Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1475578
maltatoday | SUNDAY • 27 MARCH 2022 OPINION 3 LETTERS & EDITORIAL maltatoday | SUNDAY • 7 AUGUST 2022 Mikiel Galea Letters & Clarifications AUM reports WITH reference to the MaltaToday ar- ticle 'American University to give Mal- tese free admission to bolster dwindling student population' (30 July 2022), the American University of Malta would like to note that the article is riddled with conjectures and inaccuracies. The article's tagline "Sadeen has not been able to met the conditions in the original 2015 contract, having managed to enrol less than 200 of the 10,000 students it is promised to attract," is inaccurate and false. On this matter, the AUM would like to categorically deny that any condition or obligation imposed in the original contract was not met. It is only once the two campuses as contemplated in the AUM-Government agreement are built, that the minimum student threshold would initiate. AUM stresses, that at the moment only 5% of the project is completed. Once the whole process is complete, the expected number of students as delineated under the mentioned Agreement is of 4,000. Such number is cumulatively attained over the span of four years of operation i.e. a total of 1,000 students per year. Reference must be made to the fact that currently, with a mere 5% of the project complete, AUM has around 200 students currently enrolled. AUM also categorically denies the insinuation that the government is in any way financing this initative. American University of Malta Bormla Expats' 'airport' I would like to venture an observation on a certain type of disparaging lan- guage that tends to be freely used by mostly "expat"-type residents in Malta: the mostly white, European, affluent, skilled or retired pensioners who have chosen to live in Malta for either life- style reasons or because of profitable employment. Many of these people, who I meet regularly in Sliema and St Julian's, are very prone to complain – rightly so – about worsening standards in Malta. Its shabbiness, the lack of politeness from local and central authorities when deal- ing with their complaints or requests, the noise and traffic – the list abounds! And why should it not bother them? It bothers us Maltese as well! There is also another level of com- plaint, the political kind in which any- thing that cannot be explained plainly suddenly becomes necessarily an act of corruption or rotten governance. An example of the extremism of this way of thinking comes to my mind when one of my neighbours (I spend my summers in Malta) the reason a dead cat had been left discarded by the street, was because the local police were defending the perpetrators! That's bananas to me, but it is also explainable that when a group of people – even these expats – are here simply to enjoy the pleasures of our island but still are disconnected from its language or its complex politics, can only treat the most mundane of affairs as the work of some shadowy enterprise. I understand that 'entitlement' tends to be an abused word. But for these English-speaking, well-travelled, wel- comed, affluent taxpayers and rent-pay- ers, their right to treat the island as either a paradise to which they can lay claim to, or a petri-dish of bacterium they want to smash to pieces… is just the effect of the way we have turned Malta into an airport transfer lounge. Yes, it's us Maltese who have turned Malta into an airport for those who come and do as they please, so as long as we take their money in rents and tax. Yet, we don't even try to welcome these people in such a way that invites them to learn our language or become polit- ically conversant with our social reali- ties. Instead, tourists that they are, they parrot the most convenient balderdash. Mario Tabone Kent, UK