Letters: Readers discuss loving the Chiefs, KU tenure and KC warming center success
My champs
Hey, Chiefs: Thank you so very much for another exciting season. Thanks for your good play on the field and your good work in the community.
You are always the champions in my eyes. I’m a Chiefs fan for life.
- Lorraine Bennetts, Kansas City
Teach them young
The camera scanned the players of both teams during “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the Super Bowl. For me, it was time to turn the channel because of the lack patriotism shown while the song played.
But then, why should the players act any differently? Patriotism needs to be taught, with children saying the Pledge of Allegiance every morning before school. America should be ashamed for not teaching the young to love their country.
- Roberta Gray, Shell Knob, Missouri
It isn’t salaries
The University of Kansas’ academic excellence has allowed generations of Kansans access to an affordable, world-class education. Our educational and research mission depends on the scholarly and scientific professions that tenure protections make possible. Tenure is necessary to support independent, deep and sustained research and teaching careers. While our work helps power the economy, the professoriate can’t thrive without public support.
Undermining tenure protections undermines the conditions that make a great university possible. (Jan. 21, 4A, “Kansas universities could speed up faculty dismissals under new proposal”) Other academic leaders across Kansas have recognized this and have decisively rejected any suspension of tenure. Our provost’s failure to do so has unnecessarily harmed our academic reputation internationally and has thereby reduced the value of a KU degree.
At KU, 8.4% of the budget goes toward faculty compensation. Faculty salaries are not the problem. Instead, our challenges result from enormous levels of administrative bloat and decades of mismanagement. For example, administrators undertook highly leveraged construction projects that left us with unsustainable debt obligations. They did so believing that our academic prestige would attract enough foreign students to cover the bills.
Thus, even for purely budgetary reasons, the provost should be protecting the prestige of our core academic mission rather than undermining it.
- John Symons, Lawrence
KC out ahead
The Star has run several articles on the Kansas City warming center downtown, which I had an occasion to visit this weekend. (Feb. 6, 3A, “City Council has worries about Bartle Hall warming center”) I joined my friend, who owns the downtown restaurant Anton’s KC, to donate food to help with their needs.
We arrived Saturday evening to make the delivery and were taken completely aback. The unit had been open for about a week, and it looked sparkly clean. They had 150 folks that night, and they and the staff were in complete order. The city had rented two semitrucks with portable showers. The security was not our police but the Black Panthers. Everything was low key and seemed under control.
We both wondered how many other cities could have pulled this off. It is a real feather in Kansas City’s cap. With our city thinking like this, we can go a long way.
- David Biersmith, Kansas City
Who’s smiling?
The only person who is pleased with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol is Vladimir Putin. The Russian president will no doubt mint coinage with an engraving of Donald Trump’s image on one side and a scene of the attack on the other.
- John Lancaster, Plattsburg, Missouri