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Monday, February 27, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Party politics determined committee's Tower decision
In some ways, the fight over John Tower, the capital's latest all-consuming controversy, can be decyphered like a math problem.
Subtract nine Republicans, who voted their conscience, from 11 Democrats, who voted their conscience, and the answer should be clear: In Washington, vote with your party.
When the Senate Armed Forces Committee voted 11-9 Thursday night not to recommend that the Senate approve Tower as secretary of defense, partisan politics decided the issue.
The unknown component that voters must factor into this math problem is an FBI investigation of Tower's background
When the debate moves to the Senate floor this week. Senators should strive to ignore such pressure and decide the issue for themselves
Democrats down the line who saw the confidential report said that it proved Tower was a drunk who was unfit for the military and especially unfit to be such a prominent link in the chain of command. Committee Republicans, after seeing the report, said Tower would fit in with your everyday legislator. They're probably both right.
But the report likely will never be made public, because the FBI gathered the information confidentially. And the rest of us won't be able to fairly judge the Senate committee's choice without seeing the report. So we'll never know.
What we also may never know is whether Tower has a firm grasp on international affairs and whether he would make a good leader for the Pentagon. Such tedium doesn't get a lot of play on the evening news.
But the Senators who will decide the issue definitively this week can look at the report for us and judge who is right. Let's hope they consider what's right for the country, over what's right for their career.
James Farquhar for the editorial board
The recent death of Joe Morrison, football coach at the University of South Carolina, shocked those involved in college football.
Crack down on steroid use
But for Sports Illustrated readers, it brought back memories of another tragedy, the story of South Carolina player Tommy Chaikin.
Chaikin was a defensive lineman for the Gamecocks during the past four seasons. His desire to compete for a starting position and to respond to pressures he said Morrison and his staff placed on players led Chaikin and other Gamecocks to begin regular steroid use.
Begin Regular nighmarish story in Sports Illustrated portrays a young athlete whose use of vast amounts of steroids turned him into a monster.
into a monster. Once, while under the influence of steroids, he placed a shotgun at the face of a pizza delivery worker and made the terrified man beg for his life. Another time, Chaikin sat on his bed in a cold sweat, pointing a handgun at his chin with his finger twitching on the trigger.
finger veinching on a finger. The story gave dimension to a problem drug and delivered a powerful message: Steroids can be just as dangerous as illegal parcotics.
Each state has different rules governing the use of steroids. A bill before the Kansas Legislature proposes several steps that would crack down on steroid use and possession. The bill would make it illegal for anyone to distribute, own or use steroids, except for medicinal purposes. Medicinal purposes would not include bodybuilding.
A first violation would be a class E felony.
If the bill passes, it in effect would make steroid use or distribution for athletic purposes illegal.
Mark Tilford for the editorial board
But athletes shouldn't wait for steroid use to be illegal before returning to natural forms of bodybuilding and strengthening. Stories such as Tommy Chaikin's should be enough to temper anyone who is willing to risk his health and life for a few years of large muscles.
The editorials in this column are the opinion of the editorial board. The editorial board consists of Julie Adame, Karen Boring, Jeff Euston, James Fuarquar, Cindy Harger, Jennifer Hinkle, Grace Hobson, Jill Jess, Mark McCormick and Mark Tillard.
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Legitimate racism is true danger
WASHINGTON - Gary Hart's affair cost him his political life. Pit bull senators shredded John Tower for womanizing and drinking. Robert
Bork's ideology kept him off of the Supreme Court. David Duke won a seat in the Louisiana Legislature last week, despite being a former imperial wizard in the Ku Klux Klan.
Which statement does not belong?
Which stethrescope todes
Duke, president of the National Association for the advancement of White People, won a Louisiana House seat from Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. The national Republican party ostracized him, and Presidents Bush and Reagan campaigned against him.
Treen concentrated his campaign on reminding voters of Duke's past: speeches he gave and uniforms he wore, first as a neo-Nazi follower of the Nazis, then backwell, then an imperial wizard in the Klan.
The people of Metairie listened, then elected Duke by 224 votes. The local registrar said the phones "were ringing off the hook" with people from outside the district who wanted to vote for
History comes to mind. The most disturbing thing about the pre-civil rights South was not that bigots held power. It was that bigots held power legitimately. A racial supremacist is more dangerous in the statehouse than in a robe and hood, as the BBC noted in 1958: "What is new in
Derek Schmidt
Staff columnist
our time is the increased power of the authorities to enforce their prejudices." Remember that popular legislators passed Jim Crow laws.
The unrest of the 1960s was the disinfectant for a racist system. The cure worked. Overt racism became anathema in American politics, and the battle took more subtle forms.
Then came David Duke. I laughed last year at the T-shirts that said, "He's tan, rested and ready. Nixon 88." Now I cringe. Some people are nutty enough to try stuff like that.
Metairie voters have joined the Same Mistake Twice Club, a national organization with a growing membership. But they are neither imbeciles nor racists. They are the result of the new bigotry in America. When members of the Klan spoke at KU last year, the issue was whether they should be allowed to transmit their message of bigotry and hatred. Duke's election suggests that the Klan might be more dangerous when their message is of hype and civic duty.
It was easy to demonstrate against the prejudiced propaganda of J. Allen Moran, the exalted cyclops of the Missouri Knights who appeared at KU. Everybody labeled him a racist, a slaveholder and a show how inferior he was. It reaffirmed our belief that he was somehow different from us.
But the voters of Metaria saw a well-groomed young man speaking about the virtues of peace, justice and prosperity. He smiled and said he could fix "unfair" programs to aid minorities. And somehow, his being racist did not seem so important anymore. Adaii Stevenson was right: "You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and the disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news."
The days of J.B. Stoner and blatant racism are numbered. We consider racism a part of our history, and many of us who did not live through the civil rights movement almost find it hard to believe that such hatred could exist in America. It couldn't now, right? After all, we rail against the Klan and accept that we are not. We don't know when we are, we are open minded; the mind is too open, the brains fall out. We focus upon the caricatures of racism past, but don't stop to contemplate the form it takes today.
Racism is chickening at an ethnic joke. Or getting upset because "they" are taking "our" jobs. Or letting society choose to segregate because of a "freedom of association." Or deluding ourselves that a former Klansman now can be a defender of the American way.
David Duke was a mistake for the people of Metairie, people just like you and me. The rest of us now must heed the advice of that noted 20th century philosopher, Scotty from Star Trek:
300-627-8111
"Fool me on, shame on you. Fool me twice,
shame on me."
shame on me
Derek Schmidt is an Independence, Kan., junior majoring in journalism. He is in Washington, D.C., on an internship.
Asians find college admission difficult
A law. II minorities are equal under the law, but some minorities turn out to be a good deal more equal than others. If you're an Asian-American student applying for admission to one of the country's prestigious universities, prepare to be greeted not by affirmative action but by negative reaccommodations. In practice, might add 40 to 50 percentage points to an applicant's chances, the statistics indicate that an applicant loses points for being Asian.
It's hard to believe that this statistical trend is a product of mere chance at schools such as, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Brown and other outposts of enlightenment. In part, it is a deliberate racial preference. To quote one study of admissions policies, "white or Asian students are rarely accepted by colleges, while virtually all American Indians, Hispanics and blacks who apply to Berkeley, and who meet minimum . . . requirements are admitted."
Is the preference for other minorities the only reason Asian Americans are being turned down? Hardly. A close look at the statistics indicates that Asians are affected much more adversely by affirmative action than whites, so that increases in black and Hispanic students come at the expense of Asian numbers. At schools such as Brown, Harvard and Stanford, the admission rates for Asian students, despite their superior grades and test scores, are consistently below those for white students. At Harvard, to quote one study, "The figures suggest that in order to
Paul Greenberg Syndicated columnis
oe entered admission, Asian Americans had to score an average 112 points higher on the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) than Caucasians who were admitted."
There is a simpler explanation for this trend than the effect of affirmative action programs: prejudice. To quote a report from Brown's committee on minority affairs, the admission of Asian students is hindered by the "cultural bias and stereotypes which prevail in the admission office." Berkeley has adopted a stacked admissions system in which only 40 percent of the freshman class may be chosen on straight academic qualifications (grades and test results) but 38 percent enter under special programs that give preference to blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and Filipinos. Another 22 percent gain admittance on the basis of largely subjective factors (such as "leadership" and "motivation") that can easily serve as a cover for racial bias.
The general effect of such a system is to put a ceiling on Asian Americans "guilty" of overachievement. Indeed, the admitted aim at Berkeley and the rest of the University of California system is to shape a student body "whose racial composition reflects that of the state's high
school graduating class."
That's how a theory of group entitlement replaces individual merit in U.S. education and, therefore, in U.S. society. The old Jeffersonian ideal of an aristocracy or merit emerging from a well-educated system is the rickety system of unequal opportunities that might have been designed to produce a mediocre elite.
Today's reasons for limiting the admission rates of Asian Americans sound suspiciously like those offered by Eastern universities in the 1920s for curailing the admission of Jews. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia all defended their Jewish quotas then, and the euphemisms offered were equally transparent. In 1929, Harvard's Board of Overseers recommended that "the rules for the admission of candidates be amended to lay greater emphasis on selection based on character and fitness and the promise of greatest usefulness in the future." That there be any misunderstanding Harvard's president at the time Lowell, added that any test of character "passed with the intent of limiting Jews should not be . . . applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike."
In a now classic letter, Learned Hand objected to imposing a quota system, saying he could not agree that "a limitation based upon race will in the end work out any good purpose." The limitation is now being applied again, greater than it originally should be, but Learned Hand's counsel is still right on target.
■ Paul Greenberg is a syndicated columnist who writes for the Pine Blow (Ark.) Gazette.
BLOOM COUNTY
ALTERNATE STRIP FOR FEB 27,1989
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LOPY. IN A PRAMATIC CAP TO 'WUDITY WEEK',"OPUS VISITS THE ACME STEWARDE55 SCHOOL.
by Berke Breathed
**UNWEREBE: FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE FLEE COAMARLY LET EDPORTS AMONG OUR CLIENTS ALKATEMEN STRICTly ATTRAINING A NUDE DONNED TRUMP HAS BEEN OPERATED AS A WIMPY AND PRIDISH MAN.**
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