Letters to the Editor

>Protecting pedestrians

The safest way to protect pedestrians on the East Bank is to divert most of the car and truck traffic currently on Washington Avenue around central campus. It makes no sense to spend 10 percent of the cost of the entire light-rail project on a tunnel that does not address the real safety issue, a major road artery through the heart of campus. Light rail at-grade would be a welcome substitute for the noise, fumes, and physical threat posed by the current volume of traffic on campus.

Les Everett

program coordinator

University Water Resources Center

Teaching or research

As a student with a less than exemplary attendance record, Darren Bernard's column "Responsibility and education" struck close to my quadplex apartment in Dinkytown. Bernard's assessment that students have a responsibility to attend class has merit. However, in order for there to be a responsibility there must first be a value in place.

As most of the North American higher education system is now aware, the University is trying to become one of the top research institutions in the country. This desire is so great that in many instances it has trumped the educational opportunities available to the students (or stakeholders, as Bernard asserts). In the past two years I have witnessed several great professors leave the University because they failed to earn tenure. These were people who didn't post overheads online or "immemorially rehashed" old material. In fact, I enjoyed their classes so much I made a conscious effort to be at class even though attendance wasn't (GASP!!) mandatory. Perhaps their research proposals didn't appear lucrative enough for the deans or they spent too much time teaching and not enough publishing; these professors are no longer here to influence our cut in the educational pie.

Maybe Bernard is right, we do have a responsibility to sit through our entire class. Either way, I can't help but feel comfortable knowing that ESPN and Comedy Central will be there to cut any educational losses I might take while not in my assigned seat.

Joe McNiel

University undergraduate

Abandoning ideals

I am fed up with the new DFL majority in the Minnesota House. Whatever happened to the promises of getting work done, reform of the process and actually working to pass progressive issues? We have had one progressive bill (renewable energy) pass in over two months, and that was a bill from the Senate! And now they have broken their promises by abandoning all day kindergarten. What's next? Early childhood? Environmental funding? Health care? Social Justice? Speaker Anderson-Kelliher: Let's try to have the House meet more than 20 minutes per week, and do more than raise its own pay! Wellstone would be ashamed, selling out progressives for personal gain!

Patrick Kaluza

St. Paul

A falling star

If Wednesday's letter-writer wants to be taken seriously as something more than a scripted shill for the DFL, he should stop insulting the intelligence of voters who already know Al Franken's stock is falling thanks to him turning Air(head) America into just another miserably failed effort by Fairness Doctrine lefties to combat the Limbaugh Legions.

If the times we live in are so ripe for the Democratic message to get across, then why aren't the Republicans being racked and pilloried for blocking the entire "100 Hours" Democratic agenda?

I've heard no complaints about it. Could it be the Democrats once again misinterpreted the results of an election assuming the American people want their taxes jacked up (Bush's cuts not being extended) and Iraq left prostrate before the well-financed terrorist proxies of Iran and Syria?

The GOP has obviously recovered well enough from the agony of defeat to once again taste the thrill of victory stopping the Democrats from pushing an unpopular agenda that wasn't actually on the ballot last November next to what's to be done about Iraq.

The writer calls Coleman a "flip-flopping politician", but the independence Norm put on prominent display by opposing Bush on ANWR and the President's troop surge in Iraq, are very likely the reason he's likely heading toward what for Democrats will be a disturbingly easy re-election in 2008.

Coleman's star is clearly rising while Franken's is just as clearly falling. If cheap theatrics, stunts and gimmicks like running a has-been comedian and failed talk show host is the best you Democrats have, then no wonder Coleman's already out to a twenty-point lead in this light blue state.

Mark Overholser

University alumnus