This is in response to Daniel Kempton’s defense of Eric Johnson’s selectively encouraging people to register to vote. Kempton (correctly) notes in a Sept. 21 letter to the editor that Johnson’s activities are perfectly legal. He also states that it is good politics. This is where I begin to differ. While, indeed, it is good politics if your only concern is winning the election, I would argue it is very poor politics if your concern is an election outcome that accurately reflects the will of the people – all the people, since we all have to live with the outcome. Isn’t it better to win because your ideas are superior to your opponents’, or at least because you’ve done a better job of selling your ideas to the electorate, than to win because more of the “right” people managed to show up to the polls?

We are a large public university, where we train tomorrow’s leaders. Shouldn’t we be instilling them with a sense of fairness rather than a sense of winning at the expense of fairness? Kempton takes the opportunity to get a dig in at CBS News as a role model. I only wish we could be better role models here at NIU.

Paul Stoddard

Associate professor, geology and environmental geoscience