Letters: Project 2025 vs. your values; Penn State should be subject to open records law

Project 2025 vs. your values

Donald Trump acolytes are preparing for a potential second Trump administration. Former and current Trump aides have a radical 920-page plan — Project 2025 — with a long list of executive actions to be implemented immediately upon taking office — actions affecting Americans’ everyday lives.

Before you cast your vote this November, consider how your values square with Project 2025.

Do you want ...

• Climate protections?
• Social Security and Medicare when you’re eligible?
• Affordable health care of your choice?
• Free, public education?
• Federal agencies staffed by trained experts?
• Free services provided by federal agencies, such as weather reports?
• Temporary food assistance should you experience hardship, such as job loss or housing loss from a natural disaster
• Personal freedom to: read any book you want; plan your family, with access to contraceptives, IVF, and emergency pregnancy care; marry the person you love; obtain needed health care (including reproductive and gender-related care); practice the religion of your choice (or no religion); peacefully protest injustice?
• Economic justice through a fair tax system?
• Worker protections, including fair wages, union rights and child labor laws?

If you answered “yes” to any question, you’ll be seriously hurt by a future Trump administration. Not only will Trump discard precious individual freedoms, he’ll totally control independent agencies. With SCOTUS recently granting him broad immunity, he has the power of a king, free from Congressional oversight — a terrifying proposition for a perennial self-dealer! Don’t let that happen!

Penn State should be subject to open records law

University trustees aren’t the only ones who need institutional transparency to hold Penn State accountable — all of us do. Penn State is the only public university in the Big Ten that enjoys a blanket exemption from open records laws, keeping administrative information out of the hands of the public. It’s not just the Board of Trustees’ emails or the investments office’s records to which Penn Staters and Pennsylvanians are uniquely denied access. It applies to suppressed survey data on chronic campus sexual violence and the university’s history of hiring union-busting law firms. It even exempts the taxpayer-funded Penn State police department from transparency laws that every municipal police department must comply with.

Why the exemption? In 2008, Graham Spanier successfully argued for the provision in Harrisburg, arguing that open records at Penn State would jeopardize academic excellence and faculty salary competitiveness. Today, Penn State’s ranked lower than most of its public Big Ten peers while English teaching faculty report struggling to afford life-saving medicine. Spanier’s fears were unwarranted — but the exemption kept his emails private. Turning the page on Penn State’s darkest era should mean turning the page on the laws that enabled leaders’ failures.

Lawsuits against Penn State might win access to a few documents for a few people. But all of us, especially employees and students, deserve the ability to hold our flagship university’s leaders accountable without court battles — and that starts with making Penn State, like many of its peers, subject to open records laws.

Abortion should not be a political issue

The issue referred to as “women’s reproductive rights” is widely used by politicians to try and make us think that having an abortion is like getting an ovarian cyst removed. They are enticed to neglect realizing that in abortion, another life form is involved. Abortion is not covered in our Constitution. The preservation of life is. The Supreme Court followed the guidelines of the Constitution by making abortion a state level issue. It’s the best they could do. If a law was passed to allow unrestricted abortion or the reverse, disallowing all abortions, half of us would be happy and half of us would be angry. Most people prefer some kinds of restrictions on abortion. Almost all of us have our own opinion on what should and should not be allowed. This should not be made a political issue. We are being manipulated. The real issue is, “what should a woman do with an unwanted pregnancy?” and along with that, “how do we make men responsible and accountable for both preventing unwanted pregnancy and supporting the mother and child after birth?” Impregnating a woman is not a recreational activity and it takes two people for this to happen. So please resist politicians that want to press your buttons so they get votes. Nothing of value will come of it.

Missing an opportunity

Penn State is spending $700 million to renovate Beaver Stadium, the result of which will likely reduce seats. There is a certain prestige of having the fourth largest stadium in the world. It seems to me that the trustees should have a goal to both modernize the facility and increase seating capacity. Adding over a thousand seats would make Beaver stadium the largest in the USA and third in the world. Pretty impressive for central PA. It seems to me that the architects can find a way to do it but only if there is the will to do so. In my opinion, the trustees are missing a golden opportunity for international prestige.