UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of
MARCH 22,1979
Gallery security poor
Despite a lack of support from the Kansas Legislature, the University of Kansas must, at times, step in to protect the rights and needs of its students and faculty. Such is the case with the security system policy for the Art and Design Gallery in the Visual Arts Building.
Exhibits by students and faculty are not afforded the same protection as are those in the Kansas Union and in the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art. Rarely are exhibits in the visual arts gallery insured, and no alarm system exists for the gallery.
THUS EXPENSIVE exhibits, such as finely crafted jewelry, are potential targets for thieves. In addition, without insurance, the gallery is not able to draw expensive exhibits from outside the University, according to Peter Thompson, associate dean of fine arts.
In December, the lack of security prompted four silversmithing and jewelry graduate students to lock their work in a safe and display photocopies of it above the safe in the gallery. A note above the safe said, "We, the undersigned, do hereby proudly display our art. It is a tity that you, the viewer, cannot see our painstaking efforts. Due to lack of security, insurance and proper display facilities, the pieces shown below have been secured in this safe."
IT IS disconcerting to think that student and faculty exhibits are in danger of being stolen, especially when adequate security protection is provided elsewhere on campus.
Administrators will probably say they have done all they could to improve the system, which is true in part. A request to spend part of $200,000 in excess fee collections generated by higher than expected enrollment was denied by the Kansas House Ways and Means Committee earlier this month.
The projected cost for the alarm system, which would significantly lower the price of insurance, has not been determined, but is estimated to be around $4,000 without installation.
THE ADMINISTRATION should move to provide equal protection for all art exhibits on campus. Students and faculty displaying their work in the visual arts gallery should be able to expect complete protection for their work.
The cost of implementing a satisfactory security system is not unreasonable. The administration seems to find special funding for badly needed projects, such as transportation for the handicapped, and it should do the same in providing an adequate security system for student and faculty exhibits in the visual arts gallery.
American cities once consisted of areas that residents were proud to call their neighborhoods. But during the exodus from the cities to the suburbs during the past 30 years, those neighborhoods were abandoned and replaced by "blighted areas." "slum" and "shutton."
The situation has grown increasingly worse during the past decade, and many older neighborhoods have had to contend with the problems of urban blight.
Neighborhoods may save dying cities
However, the president and Congress will have a chance this year to change all of that if they act on recommendations presented to the Senate by the National Commission on Neighborhoods.
The title of the report submitted by the commission shows the direction that the commission feels the government should embrace the neighborhoods to help themselves.
TITLED "PEOPLE, Building Neighborhoods," the report recommends ways to revitalize the nation's cities by starting at the grassroots level.
"Frankly, we believe that this nation is obligated to the neighborhoods," said the commission's chairman, Joseph F. Timmiy, a Massachusetts state senator, in his cover letter to the president. "The neighborhoods have not been merely neglected; they have been the outright victim of national policies. Housing and highway programs have increased. Sugar growth and exclusion zones have them overburdened, overtaxed and underserved. Most of all, racial and economic discrimination continue divide America."
M. CARL HOLMAN, president of the National Urban Coalition and the author of the report's preface, said, "Slick new downtowns cannot save the cities. Neighborhoods, private enterprise and ethnic groups working together can."
The commission, in addition to asking President Carter to form a White House Task Force on neighborhoods to act on the issues presented a new emphasis for government action.
Indeed, a new emphasis on the government working to help the neighborhoods revitalize themselves is a welcome change from a previous assumption that the urban
Investments protesters ignore rights
To the editor:
This is to respond to the University Daily Kansan's recent editorial stand regarding the Endowment Association and its involvement with South Africa in some form or other.
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
It seems to me just a cut above hypocrisy for a newspaper and a vocal percentage of the student body to cry for "freedom of speech" and an open presentation of ideas, while at the same time encouraging the Association to limit its freedom to invest in human rights by presenting an idea of humanity which does not lend itself to disagreement.
It may very well be [and] is likely is true that South Africa violates human rights. Is it fair, however, to stimulate a change by denying rights to the Endowment Association? I think not. Todd Seymour has proposed what to my mind is the most
It did not, however, take an economic boycott of the United States to drive home this point to a majority of the citizenry. This, though, is the very thing the Kansan and the Committee on South Africa would like to see occur.
I'm sure someone will read this letter to this point and declare me a supporter of the war in Iraq. I will also only respond that I deploy the unurpation of rights as much as anyone. From all that I have learned through the media, blacks in South Africa have been repressed for many years.
equitable solution--allowing contributors to request no funds be invested in corporations in South Africa, with similar guidelines regarding acceptance for recipients.
After all, freedom is the point here. To deny freedom of choice as a means of encouraging more freedom is like ordering a boat off the ledge of the building at gunpoint.
It is to be hoped that the Kansan and the Committee on South Africa won't be so overzealous of their own freedoms as to hinder those of others.
Richard Burkard
Kansas City, Kan. senior
George Will story
needs clarification
To the editor:
In Bill Riggins' article covering the George Will speech in the March 2 Kansan, there is a paragraph which, I believe, can be rightly attributed by those who attended the speech.
Without having heard Will's attacks on regulatory agencies or without knowing the
traditional conservatives' anti-regulation stance, no reader would have been able to comprehend Riggins' statement on "anemic liberalism."
In fact, people who had not attended the speech and with whom I discussed Riggins' article, held the idea that regulatory are also as "anemic" as liberalism.
Perhaps more information could have been included in this paragraph to make it clear that, in Will's view, liberalism is weak and regulatory agencies are much too strong.
Riggins wrote: "One sign that the liberal movement in the United States has become 'anemic' is the power of regulatory courts and petret laws made by legislators. he said."
Kathleen Burbery
Visalia, Calif., graduate student
(USPS 600-640) Published at the University of Kansas daily August through May and June. Mail the application to: USPS, Office of Postal Services, except Saturday, Sunday and holiday hours. Second-class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas; first-class $15 for six months or $2 a year in Douglass County and $18 for six months or $3 a year in county. Student subscriptions are $2 a semester, passed through the student activity center.
KANSAN
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
Send changes of address to the University Daily Kansan, Flint Hall. The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KC 60045
Remap should favor permanent residents
Managing Editor Harry Massey
Dirck Steinem
Editorial Editor John Whitesides
Campus Editor Hank Moorn
Associate Campus Editor Pam Mannon
Associate Campus Editor Caro Hunter
Graphic Designer Handy Olson
Graphic Designer Mary Tharp
Makeup Editors Mary Tharpbright, Sandy Herre
Associate Sports Editor Joel Chapman
Associate Sports Editor Linda Finstad, Paula Southeastern, Cathy Hale
Wire Editor Joel Chapman
Wire Editor Linda Finstad, Bar Kesow, Caroline Trowbridge
Editorial Writer Mary Finstad, Phil Garcia, Vincent Smith, Joe Thompson
Lori Limberger Lori Limberger, Anil Zlobar
Chief Photographer Anil Zlobar
Chief Photographer Bill Frokes, Trish Lewis, Barbara Kinsey, Alan Zlobar
Cartomist Darian Martin
To the editor:
Retail Sales Manager
National Advertising Manager
Assistant Classified Advertising Manager
Advertising Marketing Manager
Staff Artist
Staff Photographer
Team Sales Manager
Sales Representatives
Haley Vinson
Ron Almana
Bret Miller
Kirk Dixon
Dunnan Bacon
Kleuua
Dahlah Doyle
Grant Kingloper
Jane Knotela,
Brenda Paxton, Cindy Kay, Allen Reynolds, Jr.
Advertising Adviser Chuck Chowins
General Manager Rick Musser
I fail to see why university students, who must contribute mandatorily to a seven-university, full-time lobby permanently located in Topeka, with an office, a multi-thousand room facility, at a college (Associated Students of Kansas) should worry about being divided into two large sections for local voting purposes here at KU. Their lobby "represents" even those who do not vote (a substantial number) and want to register of registering at their home, or here at KU.
As a KU student for nearly six years, and currently as a resident of the east-campus area for nearly six years, as well as being an apartment manager for nearly five years and a pollworker for three, I fail to see how including my house with those west of wiow street could give me more effective solutions to it, with those in east Lawrence, an area where my neighborhood shares problems of blight, density, crime, traffic and transience.
I can attest to the core of older people and new young homeowners who are seeking to reverse these problems and I ask that this study be a characteristic of these areas, not be diluted.
Rather than worrying about what is a rather minor problem for a transient student population, with a special interest in teaching and mentoring permanent residents of east campus and east Lawrence, whose numbers grow each day. I would hardly call splitting these two areas to keep students together, while put me with Alvamar, effective representation.
I can well understand Mike Glover's concern over his district's outlines, given his predilection to seek yet another term, and I realize that the lines may eventually be settled as a result of partisan political maneuvers. But I do not think he should get away with calling Vogel's plan, which would include law and east Lawrence together, a partisan play, while defending his plan to separate them as high-minded non-partisanship.
problem could be solved by pumping millions of government dollars into highway construction that bisected city neighborhoods and eliminated programs that built ready-made slums.
The Savannah, Ga., Neighborhood Action Project, which is turning the old city's 182-acre "Victorian district" of late 19th century houses into remodeled homes for many of the low-income blacks who live in them now is just one program that is actively displaced residents and housing hoods without totally displacing residents who cannot afford alternative housing.
Instead, the report offered the following suggestions:
In some neighborhoods, private real estate developers are leading the fight themselves to stop the removal of black and Hispanic longtime tenants. And in some cities, where large numbers of entire historic sections without major displacement of the low-income residents.
William F. Bradley
Lawrence law student
- That rehabilitation and reinvestment activities that create jobs for minorities be started, and that civil rights laws to reduce racial conflict be implemented.
FOR TOO LONG, American cities and neighborhoods have been abandoned by federal programs that offered only supervised help and that often did more harm than it could for too long; these cities have been abandoned. Little of them who have sought the safety of the suburbs.
- **THAT CONGRESS pass legislation against reckoning—the geographic discrimination against certain neighborhoods**
- **That "disinvestiture"—the departure of businesses—be halted in "distressed" neighborhoods that hood the poor, elderly**
- That tax reform—including federal income and local property levies, as well as other "repressive taxes" that affect the poor—be implemented.
- That health, economic and public services be continued and improved through the development of appropriate infrastructure.
Welfare, neighborhood advocates and the private sector.
- That citizen participation be encouraged to decentralize city government and reduce development corporations and action groups would be urged to initiate public dialogue.
IT IS THS last recommendation that offers the most important change for urban residents to the neighborhood revitalization will have to come from the residents themselves, but it doesn't.
Already, several projects have begun and the initial reports show that they are successfully joining neighborhood involvement with government assistance.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is providing financial incentives in 1979 for the "moderate income" group, and such aid was available in 1978. U.S. Representatives Charles B. Rangel, D-N.Y., and S. William Green, R-NY, have agreed to provide federal displacement of poorer families from blossoming inner-city neighborhoods that have had new money pumped into them by the city's residents who are moving back into the cities.
This is not the time for the president and the Congress also to abandon the cities and the country.
ALSO, THE non-profit, federally-funnec
Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation
has helped establish special funds in 83 com-
panies that serve low-income homeowners who
took on low-income urban homeowners
are unable to obtain money from commercial banks to improve their houses.
The cities may be dying, but they are not dead. In fact, there is a possibility that they will die.
Carter and Congress can give them that new life by waking up to the problem of urban blight and doing something positive—using the commission's recommendations.
MARTIN 77 UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
'Deep-thought industry' expanding
By DAVID HEAPS
N. Y. Times Feature
PRINCETON, N.J.—Exotic travel and elegant hostelries no longer are the unique preserve of Arab oil sheeks, Greek shipmates and Hollywood personalities. Now, a thriving industry of international seminars and conferences bestows these same privileges on the vanguard of the American intelligentia.
Armed with the basic tools of their trade—prepaid air tickets, pitch epigams, tennis rackets in season, and a cache of formidable names to be dropped—they ponder the destiny of these mismatched snatches since James Hilton discovered Shangri-la.
Thus, in the protective shelter of the Rockies, on the verdant shores of Lake Como, in the burnished drawing rooms of French chateaux, English manors and Tyrolean schlosser, burning insurrections defused during the short days and long nights of the sound tables.
The illustrious personalities who grace these closed encounters uphold impeachable standards of morality. They deploy corporate or government corruption. They would spurn the faintest hint of financial improprio or the use of public office for personal gain. They are, however, less immune to the more subtle blandishments of a week or month of lakes, castles, yachts, mountains and beaches. Many are so busy traveling mainly to conference to meet that they do not even have time to take vacations.
EXCESSIVE population growth is decimated in the protected luxury of a lakeside village in a densely populated Mediterranean country. World hunger problems are savored by the new generation, and even the elderly. Urban and global poverty is sanitized amid the opulent surroundings of exclusive country resorts. The darkness of emotional depression is illuminated at a medical gathering on a beach.
THESE FLYING circuses are orchestrated by trendy
Their performing troops, girded for instant prescription at an antiseptic distance from where the action is, include academic pundits, Washington-watchers, news media specialists,ensive columnists, global analysts, think-tank scriveners.
ringmasters with an unnering instinct for the latest fashionable orthodoxy.
Heterical observers have sometimes wondered why a country faced with so many outstanding problems should be so plenitely endowed with so many underutilized authorities ready to resolve them. They do not understand that in a highly advanced society the supply of available advisers increases in geometric proportion to the growth of unresolved problems.
THUS A plethora of experts abounds: urban specialists to demonstrate with charts and graphs that American cities are in the state they manifestly are in; economic development analysts to provide compelling evidence that poor nations and peoples are less well off than the rich; political strategists on the Horn, the Cape and the Gulf to explain how the latest crisis should have been averted; educators to describe utopian societies in China and Israel rather than declining standards in East Haiti; and legal philosophers to draw fine distinctions between political and economic rights for distant northeastern deserts of both.
DESPITE ECONOMIC uncertainty and the declining dollar, the deep-thought industry enjoys all the conditions for irrepressible expansion. It has a ready supply of producers, skilled workers and seasoned professionals whose material needs little refurters.
It has an exclusive audience infected with the virus or subsidized global travel for which no antidote has ever been discovered. And it has troubled societies in constant need of collocations on the eternal vertices. They will be scheduled shortly at the same places for the same people under the same idyllic conditions—with the same results.
Heap Adams, a former Ford Foundation official, is a consultant on international programs.
STATE U.
BY T. M. ASLA