Graduate employees
To the Editor:
Your editorial on a possible graduate student union ("Student, not employee," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 10/19/01) takes the position commonly taken by university administrators that graduate students are not employees, but students. Obviously they are both. The fact that they are students does not make them any less employees working for the University than if they were washing dishes in a restaurant.
Graduate students doing research or teaching classes perform work for the University which would otherwise be performed by faculty members.They are subject to the supervision of faculty members and the administration, their hours and duties are prescribed, their performance is evaluated and they are subject to being removed from their work by their superiors. They are paid a "stipend," a euphamism for salary or hourly wage, which is determined by the amount and nature of their assigned duties. By any sensible definition, they are "employees," and they may have the same need for collective representation as any employees.
Of course, professors and the administration would prefer to deal with these employees individually. So would University administrators would prefer to deal with their professors, librarians, secretaries and janitors individually. But no one questions the right of these employees of the University to form unions and have collective representation.
I do not know whether graduate students need a union to protect and promote their interests, but that is for them to decide, not the administration, not the faculty and not undergraduates.
Clyde Summers
Professor of Law
Pursue peace
To the Editor:
With all due respect for the suffering that Israelis have experienced under terrorism, hopefully we Americans are not "bound together by fear" with Israel ("Israel and the U.S. -- Bound together by fear," DP, 10/18/01). Has the Israeli strategy of retaliation has really helped eliminate terrorism? Israeli intelligence efforts and the practice of "targeted killings" likely have prevented future terrorist acts, but some of these actions contradict basic American values. Even in this moment of national trauma, do we really want to embrace measures that are antithetical to our sense of due process?
What impact has this strategy of retaliation had on Palestinians, ignored in Noah Chinitz' column. Current events make a pretty powerful case that these actions have only fueled those inclined to pursue violence. Rather than being swept into a brutal eye-for-an-eye cycle of terrorism, would it not be more prudent to define a course of action that attacks the roots of terrorism?
Unlike the United States, Israel has a foe with which it is engaged in a peace process, flawed as it may be. The U.S. needs to push this process forward. We have a special bond with Israel, but our long-term interests demand that we pursue the path to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The truly frightening thought that seems to undermine Mr. Chinitz' view is that perhaps the Palestinians and the Islamic world in general do not want peace. If this is true, "the first war of the 21st century" is likely to be long and bloody.
Peter Watko
Director of Patient Services
Department of Obsterics and Gynecology
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