A Georgetown English professor in a letter to the editor (November-December 1996) professed to "tell more" about the National Alumni Forum-a new organization that advertised in the September-October issue. Far from setting the record straight, Margaret Stetz riddled her letter with false and vitriolic attacks that cannot be sustained in the light of day.

Far from being a "right-wing pressure group 'dedicated' to bullying tactics and media-crazy operations," the Forum is a nonpartisan organization of alumni and trustees dedicated to academic freedom and excellence. Its National Council includes eminent Harvard social scientist David Riesman, Senator Joe Lieberman (D.- Conn.), and New Republic publisher Martin Peretz, none of whom would pass the entrance requirements for right-wing bullies.

Stetz's pique is not surprising, since the National Alumni Forum last spring vigorously took the Georgetown English department to task when it chose to eliminate its Shakespeare/Great Authors requirement. Although Stetz claims that she and her colleagues "broadened the requirements for the undergraduate major degree," no amount of doublespeak can obscure the fact that Georgetown in fact eliminated a requirement, rather than adding one. Before the class of 1999, Georgetown students were required to study two of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Now, thanks to Stetz and her colleagues, students are required to take none. They can now take such courses as "Gangster Films," "Prison Literature," and "Hardboiled Detective Fiction" instead.

A study by the Forum reveals that Georgetown's action is not an aberration; it is the norm. Of 67 top colleges and universities across the country, the Forum discovered that only 24 (including Harvard) now require their students to read the great authors before they are permitted to receive an English degree. And in their place, universities are substituting courses on popular culture and sex.

Stetz suggests that it is presumptuous for the Forum and its president to criticize the "best judgment" of her buddies in the department. She fails to mention that the Forum's protest was supported by undeniably eminent scholars and writers-including Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow, former poet laureate Anthony Hecht, poet John Hollander, National Repertory Theatre director Robert Brustein, novelist William Peter Blatty, and scholars such as Walter Berns, Paul Cantor, and Ricardo Quinones. They were joined by students, parents, alumni, and a high-school English teacher-people whom Stetz would choose to silence.

The Professor Stetzes of this world are why the Forum has been formed. We believe that the mission of higher education is teaching, learning, and the pursuit of truth, and we oppose practices that threaten intellectual freedom or undermine academic standards. We believe that institutions should be called to task when they lack a vision of what every educated person should know and when departments deplorably argue that students who have not yet read the great authors are somehow better able to judge whether their works are worth studying than their professors who have. Apparently, we are not alone in these beliefs since we have members from more than 200 institutions across the country, the largest number of whom are graduates of Harvard.

Stetz is proud of her Harvard Ph.D. But Harvard English majors, even at the undergraduate level, are required to read great works by Shakespeare. Shouldn't her students have the same opportunity?

Anne D. Neal '77, J.D. '80
Vice president and general counsel
National Alumni Forum
Washington, D.C.

John Lauerman's "Toward a Natural History of Aging" (September-October 1996) was an excellent overview of new research and new conceptions of aging. I would, however, like to clarify some points about the neuropsychological testing of cognition in the New England Centenarian Study.

First, our tests do not have pass or fail cutoffs. We assess a number of areas of cognitive functioning-such as memory, language, attention, visual-spatial abilities-to delineate a pattern of cognitive functioning. Since we do not yet know what is normal aging versus disease for 100-year-olds, we don't know what "pass" would be. One of the purposes of the study is to begin to define what is normal aging in an age group for which we have little normative data.

Second, the point of the "clock drawing" is not to see if the subject can tell time. This drawing is a complex task that involves a number of cognitive functions, such as visual-spatial abilities, planning and organization, and abstract reasoning. Deficits in these cognitive areas would affect an individual's daily functioning, even if we had digital clocks.

Margery H. Silver, Ed.D. '82
Associate director, New England
Centenarian Study, Beth Israel Hospital
Boston

There is almost no basis for the assertion in "Life, Death, and the Dice" (September-October 1996) that breathing radon gas at home increases the risk of lung cancer. As a defense counsel in a recent case in which the alleged danger of household radon was a significant issue, I became very familiar with the literature on the subject.

While there is no question about the substantial risk from radon at the levels in unventilated uranium mines, there is no real proof of risk from "dangerous" household levels of radon. EPA's proclaimed "action level" of 4 picocuries is based upon alleged risks from exposure for 18 hours per day for 70 years, a fact which the EPA literature carefully buries. EPA's "authority" is a mid-'80s recommendation by a committee on the biological effects of ionizing radiation (BEIR IV) on the basis of linear extrapolation from the uranium miner studies with an assumption of no safe level. They also assumed that the incidence of lung cancer from radon rose at the same rate as lung cancer from smoking. (The 1990 total lung-cancer rate is about 15 times the 1930 rate.) There was no supporting epidemiological residential study then. There has been only one, Swedish, study since that tends to confirm the EPA position. At least four other studies have concluded otherwise. Dr. Bernard Cohen of the University of Pittsburgh, originally a true believer, has published many peer-reviewed papers challenging the assumptions. A recent paper in Radiation Research stated that the confounding problems of the few epidemiological studies are so severe that none of them is reliable. The Health Physics Society, a professional group dedicated to the study of radiation, has long expressed skepticism of the methods used for declaring household radon to be a significant danger.

A cynical conjecture of why the EPA made such a to-do about household radon is that it was during the Reagan years when the agency was being criticized for not showing enough concern about the environment. Here, concern could be shown and it wouldn't cost the government anything!

It is ironic that the article should illustrate so well the point it was making.

Stuart C. Gaul, LL.B. '51
Pittsburgh