UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN editorials
Unsigned editors represent the opinion of the Kansan editorial staff. Signed columns represent the views of
MARCH 2,1979
No to education division
As a rule, Washington can be counted on periodically to flood over with a number of awful ideas. This year, of course, is no exception.
One of those awful ideas is a proposal to create a Cabinet-level Department of Education. Vice President Walter Mondale said recently that education suffered "because its highest official is not at that Cabinet table speaking directly to the President."
While Mondale's statement is indisputable, it seems doubtful that the lack of a Cabinet-level Secretary of Education is at the heart of the educational problem in the United States.
MUCH MORE likely is the possibility that a Department of Education would serve only to worsen the situation by expanding federal influence in local and state educational programs, eventually miring the educational system in the kind of bureaucratic quicksand that is so prevalent in Washington.
WHILE MONDALE bemoans the fact that the United States is the "only major industrialized democracy in the world that does not have a department or ministry of education," he overlooks the fact that a national minister of
education has never been needed, or wanted, in this country.
EDUCATION traditionally has been the province of city and county municipalities, which allows the local educational systems to blend with the communities and bend to their needs.
And anyone who seriously thinks that a Department of Education would cut waste and inefficiency in the distribution of federal funds need look no further than the Department of Labor, or the Department of Commerce, or any department you care to choose, to see the fallacy in that argument. Fighting the bureaucracy with more bureaucracy is an idea that only a bureaucrat could appreciate, and it is hoped that there are still some left in government who don't fall into that category.
A federal department governing education would exert an oppressive and narrow-minded influence on education in this country. Anyone who cares about the quality of our education must hope that the time has not yet come for a Department of Education.
City's action on tavern arbitrary, inexcusable
Of course, there has been an increase in federal funding and involvement in public education in recent years, but there is still a need to adequate for governing that influence.
In typically arbitrary fashion, the Lawrence City Commission recently acted beyond the jurisdiction of city ordinances in passing a mall bailment license of Uncle Milt's Cafe.
Apparently, the revocation, ordered on the basis that the cafe, at 2246 Barker St., was a public nuisance, was illegal and openly arbitrary.
Uncle Mily's license was revoked in June 1974 by the urging of members and officials of Haiti to amend its commission voted unanimously to revoke the license solely because the cafe was a
KING THEN directed City Clerk Vera Murray into the cafe's license to the owner, Milton Cole.
But, Ralph King Jr., Douglas County District Court judge, surprised the commission last Friday by stating that "A search of the ordinances of the city of Lawrence reveals no provision for the revocation of a cereal malt beverage license on the basis of public health conditions," and the court prove a public nuisance existed even if this was a proper ground for revocation.
So the commission acted on the basis of complaints instead of city ordinances, essentially twisting the law to solve the problem. And the problem was that residents around Uclem Milyt's were tired of students having a bar door to the campus.
Following King's decision, City Commissioner Barkley Clark defended the commission's actions and said, "What we were talking about was that people who complains about the establishment."
So what was the commission's response to King's charge that they had no legal right to revoke a license on the basis of public nuisance? Change the law.
In his ruling he added that "investigation of the city rather clearly shows that Uncle Milly's was not a public nuisance or it would never have been approved for licensing on Jan. 1, 1979, by the Health Department, the police department, the Inspector and the Police Department."
THE COMMISSION's solution was to revoke Milton Collins' cereal malt beverage license, forcing him out of business. But they were caught overstepping their jurisdiction.
City Manager Buford Watson acknowledged the veracity of King's claim, but Clark said, "If that's the case, perhaps we can tighten the ordinance to tighten up that loophole."
Jake
Thompson
The commission has made attempts to tighten its licensing laws since revoking Collins' license, but it also has had to backpeck on those.
The commission changed the alcohol and cereal malt beverage ordinance to state that alcohol could not be sold within 400 feet of a school, but quickly had to exempt colleges and universities to allow the sale of alcohol in the Kansas Union. Then it had to redefine 400-foot distance from "as the cloud flies" to measurement by sidewalks and streets.
THESE CHANGES seem trivial but demonstrate that complaints by a small segment of the public can be action by the commission which may translate into new laws for the city. And all of this
The commission's actions in the Uncle Mitty's case have been haplocked and have laundered people for the benefit of others.
Unfortunately, a number of the city's ordinances have been generated by the city commission in this arbitrary manner. It is not only that it makes thinks it can make up whatever law it wants.
In the future, if the commission alters city ordinances to exclude Collins from operating his business, it also will legally have the power to exclude others.
As the city's governing body, the city commission should move with more care and responsibility than it has in Uncle Milty's case.
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Letters Policy
Academia shuns the mention of truth
Alexander Solzenytin reminded Harvard last spring that its motto is Veritas—truth. History may well judge that she dared devilly courage this act ranks above defiance of Soviet communism. It may be doubted that anyone at Harvard, or anywhere in academe, cares much whether a student is given cowards. But to speak of Virtals! I mean it is not done.
By DENNIS QUINN
Guest Writer
One may speak publicly in obsessions, one may chatter freely about sex of any kind and one may coolly debate the merits of homosexuality, cannibalism and abortion. But Vertas is unmentionable, especially in that naked way—with no quotation marks of apology and without a thicket of qualifiers. It's a sort of metaphysical streaking.
My own experience indicates that there are large numbers of American academicians who really regard truth as an obsolete term, designating some quaint anachronism that may have once existed or have been erased. I have received a call from the System. In the recent Report of the Integrated Humanities Program Advisory Committee, one finds the following sentence: 'But the criteria which have been established for active participation (in HIP) by other faculty has the semblance of an ideological test with the condition that paraphrasing them to a strict philosophy and a given view of truth.'
(the mind open at both ends) or contentlessness for its own sake or hypochore, and ultimately it produces pious love.
There are paradoxes in the phenomenon, of course. One is that academic pluralism is usually thought of as the policy that permits and encourages all points of view to flourish and compete. Something has happened to the policy, however, what was previously permitted is now presolved, and pluralism is as exclusive and partisan as the Nicene Creed.
THOSE QUOTATION marks - ironic, apologetic, Plateau-like - say more than the whole report. They identify the authors as naive pluralists. This mentality, it hardly matters to me, has made their quite putting it, has become the orthodoxy of academia.
Compulsory pluralism in high schools and in the media have led to policies concerning the treatment of controversial subjects. When dealing with such matters, one is required to be aware that the program's steady diet of this procedure produces isisual neutrality
ANOTHER PARADOX is that whereas pluralism is supposed to promote controversy and clash of ideas, real communities have little right to all, if everybody has his own "truth", and if all are ideas equally valid, why bother to quarrel? In the pluralistic universe everything is negotiable, subject to infinite compromise. Consequently, one gets very little clash and a real deal of reason probably transient community. All matters remain properly transient communal, just matters of "wording," as administrators love to say.
Window-shoppers in the marketplace of books, tourists of the world of thought who know the names of everything and the significance of nothing, their transcripts read like little black books. But what's it all about, Alife? Woed by experts, seduced by specialists, to whom does one give one's heart?
Such intellectual dispatches as do occur in academe are restricted by the unwritten code of pluralism. It is not good form to raise the big questions. Moral issues evaporate in hot, gaseous rap sessions; the significance of Keats or Kant or Christ is mooted in excruciating consideration of how variously they have been interrupted.
MENTAL DETENTE has overtaken the university intellectual, and he works out his aggressions in raucatellity and interminable squabbles about internal politics. The much-praised open mind may deter dermatism, but when open-mindedness becomes dogma, debate becomes the most academic of academic exercises.
flirts, permanently adolescent sons who have "been around," who have had affairs with existentialism, laisons with transactional analysis, brief encounters with Karl Marx and summer romances with Fortran.
IT APPEARS that plurialism as an ideology is entering the inquisitorial stage. One simply cannot teach, for example, that anything is inferior or superior to anything else. This is the case of the imperative verb another paradox. No "value judgments"; the favorite buzzphrase may be made. Those are first principles, and norsers not teachers may dissent and remain respectable.
Prelistial biography is such that anyone who says that anything at all is true or false is assumed to be dogmatic. In reality, the truth of any statement is not all those who have rejected pluralism in favor of a unified idea of truth are philosophical fascists who will not tolerate opposing views. The dogma that those who concur in the truth may be known are dogmatic is not open to dispute.
I have said it is a naive doctrine, scarcely rising above such platitudes as, "There are many truths" or "many paths to truth" or "Everyone has his own truth." No doubt I have given the impression that the current vulgarization of his ideas; but the most extreme and articulate of recent pluralists, Bertrand Russell, expresses the main idea rather crudely himself. "I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity and without order. It is all possibilities of business or any of the other properties that governs life."
THIS MAY or may not describe the universe, but it seems an accurate enough account of the university today. The complex theory of James has become the pragma of Professor Smatterter, and education is identical with exposure to "alternatives." To this dogma, however, there are no alternatives, such as unity and order and coherence, those pedestrian properties which Russell scorned and without which liberal education becomes merely promiscuous.
ACTUALLY, extreme pluralists such as the ancient Sophists, the enemies of Socrates, are strongly disposed to becoming monopolists. If man, the measure of all things, can establish as “true” whatever he wishes, then education becomes a matter of some strong will prevailing, and the intellect pursues a truth loses its place.
The pluralistic university typically graduates intellectual
One consequence of substituting Voluntas—will, for vertas, is that the university becomes a rudderless riffler ship. Another consequence is that the student and slager. Another consequence is that the lover of truth becomes as the leader of a rival faction hungry for monopoly, a dangerous revolutionary who is out to bet the whole world on their momentum. There can be but one solution: Socrates must die.
Dennis Quinn is director of the Integrated Humanities Program at KU.
To the editor:
Support of South Africa a disgrace
The support of South Africa, however indirectly, by funds from this university is far below that of most other countries.
The recent decision by the Endowment Association to continue to support the racist police state in South Africa displays a lack of regard for human rights.
That American business firms exert a liberalizing effect has been repudiated by actual events and by civil rights leaders in South Africa.
The men and women who control the funds of the Endowment Association have a responsibility to see that the money does not in any way become involved in the perishable items anywhere: an awesome and seemingly impossible task, but one that cannot be shirked.
Lawrence special student
1, for one, do not care to receive blood money
Chainv J. Folsom
UNIVERSITY DAILY letters KANSAN
Gun control laws help prevent crime
To the editor:
Talk about figures with figures—I wonder if Greg Errzenn (the Feb. 23 Kanan) has done more than look at a map? He compares Ohio with New York to justify his anti-gun law stance, presumably hoping that no one would notice that the population of New York City alone is just slightly less than that of the entire state of Ohio.
In addition, most of the crimes with a gun
in New York state are committed in the Big Apple, where gun control was just too little too late. I assume Ernzen isn't trying to require that New York City is typical of the country or that the reason New York has such stiff laws has nothing to do with the horrendous gun crime rate in the city. His rationale might have been valid had the law been passed before the enormous use of firearms and that this result did not was done after the fact and negated a method of dealing with an already existing problem.
The point of supporting gun laws now is to prevent such a devastating problem from
occurring elsewhere. Gun laws are not a cure but a preventative, and Erzsen falls to
I have no problems with his own a rifle or shotgun for sport. Handguns are another matter. Try walking into a bar with a rifle or shotgun, and get out when he's been drinking walking in with a concealed handgun. And check the crime figures about incidents like this while you're
As far as his remark "Remember, the West wasn't won with a registered gun"1—he is suggesting a return to that sort of lawlessness and insecurity? Hopefully, we've become a bit more civilized since then. On the other hand, I saw a nice piece of rangeland the other day that I'd really like. Maybe I should get myself a couple of guns
Kendall Simmons
Kendall Simmons Lawrence graduate student
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