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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (March 22, 2001)
Opinion ZM/) Nebraskan Since 1901 EcSton Sarah Baker Opinkxi Page Editor Jake Glazeski Managing Editor Bradley Davis Brent's Blunder Single student throttles DN's funding while on power trip Fifty thousand, eight-hundred and sixty-two dollars was never so sweet as it was Wednesday night ASUN deliberated on the Daily Nebraskan's $1.19 per student allocation for three meetings, finally voting to grant the newspaper its hill fund ing, 14-7 with 2 abstentions. Even though getting the money is sweet to be sure, we still can't help but have a bad taste left in our mouths. The system has gone sour. It needs to be examined, not only because of the ludicrous sit uation this newspaper faced, but for the simple reason that any student fee user’s budget can be held hostage. All it takes is one power-hungry student, as we’ve seen this year in Committee for Fees Allocation Chairman Brent Stanfield, who will be back next year to serve a second term. CFA is a subcommittee of student govern ment that pores over fee-users’ budgets and makes recommendations to the senate on the amount of student fees to appropriate to each organization. Stanfield, who represents CFA at ASUN meet ings, has continually touted only his own agenda, never speaking on behalf of CFA, which approved the newspaper’s student fees request 6-2. He presented his 80 percent cut-he wanted to give the newspaper about $9,000- in the face of a 20-year agreement made between the Daily Nebraskan and the vice chancellor for student affairs. The agreement states student fees will be used to pay for only a portion of the newspaper’s pro duction costs. Considering only the production costs eliminates any concerns about student government tinkering with the newspaper’s edi torial freedoms. In other words, a senator with an ax to grind against the Daily Nebraskanbecause of a story or cartoon it ran couldn’t financially ruin the news paper if he or she only is allowed to consider a portion of its printing budget Not only that, but ASUN having total control over the campus newspaper’s purse strings would be equivalent to the government running a newspaper. The existing system of granting student fees requires fee users to present their budgets to CFA, whose members examine expenditures to determine the level of student fee funding each user should receive. That’s why it’s so important for senators to respect the decisions made by the bodies they appoint to conduct their business, bodies like CFA. But this year, the system went awry when tiie power-hungry Stanfield got in his mind that he would slash a fee-user’s budget which he set out to do - basically unchecked. Stanfield made CFA’s work looking at the newspaper’s budget moot. And the budget slashing torch he carried almost homswoggled the entire senate. Had the senate bought Stanfield’s argument and voted to cut the newspaper’s student fees, his agenda would have been realized, and the voices of students would have been trampled. That’s unprincipled and unscrupulous, and fortunately, more than a few ASUN senators came to realize Stanfield s tncks. Led by ASUN President Joel Schafer, who vetoed a bill that would have given the newspa per only $9,513, the senate eventually honored the will of the students. In the future, the senate should be on the look out for people with axes to grind against certain student organizations. Senators shouldn’t let one person’s voice over power that of an entire student body. : Editorial Board Sarah Baker, Jeff Bloom, Bradley Davis, Jake Glazeski, Matthew Hansen, Samuel McKewon, Kimberly Sweet Letters Policy The Paly Nebraskan welcomes brief letters to the editor and quart Odums, but does not guaratv tee tielr puMcflton. The Daly Nebraskan retains the rigt* to edt or reject any material submitted. Submtted malarial becomes property of *» Daly Nebraskan and cannot be returned. Anonymous aubrntoatonaaO not be publehad.Thoee atop aubmt letters must identify themaokoa by name, - year in school, major anchor group aflKa&on, if any. Submit material to: Daly Nebraskan, 20 Nebraska Union, 1400 R St Lincoln, NE 68588-0448 E-matlettorsOdalyneb.com Edtorial PoHcy Unsigned editorials are the opinions of the Spring 2001 Daly Nebraskan. They do not necessarty reflect the views of the Univeraity of Nebraska-Uncoin, its employees, its student body or the Unkarsty of Nebraska Board of Regents. A column is solely the optoion of its author a cartoon is solely the opinion of to artiet The Board of Regents acts as pubiaher of the Daly Nebraskan; pot cy is eat by Vie Daly Nebraskan Edtorial Board. The UNL Publications Board, estebiahed by the regents, aupervtsas the production of the papar. According to poiey sat by the regents, reepcnai btoy tor ttieedtoriel content of toe newspaper las solely to the hereto of to employees. Jesus and crash yerttonwR PAKiy-iwis-rwe^ 1WS SATuR»f 5 "VN£ Hi MoVlg* AT MMi£l l££* C - fJJ\ . JWULOOK At l-U f«tsriw»* / '-VMoses.'aiiT't / but f \ ( ^Jpw?nwG-THe/ lix<>frg>py\ I __l ■■ ( WITH \ VMN1S?J *wp^=rli /*SUS-QIW<!\ I -rrts KID ) i ispftwwke.* / •WK is mate \ THe storm i Vs“* -1 NealOtamcyerAM A time for getting real Calliroe is a member of six university organizations. Four select TWo secret She is treasurer of her sorority. She loves to spend her free time taking naps that involve mental prob lem-solving exercises - five minute naps that are designed to help her focus Yasmin McEwen on writing her international relations honors diesis. • She works part-time as a page in the Legislature because she knows it will look good on her resume. And although she doesn't know who her senator is, Calliroe looks positively adorable in her little pow der blue sweater and matching gray boiled-wool skirt Calli also has a planner. Later, outside of Love Library, when she is returning a book, she bumps into Jacob and his Patagonia hiking pack. It can hold up to 50 pounds. But tonight, it’s only been filled to 30. Jacob is in ASUN and is tired from studying for the last eight hours in one spot, without food or drink. The two of them, planner and backpack, laugh cheerily as they do a tired attempt at a clumsy high five, neither stopping, just calling out "Harry’s Wonder Bar on Thursday." Two frosty smiles hang in the crisp air, leaving the campus empty until the lingering sounds fall and disappear into the lonely night *** They were together, once. Together together. But there were Calli's grades and then there were Jacob’s grades. Calli chose to be friends, then Jacob chose one of Calli’s sorority sisters on a fraternity dare. To make up for that, Jacob did something des perate, even foolishly romantic, the kind of thing he dreamt about but never did. A very unelite thing to do. It just might have been... embarrassing. Jacob had driven to Calli's house late in the evening hours and stood on her stoop waiting patiently for her to come out. The wind whipped Vits scolding breath upon his face and with each gust Jacob says, “sorry, so Vsorry, so sorry," under neath Megan Cody/DN Please write back! i his own. That was four months ago, and his brothers had faithfully helped him to move on. "For die love of God, get your priorities straight, man, you’ve got to stay focused,” they said. “Here, have another beer.” *** Jacob gets home to his fraternity house, and he has to wade through the usual sea of self-absorbed but good-hearted men to make it to his room. And when he makes it there, he opens the door to the sounds of "Survivor." Various members of his roommates clan are lounging noisily in his room. He looks forlornly at his couch. He just wanted to come home to his room and fall on the couch. And he is too cold; somebody opened all the windows again. *** Calligetsacall! She is in the running for a Rhodes Scholarship and he wanted to congratulate her. If she wins, it will mean traveling across continents to study for two years. She remembers that Jacob is planning on studying abroad in Germany next semester. Clearly, Calli notes, it wasn't meant to be. Had it been once? Was there a connection? They met at a leadership conference about shaping campus life and diversity and didn't seem to disagree with one another. Big plus. Once, they both were wearing matching Abercrombie & Fitch color schemes. They liked the same drinks. Once, in a fit of wild abandon, they threw up because they were really drunk. But relationships are like passing planets - orbiting each other briefly and then rotating on, Calli thought. She had better things to do these days (a Rhodes!). She was accomplishing too much. She could not deal with the pettiness of closeness. Calli almost thinks that the future success of humanity rests and rides on our ability to with stand human contact To not give yourself to some one else. To resist trust, physical love, uncertain futures, sacrifice. It’s a good plan for now. She figures, hey, it'll be there, the times to hold hands, to enjoy sunlight, to stop pulling the extra load. Time to figure things out Like the quote in her planner said: "It is never too late to be what you might have been.” That's T.S. Eliot You know, he wrote about the hollow men. Calli never read it She was late for some thing. Anything. Walking from McLuhan to Lao-tzu I woke up the other morning. (This is not a column on oral sex.) And on my bedstand was a copyofthel&olte Ching, that wise textofoldwhichl Jake Glazeski have been poring over quite a bit lately. The last time I had flipped through my worn and beaten copy was probably, oh, a year ago. In the pursuit of knowledge, every day somethingis added. In the practice of the Uto, every day somethingis dropped. I had Men asleep, meditating on the text. The Tao has almost always been a sort of guilty pleasure - sort of like my enjoyment of Enya and my fascination with Yanni (though that was long ago, back before CDs were affordable. I have two Yanni tapes still buried in Rubbermaid containers in the comer of my parents’ basement) Why the guilt? Well, Ayn Rand looms on the same bookshelf as thelbo, her fat books of fiction and her thinner, though no less substantial, works of nonfiction formingabigblackbarrierto the contem plation of the “no-mind." I can feel ol’ Ayna, looking down on me and shaking her head, sometimes. I have forsaken her. He whohaspower over others can’t empower himself. He who clings to his work will create nothing that endures. Howlcame to this betrayal was inter esting. Quite. Marshall McLuhan wrote a book titled "Understanding Media.” Now, this book is the sort of thing that ten different people can read and come away with ten different ideas because die prose is like a great, Amazon canopy- thick, tangled and leafy. So my interpretation, under stand, is little more than a swinging at die piftata, if you wilL But anyway. McLuhan writes, among other things, that the use of a phonetic alphabet (which most of the Western world uses) is connected deep down with our bias, as westerners, toward inferential reasoning. This is quite something for one who has suckled at Rand’s dry teat for... per haps a tad too long. Suppose, for a moment, that my bias toward reason in my everyday encounters is due less to the fact that hoftfc is some god by which reali ty abides, but to foe fact that 1 have been taught to view foe world as a set of logical sequences through the use of language and a phonetic alphabet I mean, there isn't anything sequen tial about foe human consciousness, for example. It makes no sense to try to take it apart bit by bit and to understand it lin early Much better to find a more global nonlinear approach. Perhaps this is what the ThoTteChing does. Throw away holiness and wisdom, and people will be a hundred times happier. Throw away morality and justice, and people will do the right thing. McLuhan isn't suggesting that useful or meaningful truths can be arrived at without reason; he merely suggests that there exist other, more accurate views of foe world, which do a better job of under standing than does the paradigm of logi cal rules and inferential logic. Our written language involves too heavy an emphasis on foe visual sense at foe detriment of foe other senses - foe result is a failure of communication, which, it could be supposed, eventually results in a larger scale of misunderstand ingin general. He gives, for example, an exercise of Stanislavsky, where an actor would pro nounce the word “tonight* with fifty dif ferent forms of inflection; an audience would record foe meanings and shadings of each. The exercise exhibits just how much is really meant when we speak. And how much we must cut out when we write things down. And so, with time, a society’s under standing of concepts is directed by the expression of those concepts. Inaccurate representations of nonlinear ideas as lin ear ideas continue and shape future minds. So we all get these dissociated notions of truth, emotion, irrationality, etc. The human consciousness, in other words, is wholly cheated by our written and spoken language. We come to under stand ourselves in terms of rules, rather than intuitions, when really our intu itions prove more accurate. My mother’s been trying to convince me of that for years. The more you know, the less you understand. Unfortunately, none of this is very conducive to living, working and learning in a university environment You tend to get less enthused about sitting in class when you are convinced your time is bet ter spent ...well, somewhere else. I suppose it’s good that I’m to gradu ate soon, then.