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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (July 23, 2002)
Newsroom: (541) 346-5511 Room 300, Erb Memorial Union PO. Box 3159, Eugene, OR 97403 E-mail: editor@dailyemerald.com Online edition: www.dailyemerald.com Tuesday, July 23,2002 Editor in chief: Michael J. Kleckner Managing editor: Jenni Schultz Editorial UO officials should rethink budget‘fixes’ The University adopted a new tuition and fee schedule Friday for the 2002-03 school year, and it’s a doozy. Resident undergraduates will pay about 1 percent more in tuition increases if they take 12 or fewer credits before 3 p.m., and 4 percent more if they take 16 credits with four of those credits after 3 p.m. Non-resident un dergraduates will pay 10.2 percent higher tuition if they take 16 credits all before 3 p.m., and 6.9 percent less for 12 credit hours with eight of those credits after 3 p.m. Frankly, this is ridiculous. Many students — and all the incoming freshmen, who stand to benefit the most from the University’s after-3p.m. discounts — haven’t taken math yet. How are they supposed to figure out what number of credits at what hour will yield what cost? Maybe the University’s plan is to confuse students so much that they won’t notice they’re being fleeced in fees. And it’s quite a fleecing, with a new fee for registering, of all things, and increases in fee after fee after fee. In disgust at the continued assault on students’ wal lets, we decided to see what would happen if the Emer ald adopted similar increases in its rates. Here’s a Fic tional scenario: Students already pay a very small portion of their inci dental fee to receive the Emerald for free. This charge, like tuition, theoretically pays for your right to pick up a newspaper. Well, this year, that fee is going up. And then, if you pickup your paper between 10 a.m. and noon, when our boxes are the busiest, you’ll pay a 9 percent increase in the fee. . There is also a new “visualization” charge for actual ly reading the Emerald, and it’s even higher if you read it in the EMU, where we have to pay rent for our offices. It’s expensive to run a newspaper, you know. Nouns and verbs are essential to understanding, so you get those for “free. ” But adjectives and adverbs now have a 3 percent “enhanced readability” surcharge. We’re instituting a 2 percent “technology” surcharge — after all, we have to use computers and expensive i software to produce the paper. If you’re a journalism or architecture student, we’re charging you an extra 1 percent. You folks are the best and brightest, so we know you can afford it. And so on. Seriously, though, these increases in tuition and fees are alarming. The price hikes are necessitated, so the Oregon University System says, by the lack of higher education funding by the state. As a result of this lack of state funding, the OUS pres idents recently signed a letter asking for more autono my for each campus president to make decisions about faculty'pay etc. The individual campuses probably de serve this autonomy: after all, they’re producing the ! revenue. But this whole scenario is backward thinking. Rather than give the universities more autonomy, the state should start paying for higher education. Taxpay ers— specifically businesses, who only pay 27 percent of the state’s tax burden, according to a recent Oregon ian article — need to pony up the bucks to make higher education realistically possible for the state’s students. After all, if businesses are the organizations provid ing all these fantastic jobs, then the University is the in stitution training their workers. Let’s just hope that the Class of ’06 doesn’t try to im plement University-style pricing structures at those fantastic new jobs—we’d never be able to figure out how much a cup of coffee would cost. Editorial Policy This editorial represents the opinion of the Emerald editorial board. Responses can be sent to letters@daityemerald.com. Letters to the editor and guest commentaries are encouraged. Letters are limited to 260 words and guest commentaries to 550 words. Please include contact information. The Emerald reserves the right to edit for space, grammar and style. Women face more challenges when balancing career, family For a woman, a bachelor’s degree has traditionally meant im proved odds of finding a suitable husband and the proper tools to raise productive and intelligent children. While women currently outnumber men at the undergraduate level, men take the lead in professional schools. This fact implies that after a woman has gained a bachelor’s degree, she be comes bogged down with family life, and, while her ambitious husband continues his schooling, she must put her career dreams on hold to pursue her biologically designated role of motherhood. Why must the woman continue to put her life on hold for children? While nature may have designated us as the carriers of new life, this does not necessarily mean that we are the sole supporters of our young, and there is no reason for a woman to sacrifice either career or family to be happy. Recent studies have suggested that women who wish to accomplish themselves in the professional world end up regretting their choice when it is too late — the studies say the women are lonely spinsters once they have matured. With their fertile days over, the experts say, these suc cessful, childless women discover that their careers cannot offer them everything. These alleged experts who claim that career women are unhappy later in life have overlooked one little fact: Men have always — traditionally Guest Commentary Meghann __ Farnsworth — put their careers ahead of their fam ily life. Men are seen as the breadwin ners, the ones who go to the office every day, leaving their wife and 2.5 kids waving at the door. What about the effects that those endless, unful filling nights at the office have on a family? Have we lost our minds? Women are no more susceptible to these “family longings” than men simply because we bear the repro ductive responsibility. Should a woman completely devote herself to her career, forgetting everything else, you had better believe that she will eventually become unhappy — this is not a new revelation. For a study to focus so specifically on women’s unhappiness in their careers unnec essarily implies that women need children to be happy. To complicate things further, anoth er recent study has found that early maternal employment has negative ef fects on children’s intellectual devel opment. That’s right: According to a recent New York Times article, women who work more than 30 hours a week before their children are 9 months old may find themselves with a kid who tests in the 44th percentile in school-readiness tests when they are three. All together now: gaspl As a master of the obvious, I have to profess what logically minded people everywhere must be thinking: Where are the studies for the men who chose not to stay home with their child? Last time I heard, a sperm was in volved in fertilization. The study assumes that the success of a child (rather, his or her testing ability) is dependent on the mother’s ability or inability to stay home — men, along with other variables, are only factors in their success or failure. With women already facing chal lenges getting into the workplace, studies such as these only increase, rather than alleviate, women’s anxiety over their children. Women do not need this kind of badgering from gov ernment-funded studies; they need the money and support to gain ade quate child care so that both mother and child can be equally fulfilled. Women have always been working — it is just work that the state does not value or pay. Raising children in the home and cleaning and maintaining a household are jobs that, while praised as valuable by the GOP and religious conservatives, are chores which go unpaid. Why the sudden nail-biting over women placing more emphasis in their career? Men have been doing it for years. Get over it, and realize that women need fulfillment in their rela tionship with their family and their professional lives. Meghann Farnsworth is a freelance columnist. Her opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Emerald. Letter to the editor Don’t take student tickets for granted Placing a value on student tickets is driven by more than just face ticket val ues, it is driven by donation values as well. In all, student tickets for football and men’s basketball games are valued at close to $2.5 million. The ASUO pays a little less than $1.2 million. We should be commending the ASUO for being able to strike this deal, and also the Athletic Department for giving students such a great bargain. I hope current students will under stand this tremendous value, because chances are it won’t last much longer. Jeff Oliver Class of ’02 Eugene Steve Sack 'THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAS Me WoRRieD...'
