Today, the entire student body will cast their votes on a survey conducted by the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) Senate to determine if there should be a $70,000 gift to the Trustees of Amherst College and, if this gift is approved, how it should be allocated. The intention of this monetary gift is to directly impact the areas of student life most valued by the student body, as determined by the survey, in response to the College’s current financial difficulties.

On the survey, students are presented with two options. The first is the Financial Aid and Staff Salaries package, which includes $50,000 for Financial Aid and $20,000 for staff salaries. The second is the Visiting Professorship package, which would allocate all $70,000 to provide most of the cost (the remaining cost would be covered by the school) for a visiting professor for one academic school year, the department of this visiting professor would be determined by the administration.

Both options have the possibility of serving as a ‘symbolic’ gesture on behalf of the student body in support of the College’s core values — accessibility, small class sizes and a low student-faculty ratio can be named among the values these two packages would support. Each of these characteristics of the College is important and the students, administration, faculty and trustees should work to preserve these aspects of life at the College in face of the economic crisis.

Going into this survey, however, we think that financial aid is the more pressing issue and that this choice has a possibility of having a larger impact on the student body in the coming years. The students should vote for the financial aid and salaries package, not simply because of the weight it would give the student body symbolically, or because of the nice addition the gift would lend to President Anthony Marx’s speeches to alumni asking for donations for financial aid. But, more importantly, students should vote for the financial aid and salaries package because as a student body, we should care about the continuation of the high levels of financial aid that the College previously gave to the students who need it; this traditionally high level of aid will be up for discussion and could be on the chopping block tomorrow during the Faculty Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid meeting (FCAFA).

Even if the Financial Aid and Salaries package is voted down in favor of the Visiting Professorship Package, or even if the gift is not approved at all, the FCAFA should take into consideration during their Thursday meeting the strong support Financial Aid obviously has throughout the student body, the administration and the faculty, even despite a loss at the polls if the survey returns a positive vote on the visiting professorship.

The committee should keep in their considerations that accessibility is one of the key principles of the College and that the previous levels of financial aid have helped to create the coveted socioeconomic diversity among the student body. Furthermore, the College’s policy on financial aid throughout the past couple years has served as an attraction for potential students — something that should also be strongly considered given that the College plans to increase the size of each class in the near future. So, when going into this meeting and contemplating what elements of financial aid to cut, the Committee should remember that this is not just a question of costs and budgets, but it is a question of whether or not the College is dedicated to upholding the long-standing values and commitments even through this crisis.