Defamiliarizing Discourse

Between the Point/Counterpoint series, LitFest, the Presidential Scholars Program, and innumerable weekly events, Amherst students have access to a wealth of visiting speakers on campus. Indeed, it feels as though one can’t go a week without being bombarded by fliers in a GroupMe chat or Valentine Dining Hall for at least one talk, often by impressively big names in government and academia.

Though we are extremely privileged as an institution to be able to bring these outside perspectives to our campus on such a regular basis, the Editorial Board feels that we need greater diversity in the types of speakers we bring onto this campus. The vast majority of speakers the administration brings are figureheads whose talks often feel surface-level or highly predictable, and allow little room for students to critically discuss or debate with the speakers. Beyond our typical candidate pool — which mainly encompasses Capitol Hill Democrats and professors from peer institutions — there are guests who could turn the worn-out speaker format into a truly provocative and stimulating event on campus.

This reflection is crucial in the context of impending school-wide budget cuts, which will likely limit the number of speaker opportunities in the next academic year. Now, we need to seriously think about the sorts of speakers and outside perspectives we want to bring to our campus, and how we want to engage in dialogue with those speakers when they do come.

While there's some truth in the claim that the lack of speaker diversity reflects Amherst’s strictly progressive politics, there are plenty of differing opinions about issues within our majority left-leaning campus: last year’s Point/ Counterpoint debate between Kwame Anthony Appiah and Adolph Reed Jr. over the extent to which race can be reduced to a function of class is a stellar example. Amherst could do more to highlight these points of friction among leftleaning intellectuals. Furthermore, although political diversity is important, speakers do not have to always be brought in to discuss important societal and global issues. We can just as easily bring in more light-hearted speakers who would rather discuss, say, the philosophy of love and marriage.

That being said, there is absolutely space to