To the Editor:

In just two days we have seen both the best and worst that the Northwestern community has to say. Let us hope that, like the football team so far, the wins outnumber the losses.

Starting at the bottom, it would appear that Ken Burns’s new Vietnam documentary has brought back bad flashbacks for Dick Reif in his piece “Board of Trustees chairman brings heavy baggage,” published on Sept. 18. Somehow, Reif sees J. Landis Martin, the new chairman of NU’s Board of Trustees, as some kind of warmongering incarnation of the late Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. On top of his hatchet job on Martin’s reputation through selective facts and guilt-by-association, Reif misses the essential point: it’s not a “partnership” between Martin and University President Morton Schapiro. Martin is, along with the Board, Schapiro’s boss. This is about a chain of command, leadership and governance — not some sitcom, as Reif suggests.

At a higher level, Dominic Bayer’s “Donors should focus on making Northwestern more affordable,” published on Sept. 20, challenges us with the classic economics argument of guns versus butter concerning NU’s spending priorities. As any faculty member in the new, shiny Kellogg School of Management building may tell you, the data do not offer any, or perfect, correlation between whether financial aid should trump facilities in the fundraising pecking order. I’m certainly not one to deny another’s charity and naming opportunity in the collegiate building arms race. Having spent a large part of my four years at NU on the third floor of Norris University Center, I think we all can agree the place needs a major facelift. But while not endorsing Bayer’s “care-free lives” as the point of a college education, he raises a critical issue, and one that Martin should address: how can NU lead in addressing the issue of college affordability? Interestingly, Martin has an expert in college economics in his employ, one Morton Schapiro. If they can clear enough safe space for Schapiro to apply his expertise, we can only hope the Board would be as bold as Bayer in pursuing a truly critical challenge to NU and the nation.

Sincerely yours,

Alexander W. Stephens, Weinberg ’87