KWSAN COMMENT
Theater of the abstruse
Puffy gray clouds rolled back, gently introducing the sun's warm beams to the Journalism School office one afternoon not long ago. A list of Daily Kansan business managers—1957-1961—and their high school graduation ranking had caught my eye as I settled into one of a group of chairs set there for errant students and prospective job interviewees. I heard undergraduates greeting professors with customary deference outside the door; two of them were bridging the generation gap via a discussion of the Four Noble Truths and the eightfold path.
The serenity of it all would have eased me through the final honeydewed corridor of the journey to Blissful Sleep, had I not been jolted into awareness by a sudden clatter, interspersed with random expletives, coming from the far side of the office.
"Asterisks! Ampersands! Dollar signs!" the mimeograph machine shouted in its husky, ink-nourished voice.
"Yes, and per cent signs, question marks and parentheses, too." returned the machine's antagonist, a graduate student intent on making 34 copies of his term paper. "But what business is it of yours whether I print these things? Asterisks, ampersands and what-have-you are just substitutes for obscenities, profanements and vulgarities, which, because of their irredeeming social insignificance, I have chosen to delete. Besides, why should a machine be allowed to preach to me about what's right and wrong?"
"My big toe!" the machine shouted derisively.
(Having conceded this 20-inch Gestetner 300 its ability to talk, I allowed it the factual offense of referring to its big toe, although I could observe no such appendage.)
"Asterisks, ampersands, dollar signs and whatever
what-have-you's are, a form of typographical pyrotechnics that I find more loathsome than the words themselves," retorted the machine. "And they waste more ink than dashes do."
"Why, if I printed a paper like this," it continued, "then there are no moral or ethical codes to live by. Even if my son could read, I wouldn't want him to read this."
(By then, I was so enthralled with the argument that I wrote of the machine's claim to a family as an unfortunate deviation from the proper bounds of allegory.)
"And as for my business in telling you right from wrong, I've been around here a lot longer than you, sonny, and I know what should appear before women and children's eyes and what shouldn't." said the loquacious mimeograph, now assuming a patriarchal tone.
Here, I felt, was a philosophical slip on the part of this amazing collection of nuts and bolts. The only people I could imagine who might see the paper were a couple of codgerly professors, the graduate student's father (who would get a good laugh out of it) and the student's girl friend, who, being a coed, was used to lascivious asterisks.
"Well, you've never liked graduate students anyway," the machine's would-be operator sputtered, and I agreed, remembering that the machine had often left ink blotches on some of my friends' papers.
In order to rectify the mimeograph's blunt injustice to him, the graduate student bolted out of the room. Soon, he returned, carrying a stack of mimeographed course syllabi—printed earlier on that very machine—which he had evidently purloined from the second floor cubbyhole of an assistant professor.
Rushing past the already confused secretary, he tossed the stack of syllabi out the window, from which they drifted down upon a campus policeman who was entering the building to investigate the ruckus.
"Good day, officer," I nervously greeted the entering cop as I began to edge toward the door.
Bent on discovering the cause of the trouble, the policeman failed to notice me, and I made good my escape.
Safely out of range, I turned to watch him appear from the office; he had in custody neither the loud-mouthed machine nor the irate graduate student, but the secretary.
The graduate student peeked through the office doorway, his mouth open in astonishment. The mimeograph machine would have done the same, but it was not endowed with mobility.
The policeman guided his prisoner through the building exit, berating her for her "permissiveness," "aimless drifting," and "super tolerance" in the face of the disputants' preceding threats to academic dignity and the well-being of the state's taxpayers.
Already flustered by the existence of a talking Gestetner 300 and especially one which was capable of ethical judgments, I strolled into the newsroom condemning the machine, the graduate student and the policeman for their absurd actions and reactions.
I decided to make some substantive protest to this miasma of irrationality, so I grabbed a copy pencil from the hands of an alarmed girl reporter and scrawled "*&$* the draft" all over the walls.
And I felt a lot better.
—Monroe Dodd
hearing voices—
(Editor's note: the views expressed in "hearing voices" are the writers'; they do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the University Daily Kansan, its news, editorial or business staffs, or the Kansan Board.)
To the editor:
The reason for the KU Printing Service walkout stated by the Kansan as "...protesting an alleged obscene poem in the Harambee" was only one fact resulting in the walkout.
If we were to leave the public with only obscenity as the factor for protest, the purpose would be lost. The Harambee is in circulation now, perhaps people will see for themselves.
The paper Harambee advocates violence. One article in the paper defines the need for violence stating that "... politics grows out of the barrel of a gun."
Other statements: "An unarmed people are slaves, or subjected to slavery at any given time;" "Free all Political Prisoners." I feel the blacks should develop their culture, but not through violent overthrow of the United States.
If the Printing Service were to print this advocate of violence then the University of Kansas, the governmental bodies of Kansas, and the Printing Service itself—a Civil Service organization—would in essence be non-opposed to the overthrow of the United States and the release of "political" criminals.
This would be a violation of our moral freedom we enjoy in the United States and make us a product of mockery.
Jack L. Hurley Lawrence senior and Printing Service employee
✕ ✕ ✕
To the editor:
Realizing that it is impertinent for a guest to comment publicly on the internal affairs of his host country, I nevertheless feel it pertinent, as a KU student, to voice my support for Professor Lawrence Velvel in the "Feb. 17" affair. Senator Shultz's intimidation to fire or disbar Professor Velvel, and Senator L. Arvin's threat to vote against future appropriation bills for higher education not only represented an attempt to gag the academic community, but also violated Professor Velvel's freedom of speech and assembly as guaranteed, I am sure the legislators are aware of, by the United States Constitution. These acts of victimization and coercion are not dissimilar, at least in spirit, to those practiced in totalitarian countries where the ruling party, with its so-called masses (silent majority!) is always presumed to be right.
Ho-Leung Fung Hong Kong graduate student
Griff & the Unicorn
BY SOKOLOFF
Griff & the Unicorn, Copyright, 1970.
University Daily Kansan.
'Move along there folks. This is a restricted neighborhood.'
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