4 -The Michigan Daily - Friday, October 29, 1993 tie £kb tt tiw&lg 1 III Lasser 420 Maynard Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan JOSH DUBOW Editor in Chief ANDREW LEVY Editorial Page Editor /-!PyHA LLO0WEE4 j ,(tc fDiF (L.Y cz 9 1 t Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the majority opinion of the Daily editorial board. All other cartoons, articles and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. + 4 E LN; 0 0 6 IE Media bias shown By PHILiP SAVAGE Judeo-Christiar I was pleased to see that you prefer to see the deemed Cal Thomas' lecture on ethics and valu campus to be sufficiently news she did not knoN worthy to appear on the front page ing that this Un of the Daily. I am certain you desire an ethics major the front page news stories to be the commentsc accurate and objective. Unfortu- article of Octob nately, Mike Newman's para- He also sug phrases of some of Cal Thomas' dent, being as comments could give readers inac- ethics, and not curate impressions of just what it for her own v was that Cal Thomas said. Further- refund from th more, the article failed to provide aftertheexchan the complete context for some of did Mr. Thoma these paraphrased comments and student's educa direct quotes. plete. The article states that "Thomas The article s became indignant" when a Univer- mas "compare sity senior "questioned his views." sities to commu Mr. Thomas did not become indig- this comparis nant when his views were ques- Rather, I recall tioned, nor did he immediately claim commenting on that the student had been "poorly War and the fal educated" student in a pointed dis- the former So cussion about ethics and values. Eastern Europe The student courageously opined the few places that Mr. Thomas and Citizens For people who vie' Family Values should not attempt exemplary so to impose whether the student was Beijing and in s an anarchist. Upon replying nega- versities. tively, she was then asked what The article alternate set of values (other than those attending by The n values) she would e source of her own es. She replied that w. Then, after learn- iversity student was , Mr. Thomas made quoted in the Daily ber 12. gested that the stu- senior, majoring in knowing the basis alues, apply for a e University. Only. ge recounted above, as conclude that the tion may be incom- stated that Cal Tho- d American univer- inists." I don't recall son being drawn. [l that Mr. Thomas, nthe end of the Cold ll of communism in viet Union and in e, said that among one can still find w communism as an cial system is in ome American uni- also stated that, of the lecture, the vast e older couples." Of oblem here is that er" are comparative mas lecture,. terms that carry different connota- tions to different readers. Did Mr. Newman mean that the couples in attendance were older than he? My wife and I are in our early 30s, and we attended the lecture. Were we among the "vast majority" of ""older"" couples he saw there? Since "older' is comparative, the reader must interpret this term. The impression I got from reading this phrase was that nearly all of the interpretations of the words "vast" and "older". This impression would be incorrect. The group at the Power Center did not just hop off an AARP tour bus. Rather, the group com- prised a diverse cross-section of the University and Ann Arbor commu- nities. Finally, and perhaps most im- portantly, the article did not clearly report the basic thesis of Mr. Tho- mas talk and comments. He argued that the root causes of the key prob- lems facing society today are not political and economic, but rather moral and spiritual. Therefore, solutions must be, sought in the moral and spiritual realm. He argued thatwe need more people with integrity and strong moral values (moral courage as Mr. Newman accurately reported) to assume responsibility for them- selves, their families, andtheir com-, Savage is a professor of Chemical Engineering at the University. majority... wer course, the pre "vast" and old American and Israeli hit men To the Daily: Ron Meisler and his ilk have sunk to a new low. Representing himself as a Palestinian American who hadn't yet formed an opinion on the Palestine question, he asked me if we could meet for lunch so that he could learn more about the facts I presented in my editorial, "Real peace starts with real Palestine," 9/27/93. Feeling it a duty to educate the community as much as possible on the issue, I obliged him for not one lunch but two. Meisler never revealed his real identity (Israeli American) or the purpose of the meetings. Next I open the newspaper to find an attack on things that I supposedly said during our discussions (Deconstructing the myths, 10/25/ 93). Not only did Meisler quote me inaccurately. More importantly, he did not have my permission to quote from our conversation at all. At best, Meisler was deceptive and unethical; at worst, he was acting as a spy and a slanderer for the campus chapter of the American Movement for Israel. Mr. Meisler, I was the victim of propaganda - anti-Palestinian propaganda. Before a year ago, I believed as you do that there is violence on both sides, the implication being that the Palestinians and Israelis are equally at fault. But since then I have learned as much as I could about the situation, both here and there, from Jews, Arabs and others. (No, I didn't speak to Israeli Jews in the West Bank. I don't generally discuss politics with neonle who have their international guests. All a person has to do is talk to a refugee family who were run out of their town (which you later visit in ruins or find built over by arrogant immigrants from Ann Arbor or wherever), talk to a former political prisoner who was beaten and threatened with rape by a prison director and check out the preponderance of the evidence on who's killing whom and who's stealing what from whom. The facts speak for themselves, Mr. Meisler. When you have the truth on your side, you don't have to stoop to dirty tricks. I won't be meeting with anyone for lunch. KATHERINE METRES LSA Senior Spanish department needs diversity To the Daily: First of all I would like to thank Nate Hurley for his well-balanced article last month ("Spanish lecturers accuse 'U' of hiring unfit replacements" 9/21/93) on the problem with the lecturers in the Spanish Dept. However, Mr. Hurley's article left the impression that the problem was something which occurred only this year when actually it has been a recurring problem in the department. The Spanish-speaking world is large and varied, but the department seems determined to limit the possibility of diversity by hiring only lecturers of mostly European extraction. The overwhelming majority-of the lecturers, almost to exclusion, are either from Spain or from countries teaching experience. Yet hiring practices seem to be based first on the racial or ethnic background of the applicant, followed closely by whether or not they have a friend in the department. There are several notorious cases of lecturers now teaching in the department who have neither the required education nor any teaching experience whatsoever, yet they have been hired in the last few years based solely on personal friendships. I wish it could be even longer to list all of the underhanded dealings in the department. The end loser in all of this is the undergraduate student and that is one of my main purposes in writing it. If we are going to have a language requirement, our students should expect to have well-trained, well-educated, experienced teachers who represent the many and diverse cultures of the Hispanic world. JON HEATON Rackham student The 'U' parking scam To the Daily: I would like to make the community aware of a money- making scam that is being perpetrated by the University administration on employees who use University parking facilities. University parking permits require the display of both a decal on the windshield and a "hang tag" from the rear view mirror. Because the hang tags interfere with driver visibility, most people leave them on the front dashboard, where they are still clearly visible from the outside. Last week the University started issuing parking tickets to these people, claiming "improper display of hang tag." The University knows $iliiyin a garage window I ,. r :.. > ,. ,..