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Erin Gibson
OPINION
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Cliff Hicks
EDITORIAL
BOARD
Nancy Christensen
Brad Davis
Sam McKewon
Jeff Randall
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Our
VIEW
Operation
last chance
NATO authorizes
military action
Time has run out for Slobodan Milosevic
and his evil regime.
The United States, along with its NATO
allies, announced Tuesday that it will take
necessary military action to stop Milosevic’s
ethnic cleansing of Kosovo, where the gov
ernment is battling ethnic Albanian rebels.
A last-ditch attempt by the United States
to draft a peace agreement Monday between
the ethnic Albanians and Yugoslavia failed,
which indicates the imminent threat of a
NATO-backed strike against Yugoslavia.
British Foreign Defense Secretary
George Robertson said air attacks on
Yugoslavia could begin today.
President Clinton said the United States
is committed to ending Milosevic’s bloody
war against the Albanians, not only because
of U.S interest in Europe, but also because
the United States has a humanitarian respon
sibility as the world’s superpower.
The United States has an obligation to
intervene to stop Milosevic’s war crimes
against the Albanians - to stop the bloodshed
that has killed thousands of people and
forced thousands more from their homes.
“If Mr. Milosevic is not willing to make
peace, we are willing to limit his ability to
make war,” Clinton said.
The Kosovars, who, as ethnic Albanians,
bear the brunt of Milosevic’s vile ethnic
cleansing, signed a peace agreement under
British and French foreign secretaries,
which Milosevic’s government refused to
sign.
i The Yugoslavian government’s latest
refusal to take the road to peace flies in the
face of NATO, the Western nations that are
united against continued Milosevic-led mas
sacres.
But the international community must
not be deterred by the threat of a large-scale
war, as predicted by military experts, if
NATO were to act in Yugoslavia.
Milosevic and Yugoslavia cannot rape,
pillage, torture and murder for years, and
have the powerful world leaders turn the
other cheek.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair
acknowledged that the human cost of send
ing troops into an area.
Despite human loss, Blair said, NATO
and his country should commit to ending
Milosevic’s reign “to save thousands of inno
cent men, women and children from human
itarian catastrophe, from death and ethnic
cleansing by a brutal dictatorship.”
I Though war is never without conse
quence, the United States, Britain and other
Western nations are appropriately united in
their resolve: Milosevic must be stopped.
As countless diplomatic discussions
have broken off, NATO’s Tuesday authoriza
tion of military action is now the only option
to stop Milosevic’s killing.
IHhatial BaHah
fillillf 111 rUIlyy
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Lupo’s
VIEW
_
I
A
-0
!
Flagrant foul
Ruling does more harm than good for athletes
SAM MCKEWON is a
junior news-editorial and
political science major and
the Daily Nebraskan sports
editor.
Another strange and confusing
development took place in college ath
letics while you were on spring break
in Florida. Or Cancun. Or Memphis.
Or the south part of Lincoln.
A judge in Philadelphia (maybe
you went there) decided that a critical
piece of Proposition 16, a rule deter
mining academic eligibility in the
NCAA, was unconstitutional.
Which piece? An important one.
The judge eliminated the standardized
test as part of the requirement for
being eligible to compete as a fresh
man in Division I athletics. The four
plaintiffs who brought the case were
black, and their lawyer successfully
argued that these standardized tests
are racially biased toward whites.
This I have never believed, and I
never will. Blacks are just as capable
as whites. The real problem here is
that many blacks are not afforded the
same education that many white
Americans are. Not because they’re
black, but because many of them live
in a socio-economic level that is not
conducive to quality education. In
other words, they are poor.
It is the greatest punishment our
country can exact on these people,
black, white or any other race. It is a
problem that will persist as long as our
fme taxpaying Americans choose to
vote down inner-city school bond
issues and vote up shiny new stadiums
so the owner of the football team
doesn’t pack up and leave.
These standardized tests were not
the problem. They never were. The
problem is, and continues to be, that
we, as a populace, systematically
ignore the plight of underprivileged
youths in their academic endeavors.
Me, too. I mean, it’s not like I want to
give up my life to go teach in East St.
Louis for 40 years.
These people are ignored, until,
that is, one of them is good in athlet
ics. Then, you will notice, that the boy
or girl nobody cared about suddenly
has everybody’s attention.
That’s where Prop. 16 came in. It
forced the students who were coming
to these big colleges to be reasonably
proficient in school. There was a slid
ing scale. To give you framework,
here’s a rundown:
To be eligible, a student had to
have an 820 SAT score and a 2.5
grade point average in 13 core classes
(math, English, etc.) The scale slides
to a 2.0 GPA, but then the athlete
needed to get a 1010 SAT score. There
are numbers in between.
The judge eliminated that SAT
score and the ACT equivalent score.
It’s goiie. And with it, much of the
progress made in helping these ath
letes, who were given up on most of
their academic lives.
If an athlete wasn’t eligible, they
could have still been let in. But under
conference rules, only a certain num
ber could be allowed. In the Big 12,
for example, only a few partial quali
fiers (they got the GPA, but not the
SAT score) are allowed. Basically, it’s
a move by the conference to say “Hey,
we believe in stringent academics. No
dumb folks allowed here.”
Many people agree. Many in col
lege say there’s no room for dumb ath
letes who already get preferential
treatment I cannot count myself
among them.
I believe there should no limit on
the number of these athletes a school
can bring. So they sit out a year. But
they go to school and, for the first
time, get the opportunity to learn from
people who, usually, want to teach.
This system works and has been
proven to work.
Eliminate the standardized test
requirement, and we just go back to
the old system of taking anybody and
forgetting about their academic
responsibilities. We reaffirm the
*
notion that, yes, these athletes are sim
ply not smart enough to make it, so let
’em in anyway.
I remember this system back in the
early 1980s. This is the system that
produced a guy like Dexter Manley,
who got through Oklahoma State
without ever learning to read and was
drafted by the Washington Redskins
without being able to write. This is the
system rife with cheating, where
schools picked up players that may not
even have gone to school on a regular
basis. This is the system that made
guinea pigs out of athletes.
This was the dark ages, and one
judge wants to go back to. That’s fine.
But not me. Me, I’d rather have more
faith in the ability of underprivileged
athletes to rise above their lack of
privileges. Many don’t want them to,
or expect them to.
A system that is compassionate
but fair needs to be adopted. And we
were closer to that before this rule was
appealed. It’s unfortunate that the four
black athletes who filed the suit sim
ply reaffirmed the belief that blacks
can’t handle a bigger load, so they run
to the courts. I know it’s not true and
so do a great deal of others, but many
will buy into that.
And even more will assert that
athletes are simply dumb jocks that
need laws broken for them to get in.
Not true, either. People who claim it
should try living a day in an athlete’s
shoes. Not fun.
It seems that, more and more, we
want to turn our backs on these folks.
We argue and challenge and play the
politically correct game, but when it’s
time to go up to bat, we won’t
By admitting that a standardized
test is biased, we’ve admitted our ulti
mate culpability in a heinous crime:
that we, the most powerful republic in
the world, didn’t care enough to edu
cate young men and women to the
point where they could pursue a future
career, that some people just aren’t
smart enough, so we have let them in
and just forget about them some more.
We simply take the stance of: What
can you do for me, athlete? as
opposed to: How can we help you
achieve it?
It is sad, indeed.
^ C Nebraskan, 34 Nebraska Union, 1400 "R" St., Lincoln,
' ,6rfax to (402) 472-1761, or e-mail <letters@unlinfo.unl.edu.
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