T FHltnrial Nebraskan
4 I I XX X X XX X X (X X Thursday, March 10,1988
Nefiraskan
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Mike Rcillcy, Editor, 472 1766
Diana Johnson, Editorial Page Editor
Jen Deselms, Managing Editor
Curt Wagner, Associate News Editor
Chris Anderson, Associate News Editor
Joan Rezac, Copy Desk Chief
Joel Carlson, Columnist
Minority recruitment
Discrimination and neglect unjustified
The University of Ne
braska-Lincoln has
once again fallen near
the bottom of the Big Eight —
this time in minority student re
cruitment and retention.
Paul Miles, coordinator of the
newly formed Minority Affairs
Commission, claims Nebraska
holds the reputation of having a
weak minority student recruiting
program.
Meanwhile, tuition increases
and the state’s economy steal all
the headlines, but minority prob
lems continue to be disregarded.
No wonder minority students
look elsewhere for their educa
tional needs.
Part of the reason for low mi
nority enrollment at UNL might
be the lack of minority faculty
members. According to the UNL
Institutional Research and Plan
ning Office, only 84 of UNL’s
idiuuy mciimcis die mi
norities. UNL employs 1,003
white men and 275 white
women, but only six blacks, 11
Hispanics, 64 Asians and three
American Indians.
UNL’s Minority Task Force
had best get busy. By increasing
the number of minority faculty,
minority students would feel
more comfortable coining to
UNL.
Besides recruiting more mi
nority faculty, there are other
ways to increase minority stu
dent enrollment Although the
recruiting program is struggling,
it isn’t beyond help.
Tonya Horn, chairperson of
, University Progi«m Council
Black Special Events, said the
I recruiting program should show
potential university minority
students what minority students
are involved in and introduce
them to university minority stu
■ dents.
In addition. Mom said, more
academic scholarships should be
j offered as incentives to keep mi
noritics at LINL after they have
been recruited. She said minori
ties attend UNL and then transfer
to the University of Nebraska at
Omaha because they cannot af
ford UNL.
Helen Long Soldier, coun
selor at Multi-Cultural Affairs,
said minority students feel iso
lated on campus because there
arc so few minorities.
Horn said if she could start
over, she would have chosen to
attend a predominantly black
university. She said the aca
demic and social aspects of such
a university would be more en
joyable and less strenuous.
UNL caters to white students,
Horn said, and Nebraska minori
ties should not have to leave the
state to attend a predominantly
black university to feel comfort
able.
It seems apparent that UNL
needs to look past its athletic en
deavors and take an interest in a
serious problem. The unrealistic
makeup of the UNL student
population docs not give a clear
perception of life in the real
world, and in the long run, the
effects of this misperception will
be felt by minorities and non
minorities alike.
Most UNL students will leave
Nebraska upon graduation. It is
possible they will encounter mi
nority situations they are not ac
customed to. The minority popu
lation of larger cities and South- |
em states may very well be in
comprehensible to those UNL
students who have never left the
state.
The initiative taken years ago :
toward desegregation in schools, (
for example, may shatter UNL’s
students’ perceptions of what !
life is really like outside UNL’s |
campus.
And just because the minority
population of Nebraska is some
what small, discrimination and
lack of attention to minority !
problems can’t be justified.
Whites still dominate society
In response lo the 20th
anniversary of the Kerncr Report,
James Sennett has written (Daily
Nebraskan, March 3) that much has
improved in race relations since then.
In 1968, the year of the Kemer
Report, black unemployment was
more than double that of whites;
today the ratio remains more than 2 to
1. In 1968, black’s median income
was 58 percent of the median income
for whites. Today the ratio remains at
58 percent.
Need more? Black infant
mortality rates still remain strikingly
higher than whites, and the
difference has increased since 1968;
housing in our cities, including
Lincoln and Omaha, remains largely
segregated; and the number of racial
incidents has taken a sharp rise
upward in recent years. In 1987, the
number of racially related incidents
in Chicago increased for the fourth
year in a row.
Want to look closer to home? A
federal jury on March 3 awarded
$35,000 damages to a black
policemen after hearing about a
pervasive atmosphere of racial
hostility in the Lincoln Police
Department.
Has the gap between black and
white narrowed in the past 20 years?
The depressing news is no. For the
most part the gap remains the same as
it was in 1968. Worse, since 1980 and
the coming to power of the Reagan
Administration, some of those gaps
that had been narrowing have started
to widen.
The danger of Sennett’s article is
it provides such an easy temptation to
do nothing. Listen to your fellow
students. Do you feel any sense of
urgency about correcting the
imbalances in our society, or is it the
usual talk of sports, parties and the
food in the cafeteria. Despite his
good intentions, Sennett is
contributing to the “So what?"
attitude that pervades this campus
and this nation.
Peter T. Hoffman
law professor
Coordinator of Clinical Legal
Education
Bush not best man for president
Vice president should stay in office forever, columnist says
I just can’t figure the man
out. There is every indica
tion that he will be the next
president of the United States, and 1
can’t figure him out.
George Bush swept through the
South like the proverbial Gen.
Sherman in this week’s “Super
Tuesday” regional primaries. One
time challenger Robert Dole and
Iowa surprise Pat Robertson were left
sucking his dust bunnies as he moved
relentlessly within spitting distance
of the magic number. With almost
500 total delegates, the vice president
now has almost two-thirds of the
votes he needs to start shopping for a
running mate.
And still I can’t figure him out.
I’m not really sure what he thinks
about most things. The only things 1
know for sure arc that he thinks he’ll
be better than Dole (and so,
apparently, do many Southern
Republicans), he thinks he can do as
well as Reagan, and he thinks no one
can do better than he.
l disagree on all three points.
Poll after poll continues to show
Dole to be the most likely candidate
to be elected in either field. The same
polls show that either Richard
Gephardt or Michael Dukakis could
beat Bush. I have never been a big fan
of these glorified surveys, but surely
the time when they carry the most
weight is when people are asked for
whom they would vote. And most
people would vote for Dole over any
Democratic candidate. Bush is
definitely vulnerable here.
Besides this, I have written before
and maintain that Dole has more of
what it takes to be president than
Bush does. He has the hard-nosed,
“I’m tougher than you are,” gut
wrenching defiance that has always
guided presidents to success in the
postwar era. Depending on how you
view him, Jimmy Carter proved that
nice guys and wimps cannot be
successful presidents. Dole is neither;
Bush fails on at least one count. It is
interesting that Dole has been hurt by
his tough-guy image. We like it when
Clinl Eastwood is in the White
House, but we are afraid to admit it,
even in the privacy of a voting booth.
Which brings me to my second
disagreement with Bush. He will not
be able to continue the Reagan
agenda. Reagan’s secret has not been
his programs but his methodology.
His incessant charm and “Aw,
shucks” veneer, barely disguising a
_I-U
grueling, incessant and obnoxious
persistence, has become the hallmark
of his strong presidency. Bush enters
as the spoiled heir, knowing all of the
surface and none of the substance.
Sure, he can echo the views, but he
will never be able to slam the results
home. I would be genuinely
surprised if the Bush presidency
lasted two terms.
All of this contributes to my third
disagreement. I happen to think
several candidates would do better
than Bush. Surely he would give us
better leadership than, for example,
Jack Kemp, but 1 am not losing sleep
wonying about Kemp becoming
president. However, practically any
candidate with an authentic platform
and the guts to carry it out stands a
better chance of a successful
presidency than Bush.
Bush has spent the last 12 years of
his career in a very low-profile, QT
type jobs, and he seems well-suited
for those. As director of the CIA, he
eschewed publicity and revelled in
his covert activities. As vice
president, he has attended funerals,
entertained dignitaries and spent a lot
of time being upstaged by secretaries
of state. It is the kind of job that suits
him. In fact, I would like to start a
movement to make the man vice
president for life — with a proviso,
of course, that the presidential
succession would skip him and move
directly to the speaker of the House.
But tons of Southern Republicans
disagree with me. Many people in
New Hampshire, Maine and points
bucolic disagree with me. Dole will
gurgle and sputter through a decent
showing in Illinois next week, and
then we will settle down to figure out
which Democrat will try to unseat the
Reagan aura transfer. I am quite
certain I do not want Bush in the
White House, but I have no idea
which Democrat I would favor. The
closer he gets, the more I start
checking out literature from the
fringe parties.
When the Democratic Party
regained control of the Senate in
1986, House Speaker Tip O’Neill
announced that the Reagan era was
over. At that time, I issued a
challenge to the man to meet me in
1988 and sec about that. He never
acknowledged the challenge. 1
obviously had him petrified.
National Public Radio exit polls
showed that 80 percent ot
Republicans voting on Super
Tuesday arc satisfied with the way
things arc and want them to continue
— hence the Bush landslide.
If the Republican Party succeeds
in transferring the Reagan glow to
Bush, the polls once again will be
proved fallacious, and Bush will
slaughter anyone the Democrats
throw at him. Far from being
weakened by years of .washing, the
Reagan Teflon is strong enough to
leap to another Republican. Unless
Bush hops in bed with a prostitute in
the future, the next president of the
United States will be a career
politician who looks like CliM
Barnes, sounds like Jack Benny and
can’t decide whether he is from
Texas or New England. I’ve heard
there are lots of employment
opportunities in Australia.
Sennett is a graduate student in
philosophy and campus minister witn
College-Career Christian Fellowship.
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