LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Thomas' Class to be Offered

To the Editor: Urban Studies is an interdisciplinary program in the School of Arts and Sciences which offers courses ranging over themes which include the built environment, the history of cities, comparative and theoretical dimensions of cities, economics and finance in cities and public policy. Dr. Thomas' course is integral to our curriculum for students interested in understanding the built environment of Philadelphia and American architectural and social history generally. Students can rest assured that the course will be offered. Elaine Simon Co-Director Urban Studies Program Terrorism not Activism To the Editor: Today, your illustrious writers inform us that recent bomb threats on campus were "more an act of activism than terror" ("Bomb threats force evacuation of Penn Tower," DP 4/21/95). Au contraire, my little hypocrites! Any time that people's lives are threatened, this is by definition an act of terrorism. Animal rights "activists" who disrupt hospital services, anti-abortion "activists" who harrass patients and douse women's clinics with acid, white supremacy "activists" who brutalize anyone not as white, christian, and heterosexual as they are -- all these people, and more like them, are terrorists when they try to force social change through violence and intimidation rather than through the democratic process. Stop falling into the trap of thinking that "terrorism" is only in the Middle East -- that it's only done by Muslim fundamentalists -- that Americans just don't do that. They do! Maria Oyaski Biomedical Graduate student Dissertations Are Chosen To the Editor: I was sorry to read ("Donor sues U. for collection's return," DP 4/20/95) that William Reich is suing the University. Reich donated to our Special Collections library some rare books of the 16th and 17th centuries, and a stack of literary and personal manuscripts written by his father, a poet who flourished in the 1920s. He claims, wrongly, that we agreed "to assigned graduate students to write their doctoral dissertations on his father's work." We of course did not do -- and could never do -- any such thing. Graduate students in the humanities (and surely in other disciplines) are not "assigned" dissertation topics under any circumstance; they freely choose them. We said of course that we would inform our students of the existence of this fascinating material. There is real interest, in Penn's English department, in modern poetry of this kind, but at the doctoral level that interest is individually developed, never "assigned." Alan Filreis English Professor English Department Undergraduate Chair