Photojournalist Habib '87 welcomes inquiries, from Michigan Today readers. He can be reached at Dan Habib Photography, 5 Lake St., Concord, NH 03301. His Internet address is dhabib@igc.org.--Ed.
YOUR TIMELY article, "Matters of Love and Death. Teen Health in the Age of Aids," by Mary Jo Frank mentions some of "more than 70 U-M faculty" who deal with HIV/AIDS in course work. Under your heading, "U-M reaches out and in to educate youths about HIV/AIDS, "you should include Sylvia Hacker, emeritus professor of nursing and of public health, and author of What Every Teenager REALLY Wants to Know About Sex (Carroll & Grass Inc., New York, 1993). No one in the country has been more dedicated to problems of teen sexuality in the age of HIV, discussing safe sex alternatives ("outercourse") rather than the usual dose of fear and repression doled out to the teen and subteen audience.
Armin E. Good
MD Emeritus Professor of Internal Medicine
Ann Arbor
I READ with interest that article on U M endowment, and noted with some perplexity that the Administration is patting itself on the back for our being 19th in the nation. In my long-ago day (1950-54), Michigan settled for nothing less than top 10 in everything, and preferably top 5 in lots of areas. We came pretty close, and nobody would have felt a bit good about being 19th in anything.
Ivan Kaye'54
Boulder, Colorado
THANKS FOR the article "The Michigan Telefund" (Dec. '94). Great pleasure is received when U-M students call--even though I dislike most phone solicitations. The students are always friendly, able to find a few extra minutes to chat about the wonderful school we all have in common. Their training is great--they do take us on a sentimental journey, and it certainly results in generous donations. If their approach had been poor, I never would have started donations, let alone continue. Praise the training experts, and good wishes to the callers.
Anne (Rothman) Gawler'58
Liverpool, New York
YOUR story re President Ford's No. 48 being retired contains at least one major error or misrepresentation. Ford was not an All American center at Michigan as were his predecessors Maynard Morrison (1931) and Chuck Bernard (1932-33). Ford was not even AU Big Ten, as some other publications have claimed from time to time.
As your article said, he was Michigan's MVP in 1934 on a team which won only one non-league game, hardly a record to influence those picking all-star teams. Ford was named a Silver Anniversary All-American in 1959 by Sports Illustrated in recognition of his services as a political figure with an athletic background--not as an athlete.
Lawrence F. Kennedy'50,'51 AM
Harper Woods, Michigan
Gerald R. Ford played in both the Chicago Tribune All-Star Game and the East-West Shrine Game, contests that featured the country very best players. Perhaps "college all-star" is a better term. In any event, neither President Ford nor his staff was responsible for his designation as an 'All-American' in our story. The source was an article published by the athletic department in the Oct. 8 football program.--Ed.
President Clinton expresses support for this new government program out of concern that students either can't get loans for college, or if they can get loans, because students don't believe they will ever be able to pay back their loans. The fact of the matter is that neither President Clinton nor the Ford program has done anything to make education loans more accessible to students and their families, It was the 1992 re-authorization of the Higher Education Act--enacted the year before President Clinton took office--that expanded eligibility for federally sponsored loans for college to millions of additional students and parents.
Furthermore, the Ford program does nothing to make college more affordable. Congress mandated identical interest rates and fees for new loans to students and parents regardless of whether the loans come from private lenders or directly from the U.S. Treasury.
President Duderstadt claims that the Ford student loan program "eliminates bureaucracy." In fact, the US Department of Education is in the process of adding more than 500 bureaucrats to its payroll--and it has been granted a waiver from President Clinton's executive order cutting federal government bureaucracy.
If U-M financial aid officials feel that the Ford student loan program helps them operationally to better meet the needs of students, that's fine. However, I would note that their financial aid colleagues at some 6,000 other postsecondary institutions have felt no need to switch to the Ford program in order to effectively serve their students.
So now she and Mr. Feldt are living together, "laughing and loving like teenagers." Well, why not? The article makes a nice back-to-back picture of American life: turn it over and you see sex lives of typical teenagers, the other ones.
I can't help wondering what ever happened to Kathy West's husband? Of course, she must have been the victim, but to stay for 32 years with a man for the money? Wouldn't that make a man manic-depressive and "increasingly dependent on alcohol?" And now, in true feminist fashion, she's living with a man who doesn't have any interest in marriage. Great arrangement.
How differently things might have gone if [the Wests] had found it [salvation] together before money entered the picture. I Corinthians 6:9-11 is bad news and good news. I never heard it at U-M; I learned only to doubt there. But I learned enough about liberation to know that it's not freedom and now I work with kids, so it makes me mad to see my school promoting as salvation and freedom the paths we are responsible as adults to warn kids about.
As editor, you can make those choices that shift the culture in your corner toward responsibility. Looking forward to being proud of my association with U-M.
Lois Holwerda Poppema '62
Mountain View, California
Dear Ms. Poppema: The editor passed your letter along to me. It made both Al and me sad to read. Each of us maker choices according to our own judgment of the best course at the time. I stayed with my husband as long as I did to enable our five children to complete their educations and to get o their own paths. They are all solid citizens who are positive contributory to society.
Al and I have not married in order to avoid confusing our relationship and estates for our collective eight children. My ex-husband has made excelknt progress since the divorce with the help of AA. Teenagers and people who are not teenagers are all looking for the same thing--close companionship and love. They must weigh the choices available and try to learn what the best choices are for them in their personal journey on this Earth. Some, like yourself, have found religion to be the answer.
Probably the best thing that can be taught to teens is that they do have choices to make and that the choices they make, whether consciously or by default, determine the outcome of their life. So many young people do not see any choices and abdicate running their lives. We wish you joy in living and all the best in your journey--Kathy West.
THANK YOU for the inspirational article about Kathy West and Prof. Jim Martin. AIDS has torn from us some of our most talented and generous brothers and sisters. Let us never forget the people with AIDS and their contributions, from Michael Bennett, who gave us the beautiful harmonies of A Chorus Line to Randy Shilts, who wrote And the Band Played On to expose the nightmarish story of how AIDS came to be; to Jim Martin, who remembered Kathy West and gave her a new and better opportunity at life. And let those of us who still have breaths to take redouble our efforts to overcome this horrific epidemic.
In the article, "Real Estate or Real Mistake?" (Dec. '94), a sentence reads: "This range of housing choices, she [Prof. Kate Warner] says, helped make Mariemont a diverse place, where the children of wealthy families went to school with kids from single-parent homes [emphasis added]." The last phrase implies that "wealthy families" and "single-parent homes" are mutually exclusive. This is a patently untrue statement: there are many single-parent families that are wealthy. It is not the erroneous nature of this misstatement which troubles me so much. It is, rather, the subtle bias against single-parent families which it contains--the bias of the speaker, the writer who quoted her and the editor who let the mistake slip through.
Many articles today, of course, go much farther and blame single-parent families for many of the social ills which beset our society. They often ignore the more important variables of poverty--lack of education., lack of parenting skills and emotional unreadiness for parenthood among some single parents. Blaming single-parenthood for social problems without specifying the many accompanying causal factors ignores the enormous number of well-educated, financially secure, psychologically mature single parents who do a fine job of raising their children.
TWO ARTICLES in the December issue concerned the professional development of women faculty and staff, as voiced by President Duderstadt and Provost Whitaker. Their responses do not begin to understand the depth and prevalence of the difficulties, intentional and otherwise, put in the path of women at universities. Below are some far more effective suggestions based on my 40 years of post-doctoral experience as a science faculty member, industrial researcher and government science administrator. 1. Women faculty should learn to "just say NO" and mean it! to unreasonable demands on their time and commitments. 2. The worst problem for women faculty--particularly those with families--is lack of TIME for themselves and their professions. Providing another tool such as a computer is not an answer. Far more effective would be continuity of reliable, committed, full-time professional support personnel. The practice of providing such faculty support is common in foreign universities, i.e. Australia and Israel. 3. Women faculty should not have to beg, grovel and justify ad nauseam why they need the money. Each is an individual case. An intellectual who is physically tired all the time cannot maintain scholarly and creative agenda with a $5,000 sop.
Martha D. Berliner'50 MA
Virginia Beach, Virginia
I READ with great interest the article "Dialogue on Ethics" in the December issue. I applaud the efforts to "reintegrate elements of religion, ethics and values into campus life." It is encouraging to know that in such a prestigious university, these considerations are important, I have always been--and continue to be--proud of having been a student at the University of Michigan.
I REALLY appreciated your story, "Succeeding in Science" (December 1994), describing the Program in Scholarly Research for Urban/Minority High School Students, the project that enables Detroit-area teenagers to undertake scientific research under the guidance of Michigan faculty. Too bad that many more students cannot have the opportunity to work in this fashion with interested adults. What a difference it would make in the hopes and dreams of our young people!
In my book Fear of Math: How to Get Over It and Get On with Your Life, I describe several such intervention programs, as well as hands-on science programs for younger children, many of which enroll minority and low-income students.
I myself was the victim of discrimination. In 1938 I was awarded a degree in actuarial mathematics from U M, having received a grade of A++ in the actuarial courses and passed several of the actuarial exams, an unusual feat for a student. However, as a woman and a Jew I was excluded from the insurance field and never held a position for which my actuarial studies qualified me. I tell this story in my book, along with brief histories of others who had to struggle to overcome discrimination in order to achieve the positions for which they were eminently qualified.
In the last chapter I quote Prof. James S. Jackson of the U-M psychology department on the need to bring fresh perspectives by opening the University to women and people of ethnic/racial minorities. I also devote an entire chapter, "Myths of Innate Inferiority," to explode the myth that African-Americans and women are not good in math--my answer to The Bell Curve.
I ENJOYED reading "They Dig that Place." My question is to all of the diggers: Did they know about the UFO coverup that took place in the '40s, or hear any stories to that effect? [The archaeological team members report that they heard the stories but did not research them.--Ed.]
Editor's reply: You and other readers who inquired may contact Prof. Ed West at the U-M School of,4rt, 2055 Art & Architecture Building, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069.
. . . March 1995
Michigan Today