Letters to the Editor

Students already gave to HUB expansion

I believe that it is a kind and virtuous gesture to leave a place better than you found it, especially an institution that had such a profound impact on your life. I commend the people involved in the senior class gift for volunteering in an attempt to make such a gesture a reality.

Unfortunately, I also have to sympathize with them. A lot of individuals share my convictions about the senior class gift and are unwilling to comply with the request. It’s easy to see why. I’m sure many people want to attempt reconciliation of an unjustifiable $50 parking ticket. I’m also sure many people feel they owe no debt to a university that wouldn’t use its influence to contest discrimination against its own students and subsistence regarding housing ordinances. Those issues may be irrelevant to some, but there’s one issue that everyone should consider before making a donation to PSU — forget the fancy fish tank to grace the interior, you’ve already paid for the new HUB itself with money that was taken from you under the pretense that it was to be spent on student activities. Then, this activity fee (translation: mandatory donation to the HUB/Paul Robeson Cultural Center expansion) was raised even higher to offset the burden of the project.

If those interested can’t raise the money for the class gift, why not swindle the money from the building construction budget and reciprocate the infraction? It seems that we’ve already left this place better than we found it, despite the fact that this place shows its appreciation by seizing every dollar it can, and even dollars it shouldn’t.

Darin Loccarini
senior-sociology

This is in response to Matt Barr’s letter to the editor “Affirmative action hasn’t proven beneficial.” Anyone who begins shouting about equal rights concerning minorities and white people should look past the logic of the issue and do some research. Affirmative action mostly benefits white women. So he’s right. It hasn’t proven beneficial because it was designed for ethnic minorities. But his statement: “The truth is that affirmative action has in fact caused reverse discrimination,” is not true because it mostly benefits white people.

It is important to understand affirmative action is the direct result of the damage caused to minorities by discrimination and is failing because that discrimination still exists today.

If everyone in the United States had been given and treated with equal rights since colonial time, we would have affirmative action today. We need only to look at recent history to find discrimination in almost every aspect of living. While affirmative action does seem to point out minorities unequally, at best, the law is trying to take one step back so that one day we can all take two steps forward in equality.

Sascha R. Skucek
senior-English