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Monday, February 8. 1988 / University Daily Kansan
Opinion
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Compromise is the solution to argument over add-drop
Students used to have it good at the University of Kansas — maybe too good. They had four weeks to add courses and five weeks to drop them without penalty. It was paradise for the "shop around" student, but it was a nightmare for instructors.
Not surprisingly, teachers were unhappy with the number of late additions, and they responded by asking for and receiving a two-week add period. Enter the complaining students.
The Student Senate and the University Council, however, have worked out a compromise that, if approved, will benefit everyone.
The Student Senate's proposal, which the University Council recently approved, calls for a drop period of three weeks and an add period of three weeks and two days. It recognizes that a four-week add period was too long and a two-week add period was too short.
The proposal must be approved by the University Senate later this spring and be signed by Chancellor Gene A. Budig before it can take effect.
Such an add-drop system would allow students enough time to get a feel for their classes. They could sit through enough class meetings to decide if the class was correct for their major course of study.
Teachers also would benefit. Class rosters would be stabilized earlier by limiting late additions, which means that teachers would not be forced to spend four weeks backing up for fresh students.
University Senate and Chancellor Budig should approve this add-drop proposal. It's time that both sides give a little and that this issue is put to rest.
Alan Plaver for the editorial board
Robertson's ideas are absurd
Maybe Pat Robertson and Jimmy The Greek should get together and talk breeding.
together and thank you. Republican presidential contender Robertson absurdly stated recently that the founders of Planned Parenthood sought to create a "master race."
Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and her disciples "wanted to sterilize blacks, Jews, mental defectives and fundamentalist Christians," the Christian Broadcasting Network,founder said Tuesday.
Robertson, stumping in New Hampshire, showed his keen political acumen and bold style when he said, "I don't really favor getting myself sterilized. And I certainly don't favor the programs of the Nazis."
The jokes that escaped from Robertson's mouth last week shouldn't be surprising, coming from the man whom God allegedly told to buy an RCA transmitter. He's also the man who accused Nancy Reagan of actually liking communists.
Robertson's foot reached his tonsils when he said that some of Sanger's literature "undergirded the genetic experiments of Adolf Hitler."
Equating Sanger's intentions with Hitler's and accusing Planned Parenthood of actively advocating sterilization as a method of birth control are ridiculous. But given Robertson's track record, it's certainly not surprising.
Russell Gray for the editorial board Editorials in this column are the opinions of the editorial board.
Other Voices
Free needles don't make addict.
Since AIDS became a national issue, much has been done to protect gay rights but little has been said about a less cohesive or politically vocal high-risk group: intravenous drug addicts.
Intravenous drug-users are at high risk of contracting AIDS because the disease can be transmitted by sharing a needle or syringe. It is against the law in many states to sell or distribute any sort of drug paraphernalia. Most heroin addicts will risk infection because they are physically dependent on the drug and clean hypodermic needles are hard to find. Thus, the number of IV drug-users who become AIDS victims grows.
A private drug abuse agency in New York City is taking steps to protect these addicts from the fatal virus. The Association for Drug Abuse Prevention and Treatment (ADAPT) has begun distributing sterile needles and syringes to intravenous drug-users, breaking state law.
Proponents of the current law say supplying clean syringes to addicts encourages people to take intravenous drugs. The logic behind this argument is warped: People will not begin taking heroin because the chances of getting AIDS from shooting up are reduced. But addicts will take whatever steps necessary to get their fix — AIDS or no AIDS.
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Justice is lost as perjurers go free
Israeli security officials perverted the idea of fairness by lying under oath
For years now, the concept of perjury has been ailing in the Western world. Those who follow the fortunes of arcane ideas should be informed that not long ago, it died in the land where it took shape. An official inquiry in Israel reported that, for the past 16 years, officials of that country's security service have been routinely perjuring themselves in order to convict suspected terrorists.
The reaction was much as one would expect from a modern, advanced society. The commission recommended that no one be punished or dismissed or censured in any other way. Its conclusion could be summed up as: Don't do it any more. And so due respect was paid to the late concept that lying under oath is wrong; convictions based on perjured testimony might even be reviewed. But the revelation set off no great public clamor. It was as if most Israelis had suspected what their security service had been doing all along and had no great objection. There's a war on, isn't there?
The Israeli army officer whose conviction set off the inquiry is a Moslem by the name of Ifat Nafus. He is Israel's own Alfred Dreyfus, whose conviction on the basis of false evidence divided France for much of the last century. The Dreyfus Affair became one of the great watersheds and wounds of modern European history. But there will be no Nafus Affair in this century; perjured testimony isn't that big a deal any more.
The Israeli inquiry concluded that the officials who perjured themselves never had "meant to convict innocent persons." It just worked out that way in this case. Those who swore that the defendant voluntarily confessed to treason doubtless had come to think of perjury as a routine necessity, another technical chore to be performed in the modern bureaucracy.
On the travel posters, Israel is still the Land of the Bible. That's the book in which it is written: "Who shall ascend the mountain of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? He that has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not taken God's name in vain, and has not swned deceitfully." But the modern man who studies the Bible as literature knows a poetic fancy when he hears one. He is not about to jeopardize the security of
Paul Greenberg Syndicated Columnist
the state because of a technicality, especially an ancient — and therefore an outmoded — one.
It is not only in Israel that a technicality has come to mean any right that stands in the way of a conviction. Wasn't it the attorney general of the United States, The Honorable Edwin Meese, who said that only the guilty avail themselves of their rights in a criminal investigation? (If so, surely he said that before he became enmeshed in one.)
Although truthfulness may be paid homage in public statements, as it was by this Israeli commission, perjury is a tough rap to prove, as was said in the midst of Watergate. That was the affair in which the conspirator-in-chief, Richard Nixon, told the public one thing ("I condemn any attempts to cover up this case, no matter who is involved") and his colleagues another. "(I want you all to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up, or anything else.)" Anything else. The truth has an inconvenient way of complicating not only criminal convictions but political ambitions.
When Robert Holt wrote "A Man for All Seasons" about Sir Thomas More, he felt obliged to answer an obvious question in this age — "Why do I take as my hero a man who brings about his own death because he can't put his hand on an old black book and tell an ordinary lie?" The playwright tried to explain:
obvious sense; we would prefer most men to guarantee their statements with, say, cash rather than with themselves. We feel — we know — the self to be an equivocal commodity. There are fewer and few things which, as they say, we 'cannot bring ourselves' to do. We can find almost no limits for ourselves other than the physical, which, being physical, are not optional. Perhaps this is why we have fallen back so widely on physical torture as a means of bringing pressure to bear on another.'
"A man takes an oath only when he wants to commit himself quite exceptionally to the statement, when he wants to make an identity between the truth of it and his own virtue; he offers himself as a guarantee. And it works. There is a special kind of shrug for a perjurer; we feel that the man has no skill to offer. Of course, it's much less effective now that for most of us, the actual words of the oath are not much more impressive mumbo-jumbo than it was when they made
That may explain why this report by the Israeli commission, headed by a former supreme court justice of that country, also countenances physical force to extract confessions. The death of perjury soon enough leads to the death of other concepts.
What must the Israeli officer who was imprisoned for seven years on perjured testimony have thought of the commission's conclusions? Said Ifat Nafus: "I had anticipated that the responsible for putting me in prison and ruining my life would be brought to trial. Instead I see that they are going to go free." He had only one question: "What about justice?"
Well, that's one of those other concepts that may have to go when perjury becomes routine; a necessary bother rather than an ultimate betrayal. As Robert Bolt noted, once the concept of a transendent self is lost, the perjurier betrays nothing. Unless perjury is a sin against something sacred in man, how serious a crime can it be? What, if anything, is betrayed if the self has become an equivocal commodity? Despite all his learning and sophistication and love of life, Thomas More preferred to lose his head rather than his self. His was a medieval choice and, however much moderns may admire it, we may no longer be able to understand it. Instead, in an arrogance of arrogances, we tend to use the term medieval as a synonym for ignorant and backward.
Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Pine Bluff (Ark). Commercial and a syndicated columnist, is the recipient of the 1988 William Allen White Award. He will receive the award and deliver the William Allen White Day address here Wednesday.
Geology jobs are scarce
I agree with the statement that Lee Gerhard, director of the Kansas Geological Survey, made in an article in the Feb. 2 Kansan. If you want to go into geology, now is the time. Unfortunately, tomorrow, when you get laid off, you'll have to go into something else.
Dr. Tony Walton, chairman of the department of geology, is a good salesman. He could probably do well as a pet rock salesman, which
is the only job geology graduates are qualified to fill. This is the second article in the past three months in which Walton has spoken of the bountie job opportunities. Neither article clearly stated that people with only bachelor's degrees would get laughed out of Houston if they attempted to apply for a job in the oil industry. A master's degree is required if you want them to wait until you leave before they roll on the floor laughing.
Most geology graduate students were surprised to read that they all had jobs waiting for them. Out of the approximately 15 students who interviewed with oil companies last fall, only two hit paydirt, and neither had "multiple offers." I wish them better luck than the two who were hired the previous fall and are now seeking employment elsewhere, perhaps as teaching assistants for optical mineralogy.
Oil prices have been rising since they hit bottom at $10 a barrel in 1986, but the average price of domestic crude last year was only $16 a barrel, according to the Explorer, a trade publication. This is well below the price of $25 a barrel set in 1985, which at the time was considered dire straits compared to the peak of $32 a barrel in 1981. Economists who predict that demand will exceed supply of oil in five years are probably the same economists who used rulers to extrapolate the rising oil price curve in 1981 to predict $50 a barrel prices by 1986. These soothsayers should loan their crystal balls to the students in optical mineralogy lab. Perhaps they could show Dr. Gerhard where the cracks are.
Matt Wilson Terre Haute, Ind., graduate student
BLOOM COUNTY
bv Berke Breathed
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