Commentary
Oregon Daily Emerald
Thursday, May 12, 2005
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■ In my opinion / despite \
The value of DDS \ J5L /
The Assault Prevention Shuttle has
had a long, contentious relationship
with Designated Driver Shuttle.
I cannot and am not speaking for
APS, DDS or the University. I can I only
speak for myself and my experiences.
During my work as an APS volun
teer, I’ve heard a constant stream of
complaints against DDS. People con
nected to APS have raised concerns
regarding the poor DDS work ethic
(allegedly choosing to play video
games instead of answering phone
calls), forgetting to return keys to the
office or van and subsequently not
working, generally poor organization
including having no spare keys avail
able and not notifying APS when they
are locked out and/or will not be
working that night.
While volunteering once or twice a
week in the APS office, I did not wit
ness any of those events first hand and
only heard of them after the fact.
However, the following did occur a
few months ago when I was there. At
APS, we received more calls than usu
al. Many calls were confused, inebriat
ed people trying to contact DDS. When
asked why they didn’t simply press the
correct extension, the callers respond
ed that they had tried repeatedly and
no one at DDS answered. There were
workers in the DDS office, so one of
our staff members walked there and
asked what was going on. DDS em
ployees said they had forgotten to turn
the phones back on after turning them
off for some reason. Accidents happen,
but when your job is to answer phones
at a popular shuttle service, one would
think it strange that no one was calling.
It’s that kind of inattention to detail
that APSers find so irritating.
Similar phone incidents occurred so
frequently that APS began a log of
when the DDS phone was not on dur
ing their scheduled work hours.
That said...
Does DDS save more lives than
APS? Yes.
Does DDS provide a more valuable
service to University students? It
ANNEMARIE KNEPPER
WORKS ON PAPER
depends on the student.
APS provides service to, on average,
70 people per night. APS runs every
night of the week, from 7 p.m. to mid
night on weeknights and until 2 a.m.
on weekends. If keys are forgotten,
workers can call someone to let them
in immediately so APS can continue
running as usual. APS has 12 paid staff
members and more than 80 volunteers.
DDS runs from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.
every day.. The DDS Web site, not up
dated since the 2001-02 school year,
does not say how many people it
serves each night. Its employees are
paid and it does not rely on volunteers.
Now, it must be mentioned that not
all DDS workers are irresponsible. In
fact, many are dedicated, polite and
good at their jobs. Nevertheless, an or
ganization, like a team, is only as good
as its weakest member. And the weak
est members of DDS did something in
credibly out of line — something so far
from okay that it is reprehensible
(“Designated drivers caught drinking,”
ODE May 3).
It seems that DDS suffers from fail
ure to communicate. Evidently, it was
n’t communicated that drinking on the
job is totally unacceptable and could
result in immediate dismissal and dis
ciplinary action by the University. The
University employee policy regarding
drugs and alcohol is very clear:
“The illegal use, possession, or dis
tribution of drugs and alcohol on in
stitutionally owned or controlled
property or as part of any University
activity is proscribed conduct.” (See
Oregon Administrative Rule (OAR)
580-22-045(8).)
“The University may impose
disciplinary sanctions against any
student or employee found to have vi
olated this rule ... not limited to, sus
pension without pay, and termination
of employment.”
The DDS employee drinking inci
dent was probably an isolated one.
Yet by not running at its scheduled
time and not answering phone calls,
which DDS admits has happened sev
eral times, DDS has been irresponsible
in its position as a student-funded serv
ice. It's unfortunate a DDS employee
did something as egregious as drink
ing on the job before the organization
got a slap on the hand.
In an online post in response to the
Emerald’s article on DDS, one shuttle
employee says “I believe that the ben
efit provided on the many nights we
are running at full strength vastly out
weighs the burden put on APS the
few nights we can't run the vans.” To
this I must ask, the benefit to whom?
The intoxicated riders? Or the person
who chose not to drink but would
like a ride because he or she does not
feel safe walking alone at night? The
latter is our customer, who couldn’t
get through to APS because drunk
customers were flooding the phone
lines when they couldn’t contact a
DDS representative.
APS and DDS are both funded in
part by student fees. When APS re
sources go to serving DDS patrons, it is
not only unfair to APS staff and riders,
but the student body as a whole.
It is impossible to know how many
assaults, rapes, and acts of violence
APS services have prevented. It is
also impossible to know how many
drunk driving incidents DDS has pre
vented. Both services are valid and
important to the University. Neither
one is more essential than the other,
and both organizations need to be
working at “full strength” every night
to ensure the safety of University stu
dents who have come to depend on
these services.
annemarieknepper@dailyemercdd. com
■ Guest commentary
Ze/hir pronouns represent future
in spite of linguistic conservatism
A great controversy has emerged
recently in campus publications over
the use of the gender neutral pronoun
set ze/hir. This has manifested main
ly in the Emerald’s obstinate refusal
to use ze/hir and the Oregon Com
mentator’s outright hostility toward
any sort of variance from a strict ide
ology of gender binaries. While the
Emerald has merely provided a
plethora of examples of dreadful
journalistic style, the Commentator
has — inadvertently, I’m sure —
demonstrated that ze/hir is a perfectly
usable form.
For those who are not familiar with
ze/hir, it is used rather than she/her
or he/him/his for some people who
identify outside of a man/woman di
chotomy. Like he and she, ze has sev
eral forms that are not particularly
easy for the average person to classify
grammatically (he, she, ze; his, her,
hir; him, her, hir; his, hers, hirs;
himself, herself, hirself), but anyone
who can use she and he is capable of
integrating ze. Listening to individu
als who respect self-identification and
pronoun preference makes this
quite clear, as they form sentences
like “ze knows that’s hir job,”
“that book is hirs,” and so on. There
is a pattern that is consistent and easy
to produce.
A description of only the speech pat
tern of respectful individuals could be
perceived as unbalanced; nevertheless,
the school administration has shown an
obvious inability to deal with gender
identity based harassment, which is ex
plicitly forbidden in the University’s
nondiscrimination policy.
Fights about pronouns are nothing
new. Most, if not all, English speakers
use “they” as a third person singular
gender neutral pronoun, even though
grammarians attempting to reinforce
class hierarchies through language have
tried for hundreds of years to convince
us that this is impossible. Lord
Brougham's Act, passed in 1850, limited
the use of “he or she,” and instead in
cluded all people under the masculine
pronoun. None of this really matters in
terms of the structure of the language,
though. The reality of what forms peo
ple actually produce determines lan
guage. Ze/hir is clearly possible for Eng
lish speakers to use, and is luckily
becoming more and more widespread in
many communities.
Pirn Kelly is a senior linguistics major
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■ Editorial
Marijuana
poses lesser
threat than
violent theft
It’s no secret that Oregon has a bit of a
funding problem. Public programs involv
ing education, insurance and so on are los
ing steam as lawmakers in Salem and vot
ers around the state continually show an
extreme dislike for taxes.
The most recent example of these
harms was reported Wednesday, by the
Register-Guard. According to the Register
Guard, Lane County district attorneys
will not prosecute more than 100 nonvio
lent misdemeanors such as car break-ins
and credit card fraud. Instead, public
lawyers will focus on crimes such as do
mestic violence, high scale robberies and
drug dealing.
Unfortunately, this is just another exam
ple of how the U.S. government’s drug war
forces individual communities to ignore
crimes that should take higher legal priori
ties. Instead of makine sure nponlp who
break into cars are taken off the street and
punished, prosecutors will use state funds
to make sure the local stoner isn’t assist
ing his neighbors in eating lots of food and
forgetting stuff.
Not that drug dealing is a small matter.
Some substances, such as PCP, pose seri
ous danger to both drug users and inno
cent bystanders. Anyone who sells drugs
that directly threaten society deserves
to be prosecuted at the most severe
level possible.
The sale of some drugs, however,
should simply be a lower priority to the
government than breaking into someone’s
car. The federal government recognizes
marijuana as more dangerous than
cocaine, which is legal for some medical
use, while marijuana is a Schedule I drug
and represents one of America’s worst out
dated policies.
Marijuana is a surprisingly mild drug. It
is usually not chemically altered, it is
much less addictive than most drugs, and
it has been used medicinally for thousands
of years. Also debatable is the govern
ment’s need to regulate its citizens’ sub
stance use in the first place.
Of course, when money runs low, the
need to make marijuana a primary public
concern at the expense of prosecuting
people who use stolen credit cards is to
tally irrational. As far as violent tenden
cies go, one should assume that a crimi
nal who breaks into or uses another’s
personal property is certainly more dan
gerous than someone who sells a drug
that the majority of the population has
admitted trying.
The real shame is that Oregon must
make choices regarding which criminals
deserve to be reprimanded for their ac
tions. Until Oregon lawmakers can figure
out how to appease voters and fund pub
lic services, Salem should seriously eval
uate its standards of community safety.
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Jennifer Sudick
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