The Amherst Contra

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 our goals and understands why I choose to publish the pieces I do, and also if they want to contribute to Contra, what they might expect.