Letters to the Editor

Trivializing atrocity

To the Editor:

Channtal Fleischfresser's cultural insensitivity is baffling, especially coming from one who is purporting to promote an awareness of international affairs ("Reading past page one: an international responsibility," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/16/02).

Her suggestion that it is acceptable to be apathetic toward the situation in East Timor, where Indonesian Muslims have slaughtered innumerable innocent people, is utterly offensive. I doubt many Penn students, even the very ones Fleischfresser laments, would deem the loss of human life on such an enormous scale irrelevant.

One cannot but deplore ascending to a moral pulpit whilst, in the same breath, trivializing one of the great genocides of modern times.

Blake McShane

Mathematics graduate student

Support your TAs

To the Editor:

I am dismayed to read that Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, the group seeking to unionize Penn's graduate students, is not considered an "undergraduate issue" when it most certainly is ("UA votes down pro-grad union resolution," DP, 9/25/02).

Consider the following: we attend a large university and almost all of us will undoubtedly take a huge lecture course where the tiny dot of a professor spends an hour lecturing, unhindered by whether or not we understand.

Consequently, we flock to the recitation sessions and look to our teaching assistants to guide us through the readings and the professor's lectures.

This is not high school anymore -- teachers do not always have time for us and our concerns. Ideally, college is supposed to be a flexible time to start questioning socially constructed "realities" and to come up with my own interpretations. My personal experience has been that professors, both assistant and tenured, are often too busy to be that source of academic inspiration and critical inquiry. Graduate students are often the ones lending themselves to be mentors.

How many professors on campus rely on graduate students to aid in their research.? Graduate students play a large part in organizing residential life on our campus, especially during our first year.

Graduate students help undergraduates out in so many ways that I haven't listed, usually without acknowledgment and unselfishly, even though they're extremely busy fulfilling all those roles and attending to their own academic ambitions.

For these reasons, it is impossible to deny that graduate student unionization is not an undergraduate issue. I want to cast my support for GET-UP because they've cast their support for me.

Sookyung Oh College '03

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