Opinion
Dirty
dealing
UNMC should have informed
citizens about research sooner
The University of Nebraska Medical Center has remained
mired in a controversy of its own making since December.
Now the battle of public opinion is being fought on the
floor of the Legislature, where two bills, one to ban the con
troversial research and the other to make the research known,
have been proposed.
Doctors and administrators chose to do research using
fetal tissue cells without telling the people of the state of
We support ' Nebraska. Since that information was
*l made known, there has been a tremen
this research dous public outcry from citizens of this
conservative state to halt the research.
and believe it The university chose to remain
, , , tight-lipped about this research
SnOUla because administrators feared the
. • reaction they knew would come.
Continue, That reaction has come, and uni
thnnah nnt in versity administrators are hiding
muugn nui in the shield of academic free.
the current dom
The principle of academic freedom
manner. includes open discussion of ideas as
well as the freedom to investigate
those ideas. If the Medical Center had been serious about aca
demic freedom, we would have heard about this research
before it started.
In that discussion, we would have fought emphatically to
ensure that our scientists could conduct this research.
But it didn’t happen that way.
This research, which is supposed to fight Alzheimer’s dis
ease, could be dqing great things. It could be developing a
cure, but the Med Center doesn’t want us to know that.
At first, the research was supposed to require a specific
type of cell that could only be attained through partial-birth
abortion. Following the outcry, die medical center started to
search for alternative tissue sources, which were never con
sidered before. ......
And groups that asked for more information were forced
to request it under the Freedom of Information Act.
That should never be the case with state-funded research
conducted at a state university.
We support this research and believe it should continue,
though not in the current manner.
LB 1427 would require the Medical Center to report all of
its research to the Legislature before starting a project. This
would ensure some public awareness of and accountability for
what goes on in the Medical Center’s laboratories.
The Medical Center needs to clean up its act and be more
forthcoming about its research.
Editorial Board
Josh Funk (editor) • J.J. Harder • Cliff Hicks • Samuel
McKewon • Pane Stickney • Kimberly Sweet • Lindsay
' Young
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Letters to the
EDITOR
Afraid of the buffoons
For a person preaching tolerance,
Chris Halligan is remarkably closed
minded. Despite what many people
believe, the Religious Right isn’t the
bunch of deranged “cuckoos” the
media portray them as. They are simply
people with morals and the discipline to
stick with those morals. This scares
people like Halligan because they have
no clue of what real structure and disci
pline are like.
As for the voting power of the
Right; I, for one, am glad it exists.
Nixon and Reagan were both excellent
presidents. Nixon had unprecedented
breakthroughs in foreign relations with
the Middle East, Russia and China.
Reagan pulled our country out of a
recession and set our economy on the
fast track it is on today.
Hypocritical “buffoons” like
Halligan who claim to speak for toler
ance only end up endorsing the same
type of bigotry they speak against.
These are the people to be very afraid
of.
Chris Rodgers
freshman
computer science
Activism at odds
In response to “A
Disappearing Act,” (DN, a
reb. zi) Americans
always have been some
what at odds with the
notion of activism.
We are a nation of
individuals, but the indi
vidualism of self-reliance
and duty to community
steadily has been
replaced by anti-social
“success” values. The i
self-actualization J
mantra fed to us by f ]
mass culture has \
worked all too well; the *
only collective act we 3
seem capable of today
is die act of consump
tion. We are, after all,
a country that mea
sures success not in
terms of literacy
rates or die availabil
ity of health care but
rather in terms of
housing starts and
automobile produc
tion.
We are yery
good at consuming
things. With 4.5 per
cent of the world’s x
population, the United States uses
about 25 percent of its resources.
What’s worse, there are a lot of people
in other countries who want to follow
our example.
Want to be an activist? Take a look
at our sprawling cities, our disappear
ing countryside and woodlands.
Consider the alarming rate of species
extinction. Water, air and land pollution
are still with us further stressed by our
exploding population - and the gap
between rich and poor continues to
widen.
There are plenty of issues that beg
activism, and paridng isn’t one of them.
David Ochsner
graduate student
English
Bring on the benefits
1985 was a year of changes at UNL.
In that year, I proposed that ASUN add
sexual orientation to its non-discrimi
nation policy. In years to follow, I con
tinued to address this issue, and eventu
ally the NU Board of Regents added
“individual characteristics.” This later
was defined as protecting sexual orien
tation from discrimination.
Along with the speeches about
inclusion of sexual orienta
tion, I included other
changes that UNL needed to make to
become a more gay-friendly campus,
including domestic partner benefits,
housing for gay and lesbian couples,
scholarships for GLBT students, sup
port for the UNL Gay and Lesbian
Alumni Association and removal from
the UNL campus of ROTC for discrim
ination, among other things.
Recently, the prospect of adding
domestic partner benefits for faculty
and staff has raced to the forefront of
the debate at the University of
Nebraska-Lincoln. This debate should
include the positives of this policy.
UNL is one of the few schools in the
United States that doesn’t have a
domestic partners policy, and many
others are debating this issue.
Why shouldn’t UNL adopt this
measure? Why shouldn’t it do so, when
UNL is not supposed to discriminate
based upon sexual orientation? Isn’t
UNL discriminating by not offering
domestic partner benefits in the first
place, and isn’t it legally bound to pro
vide these benefits anyway? Couldn’t
potential lawsuits be filed down the line
against the Board of Regents for dis
criminating against gay and lesbian
couples who are staff or faculty? I
believe the answer is yes.
Rodney A. Bell
Kansas City
chairman, UNL Gay/Lesbian
Alumni/ae Assoc*, Inc.
■ alumnus, 1987
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