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...'