Dear Editor:
I think most Washington University professors share the frustrations expressed in the recent editorial “Profs should offer more sections” lamenting that students are often unable to enroll in classes they want or need. The reasonable argument I’ve heard from students (as well as parents) is that someone paying $40,000 a year to come here should never be turned away from a course.
But for a professor, the options are akin to being stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. If we let in too many students, the individual attention and personal contact plunges. If we keep classes small, only a few can sign up and we’re buried under a tidal wave of perfectly justified e-mails beseeching us to raise the limit.
Some professors at the University choose to hold the line and keep enrollment small to benefit those who can get in. Others raise the limit and end up with gigantic courses in which they never get to know their students. Some of us go back and forth between these two equally unpleasant solutions.
My own “Greek Mythology” class has grown to almost a hundred students this semester from less than forty only a few years ago. The Classics Department even opened a second section taught by another professor, but this too is oversubscribed. Classics is hot, largely due to the increasingly well-prepared and ambitious students attracted to Washington University, and, of course, because Homer and Virgil are just amazing to read.
Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to the problem. Small departments like Classics don’t have many graduate students to help out as TA’s and hiring more faculty makes your tuition climb even higher. But I can assure you that faculty spend a lot of time struggling with the issue as well and that we never callously dismiss students hoping to get into our classes. We also want you to have the best education possible.
Philip Freeman
Department of Classics
Dean’s List requirements are reasonable
Dear Editor:
Student Life’s Sept. 8 editorial regarding the requirements for making the Arts and Sciences Dean’s List is a pathetic example of selfish whining. Student Life’s editors consider it unfair that students must earn a 3.5 GPA while taking at least 14 graded credit hours. The editors want it reduced to 12 hours. They also want the total credits required for graduation to be reduced, because they believe the requirements prevent people from studying subjects in depth.
These complaints exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding of why we have a Dean’s List. Making the Dean’s List is and should be an achievement, not an entitlement. The List acknowledges individuals who excel while performing ABOVE the bare minimum. People who choose to take only 12 credits because taking more would prevent them from earning good grades and learning in depth have every right to do so. If they manage to maintain a 3.5 GPA at Washington University, nobody will regard them as failures simply because they were not on the Dean’s List. However, a 3.5 GPA earned while taking only 12 graded credits can’t possibly compare to a 3.5 GPA earned while taking 18 or 21 graded credits.
As a last point, Student Life is incorrect that a person must take five classes in a semester to make the Dean’s List. Last semester I earned a place on the Dean’s List by taking four classes (three of them upper-level) for fourteen credit hours, while also studying for the MCATs, volunteering at a hospital, volunteering at a city school, protesting the war, and yes, writing numerous columns for Student Life. If the paper’s editors want special recognition from the ninth-best undergraduate program in the country, I suggest they either put up or shut up.
Seth Bloom
Class of 2004
Dear Editor:
Your staff editorial on Sept., “School should lower Dean’s List standards,” does well to highlight in a specific instance the way in which the university’s credit requirements can pressure students to do less thorough work in their classes.ÿ But it should be noted that many of the classes in Arts and Sciences that are geared towards in-depth work are 4-credit classes (for example, advanced seminars in the History Department). And with two 4-credit classes and two 3-credit classes, one could surely make the Dean’s List with four classes on their schedule. Perhaps departments should make sure that classes with unusually heavy workloads award students four credits instead of three.
Bill Bulman
Class of 2002
Outsourching transportation a disgrace
Dear Editor:
Washington University has outsourced its transportation services. Student Life (Aug. 29) quoted Lisa Underwood, manager of transportation and parking services, as follows: “A transportation company that already has the infrastructure and is already providing transportation services would provide the service for us more cost-effectively than we could do it.”
Student Life reported that the workers will pay more for health care and lose tuition benefits. Big surprise. Take benefits from workers who are already among the most modestly paid in our community and it saves money! This is a replay of 20 years ago when janitors were cut loose from the university and the service was outsourced. It was a disgrace then and it is a disgrace now.
This is part of the race to the bottom in which the most affluent among us benefit by paying workers less in order to make services we consume cheaper. Shame on the University for squeezing the shuttle drivers to make the system “more cost-effective.” It would be even more cost effective if drivers were chained to the steering wheel, fed through a tube and paid nothing. Can’t do that. It’s illegal. It’s a shame that the same cannot be said about outsourcing.
Danny Kohl
Professor Emeritus of Biology
Banks heard different speach
Dear Editor:
I was startled by the article by Paul Banks to Student Life on Professor Early’s speech.
Having introduced Professor Early and listening attentively to his remarks, I was struck by his efforts throughout the speech to present both sides on many issues and to attempt to suggest the complexity of the issues he addressed.
Taken out of context, remarks by Professor Early, or for that matter anyone, can be made to appear extreme. My impression in this instance was quite clearly that Gerald Early was not attempting to be an advocate for the Nation of Islam or to characterize the racial beliefs of pundits, but rather to place in a thoughtful context complex issues concerning multiculturalism and reparations.
I appreciate that Mr. Banks can disagree and indeed at the School of Law our basic purpose is to teach advocacy skills.ÿ But as one who has sat through many speeches, I frankly felt as if I heard a quite different speech than Mr. Banks reported.
Joel Seligman
Dean of the School of Law and Ethan A.H. Shepley University Professor
Women at WU: get the facts straight
Dear Editor:
I read with interest Mia Eisner-Grynberg’s editorial, “Forgetting the majority: the exodus of the female professor.” Mia cites me as one of a “steady stream of women” who have left the political science department at Washington University “in search of opportunities in environments more welcoming of women.” She condemns the University for having fostered “a culture that forces women to either stay away or go away.” While I applaud Eisner-Grynberg for her efforts to draw attention to gender equity issues on campus, I’m afraid she has drawn the wrong conclusions from her observations about the departure of female professors, at least in my case.
My departure should not be categorized as part of an “exodus,” especially given the political rationale that the term implies. Purely personal reasons motivated my decision to leave. It was not an easy decision to make. In my six years at the University I had enjoyed strong support from my female and male colleagues alike. I had ample resources to do my research and wonderful students, and I had just been granted tenure. I loved being at the University, but the opportunity to be closer to my family on the East Coast proved too great to turn down. Many of the other professors who have left in recent years did so for equally idiosyncratic reasons.
The University’s efforts to recruit and retain female faculty members have improved dramatically in the past few years, particularly in Arts and Sciences. The University has a generous family leave policy and is building a new daycare facility for the children of faculty and staff. This year the University is sponsoring a mentoring initiative. Female department chairs and the Association of Women Faculty have pressured for these changes to be made, and administrators such as Dean of the Faculty Ed Macias have responded to their concerns. The University can always do better-and I have confidence that it will. I encourage Mia Eisner-Grynberg and other students to continue to report on the status of women at all levels of the University-but to make sure they get the full story.
Lisa Baldez
Associate Proffessor of Government and Latin American, Latino and Carribean Studies
Dartmouth College
Editor’s note: Student Life also recieved several letters inquiring into the location of Kayak’s Coffee and Provisions (Coffee Shop Inhabits New Building, Sept. 3). Kayak’s is located at 276 Skinker at the corner of Skinker and Forest Park Parkway.