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University Daily Kansan
Opinion
Tuesday, Jan. 21, 1986
Invasion of privacy
If employers have good reason to suspect that an individual's performance is drug impaired, then appropriate action should be taken.
The Kansas City Star and Times has said it won't be calling in the dogs to sniff out drugs in the newsroom after employees protested with outrage, poetry and dog biscuits.
But to suggest that employees be hounded by drug-sniffing dogs or that random urine testing be instituted is degrading for the vast majority of workers who do not smoke pot, snort coke or take any other drugs in the work place.
However, Kansas Gas and Electric Co., one of the owners of the Wolf Creek nuclear power plant, is forging ahead with plans for random drug testing of all nuclear group employees.
The companies' moves come at a time of concern over employee drug use that does not warrant such intrusions of privacy.
Give us space.
Because drugs are detectable long after behavioral effects have worn off, urine testing also infringes on employees' free-time pursuits. It becomes a case of Big Brother dictating what employees may do on weekends.
No one wants to see those in sensitive positions, like journalists, or those handling hazardous materials, like nuclear power plant workers, using drugs on the job. But let's not stamp on the rights of all employees because a few are irresponsible. Deal with the offenders and leave the rest alone.
Space needs fresh words
Innocent employees also may suffer from the possibility of testing errors or mixed-up urine samples, for example. And random tests may be used to weed out workers disliked by a company for other reasons.
Although the television networks would probably enjoy the increased status and ratings, the journalist in space should not be a well-known personality such as Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather or even Geraldo Rivera.
Money spent on random drug testing would be better spent educating supervisors to detect job performance that is impaired by drug use.
Sometime this fall, the United States will have its first journalist in space, aboard a space shuttle. The deadline for applications was last Wednesday, and the selection is scheduled to be made in April by a national committee of 14 educators, journalists and a former astronaut.
James Beggs, NASA administrator, says the journalist will be able to "see all and hear all, but will tell all as well."
Their faces, voices and words are already familiar to us. The thrill of space travel shouldn't be tinged by Walter Cronkite telling us the way it was.
What is needed is a journalist with no network ties and no image to worry about.
But more is needed than a fresh opinion.
The journalist should be selected for his or her ability to write. It should be someone the selection committee perceives as best able to communicate the experience of outer space.
Since the 1960s, when man first left the earth, all of us have wondered what it would be like to travel through space. But since most of us may never get the chance to know, what is needed is someone with the ability to put the experience into words for all of us.
For all their bravery, so far the astronauts have been so overwhelmed by their experiences that they have found it difficult to tell everyone back at Mission Control and in the rest of the country just what it is like to be up there looking down at the world.
The journalist in space will be someone whose life is words, who makes a living describing events to people. This event offers all of us the chance to have a better idea of what we're missing.
The Klansmen and their grand and imperial wizards and dragons cheered for three
Time to draw the line
Members of the Grand Knights of the Ku Klux Klan gathered over the weekend in Pulaski, Tenn., to rally and march in protest of the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Many white Pulaski residents are reportedly still proud of their forefathers' founding of the vigilant group. But last week, even they were concerned that the parade would damage the town's image.
The original KKK was organized in that small community 120 years ago to help stop blacks and white Northerners from gaining political control in the Reconstructionist South.
hours at angry speeches decrying King and his accomplishments before they marched in protest of the holiday honoring the slain civil rights leader.
Both the Pulaski city attorney and the city's first black alderman said the town had to allow the demonstration because the KKK applied for a parade permit and had a right to march as long as members wore no hoods and did not litter or obstruct traffic.
In the case of a group as scurrilous as the Ku Klux Klan, taking away the constitutional right to peaceably assemble should be seriously considered.
The group has a history of so much evil and violence it has effectively destroyed its right to such a privilege.
News staff
Michael Totty ... Editor
Lauretta McMillen ... Managing editor
Chris Barber ... Editorial editor
Cindy McCurry ... Campus editor
David Giles ... Sports editor
Brice Waddill ... Photo editor
Susanne Shaw ... General manager, news adviser
Business staff
Bristol McCabo ... Business manager
David Nikon ... Retail sales manager
Jim Williamson ... Campus manager
Lori Eckart ... Classified manager
Caroline Innes ... Production manager
Pallen Lee ... National manager
John Oberzan ... Sales and marketing adviser
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Warm weather is nature's cruel joke
Mother Nature is playing a cruel and devious trick on the students at the University of Kauas, and most of us are falling for it in a big way.
The balmy temperatures we've been enjoying this month are unheard of in these usually frozen plains of the Midwest, and the sunshine and stillness are all part of a vicious scheme fabricated by the lady herself.
January is a month for woollies, ice storms and traying on the Campanile hill. These are the days when residence hall residents usually cry for more heat and gas bills soar in breezy apartments with paper-thin walls.
The walk from Hoch Auditorium to the Kansas Union to pay fees is usually next to unbearable. Sorority rushes can almost always rely on tales of treacherous trek up the Kappa hill to fill idle minutes of conversation over punch and cookies.
But, no. Mother Nature has decided to play with our minds.
Lauretta McMillen
Managing editor
She has attempted, probably successfully, to lure us into hoping that these perfect days may all be signs of an incredibly early spring.
Students all over campus have donned shorts and T-shirts in place of flannel shirts and long underwear. Wescoe Beach is crowded, and sidewalk missionaries already have taken advantage of the situation.
The usual mid-winter blahs are nowhere to be seen, and the libidos of many students have already begun the spring thaw. Every other student walks by with that silly, love-sick look that usually doesn't strike until about March.
How frustrating it must be for professors to already have to battle for the attention of students to keep them from cutting class to enjoy the weather.
Mother Nature probably doesn't realize the full ramifications of her little joke. Department stores' clearance sale cycles will be all messed up, the baseball team will go crazy waiting for the season to start and the sun-worshippers will be totally confused. What an evil ruse she has pulled.
We can't fall for it.
Just about the time she has us all sauntering down Jayhawk Boulevard in our "jams" and Vuarnets, Mother Nature will end this special edition of January. She'll then return us to the regular program already in progress for most of the country.
Worse yet, the winds will come. Chilling, biting, good old Kansas Northerlies will howl through the airspace around the doorjamb, and KPL Gas Service will breath a giant sigh of relief.
The temperatures soon will drop and with them, our morale. Sleet and snow will fall from dreary skies, and depression will fall upon us all.
Before too long, students will be reacquainted with the chores of scraping car windows and shoveling walks. Mopeds and bicycles will once again become troublesome, rather than pleasurable, modes of transportation.
Great caution should be taken not to consider this all too lightly. The emotional pitfalls of being fooled into believing that spring has arrived have never been fully studied.
Don't be trapped into putting your sweaters into mothball storage just yet. And remember, you were appropriately forewarned.
This is all much too good to be true,
and anything too good to be true is
not to be trusted. Ever.
Control of sticks and stones unlikely
Maybe that explains what happened to me one evening in 1979.
The Justice Department estimates that weapons other than guns and knives, such as sticks and stones, were used in 13 percent of the violent crimes committed in a 10-year period ended in 1983.
As I was walking along a Capitol Hill street, I was accosted by two young men, one armed with a tree limb and the other carrying a large rock.
"Are you a senator?" asked the branch-tooting footpad.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me," I answered, poetically.
“Very well, then,” said the rock-carrying evildoer. “Your money or your metatarsus?”
"Take my money," I replied. "I'm saving my arches for Miss Pringle's Jazzerice class."
I reported the robbery to the police, of course, but don't expect the second session of the 99th Congress to enact stone control legislation. The National Boulder Association simply is too powerful.
Every time a measure of this nature reaches the hearing stage in either the House or Senate, the association sends up lobbyists who tell congressional committees:
"Rocks don't break people's metatarsi; people break other people's metatarsi."
It is difficult to quarrel with logic of that sort.
It may be true that anyone on the street can climb a tree and obtain a limb to serve as a cudgel. And some streets are lined with trees.
Moreover, some unpaved roads, particularly in rural areas, have these: own boulders.
You never hear a congressional
Dick West
United Press International
witness testify that "potholes don't ruin automobile tires; drivers who don't avoid potholes ruin automobile tires."
Cities seeking federal funds to fill potholes also are too powerful. Yet, to me, that argument is as valid as the one advanced by the National Boulder Association.
I was talking the other day with an opponent of rock control laws and he said the U.S. Constitution gave citizens the right to carry sticks and stones.
"The swinging of clubs is deeply rooted in the American character," he insisted. "Why, Congress itself contributes to the tradition by providing a ceremonial staff for certain events.
"Are you trying to tell me a legislative body that approves of ceremonial staffs should outlaw cudrels. It just doesn't make sense."
It is, however, the National Boulder Association's account of this country's westward movement that wins over most converts.
"Every covered wagon crossing the amber waves of grain had stones hidden in the back," a spokesman will tell you. "They gave the pioneers something handy to fly at the Indians in event of hostile attacks."
Such arguments even outweigh the danger that one's skull will be split with a tree limb or of having an arch flattened by a rock dropped.
As yet, nobody at the association has thought of arguing that if sticks and stones are outlawed only outlaws will brandish sticks and stones.
Send back your card
If Keith Hayes wants his old KLZR (Kansan, Jan 17), he should do as I did by placing his KLZR Lazer Gold Card in an envelope addressed to KLZR, P.O. Box 3007, Lawrence, Kan. 60446, along with a note explaining why he won't be needing it anymore. Anyone else who is sick of Eddie Murphy's "Party All the Time," or Wham!'s "I'm Your Man" should do the same.
Overland Park sophomore
Tim Savage
AIA biased
Contrary to Mr. Goodpasture's defense of Accuracy in Academia as a "non-partisan and non-profit organization formed to promote greater accuracy and balance in instruction in college-level institutions" (Kansan, Jan. 16), the fact of the matter is that AIA is a spin-off of the stridently right-wing "media watchdog" organization Accuracy in Media.
Reed Irvine, the president and founder of AIM, claimed AIA is necessary because there are 10,000 Marxist professors teaching in the United States.
This absurd declaration was defended by AIA's president, Malcolm Lawrence, with the example that Angela Davis was teaching at the University of Virginia. There is an assistant dean deat Virginia named
Angela Davis. However, she is no relation to the famous black radical.
According to Louis Wolf, in Covert Action Information Bulletin (Spring, 1984), AIM is closely affiliated with various ex-CIA operatives and retired American military men with specialties in military intelligence and psychological warfare.
The point is that AIA is not an unbiased "watchdog," but is a politically extreme organization recruiting right-wing students to help them police the nation's classrooms.
Mr. Goodpasture's defense of AIA is fundamentally flawed, first by the claim that AIA will simply report the "misdeeds" of professors who "distort the truth," as if AIA is the final arbiter of "the truth."
Second, his defense is flawed by the uncritical acceptance of AIA's statements that it is unbiased, and thirdly, by the meek argument that "students may fear that if they bring up a point and irritate a professor, their grades may suffer for it."
Any professor who lowers a student's grade because he or she is irritated by relevant student challenges and questions should be drummed out of the business, and it shouldn't take a national undercover operation in the nation's classrooms to accomplish that.
Likewise, any students with so little backbone that they are afraid to "bring up a point" for fear of "irritating" the professor, simply need a little assertiveness training.
I do my best to encourage relevant
John T. Little
John T. Little Western Civilization and religious studies GTA
and religious studies GTA
Important team
An open letter to the basketball fans who come early for the men's games while the women's basketball team is playing:
In fact, I have seen some "waiting students" engage in the same conduct during the women's games that they usually reserve as an insult to the opposing men's teams, namely reading the newspapers.
Although KU women's basketball has a shorter tradition than men's basketball, it has built a strong reputation in the Big Eight Conference. During Coach Washington's tenure at KU, she has led her teams to three Big Eight Championships, the same record that is held by the men's teams during the past 22 years.
I encourage you to clap, shout and enjoy yourselves during the women's games and at the same time give the women the traditional home court advantage that cheering crowds bring and that is so important for the morale of the coaches and players.
She also helped mold the world's most outstanding women's collegiate basketball player, who is now the only woman playing with the Harlem Globetrotters.
Give the coaches and the players the respect and support they deserve, and take advantage of the fact that you can freely stand up and cheer!
If you cannot go to the men's game this Saturday, consider car-pooling with us to Kansas State to watch the women play. The women's KU-K-State rivalry is as fierce as that of the men!
We'll leave at about 1 p.m. Leave your name at the customer service desk in the KU Bookstore if you want more information. Otherwise, consider coming to the next women's home game at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 29 when the women's team (11-2) will play Colorado (11-4). Admission for students with KU I.D. is free.
See and hear you there!
Romee P. Mel Dalton
associate professor business
Box not enough
The coaches' box in college basketball is a good idea, but it doesn't go far enough. A cage would be better.
Lawrence resident