4- The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, Marchl, 1994 (ihl £irigan tui1g 420 Maynard Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan JESSIEHALLADAY Editor in Chief SAM GooDsmIN FLINT WAINESS Editorial Page Editors Unless otherwise noted unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of a majority of the Daily's editorial board All other articles, letters, and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. The residence fee paradox 'Her mother was married six times; she grew up In a trailer ... called a white nigger. Abused child, abused wife. Her insides must look like broken glass.' -Jesse Jackson, defending Tonya Harding ~3 Vg. . O N f U' A The decision to raise housing rates by four percent next year - substantially above the rate of inflation - by the University Board of Regents sets the Housing Division down a primrose path of disaster. With dan- gerously low occupancies and badly mis- placed priorities, this latest step may well result in hundreds of vacancies next year. Given the recent ouster of Director Robert Hughes, observers might have expected a shake-up in the tired plan of raising rates ad infinitium until students are unable and un- willing to pay the ridiculously high prices. Residents living in a double in a traditional residence hall with a 13-meal plan will have to pay more than $4,600 next year. That comes out to $575 a month. That the Housing Divisionwould continue to raise rates above the rate of inflation, while housing rates in Ann Arbor remain constant across the board, strikes against the very grain of common sense and gives us pause to ask: What in the world is the Office of Student Affairs doing? It is Vice President Maureen A. Hartford's office that makes the final recommendations. Her office faces a projected $350,000 to $400,000 revenue shortfall resulting from an unprecedented low occupancy rate in Bursley. Hartford's office has decided to make other students in the dorms pay for the increasing unattractiveness of the Univer- sity-provided housing. Is it fair to tax stu- dents living in the dormitories more to com- pensate for the lost revenue brought about by poor dormitory conditions? The resulting loss in revenue has reduced funds for building renovations. Major new projects for improving conditions at the resi- dence halls have been put on hold indefi- nitely. Along with an intense advertising cam- paign urging students to return to the dormi- tories next year, the Housing Division has for years provided advice to students about off- campus and alternative housing. Such conflicting initiatives within the Housing Division will soon come under in- tense scrutiny. The resulting actions by the vice president for student affairs will inevita- bly hurt students. Hartford's office will soon launch a nationwide search for a new director of the Housing Division -- a search for a "puppet" who will certainly bend over back- wards to appease his administrative over- lords sequestered within the Fleming Build- ing. Ex-Housing Director Hughes seemed to generally have the best interest of students in mind, resulting in friction between him and the administration. The latest rate increases and upheaval within the Housing Division clearly foreshadow a move by the adminis- tration to recruit a "housing director" who will merely serve as another figurehead in the over-inflated administrative infrastructure to serve at the whim of the "executive adminis- trators." Under the guise of a new "director," and with opponents in the Housing Division con- veniently "reassigned to a lateral position within the University," the administration will implement decisions based not on pro- viding a safe environment suitable for aca- demic enrichment for students, but rather based on cutthroat economics for the specific purpose of replenishing the depleted reserve funds in the Housing Division. The executive administrators who run the corporate business called the University of Michigan again have based decisions not on providing an atmosphere suitable for aca- demic progress but rather on maximizing profits and yearly revenue. Single-payer argument flawed To the Daily: While embracing the single-payer system in its recent editorial on health care ("Health Care Crisis," 2/ 28/94) the Daily makes several mistakes and leaps of faith. First, you say that the single-payer system will "revers[e] the morally abhorrent fact that millions of Americans go without health care." Perhaps what you meant to say was "millions of Americans go without health insurance." It is not only immoral to deny health care to citizens, but in the United States, with our current health care system, it is also illegal under section 9121 of the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985. According to the American Hospital Association, hospitals provided $10 billion in uncompensated care to the uninsured in 1991. You are also amazed that "a debate has surfaced asato whether or not a health care crisis even exists." Again, you have confused health care with health insurance. Just because the Clintons proclaim that there is a crisis doesn't make it so. Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle are beginning to question the depth of the "crisis" when most polls show that three-quarters of Americans are satisfied with the health care system. The Daily makes a great leap of faith when it says that with a single-payer system, run by the government, "administrative costs would significantly decrease." Since when has big government been efficient at anything? With little incentive to keep costs down (all you need is a little backbone to "take the political risk of backing tax increases" to get more money), how will a government-run system be more efficient? What the Daily proposes is that the U.S. government be given control of an additional 15 percent of the U.S. economy. If there is one lesson to be learned in recent history, it is that a centrally planned economy is doomed to failure. THOMAS LAPORTE Second-year Rackham student 'Vote no on Proposal A' To the Daily: On March 15, voters will be going to the polls on how to "re-fund" the education system of Michigan. This proposal was made due to the public's discontent with high property taxes. Well, the proposal wiped out property tax but increased other taxes. So both plans, the one to increase income tax and the other to increase sales tax, just redistribute the money lost from property taxes into other taxes, such as income and sales tax and phone and homestead tax. I urge voters to vote on March 15, and I urge you to vote no. As students, we do not receive a high enough income, but we do purchase many items. Therefore, if the state sales tax were to increase from four to six percent, it would be an increase that would be detrimental to our already vanishing savings. Vote on March 15, and vote no on Proposal A. DANIEL CHERRIN LSA junior *" * F inding a place in time to call your own Like most recent college graduates, my friend Dan had a few problems finding a job. He slept on a friend's couch as he searched for work, but after two months of trying he wasn't having any luck. Fed up, he found some cardboard and red paint and made a sign that read "College graduate. Need a job and will work for food." He went to Michigan Avenue in Chicago dressed in his business suit and stood on the median with his sign as the traffic passed. After two days, he didn't get any offers, though some of the other guys who stood on the median offered to let him sell watches with them. Welcome to our generation. You've heard all the labels that have been thrown around - slackers, the 13th generation, Generation X, the baby busters, 20-nothings, the boomerang generation. Whatever we're called, we must face asobering fact: by all predictions, we are likely to be the first downwardly mobile generation since the Civil War, the first who will not exceed or even equal our parents' standard of living.. In the book "13th Generation," self-described Baby Boomers Neil Howe and Bill Strauss pull together statistics andpopularcultureto argue a very simple point: those of us born from 1961 to 1981 have managed to get the bum rap at every point in our lives. Since I'm not living with my parents like most of my college friends, I'm not really in a position to rail against the world. However, much of what the authors said about our unfortunate generation rings true. Do you remember what it was like to be a kid in the '70s and early '80s? The divorce rate reached an all-time high, leaving kids to mediate between parents, watch their mothers wait for dad's support check that never came, and come home to empty houses after school with only the TV for comfort. In 1979, the year "Kramer vs. Kramer" won Best Picture, most of us were the age of the child in the movie - and none too happy about being there. Having kids was not cool in the '70s. We were the first babies people took pills and had abortions not to have. Restaurants which allowed children in the '50s and '60s and would again in the '80s wouldn't let us through the door. Disney stopped making large-scale animated G movies when we were kids- "The Little Mermaid," their first hit in almost twenty years, came out in 1989 when most of us were already in high school and college. TV-which during the '60s was tame enough forjust about everybody -began to portray violence and sex which our little latchkey minds absorbed without any parental supervision. Even shows that weren't blatantly violent dealt with adult topics. I remember telling my parents to turn down the volume on "All in the Family" when I was nine because hearing the arguments as I went to sleep gave me nightmares. As an adolescent, I loved the show, but as a kid all I heard was people yelling at each other. Little kids became cool again just when we weren't little anymore-in 1982, those ubiquitous "Baby on Board" signs began to appear, and evilchildrenlike "Rosemary'sBaby" or that eerie kid from "The Exorcist" became the lovable infant in "Three Men and a Baby ." In the same year, the kids who would be the Class of 2000 were born, and educators came back to basic education and abandoned the open schools and permissiveness we knew as children. My elementary school walled in the 5th grade "pod" which housed 100 kids and four teachers in open space in 1983, but it was too late for the six classes (including my own) who attempted tolearn long divisionwhile trying to tune out three other teachers. Then we hit adolescence, a time which brought sexual freedom and 01 01 S Blackmun's wise realization Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun never has been the reactionary liberal many have attempted to portray him as. A Nixon appointee, Blackmun came to the Court with a belief that government generally worked well for most people. But at the age of 85, Blackmun is beginning to draw on his almost 25 years of experience on the bench to speak out against some of the Court's greatest mistakes and injus- tices. Last week, after the Court - as it has done so many times during the Rehnquist years - refused to hear an appeal from a death row inmate, Blackmun and arch-conservative Jus- tice Antonin Scalia exchanged heated words over Blackmun's proclamation that the death penalty can never be administered constitution- ally. Blackmun is the only current justice to rec- ognize the inherent problems with the death penalty. Past justices have opposed the death penalty based on moral or philosophical grounds, but what makes Blackmun's vehement state- ment particularly important is the fact that he renounced the death penalty on constitutional grounds. "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experi- ment has failed," Blackmun noted. "It is virtu- ally self-evident to me that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inher- ent constitutional deficiencies." Conservative constitutional scholars counter that the framers were aware of the death pen- alty, and didn't think it constituted "cruel and unusual punishment." But while this may be true, the framers could not possibly have antici- pated the environment in which the death pen- alty operates today. The Court has tried with "ingenuity" and all in its arsenal to ensure that the death penalty is administered fairly. However, it is clear that the death penalty is still handed out arbitrarily and subjectively. Blackmun merely realized that the State cannot "tinker with the machinery of death" if punishments cannot be meted out fairly and consistently - and if you begin to sentence consistently, you sacrifice jury sub- jectivity. This is a Catch-22 that cannot be solved except by scrapping the death penalty. The facts speak for themselves: The Stanford Law Review states that at least 23 innocent people have been executed this century. More- over, only one white has been executed for killing a Black since 1932, whereas Blacks are routinely executed for the murder of whites. And outside of the constitutional arguments, one must consider the sorry representation that the indigent receive in this country and the tremendous amount of court time and money death row cases gobble up. Blackmun has it right: the experiment has failed, and the Court is guilty for acquiescing with this unconscionable failure. + Republicans have own beliefs By D. M. WINTHROP I am somewhat surprised at the various signs hung around campus by the College Republicans heralding: God, Family, Country. As I quite recall, it is Truth, Justice, Liberty, but perhaps, I am getting this confused with France's own three word declaration. Although I am presently somewhat non- partial, I confess to myself once brandishing the American flag and basking in the glow of Republicanism. Perhaps it was the advances of the eighties, Ronald Reagan or the influence of my family. However, I was not the least concerned with the economy during the eighties, had no particular penchant for Reagan - save that he was indeed a good president - and am D. M. Winthrop is an LSA senior quite likely to counter anything my family represents. Whether it was these issues or not, I hadn't any idea that I needed these three qualifications to be a Republican and reap the benefits of capitalism. Certainly, someone should have told me sooner. I supposed I could have but asked Rush, yet he may only request that I buy his book or videos. Certainly, he understands capitalism as well as these three golden rules. In defense of these three noted criteria, I must confess that had I, myself, any political aims for office, I would most certainly thrust to my bosom a devoted husband - with a yen for Armani - and 2.5 children and immediately attach my name to a particular church - Protestant of course. Yet, as a private citizen who should like to, or not, as the case may be, consider myself a Republican, do not feel the necessity to categorize my freedoms along a programmed set of ideals. Unless I am mistaken, a single person with undecided, unclaimed, or private religious ideals could as well have a place in the party. I seem to have a problem with such flippant use of three very "loaded" words as God, Family, Country. The individual concepts and choices of the first two are certainly a part of the make-up of the latter. So, perhaps I should remove my Bush/Quayle poster from my wall and inform the Kennedy's that they are indeed working for the wrong side. Then in exchange for these three words I offer a suggestion for all politics, regardless of party. "To be able to' practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue ... gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness." - Confuscious. 9 tl 4 fi 4 4 M y K t } p5 1 1 M t 4 M t Olympic moments to remember They may not have brought home the gold, but there are three Olympic performers that will always be winners in my mind. Katarina Witt, Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean - three figure skaters who seemed to remember that the events in Lillehammer were about more than busted knees, Disneyland commercials and Inside Edition episodes. Call me sentimental, but watching the former champions skate in tribute to the people of Sarajevo (the home of the 1984 games, where the above skaters won their medals)jerked me out of the trivial soap opera I had found myself lured into. Stumbling but never falling, elegant even in defeat, these classy performers provided a brilliant metaphor for the plight of Bosnian sovereignty. One can only hope that next time, Write! Write! Write! Write!