UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editorials represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of the editors.
MARCH 8,1979
Loss of grants harmful
From all indications, the Kansas Legislature seems to have found easy prey in students at the University of Kansas.
First came the decision by the Kansas House to gerrymander KU students out of any electoral influence, and now comes the decision by the Kansas Senate to restrict the scholarships available to students at the KU Medical Center - the very same scholarship the Legislature created only last year.
The new bill would allow the legislature to set a limit on the number of scholarships funded each year, beginning during the 1980-81 school year.
THE SCHOLARSHIP program was established last year when tuition at the Med Center was nearly tripled, and allows a student to receive a year's tuition for each year he agrees to practice in Kansas after graduation.
The program is open to all students, and there are currently 426 students enrolled. But apparently the more than $2.65 million required to run the program this year has scared the Legislature away from the system, and medical students might soon find themselves facing an exorbitantly high tuition cost with no recourse but to pay it or get out.
For some students, fewer scholarships will probably mean they will have to get out.
"I THINK IT'S very unfair to raise the students' tuition and then to tell them they can't have the scholarships," Jim Hamilton, president of the
Medical Student Assembly, said. "It seems we're in the middle of a political ballgame. We're the pawns getting kicked around."
Indeed, as was the case in last week's flap over redistricting, the Legislature seems to have found the answer. It will surely help with problem-slick it to the student.
If approved, the new scholarship policy would be crippling to those students who entered the med school at Duke's promise of scholarships in mind.
AND, OF COURSE, the new policy would hurt the once-promising possibility that the scholarships would help ease the doctor shortage in rural Kansas.
But none of that seems important to the Legislature when the dollar is the bottom line. Of course, one cannot deny the state and the University's right to give scholarships to whomever they wish. But considering the doctor shortage still looming in rural Kansas, the recent increase in tuition at the med school and the Legislature's promise last year that the scholarships would be available to those who desired them, it seems unfair and arbitrary to suddenly limit the number of scholarships available.
As State State. Leroy Hayden, D-Satanta, said, "I think it can clearly be seen that any money spent on scholarships in Kansas is money well spent."
That is obviously a lesson the rest of the Legislature still needs to learn.
Exploration of Jupiter propels space program
Scientists believe they will receive new clues concerning the origin and evolution of the solar system from a laboratory 600 million miles away.
Sodderbom, Ioamed the closest of the four to Jupiter, Ioamed, is rocky, dry and similar to Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars in its density, while the more distant moons were less dense and more gaseous, like the most distant planets from the sun.
The laboratory, Voyager 1, has excited scientists recently with transmissions of the mysterious planet of swirling multicolored gases, Jupiter. Revelations about Jupiter's 14 moons, particularly the four largest, have led one scientist, Laurence A. Sodermlund, deputy leader of the Voyager team, to say that we can see extraterrestrial systems unto themselves. The thing is that they exhibit regular trends that are reminiscent of the solar system as a whole."
USING METERITE craters on the moons, scientists should be able to crudely date surface features, Soderblom said. "We can compare lifetimes and the rates of surface processes for something very like meteorites," he said. "We never know what it's going to be like."
He is obviously excited about Voyager 1's trip, which has taken the craft within 727,500 miles of the planet. Soderibom is rightfully named after him, and given scientists the first close-up view of Jupiter, and has produced tangible findings. And scientists are reveling in the new in-
The last of Jupiter's 14 moons to be spotted from Earth was so faint that it has become lost. Part of Voyager's mission is to search for new moons as the craft passes Jupiter. Voyager I will then head for Saturn and into deep space.
If the pictures and transmissions from Voyager 1 continue as well as they have, scientists will have more factual, new information.
Jake
THE JUPITER exploration is a heady experience for scientists and laymen. The exploration will be further accentuated with the release of the second mission to begin in July. Both Voyagers were launched in 1972 to begin their fact finding transmissions, but the mission was planned to continue into the early 1980s.
Thompson
Already, Voyager 1 has transmitted information indicating that Jupiter is far more beautiful and complex than originally thought. It has also been disproved. Pictures and information transmitted this week may help identify components of Jupiter's atmosphere, previously obscured behind the clouds of gases surrounding the planet.
According to Edward C. Stone, project scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration mission, Voyager 1 should reveal specific details about the planet, forcing new theories, which is the primary purpose of the mission.
RECENT PHOTOGRAPHS have shown surrounding clouds were sometimes dense, sometimes wispy curts of orange, white, tan and gray. They also have shown holes, lenses, hoped the cameras and instruments could penetrate to examine the surface.
These developments show promise in the face of the clouded future of man's space exploration. The decline of federally supported space exploration has cast dim light on further discoveries about the solar system. More recent studies have relied more on developing new theories.
Unfortunately, but necessarily for now, the government has chosen to spend more money on earthbound concerns and less on what scientists call the "last frontier." They need supporting evidence for re-expansion of space exploration.
As a result of Voyager 1's discoveries, their theories have been disproved, which is exciting to the scientists because the earlier theories had foster new theories and greater accuracy.
Transmissions from Voyager 1 and 2 should provide more of that evidence, which will be valuable at any time to future space exploration.
Every March it is the same. Thousands of students migrate to the beaches of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and South Padre Island, Texas. And thousands more flock west to Arizona, and some may even make it all the way to southern California.
Almanac brings fading hopes for tan
All of them, it seems, are seeking something they have not felt for months—whether they'll come back on their backs. But every year, hundreds of those students come back from their expense get away disillusioned, disappointed and irritated because they did not plan on bad weather.
However, even if you are an avid follower of this winter's weather won't be enough to help you service—you could not have expected him to predict in November what the weather would be in March in Texas or Florida. And that resort hotels fill their reservations list.
THERE IS A little yellow book, though,
that sells for just one dollar and can be
unbelievably accurate in November about
the weather in March.
Indeed, countless numbers of farmers have been heeding the predictions in this
Mary
Ernst
little book for 187 years and have saved themselves from the ulcers caused by excessive worrying about what the weather will be months in advance. They use the Farmer's Almanac, which predicts March weather in November.
And it is not too late for those of us who are headed out of Lawrence this week to take a little bit of the farmer's down-to-earth advice before we spend our savings on a fruitless trip to some sun haven that turns out to be more like a rain forest.
Those who are headed south to Texas may have the most to worry about. According to the Alamacan; those going in that direction may want to detour somewhere along the coast or across the border and into New Mexico. Showers are predicted of Texas from March 7 to March 18, and
cooler temperatures will likely add to the miserable humiliation of returning to Lawrence without the promised tan nor any other stories about the 85-degree temperatures.
AND IF THAT news discourages stunners enough to make them growl and beg friends to take them to Florida, the news about Florida will not make them feel any better.
So, those who are looking for the sun probably will be safest heading for the arid Southwest and for southern California. A hot summer day is on March 13, and then remain hot and sunny through the remainder of spring break. And southern Arizona and New Mexico will be clear and warm for an entire break. The average daytime temperature near 65 degrees.
FROM MARCH 10, the day that many KU swimmers start arriving in Florida, to March 12, rain and cool temperatures are predicted. From the 13th to the 15th, heavy rains coupled to drop over Florida, and from March 16 to 18, it should again be cloudy and cool.
On page 106, about midway between the On page 106, about midway between the cook for cooking a 100-pound ostrich and the cook for cooking a question of whether the chicken or the egg first, is the forecast for Florida. But Florida sun seekers may wish they had flipped to the cook recipe after seeing the gloomy prediction.
March temperatures are expected to be four degrees below average and the precipitation is expected to be two inches above average. And it gets worse.
OF COURSE, there are students going elsewhere for spring break, and many are staying in the Midwest. Yet, no matter where students are going, they have a friend—or enemy, as the case may be—in the Farmer's Almanac.
But there is an encouraging thought for those who are imagining their Florida or Texas tans been washed away by cold waters, because a prediction for the next day—as they were several times this winter—may be even better than predictions by predictions they made last November.
However, a book that has been guiding farmers for 187 years can't be too bad—or
To the editor:
Exploiting blacks not Kansas tradition
I was disturbed to read in the University Daily Kansasan that the KU Endowment Association insists on making money out of the exploitation of South African black people. This goes against everything Kansas has stood for in American history. It is absurd to call Kansas expressly because they opposed slave labor and the profits made out of it.
U. S. companies in South Africa today profit from the Master and Servant Laws black workers can be jailed for being absent in work under which whites who quit their jobs are deported to a "reserve" in the wastelands, where they and their families risk starvation because they can't find workers to live in compounds separated from their families for months at a time; a system that legally prohibits black workers from forming trade unions and arrests those who try.
Most of this system of repression has been erected within the past two decades. During that same period American investments in the debt market from $10 million to more than $2 billion.
The presence of U.S. corporations in South Africa has done nothing to ease the plight of black majority it has served only to help them exploit the economy. Some of the South African black leaders have risked imprisonment by investors to withdraw from South Africa.
Michigan State University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Wisconsin and many other universities and colleges have already divested all their shares in corporations that operate in South Africa. So too have a great many churches and general corporations have already been responsive and have pulled out of South Africa.
The KU Endowment Association has a strong responsibility to repudiate any and all morally repugnant investments. Why can it not, for example, invest instead in economic enterprises, to help our own local businesses in financially and ethically sound ways?
Lawrence graduate student
One, the city has planned its new city hall at the north end of Massachusetts Street for the purpose of rejuvenating the north end of downtown. If the construction of the mall is allowed, this will mean over three million dollars down the rathole. The people who want to develop the mall are from Cleveland. They have destroyed their own city hall and want to reopen our money out of the area in the process. This cannot be allowed to happen.
Anita Chan
Two, the construction of this mall will undoubtedly lead to an increase in petroleum use in Lawrence, a dramatic increase, I might add.
The mall would be located in a place where every one who used it would be forced to leave.
STATE U.
BY T. M. ASLA
Three, the development of this land would take out of production over 60 acres of the wetland, and the land has built up over years of flooding by the Wakarusa River and is some of the best in the county. In this era of hunger and high food costs we need all the prime agricultural land.
Let's stop the mail and make government responsive to the needs of the people instead of the desires of a few greedy developers. In conclusion, I want to go on record as being mad as hell about city government selling real estate for the development and real estate interests.
Jeffrey P. Miller Wichita sophomore
The heating and cooling costs of an enclosed mall would be large at the outset and with predicted raises in the price of electricity would reduce the astronomical. This increased cost would not be picked up by the merchant but by the consumer, mice to the detriment of his or her property.
The planning of this mall is totally outside the interests of a healthy community. It will cause deterioration of the downtown area, cause an increase in the amount of petroleum used in Lawrence and take prime agricultural land out of production.
Let me address these points individually.
opposed to downtown, which is within walking distance and bicycling distance of many and is served by public transportation as well.
resources, all for the personal gain of land developers.
To the editor:
I was disappointed and angered to read of the decision by the Douglas County-Lawrence Planning Commission to stop construction on a town of town so that a shopping mall may be built.
Annexation decision a sell-out to builders
When are our so-called public servants going to stop being subservient to the interests of the builders and developers and represent the people? In the past five years we have seen a shift, almost no regard to the environment and our already overburdened natural
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
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