I am a member of the university football team. I have thoroughly enjoyed my collegiate experience since I arrived here three years ago. I believe Georgia fans are some of the most supportive and loyal fans out there.

That is part of the reason I found Ms. Bailey Keigers article “Athletes disregard privileged position” (April 20) so disheartening. She talks about loving Georgia athletics and never missing a game since she started attending the university as well as having a disproportionate amount of red and black in her closet.

Despite her saying these things, she continued to comment on “the level of disrespect some student athletes — especially football players — have for their position at the university.”

I, in no way, condone the behaviors of any athletes that break the rules set out for them by our athletic administration.

However, I do not believe that a student athlete should be held to any higher standard than a normal student when being reprimanded for their actions.

We are definitely in the spotlight and must hold ourselves to a higher standard. We have more stipulations put on our actions than non-athlete students and often have heavier loads as well.

I agree that being a student athlete is a privilege. Some of those privileges include intense work outs in our “state of the art training facility separate from the ‘regular’ student gym,” coming back to our “exclusive study center” after practice and work outs for study hall hours and “tutors and other academic resources,” as well as other “extra perks” that she says are reasonable.

I am more than grateful for the resources provided to me and my teammates. But the fact remains Zach Mettenberger is only a freshman. He should have used better judgment, but he would not be the first university student to get in trouble. He had a clean slate throughout high school and the rest of his freshman year of college.

If the staff of the Red & Black or any other student organization were watched as closely as our student athletes are then perhaps they would have more arrests and incidents too.

So my advice to all UGA fans is to put this into perspective — UGA student athletes do not show a “terrible ungratefulness of the benefits that have been bestowed upon” them.

One mistake should not destroy Mettenberger or the rest of the student athletes’ characters. Ms. Keiger was out of line for a number of her comments and should show that she is a “huge sports fan” with classier reporting and discontinue writing columns like this one.

A true fan would never think to “burn the red and black in her closet” as she suggested in her column.

Aron white, tight end

Junior, Columbia, MO

Business management

Blaming victim for rape shows lack of research

I was incredibly shocked while reading Mr. Michael Yu’s editorial, “Players Proven Guilty Without a Trial,” (April 26) when I read this: “What if the woman was so heavily intoxicated that she was unable to clearly state that she didn’t want to have sex?”

Throughout the whole piece, Mr. Yu uses victim blaming to try to elicit sympathy from the public for an alleged rapist, saying the fact that alcohol was involved could excuse him from his purported crime.

In Georgia, it is impossible to give consent while under the influence of drugs and alcohol. This is a basic law that any research would have shown Mr. Yu. Further research into the case might have shown that the reason the case isn’t faring too well for the state isn’t because of Mr. Roethlisberger’s presumed innocence but due to police bungling.

While those are not the only elements that Mr. Yu skipped over to write his flawed piece, they are important ones.

Before Mr. Yu wrote this piece he could have looked past his own outrage that an all-American quarterback was taken off the roster because he was accused of a heinous crime.

Rape cases are hard to prosecute due to the idea in our culture that women either deserve what happened to them or are just faking it for attention, and I would greatly appreciate if the Red & Black didn’t support that type of message in the future.

Maggie Kantor

Junior, Marietta

International business, management and French

Rape allegations always questioned by critics

Dear Mr. Yu,

Your article on the purported innocence of Ben Roethlisberger is lacking on a few different levels. First, your what-ifs present a few scenarios in which consent is questionable and not explicit.

Do you know what it is called when consent is not explicit? Rape.

Before a claim is made in favor of the defendant questioning his ability to have known that about the victim (I have removed your quotation marks), I will remind you that prior ignorance of the law is not a sound legal defense in the United States.

On the subject of the legal system, rape cases are difficult to carry out on the basis of preponderance simply due to their nature.

The majority of cases are acquaintance rape, where physical evidence is frequently lacking or indistinguishable from that of consensual sex; additionally, women are sometimes taught to “lie back and take it,” to “choose” mere rape instead of both rape and murder.

And in the event of a rape case actually going to trial, the proceedings are typically in favor of the male defendant, whose criminal backgrounds are often not admissible in court while the sexual history, reputation, morals, and clothing choices of the victim often are.

Yes, what routinely results is a case of he-said/she-said. But due to the power and privilege held by men today and the pervasive cultural cues that suggest women are asking for violence to be committed against them simply for acting freely, no matter how loud she says rape, it will simply not be heard.

So I ask you: what sort of woman would go through humiliating, invasive physical examinations, lengthy character-assassinating court proceedings, all while setting up her own name to be dragged through the mud by people like you?

People like you who wonder at their mildest if maybe she just “drank too much and regretted it,” and at the worst, that she was “too ugly to have even been raped so she must have be making it up for attention,” (the latter being a comment summary of many existing Facebook groups made in defense of accused rapists).

My guess is that, save for cases of ill-calculated sociopathy, a woman would only “cry rape” if she were, in fact, raped and seeking that elusive justice for the act, which could even result in a lower sentence than a drug offense if prosecuted.

In today’s rape culture, it is simply improbable that some random vengeful woman would willingly put herself through this in order to “ruin an innocent man’s reputation.”

Alina Yudkevich

Sophomore, Marietta

Political science and Sociology

More finance majors not needed in Wall Street

I’m writing in response to an article published Monday, April 26 titled “Teacher Calls for Finance Classes.”

The issue most pressing for UGA students is not financial illiteracy or extravagant spending on credit cards but the disappearance of jobs and collapsing economy that came with the most recent financial crash – a financial crash created by former finance majors.

What we need is less finance courses, not more of them.

Mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and subprime lending practices all entered into the public consciousness in late 2008 when news broke about our most recent stock market crash. But these terms don’t exist in a vacuum, they have a history.

For the last 30 years, Wall Street firms and banks, populated by college graduates with finance and business degrees, have been pushing Congress to deregulate financial markets. The myth of perpetual growth and optimal efficiency of free-market capitalism dictated government policy on regulation.

Graduates with finance degrees created complicated formulas to play with other peoples’ money and maximize profit for themselves — this is what mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and subprime loans are.

We don’t need more finance majors — it’s time to move away from a government and university of finance and business majors and toward a government that studies history.

Matthew Boynton

Senior, Roswell

Interdisciplinary studies