KANSAN COMMENT
Just how benign?
Have we reached the point where the issue of race would benefit from a period of "benign neglect"?
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, counselor to President Nixon and a longtime bafflement to those interested in race problems, suggested this week that it might be time for us to ignore 'extremists of either race" and pay more attention to what he called a "silent black majority."
If indeed, Nixon's desire is to keep the majority of blacks silent, he might do well to take Moynihan's advice, because there is every evidence that that "silent black majority" will not be kept quiet forever. (It wasn't so very long ago that no one at all—including blacks—was listening to the ideas of militants such as Cleaver, Brown or Malcolm X; and today their ideas are much on the rise among even middle or upper class blacks.)
If, on the other hand, Nixon's desire is to
continue to use the federal government as a weapon against institutional racism, he can afford to "ignore" no one.
Moynihan's assertion that the Negro's problems have been "too much talked about" and "too much taken over to hysterics, paranoids and boodlers on all sides" is possibly less ridiculous than other statements he made. But the very real and oppressive injustices which have prompted too much talk by us boodlers should never be overlooked by the government.
Moynihan's charge that other minorities have been neglected as a consequence of concern (such as it has been) with the American Negro is not well founded. If we can go both to the moon and to Vietnam (our two costliest trips in recent years), there is no reason why we can't go both to the Mojave and to Harlem.
Ignore? That's one of the words that ought not be in any statesman's vocabulary.
—Mike Shearer
hearing voices—
To the editor:
In this modern day of massiveness, everywhere we look we see and hear loud and long decries about pollution of our streams, our lakes, our cities, our lands, our air and everything else except the one pollution that disturbs us most of all and that one is the pollution of the greatest natural resource we have—our minds. We have many, many faults that we recognize and try to do something to remedy. We have many, many more degrading and harmful circumstances that we would like to remedy, but for which we as yet have no remedy due to size, lack of means, lack of knowledge or lack personal fortitude to tackle the problem which might bring down upon us the scourge and vengeance of our fellow man.
We who were born into a society which has surpassed any yet developed on this earth, a society which has guaranteed more freedoms, which has developed more comforts, more pleasures, more wealth, more luxuries, greater opportunities, greater education, endless incentives for the individual and developed individual human dignities out of a peasant and lord society of 200 years ago, we find that this society is now challenged. This wonder of the ages is now polluted and riddled with impurities to the extent that it may be beyond repair or renovation and may have to be replaced.
We have a multitude of individuals and small groups who declare they have the solution. Most of these schemes are ambiguous at best but their promoters arbitrary and doctrinaire in their presentation and inimical to anyone who opposes them. They are extremely fearful of investigation because their schemes are also riddled with imperfections but they seem to feel that persistent repetition accompanied by loud and determined amplification will discourage any opposition. Many of these people use the freedoms granted by this society, to decry the society that grants them the means of criticism. Where their
schemes fail to gain popular support they often, dernier ressort, try to force acceptance.
Many of our educators feel that they are the supreme. They feel that they are above criticism and that practices are beyond reproach. They use the freedoms granted by this society as a spring board for personal glories and monetary advancement. They feel that their word and actions are above the scrutiny of the people who pay the bills.
In our schools of advanced education, the student seems to be the first and only consideration. The old idea of sending students to school to learn has been changed to the conception that the student is now the teacher and administrator. There is no longer a necessity for a requirement but instead the student selects what he wants to learn and how he wants to learn it. The students make the rules that they want to live by. The pariatal rules are amended by the students to meet their desires without a dissenting word from the school administration. We ponder the question of why we pay administrators so handsomely to do a job that the students do for themselves. Why should the students not elect one of their own and eliminate the high cost of school administration that is so completely subservient to the students. We hear much about the freedom to teach but when questioned by students this freedom usually is sacrificed to the freedom of the students. Student freedom seems to mean complete independence from any inhibitions of any kind.
If a student awakes from a trip in a barnyard and is motivated to express himself on the sweet essence of bovine defecation, he should be granted the privilege and the vehicle to do so at tax payers expense, regardless of the consequence. If something is written that displeases any student or group of students, they should be free to dispose of such material without regard to the effects of denial of others or any expense involved. If by some
chance other students or groups of students do not agree, then it is they who should determine the course of action to be taken.
We once fought a long and bloody war against taxation without representation but that idea has disappeared as far as our schools are concerned. The educators feel that they alone should have all the "say" concerning schools and the only concern of the taxpayers should be to pay the bill. We fought a long and bloody war to stop persecution of some elements of our society and today that very element that cost so much is threatening and doing the persecuting of our society. We fought a long and bloody war to make the world safe for the majority to rule as they saw fit, yet today much of the ruling is being done by minimal groups with noisome nihilism. We fought a long and bloody war to preserve the right of peoples to determine their own destinies, yet we are at present bombarded with pressures and subversivealliances to surrender all that we have fought for over the past two hundred years.
Now the big question is, to what extent this pollution of the human mind will extend before the great and silent majority can be aroused to demand its rights? How long can it lend its tacit consent to our educators to waste the greatest resource? Where can it turn for leadership and advice in a society where the oppressed is the oppressor, where the student is the educator, where the majority is the governed and the minority is the governor, where the criminal has more rights than the law abiding, where the courts are shouted down by the defendants, where their judgments are treated as criminal acts or where anything is legal where punishment would cost a candidate a few votes. That is the question.
We will not get an answer that can be interpreted as yes or no, only dissertation on our right to ask the question.
Employees of the Kansas University Printing Service
Griff & the Unicorn
David Sokoloff 1970
Alphabet soup and maybe an avocado
By MIKE SHEARER Editorial Page Editor
The controversy I aroused by commenting on the Fort Hays Kansas State College questionnaire (which sought to weed out, among others, persons with long hair, beatniks, radicals, psychotics and those with problems with alcohol, drugs, or homosexuality) has spread to the Fort Hays area, where the column was reprinted.
Fort Hays' President John Gustad wrote a letter to the UDK and informed us that the questionnaire was no longer in use. An article in the Fort Hays News tells us that the questionnaire had been thrown out about a month before the controversy broke out. I am sorry I hadn't known that the questionnaire was no longer in use, but after reading the Fort Hays News story in which college officials explained the questionnaire, I have to wonder if the atmosphere is any different now that the questionnaire isn't being used.
Standlee V. Dalton, Fort Hays State's registrar, told the News he had drafted the questionnaire three or four years ago.
"I look at it this way," he is quoted as saying, "the taxpayers of the state of Kansas subsidize each student about 40 per cent. It cost the taxpayers a lot more than the fees brought in.
"Anytime we bring in in an out-of-state student, I think the student should be an asset to the campus rather than a liability.
"Say someone is a thief. I want some way to stop a community from shipping him out here to us and let us assume his liabilities.
"Assume he or she is a pervert? Do we want him in Hays?
Of course not."
There are two basic questions I have for Mr. Dalton.
First, what has convinced so many Kansans that students from out of state are more dangerous than Kansans? I have never been able to understand this. Last year, after the KU ROTC demonstration, the editor of a weekly newspaper in Topeka blasted the state schools for accepting students from out of state, for allowing them to come here and act as a corrupting influence on Kansas' sweet, fair-haired children (of which I am one). The very next day, the major papers in the state carried stories showing that by far the majority of those participating in that demonstration had been . . . you guessed it . . . born and bred in sunny Kansas (and I'm not saying that this necessarily says anything bad about Kansas).
Secondly, I haven't the faintest idea what Mr. Dalton means by a "pervert." Lay the blame either at the feet of the many of Kansas teachers I've had (starting with my first grade teacher who taught five grades in one room) or at my own feet, but I have never been able to determine just who the perverts are.
If Mr. Dalton was referring to all of those persons who would have been disqualified under the old questionnaire, I suggest not many people would qualify for higher education.
If Mr. Dalton was referring to homosexuals (as a check with a dictionary's definition of perversion might suggest), I think his attitude toward one of society's most creative and productive minorities is a very sick attitude.
I am reminded of a quote from Hannah Green's I never Promised You a Rose Garden: "She remembered Tilda suddenly, breaking out of the hospital in Nuremburg, disappearing into the swastika-city, and coming back laughing that hard, rasping parody of laughter. 'Sholom Aleichem, Doctor, they are crazier than I am,'"
Separating the well from the sick and the decent from the perverse is a task I would never undertake. I doubt that it can be done. If this is the goal of Fort Hays State, my best wishes go to those making such a mammoth effort.
But I am as unsure that our Tildas are crazy as I am that everyone else is not.
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