Council Should Get Money From University, Not From Students

To the editors:

It is wonderful that there are more student groups on campus and that they are holding more activities and so require more funding. However, if the Undergraduate Council thinks that it is in the average student's best interest to increase our term bill, they are sorely mistaken. If a club tried to levy their own $30 tax on their members, we would find this outrageous. Yet the council is trying to do just that and worse. They are asking us to support groups financially that we are, for the most part, not even members of. I would much rather give $30 directly to the group of my choice than to the council to dole out (and possibly lose).

Moneybags Harvard just raised billions of dollars, aside from their billions in the bank and what they squeeze out of us every year. They also just decided to lend out $20 million to save face from a shady real estate deal. Now they have the gall to claim that they don't have enough for student groups? That's an abomination. This is lunch money to the University. If Harvard is not serving its students well in academics as well as in extracurriculars, it is not doing its job. Our under-funded student groups should get more money and more space. They are the life of this University. But, Undergraduate Council, don't take your money from me when Harvard just lent $20 million to someone else.

Jennifer E. Cobelli '01

Nov. 12, 1999

Religion, Not Science, Source Of Humphreys' Kooky Ideas

To the editors:

I am writing to point out that Sandia National Laboratories has nothing to do with Russ Humphreys' kooky ideas about a young Earth and sprinting continents (News, Nov. 9). He has never published these speculations in a science journal, nor has he presented them at Sandia for peer review.

Humphreys works at Sandia in a weapons engineering group, which does not do scientific research. He has never seen fit to explain to geologists at Sandia why he thinks their work to characterize the stability of nuclear waste sites is incorrect by many orders of magnitude. Doesn't he have a moral obligation to speak out? If these rocks have only been around for 6,000 years, then scientists' conclusions about their stability--and therefore their safety--are all wrong! It appears he would rather make trouble for schoolteachers than for his coworkers and he'd rather get his name in newspapers than on science papers. It is unfortunate that his affiliation with Sandia, rather than his church, is what gets mentioned in the news. After all, his ideas are based on his religion, not on science.

Mark Boslough

Nov. 13, 1999

The writer is a principal member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories.

Harvard Teaching Faculty

A Vital Part of HIID Staff

To the editors:

While there were a number of things in the story (News, Nov. 9) about the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) with which I could take exception, one point in particular deserves comment. The statement that "HIID employs virtually no professors from the teaching ranks of the Faculty" conveys the impression that the Institute is essentially disconnected from the rest of the University.

A few statistics demonstrate how inaccurate this is. During the past decade, 89 different faculty members from six professional schools and several Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) departments served as researchers or policy advisors on HIID projects, while some 60 faculty members (many different from the 89) served as lecturers in HIID's summer executive training programs for developing country professionals. Faculty members from FAS, the School of Public Health, Harvard Law School and other units of the University are currently involved as lead or supporting researchers or policy advisors on HIID projects.

In addition, HIID's core staff teach an annual average of 34 courses in six professional schools and five FAS departments; and HIID hires an average of 80 students a year in part-time positions, and provides summer travel grants to an average of some 20 students each year to enable them to pursue research in developing countries.

And while it is true that Harvard faculty can earn a great deal more consulting in the public sector, the University encourages them to work with us by not counting the time spent on HIID activities against their one-day-a-week maximum on consulting .

Richard Pagett

Nov. 15, 1999

The writer is the interim director of HIID.