MELISSA BLOCK, host:
It's time now for your comments. Yesterday in an update on Haiti, we said that arsonists and looters were rampaging in Port-au-Prince.
NPR's David Gilkey witnessed buildings burning, and people hauling goods out of stores.
MADELEINE BRAND, host:
References to looting angered some of you. Delafield DuBoyce(ph) of El Prado, New Mexico, reflected what many of you wrote.
BLOCK: He writes: Tunneling into collapsed buildings could equally be described be as recycling. Rich storeowners aren't going to salvage that stuff. They'll all claim a total loss. Why shouldn't desperately poor people who have lost everything be allowed to scrape together some trash to rebuild their lives?
BRAND: And now to a very different topic. Yesterday, we talked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Menand about his new book on higher education. Menand talked about how much longer it takes these days to get a Ph.D.
Professor LOUIS MENAND (English and American Literature and Language, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University): The median time to get a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline like philosophy, English, art history, is nine years. If you think that you can get a law degree and argue a case before the Supreme Court in three years, get a medical degree and cut somebody open in four years, why should it take nine years to teach poetry to college freshmen?
BLOCK: Well, someone with a medical degree didn't think Menand had the numbers quite right. Robert Lynch(ph) is a doctor in St. Louis.
BRAND: He writes: The suggestion that a doctor can cut people open after four years of medical school is a distortion of reality. After four years of medical school, a student typically takes a three- to five-year residency and may then specialize by training for another three years. Thus, a pediatric cardiologist will be 10 years post-undergraduate school before being eligible for certification. While I agree that medical and English advance-degree training wastes time, the comparison was not really representative.
BLOCK: We appreciate your letters. Please write to us by going to npr.org and clicking "Contact Us" at the bottom of the page.