Posted on March 15, 2006
As music majors at James Madison University, we are required to take a class called “Recital Attendance.” This is a zero-credit course, but we must complete this course six times before we can graduate. Completing the course requires attending 20 concerts/performances per semester. Sounds easy enough. Well, until you add the fact that the school of music now requires all of its concerts to charge an admission fee of $2. Want to see a really good concert, as in part of the Master Series? Six bucks. Sometimes we’re lucky and there are free tickets in the office for these, but not always.
So basically, the school of music is requiring I pay $240 over the course of my tenure in order to graduate. Add on to that the now-mandatory student-teaching fee of $400, and now I’m paying almost $700 extra, just to be able to graduate. No mention of this in the promotional handbook. This might not seem like a lot, but when you’re taking 20 to 21 credits per semester on top of playing in two performing ensembles, practicing three hours a night and working to cover books, tuition and rent, there’s not a lot of time to come up with the extra money needed for these expenses.
I believe that students in other majors can easily relate (i.e., lab fees, trip fees, etc.). What can we do? We must petition our department heads to eliminate these unnecessary fees and allow us to complete our requirements without furthering our debt more into the red. Action is needed; college education is already drastically overpriced, but please, just let me graduate broke. Not broke and then some.
John Kronstain, junior music education major
In the March 1 issue, Brian Goodman wrote an article about the plight of the environmentalists. Though we environmentalists appreciated his sympathy, we couldn’t help but notice that the editorial was riddled with misinformation. An editor of a college newspaper should check his facts.
Goodman reported that green movements have taken a hit due to an article in the Christian Science Monitor claiming we should be more concerned about methane than carbon dioxide. While it is true that methane is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide, Goodman leaves out a crucial detail. Methane is a natural part of the carbon cycle, essential to life. CH4 is expelled from the cow, stays in the atmosphere for 10 years and then is broken into CH3 and H2O. Carbon is continuously consumed and expelled, and no new carbon is being introduced into the cycle.
What makes carbon dioxide different from methane is that fossil fuels, have not been part of the carbon cycle for millions of years and have effectively been “dropped” from the cycle. As companies extract these fossil fuels, they add carbon to the cycle that then stays in the atmosphere as CO2 for 100-plus years, effectively trapping more carbon in this rotation. The result: though carbon dioxide is not nearly as powerful as methane, the sheer amount of it makes it far more of a concern than methane.
Instead of pitying people working for a positive change, perhaps Goodman should do his research.
Molly Jacobs and Aaron Sobel, senior international affairs/German and geographic science majors
Alex Sirney’s story highlighting the plight of adjunct professors at JMU from March 1 correctly identifies the many difficulties faced by these individuals. In addition, they are not protected by the university’s academic freedom codes due to the nature of their employment. The problem is that adjuncts’ contracts are renewed on a yearly basis at the will of the department head. In other words, JMU is under no obligation to extend an adjunct’s contract, with the only exception being in the case of an academic freedom issue. However, because a department head can claim the refusal to rehire a professor is for performance reasons, any academic freedom issues can be easily papered over.
This is exactly what happened to Dr. Jeremiah McCarthy, an adjunct professor in the philosophy and religion department who was canned at the end of the 2005-06 school year because of an alleged complaint by a female Muslim student. Essentially she accused him of identifying somebody in class as a possible Islamic terrorist who might gun him down during a lecture on J.S. Mill. McCarthy claims nothing of the sort occurred and numerous student accounts corroborate his innocence.
No investigation of the alleged incident has been initiated by JMU because poor student evaluations have been cited for McCarthy’s non-renewal. However, because the philosophy department is struggling to find GPHIL 120 professors, this makes no sense. In short, McCarthy is another victim of JMU’s mistreatment of adjunct professors — an injustice that deserves to be rectified.
Michael Kelly, senior history and economics major
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The recent article by Alex Sirney discussing the plight of Shelley Aley reminds me of similar difficulties faced by the former philosophy adjunct professor Dr. McCarthy, who taught GPHIL 101 and 120. I do not know all the facts, but for reasons that seem strange, the philosophy department did not request his services after the end of last school year.
The loss of McCarthy is a substantial loss to JMU. His GPHIL 101 class inspired me to choose philosophy as my second major. For a first-semester freshman who didn’t know nothing from nothing, he introduced the field and its major figures in terms easy enough to understand then, but informative enough to continually serve me throughout more advanced courses. He also held his office hours in Festival where, over lunch, students could listen to him expand on his in-class lectures and relate them to everything from history to current events. Many students, including myself, made the long march across campus to attend these office hours despite not having classes in ISAT/HHS.
Finally, McCarthy is an expert on the great American philosopher Charles Peirce. According to other professors in the philosophy department, McCarthy is regarded as somewhat of a legend at UNC-Chapel Hill where his Ph.D. dissertation on Peirce is still used as a study guide by Peirce students. In short, McCarthy is an asset the current and future students of JMU cannot afford to lose, and I urge those in charge to take this into account.
Michael Yarborough, junior history and philosophy major
