To the editor:

It is very disheartening to see an institution like Kansas University behave like a heartless corporation, making profit and appearance its priorities, and doing the equivalent of firing its employees on a Friday afternoon by closing the Museum of Anthropology and laying off staff at the beginning of the summer when few students and faculty are around to voice their opinion on the matter.

While it is necessary to alleviate short-term budget deficits, KU is enacting policies that show no regard for the hardships students must endure to cope with the extreme tuition hikes, the decreasing sense of job security following so many layoffs, or the closing of key institutions that distinguish KU from other schools and offer so much to faculty, students and the public in general, such as the Museum of Anthropology.

This new philosophy is especially hard to swallow after considering the hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the Endowment, the exorbitant tuition increase and the millions of dollars that have been capriciously set aside to dump more bricks, wood chips and roses at the corner of 15th and Iowa.

Even if such extreme measures succeed, they threaten KU’s future integrity. Fewer professionals will consider KU an enjoyable work environment, fewer students will consider KU as an affordable institution and a serious place of higher learning and, in the case of the Museum of Anthropology, researchers and the public in general will be deprived of this fixture of the Lawrence community.

David Mora-Marin,

Heather Bruce,

Lawrence