LETTERS/YOUR VIEW: A complicated situation

To the Editor: First of all, end what? Milosevic? The hatred stewing in Kosovo will not end with the removal of the head man. Second, the view that war ends conflict is very simplistic. In fact, so far the NATO bombings have done an excellent job of stepping up the scale of Albanian killings and rallying the Serbs in support of Milosevic. Third, if ground troops are sent in and the Serbs are defeated, then what? Defeating the Serbs with military arsenal is not going to erase the hatred (which by the way exists on both sides, Muslims in the Balkans have been accused of committing just as outrageous atrocities against the Serbs). So what should we do then? Maintain U.S. military rule in Kosovo forever? And if we choose to do that then what about ethnic conflict in Tibet, Haiti, Bosnia -- I think I've made my point. Kosovo is a seriously complicated situation, and the last thing we need is to make rash and uninformed decisions. Jhuma Chaudhuri College '99 Economics advising To the Editor: In a recent opinion piece appearing in the DP, Dina Bass complains about advising in the College of Arts and Sciences and makes a compelling case that each student should be assigned an individual faculty advisor, at a minimum ("Raising the quality of advising," DP, 4/13/99). Unfortunately, as part of the piece, she incorrectly implies that the Economics Department belongs to the large group of departments that "don't require students to meet with an advisor at all." This was true up until this semester. However, the faculty for the Department of Economics last fall unanimously agreed to set in place a new advising system for our majors. Each Economics major is now assigned a faculty advisor and the students must meet with that advisor in order to be able to preregister. This new advising system was initiated this spring and involves almost all of the Penn Economics faculty. We made the change to the new faculty-based advising system in part on the basis of polls about advising we had taken involving our senior majors. The main reason for the change, however, was our belief that Penn students ought as part of their undergraduate experience be able to interact on an individual level with the high-quality faculty that their tuition helps attract to Penn. There are many Penn Economics majors and few Penn Economics faculty at the current time, so that the number of advisees per faculty member is all too large. This is no doubt part of why building up the Penn Economics faculty is on of the priorities in the new strategic plan of SAS and why that plan will benefit students. Mark Rosenzweig Economics Dept. Chairperson