Letters.

Not So Silent

Jason DeParle is a fine journalist. "The Silence of the Liberals" (April 1999) is not one of his better pieces of work. He puts forward a reasonably sound post-welfare agenda for "liberals" but claims in effect that he is the only one who ever said it out loud within recent memory. That is pure bunk. Establishment Washington, both political and journalistic, may not be doing anything with the story, but that doesn't mean it isn't there. And it's there not just at the level of talk. In locality after locality there are people working with some success on many of the issues DeParle lists. They would be more successful if there were more support from Washington, but they are doing cutting-edge sophisticated work.

In DeParle's mind, it seems, the only relevant place to see whether liberals are saying or doing anything is inside the Belt-way. We agree with him that serious attention to the concentrated, racialized poverty of the inner-city is a matter of the highest priority, but we're not sure who besides Senator Paul Wellstone and a handful of others in Washington get it, and we know that between this president and this Republican Congress nobody is about to do anything serious about it as a matter of national policy, the empowerment zone program notwithstanding. The last time we looked, Congress was taking away $350 million in hard-won and badly needed funds from the Section 8 housing program in order to finance the pork in the recent supplemental appropriations bill.

There is a lot of action on the issues DeParle wants attended to, but it's not in Washington and it's seldom covered by journalists, including DeParle. We look forward to a president and Congress who will be more responsive to the important agenda that DeParle lays out.

ANDREW MOTT and PETER EDELMAN CENTER FOR COMMUNITY CHANGE Washington, D. C.

Tenure Trap

Robert Worths essay on tenure ("The Velvet Prison," May 1999) was right on target. The odd thing is that the problems would be so easy to fix, but the fix is not embraced either by faculty or by administrators for fear of disrupting the status quo. All the protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, academics are thoroughly conservative when it comes to our own self-interest.

MARSHALL E. McMAHON PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS AND BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION RHODES COLLEGE Memphis, Tenn.

Thank you for Robert Worth's article about the tenure system in universities (May 1999). As a former lettuce-picker adjunct and contract...