Letter to Editor Worded Incorrectly
By Dorothy Lam PO '05

I submitted a letter next week to TSL. When I looked for it in last week's issue, I found that you have seen fit to alter my letter without my permission. The letter I submitted reads as follows:

Open Letter to the Asian American Student Alliance

Since you are proposing a SEPARATE Asian American Student Center, I was wondering if it will be EQUAL to the Smith Campus Center as well.

In contrast, the letter that was published reads as follows:

Open Letter

Consider this an open letter to the Asian American Student Center. Since you are proposing a SEPARATE Asian American Student Center, I was wondering if it will be EQUAL to the Smith Campus Center as well.

I do not understand why you decided to tack on that first sentence. I also do not understand why it makes sense to you to address an inanimate (and imaginary) object. I have a prejudice against that sort of thing, and I hope that in the future you stop attributing such nonsense to me. Not only is it disrespectful to a reader of your paper, it also violates your policy, which reads: "Letters are not edited except for spelling, punctuation, and serious grammatical errors."

Editor's Note: Dorothy Lam submitted a letter last week similar to the one she claims to have submitted, but which had the opening fragment "Open Letter to the Asian American Student Alliance" in quotation marks. Since correspondents are not permitted to write their own headlines, she was asked whether she wanted the fragment in quotes as part of the letter, or if she simply wanted the editors to somehow indicate that her letter was, in fact, an open letter to AASA. In compliance with her request for the latter,"Consider this an open letter" was added. Calling it an open letter to the Asian American Student Center, rather than the Asian American Student Alliance, was an error.