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Wednesday, February 24, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Tell students about threats
It's no longer big news when a residence hall or finals site receives a bomb threat.
But if a bomb ever did explode on campus, the big news could be the University of Kansas' policy on informing potential victims of bomb threats.
A case in point was last week's bomb threat at Joseph R. Pearson Hall. The threat came in about 11:30 p.m., but resident assistants weren't told to tell residents until two hours later.
University policy requires that housing officials notify residents of a bomb threat. It just doesn't say when.
This is a no-win situation for residence officials. Massive movement in the event of a panic could trigger certain types of bombs. And waiting around for another type of a bomb to blow up, if there is one, could do just as much damage. Neither alternative is attractive.
It's unlikely that optional evacuation would create a panic. Idiots make bomb threats so regularly that it's seen as more of a homework or television interruption than as something legitimate. And obviously, no bombs have exploded on campus recently.
Perhaps a solution would be to notify residents immediately and to make evacuation optional.
Even though residents rarely leave when given the option in a bomb threat situation, they still have the right to know about the potential danger.
Also, students should place more trust in their locks and less in their neighbors. Doors should be closed and locked whenever the rooms are left empty. It's easy to say that one's friends aren't thieves, but friends are not the ones walking out with stereos and loose cash.
And the University has the obligation to inform them. Russell Gray for the editorial board
Common sense deters crime
In the past two years, the number of burglaries and thefts in KU residence halls has decreased 30 percent. And with a little help from students and hall management, the crime rate could drop even further.
KU police officials attribute the decrease in thefts to residents realizing that residence halls are not safe havens from crime. KU police also give credit to programs that educate students about how they can avoid being crime victims.
But even more can be done to lessen residence hall crime. Hall managers can secure the halls themselves from crime by placing identification marks and security cables on everything of value. Such obvious measures would deter potential thieves.
The drop in the crime rate in 1987 didn't help last year's 56 victims of crime, but some common sense would have.
Alan Player for the editorial board
Editorials in this column are the opinions of the editorial board.
Other Voices
Censoring the KKK won't damage it
Censorship of repugnant views is more dangerous than any bigot's opinions or crackpot's ravings.
The University of Kansas should know that, but its officials bent to public pressure this week and "postponed" the appearance of two white supremacists on the KU campus.
The Ku Klux Klan members had been invited to a journalism class to inject reality into a classroom reporting project. Then, a student radio producer decided to tape a cable television show on white supremacists, inviting their opponents to participate.
Well, a group of black ministers in Lawrence raised a fuss, meetings were held, and the appearances "delayed" to let people cool off. It is on such knee-jerk reactions to their venom that the Klan and their Neanderthal ilk thrive, almost depend.
Censorship is particularly offensive at a university, where the discussion of all ideas — the good, the bad and the ugly — sharpens minds. Critical examination implies neither acceptance nor tolerance of hatemongers.
A university cannot afford to let a minority, any minority, define the limits of public debate on the basis of its own sensibilities. Few speakers worth hearing would fail to generate some animus.
Let the Klan speak and embarrass itself.
News staff
Alison Young...Editor
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Rob Knapp...News editor
Alain Ployer...Editorial editor
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Jennifer Rowland...Planning editor
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Richard Stewart...Graphic editor
Tom Eblen...General manager, news adviser
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Professor says Kansan erred The rights of white supremacists were not abridged
The Kansan is obsessed with the mistaken belief that a "chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom" exists at KU in the wake of decisions by three professors to withdraw invitations for Klux Klan appearances on campus during Black History Month.
It appears that no one except the editors believes that free speech has been abridged. Certainly not Chancellor G. A. Budig or Journalism Dean Mike Kautsch. Not the University Senate or Harry Jones, the instructor who invited the two Klan members to his class. NOT KJHK news director John Broholm or news adviser Adrienne Rivers-Waribagha, the two professors who determine the standards for programs prepared for KU's public airways. The evidence shows that the Kansas free speech crusade in this instance is misguided.
Because blacks voiced displeasure that an academic unit at the University went out of its way to sponsor a platform for remnants of a murderous and clandestine organization, Kansan writers innocently and erroneously tarred the black community and me with an anti-free speech image. That's the right color, but wrong stickum to brush on this Samba. His continuing struggle, during 35 years in media as journalist, research director, journalism educator and communications director has promoted INCLUSION of the muffled and unheard voices, not their censorship.
If that is also the interest of the Kansean, it must crusade against institutional racism wherever it exists at KU, especially at the newspaper itself, where the supreme white orientation questions blacks about "chilling" the freedoms blacks never have been allowed to fully share. It is like expecting black slaves, as Frederick Douglass so aptly said it, to applaud July 4th, commemorating national independence for the whites who still held blacks as slaves.
Rather than implying that powerless blacks are censoring the Klan at a University where they have no power, the Kansan should be shedding light on why black Americans, Jews and other non-Aryans would be insulted by any University-sponsorship of Klan visits that would desecrate their annual cultural observances.
Does the newspaper, by under-publicizing information on blacks, share the blame for the reporting class and its instructor not knowing that February is Black History Month? Whatever the answer, wasn't it wise that the professor chose to avoid disruptions by finding alternative means of interviewing the Klan leaders? Or would some people prefer the demonstrations and divisions that would have undermined understanding and lowered students' grades?
Whites who compare the Klan to Muslim
Samuel L.
Adams
Guest Columnist
Minister Louis Farrakhan show a total lack of knowledge of the two. Farrakhan was guilty of making intemperate and hateful remarks about whites, but neither he nor his Muslim associates have a record of lynching or murdering anybody. To suggest that the two are the same is again a manifestation of the blinders of institutional racism. Radicals of the left, who came closest to the extremism of the Klan, have been decrimated or chased into exile. No Weathermen or Black Panthers were allowed to survive because theyposed threats to white supremacy.
The Klan always supported white supremacy, and none of their lynching, night bombings or murders of Birmingham Sunday school girls were punished until 1967. That is when Federal Judge Archibald Cox and a jury convicted a group of Philadelphia, Miss, klansmen, not for murder, but for denial of the civil rights of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, the two Jewish and a black civil rights worker they killed and buried in a mound of Mississini clay.
During the years I lived in the South, the KKK wreaked terror on children. The bricks and firebombs they threw through my picture window and onto my yard, the wanton killings of Medgar Evers and my other friends and soul brothers, and the bombing of Gaston's Motel in Birmingham near the room I had occupied only a few hours earlier are enough to make me dislike Ku Kluxers. But my rejection of them is on rational rather than emotional grounds.
The University should continue to tolerate their free speech but refuse to legitimize them by offering a platform for recruiting converts or luring sympathizers out of the closet. Students and private groups, on the other hand, should be given someone to invite whoever they please. Suppression of KKR's free speech and academic freedom is not the question. Simply refuse to help them.
As a KU Jewish colleague argues: "The Klan is not simply an ideological organization espousing bizarre and repugnant views. It has both public and private positions and, therefore, defies the possibility of educational value derived through the normal processes of debate. Its public posture varies with its audience and frequently with the free-speech-minded audience it denies its hostile racist beliefs . . . Privately, the Klan is part of an underground coalition and interlocking directorate or paramilitary organizations who seek the
overthrow of the U.S. government through the creation of racial polarization and terrorism."
The literature and the membership applications the Klan duo intended for distribution at KU are testimony to their purpose, which they openly admitted was to recruit. Thanks to the professors' cancellations of KKK campus visits, the Knights of hatred won't have it so easy contacting their target audience.
Meanwhile, the free speech crusade that ought to be undertaken at Kansas should be aimed at ending institutional racism at KU and at a campus newspaper whose policies and news agenda are set solely by white editors, who are appointed by a white board and subject only to white authority figures. For the editing and reporting jobs, no study or knowledge of non-white cultures is required or desired.
Indeed, no free-speech platforms in campus classrooms or media will insure benefits to KU blacks until something is done to hire a critical mass of black professionals and to attract black students in all disciplines on all levels of the University.
One reason no challenge of the Klan invitation came from the journalism class, which now will go off-campus to meet the Klan, is that there are no black students and, students say, no Jewish students in the class.
One last thought: If we are to insist on making the off-campus Klan interview a black-white free speech issue, remember that attempts to muzzle blacks led to the so-called Rap Brown conspiracy law. And attempts to keep Julian Bond, black civil rights leader, from occupying his Georgia Legislature seat in 1966 were designed to force his disavowal of anti-war sentiments expressed by black Congressman John Lewis, then chairman of Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.
What most white Americans never fully understand — but what blacks can never forget — is that white academia is fully implicated in the exclusion of black voices. Academic freedom, never an absolute, is useless to the excluded. Free speech is a sham to the voiceless. White society always has excluded or restricted blacks from free speech platforms. White institutions created the exclusion, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it. Only black empowerment, which won't be gained without a struggle, will yield black access to free speech platforms.
This all means that blacks cannot afford to be against freedom of expression. It is their only avenue of escape from continuing as the nation's mute, faceless peons. Blacks must, however, even the handicap, as they attempted to do in protests against an unbalanced, official sponsorship of the Klan on campus.
Samuel L. Adams is an associate professor of journalism
Consider rights of all
William Dann, like many pro-lifers, shows more regard for his own "moral superiority" than for the rights of actual babies and their parents. His advertisement fails to mention adoption agencies or day-care centers. Not everybody can afford family life, like it or not. Many criminals were abandoned or abused as children, but Dann still supports capital punishment, which raises doubts about how "pro-life" he really is. His pointless attacks on gays provide more evidence.
Ben Asher Springfield, Mo., senior
Teach students to think
The technical courses teach one how to use the current technology, and this is to their advantage. However, it must be noted that a main feature of technological society is the change in technology changes. The subject matter of the technical course quickly can become obsolete.
I would like to respond to Maynard Shelly's article in the Feb. 19 issue of the Kansan. Shelly claimed that "the real intellectual junk food is courses such as most of those on Plato and Shakespeare."
Shelly needs a need for an increase in efficiency of education and a response to the increasingly technological nature of our society. I would like to point out that the courses he attacks, in part because of their difficulty, enable students to adapt to technological advances, and to do so efficiently. These courses 'each students how to think through difficult new ideas more than those which I will call the "technical courses."
However, if one is equipped with an ability to
learn difficult new ideas, one is more able to adapt to the changes which do occur. The difficult subject matter in the "junk food" course not only introduces students to the difficult problems humans have had and continue to be faced with in their lives, but it also equips them with the ability to better adjust to new ideas.
A recent trend in the private sector substantiates my claim by showing that employers say that the abilities gained in humanities course are at least as important as a technical background. I point to the trend of an increase in the recruiting and hiring of graduates with a strong liberal arts background. Evidently, employers, too, have found that liberal arts training is of great value in a potential employee. It seems that the very basis upon with Shelly makes his claims easily turns against him.
Brett L. Shelton Elizabeth, Colo., graduate student
Purpose was missed
In his guest column "Difficult courses should be justified" in the Feb. 19 Kansan, Professor Maynard W. Shelly completely misrepresents the purpose of education, especially at the university level.
To educate means to impart knowledge. Knowledge, in turn, is familiarity with information or facts and understanding the relationship between those facts. Learning, and hence teaching facts, is relatively easy because it only tests human memory. Understanding is much more complex and it occurs at three different and progressively more difficult levels.
The first is understanding the relationship between facts within the existing system. The second is comprehension across systems. The most difficult is making experience intelligible in partial or complete transcendence of systems. One cannot be taught facts of the future because they do not exist yet. But one hopefully can, and should be, teach understanding of facts or, to put it simply, be taught how to think.
If, as Professor Shelly claims, "the information that could be taught in a university is doubling every decade or less" and "we are moving into a highly technological world", teaching information alone becomes more and more useless and teaching how to think more and more vital. Here the necessity for Plato and Aristotle is obvious. The highest level of comprehension requires imagination which can best be stimulated by humanistic and artistic courses. So, here's for more and not less of Shakespeare.
Jaroslaw Piekalkiewicz Professor of political science
Time is right for peace
The state of Israel is reality. The Arabs must recognize the modern state of Israel in order for a just and peaceful solution in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
I am an optimist. I believe that the current unrest in the occupied territories will result in an international peace conference. A result of this unrest is that the state located in the West Bank and Gaza State.
No matter what one's views are, the Palestinians have been very successful in bringing their plight to the world's spotlight. Why at this point can't the Palestinian leaders (in particular, Yasser Arafat) recognize Israel's existential crisis? It is hard to recognize Israel publicly because I-S-R-A-E-L, spells death to any Arab leader that recognizes the existence of the state of Israel.
On the other hand, Israelis are slowly coming to the realization that the suppression of 1.5 million Palestinians is a thorn sticking in Israel's naw.
The time is right for the world community to stress the need for an international peace conference, so that Israelis and Palestinians can live next to each other in peace.
Bill Blumenthal Tulsa, Okla., sophomore
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed