Vandalism shows poor taste

As an Iron Duke and 85-year-old Duke grad, I have the privilege of parking in the Card Gym lot for home football games. Saturday after our victory over Virginia Military Institute, I returned to the lot to find that my car rear windshield wiper had been snapped broken and some political stickers had been scratched and mutilated by an unknown party.

At a previous game I had the attached note on my windshield because I had allowed room for a tailgater next to me some extra space for his pre-game party.

It seems that some students case the parking area during the game and find great pleasure in destruction and irritating alumni, particularly those whose political views are different from theirs.

Walter E. Shackelford

Trinity'42

Biking benefits everyone

Here's a great deal: Free parking right in front of your building or anywhere else on campus, plus an extra $1000 in your pocket every year, plus a free health-club membership that you will use every day for a long as you'd like. Sound too good to be true? Many Duke faculty, staff and students have been enjoying these Duke benefits for years, and you can too! Just bike to Duke.

An exciting Central Campus plan is evolving. Planning bike routes now will help students make it to their 8:30 classes on time without contending with Erwin Road traffic.

I see other Duke bike commuters every day. Sept. 22 is World Car-Free Day, so if you can, why not join us Thursday?

Henri Gavin

Associate Professor of Civil Engineering

Rallying around arrests is racial

Pardon me if I don't appear to be sympathetic, but I have my reasons. First of all, perhaps if the students were at the football game Saturday (the reason for tailgating) then this whole situation could have been avoided. If they had used their energy to support the team in their first win of the season, they may have been able to stay out of trouble. You can't blame the new limitations of tailgate. Tailgate is a "pre-game" event. Therefore, you should be attending the game and supporting your team during the game. If you aren't into that, then maybe you should not tailgate and rather have an early morning barbeque somewhere else.

Secondly, are we supposed to be outraged by this incident? Where was the outrage last year when black students were "man-handled" by authorities in front of Cafe Parizade. Where was the anger when black students' parties were being invaded by police on a weekly basis? Why were their only a few voices heard surrounding these incidents? Why was the black community pretty much left to solve the problem alone?

We established some progress, but the same things are still happening to black students and are not receiving the attention they deserve.

Now, all of a sudden, we are supposed to be in a ruckus because "the Belmontees" got into trouble. Is this a race/class issue? Since this problem has spread into other groups of people, now something must be done. Why wasn't anything done last year when the problem started? Is it because the majority was not affected?

Don't get me wrong; what happened last weekend was a disgrace. However, I cannot be in uproar over this incident when the campus, for the most part, was nowhere to be found when black students faced the same (or worse) conditions.

Maybe if the campus worked together, as opposed to only supporting our own interests, incidents such as this might not occur.

Racine Harris

Trinity '07

Katrina an engineering disaster

Professors Zbigniew Kabala and Miguel Medina strongly disagree with my characterization of the New Orleans tragedy as the greatest engineering disaster in our history. If this isn't an engineering disaster, I wonder what they think such a disaster is.

If a man from Mars were to show up and look at our society, he would be shocked that a system that could produce marvelous highways, amazing bridges and even send men to the moon could not protect a city with relatively unsophisticated engineering from a long-expected disaster.

The fact that there was a lot of politics, incompetence and poor judgment in New Orleans is beside the point. If the levees had held I am sure that we all would characterize it as an engineering success. But since it failed, the imperfections of society are called upon. Since the time of the Phoenicians, engineers have always had to contend with politics and incompetence. Engineering does not exist in a vacuum.

Kabala and Medina also disagree with my assertion that engineers (and scientists) failed to shout from the mountaintop (my phrase) that the city would soon experience a catastrophe. They give, as an example to the contrary, an article published in the June 2003 issue of Civil Engineering Magazine that warned of the upcoming problem. This problem has been discussed technically for more than 40 years, including in a book that I co-authored in 1984. But technical publications don't communicate with the public as my critics assert. Shouting from the mountaintop consists of speaking to rotary clubs, writing op-ed pieces, speaking at public hearings, contacting congressional delegations, speaking at every available opportunity to the media, organizing petitions, white papers and field trips and doing all kinds of other things that don't lead to tenure in academia.

Although there are many factors involved in this disaster, neither engineers nor scientists can escape the fact that they were not shouting from the mountaintop. Any way you cut the pie, it was the greatest engineering disaster in our history.

Professor Orrin Pilkey

Professor of Earth Sciences emeritus