UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kanan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of
APRIL 26,1979
Follow Bookstore lead
The constant quest for profits by business and a high inflation rate result in prices for consumer goods that too often deplete the pocketbook.
It is rare to find a business selling goods below the suggested retail price.
But that is exactly what is happening at the Kansas Union Bookstore.
Although any decrease in bookstore prices might seem small or insignificant, the pennies and dimes do add up, and the saving of dollars can result.
Currently, the bookstore is selling school, art, engineering, office and other supplies below the suggested minimum. Brok, bookstore manager, said.
IT IS ESTIMATED that KU students pay about 10 percent less for school and office supplies and from 10 to 15 percent less for art and engineering supplies under this new price policy.
In past years, bookstore supply buyers purchased goods in small quantities about every three weeks, Brock said. Thus, there were more expenses from more freight, more often. In addition, purchases were made through "jobbers" or middlemen. So from the manufacturer on
down the line, all price increases were usually passed on to the student.
But a change in buying practices has allowed the bookstore to offer supplies below retail prices. It is a welcome change.
PURCHASES are now made in bulk, normally at a discount and without charges for freight, Brock said. Any discounts are passed on to the student.
These efforts translate into a decrease in the price of filler paper from $1.50 a year ago to $1.10 this past fall. An imputed sheet of arches paper costs $1.15, about 85 cents less than retail price.
By purchasing goods in bulk at discount rates at a recent buying and education convention in New York for college bookstores, the bookstore saved about $4,000. Brock said. Also, by purchasing now, the bookstore avoids paying a higher price in the fall because of inflation.
Any efforts to provide students a cushion from the impact of higher prices is appreciated.
More attempts at reducing costs are encouraged, and the effort by the bookstore management is a good example that can be followed.
Although KU students' reports will not be arriving for several weeks, America's colleges already have received less than excellent outcome was deficient less than excellent.
American universities flunking ethics
In fact, America's colleges are funking ethics, at least according to a recent report by the prestigious Carnegie Council on Higher Education. The higher education based in Berkeley, Calif.
The council found plenty of blame to spread around—to students for cheating on tests and reneging on loan payments, to instructors for increasingly inflating grades in the past decade, and to college administrators for painting less than accurate pictures of college in catalogs and for inadequate entrance requirements for foreign students.
THE OVERALL diagnosis of the nation's institutes of higher learning was that they showed "sizes of deterioration of important parts of academic life."
The council found, among other things,
that:
- Nearly 9 percent of students claim some form of cheating is "necessary" to get wanted grades. At some schools, 40 percent feel that necessity.
- About 13 percent of loans made under the Guaranteed Student Loan Program are in default. Students are defaulting on other loans, too, also, many of them by declarating bankruptcy.
- Mutilation of library property is increasing. The theft of books and journals rated was "serious" at 80 percent of the schools studied.
- Since 1969, faculty members have awarded increasingly higher grades, making it easier for students to succeed even with micropor work.
- A "FRANTIC search" to keep up enrolments has caused colleges to admit unqualified foreign students, make them study in English and give undeserved academic credits.
The situation does, indeed, seem grave.
Nuclear incidents erode public trust
Throughout the 1960s, thousands of Americans lived in Utah,
Nevada and Arizona watched with fascination, boiling water,
and even seeing animals.
They witnessed actual testing of the federal government's new, powerful and terrible weapon—the A-bomb, a bomb capable of wiping up large cities and maiming hundreds of people who were in the path of its radioactive fallout.
Fortunately, at least it seemed so at the time, the government and the Atomic Energy Commission assured residents that they were in no danger, even though some lived only 60 miles from test sites.
Today, many of those witnesses are dead--cancer victims and survivors in the test region have sued the federal government, alleging that the government knowingly exposed people to dangerous levels of radiation to speed nuclear testing.
IF RESEARCH and investigation can prove a link exists between the radiation and the higher-than-normal incidence of cancer in the test region, more than 500 cancer victims and their long-term compensation in the form of hundreds of millions of dollars.
A joint congressional committee is holding hearings to examine the issue and to decide whether the government is responsible to the cancer victims. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said that "it is clear that the out of the heart of the刑事诉讼 that the government had, indeed, died."
APPARENTLY, cancer caused by that fallout now is killing people.
"Today's hearing is in a real sense what show that more than 20 years ago the government placed the people of Ulaanbaat in," she said.
"Residents in southern Utah heard 'there is no danger' every day there was a test," Utah's Gov. Scott Matheson told the committee last week. "Intentional disregard for health crept in a little bit at a time."
The government lied once to speed development of nuclear power and it apparently caused death. Concertavally it could lie in the name of national security.
The Three Mile Island accident near Harrisburg, Pa., and the
Additionally, it was disclosed last week that President Eisenhower told the Atomic Energy Commission to keep the public "confused" with explanations of nuclear power while it continued the tests. And in a 1953 document, a commissioner, W.S. Libby, said, "People have got to learn to live with the facts of life and part of the parts of life are fallout."
erode public trust Jake Thompson
A-bomb testing disclosures have eroded the government's credibility in nuclear safety matters.
How many Americans today believe that they know the full truth about the Three Mile Island accident? That they know the truth about radiation levels in the Harrisburg area? That they can accept the health assurances of their government?
THE SITUATION is grim for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Atomic Energy Commission's replacement, which must assume a new, currently undefined, burden of proof of nuclear safety.
Granted, 87 open-air A-bomb testings and one accident in a nuclear power generation station give vastly different levels of radiation. As many as 5,000 millirsds of radiation were carried in the winds during the bomb tests. No one knows the exact amount of radiation released at Three Mile Island, but officials have said it was far less.
Yet, one of the many unanswered questions is what effect the additional amount of radiation will have on area residents who were exposed to it at birth.
No accurate estimation is available. Time may reveal the truth, but links between the accident and a rise in the incidence rate are still unknown.
SO, FOR ANY additional development of nuclear power, the government and the NRC must be more open about safety issues than at present. There is a need for nuclear power plants. The government's burden of proof that nuclear power plants are safe in far greater as a result of their safety, is greater than that of other types of power plants.
If not, we could feel like Kern Bullock, a Cedar City, Utah, sheep farmer, who lost 1,000 animals in a rain of atomic dust from a 1853 bomb test. In the hearings last week he was asked if he trusted the government.
One hopes the nation will learn from its mistakes and use the incidents to protect its future.
Conversely, the public must become more wary and mistrustful of government and its institutions. The safety of the nation is
"I sure won't," he said. "I think we were all just took."
Unless the abuses are corrected, the council has warned, some colleges will be "even more reluctant to insist on ethical standards in their training," engage in improper conduct themselves."
Solutions such as the strict honor codes used at military academies and other colleges would perhaps put a lid on the abuse of some individual freedoms. Reduce
THE HALTING of grade inflation also must be done on the individual level, despite the pressures instructors may incur from demanding students.
But how to stop the abuses, which have been becoming more and more flagrant each year, is a question that seems unanswerable.
tions in cheating and in defaulting on loans
will have to come primarily from individual
charges.
However, college administrators could immediately halt some of their practices and make noticeable improvements. Foreign student requirements could be more strict, but the more honest and requirements for acceptance of academic credits could be redefined.
A competitive society that defines success in terms of how one individual does in relation to another instead of in relation to one's self is at the root of many of the
Neither the individual nor the institutional efforts are likely to be made, though, at least not in the near future. That is because a new institution will exist and do not appear to be fading away.
honesty problems of students. The desire to succeed overrides the desire to be honest.
AND A declining birthrate, which will likely mean declining enrollments in the future, has put pressure on administrators to fill the void left by the parting hordes of students from the post-war baby-boom era who flocked to America's colleges in the early 1970s. Often, that void is filled by foreign students, many of them unqualified.
The council stressed that reform is the responsibility of the colleges, including the students, faculty and administrators. The role of state and federal government, the council added, is to encourage higher education to police itself better.
Whether America's college community can do that, and whether the University of Kansas in particular can, is a big question. Hopeably, the answer will be found before the Carnegie Council's next report card comes out.
Loss of reason plaguing U.S. society
By ALAN WOLFE N.Y. Times Feature
BERKELEY, Calif.—Historians of the future may have to explain to skeptical audiences the passions that overcame the challenges of sustaining proposals for tax relief, quack remedies for economic stagnation, obsessive fears of the military strength of a declining enemy—almost every aspect of the society, they were, and had been dominated by a fricken madness.
While otherwise sensible men—including governors and presidents—lose all control and endure wolf and hysterical schemes, and invent conventional ideas that suddenly seem radical.
—Taxes in the United States are not too high.
Statistically, the United States has one of the lowest tax burdens of the world's advanced capitalist economies. But few care about the fiscal aspects of the matter. As the global economy has grown, economics promise will relieve them of their burden, people may want to bear in
SOMEONE PAYS for health care, parks, highways and theaters. As Americans opt to have these services delivered by the marketplace, they will pay more for them. But some people are more likely to the profits that will be attached to them. Taxes will go down and take-home pay will rise, but somehow -mysteriously-people will have less money left over after they obtain the services they need. At that point they become fashionable to blame sinister forces.
mind that the level of taxation must be related to the level of services.
—Inflation is not a mysterious force
Nobody denounces inflation more than businessmen, unless it be politicians. Yet both business and government prefer inflation to any other available alternative. Inflation is like a magic potion. It enables conflicts to be resolved. It encourages legislators not to make fundamental changes. It allows business to expand. It belies borrowers.
Professor's critics unfair, unethical
Although I was not in Belize myself, I have personally spoken to all the people
IRONICALLY, as the United States heeds the call, it begins to instructhe enemy that threatens it. Defense spending will drain America's resources, bankrupt its treasury and soften the dynamism of its economy. The United States and the Soviet Union like armored knights, will just themselves into impotence in the name of glory.
appeared to threaten the security of the republic. The Soviet Union is in its worst shape in years. Facing a paralyzing economic crisis, dependent on the United States to provide bread to its own population, suddenly surrounded by antagonistic superpowers on all sides, the Soviets are acting like any weak power: They are spending more on arms to give the U.S. the ability to resist the assists of American intelligence, mistaking this spending for belligerence, call for the United States to meet the threat.
To the editor:
This country can continue for a time to pass constitutional amendments as a substitute for restructuring its economy. It can make inflation the scapegoat for all its while the source of the trouble is inequality and injustice. It can blame the Russians and their social life to dismantle in the process. It can, presumably, anything it wants.
This letter is in response to the April 17 article concerning an ethics investigation of Michael Crawford, professor of anatomy at the University of Texas at Austin and Crawford for the past five years. During that time, he has displayed only the highest moral and ethical values, both privately and publicly.
One of the accusers had not even taken part in the Belizean study. Her only knowledge of events stems from her relationship with the other accuser. She did not come to KU to study under Crawford but he agreed to support her when her original adviser left the University. Although she had not been able to attend on many occasions that she would like to leave KU but was "stuck" here for financial reasons.
Lawrence graduate student
The two individuals whose complaints have now been made public, years after those complaints were investigated and dismissed as groundless by the University, have in my opinion only their own personal motives for continuing to attack Crawford.
More than ten people went to Belize with Crawford. Among these were a Lawrence physician, a number of prominent anatomy students, and one graduate student, with no previous field experience of this type, is making these charges. Other members of the field team enthusiastically support Crawford or have not publicly involved
Robert M. Baume
It was more than six months after the return to Lawrence that the charges against Crawford arose. The student's motive, he said, was to attack me, is that they became disenchanted with their work and wanted to leave. They told me they believed that Crawford would not give them a favorable recommendation. I think that in order to cover themselves, they had been helping and supporting them in their graduate careers. They accuse Crawford of being unethical, but what could be more unethical than to continue to make accusations against an individual that have been shown to have no basis in fact?
involved about their feelings on this matter. The complaining individual was fully aware of the problem and included the financial arrangements. She told me before she left that she were quite pleased with the forthcoming trip, and she agreed on the necessity of a fund to provide her with money.
Moreover, she did not express any ethical concerns upon her return. She told me that she enjoyed her time in Belize and felt better over at the end to take a vacation in Mexico.
Middle East letters reflect propaganda
To the editor:
But if it continues to do what it has been doing over the past year, there is little doubt that it will go stark raving mad while the other party tries what could possibly have come over it.
In the past several weeks, two letters to the editor concerning the Middle East conflict have been published. Both reflect some common pre-Arab claims. Unfortunately those claims are based on misleading Indian Arab propaganda.
There would not have been a single Palestinian Arab refugee if the Arabs had accepted the 1947 United Nations partition resolution and if they had not gone to war in 1948, a war that actually created two refugee problems—Arab and Jewish. There was an unplanned exchange of minorities, and there were conflicts situation elsewhere in the world between Greece and Turkey in 1922, and between India and Pakistan in 1947.
A very common belief was stated by Coleen P. McKeighan [4/9/79], "The Palestinian homeland is without a doubt the core of the Middle East problem."
The Palestinian Arab problem is a result of a conflict—not the source. The cause was the refusal of the Arab states to recognize Israel's right to exist.
Let me introduce some historic facts about the conflict.
There has never been any exile of Arab refugees from Israel, as Tom Ramstack argued in his letter (4/13/79). About 590,000 Arabs left Israel during 1947-48 and went on to fight in the war. Arabs moved to neighboring countries to avoid the war situation. From March 1948
Arabs moved because they were panicking, often at the urging of Arab leaders. The 180,000 Arabs who stole from thelamame number (600,000) of Jewish refugees fled the Arab states. Little is heard about them because they did not remain refugees for long and were never able to return.
McKeighen wrote about the basic human rights of the Palestinians that have been denied. Yes, she is right, they have been denied by most Arab governments.
They insisted that they remain refugees, living in camps, as an exhibit of Arab defiance of the United Nations. They left the burden of caring for the Arab refugees in the United Nations, and in fact most of the financial burden was carried by the United States.
For 19 years, from 1948 to 1967, Arab states controlled the West Bank and Gaza Strip without establishing a Palestinian Arab state, nor were they asked to by the Palestinian Arabs or by pro-Palestinians who now claim such a state would end the Middle East conflict. Even when the West Bank was part of Jordan, the Palestine State had no right to set its goal as the destruction of Israel, rather than establishing its own state.
As a homeless people for 2,000 years we sympathize with the plight of the Palestinian Arabs. Rather than seeking to destroy Israel, it would be constructive for them to look for relief from among their fellow Arabs.
Oded Dromi Graduate Student Tel-Aviv, Israel
TO BE SURE, many powerful people would prefer a society that had no inflation. But if the price of such a utopia were to be a dollar, it would not have an economic, slower rates of economic growth, or (perish the heretical thought) government control over prices, then inflation is a second-best choice. Before sinister exponents like Trump and Obama, let it be known that it is the work of man.
—The Soviet Union is not a military threat to the United States.
Alan Wolfe is a visiting scholar at the Institution for the Study of Social Change at the University of Pennsylvania.
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