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Tuesday, February 3, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Opinions
Keep investments rising
In the Kansas Statehouse in Topeka, the Senate and Gov. Mike Hayden are overlooking a sound investment. The investment is the payment of competitive salaries to KU faculty members, which affects everyone seeking a higher education in Kansas now and in the future.
On Jan. 26, a bill was introduced to the Kansas Senate which would reduce the salary of KU administrators and faculty paid more than $50,000 a year by 3.8 percent. Compared with peer institutions across the country, KU ranks among the lowest in average salary for its faculty.
With other universities offering as much as $15,000 more a year, faculty members affected by the cuts, primarily experienced upper-level administrators and professors, will have little incentive to remain in Kansas. Such a drain from the University staff would inevitably lead to a drain of students seeking quality education in Kansas. Several legislators have expressed their fear that such a brain drain is likely to hinder future economic growth in the state. Faculty pay cuts can only exacerbate the problem.
The situation is not likely to improve in the coming years. Hayden recently has requested a 2.5 percent faculty salary increase for fiscal year 1987, beginning July 1. This is 3.5 percent below salary requests in previous years.
These proposals come in light of several budget cuts made by this year's government. While giving high priority to a balanced budget and a law reinstituting a million-dollar death penalty, Hayden and the Senate are overlooking opportunities to invest in the state's future.
Kansas cannot afford to pass these opportunities by. Without investing in our faculty today, the stock we hold in higher education in Kansas is likely to plummet tomorrow.
Lawrence should adopt an ordinance that would make job and housing discrimination on the basis of sexual preference illegal.
A step toward equality
Adopting such an ordinance would be a positive step by the Lawrence City Commission to curb discrimination in the city, especially toward homosexuals.
A rough draft of the proposed ordinance has been written, but the city manager and city attorney must review it before the ordinance can be considered by the city commission.
Sexual preference shouldn't determine whether someone is qualified for a job, nor should it prevent someone from living where he chooses.
The ordinance would not promote any specific lifestyle.
Instead, it would try to guarantee all people the right to live and work in Lawrence.
Although the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are stated in our Constitution, and discrimination is illegal, the city government occasionally should remind residents that discrimination is also wrong.
Prejudice won't easily disappear, for those who wish it to continue will find ways of doing so. But the city should discuss the issues of discrimination and harassment and bring them into the public eve.
An ordinance outlawing discrimination on the basis of sexual preference will not banish this prejudice from this city forever, but it will be a step toward the equal acceptance of all persons regardless of their differences.
Dole on the right track
The proposal would call for pre-employment, post-acident and random drug testing of these individuals, as well as other workers whose jobs were crucial either to the safety of flight operations or safety in general.
Recently, Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole announced a program of drug testing for air traffic controllers and other transportation workers. The proposal came, coincidentally, after a Conrail train crashed, and drug tests subsequently showed the presence of marijuana in the systems of the two engineers operating the train.
help solve the problem, then the next logical industry to follow the trend should be the transportation industry.
Because the U.S. government is making such a tremendous effort to combat the use of drugs on a regular basis and it thinks that random drug testing is one way to possibly
These people are responsible for the lives of millions of people each day. They need to be fully aware of what they are doing and operating.
Although Dole's proposal is good, it definitely is not without certain flaws. Some drugs remain in a person's system up to a year after use and thus show up positive on tests. Also, many over the counter drugs show up positive as illegal substances. Also, a policy must be formulated to deal fairly with those who test positive.
Dole was on the right track when she made the proposal, but a lot still needs to be done to make the implementation of the plan successful and fair.
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"In this 200th anniversary year of our Constitution you and I stand on the shoulders of giants. . . ."
Ronald Reagan
Jan. 27,1987
Openness campaign not new to Soviets
The latest word in vogue emanating from the Soviet Union is glasnost, or public openness.
Allegedly, great things are taking place in the Soviet Union as Mikhail Gorbachev attempts to awaken his turpid country from its self-induced.
Mike Chapman C
economic and social coma. Not unexpectedly, many people in the West are herding this campaign as a new opportunity for improved U.S.-Soviet relations that could lead to an arms control agreement.
Now, a Soviet citizen can read in the state-controlled press about riots in Kazakhstan, train wrecks and natural disasters in the country. They also can hear limited criticism of the systemic failures of a planned economy from top party officials. Previously, this type of news was not considered in the interest of building
socialism.
However, a brief look at the recent past shows that Soviet leaders have a penchant for these initiatives while never quite fulfilling them.
In the 1950s, Nikita Khrushchev began what was thought to be the process of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. In 1956, he gave a speech to the Twentieth Party Congress denouncing the "cult of personality." But since the text of the speech was never published, Khrushchev merely was assuring top party officials they no longer needed to fear liquidation. And although some people were released from the labor camps, imprisonment and internal exile remained instruments of policy.
In his foreign policy, Krushchev called for peaceful coexistence. Instead, we witnessed political suppression in East Germany and Poland, military invasion in Hunan, the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis.
In 1964, Khrushchev was thrown down the memory hole, and Leonid Brezhney entered the scene. His
domestic policy led to economic stagnation in virtually every area of the world.
During the Brezhnev years, the West was treated to the disaster of detente. In return for trade expansion, technology transfers and large declines in western military expenditures, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, sent their colonial Cuban troops to Africa and made a mockery of the Helsinki Human Rights Accords. They also launched a policy of murder and forced famine in Afghanistan, strangled the Solidarity movement in Poland and dramatically increased their military capabilities by violating existing arms agreements.
In the Soviet press, this came to be known as the "struggle for peace."
In the most farcical episode of East-West relations, yet another opening was thought to have occurred when Yuri Andropov assumed control of the Soviet empire. Many in the West were willingly duped into believing Andropov was a closet liberal with an
affinity for western culture. These characteristics were attributed to the man, who as head of the KGB, expanded the use of psychiatric hospitals against political dissidents.
Given the history of previous Soviet liberalization campaigns, skepticism of Gorbachev's intentions seems understandable. Because he has released a few leading dissidents, called for a few changes in economic policy and, most recently, discussed the possibility of limited nuclear weapons for the West to become excited. Nor is it any reason for us think an arms control agreement will stimulate further changes in the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union is in need of more than mere reform. It needs to be transformed Because Gorbachev is a product of the totalitarian system he now governs, it is unlikely he will do anything to radically alter it. Rather, his efforts are an attempt to save the Soviet Union from itself — to make the system work better without changing the existing power structure.
Choosing 'official language'dangerous
To quote State Rep. Tim Hutchinson of Bentonville, making English
Arkansas was bound to join the stampede of states declaring English the official language; its state legislature has a penchant for bad ideas. Anybody with qualms about this rush to official line English is being assured it is a nonmimicking gesture. That is supposed to be a defense of the idea.
Paul Greenberg
Columnist
the official language is no bigger deal than making the fiddle the state's official musical instrument or milk the official beverage. Well, not quite. People don't tend to take their favorite drink as seriously, as intimately, as they do their language. Who ever heard of a nation divided between milk lovers and fanciers of apple juice? Yet language wars can be the most divisive of conflicts; see Canada or India.
Dividing people along language lines can be as dangerous as splitting them up by race or religion, region or family. Challenge a person's language and you challenge the person. Maybe because language is personal; it's certainly taken personally. How else can one explain the feelings stirred by the interest in Black English a few years ago? Remember the deep (and understandable) resentment spawned when some teachers tried to "cure" the black asid if it were a speech impediment? Those well-meaning cloaks may not have realized it, but they were attacking the kids' family, heritage, personality. Words are part of ourselves.
Now legislators across the country are moving to declare English the official language. They may not realize it, but that means declaring other languages' unfamiliar words. That's what's important and stir resentments. Not only is this approach not nice; it's ineffective if the object is to unify Americans.
State Sen. Joy Yates, who is handling the bill in the state senate, says its object is to assure a common language. That's a laudable goal. However, he thinks that a common language can be legislated with as blunt an instrument as this bill, he may need to think some more about how language grows and changes, and few have grown or changed more than the great river that is English.
Yates told a story that may say a lot about his approach to this issue. He spoke of a Cambodian girl who, after only two years in this country, won a national spelling bee but stumbled over the word enchilada, which Yates said wasn't a basic American term, anyway. He made it sound as if the kid had been cheated. But, enchiladas are just as basic in this country as Yorkshire pudding, maybe more.
In the course of defending his bill.
The genius of the English language has been its ability not just to annex the words and therefore the thought of other languages, but to adopt them as its own, to absorb and renew them, to make them as English as hoosegow and calaboose, which are so much more satisfying than jail, which, by the way, comes from the Old French.
Should this Republic organize its own version of the French Academy to keep subversive words like enchilada out of the vocabulary, and pass Quebec-style laws requiring fast food outlets to advertise "cheese or meat-filled pancakes topped with sauce" instead of enchiladas? Should Arkies be required to start call pickup trucks lorries? (Just try it!) These tactics, like resolutions making English official, are signs of a language on the defensive. They're used by languages that are not absorbing others
but being absorbed by them. They're loser's tactics. Where a free trade in words can be preserved, English almost invariably emerges as the winner. Maybe that's because of its very tolerance, which is at the root of its remarkable absorptive capacity.
"I'm not trying to destroy the cultural richness of any culture." Yates protests. "I don't care what language they speak. The bill doesn't do anything if you want to know the truth." (What else would we want to know — the falsity?) But the bill does do something immediately: It brands languages other than English unofficial. It hurts feelings. It estranges Americans from one another for no good reason — for the sake of a provocative gesture. It doesn't do anything that is genuinely important requiring that high school students speak passable English or be exposed to at least one other language. It attempts to impose what might otherwise be freely embraced. Making English official may be good politics but it is bad psychology.
What does all this hubbub accommodate except to stir the juices? The sponsors of these bills across the country may believe they've found a way to avoid a language war in this country someday; what they've done is fire the first shot in one.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed