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wednesday, November 2, 1988 / University Daily Kansan
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Basketball program hurt, but everyone feels the pain
Maybe the image of Milt Newton at the NCAA news conference yesterday sums it up best.
With tears welling up in his eyes and his voice choked with emotion, Newton symbolized the feeling of many University of Kansas students: humiliation, shock and disbelief that the Jayhawks have fallen so low, so quickly, after soaring so high in April.
The NCAA's surprise decision to place KU on three years probation makes KU the first NCAA basketball champion to be legally denied the chance to defend its title.
The main victims of the violations are KU students and basketball players - who often are one and the same. Their school, coaches and administrators have victimized them.
school, coaches and administrators Students and players depend on the advice and teachings of parents, teachers, coaches, administrators and others. The trust is given with the belief that they will not be led astray.
trust is given with the better understanding. KU has failed on that count. How could Newton have known that his one chance to be the leader on a major college basketball team would go unnoticed in basketball circles because of the illegal acts by coaches and team supporters who Newton put his trust in?
Newton put his trust in:
How could students who eagerly await basketball season have known that they must endure a season that has almost lost its meaning? Or that they represent a school that is now better known for lack of integrity rather than for athletic and academic achievements?
The answer is they couldn't. They put their trust in University officials, who in turn performed illegal acts that cost students these chances.
cost students these chances.
And while students, players, athletic director Bob Frederick and coach Roy Williams take the brunt of the punishment, the main violators have left town scot-free. If the NCAA is serious about stopping illegal actions, it should go beyond yesterday's rulings to ensure that the guilty people are disassociated from college athletics for several years.
college athletics for several years. Larry Brown was clever enough to move to San Antonio before the bill collector came. What is to stop to him moving to another college coaching position? If the NCAA were serious about athletic integrity, it would ban Brown from any NCAA coaching position. He has demonstrated an inability to run a clean program. It is too late for KU, but there is no reason another university should have to suffer the same way.
reason another team might win. In its findings, the NCAA wrote that it had lost confidence that the school would enforce its rules. The fact that the violations came within five years of KU's football probation led the NCAA to consider the death penalty for the basketball team.
Chancellor Gene A. Budig's failure to be present at the news conference did not help in this respect. As the most responsible official at the University — and the only one still at KU who was here when the violations occurred — Budig chose to allow Bob Frederick and Roy Williams, two innocent people in the situation, to face the press yesterday.
That type of invisibility and lack of leadership doesn't suggest a very serious approach to a very serious situation. Leadership was needed yesterday and during the football probation period. Budig apparently has failed to do so.
profession. In the goal of athletics and extracurricular activities gets lost in the hoopla surrounding major college programs and the burning desire to win. But in the end, sports and other activities are designed to supplement and enhance a young person's education and enable that student to make a meaningful and lasting contribution to the real world.
Activities such as sports, music, art and student government give students the opportunity to learn to work with others, to take on practical responsibility, and to discover the best in others and themselves.
The championship team can keep the trophy with pride. It was won fairly, the team played honestly and it represents good memories that the NCAA can't change. The athletic department, however, needs to work to rebuild its record and restore the University's reputation.
Mark Tilford for the editorial board
The editorials in this column are the opinion of the editorial board.
The editorial board consists of Michael Merschel, Mark Tillford, Todd Cohen, Michael Horak, Julie Adam, Julie McMahon, Christine Martin, Tony Balandran and Muktha Jost.
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Nobel given to a great literature
Prize reveals sad lack of concern in West for Arabic ways
The Swedish Academy of Letters is to be congratulated on its award of the Nobel Prize for Literature this year to an Arabic writer for the first time in its history. The award to Egypt's Nagub Mahfouz says something both newly encouraging and vastly depressing: that the West is again reaching out to one of the world's great literatures, and that it should have taken so long.
The general appreciation of Islamic literature in the West may be limited to the "Arabian Nights" and the "Rubaiyat," which is no longer Omar Khayyam's so much as Edward FitzGerald's; its traditional English version resembles a medieval picnic rather than a Persian picnic. A Book of Wine, called *An Arabic/Ajug of Wine*, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou . . .) The Persians themselves know Omar Khayyam as a minor poet, and among Arabs "The Thousand and One Night" is given all the literary weight of a comic book.
Westerners may know what the Koran is but may never have read it. More importantly, they may never have heard it, that "imitable symphony, the very sounds of which move men to tears and ecstasy." That description of the Glorious Koran comes from an English scholar who knew Arabic. Marmaduke Pickhall.
A critic who did not, Thomas Carlyle, found it as "tedious a piece of reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incodite — nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran." Such is the difference between the original experience and the facsimile for export. To read the Koran in anything but Arabic, as the Jews say of reading the Hebrew Bible in any other language, must be like kissing the bride through the veil.
*How familiar Americans may be with Islamic civilization in general is illustrated by a portion of Grant Butler's memoir of life with the Arabian American Oil Company back in the 1960s. He wrote:
"During our first week at the Aramco school on Long Island, questions were asked of us to ascertain our general knowledge about the Arab world. The questions 'What is Islam?' and 'Who was the Prophet Mohammed?' brought forth some interesting answers. One of our members thought that Islam was 'a game of chance, similar to bridge.' Another said it was 'a mysterious sect founded in the South by the Ku Klux Klan.' One gentleman believed it to be 'an organization of American Masons who dress in strange costumes.' The Prophet Mohammed was thought to be the man who 'wrote the 'Arabian Nights.'" Another said he was 'an American Negro minister who was in competition with Father Divine in New York City.' One of the more reasonable answers came from one of our men who said, 'Mohammed had something to do with a mountain. He either went to the mountain, or it came to him.' "
Paul Greenberg
Syndicated columnist
spiritual sensibilities were not sufficiently conventional to please the religious ones. That he should now be honored, and that his fellow Arabs should take pride in this honor from the West, is a hopeful portent.
this year's Nobel for literature honors the greatness of a civilization, not its decay. Naguib Mahfouz is not a writer for those who dream of vengeance and lose themselves in idle hatreds. His life's work is a reminder of the Arabdom of old, for once upon a time it was the Arabs who represented science and learning, tolerance and enlightenment in the known world. His writings were banned across the Arab world when he supported Anwar Sadat's peace treaty with the infidel. He depicted Gamal Nasser's Egypt so well that he found himself in trouble with the political authorities, and bi-
If Westerners now know a little more about the Arab world, what we know is often distorted by stereotypes, the kind inevitably produced by that most predictable refuge of every decadent civilization: fanaticism. Surely no one need tell Southerners how that debilitating process works. Defeat leads to bitterness to rage, rage to violence and terror. The history of the Palestine Liquidation Organization is not entirely dissimilar from that of the Knights of the White Camelia or the old Klu Klux. Defeat will breed some of the same strange growths anywhere.
Blacklisted or not, Nagub Mahfouz was read throughout Arabdom, and modern writer or not, his words trill and incandesce as they express an old longing — finally to be free of history's shackles. ("... you still feel oppressed in this cottage, in the midst of a grassy lawn surrounded by a fence lined with cypress trees. And you await the day when the cypresses will disappear, the day when the plants will no longer whisper night's sorrows, the day when the frogs will fall cockroaches and the croaking of the frogs will silent, the day when memory will lose its tyranny
The critiques find in his writings the story of a modern society emerging out of old ways, but Naguib Mahfouz is no sociologist or politician but a writer, a writer only, and so surpasses all, as literature surpasses trends, as people surpass the expectations of those who would classify and predict their every reaction. Naguib Mahfouz is a writer of the city, and his city is Cairo, as surely as Lawrence Durrell remade Alexandra in his own vision, and Buenos Aires still belongs to Borges.
with the impetus of the Nobel, all the world will soon learn Cairo through the eyes of Naguib Mahfouz, what a stark, unrelenting, piercing, instructive sight it should be.
This tribute from the West is more than a tribute; it is an expression of hope. A writer who can capture the past and present, as in "Cairo Trilogy," has shaped the future, too. The civilization that blossomed in the gardens of Cordoba before the barbarian arrived awaits only a word to thrive again in the light. And in the world that Nagub Mahafuoz has spun, there is visible the first glint of a new day true at last to the old and best.
Awake! for Morning! We put that put the Stars to flight; And Lo! the hunter of the East has caught
■ Paul Greenberg is a syndicated columnist who writes for the Pine Bluff, Ark. Gazette.
Beerbower Hall
bv B. Branit
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed