4A
Tuesday, April 18, 1995
OPINION UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
THE ISSUE: THE STUDENT PRESS
Paper dumping hypocritical violation of First Amendment
"YOU SAYTHAT FREEDOM OF UTTERANCE IS NOT FOR TIME OF STRESS, AND I REPLY WITH THE SAD TRUTH THAT ONLY IN TIME OF STRESS IS FREEDOM OF UTTERANCE IN DANGER."
The above statement was written by William Allen White, the person for which the School of Journalism at the University of Kansas is named. White does an eloquent job explaining the value and importance of free press. The paper dumping affair that took place two weeks ago was a direct assault upon that freedom. The University needs to directly address this issue with an addition to the University Code.
Freedom of the press is one of the most fundamental rights that a democratic country can have. The framers of the Constitution deemed it so crucial in the development of this country that they enumerated it as one of the first items in the Bill of Rights. For more than 200 years freedom of the press has faced attacks by narrow-minded citizens, authoritative politicians and over-zealous judges. Yet through all these attacks, freedom of the press continues to be as strong as it was when the Bill of Rights was ratified and remains bedrock to the core principles upon which this country was founded.
This episode of paper dumping raises an interesting question. Does protesting, also a fundamental right guaranteed by the freedom of speech clause in the First Amendment, against a newspaper conflict with freedom of the press? The answer is a resounding no. The press is subject to protests, but they must be protests conducted in a legal manner. While the right to protest is indeed fundamental, it is by no means absolute.
The difficult task of balancing the rights of citizens that conflict with each other has been reserved for the Supreme Court. The Court has ruled that free speech can be abridged, directly or indirectly, by legitimate time, place and manner restrictions. The important
Manner that students used to protest story in Kansan could be considered theft; a method against the law
restriction to focus on in the case of paper dumping is manner. The notion that paper dumping is a symbolic action afforded free speech protection is a fallacy because the manner of such a protest could be considered theft. Theft is certainly a legitimate restriction to impose upon freedom of speech.
One may argue that paper dumping is not theft because the papers are free. Actually, the papers are not free. Each student pays a student media fee of $3.00. That money directly funds the publication of the paper. Implicit in paying that fee is the understanding that students will be entitled to a paper each day. An organized movement to take all the papers from campus and symbolically dump them in a place that is not disclosed to all students denies students the opportunity to obtain a paper for which they paid. Thus, theft is being used as a vehicle for a protest, and this forfeits any First Amendment protection that these protesters were trying to hide behind.
Paper dumping is an issue and a problem serious enough that needs to be addressed by the University directly with an addition to the University Code. It is not a legal protest, and it is not censorship. Paper dumping is an ironic attack on free speech. It embodies the kind of regulation against free speech that is most deplored by the Supreme Court and open-minded individuals—view-point regulations. Those who dump papers are symbolically saying, "since we disagree with your viewpoint, we will allow no one to see it." Paper dumping is plain and simple hypocrisy, for one cannot use the First Amendment as both a shield and a sword.
TIM MUIR FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
KANSAN STAFF
STEPHEN MARTINO
Editor
DENISE NEIL
Managing editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
CATHERINE ELLEWORTH
Technology coordinator
Editors
JENNIFER PERRIER
Business manager
MARK MASTRO
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
News...Carlos Tejada
Planning...Mark Martin
Editorial...Matt Gowen
Associate Editorial...Heather Lawrenz
Campus...David Wilson
Colleen McCain
Sports...Gerry Fey
Associate Sports.Ashley Miller
Photo.Jennifer Lane
Associate Photo...Paul Kotz
Features...Nathan Olean
Design...Brian James
Freelance.Susan White
Jeff MacNelly /CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Business Staff
Campus mgr ... Both Pots
Regional mgr ... Chris Branaman
National mgr ... Shelly Falevits
Coop mgr ... Kelly Connelys
Special Sections mgr ... Brigg Bloomquist
Production mgrs ... JJ Cook
Kim Hyman
Marketing director ... Mindy Blum
Promotions director ... Justin Frosolone
Creative director ... Dan Gler
Clasified mgr ... Lissa Kulest
When the topic of child abuse surfaces, rarely is it from the survivor's point of view. Child sexual and physical abuse is discussed in terms of perpetrators and victims. The reaction against the perpetrators is one of emotional rage fueled by a misconception that retribution or life-long ostracism will end the cycle of abuse. The reaction for the victim is one of pity, not sympathy. Both of these reactions are inappropriate.
Stop abusers by promoting social justice, not ostracism
My own experience with abuse began as a toddler. It left me with almost no self-esteem, a grusome self-image and the feeling that I was not deserving of affection from anyone who treated me well. I was afraid of my abuser, who was my father. I was afraid of my mother, who could not find the strength to intervene and thereby seemed to approve of the abuse. Worst of all, I hated myself.
Not being heterosexual only complicated matters. After years of therapy and finally coming to terms with my own sexuality, both on-going processes, only now at age 25 can I openly discuss for the first time the abuse that took place in my childhood.
The damage, although difficult to overcome, is neither permanent nor insurmountable. I learned to cope
by trying in every way to appease my abuser. I thought that by being
cal and sexual abuse and that my father's psychological illness was not being treated properly.
GUEST COLUMNIST
In later years, when they both had good jobs and dad was getting real psychological treatment, the abuse stopped. Up until his death, dad and I were best buddies. The relationship with Mom is still rocky at times, but who gets along perfectly with their mom, anway?
John Bennett is a Mohreshev Pa., non-traditional student in biology.
Abusing a child is something that simply can be forgiven and forgotten. I am also not trying to say that those who molest or beat children are always victims themselves and that the abuse was in some way inevitable. If we want to end violence against children, we have nothing to gain by simply denouncing the aggressors. We need to stop the abuse at the root. Prevent child abuse by promoting social justice. Poverty, the fanatical promotion of violence in the media, mindless and restrictive upbringing and the inheritance of abuse and low self-esteem — together or separate — compose the root of this problem. The only vacuum in which abuse exists is a vacuum of social justice.
given me a much broader perspective on what happened to me. Sexual and physical abuse are not about perversion or punishment; just as rape is not about sex. Child abuse is about frustration, helplessness and a society that trivializes, even glorifies, violence.
the best little boy in the abuse would stop. My sister, perhaps a stronger person, used the opposite strategy. She rebelled against our parents with drugs, a pregnancy while she was still in high school and a constant stream of boyfriends. Adult
Looking back, I recognize that no abuse takes place in a vacuum. I remember a family in which my parents were separated and in which we, for long stretches, barely scraped by on public assistance. I learned as a teen-ager that my mother also was a survivor of physi-
Professor's analogy misses the strike zone
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
I am disturbed by the false analogy made in a recent letter from James B. Carothers, associate dean of the college of liberal arts and science, between the graduate teaching assistant collective bargaining movement at KU and the recent strike by major league baseball players.
GTAs cannot strike. The acrimony created by a strike situation cannot be replicated at the University of Kansas.
GTAs do not have a system of "free agency" through which salaries are inflated by bidding wars between owners about a player's services. No GTA has an agent pitching his or her wares to a rival university.
Our "University colleagues" (faculty and administration) are not the "owners" of the University. KU is "owned" by the people of the state of Kansas, which is quite different from the ownership of baseball teams. Our relationship to our University colleagues is closer to the relationship between players and managers/coaches. I've seen no evidence of acrimony between players and coaches.
between GTAs and their University colleagues (unlike Major League Baseball), and there is no evidence that collegiality would disappear. Collective bargaining makes it possible for misunderstandings and discontents to be discussed openly and within a framework of mutual respect. Such a dialogue can only improve collegiality.
Mike K. Johnson GTA, department of English
KU has a history of collegiality
Reaction to poster sign of things to come
A comment reported in the April 1 Kansan article on the incorrect engineering poster should be corrected. A secretary in engineering is reported as saying that the poster had come with another informational poster sent by this office. Academic Affairs did indeed send to all deans and department chairs posters and sample ballots, which were prepared by the Kansas Public Employee Relations Board. Dissemination of this material was required under the Kansas law governing union elections.
It is unfortunate that the poster originally prepared in engineering contained an inaccuracy, but the
persons who put together the poster did so in good faith, and are not stepped in labor law. The engineering school took immediate action to correct its mistake by replacing the posters, writing to individual graduate teaching assistants and publicly taking responsibility for the error in an advertisement in the Kansan.
The scope of the reaction to the inaccuracy is indicative of the scrutiny to minor detail that we can expect if KAPE is selected to be the exclusive bargaining agent for the GTAs. And we can also expect an enormous increase in attention, time and resources devoted to the minutiae of contracts — minutiae that will demand the attention of professional negotiators at the expense of decentralization and flexibility.
David E. Shulenburger vice chancellor of academic
affairs
Editor's note:
Roger Martin was incorrectly identified as a graduate teaching assistant in yesterday's Letters section. Martin is a program assistant for the KU research office.
The Kansan apologizes for the error.
Date books and file cabinets only lead to complacency
I've been told that organization breeds efficiency, but I don't believe it. It has been my experience that efficiency doesn't come from being organized. It comes from getting organized.
There is no better method to get things done than to mentally catalog
everything. But if you already have every scrap of paper put neatly into a color-coded file system, or every moment recorded for posterity in your 15-minute, blow-by-blow planner, there is nothing left for your mind to organize.
I often am criticized for being
somewhat disorganized. People look at my stacks of paper, piled in rows, and shake their heads. "How can you find anything?" they ask in that snotty tone of voice used by neat freaks everywhere. "I sort stuff," I answer proudly as they rub their chins in judgment.
They don't understand that neatness almost always results in complacency. If things are conveniently filed away, it is too easy to fool yourself into thinking that you are on top of everything. You're not. It is just put away, as if you really had done something about it.
Yet if your system works like mine,
you always know what you have to
do and when you have to do it. In my
world, anything that is an immediate crisis is on my desk, anything that has to be done soon is stacked by the file cabinet and anything that can wait is stacked on the extra bed.
Who needs leather date books, Post-It notes, file folders or in-baskets when you have stacks?
But if the stacks begin to bury me, I resort to sortings. When you sort things you are forced to make decisions. It isn't necessary to make a decision about things in a file cabinet because all you have to do is shut the drawer, yet if your computer is buried in stacks of stuff, something has to go. Priorities have to be made and something has to find its way to the ultimate filing system, the trash can.
I confess, I own a leather date book, sectioned off into 15-minute blocks of time. I also have a color file folders and a couple of in-baskets, but I refuse to become a slave to these icons of efficiency. Instead, I only resort to them for a change of pace, a way to reorient my mind, refocus my thoughts and sort my stuff. But before long I find myself spending more time trying to be efficient than getting things done. I get obsessed with labeling, color coding and filing. It's then that I decide to revert back to a system tried and true — stacks.
Sure it has its faults. I occasionally misplace papers, find them in the wrong stack or overlook some urgent appointment, but so do the neat freaks who swear it would be in the right folder. They never misfeish things or forget to write something in their planners. If it is not written in the right place they never knew about it. I always know I have something, somewhere in all of my things. Because a stack system is more challenging, it requires your mind to take responsibility for remembering the details.
Am I disorganized? I suppose in a world of sectioned notebooks, three-ring binders, sticky labels and memo pads, I am. Some night even call me messy, but when it comes down to it, the job gets done.
Heather Kirkwild is a Wichita Junior in magazine journalism.
MIXED MEDIA
By Jack Ohman