I want to give the administration a belated "Bravo!" on the way they handled the Daily Jolt postings about the assault near the PVTA stop a few weeks back. This may be the first instance during my time at Amherst that the administration and I have completely agreed upon the course of action taken when combating intolerance or dealing with sensitive issues. The choice of action was between actively punishing certain students who posted offensive material on the Internet by requesting information from the website, or standing together as a community united against bigotry in a campus-wide letter. The latter route was taken, and I, for one, applaud the decision.

Of course I am giving the administration the benefit of the doubt in the situation, as it is unlikely that the school could have really claimed jurisdiction over an Internet site that is not directly affiliated with the campus. However, I think there is something valuable in the way the President and the Dean of Students approached the issue, irrespective of the other options that may have been available to them. It is a far too common on college campuses these days for administrators to punish students for insensitive comments, and then leave the issue without proper redress, particularly in a public forum.

I read the postings on the Jolt that made reference to the Asian-American youths who assaulted two Amherst students. As best as I could tell, some of them were jokes in poor taste and some were truly inflammatory racial remarks. Now as vile as many of these postings were, the fact that a public stand was taken by the administration and student body at large is a much more constructive denunciation of provocative, insensitive racial remarks than any punishment that could have been conceived of by the dean's office.

Beyond this, I can say that I would rather live in a community that abhors racial intolerance and speaks out against it, rather than one that assumes the precarious role of speech police, attempting to discern between intent and effect, ignorance and prejudice. There is an old saying that "sunlight is the best disinfectant," and in this circumstance, the proverb has certainly proved true. A few people chose to express ideas that were hurtful to the Amherst community and in turn, the Amherst community rallied to discredit intolerance through reasoned discourse, not just the power of administrative sanctions. Intolerance cannot survive in a place where ideas are freely expressed, weighed and then either accepted or discarded. Amherst should always be such a place.

Buckman Sexton '04

Reflecting on the positives

With so much happening across campus and the world that has sent students, faculty and staff into frenzied discussions on the issues of racism, piracy, the Patriot Act, the lack of a core curriculum and baseball, I thought that I may want to take the time to offer my opinions on one of the overlooked, but no less important, postive things happening on our campus, or rather, not happening on campus: rioting.

On the nights when certain baseball teams would defeat another, (how, I wouldn't know, because the only baseball I have ever understood was "Arithemetic Baseball," an educational game that runs on the Apple II) reports of riots and drunken individuals throwing beer cans everywhere would come from UMass and Boston.

My friends at UMass would bar their doors and arm themselves with swords and clubs during the more important games in fear of an angry (or happy, depending on who won) mob charging into their rooms. I'm pleased to say that I neither feared for my life nor my property during those nights, and my calmness was repaid by all but two incidents in which an individual shouted loudly outside my dorm. During both incidents, the shouting ceased after my suitemate and I told them to be quiet, and in one case, the individual in question was even nice enough to shout back "sorry!"

While there are people with racist attitutes on campus towards a group I belong to by birth, the RIAA probably wants to sue me, the FBI wants to access my library records (it's times like this when I'm glad that I have memorized and burned the copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook that I once had access to), and almost nothing can make me take a class in departments like Sociology or American Studies, it is good to know that ther are still some things going well at the College.

Wing Mui '05