KAWSAN COMMENT
The fair sex meets unfairness
Mae West, surely one of America's greatest contributions to philosophy, said in one of her movies, "Better to be looked over than to be overlooked."
America's Woman has been almost as overlooked as she has been looked over. The rights women have gained have been placatory and unfulfilling of Woman's true design. Woman's true design surely ranks her as Man's mate, not only in family life but also in business, politics and culture.
A thorough poll conducted and published at the University of Colorado this week gave evidence that women are being discriminated against in the hiring practices of that University. The University employs 1,382 male teachers and 162 females, with 65 of the women in women's physical education and nursing. It shows that 39 of 41 department chairmanships are held by men.
While fewer women actually earn the academic requirements to teach on the university level (another bit of evidence against Woman's
undeserved subordinate role), the proportion is far from the 1382-162 ratio of teachers at Colorado.
Similar evidence could be compiled at KU or almost any other university. More tragically, the evidence that Woman is still being considered inferior mounts significantly when one examines other professions.
Many traditionally masculine professions, newspaper work as a notable example, are masculine because of unfounded prejudices against Woman. Woman isn't generally thought too competent for consideration when a city editor's job opens up, even when there are excellently qualified women on the staff eager to take charge.
To a large extent, modern woman, if she is to succeed in a man's world must either emasculate herself or resort to Samboism. She must either forget that she is a woman or constantly be apologetic for it.
Without suggesting that women should be forced into public affairs, one can still insist
that they should be entitled to enter that arena wearing neither male drag nor clown's suit.
As Oscar Wilde said, the value of an idea has nothing whatever to do with who authored it. Similarly, the value of a person's talents and aspirations should have nothing to do with a person's sex.
Possibly the only minorities which have suffered as much in relative unresistance have been homosexuals and the American Indian. America's blacks have set the vocal pace during the past 20 years (and during earlier periods of American history as well) and perhaps other oppressed minorities will begin to thrust their chins as vigorously in the next 20 years.
In the meantime, a woman in most professions will find her career thwarted at a certain stage, past which few women manage to struggle. The boss needs someone he can share stag jokes with, and few can trust the female sense of humor enough to elevate a woman to a position of power.
—Mike Shearer
hearing voices—
To the editor:
What will we call the next major war? The popular name accepted by most is the Third World War, but maybe it won't be. Perhaps The War of Development would be better. The combatants will be the developed nations against the developing ones. These will be North America, Europe, The Soviet Union, Japan, Australia and New Zealand against Latin America, Africa, The Middle East, India-Pakistan and undeveloped Asia.
The issue will be the right of the undeveloped world to develop. Development here meaning industrialization. The reason survival not in terms of economics or ideologies, but life itself. Many people in the United States and other developed countries are realizing that the creation of an industrialized society, such as ours, has been drastically changing the environment. There is now no doubt this has at an increasing rate been destroying the life support system on which we live. Fortunately, more people are attempting to curb and correct this destruction.
But what happens when the developing are told they can not develop because we have not the technology to allow them to do so without by pollution and alteration destroying the fragile base on which we live. They will say this is a lie to keep them in subjection and poverty. They will claim it is their right to develop as we have done and take their place in the sun.
At the beginning this issue will be used and colored by the present ones of racism, imperialism, capitalism and communism. Although development will eventually submerge the others in its waste. The final separation will come along the line of developed versus nondeveloped countries in the world. This is not an exaggeration. For even if the war and issues of stopping further development is (sic) successful the industrialized nations will have to redevelop or undevelop to insure their existence.
Sydney Karl Evans
Eastern Michigan University
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Others on issues-
(EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first column in a series which will be open to student leaders. During the next month, the column will also serve as an open forum to candidates to discuss either campus issues or national problems. This column is written by Bill Hansen, a law student, on the Chicago Conspiracy Mis-trial.)
By BILL HANSEN
Events of this past weekend should properly have a rather decided impact on any analysis of where this country is at. Any attempt to analyze a situation requires assumptions which should be founded on something which approaches "fact." There is not one person on this campus who has before him the transcript of the conspiracy trial which is drawing to a conclusion in Chicago. Only the most naive among us would accept the accounts of Ramparts, Vortex or Time. With the nearest record to what occurred missing, let me venture an analysis that is necessarily weakened by our respective ignorance.
Self-rightousness about Judge Hoffman will only serve to cloud the much larger issue of what happened in that courtroom. The crunch was between philosophies which may now properly be measured in light-years, most certainly not in personalities. Law is not unlike many if not most other man-made procedures. Its attempt is to remove the differences between men from the arena of open hositility and provide a forum for the presentation of those differences. On top of the results of that forum is superimposed the structure of previous decisions under like circumstances. It is imperfect and yet it is law. Its significance is its alleged indifference to the parties and the eventual outcome. Chicago has shown very clearly that this last "rational procedure" may very well have been lost to our society. That is something in which we may all justly take the greatest alarm.
Somehow even "law and order" freaks were never able to remove from the image of law its inherent good faith attempt to provide a troubled society some respite from the chaos of the streets. The failure of that Federal District Court in Chicago is not on the bench, but rather in the inability to exclude from the procedure of law in that court the frenzy itself.
God knows that I am not known for any strong position on "law and order." But rejecting a philosophy of increased state authority over its subjects does not even touch the issue of law as a procedure. When one rejects anarchy and selects any procedure in its place, he must, to even flirt with his humaneness and its total education, sense the similarity to a roll of the dice. Candor should compel us to admit that law attempts to load those dice.
Griff & the Unicorn, Copyright, 1970, University Daily Kansan.
When Dick Gregory spoke here recently he called it "forces in nature." When those forces are separated by worlds, that is the point at which "law ends and men begin." When that point has been reached, Mao's equation (power = gun) is only the final absurdity. If the Left really feels that more parades are going to overrule what "Hoffman did" and the Right feels that "Hoffman for President" signs are going to show those freaks on the left what law is all about then may I suggest that at the very least we pause and watch the doors close.
The courts have come through 194 years with this nation—many times tattered, sometimes humiliated, but always with a promise for tomorrow based not on the whim of today's political insanity, but more properly on the total experience of man himself. Indeed, when all is said and done, the "Warren Court" has extended to Americans more hard, concrete, substantive rights than any court in the history of our country. Brown, Miranda, Griswald, Baker, O'Callahan, Leary and many other decisions altered
Very recently I felt convinced that America would "come together" under the crises of ecology and over-population. The events of this past weekend, both here on the campus and in Chicago, have shattered that belief, at least in my head. Men cannot come together when what they are all about is pole-antipole.
significantly the direction of a country content with a philosophy, which emphasized property rights over human rights. It did in fact bring the United States "kicking and screaming into the 20th Century." To say that Chicago has shattered this is pretentious. To say that Chicago has seriously impaired the concept of law itself in this country is quite sufficient.
You don't have to be a graduate student to know that Nixon's call to "lower our voices" is a political sham and that the pressures in this nation are intense and are growing at an alarming rate. You don't have to be a law student to recognize a circus. But I publicly wonder where you have to be to feel the vibrations from a society well down the road to complete collapse?
Certainly it should be clear that there are no evil men, just victims. The events of the past weekend, both in Chicago and on this campus are without an author. That is their tragedy.