Letters To The Editor
HIGHER EDUCATION
GU should reinstate Glynn
The Gonzaga University Board of Trustees’ recent decision to remove the Rev. Ed Glynn, S.J., as president is a grave injustice, not only to Fr. Glynn, who has been an exemplary administrator, but to the entire Gonzaga community. I hope the board will reinstate Glynn, and that the bylaws will be changed to prevent similar situations in the future.
Gonzaga’s mission and reputation are still guaranteed by those most intimately associated with it as a living community: the faculty, staff, administrators and students. The board has perpetrated an injustice that the Jesuit community, Faculty Assembly and many individual members of Gonzaga’s various constituencies have protested vigorously.
It’s important to remember that Gonzaga is still made up of the same committed Jesuits, dedicated faculty members, able administrators and bright and curious students as before. Gonzaga is still committed to the mission it has had for over 100 years: to educate the whole person, mind, body and soul.
Gonzaga is still dedicated to overcoming racial intolerance and bigotry, and to creating a diverse community and a welcoming campus environment for all. The actions of a few will never be able to undo the work of those truly responsible for Gonzaga’s reputation as one of the finest educational institutions in the region.
I urge alumni and friends of Gonzaga to continue to support the university, and to write to Jim Jundt, chairman of the board of trustees, to express reactions to Glynn’s firing. Letters to the board may be sent in care of Harry Sladich, interim president of Gonzaga University. Dr. Michael R. Carey, associate professor Gonzaga University
EWU criticisms on target
Christopher Price’s letter of May 22 (“EWU is its own worst enemy”) gives some strong indications about the pervasive problems that infest Eastern Washington University.
The administration is not eliminating useless expenditures, such as the hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on counterproductive Spokane Center and Riverpoint properties. Rather than address real issues, the administration is harming students and the university’s educational mission by making unsound cuts and addressing illusory problems.
There are many good people among the faculty and staff at EWU. They work hard try to do their best, for students and the university as a whole. This requires questioning administration assumptions and decisions that have led to the many current problems, fiscal and otherwise.
Unfortunately, those who have the vision to question the administration are abused, ostracized and punished. Morale is abysmal - a direct, predictable result of the administration’s behavior.
Students need small classes and broad offerings. Decisions Price described match information I have obtained. These decisions will result in larger classes, restricted course offerings and other detrimental effects. Almost all of the classes I took were far above an objectively appropriate size. That increased the burden on faculty and students alike.
Educational quality is being sacrificed to “efficiency,” which is a non-issue. Appropriate control must be exercised over the administration, before it destroys EWU. Douglas R. Mitchell Cheney
SCHOOLS AND EDUCATION
Tailor setting to student’s needs
As an education major, I am concerned about the topic of inclusion in our public schools.
Inclusion of disabled children in the regular education classroom is an admirable idea. Disabled children have the right to be in public schools and regular education classrooms. Unfortunately, exercising this right may not be beneficial to the disabled students’ education.
Inclusion can have benefits for both regular education students and disabled students. By observing the behavior of “normal” peers, a disabled student can imitate and learn appropriate behavior. “Normal” students can grow from the exposure to disabled students. They can learn about and accept their disabled peers.
Behavior and attitudes of all students may show improvement, but the academic learning of disabled students might suffer. According to Meisbov in “Full Inclusion and Students with Autism,” studies on non-autistic disabled students do not give support for full inclusion. These studies do show partial inclusion to be preferred over full special education classrooms.
Meisbov compares full inclusion as a way of learning to live in the community to a concert pianist giving large concerts as the only means of practice.
Education that begins in a small classroom and moves toward partial or full inclusion, if appropriate, may be the best way to educate our disabled students. We should let their disabilities and, more importantly, their progress, dictate their method of education. Suzanne M. Falconer Cheney
PEOPLE IN SOCIETY
People of good will must be firm
Her name was Ceveline Jackson. The year was 1967. The place was Berea College, Berea, Ky. I was a junior, from an all-white Montana town. She was a senior and the daughter of black Alabama farm workers.
Under its charter, 90 percent of Berea’s students came from Appalachia, with 10 percent of openings reserved for foreign students and top scholars. As a Montanan, I was accepted as a “foreign” student. Ceve was a top scholar.
This was a time when racial barriers were falling all over. That winter, I happened into a store in Georgia that had just desegregated its bathrooms. The management wanted to sell the “colored” and “white” signs it could no longer use, so I bought them and gave them to Ceveline.
I’ll never forget her delighted squeal, as she assured me that these signs would forever remain her most prized possessions.
We left Berea but kept in touch. In 1970, I visited her and her fiancee in New Boston, Texas, and we attended a movie. By then, desegregation was the law but not the custom. Nonetheless, I sat in the balcony with my friends and other blacks. That evening, Ceveline’s landlady, an elderly black woman, asked that I leave because black militants had threatened to burn the house down if I stayed.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” The barriers fell because people like Ceveline Jackson refused to be inferior or intimidated.
They will stay down for the same reason. L. Jim Shamp Cheney
Disrespect should have no place
About the Colville tribe wanting to change some of the names of local mascots (Spokesman-Review, May 21), it’s time to do the responsible thing and start operating from a position of genuine mutual respect. If these names and terms are offensive to anyone, we have an obligation to rectify the situation.
The word “squaw,” for example, carries profound negative meaning for some and is applied in a flippant and ambivalent way by those outside of Native American culture.
Indifference to others’ need for respect is as bad as blatant discrimination. Curt R. Luce Cheney
Look at system at odds with parents
It is good that interactive editor Doug Floyd’s May 18 Our View editorial was on the Opinion page. It is obvious that Floyd makes assumptions about the parents of the two Sacajawea Middle School vandals that well may not be close to accurate. But it’s always so easy to blame parents.
I wonder if Floyd has had a child who went wrong and he was left wondering why, when he had done everything in his power to instill in that child a belief in right and wrong, to instill in that child a good moral ethic?
While the parents should have obviously known where their children were and what they were doing, too many children are being told by too many teachers, counselors and administrators that they don’t have to mind their parents, that they should come tell teachers, counselors or administrators if their parents try to discipline them. The result is the undermining of parental authority and out-of-control children. And who gets blamed? The parents, every time.
Until the news media are willing to report the facts about what is going on in the schools, are willing to expose the travesty of the public education system, are willing to quit conveniently blaming parents, the problem will continue to get worse. The monsters being created have no allegiance to their creators. Lynn M. Stuter Nine Mile Falls
IN THE PAPER
Clark crossed a line
The trashing of Sacajawea Middle School was bad enough, but to allow columnist Doug Clark to trash the police department simply to write a column crosses the line of journalism.
Do the parents have a responsibility for throwing a teenager out of the house at 13? To use a “… mysterious stained package someone left on my porch …” unverified, as the backdrop for a column served to thrust The Spokesman-Review as a tabloid.
When this paper examines other organizations, the question on integrity is always asked. Why not here? Edward Thomas Jr. Spokane
Clark right about police
Kudos to columnist Doug Clark’s hypotheses involving the delayed reaction of officers responding to the trashing at Sacajawea Middle School. With a law enforcement agency such as ours, it makes sense that vandalism is so prevalent in Spokane.
My suggestion to District 81 is this: to help defray the cost of the carnage at Sacajawea, why not sue the police department?
Sound crazy? If nothing else, perhaps it could serve as a wake-up call to headquarters of Spokane’s “finest.” Mildred K. Kinter Spokane
Clark could write Stooges scripts
Re: The king of frick and frack. Doug Clark just went to the bottom and I hope he doesn’t resurface. It’s a shame that our police force is not held in a higher regard by this fine newspaper.
I’m beginning to understand this conversation: “You mean you don’t take the daily paper?”
“No, we just take Sunday so we can read the comics, do the crossword and look at the real estate section.” The officers in Spokane are faced with more violence and high-powered weaponry than ever before. The punks who were at Sacajawea could have had an arsenal of automatic weapons.
Clark sounds like he is ready to write for the Three Stooges. Maybe we could reincarnate them and he could have a real job. Alice M. Gingrich Spokane
What is Clark’s game, anyway?
In reading Doug Clark’s column on May 13 (“Zoo dorks still try to keep pipe dream alive”), I was first surprised, then confused and finally angered by his reference to our “deadbeat mayor.”
When The Spokesman-Review saw fit to print a lengthy article concerning our mayor’s estrangement from his wife, I seriously questioned how newsworthy it was, as did many others. Now, much later, under the guise of humor, Clark saw fit to reference the mayor’s personal life again.
In that there is no humor associated with the dissolution of a lengthy marriage, one is compelled to question the motivation of the journalist. Or is it simply, as it appears, the writing of an insensitive jerk? J.D. Ray Spokane
Mother’s Day edition sparkled
Just a congratulatory note on your Mother’s Day edition.
Your four major stories on mothers and children are the crown jewel in the diamond tiara of superior journalism. Really well done. Larry B. Simonsen Spokane
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Social Security policy unfair
I am being punished by the Social Security Administration for being born between 1919 and 1923. It’s not my fault I was born in this range of years.
I didn’t draw Social Security until I was 70. I’ve worked hard all my life and get less than convicts, refugees and immigrants who never contributed one dollar to Social Security. Why all this compassion for them while taking it away from people of my age group?
In 1961, I fell from a 50-foot scaffold and was not expected to live. The state paid me $40 a week for industrial insurance, which caused me to lose everything I had. I tried for aid to help raise my family and they wanted to take my children and place them in foster care. The industrial insurance doctors had the nerve to tell the insurance company that if I received a good settlement, my pain would go away. But I picked myself up by the bootstraps, as the saying goes, and proved the doctors and lawyers wrong.
So, after all the pain from a broken back, neck, pelvis and arms, I went to work. Now, at 75 years of age, the government wants to punish me for being born in the wrong year. Peter E. Therens Spokane
We need an effective incentive program
Current welfare reform measures sound more like blaming the victim or scapegoating those least able to defend themselves.
The American work ethic has always been “work hard and get ahead.” Here is the deal people on welfare are given: Get a job so you are out of the home 40 hours a week while someone else watches your children. We’ll cut your benefits so you end up with no more money in your pocket than you had before you went to work. And if you are really a hard worker and put in a little overtime, we’ll cut your benefits even more.
This is not an incentive program.
An incentive program provides people with a way to improve their lifestyle by having more money. Set an income level a little above the poverty line. Subsidize people who are working to ensure their income increases to that level. And don’t start cutting back on their benefits until they have exceeded the set income level by $100 a month for six consecutive months. That would be an incentive program.
The cost of providing before- and after-school child care programs, summer child care programs for schoolaged children and day care for preschool children for lowincome families equals, if not exceeds, any savings of tax dollars achieved by the current reform program. V. Jo Smittle Spokane
Odd, what makes for racism
Let’s keep this simple: Rep. Helen Chenoweth wants to address the high unemployment situation in North Idaho by putting Idaho residents to work before importing people from other states to take Idaho jobs. This makes her a racist, according to the media.
OK, now it’s starting to get confusing. Gary M. Garrison Kettle Falls, Wash.
Chenoweth-bashing goes too far
I never thought I would be writing to defend Rep. Helen Chenoweth. I never would have voted for her, and I suspect she’s confused about a lot of things. However, the contempt, hatred and rage displayed by my fellow citizens on the issue of her remarks about people from warm-weather climes is really all out of proportion to her fault.
So, she said something foolish. So maybe she’s a racist and doesn’t know it. If those were the worst things I could say about myself, I’d be a much happier man.
The ugly emotions displayed in response to her comments pander to the worst in people and smack of demagoguery. Can we cut it out and concentrate on the big issues? Maybe have a little respect for one another? Greg H. Simpson Pullman