Editor, Daily Nexus,

We are writing in response to Nicholas C. Romero’s opinion article that appeared in the Tuesday copy of the Nexus (“Ethnic Interest Halls Encourage Racial Separatism,” April 16, Daily Nexus).

Initially, we intended to refute his very poorly organized argument. However, we are far more concerned with the fact that an article that demonstrated such a lack of effort and talent was printed in a college newspaper.

From his poor sentence structure to his obvious lack of research into his blind claims, Nicholas C. Romero achieves a high school writing level at his very best. Briefly, to illustrate this claim, Mr. Romero argues that the ethnic interest halls on campus are faulty because they do not represent the arbitrary geographical guidelines that he lays out. However, the issue of race and ethnicity as it is being used in these halls refers to race as a social construct, and therefore race, as a representation of an individual’s continent of origin, has no basis in this particular argument. Further, when comparing the ethnic interest halls to first the Nazis and then to the pre-Civil Rights era America, Mr. Romero concludes that “ethnic prejudice and hate should not be acceptable in any citizen of our country because it impairs the Constitution’s protection of equal rights.” The main mistake here is that the ethnic interest halls foster neither ethnic prejudice nor hate. Unlike the conditions of pre-Civil Rights America, there is not ethnic or racial separation enforced in the halls (we leave out the Nazis in this previous claim, because we feel that their inclusion in this overall argument is too ludicrous to address). The Constitutional cases concerning race separation in America hinged on the fact that enforced separation was unconstitutional (we realize this is a gross over-simplification of the cases involved, but it gets to the point).

Our purpose is not to refute Mr. Romero’s column but merely to point out how poorly argued and researched it was. Regardless of what is argued for, some kind of standard should be set for what is accepted by a college newspaper. Our main question is, why did the Nexus not only print this but also give it an entire page of the opinion section?