Contra, the double sided “broadside” you can find around Amherst’s campus, sprung out of a desire to encourage more discussion about important issues around campus. It can feel, sometimes, that everyone at Amherst agrees on almost everything or, perhaps, that everyone who disagrees has gotten very good at keeping quiet. That’s unfortunate. College is a place where we should encounter new and challenging ideas, where we should be forced to look critically at our preconceived notions of the world and revise them or at least clarify for ourselves why those notions are good and true. And this shouldn’t just happen within the classroom.
But to do this, to examine our beliefs in detail, we cannot only engage with people who already agree with us. To really understand important topics, we must engage with people that disagree with us. We must view issues from new angles. Perhaps we will find these new angles un-informed and lackluster. But maybe, scrutinizing our own views, we will see that we have been wrong.
My hope is that Contra can provide those new perspectives for its readers, for you. Contra is a bi-weekly single sheet opinion piece whose subjects will vary widely. On the reverse side, where this piece currently is, you’ll normally find response letters to previous weeks’ pieces. After all, a discussion is no discussion with just one voice.
In publishing and selecting our pieces, Contra will be guided by a number of principles. These principles will be used when making editorial decisions, both when I select individual pieces to publish and guiding the publication as a whole. I’m communicating them here so that everyone who might read Contra is aware of ourgoals and understands why I choose to publish the pieces I do, and also if they want to contribute to Contra, what they might expect.
Start Discussion
My desire in publishing Contra is not to provoke anger. Rather, my hope is that readers like you will seriously engage with the pieces published here. Therefore, Contra will not be publishing articles defending opinions popular on Amherst campus.If you want to defend Trump, or communism, or critique the very existence of the American state or our particular Amherst culture, I want you to write for Contra. That’s not to say I just want the extremes. Simply, I don’t want to publish pieces that everyone will immediately and naturally agree with. And I don’t want pieces whose purpose is to anger. My goal is to start interesting discussions, not stop them before they start.
Writers Can Be Anonymous
Contra extends the offer to any writer to remain anonymous. In a perfect world, I’d prefer to talk and write and discuss in full disclosure, unmasked. However, people do fear social repercussions for voicing and holding certain opinions, and whether that fear is warranted or not, it is real. When presented with the choice between voicing different opinions and facing consequences or staying silent, people seem to have chosen the latter. So, I’m easing the choice, in the hope that people will speak.
However, I do not extend the same offer of anonymity to myself. All my contributions to Contra will be clearly attributed to me.
High Editorial Standards
Contra will not be a platform for the sloppily written, the poorly thought out or the flatly wrong. Any piece, to start a discussion of value, must at least be well argued and well written. Therefore, I will strive to publish articles that are readable and rigorous. In addition, pieces submitted to Contra may be edited, or rejected.
Commitment to Response Letters
No discussion is complete without the response. So, each week Contra will publish response letters to the pieces from the previous weeks. Those letters will be located in the space this piece is currently occupying. In general, this is the only place where rebuttals will be published. The main articles for each week should be discussing new topics. Therefore, letters will be shorter and more to the point. Of course, the offer of anonymity is extended just the same to letter writers as other writers.
I will conclude by saying that the opinions and pieces that appear here will not necessarily represent my own opinion. I don’t hold myself above the quiet kind of agreement that has taken Amherst’s campus.
Contra is a continuing experiment. Every issue is published with the expectation that students on this campus have interesting and insightful things to say, and that not all of these interesting or insightful things fall within the narrow range of opinion that Amherst has deemed socially acceptable. We had some success in our previous semester, but that is no guarantee of success this semester. All I hope is that Contra will offer interesting and new ideas. Some of these ideas, I’m sure, will disappoint. Some of them, I hope, will amaze.
Want to get involved? Submissions are open to anyone in the Amherst College community, from student to employee. Email [email protected] with your piece and tell us whether you’d like to remain anonymous. Letters should be between 100 to 250 words, pieces between 600 and 1000. We’ll contact you with edits if we’ve chosen to publish your contribution. If you want to get involved another way, send us an email as well. We’re a student organization open to anyone.