Dear Chip,
After reading your article on Tuesday, titled “Professors take the easy way out, too,” I felt compelled to write this letter. Where do I even begin?
Clearly, you have opinions about textbooks and their relationship with your college education. There must be some deep-seated reason you wrote this article beginning with a rant about textbook prices and royalty fees, but that’s an entirely different story for a different day.
I find your words here appalling. You effectively single out a distinguished professor of the university’s Department of Geological Sciences, who has a Ph.D. in geology and is not some “aloof archaeologist.” You claim he wrote his own textbook and supplemental content just to make a profit from poor college students, and that he is fully aware that students are sharing test questions to get an easy A. Did you ever consider talking to the professor about why he chose to write his own content for his class? Or did that over-privileged, smart-aleck brain of yours just tell you to write a defamatory article behind a professor’s back and think it was a brilliant idea? The fact is, you’ve done nothing but prove yourself a fool here.
You called out a student for having the “gall” to complain about not getting away with cheating when students previously had no problem cheating at all. Yet you openly admit you had the “gall” to write obscene language on your chemistry lab report. What possessed you to do such a thing? As a senior in college, I’d like to think you’re not that immature, but you’re not helping your case here.
The fact is nearly every college textbook you’re required to use is written by either current or retired college professors somewhere in the world, a fact that you apparently have no grasp of. Your article also references “professors” taking the easy way out. You mention this plurality of human beings, yet you proceed to single out one professor in a school of tens of thousands of students.
You can have your opinion of textbooks and their relationship to your college career. You can have your opinion of college professors, cheating and people taking the easy way out. That much you are entitled to. There are legitimate ways to express your opinions about topics such as these, and even work to create solutions to these issues you seem to have about textbooks. However, your actions and attitude here in this article prove that you are doing everything but that. The bottom line is, you are an unprofessional, uneducated, over-privileged student who apparently thinks that writing defamatory articles against university faculty, with no substance or backing of facts, is news. Well, news flash, Chip, you won’t get anywhere in this world with the attitude you have here. I think an official written apology to the professor referred to in your article is in order. And publish it in the Alligator. Let’s see if you can learn how to act like a professional journalist, or if you’re just another stuck-up college brat like your article seems to convey.
Regards,
Guriel Zeigerman, Senior B.S. Geology Major, department of Geological Sciences
