Tuesday, March 7, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
State needs admissions bill
Once again, qualified admissions is making the legislative rounds. And once again, it looks as if the issue will continue to go round and round with no resolution in sight
Unfortunately for Kansas taxpayers, legislators have not gotten enough support from constituents to warrant passing the bill. Now, the Senate Education Committee is wrestling with the bill, and lawmakers doubt that it will ever leave committee for the Senate floor.
Kansas colleges are in dire need of qualified admissions. Education is suffering at the taxpayers' expense. Money, time and resources are continually pumped into our universities' remedial programs. If our students were prepared to go to college, the remedial programs would be unnecessary.
college, the remedial programs. Many argue that qualified admissions is the wrong answer to the wrong problem. True, poor education in Kansas must be addressed — and at a much earlier level than college. Stronger education programs must begin at the elementary school level. The system must be rebuilt from the ground up
The system must be refined from the start. Qualified admissions, however, will give college-bound students incentive to work harder and learn more while in high school. As it is now, many Kansas high school students don't feel the need to do much more than graduate; their entrance into college is assured.
Staying in college is another matter entirely. For the ill-prepared student, college can be quite a shock. State universities waste their precious resources trying to keep these students in school.
Of course, qualified admissions won't guarantee a non-existent attrition rate. Students drop out of school for many reasons other than academics. Not all students are meant to be in college, but if they have potential, they should be able to decide so for themselves, but not at the state's expense.
declare In view of the manageable requirements proposed by the Board of Regents, qualified admissions is not an elitist measure. The requirements are basic and paramount to success in college.
success in college If legislators are committed to improving education in Kansas, they will stop beating around the bush and pass qualified admissions.
Grace Hobson for the editorial board
C-section discipline needed
Most of us, it seems, have little choice but to believe a surgeon's prognosis — especially when we're already on the operating table.
During every operation, much is at stake for both patient and surgeon. Patients put their lives in the hands of surgeons who increasingly operate under threat of costly and embarrassing malpractice suits. Physicians blame that intensifying cycle for their high-priced services. One physician said malpractice-fear also was responsible for a startling upward trend of precautionary and often unnecessary operations.
A study by Public Citizen, a Washington consumer-advocacy group, recently asserted that in 1987, 500,000 C-sections performed in the United States, or about half, were unnecessary.
The number of Caesarean-section births, for example, has increased steadily for 12 years. The C section procedure involves cutting the abdomen and uterus to deliver a baby, for reasons such as infection or failure of the fetus to descend.
Bob Crisis, of Public Citizen, contended that obstetricians opted for Caesarean birth not only from fear of legal action. The trend, he said, was partly because the surgery meant more money for surgeons and hospitals, boosting patient costs to twice that of vaginal deliveries; and because it could be scheduled for the surgeon's convenience.
The study found that unnecessary C-sections cost the economy $1 billion and 1.1 million hospital beds annually.
That is not to mention the added trauma and risk to patients According to Washington's Center for Disease Control, C-sections multiply the risk of fetal death two to four times. The procedure causes postoperative infections in one-third of all mothers. And it is proven to cause respiratory, neurological and psychological damage to the newborn.
This problem must be addressed. Government regulations, while not out of line, would be messy and ultimately regrettable. The medical profession should discipline surgeons who engage in dangerous and unnecessary surgery.
James Farquhar for the editorial board
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Playing game of chance is a risk
Students in School of Business don't have a Monopoly on good fortune
h. to engage in a game of Monopoly with a business major. The most trying of all scenarios, maybe. On nerves. Sense of decency.
Imagine an ambitious young lad dressed in a three-piece suit for a mere board game, serving martins and holding his play money in a gold clip — the kind with the dollar-sign insignia carved into the metal. Keep that general impression, minus the suit, martins and money clip. Actually, the martins became a factor later.
But playing Monopoly with my friend Brad was positive in one respect. He let me be the car. He didn't want it. With gas and upkeep, it was not efficient. Instead, he would be an old shoe. Mobile, efficient and no significant upkeep except a coat of polish once or twice a year. Cost effective, man. Cost effective.
And no properties or monies when playing Monopoly with a business major. Only "capital gains" and "net losses." Every decision to purchase a "long-term property investment" requires extensive "risk analysis." No green properties and purple properties. Merely properties high and low in terms of "net profit potential."
Still, it was Monopoly. And in a friendly game of Monopoly, the stakes just aren't quite high enough for a 21-year-old who has dealt with millions of dollars within the confines of a
business school textbook Brad became irritated when we both started to accumulate money
Steve Brown
Staff columnist
"With this level of equity," he said, "the game isn't even interesting."
isn't even interesting. "Why is that?" I asked.
"Nothing at stake," he said. "I mean, no risk of hostile takeover at all."
or hostile tackles.
I suggested we cut off a finger each time we landed on each other's hotels, hoping to add a little excitement to the game. Brad squinted his eyes, pondering the thought. After a few minutes, he dismissed the idea.
"No," he said. "There really needs to be something at stake here. Profit motive, man. Profit motive."
But a certain twist would lift our game out of the doldrums — an element that never would show up on Brad's balance sheet. Quite simply, he didn't count on luck. He didn't count on a young journalism major blindly landing on free parking every fourth roll. He didn't figure on an opponent with little notion of risk analysis finding his way between Boardwalk and Place six
straight times and avoiding a backbreaking financial penalty.
Moreover, Brad didn't account for his own string of impeccably bad luck, and the dice failed to realize the extent of Brad's business knowledge. The dice knew nothing of capital gain and net losses. But the dice did seem to know something else: a well-read, well-informed business major was in need of an important lesson in paper entrepreneurship.
In the business game, there is occasionally room for a naive amateur who can espouse good luck and good nature. Competence isn't always business world or any other world for that matter.
And so a young journalism major drove a confident, well-versed business major to a three-martini lunch at 1:30 in the morning. Over a game of Monopoly game, no less.
I hear Donald Trump is coming out with a board game. When Brad resolves his anger over the Monopoly episode, maybe I'll see if he wants to play.
game of chance
But what's next? Scrabble with an English major?
Tinker Toys with an architecture student?
Perhaps Battleship with an ROTC cadet?
Or maybe I'll play the game of Life with a philosophy major.
Steve Brown is a Kansas City, Mo., senior majoring in journalism.
Civil rights movement needs updating
This year, to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., there was a march on the campus of the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. The songs
were still the same, and the speaches hadn't changed much, either. It should have been like old times. It wasn't.
For one thing, it would have been hard to imagine a civil rights march on this campus back in the early 1968 when it was still all-black Arkansas AMNM. One of the principal chores of its chancellor was to keep the lid on an assignment he perforated for another or home of the old sense of pageant. The form had been preserved; the spirit had to be imagined
imagined.
For those impelled to continue The Struggle,
it's something of a sacrilege to say it has been
won. But it has. The essentially formal, political
legal goals of those days were achieved — in
schools, in the voting booth, even at the lunch
counter. That is why the spirit of those days is no longer recapturable.
Yes, there are still gaps to fill in the law, particularly in its enforcement. But anyone who can remember the freedom riders and sit-ins of the 1960s has lived through one of the most successful and relatively peaceful revolutions of this century. It is difficult to think of any other caste system in the world that has been overhrown, at least outwardly, with such dispatch, law and order. Nor is it easy to imagine any sentient Southerner who would willingly return to the era of segregated schools, poll taxes and lunch counters.
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnist
The challenge now is less political or legal than economic and social. To continue to fight the same old battles against the same old enemies (Racism!) Discrimination!) by using the same old tactics is to reduce the cause of civil rights to an historical re-enactment — and to ignore today's different and more dangerous foe.
different and ill. If there were a civil rights movement instead of a civil rights establishment, perhaps Ronald Reagan would have inspired a more thoughtful response when, in a parting shot, he noted that some black spokesmen "are doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that they're victims of prejudice." Immediately, the air was full of dissimulative reactions. Anybody who thoughtfull of Reagan have a point to be better than to speak out and violate the vanities booth he had. And so the usual biography of the vanities proceeded uninterrupted until it died out from lack of interest. When no one dares to discuss real concerns, real dialogue is impossible.
is hipopia, not say it? There is no longer a civil rights movement, at least not in the sense of the 1960s. Mainly because those rights have been secured. Instead, there is a stiltified roster of
civil rights organizations, or camp burlesques of civil rights struggles such as the Tawana Brawley Affair in New York starring Big Al Sharpion and his little sharpies. Have you noticed that the very term "civil rights" has acquired the same suspect patina that so often loses its appeal to "welfare"? Words are the currency of thought, and can be abused only so long before losing their original value.
The great unmentionable in discussions of civil rights today is the mundane observation that racial discrimination is no longer the basis of the most serious problems that beset black Americans. Racism may make a great scapegoat, but it is not a cogent explanation for racial paralinguistic ghettoes. No racism could do what drugs, crime, ignorance and family disorganization have done there.
What could induce dependency more surely than blaming all of one's ills on invincible, inadicable prejudice? Even after the political goals of the civil rights movement have been achieved, the economic and social challenge remains as formidable as ever.
The vision of the old civil rights movement is now a reality. The most neglected and sometimes even most despised figure in the black pantheon is Booker T. Washington, who understood that political power without access to self-affirmation, without a church and social base, proves an illusion and fleeing dream. And that is just what is happening to the half of Black America that is being left behind.
■ Paul Greenberg is a syndicated columnist who writes for the Pine Bluff (Ark.) Gazette.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed