This is a follow-up to Professor Besser’s letter in Tuesday’s Iowa State Daily (“Sociology need not be cut”).

The letter lists the sociology department’s ongoing contributions to ISU diversity values, and its teaching, research and outreach/extension missions.

There, Professor Besser listed numbers that placed sociology as a solid, if not superior, contributor to ISU institutional objectives.

If the university’s administration wishes to claim that departmental budget cuts were applied fairly, one wonders what criteria were used to justify a cut to sociology — housed in both the LAS and CALS colleges — two-and-a-half times larger than any other department in LAS and one-and-a-half times larger than any other department in CALS.

The issue is one of fairness — i.e., the impartial application of a rule to all parties. Upon reading Professor Besser’s numbers, one cannot help but ask, “On what measure does sociology rank two-and-a-half — or even one-and-a-half — times less than other departments in the LAS and CALS colleges?”

Surely ISU administrators should be responsible enough for their decisions to provide their decision-making criteria to ISU sociologists trying to make sense of a 40 percent cut to their budget.

Carl Roberts is an associate professor of statistics and sociology.