I want to publicly thank Greg Rivara for his excellent column of April 3.

Not often on this campus do you hear it asserted that there are limits to what any community, whether that community be a town or a university, can impose on individual members of that community.

Such limits are what those of us whom are more concerned with respecting civil liberties than with being politically correct mean when we speak of rights.

To live as a student in DeKalb is to be constantly caught in the ideological crossfire between two grubby little orthodoxies.

Neither the troglodytes who control city hall nor the tenured radicals who dominate discussion on this campus seem to recognize any moral constraint on the exercise of power beyond “don’t do anything I won’t do.”

Both groups seem maniacally focused on imposing their own idea of appropriate thought and conduct on the world at large by any means at their disposal.

In this social atmosphere, Mr. Rivara’s column rings out like a call to return to sanity.

Michael Roberts

Graduate student

Educational psychology