Letters to the Editor: Tests Are Needed To Promote the Best

Tests Are Needed To Promote the Best
Editor, Times-Dispatch: A recent news article, "U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Could Alter Hiring Practices," about the court's decision was more significant for what it did not say than for what it actually said. No one said, "Finally! A decision that rewards tested merit."

Long ago I was a college music teacher and sat on a committee for a clarinet position. We went through résumés and invited candidates for interviews. The man with the best paper résumé was interviewed. He spoke well about many topics. Time came for the audition, and we proposed the Mozart Concerto. The candidate did not know it -- a very bad sign, since it is the standard concerto that all clarinetists should know. He couldn't play it; his attempt was atrocious. Obviously, we did not hire him. The important point is that only the test of the audition revealed his ineptitude. We later learned his credentials were faked.

Later, I was education director at a school, in charge of hiring instructors. An applicant for an English position had several bold, all-caps, underscored headings on her résumé, beginning with the word STRENGHTS. I did not call her for an interview; her résumé was the first test of the skills I sought in a teacher, including spelling and proofreading. She failed.

Employment and promotion tests are necessary in many fields. Their foremost public function is to prevent unqualified persons from filling important positions. Without well-made tests, we might fly in planes piloted by unqualified pilots, undergo surgery performed by unqualified medical practitioners, or lose our home because an unqualified person fought the fire.

Employment or promotion tests cannot depend upon extraneous matters such as sex, ethnic background, religion, or the like; public welfare and safety demand that the best people be hired, regardless of other consequences.

John M. Ware.
Mechanicsville.

My question is this: How can members of Congress appropriately vote on legislation in a way that reflects the opinions of constituents when the constituents most affected admit they don't have the power to know what the heck is going on?

Members of Congress and those proposing legislation need to do a better job educating people in general, but especially the business owners currently charged with the burden of offering health care, about what these pieces of legislation mean in reality. If they can't explain that, then how can they expect constituents to be able to explain why they should feel compelled to vote for them? Knowledge is power, and to keep us unknowledgeable is to keep us powerless -- but maybe that's what they want.

Lauren Milam.
Richmond.

Let me mention just a few key liberal initiatives once resisted by most Republicans, especially by those on the hard right:

• Social Security and unemployment insurance, which particularly in the years of the Great Depression rescued millions from destitution and despair;

• Measures to fight air pollution, clean up lakes and rivers, and guard the sanctity and beauty of our nation's vast wilderness preserves;

• The campaign for equal rights for women, now largely endorsed by even the most macho men -- and the civil rights movement, which finally dealt a death blow to Jim Crow.

It's probably uncomfortable for many Republicans to recall that, not so long ago, their party was almost entirely a white, male club; and worse still, that it often won Southern voters by playing the race card. (One of our most eminent conservatives, Bill Buckley, expressed regret in his later years for his once backward views on civil rights.) Republicans today may be quite right to fight liberal excesses; but it's only the blind ones who fail to recognize the liberal contribution to a great democratic America.

Must the Republican Party remain a backward-looking party, forever fighting rear-guard action, as it is doing now with respect to global warming and gay rights? Must it rely on attack dogs whose main theme is always liberal villainy? I don't think so. In my view, a healthy Republican Party will be an inclusive one, absorbing the wisdom of libertarians and constitutionalists, moderates and old-line conservatives. It will be a party that challenges with fresh ideas, not stale labels, and nourishes the Jeffersonian notion that, whatever our differences, we are all Americans. Irwin Shishko. Richmond.

Madoff's Sentence Compounds Injustice
Editor, Times-Dispatch: The rhetoric surrounding Bernard Madoff's 150-year sentence has been that of fantasy films and revenge plots. He is the phantasmic beast disguised as a 71-year-old human, which enables him to walk among us, and we are the innocent victims enacting our revenge.

But that's just a story filled with fictitious characters and surreal explanations of human behavior. The truth is that Bernard Madoff is a man, a human being, who made a criminal mistake that harmed the fiscal lives of thousands, including his own. The truth is that his victims deserve to have their fiscal wounds healed, and the public deserves to be protected from any future crimes he may enact. However, a sentence that will continue into his afterlife does not protect his victims. A sentence like this only serves to punish the beast.

Do we still live in a world where people would crowd the street if allowed to watch a guilty man be killed? When blood -- or billions of dollars -- is spilt, do we thirst for more? Maybe. Maybe we do if we are willing, almost gleefully, to subject another human being to shivs, rape, and other dehumanizing acts.

In a time when more and more studies are exposing the prevalence of mental illness among American criminals and the inability to prove causation between severity of sentences and number of crimes committed, we should question our acceptance of punishment as justice and strive for humaneness.

Punishment merely ensures more pain and assumes superiority. We should strive to be better than those we scrutinize, but when our primary goal is to punish offenders with less regard to protecting victims, we are no better. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Virginia Richardson.
Richmond.

Ryan quotes the science section from a Web site in England that claims the "UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Center for Climate Studies HadCRUT data . . . shows worldwide temperatures declining since 1998." I went to the Web site for the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research and found that instead it says: "The rise in global surface temperature has averaged more than 0.15° C per decade since the mid-1970s. Warming has been unprecedented in at least the last 50 years, and the 17 warmest years have all occurred in the last 20 years." (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/bigpicture/fact2.html)

Miller also makes reference in his letter to the "UK Hadley Climate Research Unit" among several sites that, he claims, document that "global temperatures had significantly decreased" and effectively counter "the total global warming recorded in the past 100 years." As I showed above with direct links to the Hadley Center, this is false and totally contradictory to what they actually say.

He also references the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I went to its Web site and, again, found information directly contradictory to what Miller would have us believe. Specifically, "In our analysis, 2008 is the ninth-warmest year in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880. The 10 warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008." (http://www.giss.nasa.gov/ research/news/20090223/)

I would encourage all readers to access the two sites noted above, both of which were referenced by Ryan and Miller, to see for themselves where the truth lies.

Rod Elser.
Powhatan.

The last person who should be making decisions about whether or not I receive end-of-life care is some faceless bureaucrat in Washington. Medical treatment decisions, especially ones that can provide comfort and quality of life to someone who is on his deathbed, should be between the patient and the doctor. The decision of whether to have a certain medical procedure should be between the patient and his doctor. The decision of whether to have a certain medical procedure should be made on a case-by-case basis, instead of by some blanket federal mandate. Maybe some treatment will only extend a patient's life by a couple of months, but who is Obama to say it isn't worth it? Every human life has dignity and should be treated as such.

Robert Burch.
Midlothian.