Chairwoman dismissed for high standards

As a former member of the philosophy department and one-time colleague of Julie Van Camp, I think it a mistake to suggest that her recall had anything to do with gender issues, as you suggest in your lead article published on Feb. 25.
 
Traditionally and regrettably, philosophy has tended to be a male preserve, in spite of the fact of an increasing number of distinguished women philosophers.
 
My impression is that Julie’s ouster was engineered by philosophers who favored a narrow conception of their field — logic, metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, approached from a linguistic or analytic perspective — over a smaller number who favored a broader approach. The latter saw philosophy, not as excluding traditional concerns, but as including much more, such as outreach to other disciplines and involvement in inter-disciplinary projects.
 
Julie distinguished herself in her pre-law program, her computer ethics class, her support of applied ethics, including bioethics and business ethics, and her philosophy of dance class. While this effort led to increased enrollment of majors and graduate students, colleagues may have feared that its popularity threatened their own preserves.
 
Also, as an achiever at the highest level, whether teacher, researcher, class-developer, organizer or fund-raiser, Julie may have disturbed tenure-track faculty by the prospect of having similar standards applied to them. That is for them to say.
 
Unfortunately, Julie’s recall may cast a dark shadow on the department’s future. Though in no way unfriendly to women, the philosophy department now faces the danger that concentration upon a narrow conception of philosophy will alienate many students, shrink enrollment and lessen its relevance to the university community at large.

— Shane Andre, professor emeritus

Forty-Niner apology not good enough

It takes a lot for a group to swallow their pride and admit that they are wrong. The On-line Forty-Niner was asked to write an apology by the College Republicans for the article printed by Joyce Kelly regarding the Pro-America rally. On Monday Feb. 24, the editor-in-chief of the On-line Forty-Niner, Kimberly Pasquis, admitted to us, the readers, that she made a mistake in publishing the article on Wednesday Feb. 19 written by Joyce Kelly regarding the Pro-American Rally.
 
The club asked for the apology because the article was especially biased against them and against the rally. The job of a reporter is to present facts, not make one side look better than another. The letter from Pasquis acknowledged that Kelly wrote the article while having a conflict of interest, and the On-line Forty-Niner was wrong in printing it. However, this does not go far enough, as an apology to the College Republicans was never made.
 
She apologized to Dr. Karenga because he was called a “convicted torturer,” and the article was printed without giving him a chance to respond. What about the College Republicans? Why didn’t they get a chance to respond to Uduak-Joe Ntuk’s quote that the College Republicans are a bunch of “white males and blonde bimbos in tee shirts” in Kelly’s article? Why didn’t they get a chance to respond to Ntuk’s accusation that they support people like Trent Lott in Kelly’s article? If she apologized to Karenga, then Pasquis should also apologize to the College Republicans for being victims of the same thing.
 
The College Republicans deserve a sincere apology from the newspaper for the publication of the article. The club strongly urges Pasquis to do the right thing and issue an apology.

— Jason Garthoffner and Alex Omel, College Republicans
 

Palestinians true victims of Israli terrorism

This article is in response to Gerry Wachovsky’s article “Palestine, a contradiction in itself which was published on Feb.18.
 
The idea of a Jewish state was influenced by the Jewish Zionist movement led by Theodore Hertzel which began in 1897. The politics of Zionism were influenced by nationalist ideology and by colonial ideas about Europeans’ right to claim and settle other parts of the world.
 
In the 1930s, Jews began to migrate to Palestine, and started to terrorize the Palestinian people. By 1948, when the British pulled out of Palestine and Israel was created, more than 400 Palestine villages were destroyed. Today the Palestinian refugee population includes about 5.5 million people living outside their occupied land.
 
Wachovsky claimed that the Palestinians have no rights in Palestine — neither do the Jews. First of all, 96 percent of the world’s Jews are Ashkenazim, who trace their ancestry to Khazaria, a conglomerate of Aryan Turkish tribes which converted to Judaism in A.D.740. The Ashkenazim have no historic rights to return and occupy land in the Middle East. They should transfer to the steppes of southern Russian or straight to Mongolia where all Turkish tribes originated.
 
Israel now stands in defiance of 69 U.N. resolutions, more than any other country in the world. Examples of Israel’s cruel procedures are terrifying. Israel allots 85 percent of water resources in the occupied territories to Jewish settlers. In Hebron, for example; 85 percent of water resources are given to about 500 Jewish settlers, the remaining 15 percent is divided among 120,000 Palestinians.
 
Since the start of the current Intefada, some 2,800 Palestinians have been killed, most of them unlawfully, by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The victims included more than 412 children, as accounted by Amnesty International. Thousands of Palestinians, hundreds of them children, have been arbitrarily detained. Some 5,000 Palestinians were being held in administrative detention without charge or trial, on the basis of secret evidence, which neither they nor their lawyers are allowed to see or challenge in court.
 
During the same period, Palestinian armed groups, labeled as terrorists by the United States and Israel, killed more than 689 Israelis. My question to Mr.Wachovsky is: if the Palestinians are terrorists, what do you call the IDF, since they have killed more people?
 
One last word for you, Mr.Wachovsky. People earn the right to their lands by living on it for 2,000 years and defending it and sacrificing their lives for it, not by occupying it and enslaving other people.

— Mohamad Arabo, senior, Computer Engineering

Calendar

Display Ads