Letters to the Editor – Vaping, tenure, foster care, luck, rights

Vaping overkill

Re: “State cracks down on vaping — Hundreds of North Texas students land in alternative schools under new law,” Monday news story.

I was surprised and disappointed to read that students caught vaping are sent off to disciplinary schools. Although smoking and vaping are unsafe activities, they largely only hurt the person engaging in them.

What harm is then done by sending them off to an alternative school where they are surrounded by potentially violent students who are being punished for “making terroristic threats, selling drugs or assaulting an employee”? If we want our youths to turn into good people, we have to surround them with better people, not more troubled ones.

It would make more sense to send these misguided youths to good schools where they’d be surrounded by students focused on college and careers. Since vaping could then be seen as a golden ticket to a better school, God forbid, another approach would be to demonstrate disapproval, but otherwise to ignore smoking or vaping. The rule in our schools should be like what doctors follow: First, do no harm.

Roy Birk, University Park

Tenure attack

Re: “Patrick details campus review,” April 14 news story.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick’s base-pandering fight regarding eliminating tenure in Texas universities deserves a response. The staffing of faculty in institutions of higher education is not just an isolated Texas issue.

To attract quality faculty, major colleges and universities competitively recruit not just nationwide, but internationally. Any change in Texas’ tenure rules in isolation from other states will dramatically reduce Texas’ ability to recruit the best and brightest faculty members for our universities.

Patrick may have a valid point that tenure and promotion rules are in need of a nationwide overhaul. Professional schools and departments (e.g., engineering, business, education) might be better served with rolling tenure-like contracts, not lifelong appointments. Upon expiration, the contracts would trigger a performance evaluation with possible renewal.

But like tenure, a rolling contract system would have to be adopted nationwide, else any state implementing such a system in isolation would be severely handicapped in its ability to recruit quality faculty members. Does Patrick understand these issues, or does he just not care?

Ernie Stokely, Far North Dallas

Caring about the children

A friend and I spoke recently about our state and federal politics. She wondered why it is that so many politicians want to dictate a woman’s reproductive health decisions yet have seemingly no interest in what happens to so many children in the foster care system.

Isn’t that the million-dollar question?

Sara Miskimins, Dallas/Lake Highlands

Merit vs. ZIP codes

Re: “No one gets anywhere on talent alone — Texas scraps DEI as unfair to merit, but luck and chance also drive success,” by Mark Rank, April 9 Opinion.

Rank debunks the myth that we could ever live in a pure meritocracy where everyone’s advancement and success depend solely on their abilities and merit. He points out correctly that chance and luck often enter into the equation.

I recall seeing the results of a study several years ago. It had as its objective to find the single most important predictor in identifying who will be materially successful on the socioeconomic ladder. As it turned out, that single factor was the ZIP code in which one is raised as a child. Those children born into affluent ZIP codes tended to become wealthy and successful adults themselves.

The last time I checked, we have no power to choose our parents. Therefore, the study seems to confirm that plain old luck has a lot to do with material success. And some have more equal opportunity than others.

Fred R. Neary, Far North Dallas

Court-created rights

In 1973, by using the broad language in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court determined that a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion was above the right of states to regulate abortion. The right thus created existed for 50 years until, in 2023, a new Republican-dominated Supreme Court ignored precedent and for the first time in our history took away that federal right of women to control their own bodies (at least prior to a fetus being able to exist outside a woman’s uterus) and again empowered states to regulate abortion. We are now seeing the tragic results of that decision.

There are many rights that are expressly written into our Constitution and the Amendments. But there are also many rights found by the Supreme Court to exist despite not being expressly written into the Constitution or Amendments.

Now that Republican Supreme Court justices have taken away one Court-created right, others could be at risk. Here are a few examples:

Birthright citizenship (the right of a person born in America to be a citizen even if their parents were not),1898. Integration (the right of public school students to be protected…