Socialist newspaper sale ironic

(Yesterday) I was walking down the UA Mall, and I saw some socialist group selling their news publication. Normally this wouldn’t catch my eye, but it was the socialists and they were selling their literature. Every other one of the hundreds of groups I see with literature is giving it away. I just found this a bit ironic.

Alex Hoogasian
political science senior

UA an obstacle course for cyclists

It is common sense that a person should not step in front of a moving vehicle.

We all learned in primary school. Then why are college students doing it all over campus? After reading Jennifer Tramm’s article on bike safety, I am glad to hear that the University of Arizona Police Department is starting to put more attention on bike safety, but honestly, why are they? We as residents here at the UA should have the common knowledge to obey the traffic rules just like any driver should. But are the rules taken seriously? No. Two years ago, I was hit by a bicycle because the cyclist was riding on the sidewalk that I was walking on, fully aware that I was in front of him. He careened right into me, sending me home with a hurt ankle and him shouting, “”Well, why didn’t you get out of the way?””

Come on guys, use your heads. Look both ways before crossing the street, walk on the sidewalk, not in the street, and bike in the road or on a bike route. We are all old enough to make the right decision on whether or not to cross the street with a car or a bike coming your way. This campus has seen enough accidents already.

Tim Smith
music business junior

Guest-worker program arguments approach those of slavery

David Francis’ Aug. 29 column raises the specter of President Bush’s proposed guest-worker program. Francis quotes U.S. congressional candidate Steve Huffman as stating, “”Border security reform without a temporary-worker program will be economic suicide in a state like ours.”” The likes of the Republican Party claim that the work that illegal immigrants perform is “”work that Americans will not do.”” Ironically, the guest-worker program is a legal and moral equivalent to creating a group of second-class citizens to perform manual labor for the rest of us. This argument is chilling in similarity to mid-19th-century America, when white southern farmers argued that slaves were necessary to perform “”work that whites will not do.””

Instead of granting amnesty to lawbreakers (which didn’t work under the Reagan Administration) or creating a class of semi-slaves, a solution more respectful of human rights is simply to allow more immigrants to enter the country legally and become citizens who would adopt American political values and be subject to the labor protections of United States and Arizona law. The “”Party of Abraham Lincoln”” really needs to think this over again.

Garrett O’Hara
political science senior

Fair-trade coffee blame misplaced

One can only speculate as to the purpose behind reprinting the garbled and incomplete excerpt from the The Daily Illini, misleadingly implying that fair traded coffee harms coffee producers. Blaming fair-trade organizations for conventional merchants’ exploitation of coffee farmers is a grotesque displacement of responsibility, inverting the causes and remedies of coffee producers’ poverty. The Arizona Daily Wildcat has a duty to educate and inform the university community, but it has failed in this instance.

Laura Tabili
UA history professor

U.S. already hospitable, lenient toward immigrants

I am writing regarding some of the letters and articles in today’s paper about changing the tuition at the state universities from in-state to out-of-state prices for illegal immigrants. A fact to consider for the contributors who refer to the government as “”xenophobic””: in Mexico, not only is being inside the country illegally a felony, but those immigrants who arrive legally still face sometimes harsh regulations and are never allowed to own land. For example, only those Mexican citizens born in Mexico have priority for employment, positions and aid from the government.

I am not suggesting that the U.S. lower itself to the level of some other countries when it comes to immigration policy; I feel that immigrants have much to contribute to this country, not just culturally or economically. Now, whether the policies regulating this influx are efficient or not is another story; yes, the road could be smoother for immigrants trying to come here legally or needing to come here so desperately that they come illegally, but they are displaced people.

There are always going to be bumps in the road. I am merely suggesting that a little more appreciation or respect be paid to a system that allows an enormous number of people not born in this country to experience what is, relative to a majority of places in the world, a generous amount of what could either be considered leniency or hospitality.

Belinda Richardson
undeclared sophomore

UA should not be students’ nanny

I think it’s a bad idea for the UA to get involved with the off-campus behavior of its students. It reeks of nannyism. UA students are adults who are legally responsible for their behavior off-campus. The UA is not the parent of its students, as much as it or the actual parents of the students wants the UA to be so.

There may be a code of conduct for on-campus behavior (much as there is for me, an employee), but this code disappears when the student (or employee) is no longer on campus or involved in an official school activity.

The idea of the university as nanny goes back to a time when 21 was the age of adulthood, and parents actually had to give written permission to the university to act in loco parentis (legal Latin for “”in place of the parent””). In those days, it made more sense for the dean of men to discipline unruly frat boys for their off-campus shenanigans – the dean was acting as the parent.

Yet this nanny mentality has carried over into the present, when students are legally adults. The university tends to treat students like children both in respect to rights and responsibilities. For instance, university administrators seem to think it’s okay to go through students’ MySpace accounts, where they find out that – big shock – college students drink, smoke pot and have sex! If the university were examining my off-campus behavior and tried to discipline me for something they did not approve of, I think they would have a lawsuit on their hands.

As far as the issue of loud parties off campus goes, I can’t stand them whether they are being attended by UA students or not. The police can string the hosts up by their testicles (or ovaries) for all I care. But the university has no business trying to further discipline loud partiers who happen to be UA students.

James A. Parks
research specialist, Tree-Ring Laboratory