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Wednesday, March 30, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Oral Roberts misled students with his scholarship promises
More than a year ago, Oral Roberts ascended to his Prayer Tower and said that he needed to raise $8 million by last March 31 or God would "call him home." He said that God had commanded him to turn the Oral Roberts University medical school into a missionary research program and that he needed the money to supply full scholarships to medical students.
But it's now apparent that Roberts grossly misled ORU medical students. He got his money and was saved from death, but less than a year later, the $8 million is gone.
As a result, students in the ORU medical school have been told that they might each have to pay bills of up to $71,000 by the time they graduate. And if they transfer to try to avoid some of their debt, they will have to repay the scholarship funds they have already received plus 18 percent interest, a total of $26,550.
The school's application material refers to the medical school sequence as a four-year program. Oral Roberts' publication, Abundant Life, said last spring that the fund-raising effort had full scholarships as its goal. Roberts wrote in a column titled "God's Mandate to Me" that the money would "give full scholarships to each of our young physicians in training, including their room and board."
Roberts implied that medical students at ORU would be able to use the $8 million he raised to cover their school expenses for four years.
Calls to ORU on the subject result in an ambiguous prepared statement from the office of Larry D. Edwards, physician, who is vice president for health affairs and dean of the ORU school of medicine. The statement is filled with religious references and pious statements, but it fails to address the question of where the $8 million has gone.
The official statement says that the ORU school of medicine is "increasing its methodology for medical missions", whatever that means. The statement also defends the university by saying ORU is concentrating on supplying medical missionaries to needy communities within the United States.
It was bad enough for Roberts to say that God blackmailed him into raising $8 million, but it's worse that he misled medical school students. Those students had a goal of helping people in Third World countries, and Roberts' tactics may now prevent them from doing so.
It's sad that the 117 students now in the scholarship program had to learn so harshly that Oral Roberts' words definitely are not gospel.
Alan Plaver for the editorial board
Fighting teen sex is expensive
President Reagan has learned that not only is it difficult to persuade teen-agers to abstain from premarital sex, it's also expensive.
Since 1981, the Reagan administration has poured more than $70 million into religious organizations that promote chastity among teens.
Today, the Supreme Court will hear the case to determine whether this money is a violation of the constitutional separation of church and state. The justices should reach a conclusion some time before their July 3 summer break.
The court decision could be intriguing, but what's really interesting is the amount of money the government spent promoting a solution that in itself simply isn't enough.
These days, $70 million is a drop in the federal bucket, but a person could buy a lot of things with $70 million.
The money would provide 17,500 University of Kansas students with the maximum $4,000 guaranteed student loan. Struggling businesses could buy themselves a car fleet of about 17,000 Yugos.
Closer to home, $70 million is worth about 2 million kegs of beer or about 1.75 million kegs if it's the good stuff.
The money could help furnish countless high schools and grade schools with about 58,000 Macintosh computers from the KU bookstores.
If Reagan really wants to address the teen-age pregnancy problem, he could have invested the cash in education programs in the nation's school systems.
Or he could spend the money on about 15.5 million 12-packs of Trojan condoms or about 1.5 million three-month cycles of birth control pills.
Editorials in this column are the opinions of the editorial board
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Western culture good for students
There have been times when the end of Western civilization has been viewed with alarm. At Stanford University, it is viewed as an objective devoutly to be wished and, more than wished, demanded. About a year ago, Jesse Jackson joined a group of chanting students there who demanded: "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go!" They were referring to the course in Western culture required by schools like Stanford, courses that strike these critics as full of "sexist and racist stereotypes" and reflecting, to slip into Protestspeak, a "European-Western male bias."
As an old guide once told a novice hunter who had just shot a sitting duck and was wondering how to tell his friends about it. "No need to go into town," he said, smiling, then denying they offence are also full of revolutionary ideas
— like faith, reason and liberty. If Plato and St. Augustine are on the reading list, so are radicals like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Stuart Mill. But being men, and white men at that, perhaps they are disqualified from an Affirmative Action reading list — as if the value of an idea depended on the racial origins of those expressing it.
Today's new barbarians and their slogans ("Western culture's to go to get!") may not be all that different from yesterday's old ones. It was a fictional member of the Brownshirts who drew applause from Naudi audiences: "When I hear the word 'culture', I reach for my revolver."
The critics of Western culture at Stanford are quick to explain that they're not out to purge Plato and his intellectual descendants from the reading list but only to balance Western civilization with non-Western culture, or maybe minority civilization. Behind all this Protestspeak is an approach inspired by the unexamined assumption that all ideas are created equal and that it's only fair to balance a white male thinker from the fourth century B.C. with one black female from the 20th century A.D. — a kind of proportional representation of culture. The object is to give the minority something to identify with, as if in being the minority means one can't identify with an idea.
The notion that the great ideas are those that withheld on the test of time is being dropped at Stanford on the ground that it's an example of age discrimination, this time in favor of the old. If the Bible is to be on a reading list, a separate but
Paul
Greenberg
Syndicated Columnist
equal spot should be reserved for the Whole Earth Catalog, or maybe Eldridge Cleaver's "Soul on Ice." Fair is fair. One suspects that modern authors with some discernible link to Western civilization, like Martin Luther King Jr., or Flannery O'Connor, would be disqualified as Uncle Tom or religious fanatics.
The theory, apparently, is that if the Greeks and Hebrews are going to be represented on this reading list, then the Esquimau and Pygmies should also get one author each. It's the intellectual equivalent of the United Nations General Assembly. Gresham's Law soon sets in: No idea is bad enough to be ignored, but many are disqualified because they're too good. Nothing travels quite so rapidly as student fads; the same demands are now being made on other campuses.
Jonathan Swift claimed that one could tell a true genius because all the dunes would form a confederacy against him. Enough students and faculty at Stanford now have formed a confederacy against Plato et al to revamp the old reading list in favor of — what? Quotations from Chairman Mao? Shirley MacLaine's latest eruption? The collected works of Susan Brownmiller? The metaphysics of Noam Chomsky? Whatever the choices, the odds are the substitutes will be inferior to Plato et al. John Sturgeon Mill That is modern inferior. Compare Wagner to rock 'n' roll, for example — classic rock 'n' roll, of course. As with literature, time winrows and validizes music, too. Telman and Elvis Presley are both making a much deserved comeback.
Unfortunately, one suspects that political ideology rather than a seasoned judgment will determine the new reading lists. Booker T. Washington, the Machiavellii of the civil rights movement, will probably lose out to W.E.B. DuBois, who finally gave up on Western civilization. Martin Luther King Jr., whose roots went deep in Christian philosophy, is much too practical a choice compared to a romantic but largely irrelevant figure like Malcolm X. On this Pro
crustain bed, ideas are not judged or weighed or
strongly criticized but fit political prescriptions.
William J. Bennett, who is remarkably well educated for a U.S. secretary of education; sounds like he's seen it before. Talking of Stanford's drift away from Western civilization, he said: "They are moving confidently and swiftly into the late 1960s, and why anybody would want to do that intentionally, I don't know. It looks to me as though policy by intimidation is at work." Unfortunately, a lot of academic leadership is readily intimidated by the noisiest of its students and faculty.
Happily, not all the faculty is buckling. William M. Chace, an English professor, called the attack on Western culture "a version of academic populism, and populism is always dangerous for a university. Education is not a democracy...There is a system of deference, and if the system breaks down, we're in real trouble. We owe it to our students to tell them 'Here's the kind of thing you will find of long-term value'. To relegate (these books) to the status of white male writing may be factually true, but it's of low significance."
Students regardless of creed, color or sex will be cheated if the old reading list is excised in accord with transient prejudice. As one student of the classics at Stanford put it: "The overriding motivation for the change is political expediency. I think that the consequences will be the impoverishment of the undergraduate experience. What is a liberal education? It's an education that liberates people. And if there's a liberating idea in the Western tradition, it is that it doesn't matter if you're black or white or Jewish or Chinese, that there are truths that transcend the accident of birth. That's why the great books are important."
And that's only one of the reasons. Another is that ideas are power. By spreading around the best ideas, Stanford has been empowering its students, including those traditionally denied the reason of the Greeks, or the wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures, or the insights like those in Machiavelli or the Federalist Papers, and feed them fashionable simulacra instead, to be cheat those students, to disfranchise them intellectually. If this diminution of the curriculum were being forced on such students, rather than demanded by them, it would be seen as the racist, sexist公害谚 it is.
K·A·N·S·A·N
MAILBOX
Need qualified advice
studies itself, 'tought that he was degrading the department of African studies and in some way saying that it wasn't competent to advise. I don't think that was his message at all. He was merely saying that a person interested in a specific field of study should be able to have an adviser in that same field of study.
A while back there was an editorial in the Kansan that received a lot of flak. It concerned an individual who I think was an English major. He was upset over the fact that he had been assigned to the department of African studies for advising. Many angry letters poured in; and in the process, the whole issue got turned around. It seemed that a great many people, including the department of African
I recently received a letter from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Services that read as follows:
KU Student Records lists your degree and major as the following: POUR-JOURNALISM.
BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES: This is the department you should contact for advising for main enrollment for fall of 1988.
Does anybody see a problem here? Now, I want to make clear that I am in no way putting down the department of biological sciences. I'm sure that they are a highly intelligent, highly competent group who are more than qualified to advise students ... interested in biological sciences as a field of study. All I am trying to say is that as part of the process of education that this institution provides, a student should receive advice from a person knowledgeable in his or her particular field of study. I sincerely hope that I haven't ruffled too many feathers. If I were a biological science major, I certainly wouldn't want a journalist giving me advice.
M. Sean Rodman Andover sophomore
BLOOM COUNTY
- 1989 Washington Post
by Berke Breathed