4A
Thursday, February 15, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
With linear tuition, access to evaluations is critical
An important reason why many students are adamant about gaining access to student evaluations of instructors is the new linear tuition system.
Students no longer will be able to add or drop courses with the same flexibility they have had in the past, and they are concerned. Linear tuition will force students to be more careful about class choices, giving them a legitimate right to research instructors if they desire.
Student senator Scott Sullivan plans to sue the University because it has denied his petition to release evaluations of instructors under the Kansas Open Records Act. Although this action perhaps is excessive, Sullivan was driven to it by University administration.
The administration made the decision to switch to linear tuition, but it refuses even to be remotely sympathetic to student concerns about adding and dropping classes. Beginning next year, students
THE ISSUE:
Linear tuition
Because it will be more difficult to drop a class, access to evaluations would be valuable.
may find themselves between a rock and a hard place if they get stuck with a bad class or professor. Under linear tuition, students will be punished economically for dropping a class early in the semester.
The University should work with the student body to come up with a solution. If the administration doesn't compromise with Sullivan, valuable time, energy and money will be wasted.
Linear tuition will force students to be extremely careful about class selection, and they should be allowed access to student evaluations of instructors. The University implemented linear tuition and therefore should allow students to access past evaluations.
TARA FITZPATRICK FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Higher Internet access charge could help offset growth costs
The University of Kansas, which has struggled to maintain the minimum speed limit on the information superhighway, has announced its willingness to fall further behind and risk getting pulled over for impeding traffic. The growth of offcampus terminal server accounts, almost 100 percent during the past year, has created the need for more phone lines and enhanced Internet access systems.
Unfortunately, this growth has been met with the attitude that we cannot keep up and perhaps should stop providing access. What the University fails to see is the tremendous opportunity for financial gain and academic dispensation that can be attained by continuing to offer the service and charging a higher fee.
The University has two things to gain: money and reputation. The University already receives $30 per terminal server account for which they received nothing last year. The University could raise its ter-
THE ISSUE:
Terminal fees
minimal server charge and still provide Internet access for a fraction of what commercial service providers charge. Students and faculty would benefit from continued access at the University and still pay less than commercial rates.
Students and faculty accepted the $30 price tag for access this past year without so much as the blink of an eye. The necessity for students to understand and work with the Internet, and computers in general, far outweighs the price that the University could charge for this service. A fair price and continued service would benefit students and provide the University with the funds to continue service, and possibly enhance it in the future.
The University cannot afford to fall further behind other academic institutions in the race for computer accessibility.
CHRIS VINE FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Jeff MacNelly / CHICAGO TRIBUNE
WHAT IS RACE FOR?
The third of three essays on race and identity
Biracial children are quite special people with special needs in a society that is more obsessed with race than its members usually care to admit. They are Caucasian, but not quite. They are Black, but not completely. In some less-enlightened Black circles, they find themselves envied and ostracized.
exalted and defiled, all because of a genetic accident in which they had no say. They live, like their parents, on the edges of tribal life, on the margins of America's historical
racial contradictions. By their very existence, they flout both the immutability of the one-drop rule and the purity of Africa-descended Americans as a "race."
"The large majority of Mexico is multiracial. It's almost the official culture. Mexico hasn't asked a race question on its census since 1921. So on the U.S. census, people who put Mexican for race know full well what it means. It's mestizo, and that is a racial designation, not a nationality."
The number of
But times are changing. Interracial marriage and reproduction are on the upswing, and a new generation of post-1960s multiracial children is demanding recognition, not in the margins of society but as a mainstream of their very own.
The future of race in America increasingly will sound out the question a Newsweek cover asked in 1994, "What Color Is Black?" What color is white? What is race? Such questions always have nagged at the rigid underpinnings of America's racial order, but never more urgently than today, on the brink of a new century in which the standards of a new generation pose the greatest challenge yet to the curse of the color line.
The future of race in America is the focus of a political and social movement by mixed-race children and their families. They don't seek much, just recognition. They want the government to create a new "multiracial" category on census and school forms.
"Mexicans, especially, regard themselves as mestizo — part Spanish, part indigenous," Carlos Fernandez, president of the San Francisco-based Association of Multi-Ethnic Americans, told American Demographics in June 1994.
The future of race in America is in Mexico today.
Their organizations and support groups across the country include the Atlanta-based Project RACE, the San Francisco-based Association of Multiethnic Americans, the Chicago-based Biracial Family Network, and the District of Columbia-based Interracial Family Circle, among others.
people who checked the box marked "other race" on census forms increased 45 percent between the 1980 and 1990 censuses, to
9. 8 million people, about 1 in 25 Americans, according to American Demographics. Out of that group, 98 percent claimed Hispanic origin on the ethnicity question, which means more than 40 percent of the nation's 22 million self-identified Hispanics are not willing to identify themselves as black or white.
Even in the 1920s, when Mexico was removing race from its census forms, the U.S. Census Bureau was estimating three-quarters of African Americans could claim at least some white blood.
The future of race in America is in Brazil, where it is said that the first "Coloured" was born nine months after the arrival of the Europeans.
The future of race in America is the Latino-American woman whose great-great-grandmother was Black, but she passes for Caucasian, while she describes her dark-skinned sister to American Demographics magazine as trigua, which she translated as "brown."
Black people, in my experience, seldom have been very sophisticated or tolerant about fellow Blacks who don't want to be Black. As a college roommate of mine used to say, "Black, the whole Black, and nothing else but Black." Few are willing, in the face of what appears to be omnipotent, omnipresent Caucasian racism, to split hairs or chromosomes about the one-drop rule.
Much of the Black backlash against Blacks who want to be identified as mixed or multiracial stems from ancient resentments in the Black community about not just color but complexion and even deeper self-loathing that reaches the boiling point at the suggestion that some other Black person does not want to be Black.
"When I discover who I am, I'll be free," Ralph Ellison once said. If Black Americans of whatever color cannot be freed to be appreciated as
individuals, one wonders, what is freedom worth when it is a freedom limited by the tyranny of small community minds dressed up in the trappings of cultural nationalism?
Perhaps, then, the future of race in America is captured at the end of a handy list of "Coping Tips" for biracial teens published in *Biracial Child magazine*: "Don't try to befriend people who won't accept you for whom you are." It is the easiest advice for parents to give. And the most difficult for teens, still forming a sense of their own individual identity while also yearning to be a part of a crowd, to follow.
Multiracial children bear a special burden. They hear black people instructing them to identify strictly as Black because that is the way society will view them. Whose society? At bottom, it is the society of those very same Black people. Black Americans who have internalized white supremacist attitudes and values become agents of those attitudes and values, enforcing them in others and passing them on to a new generation more effectively than the Ku Klux Klan ever could.
Biracials point out that they are running away from nothing. I believe them. They cannot run away from race any more than any other American can, as long as they remain in America. They still are people of color, still evoking all the responses that people of color evoke. They cannot run away. They can only turn, as W.C. Fields once said, take the bull by the tail, and face the situation.
"I want to be Black," Harvard's Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who happens to have biracial children, once said, "to know Black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color."
The future of race in America will win a freedom not only to be Black but also to discover and appreciate one's own individual humanity. It will include not only our obligation as Black Americans to the Africa-descended community that culturally nurtured us, whether others accept us or not, but also our obligation to be true to ourselves. Black self-determination is an empty victory if it is not accompanied by one's individual ability to control one's own fate. America will have to go through race to get beyond race.
Boxer's crisis should teach us the threat posed by unsafe sex
Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune
On Monday, professional boxer Tommy Morrison was confirmed to be HIV positive. Morrison's off-and-on boxing career has come to an abrupt end. Friends, family and Morrison's promoter, Tony Holden, are not concerned with his boxing career, though. They are concerned for Morrison. He has taken a second test to reconfirm his diagnosis, and still is hopeful that the first test will
be proven raise. Morrison already has expressed his desire to become active in AIDS awareness to help prevent others from making the same mistakes that he made.
Hearing about these stories opens our eyes to the nightmare of AIDS. Unfortunately, people still do not grac-
tice safe sex. It's the least we can do to protect ourselves. We have learned from the time we were young children to look both ways before crossing the street. We know not to run with sharp objects in our hands. And we would never put metal in the microwave. These things could seriously injure or even kill us. So why in the world would we continue to have unprotected sex? Because it feels good at the time, right? Well, hold onto that feeling and hope that it lasts a lifetime, because it could be the last.
In the past decade, more people have gone public with their disease in an effort to inform or scare the public. Celebrities have let us into their personal lives while dealing with and learning to cope with HIV and AIDS. I think that every effort people have made to help society be more aware of this fatal illness has been effective. We now are more knowledgeable than we have ever been about HIV and AIDS. However, the disease still lingers and continues to conquer so many people. Some of us know only about the celebrities, like Morrison and Magic Johnson, who have HIV. But there are many more like them that we never learn about.
Last week Jerry Springer, daytime talk show host, did a follow-up show on two young guests living with HIV. The remarkable thing that sets these two apart from the average HIV infected person is that they both are 10 years old and were born with the disease. These kids are adorable and bright. They are dedicated to informing the public about the virus they acquired from their infected parents.
When a person is infected by the HIV virus, he is not the only one to worry about. Anyone who has been sexually active with that person or has shared needles with him is at risk. This is the worry of many of Morrison's acquaintances who have just heard about his infection. Although Morrison originally is from Oklahoma, he has spent a lot of time in Westport. The boxer is said to have led a promiscuous private life, which wasn't very private after all. A Kansas City. AIDS hotline, (816) 923-AIDS, received an unusually high number of phone calls Monday regarding concerns about the Morrison situation.
The fatal epidemic is growing and becoming the most common killer among sexually active people of all races, religions and sexual preferences. AIDS, the inevitable outcome of the HIV virus, has no prejudices. Anyone can become infected.
Sarah Preston is a Wilmette, ill., senior in English
KANSAN STAFF
ASHLEY MILLER
Editor
VIRGINIA MARGHEIM
Managing editor
ROBERT ALLEN
News editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
Campus ... Joann Birk
... Phillip Brownies
Editorial ... Paul Todd
Associate editorial ... Craig Lang
Movies ... Michael Moore
Sports ... Tom Erickson
Associate sports ... Bill Petula
Photo ... Andy Rutledge
Matt Flickker
Graphics ... Hosh Musser
Special sessions ... Noveltia Sommers
Motion Graphics ... Melissa McKinnon
Wire ... Tara Trenay
Illustration ... Michel Leaker
HEATIER NIEHAUS
Business manager
KONAN HAUSER
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
JUSTIN KNUPP
Technology coordinator
Business Staff
Campus mgr ... Karen Gernch
Regional mgr ... Kelly Connelys
Management mgr ... Claire Hammons
Special Sections mgr ... Norm Blow
Production mgrs ... Rachel Cahill
Heather Walters
Marketing director ... Heather Walters
Public Relations dir ... Angle Adamson
Creative director ... Ed Kowalczyk
Boston manager ... Brandon McKinnon
Internship/oo-pm ... T.J. Clark
HUBIE
By Greg Hardin