talkback...

Newsom's folly

Sup. Gavin Newsom and other irrational anti-homeless folk should consider this: I spent most of April (and $2,000) getting a disabled homeless friend a place to live. My friend's Social Security income is more than twice the current General Assistance grant, and she had a middle-class employed white man with a long rental history, flawless credit, and a Ph.D. as her cosigner. Yet it still took almost two weeks for the landlord [to] (reluctantly) accept her application. After rent, she is left $104 per month and is ineligible for food stamps.

One might hope that any serious candidate for mayor of San Francisco would show substantially more skill in crafting social policy than a punishing parent who cuts a child's already meager allowance because that child cannot afford to house, feed, and clothe herself.

Scott Bravman

San Francisco

Take back gun control

Your cover story on how San Franciscans charged with gun offenses are increasingly being prosecuted and imprisoned in the federal system, rather than through local courts, was important ["Gun Law Gone Bad," 8/7/02].

The federal court and prison system has ballooned in recent years, without public scrutiny, and it is choked with minor offenders serving long sentences far from home.

These people are most often drug users, caught in the relentless federal war on drugs, which has also included joint federal-local task forces. Your own piece noted that anyone with a felony drug possession conviction is prohibited from having, and thus automatically prosecuted if found with, a gun. And, as you also note, young low-income African American men – who more often than others have drug convictions – are hugely overrepresented in this group of federal defendants.

While many of us in the Bay Area strongly support gun control, your story highlights the opportunity for local law enforcement and government officials to take back control of the issue. They can decline to cooperate with the federal "anti-gun" (and "anti-drug") task forces and work to reduce gun violence in ways that respond to their communities' needs and values.

Dorie Klein, D. Crim.

Albany

The dam and Prop. D

While it might seem irrational at first glance to restore Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park by demolishing the O'Shaughnessy Dam, delving deeper shows that it is probably feasible over the long term [Editorial, 8/14/02]. Since the Tuolumne watershed below the dam is already shot, it should be possible to replace that huge impoundment with a series of smaller structures, which could provide for a comparable amount of water and power.

But this could only happen long after the toxic Hunters Point plant was a dim memory. Like acquisition that Proposition D would permit, demolition of the O'Shaughnessy Dam would require intensive feasibility studies and would probably happen long after most of us were dead, if at all. Merely setting the long-term goal of demolition of the dam and restoration would put the issue on the policy radar of the PUC.

Vote yes on Prop. D and demand the PUC start planning for the long-term restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley and replacement with multiple, smaller electricity and water facilities.

Marc Salomon

San Francisco

Heads in the sand

Thank you for doing such a thorough job on a complex and difficult subject ["All Quiet in the Classroom," 8/14/02]. I got your article via the ASLE listserv and immediately put it out on our campus listserv. Maybe your piece will be instrumental in bringing about changes in academe. It always amazes me that for people who are supposedly so educated and smart, academics are sure good at burying their heads in the sand, especially here in the South.

Andrea W. Herrmann

Little Rock, Ark.

For-profit universities

As an unemployed sociology Ph.D. who has not had the privilege to enter the world of underpaid, temporary, road-weary faculty, I commend you on your excellent exposé "All Quiet in the Classroom." In fact, I attribute much of the reason for not being able to work in academia, or willing for that matter, is that I wrote my dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin on this very topic. Calling it "enterpreneurialization," I found that this has been quietly going on since the beginning of the 1980s in many more areas than just faculty and graduate student teaching, including universities using public funding to generate university-owned spin-off companies to sell the products of publicly funded research. In short, the universities are being reorganized as profit-making multinational corporations. For awhile I published extensively on this. One of my articles on graduate student teaching can be found at www.etext.org/Politics/AlternativeOrange/2/v2n5_wsic.html.

Robert Ovetz