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Thursday, November 11, 1976
University Daily Kansan
Comment
Opinions on this page reflect the view of only the writer.
Pay raise overdue
The 1976 election is over, which means that the real business of government is about to begin.
Nationally, Jimmy Carter is getting ready to occupy the White House and Gerald Ford is preparing to retire as President.
IN KANSAS, and in many other states, state governments are getting ready to organize. Most of them will have basically the same political makeup as before the election, but here in Kansas the politicians are getting ready for a Democratic House, a Republican governor and possibly a Democratic Senate. For what was once called the most Republican state in the union, the rise of the Democrats is surprising.
The University of Kansas must now deal with a divided state government. It's going to be tough for the government to get anything done during this session of the legislature, and the funding of KU could become a target of a headline-grabbing politician, as it has in the past.
What the University is asking for is reasonable. The most controversial thing to be requested, and one of the most important, is a 10 per cent increase in faculty salaries.
THE UNIVERSITY requested the increase, and the Board of Regents approved a 7 per cent request.
Governor Robert Bennett looked at the request and chopped it in half.
If the legislature does again what it did last year, it will whack Bennett's request by a per cent or two. Although something is better than nothing, an increase of 3 or 4 per cent won't even keep the salaries of KU professors ahead of inflation.
KU ranks 12th in faculty salaries out of the 14 Midwestern state schools that are rated alongside it. That's the pay equivalent of finishing number seven in the Big Eight.
I DON'T think number 12 (or for that matter, number seven) is a good place for KU to rank. The students of Kansas need a good school to attend, and a lower division school can't expect to keep or hire good faculty members.
The legislature has made some progress in improving faculty pay. They approved increases of 10 per cent two and three years ago, although they trimmed another 10 per cent increase last year to 8 per cent.
The University of Kansas and the other state schools need a substantial increase in pay for faculty members this year.
Without the increase, KU and the other schools have no place to go but down.
By Carl Young Contributing Writer
1976 NYT SPECIAL FEATURES
Politics can mean life or death
Americans, as we've heard this election year, live in a land where the great majority of citizens have the luxury of ignoring politics if they wish. As a matter of fact, it's so easy to do that it becomes equally easy to see politics everywhere as a part of a few professional politics that has little to do
with the daily lives of most citizens.
BEING ABLE to have that luxury might be testimony to the greatness of our system. It also could be a sign of its decay. Whatever the case, it's a luxury that many peoples in countries around the world can ill afford. There, in such places as Angola, Lebanon or South Africa, people with a desire of life and death, liberty or enslavement, hunger or fulfillment.
This reality was driven home to me Monday evening when I attended a conference on the Palestinian Revolution and the movement of the Movement sponsored by the IranianStudent Association and the Organization of Arab Students in the United States and Canada. The conference also involved the two groups with the Palestinian Revolution. It was intended to help the American people understand the situation in Lebanon and the extent of the movement there. Naturally, few Americans showed up.
I HAVE no intention of taking sides in this column on the Palestinian question or the Arab-Israeli conflict in general. As L.F. Stone once suggested, if one of our tribal communities undoubtedly died from trying to untangle the origins of the Middle East conflict. Even Fawaz Turk, the passionately pro-Palestinian speaker at the conference, admits in one of his books that the "diligence, partisan historians on both sides can come up with perfectly valid, though
The murmuring about NBC black network news stars, or the absence of them, has begun again. Not that the other two networks are overloaded with black news content, but some reason the National Biscuit network gets blamed more than the others.
That may be because only NBC bothers to reply to complaints about the matter, such as the one made by Ken Dean, the President of NBC's Jackson, Miss., affiliate WLBT-W. Richard Walid, president of NBC News, was quoted by president Obama as saying Dean Cain criticizes about the lack of coverage the Democratic National Convention last summer was "unfortunately part right."
Blacks vet to be newscasters
Q. There must be one black reporter talented enough to be featured on network news. Yet there isn't. (B laugh) people do occasionally hold microphones on the Chancellor-Brinkley Hour of Power, usually Carol Simpson, who is also doing wildlife stories and places about cuddly animals at the National Zoo.
Q. For a network that spent a half-
A. Believe me, it is not for want of looking. We are scouring the country. Women's file suit against us. The National Broadcasting Company is a profit-taking company with its image. And they have not been able to solve this problem.
million on a logo, it's incredible that you cannot discover a single black correspondent.
and a. If we'd taken the logo money and used it for a minor talent office, I'm not sure that we could found them because I'm not certain they exist. On a
LAST SPRING John Chancellor, in an interview with Philip Nobile of More magazine, talked about these questions, and he was the author for an old pal of his to have to reprint.
LET'S NOT humiliate the creature and put "a poor unqualified black" on the air. Lord, lordy, no! But what we will do instead is make Miss Teenage America an anchor person. You don't even have to know how to read without moving your lips because you're reading out loud. Index fingers are verboten though.
Not long ago, Variety, the show biz magazine that probably covers TV news better than any other publication, carried an item that said a New York television news program and the grounded that everybody knows television news is entertainment, that it isn't intended to be a representation of fact, and so it couldn't anyone any more than Robert Louis Steele. But currently unbelievable tell of tall tales.
THERE ARE well-read, studious and skilled people in TV journalism, but they don't use those qualities in the performance of their work. If ABC can take John Lindsay or David Hartman and turn them into newspapers, if NBC can call Tom Snyder, the first man to win an award for his natural act on network TV, a journalist, then it is paliably ridiculous to speculate that similar black talent doesn't exist. If NBC can make a star out of a white woman with a speech
network level, they are extremely hard to locate. What NBC refuses to do, unlike local stations around the country, is put some poor unqualified black on the air and then say privately that so-and-so is terrible but we have to get him or her
Nicholas Von Hoffman (c) 1974 King Features Syndicate
IF TELEVISION news is primarily entertainment, a conclusion only
impediment, it can call up central casting and find a glamorous person of the black or Mexican persuasion to share the nBC news update with Torn Snyder. Can't find a person qualified to do that? What about looking in the living pool?
The long history of resolutions, treaties and wars in that part of the world is like a Gordian knot that can seemly never be undone or dead. If there were more events there would seem therefore even more futile and repugnant than here, when people are born
diametrically opposed, views at the long and bloody conflict
and live their lives in refugee camps, when school children are massacred on both sides and when the bombs explode on innocent streets and villages, politics should seem totally corrupted and devoid of any solutions or problems in the Middle East.
disputed by people in television news, why can't the dear old Biscuit Company find a few black stars? Baseball, football, basketball. These are the branch of the entertainment industry has been able to discover a pleid of black stars. These folks sing and dance as well as white men, and, if you work with 'em a little bit, you'll be their fingers and keep pretty good time.
The work isn't that hard. Mostly what you need for it is presentable looks and the gift of gag. He or she who can wave his or her mouth around so as to extrude a seamless flow of dimmed out, conventional vacuities should do admirably. There are some well-educated anchor people, but it isn't an job you can afford. You wouldn't need very much or have the kind of information that is the basis for good judgment because other people do that for you.
A few anchor people do some writing for their shows, but for the most part shows are written and assembled by others. The anchor person is to the news desk, cutting and disseminating chain as the display screen is to the computer.
John Fuller Contributing Writer
Jack Chancellor is a dear man, personally, and an excellent journalist, professionally, but his considerable talents aren't tested in his present position. TV newsing doesn't require the skills we ordinarily associate with journalism: an ability to write well, quickly and concisely; a capacity to organize complicated and technical information; and soothe people not familiar with them can understand: a knowledge of history, philosophy; etc. Last summer on coast-to-coast TV, Jimmy Carter's mother had to explain to Waltron Cricktean who Tom Watson, a major figure in southern and national history, was.
TURKI SAID in his speech that it was in fact a Draconian task for an Arab revolutionary movement to succeed now. He says the many forces acting against the revolutionary forces there.
IN VIEW of the fact that news anchor people are of such large symbolic importance in our society—vide the fuss over the arrival of La Walters at the pinnacle of evening news—it's important that each network have one who is black. The ultimate in tokenism. True, but the difference between faithless gestures and symbolic promises is too fine to distinguish. Company is a part of them, including noncommercial TV, which is the worst of the four networks in this regard, should get on the case fast. Otherwise fellas, how about Chevy Chase in black face?
"We must fight against not only imperialism, but against Arab reactionism and Islam," the speaker said. "It's a bloomer it is."
Those who are involved in an armed and bitter struggle can't play it safe. The issues they are dealing with are at more much of a gullet level than say inflation, government spending or the sex lives of our august representatives in Washington.
During the conference, I reflected on the difference between American political rhetoric and debate and that of those engaged in a drastically different arena. The presidential debates, for example, stressed "playing it safe" above all else. Both candidates played it so safely, avoiding emotion and candor as much as possible, that the majority decide on the winner. Too much of our political debate is like that.
Despite the odds that the revolutionaries and their sympathizers and their abroad face in their struggle, I saw no difference between weakening of resolve. There were instead strong signs of commitment and patriotic fervor. Politics may have been unworkable, but that exist in the Middle East but most of those at the conference, I think, have realized that turning away from politics in Israel is a sin when so many of their people are suffering.
TURKI WAS asked what was to be done about such things as inflation and the quality of information in the Palestinian world.
"We can't address ourselves to inflation and education until after we overthrow these regimes that have stolen our blood," he said. If we have to die by the gun, we have to die by the bunn!"
"common sense!" Turk retorted indigently. "You live on the West Bank for five days—just five days. If you aren't filled with rage enough to want to strike back, then come back and tell me about common sense!"
walls of the meeting room reflected that commitment and perhaps a shade of fanaticism. "Long live the Palestinian Revolution and Lebanese Republic," she said. "Oppose U.S. backed Syrian invasion," read two of the large hand-painted signs. Perhaps the most effective was a color print solemnly faced Palestinian girls standing with machine guns crudled in their arms.
SIGNS AND posters on the
Perhaps he is really describing why politics exists.
Substitute Israeli for Palestinian and you have what the Israelis are also fighting for. Both sides of this particular conflict have suffered. Sides have suffered. Politics in their world is inescapable and pervasive. Politics there means the loss of a home, a stray bullet in the back or the inability to have any true peace of mind. It has a struggle for survival, a place to call home, and freedom.
One American student said that it showed more common sense to try to resolve the conflict without guns.
SOME WOULD dismiss this as strident radical rhetoric, but they are those who have forgotten that such rhetoric is necessary and vital in some situations.
There are still people fighting for the things that most Americans take for granted. Turki reflected in his book on his experiences as a Palestinian refugee.
"Wine is an existential problem," he said, "having to do with the yearning for my homeland, with being part of a culture, with winning the battle against it." The Palestinian belonging to a people with a Palestinian consciousness."
That's something to think about the next time someone says to you that politics is meaningless or ridiculous. That doesn't matter to them and our complacent nation than it does about politics.
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Letters
Ab Jimn in Ho cone
Voting spot defended
m response to the Nov. 9 letter criticizing the location of the HOPE voting, we the undersigned feel that a valid point was made. However, this problem was considered more difficult and decided to continue the voting at the information booth.
To the Editor:
ticke sell City
both ends of campus. Also, the information booth isn't in any particular building. If it were in Summerfield, Green, Robinson or Blake, there would be a definite bias. The closeness of students to the Green Street indicates that the seniors in schools housed in those halls have just as far to go to vote as a journalism student.
The information booth is the most centrally located spot on campus. This allows for a balanced flow of traffic from
on the past 19 years, the journalism school has won the HOPE award only three times. There have been 16 award winners in other schools. This indicates that the interest has
been there before and if a senior feels that one of his instructors is worthy of a vote he should make the effort.
Bill French,
Senior Class President
Steffen Van Kepel,
Senior Class Vice-President
Sheila Moore,
Senior Class Treasurer
Mariane Maurin
Senior Class Secretary
Carol Kennedy,
HOPE Committee Chairman
HOPE, Committee Chairman
HOPE, Committee Chairman
Letters Policy
Letters to the editor are welcomed but should be typewritten, double-spaced and no longer than 400 words. All letters are edited and may be condensed according to space limitations and the editor's judgment. Letters must be submitted to all students must provide their academic standing and hometown; faculty must provide their position; others must provide their address.
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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