Letters to the Editor – 2/26/14

Play down

Bob Jones’ column “Should UH Sports Really Be Division I?” hits the nail on its head.

For $400,000, coach Norm Chow hasn’t done anything right except apologize and make excuses.

Stop already! Play the teams that are equal to your team. Instead of having a chance to have a winning season, all Coach Chow and his staff are doing is adding zeros.

Peter T. Coleman Jr.
Makiki

Drop football

Bob Jones is absolutely right about the UH inter-collegiate athletic program! But, unfortunately, to most people in Hawaii, the university is primarily a source of entertainment: tailgate parties and the Wahine on TV. In football and basketball, UH will never be a serious national power and should not be wasting academic resources trying.

In Reclaiming the Game, William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, and Sarah Levin of the Mellon Foundation detail how even Division III programs at highly selective colleges/universities and the athletic programs at Ivy League universities adversely impact academic programs.

University of Chicago got it right a long time ago. Even though it was a founding member of the Big Ten and had a storied football program, it decided in 1939 that big-time football was negatively impacting its primary higher education mission and pulled the plug on the program, and became what is now Division III.

The school administration weathered the political storm of alumni and community reaction, and preserved their academic reputation.

It will never happen here!

Paul Strona
Kakaako

OHA not pono

Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Aina I ka Pono – the Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness.

That has been the motto of Hawaii for more than 160 years.

Not so for our current Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustees anymore. They want to sell some of the last remaining precious water-front park land along Kakaako to some developer to put high-rises on that dear piece of loved soil. Spoil the land forever. That is committing blasphemy in its purest form.

Hawaiians already have been through that before. At the Great Mahele (1848), the land tenure system was changed from communal trusteeship to private ownership. The missionaries and other supposed dogooders got richer and the Hawaiians got poorer.

Let us hope that our Legislature will save them from committing blasphemy and keep the aina open for everyone to enjoy in perpetuity.

Gerhard C. Hamm
Waialae Iki

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