I should preface my response to Dick Hubert '60's letter to the editor by admitting that I am a staff writer for The Student. Perhaps that is why I took particular umbrage at Mr. Hubert's infelicitous attacks on The Student, its reporters and the students and professors of Amherst College.

Since I am cannot claim to know what William Symonds, the reporter from BusinessWeek, was told in his many interviews with members of the Amherst community, I am not writing to question the substance of Mr. Hubert's letter. I will leave such responses to the students and administrators who personally spoke with Symonds. I am simply writing to raise issue with the style and tone of Mr. Hubert's letter.

Mr. Hubert makes the rather interesting claim in his letter that Symonds should have been invited to comment on the various responses to his article. He argues that such an invitation would be in line with "a basic tenet of American journalism." Sadly, Mr. Hubert does not provide any reasoning as to why this might be the case. Given that the two pieces (the editorial and the news piece entitled, "BusinessWeek sparks campus debate") targeted by Mr. Hubert both express responses to the Symonds piece, it seems that offering Symonds another chance to express his views is both unnecessary and outside the scope of these two articles. Unfortunately, instead of listing his reasoning for such a claim in his letter, readers encounter a significant number of speculative, and seemingly baseless, accusations.

In particular, Hubert's letter goes on to suggest that there are nefarious motivations underlying The Student's claims of sensationalism. He goes so far as to suggest that The Student is conspiring with the administration to aid alumni capital campaigns and defend the authors of the CAP report. As someone who works on The Student, I find this quite insulting. I would point Mr. Hubert to the Feb. 15 Student editorial (and subsequent addendum) that clarifies the newspaper's independent position on campus.

However, these other criticisms aside, I was motivated to write largely by his letter's unnecessarily condescending tone. While it is perfectly valid to criticize the opinions of the various figures involved, including the reporters and editors of The Student, and the terminology they use, such criticism need not be disrespectful. I question the necessity of including phrases like, "While your professors may not teach getting both sides of the story in your English classes, or in any of your other classes for that matter"; or, "Perhaps the reporters and editors of The Student could start acting like journalists." The BusinessWeek article, whether sensationalist or not, raises many important questions and has sparked much debate concerning the future of Amherst College. Unfortunately, letters like those from Mr. Hubert do not contribute to the debate; they only distract from it. Perhaps the next time Mr. Hubert chooses to chime in he could tone down the vitriol.

Andre Deckrow '06

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Sidman defends with rebuttal and reproof

In his rush to condemn me, Tim Zeiser '07 succeeded in missing the entire point of my article. The central question being raised concerned the future of Amherst College's admissions policies, not our current ones. I neither stated that low-income students currently attending Amherst did not belong here nor did I equate low-income students with being intellectually inferior. Rather, my article addressed a specific part of President Marx's agenda in which he acknowledged a desire to admit more low-income students at the expense of academic rigor. President Marx has since backed away from that plan.

I don't want to see low-income -or any other type of-students being admitted to Amherst who would bring down the academic quality of an Amherst education. This position is not the same as being opposed to having students at the College from low-socioeconomic backgrounds.

Zeiser also undermined his main point about the intelligence of low-income students when he suggested that the SAT wasn't a good measure of intelligence and that we should put greater weight on class participation. While the SAT is certainly an imperfect measure of intelligence, it does correlate well to first-year grades in college and one does need a standard for measuring learning across the country. If he thinks we should throw out the SAT, then he must believe that low-income students can't perform well on the exam.

Moreover, if Zeiser feels the need to reward class participation over a written product then he has capitulated to the very stereotype that he was trying to challenge: Low-income students' writing is inferior. Essentially, instead of counteracting the stereotypes about low-income students, Zeiser gives weight to them. In the future, I would encourage Zeiser to engage in constructive dialogue instead of angry, thoughtless attacks.

Melissa Sidman '06