Tomorrow could be the start of a momentous change at Amherst College. We, the student body, will be voting on whether we support the College Council's proposed Honor Code as a means of addressing the rise of cheating and plagiarism on campus. The notion of an "Honor Code" sounds off-putting at first. For some, it harks back to a by-gone age of rigidity and conformity. Yet this association is the result of a misconception. It comes from the belief that "Honor Code" means a clamp-down by the administration because of its distrust of the students. An Honor Code, rather, when properly understood and formulated, is an investment of trust and power directly into the students' hands: It is the administration realizing that only the student body can truly reach the heart of the problem of academic dishonesty.

Indeed, the modest changes proposed by the College Council lead unquestionably in this direction. The very fact that the Code is being placed before the students for initial approval before approaching the faculty for permanent changes is a telling fact. Further, the Code, if accepted, is to be perpetually subjected to scrutiny and revision by the students as it goes to referendum every four years. The suggested change in the disciplinary procedure will allow for more direct involvement by students in the adjudication of their peers' offenses. Finally, the suggestion that students sign the Code upon entry, affirming their academic commitment to each other, will go a long way to bringing the issues to the forefront and remind students that above all they are responsible to each other in the classroom.

I would encourage students to take control away from the administration, admit that in large part, we are largely responsible for academic infractions and decide collectively that we will address the issue ourselves. We can begin to do this with a vote for the Honor Code.

Mihailis Diamantis '04

College Council Member

Preserve natural law ideology

Professor of Sociology Jan Dizard's piece from the March 24 Amherst Student ("Opposing views need to be taken seriously") makes several assertions that bear clarification or correction. Dizard revels in providing the history of Professor of Political Science Hadley Arkes' activities with his alumni group, straining to cloak them in a nefarious and diabolical light. The question that he leaves unanswered is why Arkes' movement has resonated with so many alumni (and quite a few current students). Dizard dismisses any concerns over a lack of intellectual diversity at Amherst, ignoring the value some alumni might see in preserving the teachings of Abraham Lincoln and the founders at Amherst after Arkes' retirement. The homogeneity of ideology embraced by the current Amherst faculty makes it unlikely that this will occur without considerable effort.

Dizard claims that at Amherst, "we hire professors because of their intellect and their commitment to unfettered inquiry, not because of their political ideology." I assume the professor is aware that the gross imbalance of political ideology on the Amherst faculty belies this assertion, as evidenced by the survey of Amherst voter rolls undertaken recently by a campus publication, which found one registered Republican among a faculty of 185. Clearly such a skew could not be randomly obtained and it is obvious that, whether overt or not, political screening has long been at work in the hiring processes conducted at Amherst. Many on the faculty might resist this notion, since in their mind they have hired only those candidates they found "most sensible." The difficulty is that, as evidenced by the extreme uproar over the Justice Scalia lecture, many at Amherst have ceased to respect viewpoints based on self-evident truth and natural law as legitimate, and certainly would not deem them sensible. Thus, it has become impossible for an Arkes, a Scalia or any scholar of similar mind to be hired at Amherst.

The recent creations of WAGS, LJST and other departments and programs demonstrate a tradition of faculty members starting academic movements to bring teaching to the Amherst campus that would be otherwise unavailable. Does anyone dispute that many viewpoints, including the teachings of the founders, would not be taught at Amherst absent the efforts of Arkes and others who are similarly inclined? Dizard claims that "faculty do not jockey to hire someone to teach a subject from a specific and unvarying ideological point of view," and I take him at his word. It has become accepted that faculty appointed in many of the humanities departments will embrace postmodernism and relativism, so no jockeying is needed to employ the type of political litmus tests that have rendered the current skew of Amherst's faculty. Dizard should quit his condemnation of attempts to preserve voices like Arkes' at Amherst and concentrate instead on how the College arrived at the gross imbalance that has given rise to such efforts.

J. Ashley Ebersole '01

Restrict liberals' speech as well

Over the past few months we've learned all about the limits of free speech at Amherst. Those who engage in "vitriolic name-calling," according to the 16 professors who boycotted Justice Scalia's lecture in February, should not be invited to the College. We were assured that the professors' protest was directed at Scalia's style, rather than his conservative judicial philosophy. We waited with interest to see if this new principle would be applied to liberal as well as conservative speakers.

And so it was with some surprise that we watched the Reverend Al Sharpton, invited to Amherst by the College Democrats, come and go this weekend with nary a word of disapproval from Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat, Professor of Sociology Jan Dizard, Professor of Political Science Nasser Hussain and the other signatories of the faculty boycott letter.

By the professors' standards, Sharpton clearly indulges in "vitriolic name calling." Speaking at a funeral in Brooklyn in 1991, Sharpton referred contemptuously to the local orthodox Jewish population as the "diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights." In 1995, Sharpton called a Jewish storeowner a "white interloper." Three years later, Sharpton was found liable for defamation in a lawsuit related to the Tawana Brawley affair. Sharpton has even referred to African-Americans who disagree with him as "yellow niggers." But any condemnation of Sharpton's "vitriolic name calling" from the Amherst faculty went curiously unreported.

Nor is this peculiar silence confined to Sharpton's visit. Any liberal, no matter how offensive, apparently passes muster for our LJST department. Barbara Ehrenreich, speaking at Amherst on Sept. 11, 2001, called President Bush a "moron" and expressed her fear that the administration was going to "bomb a bunch of brown people." There was not a peep from the Amherst faculty. So why was Scalia received with jeers, catcalls and "quack, quack" posters, while Sharpton enjoyed a standing ovation? Could it be, perish the thought, that it's because Scalia is a conservative, and Sharpton is a liberal?

Ethan Davis '05

Ryan Raskopf '05

Jed Doty '05

Music facility is inadequate

The music department has been making great things happen on campus this year. The Music 9 and 10 residencies (where the music department brings in professional musicians to work with students) have spurred students' interest in chamber music, and the excellence of performance ensembles-from concert choir to the jazz combos-have spurred hundreds of students to participate in music. Unfortunately, the building that houses the music department, the Arms Music Building, is quickly becoming inadequate for the needs of the department.

First of all, the place is just dismal: horrible lighting, little slits for windows, glass walls and an ugly, concrete ceiling that make you feel like you're working in a prison. The lobby is a huge, impersonal cavern; nothing in the place is inviting at all.

Furthermore, whoever designed the building had no concept of efficiency. Offices are crammed into practice rooms because the lobby is such a huge waste of space. One of the main rehearsal spaces is connected to an office, with only a pane of glass separating them. Maybe they didn't realize it at the time, but glass isn't an effective sound-proofing device.

This raises another problem with the building: nothing is soundproof! Nothing is more upsetting while practicing than having to suffer through an off-key vocalist trying to sing Brittney Spears. The music program is getting too big to have to cope with issues of bad architectural planning.

Musical programs on campus have outgrown the building to such an extent that even practice time is hard to come by. When I went in to practice last Friday morning, I was met with zero available practice rooms. It's great that more students are practicing and trying to better themselves as musicians, but shouldn't the building be able to accommodate that?

I know that there's nobody to blame here except for the people that designed that hopeless piece of architecture, but it's time to consider taking some steps to work around Arms' limitations. We're in the middle of building new dorms, so why not put some sound-proof space into them for rehearsals and personal practice? Or build an annex where musicians can work in peace? It's a bad sign that I'm just a freshman and already fed up with our sorry excuse for a music building. It's time to start looking for answers, not excuses.

Alex Rodriguez '07