KANU News Retention

On Sunday, some 4,600 people will walk down the hill and graduate from the University of Kansas, joining the several hundred students who graduated from Haskell Indian Junior College last week. They came to Kansas from across the United States and around the world, bringing with them a diversity of experiences and perspectives. Now they will move on. Commencement. At one time it symbolized a new beginning for young people who were about to, quote, enter the world after their years in the ivory tower of academia. Those were the days when students started college immediately after high school, unless the war intervened. They finished in four years, found a job, and began the rest of their lives. School and work, student and adult, the categories were discrete, and for the most part they didn't overlap. No longer. Town, down, and the world merged in line. KU and Haskell students were part of the recent vigil in South Park after the Los Angeles riots.

They participated in the anti-war demonstrations that took place every Sunday as 1990's Desert Shield became Desert Storm in 1991. And they were also among the troops who served in that conflict. If on the hill, it no longer carefully insulated funny been in the rest of the country. The effects of the recession were experienced this year, in larger classes, fewer faculty, and the cancellation of journal subscriptions in the library. The issue of sexual harassment was raised not just with the Clarence Thomas hearings, but in KU's own student government and in its law school. A growing number of students have children and adult responsibilities. Teaching held jobs before coming to the university, and a majority continue to work while they are in school, often taking the less desirable odd hours that allow them to juggle classes while putting food on the table. As a result, finishing an undergraduate degree in four years has become much less common. Sophomore status reflects only the number of class hours taken, not the number of years

on campus. Even so-called traditional students, those who begin college at 18 and go through school for a full time, are not detached from life in Lawrence. Students shop in our stores. How else could a town this size support three non-western grocery stores? Not to mention 19 pizza restaurants. There are tutors in our schools, volunteers with habitat for humanity, fundraisers for the United Way, and participants in our religious organizations. There are coaches for intramural athletic teams and organizers of tenants' rights groups. In short, students live here, they are part of our community. So graduation is no longer really a commencement, at least not in the conventional meaning of the word. It does celebrate the end of a college career, and a transition to an existence no longer affected by finals, term papers, and grade reports. But today's student does not dawn a cap and gown to commence life in the real world.

That began in Lawrence, if not before. And whether a student remained here for a semester or for ten years, Lawrence was enriched by their presence. 65 years ago, the last great American hero was completing his great heroic act. When Charles Lindbergh landed in Paris, he'd already assured his place in history, but his time on the public stage unhappily was far from over. Seven years later, Colonel Lindbergh sat unwaveringly through the trial of Bruno Hauptmann, who was accused, convicted, and executed for kidnapping and killing Lindbergh's first child. It was actually two trials. One went on largely in the streets of Flemington, New Jersey, with as many as 20,000 gockers on hand during a single day. 800 reporters filed deathless prose, such as the dispatch that described Hauptmann as a thing lacking in human characteristics. The other trial went on in court, and it had its circus aspects, too. Microphones and cameras were crude and intrusive by today's standards, but they were present

and disruptive, then Hauptmann's innocence was hardly presumed. The aftermath of the Rodney King beating case brought all this to mind. I would guess that to the average person the police accused of using excessive force on King had about the same presumption of innocence as Hauptmann, that is to say not much. A colleague pushed it further, though, when he told me that media had tried and convicted the L.A. police as much or more than they had Bruno Hauptmann. That's not a ringing endorsement of the reporting that came out of Seamy Valley over the last few weeks, and frankly, no ringing endorsement is justified. In court, a reasoned approach to the King incident prevailed, jurors watched over and over a videotape showing what's generally considered to be the worst of the beating, but they watched it with a constant barrage of commentary on what had meant with freeze frames at key points supporting the defense's case that King repeatedly resisted the officer's commands. The jury returned no guilty verdicts, an outcome with which I happened to disagree strongly, but it was a reasoned outcome.

Outside the courtroom, the powerful image of the videotape itself prevailed, an image of brutality and excess of racism and the guise of authority. That image led many people simply to presume that guilt was a foregone conclusion. It led some to start beating, burning, and looting. If anything, the media of 1992 were a more guilty of sins of omission than commission. Yes, the beating video speaks and even screams for itself, but I'm afraid news people let it have the last word, as most of us did. Camers and mics were largely barred from US courtrooms after the Hauptmann trial, and especially after the Billy Solestice trial in the 60s. Improvements in electronic news gathering technology helped them get back in, but never before has a piece of electronically recorded evidence been so overwhelming, not only in the trial itself, but in the public reaction to the case. Sixty-five years ago, Charles Lindbergh became the first truly technological hero. It made him the world's greatest celebrity, which ultimately cost him his first born. The technological frontier is now communication, not transportation.

And much as people had to do with the New York to Paris non-stop flight, we have to come to grips with the consequences of 50-some seconds of videotape that ultimately said so much and so little. In classical mythology, the gods often caution humans against hubris, excessive pride or self-confidence, woe be tides those who ignore the warnings, yet two recent actions by the United States illustrate the arrogance that is the essence of hubris. Most is our stance during the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Standing alone against more than 150 other countries, the United States refused to sign the biodiversity treaty. Disagreement requires signatures to make an inventory of plants and wildlife in their countries, and to develop plans to protect endangered species. It also requires that research, profits, and technology be shared with countries whose genetic resources are used.

Japan thought this was reasonable. So did Germany, Great Britain, France, and numerous other traditional U.S. allies. But we knew better. It was a flawed document we said. So after watering down the treaty significantly, we declined to affix our name to it. What an impressive show of leadership by our environmental president. Last Monday, we showed hubris of a different type. The Supreme Court rules that the West government can kidnap a citizen of another country in order to bring that person to the United States and put them on trial in a federal court. Never mind that the other country object, or that the United States could have used illegal procedures specified in extradition treaties to obtain the suspected criminal. Now it is true that the extradition treaties do not explicitly forbid forcible abductions by national governments. This is the basis of the Supreme Court ruling. But as Justice Stevens pointed out in his dissent, the treaties don't explicitly forbid torture of a suspected criminal either.

Does this make torture acceptable? More to the point, how would the United States respond if a U.S. citizen was kidnapped and taken to a foreign country to stand trial? Suppose Iran, or Colombia, or Vietnam did to us what we did to Mexico. We would scream bloody murder and complain about the violation of our sovereignty. So why is it okay for the United States? Because we can get away with it. I'm troubled by the willingness of the United States to flaunt international public opinion and norms. Apparently our attitude is, hey, there's only one superpower now, and we're it. So we make the rules to suit ourselves, who's going to challenge us? And if you don't like it, find another planet. Is this what Bush means by a new world order? In 1972, the committee to re-elect the president held a similar point of view. The result was the Watergate break-in. In the long run, those actions brought down a president and led to widespread decline

in public respect for the institutions of government. Twenty years later, we still haven't recovered. When Echorus, son of the Ascension Architect Deadlyz, became prideful and flew too close to the sun, the heat melted the wax on his wings and he fell to his death in the sea. Jackson's arrogance was checked by deep throat and by a couple of persistent reporters. What will it take to halt the present hubris of the U.S. government? And what price will we eventually have to pay? Forget the network news, fold up your soundbite and