Letters to the Editor

Cupcake excess

I, like any other student, would love to witness successful fundraising at my university. Administrators seem to be finding that it's difficult to collect from alumni. As university President Dan Mote stated, "We were very late to the game."

It isn't that we were late to the game. It's that we were never in it. This university is plagued with more than just financial problems. There is a lack of communication between the administration and its students. With high crime rates, housing shortages and parking problems, students are forced to take negative views of the university. Why would alumni fund a university that failed to provide them with a unique experience?

If the problem were that we were a decade too late, then the university needs to start planning ahead. In another 10 years, how many members of the class of 2008 will be signing over checks? When parents and alumni visit the campus and see a field of cupcakes, they'd honestly question the use of their funds.

If I had seen the campus for the first time on Maryland Day 2008, I would have noticed aged dorms, a mall covered in white tents, showcase cupcakes, historic academic buildings, frustrating parking situations and overcrowding. From this first impression, I would have taken my donations to the local bakery (because those cupcakes looked delicious), local landlords (to expand off-campus housing), public transport (to reduce the number of students dependent on the university's Department of Transportation Services) and local landscaping companies (because those tents and heavy traffic must have laid waste to the mall).

Our reputation precedes us. Our students tore up downtown after basketball games. Our athletes are caught cheating, failing or driving drunk. Our parking lots are converted into toilets and trash cans during football season. Our Greek organizations are still caught hazing and marring the face of the university. There are frequent reports of robberies, rapes, assaults and thefts. Can the same be said for UCLA, North Carolina and Illinois?

Christopher Amerasinghe Junior Economics

Realism on library funding

This is in response to the staff editorial printed April 25, "The heart of the university." I'm disappointed to see The Diamondback take a narrow view that fails to account for previous university objections. Yes, we would like for everything to be our No. 1 priority, but that amounts to nonsense. To give more money to the libraries, we have to take that money from somewhere else - complaints are not solutions; alternatives are. Is spare cash better spent on libraries or new buildings? Increased student housing? Funding other chronically underfunded programs?

One partial solution is to pass subscription costs along to the primary users. If a department is the only significant user of a journal, it should pay the subscription cost, instead of the university as a whole. This will have three main effects: Journals not worth their cost will be dropped, the campus community as a whole will have a better idea of what subscription costs are, and librarian salaries (and other library maintenance) will not directly compete with subscriptions. The first effect may be mitigated by the tendency of large publishers to offer journals in bundles; the second effect may not help much but will keep the misery of rising subscription costs from falling solely on the shoulders of the library system.

There will be other complications to work through (more than one department, for example, uses Nature, and pricing journals that compose a bundle is tricky), but that'll probably be easier than conjuring funding out of a hat. I must confess ignorance as to how our libraries are currently funded - this idea may already be in place, or its effects may not be what I project (if, for example, librarian salaries and journal subscriptions come from different areas of the university budget).

Matthew Graves Sophomore Economics and physics

Fine art in The Diamondback

"From Italy, With Opera" was a great article in yesterday's paper about the Maryland Opera Studio's production of Così fan tutte, but I wish it had come out last week, or even two weeks ago. For anyone who reads the article and feels enticed to go, it will be a disappointment to realize that the opportunity has now passed. More disappointing is the fact that there was very little advertisement for the show other than what was on the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center website and what traveled via word of mouth. As operas go, Così can serve as a particularly wonderful first-timer's piece, and it's a shame to think of how many people may have missed out simply because they were never aware of the opportunity.

On a broader scale, I've yet to see any mention of the Theatre Department's production of Marisol this week or the University of Maryland Symphony's Orchestra and University of Maryland Choirs' performance of Joseph Haydn's The Creation on Friday. With so much great art going on up at CSPAC, one really wishes a little more attention were paid. If there's enough room for "All The Crap You [Allegedly] Care About" involving people in Hollywood, I have to imagine there's enough room for the university's newspaper to cover some of the more creative things being done by students at the university.

Zain Shariff Senior Cell biology and molecular genetics

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