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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (Sept. 8, 1986)
Monday, September 8, ,1986 Page 4 Daily Nebraskan Jeff Korbelik, EdiUtr, 4721766 James Rogers, Editorial Page EdiUtr Gene Gentrup, Managing Editor Tammy Kaup, Associate News Editor Todd von Kampen, Editorial Page Assistant NebraMcan University ol Nebraska-Lincoln tadente Live instructors needed UNL's College of Business Administration faces a no win situation and some 500 accounting students are finding themselves the real losers in the college's decision to use video tapes as a teaching device in stead of professors. Students in two of the. six fall Accounting 201 classes are being taught with tapes made last year. Thomas Hubbard, director of the School of Accountancy, said the change to video came from necessity because of a faculty shortage (Daily Nebras kan, Septj 3). He said he would much rather have live sections, but told the Daily Nebraskari that students would not be shortchanged. Two ASUN senators disagreed. During the last senate meet ing of the spring semester, Doug Weems of the Arts and Sciences College and Ed Miller of the Graduate College introduced a bill, saying that the use of video taped instruction defies the pur pose of higher education (D.N., Aug. 29). In May, ASUN President Chris Scudder vetoed the bill because, she said, no one knew whether the program would work during (he summer. Aptitude tests biased Students' potential cannot be tested Tests are obviously an inte gral part of college life. Not only do they form a signifi cant part of a student's life while at UNL, but the vast majority of students needed to take "apti tude" tests to get into the uni versity. Similarly, for many stu dents, aptitude tests (like the LSAT, GRE and GMAT) are re- quired for continued studies after graduation. An intriguing shift has occurr ed over the past few years regard ing the way the public, students and academians view these "apti fude" or "achievement" tests. This shift should call forth policy changes by post-secondary schools. Decades ago, aptitude tests were considered objective mea surements. Like IQ tests, these tests were thought actually to measure intelligence and poten tial for education rather than test "mere" knowledge. As the years passed, these claims of objectivity came under increasing scientific scrutiny, and substantial doubt about these claims began to arise. These doubts came to a head especially during the '60s when the "objective validity" of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant viewpoint underwent critical scrutiny. (The WASP perspective was claimed to underlie the con struction of these exams.) Yet in spite of the cultural and socioeconomic bias of these tests uncovered by critics, the tests continued in popularity even though the presuppositions which called forth the tests in the first place were largely discounted. cheated. Weems introduced a different version of the bill, which failed to get on the floor. He then moved to override the veto, but failed. Robert Furgason, vice chan cellor for academic affairs, spoke against the bill. He said video taped courses wouldn't be needed if the Legislature had not cut $3.8 million from the university budget." He said that if the ad ministration did not introduce the videotaped classes, they would have to raise the grade point average requirements for upper-level classes. , . The way it stands now, every time the university receives a "setback in educating its stu dents, the budget cuts are blamed. The time has come to do something to overcome the cuts and not reduce the quality of education. '. videotaping classes is not a step in that direction. Students are paying for the real thing and are finding themselves being cheated. A possible alternative: have students pay more in tuition to receive the education they de serve. Until then, education at UNL is beginning to diminish. The rhetoric surrounding the tests subsequently changed. The tests began to be talked of as "rites of passage" into adult hood as if they were testing sheer strength of character. As journalist Michael Knisley re cently observed in a Well Street Journal editorial: "The real social function of the SAT is as the central affirmation ritual of American meritocracy. It justi fied the pecking order and re minds people that they deserve their place in it." While measuring "objective in telligence" may justify the use of these exams, we certainly are justified in doubting that testing students' ability to do well on aptitude tests (what else do they really "test"?) is a basis suffi cient to justify their continua tion. Why, then, do universities con tinue to require submission of these test scores when scholarly judgment seems so skeptical of their validity? The answer which is no real answer at all is that the direction of institu tional academic inertia are diffi cult to slow and change. If two indices of scholarly potential (such as GPA and recommendations) are not suffi cient to make an informed admis sions judgment, adding a test score that is assigned in a biased fashion is not helpful. Universi ties should be concerned with truth and accuracy; a fundamen tal contradiction occurs if admis sion into these institutions of higher learning is based upon indicators not demonstrative of a student's desire and ability to further these two aims. r r C0N2RNED ABOUT fti. HOWMWl Tni r". r .w..- A.,, i, ,. - - i J ." ytjjf M"--' TT mi tTTS fwiOT,jtumiMi -in '?sr Jti) ALf I hi. o- ' i.i. tmmmmmmmmmamijm'Sm-mmms:)i.: i, r rn mmmmmmmmmC IfIM r UL lllri!,! m wuji i .ttu-i-i.i.iiijjJUinnn iiiu niitiiM ioxi ,r4mM lWlj,Mllsf'' rrpT3M I "" T " " rt-r" (S I I'll iiU". ( JPJ? LATIN AMERICAN ij V JL ift J JUSTICE II I Wfe. A In rl - ?? 4 J NCAA raling on Hiiskers 4not stupid' UNL 's true colors scarlet and cream not Last weekend wasn't a wash after all, now, was it? All the predictions of doom that popped up in midweek didn't come true. The NU flag over by the Administration Building wasn't hauled down to half-mast. The pep rally Friday night didn't become a "pep wake." And, by gum, our beloved Cornhuskers took the field Saturday night with all players eligible and won big. Boy, were Helen Boosalis and the rest relieved Thursday when the word came that those 60 players accused of violating the NCAA's game-pass rule could play after all! Somehow, we man aged to convince those wolves down in Shawnee Mission, Kan., to give us a chance to plead for mercy tomorrow. But the most important thing about the whole affair was that we'd have Steve Taylor, "End Zone" Jones and the rest and we wouldn't lose our undefeated season and national title. Wait a minute. Most important? It's well-known that "denial" is the first stage people go through when they learn something unsettling to them selves. That something can be learning you have cancer, your long-time boy friend or girlfriend dumped you for someone else or a cherished myth you held for many years has been shat tered. Lost in the hullabaloo over the NCAA's death sentence and stay of execution was the sound of a broken myth clattering to the Memorial Sta dium turf. That's the myth that the lighter of the two Husker colors is white, as in lily-white, pure white and our-athletic-program-is-blameless white. It's as much a part of the Nebraska experience as loving the Marching Red or hating the Sooners. But the color is cream not quite pure white. And we don't like it, so we deny it. Surrogate motherhood turning into controversial rent-a-womb business Her parents cannot agree on any thing these days, not even on her name. Her biological mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, calls the 5-month-old girl Sara. Her biological father, William Stern, calls her Melissa. The court in Bergen County, NJ., just calls her Baby M. The case that will come up on Wed nesday is no ordinary custody fight between estranged partners. These two parents never had a relationship; they had a deal. The intimacy was not one of man and woman but of sperm and ovum. Mary Beth Whitehead was hired to be a surrogate mother. When Stern, a biochemist, and his wife Elizabeth, a pediatrician, disco vered thev couldn't have children to There's so much we all should be disturbed about. The first is that the 60 players were guilty. UNL admitted as much in its report to the NCAA; so did Tom Osborne; so did a couple of the players. The evidence is overwhelming: there were people admitted to games on players' pass lists that weren't "fam ily members, relatives and fellow students." Todd von Kampen And the violations were widespread. An Omaha World-Herald story Friday noted that those who broke the rule 10 or fewer times were suspended for one game, while those with 11 or more vio lations have to sit out two. Fifty-three Huskers received the one-game penalty and seven the two-gamer. Figure it out. At the very least, the rule was broken 130 times. Even the brightest lights of the team Taylor, McCathorn Clayton, Jones and so on broke the rule. Worse, most of the players took their actions much too lightly. As senior linebacker Kevin Parsons told the World-Herald, "the guys laughed" when Osborne told them about the rule last August. "They said they couldn't keep that rule even if they wanted to . . . It's totally unfair and unworkable." Maybe it's a stupid rule. But I wasn't aware that it's so difficult for a Husker player to distinguish between family and friends, students and non-students. We can try to change rules, but our personal feelings about them don't give us leeway to ignore them. Turning yourself in is fine, but that doesn't mean you should escape punishment. gether, they went to an infertility clinic. There, they met Whitehead, a 29-year-old mother of two, the wife of a sanitation worker. And there they drew up a contract. Ellen KS', Goodman sfy Whitehead agreed to be artifically inseminated with Stern's sperm, to conceive and carry a baby for the cou ple in return for $10,000. She signed on - ' ,3k. pure and lily-white We've got a problem here. But it goes far beyond the football team. Last year, we had a basketball coach who felt he could start practice before the NCAA allowed. We had a women's gymnastics coach who broke state law by taking away the scholarships of two injured stars. What happened last week was only the final crack in the vase of pur ity.' All of the above facts were duly reported by the media. One would think those who are proud of Nebras ka's once-unchallenged reputation as a "clean" school would be outraged. But what did we witness? The Democratic candidate for governor, UNL's chancel lor, NU regents, students, newspapers, ordinary citizens all cried out the lightest NCAA penalty possible was too harsh and the NCAA was out to "get" Nebraska. It's a sorry commentary on what has happened to our senses of morals and values. People used to think quality education was most important and that citizens had a duty to obey the laws. Here in Nebraska, we have the state's only major university falling apart at the seams from budget cuts, appar ently unnoticed by the public or the polit icians. But they notice when their weekend entertainment is put on the ropes because the entertainers broke the law and they go after the policemen for doing their job. Yes, we got our game Saturday night. But we'll never get back the presump tion of purity that followed the Huskers around until last Wednesday. The way Nebraskans from Scottsbluff to Omaha reacted to last week's news shouldn't go unnoticed, for it should make us all wonder whether this whole collegiate athletics industry is really worth losing our souls. Von Kampen is a senior news-editorial and music major from Ogallala and is a DN editorial page assistant. the dotted line a promise that she would not "form or attempt to form a parent-child relationship" with the baby she carried. But when the baby was bom, White head welched on the deal. After turning Baby M over to the Sterns, refusing their money, she "bor rowed" her back. When the Sterns, tried to reclaim the baby, the White heads ran off with her. Finally, on July 31, Baby M was tracked down in Florida -and returned to the Sterns and New Jersey. "People treat it like we're fighting over a car," says Whitehead now. "But she's not a possession, she's a part of me." She is also a part of William Stern; See GOODMAN on 5