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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 15, 1971)
It's budget time again It appears by the budget request approved by the Board of Regents Monday that University officials are well aware that Gov. J. J. Exon, a fiscal conservative, is sitting in the Statehouse. A year ago the Board of Regents approved a budget requesting a 30 per cent increase in state funds for 1971-72 that was designed to give NU a good start on becoming the finest university in the area. Although the University had ordered a full-meal with dessert, Exon and the Legislature told the school it would have to go on a diet with a budget that provided only a slight increase in state funds. The Regents Monday pared down their earlier ambitions and requested a 15.5 per cent increase in state funds and an 11.1 per cent in all funds for the 1972-73 fiscal year. With an eye toward the Statehouse, President D. B. Varner said "the economic and political reality of 1971" had led him to suggest the Board ask for a smaller increase than it had last year. However, Varner said the request "in no way lessens our enthusiasm to move to the top of the Big Eight in this decade." Although the University substantially scaled down its request this year, the proposed budget will stHI probably meet some opposition from Exon. The governor has told state agencies not to submit requests for increased state aid for the 1971-72 fiscal year, and he has repeatedly said that the University should not expect to receive large increases in state aid. The Regents wisely asked for no funds to develop new programs in their request. With the current tight fiscal situation, the University should concentrate on maintaining and upgrading existing programs. The request also anticipates no increase in tuition rates, which were hiked substantially for the current school year. This is only fair since the tuition increase was based on the premise that the University would receive a large increase in state aid for 1971-72. However, the large boost in state aid never materialized, while the tuition increase was adopted. The Board Monday also approved a capital construction request of $15.9 million, including $8.27 million for UNL. The Lincoln funds would include monies to build an addition to Love Library, a new home economics building and a law college and to plan a life sciences building. These building projects are long over-due and should be adopted In the governor's capital construction budget. The Board of Regents, which has its own fiscal conservatives, has submitted a realistic budget this year. Hopefully, it will start the University on its long climb to the top of the Big Eight as well as reduce the friction between the governor and the University that developed from last year's budget battle. What after Attica? The recent bloody uprisings at New York's Attica Prison and California's San Quentin Prison are tragedies in that 46 human beings were killed. But an additional tragedy of the riots is that they will probably create a backlash which could jeopardize the current interest in penal reform that is taking place across the country. The two prison rebellions could easily produce more repressive conditions in prisons and hinder the move to improve the facilities and methods that are needed to better rehabilitate prisoners. This would be unfortunate since the riots are largely the result of racism and poor prison conditions. Repressive punishment of the participants without removing the conditions that caused the rebellions will do little good. More will be accomplished by continuing the push for reform rather than restoring to repressive punishment. A drive for prison reform is just taking roots in the Nebraska Legislature. Nebraska state officials, as well as other government officials across the nation, should not fall victims to a possible backlash and discontinue their interest in penal reform. The experience of Attica should also force prison officials to improve their security and develop new ways to handle future outbreaks. The matter in which the Attica rebellion was handled is open to serious question. Granted, New York officials could not offer full amnesty to the rioters as was demanded. However, force should not have been used to smash the rebellion when further negotiations would have spared the lives of many of the hostages and prisoners. Vernon Fox , a noted authority on the causes and preventions of prison riots, said New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller was wrong to use force at Attica. There is probably some truth in Fox's contention that the motive for the attack was to give Rockefeller's administration "an image of strength with the public." Undoubtedly Attica and San Quentin will have a large impact on how the American public views criminal justice and prison reform. Gary Seacrest I Telephones: editor: 472 2588, news: 472 2589, advertisir 472 2590. Second class postage rates paid at Lincoln, Nebraska. The Daily Nebraskan is a student publication, independent of the University of Nebraska's administration, faculty and student government. Address: The Daily Nebraskan, 34 Nebraska Union, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska 68508. bob russell The art of creative cursing People seem to be slinging around the English language quite loosely, as of late. These people are not "them or "us", these people are nearly everyone, including us and them. But there are certain people who seem to sling around the language a bit more than most of us do; these people being "word mongers.' Now a word monger can do several travesties with our tongue, or whatever is left of it. Word mongers usually use our language to allure or to obscure, or they are just plain lazy. . To keep all of you relevant and meaningful people on my side, I will first launch certain epithets against what is loosely referred to as the "establishment, and particularly, the Defense Department, since they are 1 superb word mongers. The Defense Department, mostly on the defense lately, mostly mongers words to obscure; for to obscure is to defend. Examples abound. Defensive missies are supposedly used only to defend, but many people seem to think that they can be just as offensive as an offensive missle. In fact, some people can't . tell the difference between a defensive and an offensive missle. The difference can be as little as the difference in the looks between a cue ball and Melvin Laird's bald head. Anomer Defense Department favorite is the "protective reaction strike." This means that we barbecue people and things in Vietnam with bombs and other implements of destruction because they had the gall to shoot at one of our planes flying over their territory. Then there are those people who intend to both obscure and allure. Add to this a generous portion of laziness. This group of people could be put in a sub-group called the "labelers." The "labelers" see something they don't like. They might not know quite what they don't like about it, but the first relevant and meaningful derogatory label that comes to their mind is obviously what is wrong with whatever they don't like. Take a disliked institution, for example. This disliked institution can be either a) sexist, b) racist, c) fascist, or d) whatever else comes to their mind. The final group of people I want to cover is all of us. I wanted to wait until the end to offend everyone. All of us have this slackness of the tongue, this lack of imagination, which causes us to use a four letter word, whenever we don't feel like exerting any effort to think up a really creative curse. I myself have just taken up creative cursing. I used to, and still do, sprinkle conversations with four letter words. But now I try to reserve the use of four letter words to those occasions when only they would be appropriate. For example, I was one of those lucky people to have the privilege of waiting in line for my student ID sticker. I had come all prepared for waiting in line, with loads of paraphenalia. With me I had two gallons of Grape Kool-Aid, seven boxes of the laxative cereal Bran Flakes, a bucket, fourteen pieces of Banana Bubble gum, six Zap Comix, an 8x11 autographed glossy of R. Crumb, a folding chair, a dorm pancake allowed to harden for use as a Frisbee, etc. Worse finally came to worse and I got bored. Then all of us stalwarts who were left, started to string together all of the four letter words we could think of, ending the phrase with that vilest of words, University. Creative cursing need not be a great burden on your intellect. If you know a foreign language, you are halfway there. Besides using foreign gutter language, you can say such things as, "Mi Universidad es el moton de basura", or "Die Universitaet ist voll mit Sinnlosigheit." Otherwise, words such as wombat, gncrd, vasch (French equialent for s.o.b.), varmint, polecat are useful, with appropriate adjectives modifying them to the worst extent. Verbosity not being a virtue, I will leave you with this. Curse if you must, and if you must curse creatively. Environmentalists implement ecotage' by M.J. Wilson Newsweek Feature Service Have you ever seen a gaudy advertising billboard blocking the scenery on a country road and wished you could transport that billboard to the front lawn of the man who put it there? Have you ever looked at a river ripe with industrial pollution and wanted to dump some of that scummy water all over the private office of the chairman of the board? Have you ever watched a factory belching black smoke and thought how satisfying it would be to drop a dynamite charge down the smoke stack? These migh once have been considered only the fantasies of a mad ecologist. But at a time when environmental laws are weak and enforcement weaker still and when militance seems in many cases to pay off-more and more people are beginning to take an extreme view of pollution and polluters. Though the dynamiting hasn't begun yet, the direct action has. Along Michigan Route 23, for example, a group calling itself the "billboard bandits" sawed the suppqrts off 40 highway billboards, toppling the signs to the ground. There they remained because they were illegally placed to begin with. In Florida, "Eco-Commando Force 70" has made its presence felt on several occasions. Once, it put yellow dye into sewage treatment tanks to demonstrate just how insufficiently "treated" the water actually is, as it makes its way back to the households of Miami. Another time the group placed signs on beaches giving the true bacteria counts of the water which local health authorities had labeled safe for swimming. In dozens of communities from New York to California, groups have denounced, picketed and, on numerous occasions, interposed their bodies to prevent roadmakers from bulldozing sections of parkland or unspoiled wilderness. Now, there is even a name for this kind of militance: "ecotage," a combination of the words ecology and sabotage. The art or science, or sport of ecotage already possesses two of the ingredients needed to inspire a successful movement: a hero and an organizer. Its hero is a near-fabled and still anonymous Illinois man called "the Fox" whose deeds have confounded giant U.S. Steel Corp., to say nothing of the Kane County, III. sheriff': office. Its organizer is mild, mustachioed Sam Love, 24, head of Environmental Action, the Washington, D.C., based antipollution lobby that put together last year's Earth Day observances. -Now, the group is judging the entries in a well-publicized essay contest to find new -but nonviolent- ways to ' harass corporate polluters. "Violence is against the spirit of the contest and of ecology," says Love. "The object is to find tactics that can be directed toward the corporate image without really hurting anybody." The Fox has already found such tactics. He has ecotaged a company's smokestack (by climbing it one night and applying a home-made cap) and several times he has deposited dead skunks on the front porches of executives of companies which pollute. Little is known of the Fox, except that he is a very cagy individual with a sense of humor, lives in a Chicago suburb, is middle-aged and apparently has some technical background. (Most recently, he ecotaged an asphalt plant-leaving, as always, a note explaining his actions and signed "The Fox.") He has also spoken to journalists over the telephone. But his greatest act of ecotage came when he walked into the Chicago office ot U.S. Steel a few months ago and told the receptionist that he represented the "Fox Foundation for Conservation Education" and had come to present the company with the foundation's annual award. The award, it turned out, was a jar of foul-smelling liquid which he poured over tha office carpeting. The liquid was a sample of the effluent that U.S. Steel was pouring' into Lake Michigan from its Gary, Ind., woncs. "I don't believe in throwing bombs or destroying anything," says the Fox. "But man shouldn't be allowed to ruin nature. I think man should exploit his environment but he shouldn't kill it." Quite properly, the prize in the essay contest for good ecotage ideas which Sam Love is running is a Golden Fox trophy. It is named for the Chicago activist whom Love has never met. The contest closed September 1 -there were some 1 ,000 entries and the winners will be announced in January, about the time Simon & Schuster, Inc.. publishes a compilation of the "best thinking" in ecotage. Some of the entries have already been made public. One advocates digging a hole at night in the middle of a highway and planting a tree. Another suggests pouring concrete onto the lawns of congressmen who advocate ever more freeway -building. The most provocative suggestion, perhaps, was the one that called for a chain letter urging recipients to send small packages of garbage through the mails to unregenerate' polluters. If such a letter catches on, some unfortunate corporation head might find hundreds of packages of garbage in his in-box some morning. (KPOffiGDH & I I qxpfiSuMyir BSSnaKHBiHatiWflifariattilMfiiiiMIMtflittBMtflliflnMUflttll Brevity in letters is requested and the Daily Nebraskan reserves the right to condense letters. All letters must be accompanied by writer's true name but may be submitted for publication under a pen name or initials. However, letters will be printed under a pen name or initials at the editor's discretion. Dear editor, The results of the rebellion at Attica State Prison are not fully known yet. To date, thirty seven human beings have lost their lives including nine prison guards and twenty-eight inmates. Whether force was necessary will never be known. Governor Nelson Rockefeller said, "The tragedy was brought on by the highly organized, revolutionary tactics of militants who rejected all efforts at peaceful settlement..." Rockefeller was probably correct in his assumption that a small group initiated the rebellion. The point to remember, however, is that leaders do not cause revolutions, they take advantage of situations created by the power structure. A rebellion as large as the one at Attica is the product of festering conditions too long THE DAILY NEBRASKAN ignored by bureaucrats and legislators unwilling to appropriate the money necessary to improve conditions in correctional institutions. Therein lies the tragedy. The hope is that we have learned from this unfortunate occurance. Harsh punishment of the participants without removing the bases for the rebellion will prove ineffectual. New leaders will arise unless the conditions at Attica and other institutions are improved. I cannot condone the actions of either the inmates or the attacking force. The action was hasty and irrational, but the bulk of the burden must fall on those who were blind and now have the chance to achieve far-sighted goals instead of near sighted retributions. Tim Tur er Dear Editor, Bike riders have rights but they are being ignored by the city council and particularly Mrs. Boosalis. They plan to close off the city's arterial streets to bike riders at times of the day when bike riders need the streets to get to work or school or to get home. A better plan for student bike riders would be to close down only "O" Street at certain times of the day, since it is becoming more popular to ride bikes to school. Cycling is also less of a parking problem to the University, less expensive than driving, more condusive to physical fitness, and so on. If the law is not amended or thrown out there will be mass bike-ins on the main arterials (particularly Vine Street) scheduled for the moment when the signs go up that indicate police harassment will begin. First there was black power and student power, now there is bicycle power. Let the wielders of absolute power tremble before the might of the organized cyclists of Lincoln CM. Dalrymple Dear Editor, I am assuming that your omission of "planning money for a life science building (Manter Hall)" from the list in your front page University budget story, was an oversight on your part. Please note it is essential that this sort of omission not be allowed to ocurr if the crying needs of thousands of students are to be kept visible. John Janovy, Jr. Assistant Dean, Arts and Sciences OUT OF TOWN COLLEGE STUDENTS REGISTER HERE IN LINCOLN . . . BUT FIRST: f 4 I PsnRvneti HAiRCOT 3-Piece Suit $&7rW77- ETC. (ujomch) 7) prrc4 STAR SRPVrtiUEP 8) SWm AMDS WITH H6o eis, pef aminian motou. cannon rmtt Or 3 3I?4-. T''W ii inn i .. .iii m IV. A f: f t r ! ' 'j 1 p. a ;, I. vr. 1 t i i $ i !:! Vi PAGE 6 WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1971 WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1971 THE DAILY NEBRASKAN PAGE 7