LETTERS: A Chodorow exit leaves a mess

To the Editor: The situation would be un peu plus amusant if they did not leave behind such a mess when they go. Positions can't be filled, promotions go on hold, policy decisions are iced for the duration and an avalanche of trickle-down negative spin-offs materialize when the University has to scramble into high gear to form yet another costly and time-consuming search committee and once again turn up a replacement who is prepared to swear piously on a stack of Chronicles of Higher Education that all they have ever wanted to be since first learning how to talk is an administrator at the good-old U. of P. Chodorow is by all accounts an excellent fellow and nobody would like to see his career crimped by something as mundane as a paper commitment to Penn. Let me proffer instead a simple suggestion. In the future, let all top administrators who leave Penn before their contracted terms of office are over rebate to the faculty and students their full salary for the entire calendar year in which they decide to announce their departure. Donald White Classical Studies Professor Curator of Mediterranean Section at University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology Debating welfare To the Editor: I would like to comment on Wednesday's panel discussion on welfare reform as well as the DP's coverage of the event. Promoters advertised the panel discussion as a "debate" on welfare reform. Being interested in the topic, I attended the forum. I was quite disappointed to discover that the event's organizers, the Poverty Awareness Committee and the Program for Student Community Involvement, failed to sponsor a true debate, simply because all of the panelists agreed with one another! All five speakers assailed the welfare reform laws, many of them plugging each others' efforts against the downsizing of the leviathan of public assistance. Where were the supporters of the enacted welfare reforms? Where were those who believe that it is high time to ween Americans away from the notion of entitlements? Perhaps most telling about the incredibly biased nature of the event was the young woman in the audience who used the Q&A; period to announce her campaign to physically blockade government buildings in protest of welfare reform. While the DP accurately reported that all of the panelists were opposed to the welfare reforms, discussion was far from "heated," as the DP article described it. In general, I hope that in the interest of true dialogue that student organizations will be more responsible in the future about their "debates" and who they invite to facilitate them. Lee Bailey College '98 Not a grandmother To the Editor: Why is it that your cover page story titled "Through CGS, grandmothers mix with 18-year-olds" (DP, 2/28/97) has nothing to do with grandmothers? After finding no mention of grandmothers on the first page, I continued inside and still found nothing relevent. If I were Mrs. Radetich I'd be upset and insulted that the article which featured me on the front page had a grandmother reference in the title. She is 42-years-old has no kids over 17! She's far from grandmotherdom. In the future, try to construct headers that are not so misleading. Ryan Oakes College '00 Just an innocent game To the Editor: On Friday night a bunch of friends and I decided that it might be fun to play a round of Frisbee Golf. For those that don't know, it's a game that involves throwing a frisbee from a spot (the tee) and hitting an object around the campus (the hole). Mind you, these objects never have and never will be damaged by the frisbees. However, one of our campus policemen decided that he'd rather harass a bunch of people playing this simple game by calling it tasteless and telling us to find something better to do rather than stop the many crimes that do occur around this campus, especially at midnight. The point? Don't our campus elite have something better to do than to stop an innocent game that does no harm to anyone and keeps us from committing any real crimes? Ray Braithwood Engineering '97