Letters

Credit students, not Congress

Editor:

If I put a gun to your head and threaten to shoot you, and you
scream

and yell so I have to pull it away, how can I claim credit for
not shooting

you? But, this is exactly what Rep. McKeon does. After months of
saying

that the interest exemption student loans was "unfair," that it
wouldn’t

cost students more than "A Big Gulp per day," and getting
hammered by

thousands of students who wrote, called, faxed or e-mailed, Rep.
McKeon now

claims "Republicans are preserving the in school interest
subsidy." What he

doesn’t say is that it is safer despite his best efforts to
eliminate it.

Graduate students faced student loan payment increases of up to
$300 per

month. That’s a hell of a lot of Big Gulps.

This same line of reasoning is used throughout his letter.
House

Republicans proposed cuts which were draconian and unwise.
Students, higher

education associations and many members of Congress (mostly
Democrats, but

quite a few Republicans) said, "no!" So they backed off, and now
claim that

the threatened cuts, which are well documented as coming from
House

Republicans, never made it into the legislation. Thus, they
claim,

"Democrats and the Clinton Administration" are lying and trying
to scare

students.

Come on … students aren’t that dumb. We read. We listen. We
see this

letter for what it is – an attempt to get out from under the
deservedly

harsh criticism that House Republicans have received for their
proposed

cuts. The answer? Blame the Democrats. Blame the White House.
But, never

will you hear from House Republicans what should have been said
months ago

– that they made a huge mistake in proposing these cuts in the
first

place.

The bottom line is this, there is no pro-student, pro-education
agenda

coming out of Rep. McKeon’s committee. Indeed, other than
cutting the

education budget, THEREIS NO EDUCATION AGENDA AT ALL! This is
the most

shameful fact of all.

Yes, it is better that, instead of $20 billion, the committee
is

proposing cuts of $10 billion, "only" half of which will be
borne by

students and their families. But forgive us, Rep. McKeon, if we
don’t thank

you for that. We never asked for billions in cuts in the first
place. And

we were never asked to vote on education cuts in the last
election.

But, we will promise you one thing. Next time we will vote as if
our

future depends on it, because we know that it does. Rep. McKeon,
do you

think the outcome will be different now that we know the
stakes?Kevin Boyer

Executive Director

National Association of Graduate

and Professional Students

Standard merit

Editor:

I am writing in response to David Aguilar’s Oct. 6 article,

"Assimilating Identity."

Aguilar asserts that different cultures possess different
notions of

merit, and on this basis, advances the propositions that
standards for

admission to universities ought not to be uniform for all
applicants.

Aguilar fails to consider, however, that standards for admission
need

not change with the cultural background of each applicant to
insure fair

treatment of that applicant, and standards cannot change if fair
treatment

is a goal.

Indeed, the notion of equal treatment presupposed a certain
uniformity

of standard. All applicants can and should be expected to meet
at least

certain minimum standards for admission necessary for success in
a

university environment. To suggest that standards change from
cultural

group to cultural group or, more egregiously, from applicant to
applicant,

depending upon a variety of factors, is to advocate the
destruction of

standards altogether.

Standards in the context of university admission must
necessarily apply

across certain social and cultural lines to be meaningful, or
else how is

one applicant to be fairly evaluated against another for the
same position?

With the increasing number of cultural groups in this nation,
uniform

standards as a cohesive social force are needed more than ever
to insure

fair treatment for all members of this society.

No doubt Aguilar would respond to this by asking, as he does in
his

article, "Since when has (the system) been fair?"

But surely, the existence of past deficiencies in the system to
the

disadvantage of certain minorities cannot constitute an
acceptable argument

to perpetuate those same deficiencies today to the disadvantage
of a

shrinking majority. This kind of "payback time" attitude will
exacerbate

the very same social ills that Aguilar seeks to remedy.Zareh
Jaltorossian

Fourth-year

Philosophy