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I was particularly amused at the "Fleeced Again" article under Americana [May 1] dealing with wasteful undertakings by academic researchers. Colorful Senator William Proxmire has delightfully poked fun at those endeavors, considered purposeless and a waste of the taxpayers' money. Ironically, the American taxpayer is paying for those trifling doings of Proxmire's staff researchers.
Kip Randall
Whitefish Bay, Wis.
I am surprised that TIME should still opt for the same brand of cheap sensationalism as Senator Proxmire. Of the $97,000 of the NIMH grant in question, a maximum of $50 was spent on the brothel study. This minute aspect of the total project resulted in a single paragraph of 14 lines in a book of 324 pages where George Primov and I reported the results of our study, approximately the one-thousandth part of the total project. The book is entitled Inequality in the Peruvian Andes; Class and Ethnicity in Cuzco. That sounds sexy, doesn't it? If my study was about prostitution, then TIME is a pornographic magazine. It too occasionally mentions prostitution.
Pierre L. van den Berghe
University of Washington
Seattle