Let's pay Harrison
Leonard Harrison has much less to gain by being approved as a KU teacher than does KU.
The controversy over his hiring in the Political Science department as a lecturer and consultant has been absally inane, typically petty and outrageously anti-education.
Hired to teach Political Science 164, a course in black political ideology, Harrison's salary has been challenged because of his academic background and his recent conviction for intimidating Wichita anti-poverty program officials, a conviction which is on appeal.
The real question, however, should be whether Harrison is competent as an instructor, and that is really no question.
Harrison's work with the Ballard Community Center and several supplementary programs had been widely recognized in Lawrence as the first success in that area. Harrison brought to life issues concerning poverty and race which Lawrence had kept carefully hidden for a long time. His treatment of these issues was always positive.
In 1968, when a segment of Lawrence High School's black students walked out of classes because of administration negligence concerning several issues with which the students were concerned, Leonard Harrison proved to be a liaison between the students and their parents and between the Lawrence black community and the school board. Without threats, without hatred, and with a great deal more diplomacy than most people would be able to muster for such a situation-if it affected their race-Harrison counselled the participating students, encouraging and cautioning them in their act of civil disobedience.
Harrison and his wife Tina helped set up a temporary black school in a home so that the black students could not be accused of avoiding education when, in fact, they were wanting to make education more meaningful.
On KU's campus, Harrison has been a frequent lecturer, and his lectures have been impressive to the many who have heard him.
What is KU all about if not education?
He is no saint, but on the topic for which he has been hired, no man with ten PhDs could surpass him.
"The real question," Harrison has told the Kansan, "deals with academic freedom. Black people can not allow white America to determine who has black experience."
State Sen. Reynolds Shultz, R-Douglas County, (the one who said he admired much of what Joseph McCarthy did, in case anyone has forgotten) is among the opposition to Harrison's hiring. Shultz said, "Harrison is a militant and his political ideas and opinions could sway uncertain students in that direction. It is wrong for the University to hire him; they should get someone else."
It is precisely because Harrison's ideas and opinions could sway 'uncertain students,' whoever they are, that Harrison should be hired. Deeply concerned with his race and deeply concerned with KU's weak black recruitment programs, Harrison's ideas are precisely the ideas which need exposure.
Hopefully, Harrison's hiring will not be looked upon as a favor to him. Those who have heard him speak and seen him in action know that his primary concern is not acquiring teacher status; his primary concern, if an observer can judge, is the destruction of evil misconceptions and the creation of a just position in America for the American black.
If Harrison is passed over in this search for a salary source which won't offend those who should be offended if they find truth offensive, KU will have begun a very sad decline in both black education and student-administration relationship. Mike Shearer
$haring God's wealth
Madalyn Murray O'Hair, that irrate atheist who has an uncanny ability to find holes in what we fondly call "freedom of religion," has found another hole.
In starting her own non-church church to gain the tax exempt status which churches enjoy, Mrs. O'Hair has brought to the surface a fact which most churchmen would like kept a secret—that money is every bit as much a part of the American church as Nabisco wafers and grape juice.
The church has, at least in the past century, been deeply involved in great humanitarian work which, understandably, should differentiate it from other organizations. But at the same time, inconsistencies and blatant hypocrisies have arisen in the tax-freed church.
As Alfred Balk put it in the title of a Harper's article some time ago, "God is rich."
In addition to passing the coffer, modern churches have dabbled in business, and here is where I think Mrs. O'Hair must be heeded. If a church branches out from the usual business of pastoring to the spiritual and sociological needs of man into the field of business, then there is no doubt that that business branch should be tackled by the government the same as any other enterprise whose design is profit-making.
In Los Angeles, the Temple Baptist Church, for instance, owns the Philharmonic Auditorium and office building; the Muskungum Presbytery of Ohio operates a cement block factory in Arizona; the United Brethern Church in Milbank, S.D., is in the butter and cheese business;
and a Southern California religious group operates a chain of eateries featuring mushroomburgers, all of which has been noted by writer Balk.
Other church assets include holdings in newspapers, radio stations, television stations department stores, farms, tourist havens Republic and National Steel, Boeing, Lockheed Curtiss-Wright, fruit companies—and on and on and on.
"California's Christian Brothers—a monastic order—are major winemakers and one of the country's leading producers of brandy," Balk says.
"The Protestant Cathedral of Tomorrow in Akron, Ohio, owns a shopping center, an apartment, an electronics firm, a wire and plastic company and the Real Form Girdle Company," says Balk.
If Mrs. O'Hair's contention that churches should be taxed in entirety is a bit extreme, and I think it is, there remains the very real point that many churches are using their tax exempt status in non-church, profit-seeking pursuits.
One Catholic priest has estimated that the Catholic Church itself is "the biggest corporation in the United States." If that is doubtful, the combination of the assets of all protestant and Catholic churches would surely make for a less dubious statement.
In view of the extensions of the church, Mrs. O'Hair cannot be ignored. If we see any gap at all between passing the coffer and making Real Girdles, then this is one sacred cow that should be butchered.
—Mike Shearer
Griff & the Union, Copyright, 1970,
University Daily Kansan.
Alphabet soup and maybe an avocado
By MIKE SHEARER
Editorial Page Editor
"Bullshit" is not my favorite word.
And with the urgency of such problems as air and water pollution, growing militarism and stifling materialism, it might seem superfluous and blind to devote time to the advantages and disadvantages of the word "bullshit."
But since I believe that freedom of expression is closely associated with all of the sacred freedoms (including freedom from pollution, militarism and materialism), I must apologize for the use on two editorial pages recently of dashes in place of the 'h' and 'i' in the word "bullshit." The dashes were provided by neither the authors nor editors, and we all regret them.
Asterisks and dashes, in 1970, are an affront to any intelligent person. They are an aberration left over from a time when books and witches were burned.
Oscar Wilde insisted that there are no such things as bad books. There may be poorly written books. Likewise, there are no bad words, there are only poorly used words. Words concerning sex, the human anatomy or even animal excretion (that's bullshit for bullshit) shouldn't frighten us.
By GUS diZEREGA
In our "democracy," campaign promises are often made and rarely kept. President Nixon is no exception—or perhaps we could say that he is exceptional in the arrogance with which he is abrogating his promises, promises which got him elected.
Take two promises of importance to all students, those dealing with conscription and Vietnam. The draft, we were told, was to be ended after the war. Yet what do we see shaping up? The lottery, by giving the illusion of reform, has undercut student protest against the draft. In reality, however, the lottery plus Nixon's projected elimination of deferments have in reality set the stage for universal military training which, oddly enough, comes closer to meeting the military needs of a badly overextended empire than anything so unAmerican as voluntarism.
The Nixon regime is sending up trial balloons suggesting that a volunteer army is impractical and plans to end the draft may have to be scrapped. The only likely "reform" is Sen. Edward Kennedy's "universal service" which makes the draft "fair" by making every man a slave with no exceptions. I cannot help but wonder at those who feel that democratic oppression, because it is universal, is more fair than selective oppression.
Saigon cannot take over in Vietnam. In a country where ten year old children fight the American invaders it is idle to speculate whether Thieu or any other American henchman can stabilize South Vietnam. Tricky Dicky refuses to make a time table for withdrawal public because it "would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in." Monthly Review shatters his logic by asking "if Saigon couldn't take over the war by a fixed date, what reason is there to suppose it would ever be able to?" Nixon himself admits that our rate of withdrawal depends to a large extent on what Hanoi does. Whatever that is, it is neither plan nor timetable.
A similar story prevails with Vietnam. Nixon's colossal lie that he had a plan to end the war won him election and still has most Americans in thrall, but let's look closer.
Supposedly the war is going to be Vietnamized which, far from being a new policy, was pushed by LBJ during his reign. The December Monthly Review effectively demonstrates that Nixon's "Vietnamization" is an attempt to take some of the strain out of American involvement in Vietnam not so much to make peace (it won't) but to make our continued stay there more palatable politically while freeing forces to make war elsewhere in the world—most probably South America.
End the draft? A Nixon lie. More likely it will be extended. Plans to end the war? Timetables? Also Nixon lies. As usual, the government whether it be tweedledee Democrat or tweedle-dum Republican has refused to make more than token gestures towards peace while stirring up the American people against those who want us out as friends of Communism, dupes, etc., etc. The war was begun undemocratically by a President who got elected on a peace platform. It has proceeded just as undemocratically since then. Demonstrations have not ended it. The "New Politics" have not ended it. Only organized resistance will end it. Unless you're married, don't go to Canada when you are drafted, go into the army and organize. A conscript army is a slave army, dissent can be stirred.
When the history books of the future compare the Vietnamese people with the Greeks at Thermopylae let it not be said that like the Persians, we remained an army of slaves.
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