the following appeared as part of a recommendation made by a faculty member to the president of a large university.

"never once in our 150-year history as a university have we clarified our objectives. how, then, can we hope to adapt as an institution to the new challenges facing higher education. as a first step in this evolutionary process, therefore, we should send out questionnaires asking faculty members why they teach, asking students what they want from this university, and asking former students what they gained from their own education here. when the replies come in, we can tabulate them and formulate an official statement of our educational mission. this will surely result in improved programs at our university."

the following appeared in the editorial section of an educational publication.

"one study at lee university found that first-semester grades of teenage students who had always attended public, tax-supported schools were slightly lower than the grades of students who had received some home schooling instruction by parents at home, although the grade differences disappeared in the second semester. these results suggest that home schooling is the best way to educate teenage children. therefore, instead of spending more money on public education, the government should provide financial incentives so that home schooling is an option for more parents. after all, children schooled at home receive more attention, since they are taught by the best possible teacher: a parent who has a high stake in educating them well."

the following report appeared in a memo from the vice president of the southside transportation authority.

"we should abandon our current five-year plan to purchase additional buses to serve the campus of southside university, because students there are unlikely to use them. consider the results of the recent campaign sponsored by the environmental club at southside university: in a program on the campus radio station, the club asked students to call in and pledge that they would commute to school by bus instead of by automobile at least one day per week. only ten percent of the students called in and pledged. in view of the campaign's lack of success, we can assume that the bus service we currently offer will continue to be sufficient to serve the university."

the following appeared in an editorial in the mason city newspaper.

"at present, mason city residents seldom use the nearby mason river for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. but that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up mason river. therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the mason city council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the mason river."

the following is part of a letter from the brookfree school board.

"as part of our new educational reform program, we identified ten schools most in need of immediate improvement. an advisory committee is now recommending that we hire consultants to study further the schools' problems and to propose a plan of action. only two years ago, however, another group of consultants determined that several schools in our district had problems because their principals were inexperienced. thus, if we want to see immediate improvement in our schools and save the district the money it would spend on hiring more consultants, we should replace all the principals in the ten worst schools with ten of our most experienced principals in the district."

the following is a memorandum from the business manager of wlss television station.

"over the past year, our late-night news program has devoted increasingly more time to covering national news and less time to covering weather and local news. during the same time period, most of the complaints we received from viewers were concerned with the station's coverage of weather and local news. in addition, several local businesses that used to run advertisements during our late-night news program have just cancelled their advertising contracts with us. therefore, in order to attract more viewers to our news programs and to avoid losing any further advertising revenues, we should expand the coverage of weather and local news on all our news programs."