El Toro, Cont’d
Being a good loser is the sign of a winner. Your March 20 editorial outlining how the pros and cons might get together on resolving the El Toro airport issue is an important first step!
Judy B. Rosener
Professor, Graduate School of Management
University of California, Irvine
Read your March 20 opinion. I don’t expect you’ll get much applause from South County on your proposal. In fact, I would expect you to get shot down for such a plan.
If you really want to know how the South County heart beats, you must start attending Irvine Council meetings. After attending them for over 12 months, I think I know how they feel and what they think. They will not support any form of residential buyout or soundproofing. Never. Nor will they ever accept an airport that includes the controversial east/west runways.
If I were you, I’d be carrying an umbrella.
Russell Niewiarowski
Santa Ana Heights
Supervisor Jim Silva expressed his desire to resolve the divisive El Toro issue by focusing on cooperation rather than conflict and to work to ensure that the community’s concerns are depressed.
If the supervisor is indeed serious in his desire to work together and to reconcile differences he must be willing to support the following:
n Invite Irvine and Lake Forest to become full members of the Local Redevelopment Agency.
n Eliminate the so-called “fatal flaw” provision as a condition for the approval of the Millennium Plan.
These two provisions should restore credibility to the planning process. Moreover, it will start the process of restoring public confidence in county government.
Paul Willems
Laguna Niguel
The Problem of Greed in Education
Educators are committing the very acts for which they bitterly rebuke businessmen in every media outlet just about every week. I’m talking about (may I use one of the liberals’ own favorite words?) greed.
As the number of students increases dramatically, so too do the number of remedial classes for UCI freshmen, in both math and English. And yet the “number of ‘qualified’ applicants turned away by UCI” is estimated to be 7,000 for this year, well above the 5,500 turned away last year (“UCI Girding for Rapid Growth in Next 10 Years,” Feb 28 issue).
Imagine your life being in the hands of an engineer or doctor or other critical professional who required dumbbell English and math. The only conceivable reason such students are accepted is the greed of the profoundly liberal academia. Public education is, in the words of Nobel laureate and college professor Milton Friedman, a “socialist monopoly.”
What is needed is a dramatic decline in college enrolment, not an increase. Emphasis of quantity at the expense of quality is the antithesis of intellectualism.
John Jaeger
Irvine
