Letter writers respond to Saint Martin’s job letters, offer a reality check on landlord rules
Online teaching will replace Saint Martin’s professors
I appreciate The Olympian’s follow-up on the massive faculty job cuts at Saint Martin’s University.
Although the college says students won’t be affected, that is false. For a start, here’s what students will lose:
• 14 professors with 234 total cumulative years of teaching, replaced with a canned, off-campus online teaching platform the university has contracted with. These online classes just pay lip service to teaching students how to engage morally and ethically in the world, which is Saint Martin’s mission.
• Disciplines available to major or minor in. Professors receiving termination contracts include all who teach English, history, sociology/anthropology, political science, communication studies, world languages, and gender studies. Education and religion also will lose tenured faculty.
• Courses with professors who teach foundational critical thinking, meeting SMU’s mission of educating students to “make a positive difference,” striving “for holistic development” through “interaction of faith, reason, and service.”
• 3 Fulbright scholars and 5 Faculty-of-the-Year teachers.
• Most of its faculty leaders and many recognized scholars, their displayed books on campus now covered, in protest, with their terminal letters.
• Their access to personalized, on-campus instruction, but still paying SMU tuition for online courses through Texas-based “Acadeum.” SMU will pay annual and per-student enrollment fees, instead of paying their faculty.
The university experienced several “financial crises” when I taught there for 19 years, occurring when liberal arts faculty, among the nation’s lowest paid professors, requested pay raises.
These actions put to shame such Benedictine values as “community living,” “hospitality,” “dignity of work,” “respect for persons,” and “justice.”
Olivia Archibald, Olympia, Emerita Professor, Saint Martins University
New Olympia landlord rules are daunting
I’m a landlord with two single-family homes I’ve rented in west Olympia for years. I charge below market-rate, don’t require first/last, seldom raise rents and spend on average a few thousand dollars a year maintaining the properties. Renters say I’m the best landlord ever.
Yet now I am forced to fill out online forms, pay fees and submit to inspections to keep on renting. While I don’t mind the inspections, the fees are more than promised and the forms, well, let’s just say I had to pay someone hundreds of dollars to do this for me. And even though this person does such things for a living (they help people with medical billing, online, remotely), they said they had never seen such a goat mess of mindless crap.
I challenge the Olympia City Council to experience this themselves by working through the process as though they were renting out their own residence. Hopefully this will help you see what you have begotten us.
Now, as to the renter/landlord wars, I have some thoughts. First, if rent increases are capped annually, most landlords will automatically increase the rent every year to whatever the cap rate is. This will promote gentrification, not stop it.
Second, renters need to keep this simple axiom in mind: Without landlords, renters would be homeless, but without renters, landlords with single-family homes could simply sell them to owner-occupants.
Wars aren’t good for anybody but are especially bad for the losers. Peace, communication and compromise always work better.
Steve Shanewise, Olympia
Look forward to Looking Back
Just wanted to say thank you for the “Looking back” historical photos in every Sunday’s paper. I look forward to it every weekend!
Thanks.
Mike Vessey, Tenino
Professor, student speak out after 14 Saint Martin’s faculty get ‘terminal appointment letters’
Dozens rally outside City Hall for tenant rights, but some landlords think they go too far
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