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daily nebraskan
Wednesday, may 3, 1978
C
Union Board leaves students out with no-tell policy
Personal conflict has been pegged
as the reason for the Union Board
closing its April 26 meeting.
Mark Knobel, Union Board presi
dent, said a "personal conflict" be
tween Nebraska Union Director Al
Bennett and "several" members of
the Union Board led to the closed
session. There seems to be a differ
ence of opinion between the mem
bers and Bennett, but Knobel de
clined to say what that difference
was and who it involved.
It seems that when students are
appointed by ASUN to serve on the
board they should be serving in the
best interest of the students, letting
them know what is going on with the
Union and showing their effective
ness. The closed session provided a
"confrontation" between Bennett
and the parties involved, Knobel
said.
When a body that is representing
the students and how they spend
their monies is not willing to air its
dirty linen in public, we begin to ask
if these representatives are truly act
ing on behalf of the students.
These "personal differences" be
tween the union director and the
members could just be some students
acting in the best interest of the
22,000 other students at UNL.
We will never know, though, will
we?
The Union Board executive com
mittee is tight-lipped, and mum is
the word with Al Bennett.
And where are the rest of the stu
dents left? They are left not knowing
who is representing their best
interests.
The effectiveness of student
opinion getting across to the Union
Board members, and eventually to
the planning and programming of the
two Unions by Bennett and the ad
ministration, is being hampered by
the problems on the board.
Some students are coming out on
the short end of being represented,
and it is not the nine student mem
bers of the Union Board.
Dissected flies don't necessarily die,.. neither do students
When Ponce de Leon was finished
dragging his sagging libido through the
Florida swamps, he must have been frustra
ted. What began as an extended trip to
eternal youth ended as a hot, sticky re
affirmation of his own mortality.
Strangely enough, the end of the semes
ter always has given me ample reason to
identify with the old fart. (You guessed it,
this is the "I-won't-write-a-self-indulgent-end-of-the-year-column
column."
This year, however, as I look down the
loaded barrel of finals week, I have a new
attitude. It is a non-verbal attitude. One
that is usually expressed by placing one's
thumb on one's nose and wiggling one's
fingers to and fro.
michael
zangan
It's gratifying to know I've learned
something in the past few years.
Actually I've learned quite a bit in the
last few years. That is why I keep coming
back. That, and I have a high threshhold
for pain.
AH of which has nothing to do with to
day's subject, which is "Our Friend the
Fly." But we'll get to that later.
Speaking of pain, (and we were a line or
two ago), death has proved to be an ex
cellent, and possibly the only long term
cure for pain. Death, however may be a
little extreme in many cases. Medical sci
ence has made death confusing in the last
few years, and it may be hardly worth the
effort.
Technological advancements have not
cleared up the matter any; in fact, it is
harder now to determine when a patient
has died. In the old days it was easy. If it
didn't move, you buried it. Now we have
moral conflicts along with medical ones.
Maybe the individual isn't moving for a
reason.
Having warmed up to the subjects of
school, pain and death, we now can
approach the subject of flies.
From Newscript news service comes the
following item about an entomologist
at the University of California at Riverside.
(For those who are under the impression
from reading this column that all things
good and pure come from California, I
sincerely apologize. As Hoyt Axton has
said, ". . they tell me I was born there,
but I realiy don't remember. . . .") Thomas
Miller, the entomologist, is saying that we
are being forced to "define death in new
terms for insects."
According to Miller, insects don't have
vital functions the way humans do. This
being so, he says you can remove a fly's
heart, (assuming that you can find it) and
nothing will happen. The fly will go on
like nothing happened. Miller also says you
can remove the fly's head (did the French
remove Marie Antoinette's head?) and the
only reason the operation would prove
fatal is because it would inhibit the fly's
ability to eat.
The Daily Nebraskan, being basically
morally sound, must bring up the possibili
ty that although some of the fly's vital
functions continue to work, the insect may
be as good as dead from a human
standpoint.
At any rate, scientists say that a fly is
considered dead when it fails to move for
24 to 48 hours.
There is a great deal of comfort in the
knowledge that we are still progressing at
this Jate date.
Remember, you read it here first.
Having discharged my responsibilities
for writing a weekly column this semester,
I am reasonably prepared to face anqther
finals week. My thumb and fingers are
oiled and ready, I'm on the verge of mental
collapse, and judging from my own incom
prehensible ramblings and those of my
friends, we seem to have more in common
with the common housefly than Ponce de
Leon this time around.
Let's cut student fees.
Almost every UNL student worth his
social security number would say that this
would be in his or her economic interest.
Why, then, are so many of these same
students passively (or worse, yet compul
sively) willing to allow their hard-earned
dollars to be spent by organizations of
which they have never heard, for the
services of which they have little use.
or which support political views unfavor
able to some fee payers'.'
The answer apparently lies in the holy
mystique which surrounds that nohle term,
"public interest." Very few interests,
except survival, can he attributed to every
member of a group so diverse as at I'N'L.
The public interest is in fact merely a loose
association of the individual interests of
those involved.
I suggest that the crucial question
regarding the funding of NUPIRG is,
"What's in it for me?" If an individual can
answer this, his monetary contribution is
proper. If one cannot, then the so-called
"public interest" organizations have not
business spending his money for him.
I am not saying that we must beat each
other to the ground in pursuit of our own
interests. I am saying just the opposite: if
each individual at UNL would give more
serious consideration to the question,
"what's in it for me." perhaps our earnings
wouldn't have to be confiscated in order to
pursue the question, "what's in it for us?"
That consideration would be automatically
taken care of.
Then we who earn what we spend
could, believe it or not, spend what we
earn.
Becky de la Motte
Freshman, journalism
Nuclear fusion
In early April I listened to a presenta
tion on fusion energy by Professor Dennis
Alexander, nuclear engineer, of the UNL
mechanical engineering department. He
speculated that one of the main rea
sons the fusion program was going ahead is
because the military would like to have re
search done on fusion bombs, and in parti
cular, the neutron bomb. Alexander also
stated that this is one of the reasons he is
involved in nuclear research.
A fusion reactor works on the same
principles as the sun. There is a rumor that
fusion reactors do not have the dangerous
radiation, but this is not true. The reason
the sun's radiation does not hurt us that
much is because we arc protected by a dis
tance of 9.1,000,000 miles and our atmos
phere. I see the following problems with fusion
energy.
1. They are not sure if a fusion reactor
will really work or not.
2. Because fusion plants require a large
sie. electricity would have to be
transmitted longer distances which
means longer, larger power lines and
therefore greater inefficiencies.
3. There will be a problem with obtain
ing lithium which is needed to make
tritium which is used as fusion fuel.
4. This problem requires a lot of capital
invest ment.
5. The radioactive wastes are in part
gaseous and hard to contain.
The military developed this technique
of taking minerals for making both energy
and bombs at the same time from the fis
sion program.
A different tactic must be emphasized
to prevent the escalation of war through
arms competition with Russia I like to
think of this tactic in the following words
let's organize, make friends with the Rus
sian people and get rid of the arms " tactic
This means changing a pattern of war
which has persisted in humanity as long as
we have known in about one lifetime If
to the editor
our species is to coninue we must change
to meet the crisis.
At the present, our military spends no
money on this tactic and in fact it spends
money to prevent it by labeling people
who are against it as subversives and then
spends money to investigate them.
The United States should start empha
sizing real friendship and cooperation be
tween Americans and Russians. What we
really need in this world is cooperation,
thought, and love.
Larry Hassebrook
Senior, electrical engineer
Classics 180
The article (on) "grade inflation" ( April
20) was based on an inaccurate report with
regard to Classics 100 as having the highest
grade average of 3.712. The report should
have indicated that Classics 1 80 has this
3.712.
Thomas E. Rinkevich
acting chairman. Classics
Self-righteous Christians
I never cease to be appalled by the selt
nghteousness of those who profess Christ
ian love of neighbor and simultaneously
spew forth hatred for anyone who docs
not express love within the awesome sanc
tity of marriage and family. A letter was
printed April 26 which condemned homo
sexuality because it was not procreative.
If the "enjoyment of sex" is only to be
"justified because it makes babies, then
is sex unjustifiable during a woman's non
fertile cycle9 Are all birth control measures
also unjustifiable ?
The fear and ignorance which relegates
homosexual acts to society-dooming
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