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Thursday, November 18, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
D-day for budget
Today is an important day for the University of Kansas, KU officials are scheduled to try to justify budget requests to try to justify Knett and James Bibb, state budget director.
Right now the fiscal 1978 budget doesn't look good for KU. Bibb has recommended incredible cuts in KU's requests, even though the university be approved by a Board of Regents.
NO ONE wants to waste the taxpayers' money, but Bibb's cuts are difficult to believe, much less support. KU isn't asking for great improvements. The University is merely trying to provide the basics, and Bibb has said no.
For example, KU asked for about $300,000 to keep the library open more often and to meet the increased costs of journals. KU isn't asking for much, especially considering that the library is understaffed. Bibb cut the whole library improvement request.
Did KU ask for fancy new facilities and bloated salaries? Bibb must think so, because he cut money. O. expressJohnson increased the salary of his college faculty increases from 7 per cent to 3.5 per cent.
THIS DOESN'T leave enough money for KU to even keep up with increasing enrollments and inflation. The University is crowded in many places, and its faculty are grossly underpaid when compared with the faculties of comparable universities.
The cuts aren't only unreasonable—they are asking the impossible. The state expects
KU to provide a top-notch university education to more than 24,000 students, but it expects KU to do so without the facilities, the library or the salaries needed to attract—let alone keep—the best professors in the Midwest.
This is made even more unreasonable when one considers that Kansas is by no means a poor state. Unemployment isn't much of a problem, either. This state should be able to finance its services at least well enough to keep up with inflation.
For the future, all universities and other institutions dependent on state funds should band together and demand that the Kansas Legislature reform the state tax structure.
More income taxes should be used because they expand with the economy and inflation unlike sales and property taxes. A more elastic tax structure would give the state the revenue to avoid its annual wrist and budget slashing.
WHAT KU must do now is defend its reasonable requests and hope that Gov. Bennett, who has been good to higher schools in the state, sees the need to restore Bibb's cuts.
KU's budget problems are significant because KU is a great university in danger, and because they show that the state's annual fiscal crises are the fault of lawmakers, not of the agencies requesting support or of the state's economy.
By Greg Hack
Contributing Writer
Ho, ho, ho hum
Guess what tonight is, kiddies.
No, you're wrong. Tonight is Santa Night at Sears—the official opening of the Christmas shopping season. After all, there are only 38 shopping days left.
NOW SOME of you might think it is a bit early for decking the halls with boughs of bolly, but then some of you are Sergeoges. If you work your way year, why not make it last all year long?
Second, it extends the football bowl entertainment both sports fans and television networkers.
There are all sorts of marvelous and wonderful reasons for extending the shopping season into mid-November. First of all, it is warmer and less likely to snow. Snow and cold weather cause great purchases for both shopers and sidewalk Santas.
Matching an extended shopping season with an extended bowl season is great for everyone concerned and prevents needless competition.
THIRD, finally and least important, it helps the merchants and the American economy. Increased Christmas spending will more than make up for any cuts in the defense budget and will help ease unemployment.
There are those few who say that the constant lengthening of the Christmas shopping season is a Communist plot designed to destroy Christmas as a holiday by making us sick and tired of it by the time Dec. 25 finally comes along.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Publicized at the University of Kansai daily August 17th, 2014 at 10 a.m. (EST) June and July except Saturday, Sunday and Halloween. Subscriptions by mail are $9 a semester or $18 a year outside the county. County student subscriptions are a year outside the county. Student subscriptions are a year outside the county.
Editor
Editor
Debbie Gump
Managing Editor Editorial Editor
Yael Aboualakh Jim Bates
Business Manager
Assistant Business Manager ... Carole Rosenkoetter
And there are those few who say the constant lengthening of the Christmas shopping season is nothing but an indication that this year the American businesses and advertising agencies.
BOTH THESE few are wrong. In the first place, Communists don't care about Christmas, and in the second place, American businesses aren't greedy.
The truth is the American people like to hear "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" for two months out of every year. They like their Christmas heaped full of electric ho, ho, ho; they have their own rares and proper occasions, they like an occasional cartoon about the baby Jesus.
Sure, they protest about too much commercialization of the holiday, but they're not serious.
COMPUTERIZED surveys done by a prominent Eastern firm prove that deep in their heart of hearts the people of this nation want their Christmas to be long and gaudy and fake. They really don't believe that Christmas is about peace on earth and the Christmas spirit.
American business is only giving the public what it wants.
Now, if you will bear with me for a time, let us stand in the stern ward sarcastic to a more serious tone.
NOV. 18 being Santa Night is funny, but it is also rather sad. Christmas should be something special—especially for animals for an forgastics, atheists and others as well.
Protesting the commercialization of the holidays is something that millions of people do every year. Yet every year the commercialization continues.
So maybe the businesses, advertising agencies and television networks know what they're doing. Maybe they're right. Downtown Christmas lights in September may be just what the masses are clamoring for.
It certainly would be great if that isn't the case. But the way things are going, who knows.
By Jim Bates Editorial Editor
The thought both excited and horrified
Mass exodus no big deal
And guess who was left? Yours truly, the lowly associate campus editor, left behind to run the Kansan for a couple days.
'LOOK AT THAT! 37 CENTS! AND THEY SAID WE'D NEVER RUN IN THE BLACK!'
I've often wondered whether there were some sort of force—call it a ghost, spirit, whatever—that insures the Kansan's daily survival.
**THAT THOUGHT** was put to a test of sorts the latter half of this past week, when Ms. Banks taught editor, managing editor and campus editor ( lots of editors float around Flint Hall) left campus to attend a convention of the Society of Professional Journalists
—And that if, for some reason, neither reporters nor editors showed up some night, there would still be a Kansas the next day—stuffed, crammed and piled into the distribution boxes around campus; fluttering out of campus bus windows filling trash cans after one hour at least part of the minds of its readers.
Of course.I'd known about my impending abandonment for some time before it occurred and had conjured up delicious images in vivid Technicolor of me, as the Lord of the Newsroom.
THERE I was, steering the Kansan
you what it was like, being editor those tumultuous two daws last week.
The trouble is, I can't. Nothing happened.
I DIDN'T have to fire anyone. Chan-
Editor's Note
ship of state through the choppy waters of day-to-day news, herding my reporters over journalistic mountains a Hannibal would dread, urging these same reporters to higher Herculean phases of brilliance (forgetting at the same time that some had yet to enter Herculean brillance phase No. 1).
cellor Dykes didn't die. Mt. Rushmore, at last report, is still standing.
And now, a week later, here I sit, back in my old (safe) position, trying to tell
I also imagined falling asleep in the editor's office and setting it afire; being beaten soundly by some jock who demanded football photos of him in action; overwatering and drowning the office plant (a pampered Boston Fern).
And so, apparently, is the Kansan.
To that, I attribute the cooperation I received from the rest of the staff. A few minor problems, to be sure.
The sports staff had to rewrite their copy to fit two ad-crammed pages. The photographers occasionally quibbled about whether to run one or two photos on page one. And the printing plant had to run the lead editorial in the wrong size
BUT AS far as I know, I stepped on no toes, and the plant still likes me (I think).
Perhaps the second biggest shock or all last week was the knowledge that I
would, if necessary, have to make a final decision. "I was never getting the chance to make one."
What would I have done if a major fire had destroyed downtown Lawrence? Suppose the Board of Regents had ordered the University closed? What would have happened if the office plant had indeed died?
ALAS, THE heavy burden of responsibility was not to be mine last week.
Thursday and Friday's Kansans came out, just as they have Thursdays and Fridays in the past. Reporters missed deadlines, photographers missed that "once-in-a-lifetime" shot, and the janitor cleaned up the news room again, just as they have Thursdays and Fridays in the past. Somehow it all got done.
to those staff members who stayed behind and helped me make those not-so-good decisions.
And to those staff members who went to Los Angeles . . . well, no hard feelings. And thanks for the Universal Studio pennant.
I think I'll go home now.
And let the Kansan ghost take over.
Resolution may stop news flow
This is shop talk, in a sense,
for it deals with the news
business. But in calling attention
to this month's UNESCO
meeting in Nairobi, perhaps a
newman may be forgiven for
the mischief of having Nairobi
Nairobi the fix on; and this is
everybody's business.
THE PURPOSE of the resolution is to cut off the free
UNESCO, of course, is the United Nations Educational, Social and Cultural Organization. It is the one big umbrella organization pretentious folly that keeps the United Nations busy. At their 19th annual conference in Nairobi, delegates will consider a resolution backed by the Union of potentially large OPPONENTS.
flow of news from the Third World. To be sure, the purpose isn't stated so bluntly.
The Soviet resolution hints at a new mechanism to achieve these aims—a kind of Third
James J. Kilpatrick
World Press Association with total control of the gathering and dissemination of news in member countries. But this is not the case in the fashion of the Associated Press or United Press International
Aed 1976 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
This prospect emerges from the gauzy wording of the resolution. "Since the international exchange of information is fundamental to the strengthening of peace and international understanding. We understand that countries have the right to diffuse reports of national events beyond their borders'. Translation: Thirty years ago, we have the right and the power, to control the flow of news.
"IT IS a responsibility of the mass media to avoid any justification or encouragement of the evils of war, violence, apartheid and other forms of national, racial, or religious hatred. Translation: Foreign comment upon things we don't want them to cover or comment upon.
have a duty to make widely known among the peoples of the world the objectives of equity, sovereignty, equal opportunity, inter- interest and cooperation, among all states." Translated from the U.N.'s newspaper, that means that Western journalists have an obligation to disseminate information oppaganda in the ruise of news.
The resolution asserts that member states "are responsible for the activities in the international sphere of all mass media under their jurisdiction." accrediting and censoring
"volunteers in our countries," Abbas Sykes said. "They should take their news from us."
DURING THIS past weekend, Tanzania's ambassador to UNESCO will pretense to side. "We don't want Western
THE UNITED States will be represented at the Nairobi conference. Our delegation of course will oppose the Soviet resolution. To their credit, some Third World spokesmen have warned that Moscow has grave reservations about the pending resolution.
Even so, it is probable that something close to the Soviet draft resolution will win approval at Nairobi. If the resolution then is implemented, much of the word "close" is used in the kind of press we cherish. At Nairobi in 1976, we move significantly closer to Orwell's 1984.
Bishops uphold uncontemporary views
Less than a month ago in Detroit, Catholic lay delegates attended a conference aimed at democratizing the church at the national level. The conference was called the "Call to Action," and it urged the nation's Catholic bishops to begin focusing on and search for fulfillment within the Christian framework than on traditional dogma.
THE CONFERENCE called for an emphasis on the part of church teaching that permits married couples to follow their own path. The committee asked for a "serious effort to reconcile separated, divorced and remarried Catholics with the church" and called for the church to lift the automatic exoneration against divorced, remarried Catholics.
The Call to Action recommendations will be formally acted upon by the bishops at a conference next May, but a conference of the bishops in Washington, D.C. last week issued an official delegate a good idea of how difficult it is to reach an old church new tricks.
The bishops passed, by a substantial
ACCORDING TO the letter, one is bad, or sadly in need of moral education, if one practices any sort of birth control except for the rhythm method, is homosexual, has any kind of sexual intercourse outside of marriage, gets married, is as long as one's spouse is alive. Married couples who decide never to have children also are condemned.
majority (241 to 172), a statement reaffirming the church's traditional stands on sex, divorce, birth control and homosexuality. The statement, called a Pastoral Letter on Moral Values, is certainly not what Call to Action had in mind.
What can be criticized is the church's refusal to abandon long cherished dogma and taboos concerning the individual sex lives and preferences of its members. The church's "contemporary statement on sexual morality" developed to clear up confusion
The issue of abortion is one that reasonable people can vehemently dispute forever. Thus, criticism of the church's views on the issue would serve little purpose here.
ALTHOUGH THE letter's strong reactionary stands may have cleared up the confusion, it certainly isn't 'nature'. Its sate is to say that the nation's six million divorced Catholics (out of 48.7 million) don't consider it a satisfactory resolution to their
that aureus from Pope Paul VI's 1967 birth control method, artificial infant birth control methods
John Fuller Contributing Writer
problem. The letter says they are adulterers living in sin if they remarry or have sexual relations with others. Yet there is hopelessly long waiting lists for the church courts' annulment process whereby marriages are declared to be non-sacramental or invalid. Those who go through civil courts face excommunication.
Certainly those Catholics who have decided to stop having children after their first, fifth or twelfth child don't consider it a religion. They would rather have the children they have to choose between a religious they
get comfort and inspiration from and having more children than they want or can afford? Why should the sex lives of married couples be impeded by the church with its clammy and risky rhythm method of birth control?
IN A WORLD with exploding population and food problems, why should couples be condemned for not having children? In India the government is paying citizens a tax on the money they use mandatory sterilization programs. India has seen the results of a people's failure to use birth control methods. Now it's desperately trying to correct the situation where millions won't starve, Lobbi, the Catholic Church has very limited there.
Unfortunately, it does have massive influence in many other countries that have population problems. Still, the bishops insist on tradition. But that is another issue.
Not to leave any doubts in the minds of
Gay Catholics, the bishops issued a
statement against homosexuality, which
the Washington Post said was probably the
strongest on the subject by any American church.
Ca
Simply put, to be moral one must be heterosexual. However, the bishops did say that homosexuus were entitled to "respect, justice." Justice ." None will be burned at the stake.
Many of the bishops were disturbed by the tone of the letter. They saw that it showed little understanding of the values and realities of contemporary society in America. How many people still consider the sun? Is birth control evil to the masses?
FORGIVE THE FACIENCY tone, but it was used to show one attitude that can arise from an institution's refusal to change: people stop taking it seriously and start ignoring it, or at least ignoring the particular aspects of it that aren't valid to them.
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Archibishop Peter L. Gerety said he had a "profound unease about the tone of the letter." He and others said it was insensitive to too many Catholics.
"It pays little attention to the practical
He and the that or a
problems that many people are confronting in regard to certain aspects of moral conduct.
THE LETTER contains beliefs and rules for behavior that once had some sound historical foundation. There was a time when there were good practical reasons for practicing chastity, for instance. But the time has come for the Catholic Church and other religions that can be dogged to realize that without the support of those who believe in them, churches and all their rules are meaningless.
How can people be asked to give their full support to a church that asks them to deny or ignore widely accepted and arguably correct beliefs, such as artificial birth control or divorce?
As the Call to Action conference indicated, this question and many others will continue to be asked by people who refuse to relinquish either their faith in God or their right to follow their own consciences on certain personal matters. How the church responds will determine its future in an increasingly complicated world.