By Luke Knipe
Arizona Daily Wildcat
April 15, 1998

Spank Peter Likins

To the Editor:

It's time for the university's students, faculty and staff to take President Peter Likins into a back room and spank him. Not enough to make him hurt real bad, but enough to get one very important message across, one that everyone should learn at an early age: actions speak louder than words. I fear that the students, faculty, and most of the university employees are being taken, by Likins, for fools. But it's not too late to show him we're not.

The new CatCard mess is quite like the older Nike mess in that it has proven thus far to be little more than an opportunity for Likins to strike a magnanimous pose, then do a political dance, a smooth, sexy, glossing-over-the-mess-I-just-made dance, one that our former (and politically impotent) president Manuel Pacheco never quite learned the steps to, one that the university has been in need of for quite a long time. Likins is a remarkably intelligent man - more remarkably, he has demonstrated an ability to do things that are hardly in the interest of the university community as a whole, then generate just the right rhetorical patch for them. He's clever. But not that clever. I say we spank him.

You really think the CatCard "oversight" was just an honest mistake, and not a failed attempt to do something unethical without getting in trouble? Come on. You really think that Likins flew up to Phil Knight's palace to be convinced that Nike's Labor Practices were fair? You think that Likins is being completely straightforward with us? SPANK!

Luke Knipe
Biochemistry Freshman