Dear Editor:
I'm writing to congratulate The Spectrum for two superb investigative articles last week. Amanda Jonas's article, "A Shameful Low in Higher Education: The University at Buffalo is inaccessible to disabled students," is a superb piece of reporting. By noting UB's continued non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, Jonas really gets at some of the sickness that pervades UB generally.
Interestingly, the period of this failure coincides almost perfectly with the term of UB President John B. Simpson. It's illuminating to put this Friday article together with the Wednesday article by Andrew Wiktor and Luke Hammill, "Artvoice Compensation Numbers Are Correct." Hammill and Wiktor confirm a recent story in Artvoice that the UB administration is using the $410-million-dollar UB endowment as a moneypot to top-up the salaries of university administrators, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In its "UB Fact Sheet," a factually-challenged effort to respond to Artvoice, the UB Office of University Communications says that this "supplemental compensation . . . enables UB to compete nationally in its efforts to recruit and retain very talented faculty, staff and administrators." If allowing the Office of Disability Services to remain inaccessible to handicapped persons is "talent," then what does "gross incompetence" look like?
Perhaps the money squandered on administrative salaries would have been better spent by making the university fully accessible to all its students, staff, and faculty. We at UB should think less about "competing nationally" (whatever that means) and more about doing our jobs and acting like decent human beings.
Jim Holstun
Professor of English
Letters to the editor are not edited by The Spectrum.
