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Daily Nebraskan
Friday, January 22, 1982
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Bill offers potential variety on Board of Regents
Sen. Peter Hoagland of Omaha has introduced two bills
in the Nebraska Legislature that would add three
governor-appointed members to the NU Board of Regents.
LB735 calls for a constitutional amendment making the
change. Voters would have the chance to approve or reject
the proposed amendment in this fall's state elections.
LB736 establishes the ground rules for appointment.
The new regents would each come from one of Nebraska's
three congressional districts.
Hoagland says the measure would make the regents
more accountable to the state. Because the regents distri
bute money allocated by the Legislature, Hoagland sees a
need for more unity between the two governmental
bodies.
But there are even better reasons for adding appointed
regents. The representation now on the board ignores, for
the most part, its most important constituency - the stu
dents. Perhaps with more variety and more open minds on
the board, students might be better able to get their mess
ages across. Perhaps they would be treated as adults with
serious concerns, rather than children who don't have a
futt understanding, of the issues.
Appointment could bring that needed variety. The
governor could name a woman, a black, or a member of
some other under-represented group. The governor also
could appoint members closer in age to the majority of
students. Even someone in his 30s would have a better
understanding of students' problems and remember more
vividly his own experience as a student.
As it is now, the board is monopolized by older white
men well established in their communities - maybe too
well established.
However, voters would have to keep in mind that
appointed regents could be only as good as the governor
who appointed them. The governor would have to be ex
tremely sensitive to the issues and needs of students and
their campuses. And as we all know, a governor easily can
lose contact with the realities of university life.
Of course, the regents strongly oppose Hoagland 's bills.
In a resolution passed at their last meeting, the regents
said the board "has been and remains responsive to the
needs and interests of the university's primary constitu
ency, the people of this state." But can the regents claim
Honesty knows no gender bias
Does a single woman who wants a child have an
obligation to ask the consent of the intended father?
Should she get his consent or should she simply inform
him after the fact or, maybe, tell him as one woman did
that the baby she was carrying might or might not be his.
Either way, she said, it was none of his business.
I put those seemingly academic questions to you
because they are not academic at all. In fact, in 1979
Richard
Cohen
alone, something like 42,000 babies were born to single
woman over the age of 30 - no confused teen-agers these.
Instead, many of them are women who because of their
age thought that while marriage could wait, children could
not.
Statistics can tell plenty, but they can not tell whether
the men who fathered those children consented to play
that particular role. A recent newspaper story, plus some
questioning by yours truly, indicates that there is a good
chance they were kept in the dark. For instance, two of
the women quoted in the article said they withheld their
intentions from the prospective (and, it turned out,
actual) fathers. One later told him what she (and he) had
done, but the other, a true sweetheart, said she refused to
say when the father asked if the baby was, at least bio
logically, his.
As for my own reporting, I find no unanimity on the
subject. Some women thought they had a right to keep
the man in the dark while others did not. I found one 29-year-old
woman who confessed that she was considering
motherhood and was not sure if, when she picked the man
for the task, she would bother to tell him what, in nine
months time, would develop.
I am, I must confess, flabbergasted. The issue, after all,
is not whether single women ought to have children.
Editorial policy
Unsigned editorials represent the policy of the spring
1982 Daily Nebraskan but do not necessarily reflect the
views of the University of Nebraska, its employees or the
NU Board of Regents.
The Daily Nebraskan 's publishers are the regents, who
have established a publication board to supervise the daily
production of the newspaper. According to policy set by
the regents, the content of the UNL student newspaper
lies solely in the hands of its students editors.
Through divorce or separation or death or plain old
desertion, single women have been raising children since
time immemorial. No one is contesting a woman's right to
control her own body - to decide when and under what
circumstances she will become pregnant. The issue,
really, comes down to good old-fashioned honesty. The
failure to tell a man he is being used like a retired race
horse comes down to nothing more than a lie.
What we have in these situations is the Frank Serpico
case upside down. In that one, Serpico, the famous cop,
was sued by a woman who claimed - and proved - that
Serpico was the father of her child - a boy. To this,
Serpico said the legal equivalent of "So what?" He main
tained he hardly knew the lady, that he had sex with her
once, that he was assured that she was practicing some
sort of birth control and was tricked into becoming the
father he did not want to be. For those reasons, he said,
the baby was hers, not his - and he was not going to pay
one red cent for its support.
The issue in all these cases is honesty- or, more pre
cisely, dishonesty. In both the Serpico case and in the
cases of the women quoted in the newspaper interview,
the rhetoric of feminism gets thrown around a lot. That
makes it sound like we are dealing with something terribly
new under the sun, something having to do with the rights
of women and a new sensitivity that, if you only gave it a
moment's thought, would become stunningly clear.
But that is not the case. The words "men" and
"women" only confuse the issue. We are dealing here with
people. And what these people are doing is lying to one
another - either that or withholding information. What
makes it worse is that they are not dealing with used cars,
but with the creation of life. A man, like a woman, ought
to be able to decide when and under what circumstances
that will be undertaken. It should not be produced by a
lie.
Men who lie to women ("IH call you in the morning")
are considered cads. And there are even worse words for
men who use their physical chips (their strength or the
plain fact that they can't become pregnant) to either get
sex or avoid the consequences of it - pregnancy and what
may or may not follow. Why should it be different for
women?
Standards of honesty do not change from one sex to
another. Pregnancy does not cleanse all sins nor excuse all
lies. After all, no woman gets pregnant on her own. A
woman who tricks a man into becoming a father is the flip
side of the man who tricks the woman into sex. She is no
gentleman.
(c) 1982. The Washington Post Company
that they are responsive when they propose irresponsible
measures such as the enlarging of Memorial Stadium until
its cast wall is as high as Oldfather Hall? Or when they
take away salaries from student regents?
No doubt, the regents are afraid of losing their
positions and power. But Hoagland's bill would increase
the number of regents without endangering the positions
of the current regents. The only question mark hanging
over their seats is their own chances for re-election. Koe
foot, Moylan, Prokop and Wagner face the test this year.
But the regents shouldn't worry. If they have been ful
filling the expectations of the voters in this state, then
those same voters will turn down Hoagland's amendment
when it appears on the ballot.
Hoagland's proposal is a good one, but it just misses
the mark in the question of representation on the Board
of Regents. The real issue to be addressed is whether the
student regents each should be given a vote, whether those
three regents should be given the opportunity to truly
represent the students. To that question the Daily Nebra
skan responds with an enthusiastic "yes."
IS
Letters
Cold, raw, burnt burgers
In response to Steven Hardy's Jan. 20 letter, I have eat
en at Union Square six times since it has opened, the most
recent Wed. Jan. 20, 11:30 a.m., and each time I have eat
en there, the hamburgers are burnt and cold, and on the
inside they are very raw. I am sick of the snow job the un
ion is giving the students about its high quality hambur
gers. I can get a better -pound burger at Wendy's for the
same price.
If the union is going to attempt to be a fast-food res
taurant, it should start serving good hamburgers and not
cold junk. Dormitory hamburgers are better than the gar
bage you serve there.
Dee Hoffman
Junior
Evolution roots in science
In her Jan. 19 letter, Sandra George seems to be saying
that the creation story should be taught to all school chil
dren, regardless of their upbringing, to keep the theory
from dying out.
To our knowledge, no one in recent history has learned
creationism in a public shcool, yet the story is in no dan
ger of fading away. As for atheist's children needing to
know the theory, it is the perogative of parents in this free
country to raise their children with any beliefs they see
fit. If George feels we need to teach the traditional Judeo
Christian account of the beginning of the world, she
would surely agree to the teaching of the Navaho creation
story, the Hindu creation story, and all of the other crea
tion myths devised by the ancient peoples of the world's
many different cultures prior to the era of modern sci
ence. Calling something science does not make it scientific.
While the creation story is an explanation of how we got
here, it has no place in a science classroom. We are not de
fending evolution; the argument here is not over which is
the better theory, evolution or creation. Anyone familiar
with Darwin's theory and the assumptions involved knows
evolution's shaky stance. But it is a theory rocted in sci
ence and the scientific method. The creation story cannot
say the same.
Brad Carline
Sophomore, Mathematics
Jim Herder
Sophomore, Engineering