To the editor:

As Kansas University Chancellor Robert Hemenway’s salary rises, in spite of the university’s plummeting academic rating, its public relations mavens are attempting to link this increasingly mediocre institution with the great colleges of the world by building yet another entrance gate (Journal-World, Sept. 21).

Slated for the intersection of 13th and Oread, near the hideous Boots Adams Alumni Center, the design for which evokes the era of the antebellum plantation, the artifice of a so-called gate will only serve to trivialize the architectural traditions of the storied medieval institutions of higher learning, which KU tastelessly seeks to emulate.

That it would be principally paid for as a vanity by one of the wealthiest banking families in Kansas history – the Dockings – is appropriate.

Mark Kaplan,

Lawrence