Letters to the editor
Faculty salaries not necessarily comparable
To the editor:
It's certainly true that Santa Clara must keep its faculty salaries competitive. But I teach part-time at Santa Clara and San Jose State and I would caution that in comparing the two, you have to remember that Santa Clara uses quarters and San Jose State uses semesters. Also, Santa Clara offers non-monetary benefits in the form a nicer campus and high-quality students.
I am fortunate in that I teach because I like to, not because I need the income. I don't see how anyone could survive in the Bay Area teaching part-time, at Santa Clara or anywhere else, especially considering that no benefits (health insurance, etc.) are provided.
Warren Gibson
Professor, mechanical engineering
Guilty or not, no one deserves to die
To the editor:
"What did he do?" That's the question everyone asks me whenever they hear that I have a friend on death row. We can easily say that Tookie or Clarence deserved it. That's fine. But how much do we really know? Before reaching such sweeping conclusions such as, "They should kill him," or, "He deserves to die," perhaps we should consider the human side. I'd like to offer another question: What's he like?
I can't describe Steve Champion except to say that he is an extremely peaceful man with a self-awareness unlike any I've seen.
As an author, Steve and two of his friends, Anthony Ross and Tookie Williams, designed a simple self-help program for inmates who are trying to discover who they are. Inmates are excited about the program. Tookie would also be excited about it, but he can't be because we killed him.
In a correctional system that lacks real correctional tools, people like Steve, Tookie and Anthony are making a difference inside prison. Let's not freeze them in the worst part of their lives. That's not who they are. They're human, just like you and me. They deserve life. No one "deserves to die."
Let's start asking different questions and maybe we'll find that the answers we get will actually solve problems. Further violence is not the answer, guilty or not.
Matt Smith
Campus Ministry
Death penalty column argument too simplified
To the editor:
Annie Rose Ramos argues in favor of capital punishment for those who take a human life (Jan. 12). Capital punishment is an issue deserving of more sophisticated treatment than it received in this article. Injudicious use of Web sites in any serious writing can lead to skewed results, as it did in this case, when she says that "even the Catholic Church sees the punishment's value..."
For some nuance, I recommend starting with the latest version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: "The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor. If, instead, bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person.
"Today, in fact, given the means at the State's disposal to effectively repress crime by rendering inoffensive the one who has committed it, without depriving him definitively of the possibility of redeeming himself, cases of absolute necessity for suppression of the offender 'today ... are very rare, if not practically non-existent.'Ã "
The author is correct that the U.S. bishops as a body oppose the death penalty. Furthermore, they are actively seeking its abolition.
Paul G. Crowley, S.J.
Chair, religious studies