With every round of pre-registration, students-and The Student-find themselves dissatisfied with something: the course offerings, the concentration of non-science classes at certain time slots, the difficulty of registering for a Five College course. The Office of the Registrar has strived to address these concerns, and over this academic year amelioration has been forthcoming. Five College course registration is now more streamlined, and next semester there will be a good number of 8:30 classes to minimize overlaps. This week, however, students of philosophy are grappling with a more fundamental anxiety-simply finding enough classes that pique their interest.

Philosophy, traditionally an excellent department, will run on a severely reduced staff this fall and possibly next spring as well. With Professors Kearns and Shah absent and Professor Smith's future at the College uncertain, the department faces the prospect of retaining just three full-time faculty members. This poses a problem on several levels.

The first, perhaps most relevant to non-majors, concerns the paucity of courses. At the moment there will only be six courses (not including courses pending approval) offered by the department in the fall, halved from the 12 this semester. Majors worry, in particular, about the lack of a 40-level course. Students new to philosophy may choose from just three courses, one of which still lacks an official instructor (Introduction to Philosophy). It is all the more striking that, considering the department's lightweight course list, more effort has not been made to keep or adequately replace Professor Smith.

At the same time, philosophy majors intending to formulate a thesis are likely to be limited in terms of possible fields of specialization. The department's ethicist, Professor Shah, will be away for a year, and the department will also lose the legal expertise of Professor Kearns to retirement. It seems natural to conclude that the remaining professors will be overburdened as thesis advisors, as thesis reviewers and simply as teachers.

It is possible, of course, visiting professors will be hired as a stopgap measure; with the new hiring policies regarding visiting appointments though, this appears to be increasingly unlikely. The subplot to this minor tragedy, Professor Smith's departure, has thus taken on a complexion of ludicrousness. Does there really exist a compelling reason, short of perhaps a unilateral decision on Smith's part not to stay, to weaken the department further?

The ones among us who have taken philosophy courses express almost unanimous praise for the quality of instruction and the variety of course offerings in the past. If the department is to maintain its standing as one of the nation's strongest undergraduate programs, measures must be taken to bolster the staff. We think one of the ways may be to offer Smith an extended professorship, but above all the administration must pay more attention to supporting a range of course offerings capable of sustaining the intellectualism of Amherst's students.