Requirements fail to diversify
At the University, the matter of their “multicultural requirements” has been an issue of concern for the students. Right now, we students are concerned that our current requirements are not diversifying our education as they were designed to do.
At the current state, students can take such courses as basic music, geography and general biology to fulfill their requirements. These courses do, indeed, educate students, but do they really provide them with diversity? Do they teach students about racism, other cultures or unified causes?
Our education should be fashioned to prepare us for the future and the very diverse world that we will be working and living in.
Students, faculty and community members need to be made aware of this problem. Eugene and the University have always been prided on being diverse places to live, work and study. But what multiculturalism are our students really coming out with?

Hilary Evonuk

communication

disorders and sciences

No one is permanently

rich or poor
Ralph Nader was incorrect to state that corporations control all (ODE, 3/8/02). Corporations are controlled by their owners, not the reverse. Perhaps Nader would prefer that corporations were owned by the government — like the Soviet Union of old, or have corporations were controlled by the government, like Germany’s National Socialist Party and Italy’s Fascist Party of the 1930s.
In regard to the growing disparity between rich and poor to which Nader referred:
An absolute majority of the people who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 have also been in the top 20 percent at some time since then. There are some who remain permanently in the bottom 20 percent. But such people constitute less than 1 percent of the American population.
Real income per capita has risen 50 percent over the same span of time when household income has remained virtually unchanged. How is this possible? Because households are getting smaller. Higher incomes enable more people to afford to go out and set up their own households. And who should be surprised that 60-year-olds have higher incomes and more wealth than 30-year-olds?
Moreover, that was also true 30 years ago, when today’s 60-year-olds were just 30. But these are not different classes of people. They are the same people at different stages of their lives. The whole classes of people who live permanently in poverty or in luxury in the United States do not reach beyond single digits.

Robert P. Kelso

San Marcos, Texas