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Opinion
The Battalion
Memorializing the
Page 11 * Tuesday, January 21, 2003
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THOMAS
CAMPBELL
resident Bill
Clinton said in
a 1995 letter to
school superintend
ents across the
nation that nothing
in the First
Amendment con
verts our public
schools into reli
gion-free zones or
requires all religious expression to be
left behind at the schoolhouse door.
He is right.
The tragedy of April 20, 1999 —
|the day Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold stonned into Columbine High
(School with guns blazing, killing 12
students, one teacher and themselves
— will be forever etched in the mem-
lories of Americans. Parents' memories
of their children, however, may lose
their chance to be displayed at the
school.
Columbine High School allowed
each of the parents of the students
killed a few tiles memorializing the
loss they suffered that warm spring
day. Brian Rohrbough, father of slain
student Danny Rohrbough, made a
couple of four-inch tiles with religious
themes, but the school took those tiles
off the memorial wall because of their
religious themes, cheapening the
memorial they created for the fallen
students in the process.
“If you asked me to create a mem
ory of my son, it is always going to
include a reference to God, because it
is a core value," Rohrbough told
foxnews.com. If Rohrbough cannot
make his own son’s memorial, no one
else is fit to.
Rohrbough and the parents of
Kelly Fleming, also killed in the
massacre, sued the school. Their suit
made it all the way to the Supreme
Court in their journey to defend free
speech. But their victory was short
lived. On Monday, Jan. 13, the
Supreme Court decided not to
hear arguments in the case,
without comment — which
defers back to the 10th circuit
court ruling that the tiles can
not be hung, according to
foxnews.com.
School district officials
told Fox News that they invit
ed the parents to create tiles
when they were renovating
Columbine High School after the
attacks. They told the parents not to
make a memorial out of the tiles —
but parents of these slain children
likely had little other motivation.
School officials also asked the
parents, after they made their
tiles, not to have religious
themes on them, observing a
non-existent Constitutional
requirement of the “separation of
church and state.”
In fact, “separation of church
and state” appears nowhere in
any governmental document or law
for our country. The First Amendment
says that the government cannot
establish a church. But allowing the
parents of a child who was killed
while helping other students flee mur
derers on governmental property to
write “God is Love” on a tile is not
establishing a national religion or
forcing students to believe in God.
School officials will not let these
parents memorialize their children in
their own way; yet, in the high
school’s front office hangs a plaque
that says “God Weeps Over
Columbine.”
Right now on the Polo Fields on
the Texas A&M campus, 12 white
crosses memorialize the Nov. 18,
1999 Aggie Bonfire Collapse. The
crosses are not construed as the estab
lishment of a University religion, but
rather as a memorial to fallen Aggies.
Likewise, two out of 4,100 tiles in
the Columbine hallway are not in any
way establishing a religion, but rather
memorializing those parents’ fallen
sons and daughters. All the parents
should be encouraged to show what
their child was interested in,
whether it is football, baseball, God,
Buddha or Allah.
This is not an establishment of reli
gion problem as much as it is a free
dom of speech problem. By allowing
the tiles, Columbine school officials
would not be establishing a religion,
but by censoring the religious tiles,
they are stifling freedom of speech.
Thomas Campbell is a senior
agriculturaljournalism major.
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King for a day
King's dream still not reached
u have a dream
I that my four
JLchildren will
one day live in a nation
where they will not be
judged by the color of
their skin but by the
content of their charac-
ter.”-Martin Luther
King, Jr. Aug. 28, 1963.
King stood for hard
work. Monday, Texas A&M honored
Martin Luther King Jr., a man who
labored tirelessly for educational opportu
nities for all, who toiled endlessly for
equality on the job, with a day off for stu
dents and faculty. This reverence is just a
prelude to the backwards homage paid in
the name of the most famous leader of
the civil rights movement. This week’s
events at A&M and the mindset of the
University administration is a microcosm
of the sad state of the modern civil rights
movement.
King stood for equal treatment,
regardless of race. Highlighting A&M’s
week-long “Campus With a Dream” fes
tivities will be an address today by
Kweisi Mfume, president of the National
Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP). Mfume leads
an organization that has abandoned all
pretenses of seeking a colorblind society,
the foundation of King’s dream. The
NAACP issued a rebuke last week of
President George W. Bush’s brief in the
University of Michigan affirmative action
case, stating that, “The president com
plained that black applicants at Michigan
were given twenty points toward admis
sion, not because of ‘life experience,’ he
said, but because of race. But life experi
ence in the 21st century is determined by
race. Race colors all our lives.” The
NAACP could not have misstated the
ideal of the civil rights movement more,
and King would be the first to agree.
King stood for straight talk on racial
issues. The NAACP also recently
launched an attack on Bush’s nomination
of Judge Charles Pickering Sr. to the 5th
Circuit Court of Appeals. Julian Bond,
chairman of the NAACP National Board
of Directors, said of Bush in a press
release that “Elevating him is a sop to the
racial politics that has proven so success
ful for the Republican Party from Barry
Goldwater in 1964 through 2002. They
have no shame!” In reality, maligning
Pickering as a racist is the most shameful
play of the race card in recent memory.
According to CNSNews.com, risking his
life, Pickering worked with the FBI in the
60s to prosecute KKK members in
Mississippi as a county attorney. He went
so far as to testify against the KKK impe
rial wizard in the case of a murdered civil
rights volunteer in 1967. Since those
activist times, Pickering has served on the
board of the University of Mississippi's
Institute for Racial Reconciliation and
has the support of local civil rights lead
ers. Unfortunately for Pickering, that
doesn’t serve the political motives of the
NAACP.
Avoiding anything resembling straight
talk, A&M President Dr. Robert M. Gates
issued a press release last week dis
cussing his diversity plans. “The initia
tives have nothing to do with quotas,
preferential treatment, lowering of stan
dards or the like.” The last time Gates
issued a press release, it included the fol
lowing lines: “This campus needs to look
more like the state of Texas; 93 percent
of our undergraduates are Texans. Texas
is 32 percent Hispanic; we’re 9 percent.
Texas is almost 12 percent African-
American; we’re under 3 percent.” If issu
ing targeted percentages of students based
on racial statistics is not quotas, then
what is?
King stood for brotherhood and was
against segregation. Further desecrating
this dream are A&M programs based on
race. This week, A&M will play host to
the Southern Black Leadership
Conference, a mostly segregated program
sponsored by the University, but to be
fair, a person of any race can join. The
Minority Enrichment and Development
through Academic and Leadership Skills
(MEDALS), slated for Jan. 24-25, oper
ates with the same racially segregated
pretenses. Ending the week is a “Miss
Black and Gold Scholarship Pageant,”
another segregated event that would very
likely violate the law against discrimina
tion in higher education. Race relations
are furthered by programs of inclusion,
not exclusion, so why not include stu
dents of all races? The NAACP states on
its Web site, “Affirmative action is the
just spoils of a righteous war, won at
great cost and intended to heal division
and end centuries of discrimination.” It is
sad that 37 years later. King’s movement
has turned to supporting a racial spoils
system that furthers racial division.
Texas A&M should take a lesson from
King, and seek not the politically correct
and easy route, but take the moral high
road of color blind policies. Stopping
racially discriminatory and segregationist
behaviors will mean lots of hard work
and perseverance, but that would be the
best tribute to a man who fought and died
Matt Maddox is a junior
business major.
MATT
MADDOX
PUF must stay untouched
Permanent University Fund shouldn't split
I n order for
the Texas
A&M admis
sions office to
skim the cream
off this semes
ter’s applicant
pool, the under
graduate ceiling
was raised to
42,000 just to accommodate the
University’s most elite applicants.
To top it all off, A&M is quite
the bargain education.
Part of the reason the
University enjoys the quality and
quantity of its applicants is simply
because tuition here is dirt cheap.
That’s right; the A&M system is
selling us a $30,000 education for
a little more than $10,000.
Whoever is signing off on our
tuition checks each semester can
thank the 1839 Texas legislature
for that.
Almost 200 years ago, Texas
congressmen set aside a public
endowment, giving future students
at A&M and the University of
Texas a little gift called the
Permanent University Fund
(PUF), which helped to establish
both schools. The fund, which
was thought to be of petty to
moderate value at the time of
endowment, came to include all
proceeds from oil, gas, sulfur,
railroad and water royalties in
Texas and currently generates
nearly $300 million in revenue
annually for both schools.
Revenue from the PUF today
helps to subsidize student tuition
costs at A&M and UT by quite a
generous percentage, an estimated
50-70 percent, according to the
Houston Chronicle. And now,
everyone is out to get a piece of
the PUF pie.
An estimated 50-70 percent of
a $30,000 education is a heck of a
birthday present from the state of
Texas, especially when you con
sider that Texas dishes out a little
more than $2 a day to its welfare
recipients. And although other
universities in the state outside of
Texas’ “big two” have their own
endowment funds, there is little
that schools such as the
University of Houston, Southwest
Texas and Texas Tech would love
more than to tap into our PUF
revenue base.
For A&M’s sake, the PUF fund
must remain untouched.
During the current legislative
session, lobbyists are pouring into
Austin, pressuring congressmen to
see that the PUF pie is expanded
to mutually include and benefit
the schools they represent.
Other lobbyists in Austin are
arguing that the revenue being
spent to maintain and expand
A&M and UT should instead be
borne by the students who benefit
so greatly. Perhaps they are bitter
at the fact that college graduates
earn $19,000 more per year on
average than those without
degrees, precisely the amount the
state subsidizes each year for each
student at A&M and UT. These
same lobbyists cite the median
family income of college fresh
men at both schools exceed
$50,000, which is more than
national averages.
The lobbyists’ argument is a
simple one: the benefit received
by college students in Texas
should more closely resemble the
amount they contribute. “Equity,
equity!” they shout.
There are a couple of problems
with that argument, however.
Cutting the PUF pie too thin
could be the worst-case scenario
for Texans’ higher education.
A&M and UT would either have
to significantly cut spending,
which would significantly reduce
the quality of the two schools, or
would have to begin to charge pri
vate school tuition rates for public
school education. A&M’s funding
does not need to be cut any fur
ther.
Still, less money would be
available to recruit quality
instructors and several programs
would have to be cut as a conse
quence. Our public schools would
have to begin to rely a little too
heavily on private donations to
maintain the degree of excellence
they currently exhibit. And hon
estly, there are just too many out-
of-state and in-state private
schools for Texans to apply to.
There are only so many Texans
who can afford to pay higher
rates, and Baylor, Trinity and
Southern Methodist University
already hold that market. Sure,
there are plenty of true-blue sixth-
generation Aggies and Longhorns,
but there are also plenty of very
smart people that attend Texas’
public university system because
of its comparatively low cost. The
quantity of A&M and UT students
would undoubtedly crash, never
mind the quantity of quality appli
cations, if A&M and UT’s share
of PUF is sliced. The two schools
would fall out of the prestigious
national rankings they hold.
And at the risk of sounding
politically incorrect, who among
us really wants well-to-do appli
cants who can afford the cost of
private schools but who chose to
attend A&M because of its cheap
er price, thereby eliminating room
for the less qualified who would
typically only qualify for federal
grant money? In this case, public
money would come out of the
same pot, and be much worse
spent.
A&M and UT should continue
to be a great source of pride for
Texas. The PUF established both
schools in the name of quality
education. If the lobbyists have
their way and the PUF is expand
ed to include all state universities,
or even worse, the PUF is expand
ed to include state programs other
than education, the reputations of
“the big two” will certainly be in
danger.
So, for goodness sake, Ags,
write your congressman and tell
him to protect our PUF.
Leann Bickford is a freshman
business administration major.
The Battalion encourages let
ters to the editor. Letters must
be 200 words or less and
include the author's name, class
and phone number. The opinion
editor reserves the right to edit
letters for length, style and accu
racy. Letters may be submitted in
person at 014 Reed McDonald
with a valid student ID. Letters
also may be mailed to: 014 Reed
McDonald, MS 1111, Texas A&M
University, College Station, TX
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Email: mailcall@thebatt.com.
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LEANN
BICKFORD