From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Oct. 24, 1986:

A Hoch Auditorium crowd of about 3,200 people had recently enjoyed a visit from author Kurt Vonnegut Jr. The writer’s 1 1/2-hour speech focused on the state of the nation and the meaning of life, with plenty of humor interjected into his talk. Vonnegut, 63, expressed great concern about the prevalence of television and the actor-like persona of President Reagan. “He’s not an educated man. Why any university person should admire him, I don’t know,” Vonnegut said. Americans’ dependence on TV news more than fulfilled George Orwell’s “1984” predictions, he said: “We’ve got something much bigger and simpler than a camera in everyone’s room. We get all our news from a single source.” Vonnegut also spoke of the good he found in the country, however. “In race relations, I think Americans now are better than anyone on earth for judging people for what they are. We could get a lot better. We need to get a lot better. But we’ve come an awfully, awfully long way.”