Letters to the Editor: Dec. 7, 2010

Professors consider viewpoints other than their own?

Regarding “From precept to prayer: Religion in the classroom” (Friday, Nov. 19, 2010):

Thank you for your three-part series on religious life on campus. As former editorial page editor for The Daily Princetonian, I appreciated the series’ receptivity to a variety of student voices. What surprised me was the faculty comment. Molecular biology and Wilson School professor Lee Silver claimed: “If someone’s religious, they study the material, they have a certain point of view, it’s not going to have any effect on their grade.”

In 2003, I submitted a Wilson School senior thesis which proposed adoption as one solution to the public problem of abandoned frozen embryos. My thesis moved from ethics into legal analysis and policy proposals.

Silver signed on as my second reader, even after having been discouraged by the departmental administrators because they anticipated controversy. He rejected my paper out of hand, marking it two letter grades below the A awarded by my first reader. Silver briefly commented that the paper was carefully written but relied for its conclusions on religious revelation. Yet the thesis contained no mention of God or any citation to a sacred text. As a direct result of Silver’s dismissal, I lost academic honors.

Three years later, Springer Academic Press published a version of my thesis in its Philosophy and Medicine series.

Intellectual disagreements are not confined to matters of religion. All classroom participants are expected to engage each other, rigorously and civilly. While I am not convinced that Silver meets these expectations, I believe most of his colleagues earnestly consider lines of argument that lead to judgments different from their own. And this good faith creates the mutually challenging and enriching undergraduate experience that characterizes Princeton.

Cason Crosby Cheely ’03

Governments should invest more in education

Regarding “Back to basics” (Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010):

Higher education should be equally accessible to all. Certainly the European Convention on Human Rights demands it. By keeping the tuition fees as low as it has, the British government has made university education accessible for more students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Perhaps there is some data available that may demonstrate how many students in the United States would have wanted to have, or missed out on, university or college education because they or their parents simply could not afford it.

Indeed, the tuition and maintenance fees that a student incurs during his or her years at a British university are all in the form of student loans which the students start paying back as soon they commence employment. You are starting your working life already in debt from the word “go.” The Browne Review recommendation for an increase in student fees comes as a result of proposed cuts across all government departments necessitated by the economic mess the banks left us in. The ordinary person in America or Britain didn’t contribute to this mess, yet we are all victims of government budget cuts. Universities do contribute to economic growth, so is it not in the interest of governments to invest in education that will bring that future growth? Columnist Brendan Carroll needs to come off his privileged perch.