Letters to the Editor

Advising not a problem

To the Editor:

I was quite disappointed to see the front page news article criticizing Engineering advising ("SEAS students say advising needs help," The Daily Pennsylvanian, 1/25/02). I would like to clarify some inaccuracies and outline the advising procedures of the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

First-year students are told who their adviser is and given contact information and may use several on-line advising tools, such as a freshman Web site and a Blackboard course with an advising discussion board.

Students are notified about these resources in their summer mailing, and academic advising is an important topic during the Dean's meeting with freshmen. We distribute adviser information cards containing the student's assigned advisor, as well as contact information for the department's undergraduate coordinator and peer adviser. Faculty adviser assignments are readily available through each academic department's undergraduate coordinator and through the Academic Programs Office.

Contrary to what the article states, curriculum deferred advisers are not assigned at random. We ask a select group of faculty members to advise a few curriculum-deferred students each. We ask students for input about possible major interests and try to match students with advisers. We also repeatedly encourage students to switch to a specific area of interest as soon as possible, so that they can become attached to a department and its faculty.

Unlike some other undergraduate schools, we do not have an "advising department." Our system assigns each student to a faculty adviser who can provide advice on curricula and on becoming an engineer or scientist.

We have many opportunities for first-year students to get acquainted with SEAS majors, faculty members and upperclassmen. These have included departmental dinners, panel presentations and majors fairs, the next to be held in late February during National Engineers Week.

Peer advisers in the Engineering School serve primarily as a kind of "big sister" or "big brother" to incoming students and offer assistance in making the transition to university life. They perform no official advising duties.

SEAS advising resources are readily available through departments and my office staff. Director of Engineering Advising John Keenan does an exemplary job of advising students. Student comments on our advising system are welcome and may be addressed through their student representatives or directly to me.

Norman Badler,

Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

School of Engineering and Applied Science

The fruits of dirty money To the Editor:

The universities that have been subpoenaed by the tobacco industry ("Schools defy tobacco industry requests," DP, 1/28/02) have absolutely no place being righteously indignant. The Center for Tobacco Research, an initiative by the Phillip Morris Companies, gave away more than $20 million in grant money every year until 1997.

In a pathetic attempt to convince the public that smoking did not contribute to lung cancer and heart disease, despite the overwhelming clinical evidence to the contrary, tobacco companies paid researchers millions to conduct wasteful and fundamentally flawed studies on animals. There are two guilty parties here: the tobacco industry and the researchers who carried out these studies. I hope that the tobacco industry succeeds in getting the documents that it wants. Clearly, they are trying to shift blame away from themselves for selfish reasons, but the researchers who padded their budgets with tobacco money should be held accountable, as well.

Provost Robert Barchi said, "I think there is the broader issue of academic freedom and invasion of privacy of our faculty, given the very broad scope of the request." What about the issue of academic integrity and the supposed independence of scientific inquiry from politics and money?

The New England Journal of Medicine reports that scientists with financial ties to pharmaceutical companies were much more likely to give positive evaluations to that company's product than those produced by those companies without any connections. Big surprise.

Yes, money can corrupt even scientists, which is exactly what happened in the case of tobacco research. Scientists conducted experiments on dogs and other species and concluded that since they did not get lung cancer from smoking, humans would not either, even though the causal link in humans had already been established clinically.

Ian Ross

Linguistics Ph.D student

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