What a comeback story! Yet somehow the Star Tribune’s Aug. 16 story managed to turn it into a doomed college dragging on the university’s $4.5 billion budget with its free tuition to a handful of deserving Native students. Coupled with deceptive photos of empty halls taken — you’d never guess it — the week before students returned to campus and you’ve got yourself a real hit-job contrived by a couple of metro voices dedicated to slandering Morris. No matter how far down you bury a 25% enrollment increase (the 13th paragraph!), the reality is Morris is on the rise. Its alumni are our state’s teachers, scientists, social workers and, in my case, attorneys. Morris gives Minnesota so much more than it costs to run. We are lucky to have it.
Michael McBride, Minneapolis
The writer is a 2011 graduate of the University of Minnesota Morris and former president of the Morris Campus Student Association.
I am sitting here reading about young people being addicted to scrolling and the effect of artificial intelligence in classrooms (“I’m ditching computers in my public school classroom this year,” Strib Voices, Aug. 20). I am 71 and waste many hours doing the same thing — justifying my love for animals as a reason to spend hours of the time I have left on this Earth looking at a screen.
It takes me away from washing my floors, taking a walk, cleaning out a closet. I joke about being in my 80s one day and happily watching a hunky farrier from Scotland cleaning horses’ hooves.
Maybe I’ll make it to 80 if I program myself to stop scrolling and start moving around.