Letters to the Editor

Parents concerned over too-short break

Hear hear! As a parent (and UCLA alumna), I heartily applaud the concept of having a full week break during Thanksgiving (“Students would be thankful for a real break,” Nov. 25). This would be a tremendous benefit to students and instructors alike.

My freshman daughter stayed on campus during the break instead of flying or driving to Northern California. I was concerned that while the dorms were open, there would be no food service from Thursday until Sunday evening.

Also, with the rainstorm that was due to hit Southern California that Wednesday night, I would have been worried if she were driving home late that night in the pouring rain, just to join us briefly for Turkey dinner.

I hope that students, professors and UCLA personnel will rally around this great idea of starting school three days earlier and instituting a full week break at Thanksgiving.

Lisa Mengel Stackpole

UCLA ’80

UCLA, help solve commuter conundrum

As I write this, I am sitting on a Metrolink train, bound for my home in San Bernardino County. In light of this, one can see why I was struck by two recent items in the Daily Bruin on public transportation (“That’s how I roll, Los Angeles: Metro bus style,” Nov. 25 and “Project aims to revamp Wilshire,” Nov. 14).

While I was happy to see the topic addressed, I was disappointed that neither article addressed the transportation needs of commuter students like myself. Since my schedule does not allow me to take a vanpool, I take more than 50 miles of public transportation to campus.

The trip into downtown Los Angeles on the Metrolink is quick and quiet. Even the trip on the Metro Red Line is fairly convenient. But bus travel from the Red Line station to campus is a nightmare. I’m afraid I don’t share McReynolds’ fond feelings of the No. 2 bus during rush hour; Sunset Boulevard is a mess, and it takes around 40 minutes to travel from the Red Line to campus. Taking Wilshire from the Purple Line station isn’t much better. To make matters worse, each bus tends to be overcrowded, making it impossible to do any meaningful studying en route.

The new Greyhound/Amtrak service in Westwood doesn’t even address this problem, seeing as it doesn’t access the Metrolink system. The answer? UCLA needs to take a lesson from its crosstown rival and establish a shuttle service that will take Bruins from the rail grid directly to campus. Shuttles wouldn’t even need to travel all the way to Union Station; commuters could be picked up from easily accessible points like Wilshire and Western, or Hollywood and Highland.

The advantage of this? It would allow students to travel to campus with greater ease, allowing them more productive study time on their commute, and would shave off valuable minutes by not stopping every other block to jam-pack the bus!

UCLA, please help me shorten my five-hour commute (no exaggeration) and find a way to plug into Los Angeles’ excellent commuter train system. Why should USC have all the efficient transportation in this town!

Andrew Compton

Graduate student, Near Eastern languages and cultures

Protest of X-rated film admirable

I am disappointed that the Daily Bruin Editorial Board failed to recognize the value of what the International Justice Mission did about the screening of the X-Rated “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge” this past Wednesday night (“Protestors shouldn’t have saved seats,” Dec. 4). Members of IJM did not reserve seats for the screening just to take away spots from others, but did so with the intention of adding to the discussion afterwards. It is entirely understandable that those people did not also attend the screening of a movie to which they had objections.

And no, we can’t just “agree to disagree.” An institution as damaging to the fabric of our society as pornography deserves to be debated and not simply tolerated. IJM should be applauded for initiating a real discussion about pornography by presenting a dissenting view to the speakers following the film.

Kelly Regan

Third-year, economics and international area studies

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