Amidst this past weekend's festivities, the canned food drive organized by the Amherst chapter of MassPIRG may have garnered less attention than the games or the revelry. The idea involved competing with Williams College to raise as much money and non-perishable food as possible. Although Williams failed to come through, we feel that this aborted attempt at intercollegiate collaboration belies the potential of other similar opportunities.

It is true that the College already benefits a great deal from its participation in the Five College system. Yet this should not prevent the College from looking further afield for means to supplement its students' experiences. In this respect, we think the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) offers many untapped possibilities for cooperation. Almost without exception, institutions in the NESCAC are small, co-educational, academically rigorous, geographically close and, above all, accustomed to working together (if only in sports).

As an athletic conference, the NESCAC requires "its members [to be] committed first and foremost to academic excellence, and believe that athletic excellence supports [that] educational mission." Other goals include focus on equality in treatment and student development. Working off of this set of principles, we think the NESCAC has the potential to develop into a lattice of academic relationships based on equity and reciprocity.

We recommend several avenues of liaison. Coordinated efforts for, and consolidation of opportunities in, community outreach would be a good place to start. More ambitiously, a faculty exchange system would augment departmental course offerings as well as provide Amherst professors with the capacity to bring their scholarship to other schools' forums of discourse. A steady succession of experienced professors dedicated to instruction can only enhance the strength of the faculties across the NESCAC.

The recent introduction of Interterm colloquia presents another option for an expanded future program involving more schools. The positive response to the 2007 offerings suggests that students would not be loath to travel to, say, Bowdoin or Middlebury Colleges for a day-long conference if transportation is provided.

This brings us to the prospect of increased intercollegiate student interaction. Students often cite the lack of school-sponsored interaction with other colleges as a reason for the familiar "Amherst bubble." If the NESCAC schools make a concerted effort to organize inter-school seminars and social events-and supply the necessary travel facilities-the intercollegiate exchange of ideas and values should flourish. The significance of social networking as a future workplace resource cannot be underestimated either.

We do not expect that the these intercollegiate interactions will be regimented; rather, we feel that simply fostering closer ties to its cousin institutions is a vision worth exploring. It's time to take the NESCAC beyond athletics, and build an even more meaningful association of colleges.