4A
Thursday, February 1, 1996
OPINION
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
VIEWPOINT
Out in four less likely with enactment of tuition plan
You can't squeeze blood out of a turnip. At the University of Kansas, however, administrators will attempt to squeeze more tuition money out of your wallets.
With linear tuition, which goes into effect this summer, students will pay by the hour instead of by a flat rate. The cost to the student planning to graduate in four years will rise.
Kansas requires 124 hours for most department degrees. That means an average of 15.5 hours per semester to graduate on time. Under the flat rate, a student graduating in four years will pay $7,064. With linear tuition, that jumps to $7,812.
Of course, that's just for instate students. Out-of-staters can expect the hit on the checkbook — or in many cases, the loan payments — to be about $4,000. Tuition now costs about $29,000 for four years, but under linear tuition, that cost will be about $33,000.
The University isn't telling the truth about this money squeeze. Administrators say
THE ISSUE:
Linear tuition
it will eliminate class shopping, thus cutting unneeded classes from the budget. But only a few students drop classes — rarely enough to cancel an entire class. Not only is it based on false reasoning, but linear tuition also is a direct attempt to skirt the issue of a price increase.
The University is a good bargain for students, especially in these times of rapidly inflating tuition costs at colleges across the nation.
The administration discussed a guaranteed fouryear graduation plan, but as we see now, that was mere lip service.
The problem is that the University is going to hurt students who are trying to graduate in four years.
If the University wants to raise tuition, then it should do so. But it shouldn't waste our time and insult our intelligence by saying it's going to improve students' standing.
THOMAS PATTISON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD.
Chaplain's radical remarks have no place on House floor
Guest chaplain the Rev. Joe Wright outraged Kansas State House members last week with a session-opening prayer spouting the radical right's platform, including remarks about homosexuality and freedom of expression. Republicans defended the prayer in the name of free speech, but political platforms have no place in the opening prayer.
Wright, pastor of Central Christian Church in Wichita, was invited by Rep. Tony Powell, R-Wichita, to give the opening speech. This marks the second time in many years that prayer has been controversial.
Democrats initiated change last year because the Rev. Cecil Washington, minister at Topeka's New Mount Zion Baptist Church, prayed "in the name of Jesus."
This led to the invitation of pastors to give blessing by House members, which allowed multidenominational opportunities. Every group is given equal opportunity under the law, which is both morally and legally correct.
THE ISSUE:
Church and state
Wright overstepped the bounds of prayer, blasting many of the evils of the state.
The prayer spoke more of political issues than of a blessing: "We have endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle...We have killed our unborn and called it choice...We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression...We have ridiculed the absolute truth of Your word and called it moral pluralism."
Wright was invited to bless the assembly, not to impress his values upon the state. Blessings have been included in the House since the state was founded, and this noble tradition is important to uphold. But regulations should be enacted so the guest chaplain's only purpose is to give a blessing.
Shawn Trimble/ KANSAN
JOHN WILSON FOR THE EDITORIAL BOARD.
THE RUDENESS OF RACE
Race long has had a rude presence in my life. While visiting relatives in Alabama as a child in the 1950s, I first saw water fountains marked white and colored. I vaguely re-call being excited. I rushed over to the one marked colored and turned it on. To my deep disappointment, the water came out clear, just like the water back home in Ohio.
"Segregation," my dad said.
"There are places white people don't want colored to go," my elders told me in their soft, southern accents. "And white people make the rules."
I'd never heard the word before. My southern-born parents explained that it was something the white folks down home practiced.
We had plenty of segregation in the North. We just didn't have the signs, which made it cheaper and easier to deny. We had to go across town to the separate-be unequal pool for colored people. The steel mill, our town's biggest employer, held separate picnics for colored and white employees. Everyone had a good time, separately and unequally. I think the colored folks, who today would be called the Black community, were just happy to have something to call their own.
When I was about 6 years old, I saw a commercial for an amusement park near the southern Ohio factory town where I grew up. I chose to go. I told my parents. They looked at each other sadly and informed me that little colored kids couldn't go there. I was crushed.
"I wish I was white," I told my parents.
"No, you don't!" Mom snapped. She gave me a terrible look, enough to persuade me instantly that no, I didn't want to go.
I remember I wanted to show them what a terrific kid I was. I felt sorry for the little white children who would be deprived of getting to know me.
Throughout our childhood years, my friendships with white schoolchildren proceeded without interruption. Except for the occasional tiff about some injudicious use of the N-word or some other slur we had picked up from our elders, we played in each other's back yards as congenially as Spanky,Buckwheat and the rest
of the gang on the old Hal Roach Our Gang comedies. But I could tell from the way one white friend happily discussed his weekend at LeSourdesville Lake that he did not have a clue of my reality.
"Have you been?" he asked.
"Colored can't go there," I said. "Oh, that can't be" he said.
For a moment I perked up, wondering if the park's policy had changed.
"Have you seen any colored people there?" I asked.
My white friend thought for a moment, then realized that he had not. He expressed surprise. I was surprised that he was surprised.
By the time I reached high school in the early 1960s, LeSourdesville Lake relaxed its racial prohibitions. But the lessons of it stuck with me. It taught me how easily white people could ignore the segregation problem because, from their vantage point, it was not necessarily a problem. White people of low income, high insecurity or fragile ego always could say that, no matter how bad off they felt, at least they were not Black.
Segregation helped them uphold and maintain this illusion of superiority. Unwittingly we played to this illusion, I thought, when my friends and I began junior high school and suddenly were thrust into the hormonal world of adolescence. We quickly gravitated into social cliques according to tastes and race.
"Don't be showin' y color," my parents would admonish me in my youth, before we would go out in public, especially among white folks.
Imbued with many subtle meanings and nuances, the showing of one's color could be an expression of chastisement or warning, admonishment or adulation, satire or self-hatred, anger or celebration. It could mean acting out or showing anger in a loud and uncivilized wav.
The showing of one's color connoted the display of the very worst
stereotypes anyone ever dreamed up about people's behavior
"White people are not really white," James Baldwin wrote in 1961, "but colored people can be extremely colored."
Sometimes you still can hear Black people say, in the heat of frustration, "I almost showed my color today," which is a way of saying they almost lost their cool. Losing one's cool shows weakness in a world where spiritual rigor is one of the few things we can call our own. It is cool, in other words, to be colorless.
"Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self, in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes, discerned." Baldwin wrote in The Devil Finds Work. "This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes."
The cloak of proud Black identity has provided a therapeutic warmth for my naked self after the chilly cocoon of inferiority was imposed early in my life by a white-exalting society. But it is best worn loosely, lest it become as constricting and isolating for the famished individual soul as the garment it replaced.
I cannot forget how persistently the rudeness of race continues to intrude between that dream and me. I can defy it, but I cannot deny it.
We must examine the garments of race and identity to loosen the camouflage and constraints on the naked self and its strengths and vulnerabilities. Only then, beyond the confining fashions of race and nationalism, can we express the full rainbow of our true humanity.
I feel like showing my color today. My true colors.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune
Name-calling used to thwart Republicans' budget plans
If you can't beat your political opponents, call them fanatics.
This is the tactic many Democrats and liberals have adopted in their crusade to thwart Republican plans to balance the budget in seven years. In doing so, they are employing a classic debate fallacy — calling your opponent names rather than refuting their arguments.
The Democrat's response to the
Republicans' taking of Congress in 1994 has evolved into a rhetoric of extremism.
Political commentator Joseph Sobran writes, "A liberal who refuses to violate his principles is an 'idealist.' A conservative who refuses to violate his principles is an 'extremist."
We're told the
we're told the extremists in the radical, ultra-conservative right wing of the Republican party want to make the richer by taking money from children and the elderly.
For example, President Clinton, the Michael Jordan of spin doctors, has accused extremists in the Republican party of wanting to destroy Medicare. The President's representative actually said the Republicans wanted old people to die.
The Republican plan seeks to reduce the growth of Medicare by asking seniors to pay an extra $7 a month more than what the President would ask them to pay.
This wouldn't kill old people any more than a $2 per semester fee increase designed to bail out the bus system would make KU students drop out of school.
The 1994 elections sent a clear signal that the public would not support a continued expansion of social welfare programs — the backbone of the Democrat's vision for 40 years.
Also, the Democrats have adopted many Republican themes, which suggests that they have lost confidence in their own ideas. The President's recent State of the Union address sounded like a Rush Limbaugh impersonation with his calls for downsizing government.
As the rhetoric of extremism becomes more strident as the 1996 elections approach, people should remember that today's extremists often are tomorrow's visionaries.
Almost 25 years ago, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., expressed alarm at the 20 percent rate of illegitimate births among Black families in the United States. At the time he was called a racist and an extremist. Today, the illegitimacy rate among Blacks is close to 70 percent. It is difficult to find a reasonable person who is not alarmed by that.
Only five years ago, then-Vice President Dan Quayle spoke on the importance of family values in his infamous Murphy Brown speech. He argued that strong two-parent families were good for children and society — a truly revolutionary notion. At the time he was called a narrow-minded sexist bigot. Now, President Clinton frequently appeals to the central theme of Quayle's speech.
Today, a Republican Congress wants to balance the budget by the year 2002. They also are being called extremists for their efforts. Their plan isn't perfect, but they have proposed substantial change.
If they succeed, future generations may treat them as visionaries. The most extreme course of action is to take no action at all.
John Hart is a Shawnee graduate student in Journalism
KANSAN STAFF
Campus...Jonn Birk
...Philip Brownlee
Editorial...Paul Todd
Associate editorial...Craig Lang
Features...Marian Wood
Sports...Tom Hidkinson
Homeschool sports...Bill Petula
Photo...Andy Rulletod
Matt Pflucker
Graphics...Nash Musser
Special sections...Monroe Hill
Umphrey Wine...Tara Trenary
On-line coordinator...Tina Fessett
ASHLEY MILLER
Editor
VIRGINIA MARGHEIM
Managing editor
ROBERT ALLEN
News editor
TOM EBLEN
General manager, news adviser
HEATHER NIEAHUS
Business manager
KONAN HAUSER
Retail sales manager
JAY STEINER
Sales and marketing adviser
JUSTIN KNUPP
Technology coordinator
Campus mgr ... Karen Gersch
Regional mgr ... Kelly Connelyn
National mgr ... Mark Odkmek
Special Sections mgr ... Norm Blow
Production mgr ... Rachel Gullit
Marketing Director ... Heathvill Mosher
Public Relations dir ... Angie Adamson
Creative director ... Ed Kowalski
Classified mgr ... Stacey Wolgarten
Internship/oo-cop mgr ... T. J. Clark
OUT FROM THE CRACKS
By Jeremy Patnoi
---