Credit students, not Congress
Editor:
If I put a gun to your head and threaten to shoot you, and you scream
and yell so I have to pull it away, how can I claim credit for not shooting
you? But, this is exactly what Rep. McKeon does. After months of saying
that the interest exemption student loans was "unfair," that it wouldn't
cost students more than "A Big Gulp per day," and getting hammered by
thousands of students who wrote, called, faxed or e-mailed, Rep. McKeon now
claims "Republicans are preserving the in school interest subsidy." What he
doesn't say is that it is safer despite his best efforts to eliminate it.
Graduate students faced student loan payment increases of up to $300 per
month. That's a hell of a lot of Big Gulps.
This same line of reasoning is used throughout his letter. House
Republicans proposed cuts which were draconian and unwise. Students, higher
education associations and many members of Congress (mostly Democrats, but
quite a few Republicans) said, "no!" So they backed off, and now claim that
the threatened cuts, which are well documented as coming from House
Republicans, never made it into the legislation. Thus, they claim,
"Democrats and the Clinton Administration" are lying and trying to scare
students.
Come on ... students aren't that dumb. We read. We listen. We see this
letter for what it is - an attempt to get out from under the deservedly
harsh criticism that House Republicans have received for their proposed
cuts. The answer? Blame the Democrats. Blame the White House. But, never
will you hear from House Republicans what should have been said months ago
- that they made a huge mistake in proposing these cuts in the first
place.
The bottom line is this, there is no pro-student, pro-education agenda
coming out of Rep. McKeon's committee. Indeed, other than cutting the
education budget, THEREIS NO EDUCATION AGENDA AT ALL! This is the most
shameful fact of all.
Yes, it is better that, instead of $20 billion, the committee is
proposing cuts of $10 billion, "only" half of which will be borne by
students and their families. But forgive us, Rep. McKeon, if we don't thank
you for that. We never asked for billions in cuts in the first place. And
we were never asked to vote on education cuts in the last election.
But, we will promise you one thing. Next time we will vote as if our
future depends on it, because we know that it does. Rep. McKeon, do you
think the outcome will be different now that we know the stakes?Kevin Boyer
Executive Director
National Association of Graduate
and Professional Students
Standard merit
Editor:
I am writing in response to David Aguilar's Oct. 6 article,
"Assimilating Identity."
Aguilar asserts that different cultures possess different notions of
merit, and on this basis, advances the propositions that standards for
admission to universities ought not to be uniform for all applicants.
Aguilar fails to consider, however, that standards for admission need
not change with the cultural background of each applicant to insure fair
treatment of that applicant, and standards cannot change if fair treatment
is a goal.
Indeed, the notion of equal treatment presupposed a certain uniformity
of standard. All applicants can and should be expected to meet at least
certain minimum standards for admission necessary for success in a
university environment. To suggest that standards change from cultural
group to cultural group or, more egregiously, from applicant to applicant,
depending upon a variety of factors, is to advocate the destruction of
standards altogether.
Standards in the context of university admission must necessarily apply
across certain social and cultural lines to be meaningful, or else how is
one applicant to be fairly evaluated against another for the same position?
With the increasing number of cultural groups in this nation, uniform
standards as a cohesive social force are needed more than ever to insure
fair treatment for all members of this society.
No doubt Aguilar would respond to this by asking, as he does in his
article, "Since when has (the system) been fair?"
But surely, the existence of past deficiencies in the system to the
disadvantage of certain minorities cannot constitute an acceptable argument
to perpetuate those same deficiencies today to the disadvantage of a
shrinking majority. This kind of "payback time" attitude will exacerbate
the very same social ills that Aguilar seeks to remedy.Zareh Jaltorossian
Fourth-year
Philosophy