Sex class not worthwhile
To the editor,
It certainly was a nice treat to read the Oct. 6 headline: "Sex class draws about 50 students last night." If that was worthy enough to make headline news and be ASUA-funded, I hope the Wildcat and our student government will also be responsible and balance this thing out sometime with a dose of reality.
According to the article, students attended the workshop to learn about great sex. Ah yes - tell me about the sex toys, techniques and don't forget the, ooh la la!, creative positions. All this can be yours with open communication and a condom - that is - if the condom is even used, or doesn't break! After all, what are we really in school for?
Yet as a nurse, I've gotten to see the possible side effects of these great encounters: unplanned pregnancies, horrific STDs or the emotional turmoil with the scare of one. Were these things important enough to be discussed also? But then again, reality isn't always fun or romantic.
Sharon Platt
Journalism, non-degree
Campaign Arizona will bring changes
To the editor,
We were overcome with cleansing fear and sublime awe at witnessing the vast mobilization taking place on the Mall this past Friday. Reading the edict concerning "Campaign Arizona" issued by the University's Ministry of Communications and Public Affairs, we learned that our entire university was mustering its forces towards what Likins henchman, UA Foundation President Dick Imwalle, calls "confirming the global reach and influence of the University" by means of "the largest fund-raising campaign ever undertaken in the state."
Clearly the university's foreign policy has lagged as concentrated efforts have been made to improve the domestic infrastructure with projects such as the Integrated Learning Center and various other great leaps forward intended to refashion the university as a "premier student centered research university." But we see no reason why these projects cannot be fused with Imwalle's bold foreign policy initiatives in order to form one over-arching strategy "to lay a foundation for an expanded definition of better living".
In order to accomplish this noble undertaking, we, as a university, will require an elite corps of well-disciplined soldiers capable of putting aside all individualistic concerns about their own personal education for the sake of our university's financial health. We would do well to follow Phaedrus's suggestion in the "Symposium," Plato's great treatise on military strategy:
"if there were some method for bringing about an army made up entirely of pairs of lovers they would avoid all dishonor and compete with one another for glory. Though small, this kind of army, made up of lovers fighting side by side, would just about conquer the whole world in battle."
Coed dormitories may achieve this necessary closeness to some small degree, but we all know that the strongest bonds are made under extreme and overwhelming circumstances. We recognize that the ILC's main purpose is to provide just such an extraordinary learning environment. Our students will simulate the sanctified bonds of war in this educational boot-camp where, deprived of outside stimuli and the distractions of the world above-ground, they will spend no hour outside the surveillance of their peers. This will serve to break down psychic barriers and render the incoming freshmen docile. Once this process has been achieved it is imperative that we provide a tightly-structured, martial atmosphere, which will then mold these hollow shells into the kind of close-knit, fund-raising soldiers who can carry out Likins and Imwalle's global ambitions.
Of course, some changes to the university's curriculum will be necessary. Therefore, we suggest that the university attack this friendship situation on three fronts: 1) Jettison moribund and superfluous programs and departments (i.e. the Humanities), and inter what remains of traditional education in the soon-to-be built "libratory." 2) Replace required courses such as Traditions and Cultures, etc., which fail to inculcate proper attitudes toward working in groups, annulling diversity and following orders, with a carefully integrated series of courses in the Development and Production of Best Friends. 3) Transform the freshman year, and every subsequent year, into a precisely orchestrated series of procedures for drilling into students the Three F's, Fraternity, Friendship, and Fun.
In this part of the campaign, leadership skills will be integrated with broad student-centered opportunities geared toward energizing and encouraging discovery, vitalizing global partnerships and engineering better living, all by means of an integrated, student centered approach. Rather than mastering useless skills such as critical thinking or using language to express meaningful ideas, students will now learn how to share vibrant experiences; how to arrange themselves into appropriate hierarchies, or "teams," for the transmission of orders from their superiors (ourselves); and how to "discover" for themselves the satisfying plentitude of what already exists. A night of solitary study, has, to our knowledge, never raised a single dollar; whereas nights of brotherly camaraderie have often created the deep bonds of friendship necessary for fund-raising exploitation. With crack drill instruction, these newly manufactured best friends would rather die a thousand deaths than be out-fund-raised by a university of similar stature.
Likins's shock troops will indeed be "flexible workers who can respond effectively to changing economic and technological conditions." Just as our pioneering business leaders fashioned faster and more efficient microprocessors, we will fashion more driven and more standardized students who will, by whatever means necessary, wage "Campaign Arizona" in the blood-hallowed streets of Beijing, the trading floors of the world's major commodity exchanges or even on the oil rich sands of Libya.
Jesse Showalter
Classics graduate student
Robert Horning
English graduate student
