Art Miller, Margaret Cathcart...Assistant Managing Editors
Scott Payne...City Editor
Trudy Meserve and Jackie Stern...Co-Society Editors
Steve Clark...Sports Editor
Murrel Bland...Photograph Editor
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Dennis Branstiter ... Editorial Editor
Terry Murphy ... Assistant Editorial Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Jack Cannon, Business Manager; Jim Stevens, Assist. Business Mgr.; Mike Carson, Advertising Mgr.; Joanne Zabornik, Circulation Mgr.; Brooks Harrison, Classified Mgr.; Bob Brooks, National Adv. Mgr.; Charles Hayward, Promotion Mgr.; Bill Finley, Merchandising Mgr.
Yet, in the manner of a tragic drama in which the ultimate tragedy is heightened by its contrast with earlier scenes of gaiety and innocence, the Harding administration began on an optimistic note of good will and a genuine expectation of good things to come. Not all of Harding's appointments were of second-rate men; his secretary of state was Charles Evans Hughes, his secretary of commerce was Herbert Hoover, his secretary of the treasury was Andrew D. Mellon. These capable men furnished the respectable "image" of the early Harding administration, even as such men as Daugherty and Fall were later to tarnish that image beyond repair.
he even coined a word to describe what he saw as the overriding goal of his administration. America would "return to normalcy."
Then too, the change from Wilson to Harding was refreshing for a nation tired of war and international involvement and still nursing the internal wounds of a recent Red Scare. The people, writes Allen, were "sick of Wilson and his talk of America's duty to humanity, callous to political idealism, they hoped for a chance to pursue their private affairs without governmental interference and to forget about public affairs." Harding was perfectly in tune with the times;
"NORMALCY" COULD mean different things to different people, but to Harding, it apparently meant business prosperity at home and peace abroad. Accordingly, the new administration moved toward these ends—and scored what, even today, can be seen as an astounding success: a sharp reduction in international naval strength through agreements reached at the Washington Conference of 1921-22. Through Secretary of State Hughes, the United States took the leadership in the conference and pushed through its program, literally sweeping aside initial British and Japanese opposition. Score one for Harding.
At home, one of the first acts of the Republican administration was to push through Congress the Fordney-McCumber tariff—which gave the country the highest import rates in peace-time history. "I believe in protection of American industry," Harding had told Congress, "and it is our purpose to prosper America first." (Later, Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, would put it more succinctly; "The business of this country is
Short Ones
* *
There are two good things in life, freedom of thought and freedom of action.—W. Somerset Maugham.
Like all weak men he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind.—W. Somerset Maugham
* *
You must not pursue success, but fly from it.-W. Somerset Maugham
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
-Gertrude Stein
business," he would say.) At any rate, Harding's conservative tariff policy mirrored the business-oriented, conservative temper of the country — and it got results. When Harding died in 1923, the country had recovered from a 1920-21 depression and things were booming.
More important to this warm, uncomplicated man than his initial successes as Chief Diplomat and Chief Legislator, perhaps, was the fact that the people liked him. His first official act after his inauguration had been to throw open the White House gates, which had remained locked during the second Wilson administration.
ALLEN WRITES that what Harding did, in effect, was "to permit a horde of sight-seers to roam the grounds and flatten their noses against the executive window panes and photograph one another under the great north portico; to permit flivvers and trucks to detour from Pennsylvania Avenue up the driveway and chortle right past the Presidential front door. The act seemed to symbolize the return of the government to the people."
Later historians would write of the difficulties other Presidents had in filling their role as Chief of State, the ceremonial head of all the people, but Harding enjoyed the role. Instinctively, he liked people.
And so, amid this backdrop of public support and outward successes, the Harding administration played out its tragic drama on the floodlighted Washington stage. The President signed a peace treaty with Germany in July, 1921, ending the technical state of war between the two countries which had existed because of the Senate's opposition to the Treaty of Versailles. The government was put on the unified budget basis for the first time in its history by the passage of the Budget Act of 1921. Immigration was restricted by a quota system — much to the relief of labor. Outwardly, everything was going quite well.