By KAYE M. BOGGS

Wallace

Sir / I'm not for George Wallace [March 27], but in the campaign for the Florida primary he was the only one who was open and honest and gave the other Democratic candidates an issue. Why do the Democratic presidential candidates have to wait until they know what the major issues are before they can use them as propaganda on American voters, young and old? As an 18-year-old voter, I have my doubts as to whether I want to vote in 1972!

BEVERLY FOLGER

North Augusta, S.C.

Sir / Most of the candidates are not really listening to us. I'll not vote for George Wallace. I still see him standing in the doorway barring the way of a Negro trying to get a college education; but I can't help feeling quite a bit as he does. I also think thousands, no, millions of others are feeling the same way. We are just plain tired, tired of supporting everyone. It really seems that everything is geared to help the poor (nobody really begrudges this help), but since we pay the way, maybe a little bit of help for us is due.

(MRS.) PAT GALLAGHER

Bridgeport, Conn.

Sir / I am sorry you did not save the "Con Man of the Year" award for George Wallace. He has conned many Americans into believing that freedom, equality and justice can be compromised by bigotry, racism and inhumanity to one's fellow man.

CLIFFORD M. BLACK

Columbus

Sir / I'm from the South (Florida) and am amazed at all the people I've met in the North who favor Mr. Wallace for President. Your story depicts a character straight out of Tennessee Williams. As for me, I don't want my President to be a Big Daddy in the White House. I hope he lost the Women's Libbers' vote with that quote about matching ties being a "woman's job." When Lurleen was Governor he thought that was a woman's job.

KAYE M. BOGGS

Nashua, N.H.

Busing

Sir / I fail to understand the argument about the need for neighborhood schools that is used by those opposed to busing [March 27]. The irony of the whole situation is that we have destroyed neighborhoods all across America. For example, rather than supporting the neighborhood Mom and Pop stores, we have driven miles out of our neighborhoods to shop at supermarkets. We don't attend cultural events in our neighborhood but drive out of the neighborhood for entertainment. We are also the people who destroyed the neighborhoods by getting into our trucks, buses and cars and moving. With this new non-neighborhood approach to life, might it not be better if our children are bused across town so that they will learn about adapting to a mobile society? In fact, forcing children to stay in their own neighborhoods to attend school might actually hinder their development and their ability to adapt to being well-rounded adults on wheels.

LEROY GOERTZ

Florence, Ore.

Sir / For me the unhappiest part of the President's school proposals was their sequence. Had he but placed his recommendations for increased aid to needy schools first and the call for a busing moratorium second, we might have felt that it was deprived schoolchildren and their education that he truly cared about. As was, by hitting first hardest on the "evils" of busing, he gave the unmistakable impression that his first concern was votes, not children.

ELIOT T. PUTNAM JR.

Dedhame, Mass.

Sir / It is fallacious to assume that integration cannot take place without busing children or that busing children will bring about integration during nonschool hours. It is an absolute fact that money spent on busing is money that cannot be spent for education, so education will necessarily suffer, and it has. ANITA THOMPSON Jacksonvile

Steel Wool for Measles

Sir / A legal crackdown on fake term papers [March 27] is like fighting measles by using steel wool to scrub off the belmishes. The basic contradiction this business thrives upon is that students are required to write term papers of no use or interest to them. "Publish or pelish" on the professoriaal level becomes "compose or fail" on the student level. This term paper requirement, so irrelevant to real needs of most students, is just one more example of how the educational system is geared to academic, bureaucratic and corporate instuitions and not be the needs of the students.

JAMES MORK

Stillwater, Minn.

Sir / The mentality that creates a market for fake term papers flourishes in most of our schools -all for the noble purpose of charting the smoothest and least scholarly route to a diploma and a job. This is a far cry from the original idea of a university as a haven where those individuals who sincereley wanted to pursue a topic could do so. If students by the thousands can take these short cuts through the groves of Academe and later perform satisfactorily in their careers, perhaps they did not need to enter the groves in the first place.

KAREN COHEN

Chicago

STRINGS

Sir / Re the ITT-Republican Party affair [April 3]: what really amazes me is that this sort of situation has been allowed to continue for so many years. One would have to be terribly naive to believe that large politi cal contributions are made with no strings attached,

PHILIP DIAMOND

San Diego

Sir / Jack Anderson doesn;t need to prove any of his charges in the IT antitrust-suit controversy; the allegations alone have caused serious political damage to the Republican Party. And isn't this really the name of the game in an election year?

JOHN MCVEIGN

Melissa, Texas

ROOTS OF PREJUDICE

Sir / The Black caucus that met in Gary, Ind. [March 27], had as its raison d' etre the roots of prejudice. Its members built rhetoric on the atrocities of discrimination. They said they stood for justice and against exploitation of human beings. And yet how easily they ignored the only group whose fortitude truly challengs the foundatios of prejudicial thinking, whose political aims so closely reflect those the caucus gave lip service to - women. So firmly entrenched are we in the roots of prejudice that even the discriminated against act in turn to discrimate. Does anyone doubt it that if Shirley Chisholm had been a man, the first black political caucus would have supported the first black political candidate for presidential nominee?

ELIZABETH CITTADINE

Chicago

Aborigines

Sir / I realize that many Americans revere the shortened word form, but unfortunately the word "Abo," referring to Australia's Aboriginal Embassy [March 13], is received by Australian aborigines with about the same amount of enthusiasm as the word nigger or coon by Negro people.

In fact, even the word aborigine has overtones of European paternalism; many of Australia's dark people prefer their own traditional term, "Koori."

PETER MCLAREN

Croydon Park, Australia

Women

Sir / TIME in its issue on American women [March 20] made me sound like Shirley Temple! I am not really against exploring depravity. I understand it's terrific both on-and offscreen and can be done by either sex. ELEANOR PERRY

New York City

Sir / Tell Reader Carol Keough to fret no longer about discrimination appearing in math problems. Women's Lib is snowing up at the college level. Here is the kind of math homework my son struggles with:

A class consists of ten students, of whom four are girls; three of the girls are married to three of the five married fellows in the class. They all spend an evening at a motel, which has two rooms of two single beds each and two rooms of three single beds each. Assuming that only one sex occupies any room except for married couples, who may but do not have to share a double, in how many ways can the students distribute themselves in the rooms?

ANITA LANE KAISER

Indianapolis

Sir / It simply does not automatically follow that where the target enrollment for women is set lower than that for men that "women therefore need higher grades than men to gain admission to college." This may or may not be true in given instances; in the case of Stanford, which you cited, it is not true. Our present enrollment target of 550 women and 900 men in a freshman class is not significantly unrepresentative of the ratio of women to men applicants for admission (1 to 2) in recent years. Moreover, while the women applicants are every bit as academically qualified as the men applicants, it is simply not the case that the women are more qualified academically.

In fact, a university committee studying the possibility of increasing the enrollment of women undergraduates at Stanford concluded that had academic criteria alone been used to admit the class (without regard to sex), eleven more men and eleven fewer women would have been admitted.

FRED A. HARGADON

Dean of Admissions Stanford University Stanford, Calif.

Teachers

Sir / In your article in the Economy section [March 13], you say that "Teachers, government clerks and other civil servants in the past struck a tacit bargain under which they accepted relatively low pay in return for easy work, short hours, job security and relatively high pensions."

In private industry today, easy work, short hours, job security and relatively high pensions have become characteristic. Job security in teaching, however, has all but disappeared. The nature of teaching in overcrowded, underequipped, urban-suburban and consolidated rural schools, the continued dependence of local boards of education on curriculums that are momentarily irrelevant to the students, the pressures of diverse groups to make schools attentive to their separate needs, and the continuing invasion of drugs and acts of violence--all these make teaching today a hazardous and unpredictable career. They explain the demands by teachers for a level of compensation and benefits that provide them with more than the genteel poverty so characteristic of an earlier era.

DAVID E. ENGLAND

Executive Director

Teachers' Association of Baltimore

County, Inc.

Towson, Md.

Address Letters to TIME, Time & Life Building, Rockefeller Center, New York, N.Y. 10020

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