University needs to renew dialogue on Miami Plan

I want to thank Karli Kloss for voicing her concerns about liberal education in her Oct. 27 op-ed piece, "Miami Plan should focus less on science." Putting aside assumptions Kloss makes about the value of science and fine arts requirements for non-majors (I'm sure my colleagues in these departments can more than adequately make their case), it occurs to me there are features of the article I can agree with, or at least would be put upon to argue against. Basically, when someone tells me, "This is my view of this experience," it's never made much sense to fire back, "No, it's not."

I certainly agree with Kloss that students have the right to relevant courses. According to its founding documents, the Miami Plan views the relevance of liberal learning not primarily in terms of career aspirations, but also in terms of personal moral commitment, ethical understanding and civic participation. That any student should experience any of our program's requirements as irrelevant to these aims signals our school's need to extend its dialogue on the meaning of liberal learning, signals our need to work even harder to move conversations beyond a checklist of requirements, beyond careerism and beyond principles (critical thinking, understanding contexts, engaging other learners, reflective action) reduced to sub-skills.

Given the range of courses the Miami Plan includes in this dialogue, I also can't argue against Kloss's point that this program might have a deleterious effect on some students' GPAs. The impact on GPAs has never come up in any conversation I have ever had about the shape of our plan for liberal education, and frankly, I hope it never will. The goal of the people I've worked with has always been to construct courses and programs that best reflect knowledge as we know it and to best position students to access that knowledge and engage with it in creative and critical ways. Through such engagement, you might say, the Miami Plan intends to trouble students' and faculty's sense of their own "inclination(s)," as Kloss might term them. The aim is to ensure we all move from discipline to discipline, explore ways each constructs knowledge (versus what just passes for knowledge) and learn no one field has a monopoly on what is true or what is of value. Troubling our inclinations means movement into areas to which we are not always as accustomed as we might like to be, but that movement is necessary for an appreciation of what others contribute to understandings of the planet we share. In addition, I can't agree more with Karli Kloss that our commitment to such movement reflects "high ambitions." The Miami Plan not only sets a high bar for faculty, staff and students, but also for the world in which we live. The Miami Plan, particularly its forthcoming iteration as the Global Miami Plan, should be a challenge to inclinations that teach so many of us not to know - not to know ways we and those around us are implicated every day in beliefs and practices that curtail or facilitate democracy, creativity and love. Miami's plan for a liberal education should provide opportunities for all of us to weigh the meanings and values that guide our tendencies alongside those of others and, through informed reflection and action, encourage us to affirm those characteristics of our world we find of value and to contest those aspects in need of change. 

I hope that all students have the chance to experience a liberal education that realizes these high ambitions and, as a result, find the Miami Plan beneficial to their social, professional, academic and political lives. I read Karli Kloss's op-ed piece as a call for action - one to renew dialogues on meanings of a liberal education and to develop and maintain practices that serve them. Such action is vital in the face of those assumptions and experiences that would teach anyone that our ambitions buttress only, as Kloss says, "(b)ig words" and "wasted time." I hope members of the university community will continue to question the Miami Plan's relevance and to participate in its development: we can only be the better for it.

John Tassoni University director of liberal education tassonjp@muohio.edu

Clean air legislation will not harm job total

After reading the Op-ed in the Oct. 27 paper on cleaner air laws ("Laws for cleaner air may negatively impact jobs"), I was left confused about the direction and purpose of the column since most of the column discusses the personal choices, even though the title and basis of the column is environmental legislation. The title implies the net effect would be massive job losses, yet there is scant evidence outside of biased reports from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (a business lobbying group) and industry CEOs that this would be the case. Nonpartisan groups such as the Congressional Budget Office, FactCheck.org, the Energy Information Administration and the arguably nonpartisan Noble-prize winning economist Paul Krugman have presented studies showing the boost in green energy jobs would offset almost all losses, resulting in miniscule job losses under a worst case scenario.

Even if the job loss argument was relevant, the reality is that many of those jobs are not in sustainable industries. Oil, coal and other large polluters are not industries that can be maintained indefinitely as the resources they depend on will eventually run out or become obsolete. A transition that has little effect on the job market and limits pollution, such as cap and trade, is the best alternative. Additionally, cap and trade (climate) bills will not result in large immediate cuts to pollution levels. Cap and trade sets an overall allowable pollution limit for a region and then issues pollution permits to companies, setting the amount of pollution each company is allowed to produce. A high polluting company can choose to forego costly upgrades by buying permits from other companies in the region (such as those below their permit level) ensuring fair benefits for clean industries and low transition costs for high polluting ones.

Given this, I fail to understand why the column states these costs would "be reflected in the way employees are treated," and have no idea how climate bills are relevant towards "workers in industrial facilities … (having) little … to spare for the higher-priced environmentally friendly products."

Another problem I had with the column is the statements describing how " … the people who will feel the strongest effects ... may not necessarily care about green issues" and that "Industrial facilities that provide substantial amounts of air pollution ... (are) located in low-income population areas." While I hope it was not the intention, this seems to imply that low-income people care less about the environment, a classist statement at best.

Also, the focus on the economic results ignores the basic health benefits. The column does state that industries are concentrated closer to low-income population centers but fails to mention how forcing these people to be exposed to high levels of pollution results in cancer, asthma and other lung diseases. While a lot of letters here have argued on one side or another on heath reform, one thing that can be universally agreed on is lowering the need for care in the first place.

Mike Jensen jensenmd@muohio.edu

Science plays vital role in Miami Plan

I was disheartened to read the Oct. 27 essay ("Miami Plan should focus less on science") by Karli Kloss. Not simply for the fact the sentiment was published, but because it is a reflection of how widely held her beliefs are. In arguing against the science inclusion in the Miami Plan, the author relies on several arguments  that do not seem to hold weight to me. Science is a necessary part of our curriculum at Miami University because as future citizens of a global community scientific facts and theories necessitate evaluation as they inform nearly every aspect of modern life.

The author states she would rather be talking about the differences between Hamas and  Fatah, and I think that is also a very valuable discussion, but to really talk about this, or any conflict, we need to be informed about what we are truly talking about. Primatology has risen as a major body of knowledge about conflict resolution. By studying the means that other species utilize to lesson tensions in their communities, we can learn valuable lessons about not only Middle Eastern conflicts but broader aggressions. Furthermore, I would hope our future leaders would have more than basic knowledge of the scientific methods expounded by the Miami Plan. Indeed, I hope our future presidents can understand the complex sciences (i.e. global warming, stem cell policy, population density and ecology and development of future medicines). Instead, most of our student body (who will someday be our policy makers) is indifferent and just wishes they didn't have to take the classes as an attempt to inflate our GPAs.

I can guarantee that this same student body is not indifferent about the H1N1 flu whose vaccination shortage has caused a major debate not only here at Miami but in the community at large. If our general public had a better grasp of science, we could possibly have avoided this crisis through the use of adjuvants to increase vaccination supply (already accepted for use in European countries since 1997). In closing, I understand that science can seem to be too obtuse and disconnected to everyday life to be relevant. This is not a problem with the Miami Plan's requirement, but rather with the course content. Instead of rallying against science's inclusion, let's have more discussion about how we can make the connections clearer so that no matter what the major, it is easy to see how our education benefits us as citizens a great deal more than our GPA does.

Corbin Rayfield rayfieca@muohio.edu