Letter to the Editor
February 11, 2016Professor Isserman’s letter is in response to concerns over criticisms of two of his colleagues on the faculty. More ...
Editorial
Changes at Counseling Center a good step
February 4, 2016As several recent Spectator stories have reported, both the Health and Counseling Centers have faced an influx of demand. As the article this week notes, the Health Center lost its medical doctor and has had to hire a part-time MD to fill the gap. Unfortunately, the new doctor will only be available to see Hamilton students on Thursday afternoons from 1-4 p.m. Meanwhile, the Counseling Center has responded to heightened demand by doubling the psychiatrist’s hours and treating students increasingly in a group therapy format. More ...
Reflecting on the next president
January 28, 2016In the last week of the fall semester, the Presidential Search Committee summoned the campus community to the Chapel to announce that David Wippman will be the next president of the College. Wippman’s selection was met with mostly, but not exclusively, praise from students. As a leader in the international law community, all are impressed with Wippman’s scholarly and humanitarian work. The announcement came, however, at a highly-charged time in discussions of diversity on the Hill. The trustees introduced Wippman a week after the group that calls itself The Movement demanded the next president be a person of color. The search committee was clearly cognizant of this demand, made after they had pegged Wippman as their choice. Co-chairs Steve Sadove ’73 and Robert Delaney ’79 worked to play up Wippman’s diversity work in the international community at a press conference. Still, some expressed frustration at the selection of a white male. More ...
Do we have traditions?
December 10, 2015The Citrus Bowl should make us ask ourselves the same question every year: What are our traditions? The Citrus Bowl? Class and Charter Day? FebFest? These are the kinds of things that tour guides talk about. But let’s consider the Citrus Bowl. It is nothing more than our first home hockey game, yet it has been elevated into Hamilton lore because of the traditional throwing of oranges onto the ice. The practice has been rightly banned. And yet we keep the name as if it remains a tradition. It’s a gimmick. More ...
Debating The Movement
December 3, 2015Reactions to The Movement’s demands have been swift and decisive. Students, alumni and many outside of the campus community have denounced the demands as needlessly polemical, unproductive and even embarrassing. They’ve panned the notion of eliminating references to Elihu Root on campus, mandating a person-of-color as Hamilton’s next president, and free tuition for “indigenous” students. Some have even noted grammatical mistakes. It’s probably true that a document that makes many students say “what wallpaper?” is not the most productive. People have been quick to dismiss it as the absurd folly of a small number of students piggybacking on recent protests at the University of Missouri, Yale University and elsewhere. All this has gone to discredit the list of demands. More ...
An intellectual home
November 13, 2015“It is not about creating an intellectual space… It is about creating a home here.” In a viral video, a Yale student shouts these words in the face of Nicholas Christakis, a Yale professor at the center of controversy over appropriate Halloween costumes at the University. When did those terms become antithetical? We ask, can there be both? More ...
The Spectator looks to change with the times
November 6, 2015Because The Spectator is entirely student-run with no oversight, we never really have anyone looking in on what we do. Last Thursday, we hosted a panel to speak on the future of journalism, and it was a good opportunity to reevaluate our own practices. More ...
Introducing SpecSpeak
October 29, 2015Hamilton College stands apart from its peer institutions for its renowned writing program, a defining characteristic of its prestigious academic curriculum. Through writing-intensive courses and the significant assistance of the Nesbitt-Johnson Writing Center, Hamilton improves and primes the skills of even the most eloquent student writers. More ...
Reflecting on the shelter-in-place
October 23, 2015Some students have called the shelter-in-place ‘ridiculous.’ Indeed, the basic narrative is almost comic: a student with a Nerf gun participating in an annual event gets reported as a possible shooter, shutting down the College and several schools around the country that received the emergency notification. More ...
Better health services is more than a new building
October 8, 2015As we reported in our lead story, with the leadership gift of Joel and Beth Johnson, Hamilton will be constructing a new building to replace the outdated Thomas B. Rudd Health Center. More ...