Letters to the Editor

'U' should rethink affirmative action

To the Daily:

I was in a conversation with a friend recently regarding affirmative action at the University and I was saddened by thought that such a fine institution should choose to blemish its name by accepting students unconstitutionally.

I have always been a fan of civil rights, yet some people feel that my beliefs contradict this statement. I think back to Dr. Martin Luther King who always wanted people to judge him "not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character." Here at the University, our admissions office and others who advocate affirmative action actually insist that people be judged by pigment, not merit.

This creates a division between people who were accepted for competitive reasons such as ACT scores or GPA and those who were able to represent a minority. Frankly, I feel that the diversity of ideas and beliefs is what makes the University great. It is trivial and superficial to call a student body "diverse" due to color.

I urge people to support diversification of our school, but the answer so far chosen is the easy way out of a tough situation. This does not justify us to use affirmative action. I also challenge those students who constantly circulate petitions for affirmative action to examine other ways of combatting the problem of diversity. Our University is what we make of it and we owe it to ourselves to make it the best place possible.

Barry Shapiro

LSA senior

New online class registration system is 'a disaster'

To the Daily:

The new online registration system, which the University has paid millions of dollars for, replaces the old telephone registration system and the old Wolverine access system.

The old system was delightfully easy to use: You look up your division/course/section numbers in the schedule of classes, call a phone system that has you punch in your Social Security Number, a validation code (your birthdate or a code of your choosing), and then follow a few simple menus to add and drop courses. You could look up the course availability, your grades and even order official and download unofficial transcripts from the 128-bit secured web page.

The new system is a disaster.

It is hampered by a lack of documentation - who would know you need to enter labs before lectures or the system rejects a class add? It is considerably slower than the old system at searching course numbers and performing add/drop transactions.

It will not work through a firewall, which limits a number of access points to the system (I could previously access this from anywhere in the world with a web browser and a touch-tone telephone). It uses all new, arbitrarily defined course numbers that don't seem to have any bearing on the old system, so even with a current schedule of classes in front of you need to first perform a search to look up the new numbers.

The search system doesn't understand the subject names or old course numbers, so you need to do a search for all subjects first, then for all courses in that subject, making it less useful than just displaying a list of all courses alphabetically and their course numbers.

When adding a course and not having the course number, there is a way to browse the course catalog - but it does not show more than eight course numbers in the window, and there is no way to scroll, so many of the lab/discussion sections (which need to be selected before it will allow a lecture to be selected) do not appear.

You cannot disenroll from a term online, even before the term starts, which the old system let you do. You cannot download unofficial transcripts or request official transcripts through the new system.

Finally, the new system uses 40-bit encryption - a step backwards from the old system which supported 128-bit.

I now know where my $80 a term registration fee is going - I have been wondering why registration was so expensive because in the 8 previous semesters at the University, registration seemed painless and fully automated; apparently, the University felt it needed to spend more of its limited resources on another product it did not need.

Kevin Kalp

Students should support English 317

To the Daily:

We are writing to support in the strongest terms David Halperin's course, English 317: How to Be Gay. We want to be clear at the outset that we think that support for the course is not just a matter of academic freedom but concerns an equally important principle - standing up to bigotry in all its forms.

It strikes us that the criticisms of the course were not well informed about the content and aim of the course, in that they seem to confuse examining questions of social construction with brainwashing and recruiting. This is profoundly disrespectful of University students, whose sexual identities are viewed as blowing in the wind.

Even if the critics were more precise in their attacks on the course, we would still support Prof. Halperin's course in the name of academic freedom. The assumption that being straight is normative is just as prevalent in the University's curriculum as is the assumption that to be white is to be without race and to be male is to be without gender. This course attempts to carve out a space to talk about subcultural practices and queer studies, and to examine the cultural trappings of gay identity.

The University has a responsibility to its community to provide space for that discussion, as it has for the discussion of issues of race, ethnicity and gender in its sincere effort to enrich the diversity of our community and its intellectual life. We take for granted now that Women's Studies, Ethnic Studies and African and African-American Studies are an important part of the curriculum, but not so long ago they were as contested as English 317 is today.

In supporting English 317, we, the undersigned graduate students in the Department of Political Science, support multiculturalism and academic freedom and denounce homophobia.

- This letter was written by Rackham students Irfan Nooruddin, Khristina Haddad, Joan Sitomer, Veronica Reyna, Marek Steedman, Ted Miller, Aaron Stern, Amit Ahuja, Yunju Nam, Todd Austin, Debra Horner, Dulcey Simpkins, Laura Evans, Cindy Kam, Carrie Konold, Ryan Hudson, Deniz Erkmen, Regina Baku, Lara Rusch, Laura Wernick, Encarnacion Anderson, Pam Ramseyer, Luis Fuentes-Rowher, Nick Jorgensen, Anna Maria Ortiz, Susan Moffitt, Devra Coren, Ifeoma Okwuje, Nick Winter, Alex Yeo, Katherine Vasetsky, Debra Cohan, Harwood McClerking, Charlene Allen, Joshua Bauroth, Kevin Maillard, Ryan Rynbrandt, Denise Degarmo, Todd Allee, Paula Pickering, Mike Hanmer and Kristina Miler.