Category: Letter to the Editor

An article written by Jennifer Faulconer and featured in The Spectator titled “Valdosta does not support recycling” included several key points of inaccurate information. I am a VSU graduate of Biology and Chemistry and trust that anyone associated with VSU has the most honorable intentions. My feeling is that your contributing writer initially had a [...]

1.
Dear members of ‘The Spectator’ editorial team,
I am writing with regard to the article ‘Veterans in the classroom’ in today’s issue of your paper. This article seems to be emblematic of an extremely worrying trend at VSU and in American higher education at large, namely the unquestioning and uncritical acceptance of military
perspectives and military values in higher education. In a democratic society with a supposedly clear separation of powers and institutional spheres, it
seems worrying that military values—hierarchy, authority, unquestioning obeisance of orders, the use of violence, etc.—are intruding into institutions of higher learning like VSU, apparently with no questions asked. In a society already characterised by an ever-growing punitive ‘carcereal archipelago’ and in an already crime-plagued and violent town like Valdosta, questions ought to be asked as to the role of military personnel in criminal justice programmes, instead of just uncritically offering a description of their activities, as in your article. Moreover, in a situation in which the USA is already engaged in two illegal wars of conquest abroad, questions ought to be asked at institutions of higher learning such as VSU as to the role which the military has come to play in this society. The total lack of awareness of those issues reflected in
your article is deeply troubling to me. It seems to contradict the very mission of this university.
Yours sincerely,
Dr. Daniel Nehring
Assistant Professor of Sociology
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Dear Mr. Johnson,
Ms. Green’s November 12th Article on “Veterans in the Classroom” was recently brought to my attention, and I am at a loss for words. As a ten-year service member in [...]

Valdosta State University’s attendance policy–which states that a student should fail after missing 20% of the classes–is an unfair way of governing the students behavior.  This semester I enrolled in Anthropology 1102.  I really enjoyed reading the material and found it to be quite interesting.  I missed 14 classes this semester and am facing a [...]

Full time means full time
Choosing to be a full-time student means you’re choosing just that: your full-time job is to be a student. Too many students see their school work as secondary to making money, and while that’s understandable for some, for those who do decide to be a full-time student, sacrifices must be made. [...]

In response to “There’s no point to
voting in the SGA election”
I would be more than happy to vote, but I don’t know anything about any of the candidates.  I read the Spectator every week.  Maybe I have overlooked it, but I have not read anything covering the candidates.  I didn’t even know there were elections until [...]

Kudos on rant and SGA story
Hello to all:
Contrary to popular belief, I found this week’s edition very entertaining and interecting.
The letter to the editor, blasting the Spectator for doing a poor job, and then asking for a job. Good self-marketing tool. That put a smile on my face early Thursday morning.
I agree with the “Rant of [...]

Dissappointment
I am disappointed every week by all the mistakes and shocking things I read in the Spectator. I would not be lying if I said that my fellow peers and I share what is in the paper and laugh because we are somewhat ashamed and embarrassed by some of the writers’ incompetence.
When I say [...]

Great topics, bad grammar
To the Spectator editors:
I am writing to compliment the Spectator on its choice of recent topics. The column about parking scams, the editorial on illegal solicitation, and the ongoing “Where Does the Money Go?” feature are what makes a student newspaper truly independent. This is the kind of stuff I want to [...]

Crosswalk chaos
Hi, I don’t want to give my real name because I do not want to be pin pointed. Ever since I started going to school here, I have always had a problem crossing the street at Oak and College Street. The signs say pedestrians have the right of way and it’s a Georgia law. [...]

The United States makes up about 4.5 percent of the world’s population, but we consume more than a quarter of the world’s oil. More than half of this oil is imported from foreign countries. We have by far the largest trade deficit in the world, nearly $1 trillion in the hole. That’s money that will [...]

Dear Editor,
I am writing concerning the article that was posted on Nov. 5th. I felt the title “Yes They Did” to be very condescending. I would think a more appropriate phrase to be “Yes We Did” since it was “We” the American people who elected Obama to be our next president. As a journalist, [...]