4A - Monday, October 1, 2007 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com c~Jbe 1iWhd4an :&i41 Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890. 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109 tothedaily@umich.edu KARL STAMPFL IMRAN SYED JEFFREY BLOOMER EDITOR IN CHIEF EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR MANAGING EDITOR Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views ofttheir authors. Academic apathy Lack of participation in rally makes students easy to ignore f the 350 University of Michigan students to take the Amer- ican Civic Literacy Test, freshmen managed a score of only 47 percent and seniors 51 percent. This report, released last week by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, demonstrates that University students don't know much about the world around them, and they don't learn more about it during their stay at the University. Such ignorance, especially of state issues that have led to constant tuition increases, leaves young people at a marked disadvantage. Until students become informed and make it clear that they intend to hold elected officials accountable, they will continue to be taken advantage of by the state and national leaders. They want to live in peace and have a comfortable life with their families:' - Humayun Hamidzada, spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, on whether the Taliban will negotiate with the government during a period of foreign occupation, as reported yesterday by CNN.com. LILA KALICK aking the, case for essays 0 6 Last week, student governments from several state universities bused students to Lansing to gather in protest of pro- posed cuts to education funding. Given that state universities in Michigan have close to 200,000 total students, it is downright embarrassing that only 300 managed to attend the protest. This was a prime oppor- tunity for students to make a strong show- ing of their numbers and support for issues like higher education funding. The Michi- gan Student Assembly provided transpor- tation and professors were even asked to excuse students from class for the protest. Yet, this opportunity was ignored by many; the sparse attendance only confirmed for legislators what they've always known: Students are lazy, unwilling to get involved and can safely be ignored. Student leaders at universities like our own are to be commended for doing all they could in organizing this event - with one excep- tion. The student government at Michigan State University failed to organize students of that campus. That's especially deplorable considering that MSU is the campus closest to the statehouse. When the state's largest university does not even inform its students of a rally just down the road, it shows that civic apathy at some campuses is starting to trickle from the masses and infect student leaders too. Hopefully this doesn't reflect a wider trend. The students who did rally managed to effect some level of awareness. For example, politicians seemed downright shocked that students had turned up at all. Some were genuinely affected by the concerns students have fortuition increases, but this effect was minimal, considering there were only 300 students there. Most legislators were likely just amused at the toothless spectacle that they could simply forget about the next day and not face any consequences. Could they have done that if 10,000 students gathered at the rally? Probably not. As legislators hurry to slop together a state budget on deadline, the last-minute cuts and compromises made will reflect the interests of voting blocs that are most likely to hold lawmakers accountable. Groups that swear to recall any politician voting in favor of a tax increase, for example, will be a primary concern in the minds of the legislators. A tiny gathering of 300 is not a group the leg- islature is going to seriously work to placate. They have no incentive to work for us, and so we'll be overlooked again. For thousands of aspiring law- yers, Sept. 29 was more than just a typical football Satur- day: It was LSAT Saturday, the time for them to display their analytical reasoning skills to scouts from 196I acaredited lawj schools. For those unfamiliar with this . academic MIKE combine, the Law E School Admissions EBER Testconsists of five 35-minute multiple-choice sections, ranging from reading comprehension to analytical puzzle games and one unscored essay segment. Does it make much sense to not count the essay portion of such a high- stakes exam? Compared to the 101 fill- in-the-bubble questions, reasoning demonstrated in writing reflects real aptitude for any law-related profession. Lawyers in action rarely circle A, B, C, D or E in assisting their clients. How- ever, they are likely to write briefs, sub- poenas and closing arguments to prove their superior reasoning skills. The lack of importance placed on students' ability to argue and reason effectively through writing disap- points me. According to a Law School Admissions Council survey, only.9.9 percent of schools "always" look at the LSAT writing sample as part of the admissions process. The fact that an extemporaneous writing section on the LSAT is considered irrelevant could either mean that the testing method is flawed or that admissions committees just don't place enough itportance on this method of analysis. In my own LSAT preparation class, a total of 15.minutes out of more than 60 in-class hours was devoted to pre- paringstudents forthewrittensection. If anything, the minimal emphasis on the essay shows its lack of importance and the irreverence our society has for articulating knowledge in narrative form. This exclusion of writing skills and over-reliance on multiple-choice testing debases academic aptitude to the mere ability to darken circles - an attack on reasoned discourse. I would postulate a testing method that tests in the same manner that knowledge is formed for each respec- tive subject. For example, if you want to test how well a monkey eats a banana, stick a banana in its hand and observe how nimbly it can peel the skin and chew with its mouth closed. Assign ita score on a bell curve on a scale ranging from120to180. If you wantto testhow well a monkey can fill in a bubble, stick a pencil in its hand and give it a test. Reducing knowledge to a one- option-out-of-five crapshoot is an insult to thinkers throughout history. As the regurgitation of knowledge should mirror its initial formation, to create knowledge one must painstakingly understand a problem, ruminate over interrelated ideas and finally articu- late the assertion in writing. Whether a person is demonstrating his or her mathematical abilities or knowledge of political science, important facts and numbers can only support reasoning if these facts accompany a narrative explanation. At the University, we take some' classes that are graded entirely by multiple-choice examinations. Most- ly, these are mammoth introductory courses with hundreds of students,. and professors administer this type of "objective" analysis because the sheer number ofstudents prevents themfrom reading actual words and appraising a grade under any realistic time frame, This is reality at underfunded public institutions when class sizes get too large. Although this type of academic assessment is what constitutes our grade point averages, it is unfortunate that the same analysis makes up our entrance exam scores as well. I fear that this multiple-guess format excludes people who cannot express their knowledge in two-millimeter bubbles. While some people may see neatly aligned grids, others may see a Jackson Pollack-ian splatter of paint on paper. Like it or not, an accurately bub- bled Scantron exerts a form of social control. Those who master or inherent- ly excel at multiple-guess examinations have far more career opportunities than their unlucky counterparts. Lawyers should learn how to write, not darken circles. It's doubtful that there is a causal link - or even a correlation - between a high LSAT score and one's success as a lawyer. According to the LSAC, how- ever, "the LSAT alone continues to be a better predictor of law school perfor- mance than is GPA alone." How could a three-hour test possibly be more indic- ative than four years of coursework? Despite this, top law schools require higher scores, and entry into those schools is the edgeusually required for getting a job at one of the better pay- ing law firms. It shouldn't be this way. Achievement on multiple-guess exams is not necessary for professional suc- cess, but evaluating one's academic aptitude through more written dis- course might be sufficient for further test-taking parity. Mike Eber can be reached at mieber@umich.edu. BEN BECKETT AND ESMAEEL REZA DADASHZADEH Reconsidering Iran Let's all take a deep breath on the issue of Iran, please. Recently, there have been a lot of reports about the dangers Iran poses to America. Many of these stories have contained the same talking points and have revolved around the personality of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A viewpoint by the group Isra- el IDEA ran in the Daily last week ('It's 1938 and Iran is Germany', 09/26/2007): There are two problems with that title: It's 2007, not 1938, and Iran is Iran, not Germany. As Israel IDEA's viewpoint showed, it is easy to criticize Ahmadinejad. There is no question that some of his statements have been thoughtless, even hateful. There are enough real reasons to condemn him, but by inflat- ing his rhetoric and his power, critics attempt to increase their audiences' hostility toward Iran without providing an accurate picture of that country's complex politics. Presenting Iran and Ahmadinejad as bigger threats than they actually are is not helpful to American or Israeli interests. It seems that whenever Ahmadinejad says something conciliatory - for example, that Iran wants only a peaceful nuclear program - he is called a liar. But when he says some- thing more aggressive, commentators rush to say that we must take him at his word. We have no sympathy for the Iranian president, but conservative commentators have con- structed the Ahmadinejad they want: the most hostile one possible. It is important to note that the presidency is not a very powerful position in Iran. The presidency is contested in an election every four years, with a maximum of two consecu- tive terms. The election process is not entirely democratic - the clerical establishment for- bids some candidates from running. However, among those candidates who are allowed to run, competition is fierce, despite the weak- ness of the office. Real power resides with the supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The office of the Supreme Leader is, in fact, dictato- rial. He serves for life, and the army, the elite Revolutionary Guards and the security ser- vices report directly to him. All of the atten- tion on Ahmadinejad pulls the spotlight from. the more powerful Khamanei, who is less dis- posed toward bombastic rhetoric. In addition to the supreme leader's author- ity over the president, political power in Iran is dispersed across myriad offices and commit- tees, further diluting the influence of the presi- dency. Ahmadinejad is a convenient rhetorical punching bag, but he is not necessarily a win- dow into the Iranian government's intentions. However, let us assume for the sake of argument that it is Iran's intention to directly attack America or its allies. Unlike Germany in 1938, there is no question about the outcome of a hypothetical war between the America and Iran: The full brunt of American power would quickly overwhelm Iran. Iran is also dissimilar to Germany in the way it treats minorities, including Jews. Today, tens of thousands of Jews live in Iran as equal citizens, and the Iranian parliament reserves a seat for the Jewish community. Iran is home to more Jews than any place in the Middle East outside of Israel: There are 23 synagogues in Tehran alone. The most expen- sive and one of the most popular television shows ever broadcast on Iranian state-run television is a current show about an Iranian diplomat who forges passports to help Jews escape from Nazi-occupied France. The Ira- nian government may be hostile to Israel - and Ahmadinejad is vehemently hostile - but it cannot fairly be deemed hostile to its Jew- ish citizens or Jews in general. The comparison of Iran to Nazi Germany is not only factually incorrect, it is insulting to the Iranian people and damaging to the democratic reform movement. After Ahma- dinejad's speech at Columbia, Mohsen Mir- damadi, a prominent Iranian reformist, told The Associated Press that "The blistering speech against Ahmadinejad only strength- ened him back home and made his radical supporters more determined." The hostility and possibility of war between America and Iran has preoccupied many Iranians inside and outside of the country, and it has taken the focus off of internal reforms. In short, the conservative media is helping destroy the best means to achieve what it claims to want: a truly democratic Iran. As The Washington Post reported in June of 2006, under pressure from a then-power- ful reform movement, the Iranian govern- ment in 2003 sent a secret message seeking reconciliation with America. It proposed negotiations to stop monetary support for Hezbollah and Hamas, to provide assistance in Iraq and Afghanistan and to recognize Israel in exchange for a lifting of American sanc- tions and a guarantee not to try to overthrow the current government. America rejected the offer and increased its anti-Iran rhetoric, the Post reported. The next year, the reformists were defeated in Iranian elections, and they have been demoralized and relatively weak ever since. Foreign policy hawks like to point to 1938 as an example of the failure of dialogue in avert- ing great human tragedy. In dealing with Iran, a more relevant point of historical reference is 2003. Hostile rhetoric against a Middle East- ern country that in reality posed no threat to America escalated to the fiasco in Iraq in which we now find ourselves. It's time to take a deep breath before things go too far again. Ben Beckett and Esmaeel Reza Dadashzadeh are LSA juniors. 0 Free market is really to blame for environmental problems TO THE DAILY: I would like to clarify some general misconceptions raised in Patrick Zabawa's column last week (False Hope, 09/28/2007). First of all, back in the early 20th century, electric cars were just as popular as those powered by gasoline. How- ever, consumer demand tended to lean toward the more powerful gasoline engine, and by 1930, it was difficult to find an electric in operation. General Motors had experi- mental electric cars back in the 1980s, along with numer- ous other advances in technology. The consumer ignored all of these. Those paddle shifters on the Lexus? GM had something similar in the late '60s and early '70s, but con- sumer demand killed it. Secondly, House Democrats-made the right decision in stopping the bill. It unfairly attacked automobile emis- sions, which are some of the cleanest. If the bill was fair, it would have regulated emissions for all energy sources, including coal, gas and oil power plants. My point is that the free market is not the reason the environmental movement is working. Those blamed for this lack of environmentalism have historically pushed the technology to deliver more than consumer expecta- tions. Granted, I amleaving out the 1980s and 1990s, which were ugly for American auto companies. It was consumer demand that stopped the flow of environmentally friendly products because no one would buy them. The free market is the vehicle thatconsumers have used to allow for the pollution of the Earth. It's just now that people are becoming aware of the hazards this causes. John W. Schmotzer Engineering alum The letter writer is a member of the Society ofAutomotive Engineers. SEND LETTERS TO: TOTHEDAILY@UMICH.EDU Current tax system already hurts Michigan's strappedfamilies TO THE DAILY: In his letter (Don't rally to raise taxes on struggling state, 09/25/2007), Clark Ruper deplored the detri- mental effect that any possible state tax increase in Michigan will have on "Michigan's already strapped families." Michigan's state tax structure is currently unfair to poorer families and individuals because the state constitution stipulates a flat tax. Everyone, irre- spective of income bracket, is currently taxed at the same percentage rate. The problem to which Ruper points can easily be addressed if.the state switches to a graduated income tax, which means that people in higher income brack- ets pay taxes at a higher percentage rate than those in lower tax brackets. In this way, additional revenue can be raised without unduly hurting the individuals and families who are already strapped. This will require a constitutional amendment, which I hope Ruper will support. Sayan Bhattacharyya Rackham LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Readers are encouraged to submit letters to the editor. Letters should be under 300 words and must include the writer's full name and University affiliation. All submissions become property of the Daily. We do not print anonymous letters. Send letters to tothedaily@umich.edu. Editorial Board Members: Kevin Bunkley, Ben Caleca, Milly Dick, Mike Eber, Brian Flaherty, Gary Graca, Emmarie Huetteman, Theresa Kennelly, Gavin Stern, Jennifer Sussex, Neil Tambe, Matt Trecha, Radhika Upadhyaya, Rachel Wagner. 0 A t f _ 1