The Environmental Protection Agency has proposed strengthening the health standards under the Clean Air Act to limit the amount of these two pollutants that can be released into the air. This would be beneficial to the health of all citizens because the new standards would prevent 20,000 premature deaths, 250,000 cases of aggravated asthma and 9,000 hospital admission per year.
However, the big polluters - such as electric utilities and the auto, chemical and mining industries - are against strengthening health standards. Since this is such an important issue that affects our health and the health of those we love, I urge the community to support these new standards and to fight against big polluters.
Tiffany Bloom
LSA junior
To the Daily:
Your editorial about Michigan's High School Proficiency Exam ("Testing patience," 5/28/97) reminded me of the story about the Japanese and the American car manufacturers: When the government made automobile-emission standards tougher, the Japanese company immediately hired 100 more engineers - the American company hired 100 more lawyers.
Data have been coming in for years indicating that American high school students lag behind their counterparts in other industrialized nations. If a test is designed that measures what high school students should know, it would not surprise me a bit if only 40 percent of American high school students could pass it. The poor performance of Michigan students on the HSPE should be a wake-up call to students, parents, teachers, school administrators and the state government.
We need to behave as the Japanese company in the story and rise to the challenge of the HSPE instead of behaving as the American company in the story and trying to get rid of it.
David Sirkin
Medical School
To the Daily:
The tempest among the prismatically correct University administration leads me to write about the sullying in recent years of the block 'M' in the center of the Diag with the crossbar that now says, thoroughly redundantly, "Michigan." Everybody knew with crystal clarity what the 'M' stood for - it had those ingredients essential to a good logo: Simplicity and instant recognizability.
In my humble opinion, ours was one of the top two or three university logos in all the land - I might rate only West Virginia's higher. Why then, did some well-meaning but logo-challenging soul decide to improve on perfection?
Can we please have our unadulterated, uncross barred, plain old block 'M' back?
Rand Bishop
University alumnus