LETTERS: Funding Hamilton Square

To the Editor: Kathy Engebretson Vice President for Finance A night for women To the Editor: I found Mark Fiore's column concerning Take Back the Night very offensive ("Take the night, but do it right," DP, 4/12/99). This event is not about you, Mark, and it's not about men either. It's for victims of sexual violence, who are, not surprisingly, most often women! Part of the point of the event is to give these people a voice. Since sexual violence has a gender component in our patriarchal society, it was necessary to address this issue by making some part of the event for women only. The march was historically and nationally designed for women only, since its conception through the National Organization for Women. If you truly did care about this issue, you could have shown your support by attending the event and listening to otherwise oppressed voices instead of attacking them. We only ask for a few hours each year to have a space to voice our stories, but once again Penn has proven to deny us those few hours. Furthermore, his accusation of NOW's "routinely falling short" was completely unnecessary. Each year's organizers are different, and I have never felt that the event was a disappointment. I don't care if 5,000 or five people go. The point is to create comfort and support for survivors. Erin Healy College '00 NOW Co-Chairperson Vocational school To the Editor: I found Emily Lieff's column interesting ("Four years spent learning nothing," DP, 4/15/99). The column demonstrates an approach to education that one might call a consumer or vocational model. You invest in a portfolio of skills that, you hope, will render a good return and you find yourself disappointed. Lieff appears to see no value in education for its own sake, nor in a liberal education. This model is perfectly valid but one that fits better at a technical or a vocational school than it does in the College. I would suggest, in the spirit of Lieff's column, that if she was looking for vocational training she was not a very savvy consumer. Better for her to study in a part of the University that markets itself as vocational -- Wharton and Engineering come to mind -- or to choose a vocational school where she might not have such wistful misgivings about her area of study. The University of Pennsylvania and the Annenberg School for Communication have as their mission the education of those individuals who will use that education to advance the broader society of which we are all a part. You may find an epigraph attributed to Ambassador Walter Annenberg to that effect in the vestibule of the Annenberg School. If a student is so limited in perspective as to simply be looking for the next paycheck, the University and the Annenberg School have done as poorly in their jobs as Lieff in hers as a student. Eric Zimmer Doctoral Candidate Annenberg School