OSU should focus on its academic mission

Leave it to the Beavers. The OSU football team has signed a "big player" (Gazette-Times, Feb. 7). This type of headline reads like a professional team's acquisition. But I suppose that is what we are looking at here.

In addition to the $1.1 million golden parachute of the basketball coach, the enormous expense of replacing him ($100,000 for the search alone), and the outrageous $800,000 yearly salary of the football coach, this latest "acquisition" should constitute enough evidence to prove that athletics hold an inappropriately elevated position at OSU.

Does OSU or Corvallis really need professional athletics? It certainly appears that we have them.

While appearances can be deceiving, they are also telling. When are OSU, UO (which plans to spend $200 million on a basketball center), and the state of Oregon going to focus on the important educational and intellectual work that is supposedly the core of a university?

Redirection of these excessive salaries and obscene expenses could revamp and revitalize entire scholastic branches of our universities.

The football coach's salary alone could replace the 10 full-time faculty positions that the music department has been stripped of in the last few years, with funds to spare.

Lest I seem prejudiced in favor of the music department, the money would be useful to any academic department to boost staffing and academic credibility nationwide, with the concomitant increase in the reputation of our graduates.

Let us refocus on funding the important functions of a university and return athletics to the amateur and ancillary status to which they belong.

Martin R. Mulford, Corvallis

We need health care access, not a lottery

I applaud the Benton Community Health Center's efforts to enroll more uninsured residents in the Oregon Health Plan.

I work there, and it is disgraceful to see what uninsured people have to go through. It is now appalling that eligibility for some 9,000 county residents is dependent on a lottery system.

The Oregon Health Plan, like other states' plans over the last decade, is a well-intentioned attempt to provide more universal coverage to the uninsured of our state.

Unfortunately, the lack of predictable state funding has gutted the plan, making no dent in the number of uninsured Oregonians.

This pattern has been repeated across the country, and Massachusetts' latest highly publicized effort will likely meet the same fate: the number of uninsured residents has not changed via any of these efforts.

We don't need lotteries, we don't need mandates. We don't need a mixed public/private insurance mix fraught with profit, administrative inefficiencies and misguided incentives. We don't need a piecemeal approach to getting everyone covered.

We need what 70 percent of polled Americans say they want: A national health insurance that is guaranteed to all Americans - regardless if you're poor, can't fill out an application easily, unemployed, or unfortunate to be sick.

We need national leadership to make mainstream what the nation wants.

Cosimo Storniolo, M.D., Corvallis

Climate change has occurred in the past

John Selker's perfervid response on global warming was amazing ("How can humanity destroy the Earth?" Letters, Feb. 6), providing multiple examples of common fallacious arguments: the ad hominem, poisoning the well, and appeal to authority.

But the best one was the non-sequitur equating climate change skeptics with a rampaging, machete-wielding Kenyan mob ushering in "a living hell." Yeah, whatever dude.

Let's have some context. Over the 20th century, after four centuries of the Little Ice Age, average global temperature increased about one degree Fahrenheit.

However, recent data show a temperature plateau that is particularly evident in satellite temperature measurements (data linked and charted at the blog "whatsupwiththat.wordpress.com"). This plateau has persisted despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration.

Before the LIA there were five centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, a time warmer and wetter than today, but apparently with less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If civilization survived global warming then, we can probably muddle through now.

However, alarmists demand something be done.

Politicians mandate ethanol use, negligibly impacting climate change, but at least it will increase costs. Millions of acres are replanted to corn for fuel rather than food, decreasing the supply of other food crops and resulting in higher prices.

These higher prices hit the poor the hardest. The Financial Times recently reported on a food riot by poor Indonesians; apparently soybeans have become too expensive because much of this crop has been displaced for corn grown for ethanol.

Thus, alarmists "do something" and the poor starve because of it. Now that's a living hell.

John Jones, Philomath

We need a better strategy for forests

I'm not surprised that Chris Foulke ("Old-growth forests should be preserved," Feb. 11) misunderstood my point regarding "old growth" in my Jan. 2 letter ("Keep a cool head on forest policy issues").

My disagreement over the use of the term "desecration" was a single sentence in a letter covering several topics.

My opinion regarding the preservation of so-called old growth, particularly Douglas fir, takes more than a single sentence to explain.

I believe the current "set-aside" policy to be foolish. One must think in terms of a Douglas fir's lifetime, which is many times a human's.

I saw the devastation caused to second-growth and old-growth Douglas fir stands by the 1962 Columbus Day storm. The foolishness of believing you're preserving anything tied to a single plot of ground was made clear by that occurrence.

A better way to preserve Douglas fir old growth would be to decide on a strategy of what proportion of each age class covering a Douglas fir's lifespan should be maintained. I would further stratify this by soil class types within the Douglas fir range.

By such a strategy, and seen across several Douglas fir lifespans, old growth stands would move across the landscape like the shadows of clouds - only on a significantly longer time frame.

Obviously a more complex idea than can be represented by a single sentence.

Robert G. Gourley, Corvallis

Why did actor rate front-page obituary?

I don't know what it says about our culture and the Gazette-Times that actor Roy Scheider's death rated a bold front page headline on Feb. 11, and yet the scant article about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's passing on Feb. 5 was tucked away in the back pages, almost a filler afterthought.

I'm sure Mr. Scheider was a fine man, and was loved by his family and friends. But the space the G-T dedicated to ridiculous details about his life - "Scheider had a home built in 1994 … which featured five bedrooms, four fireplaces and various decks and porches …" - was just simply absurd.

On the other hand, Maharishi, who founded the transcendental meditation program in 1958, was a powerful teacher whose life's work profoundly enriched the lives of millions of people in over 130 countries.

A simple list of all of his extraordinary accomplishments would take much more room than is allowed here.

He was a great and humble man. The Gazette-Times could - and should - have done better.

Rosie Saraga, Corvallis

Driver licensing isn't immigration issue

Your editorial "We don't need more unlicensed drivers" (Feb. 13) is right on.

The driver's license is "a state-issued permit to legally drive on public roadways"… it "is not an immigration document" and it is wrong for the federal government to take from our state the right to license drivers based on their driving abilities and willingness to follow other rules regarding responsible driving.

It is still midway in the legislative session. Surely the Legislature can (if it would) resist the impulse to give in on this important issue, as it conflates this topic with the immigration discussion that needs to take place in a manner that allows all aspects to be discussed, e.g., the negative impact of NAFTA, the history of many of our states that within the time of our republic have been Spanish-speaking, the economy, the rights of workers to a living wage, and many more.

In the meantime, we need safe driving conditions. As the editorial sums it up, "We shouldn't allow a federal security mandate to trump common-sense highway safety here in Oregon."

Roberta Hall, Corvallis