A Response to "Conflicts on Campus"

I’d like to offer a couple of thoughts in response to President Biddy Martin’s “Conflicts on Campus” email to the Amherst College community. The first has to do with her discussion of the drawing of a swastika on the face of an unconscious student [https://amherststudent.com/article/members-of-mens-lacrosse-posted-snapchat-photos-of-unconscious-person-with-swastika-drawn-on-face] during an off-campus party. Why, she asks, would anyone draw such a symbol — and, although she doesn’t say it, why w

Trump and the Activity of Thinking

The following piece was first delivered as a paper presentation to senior English majors. Everyone involved in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the philosopher Hannah Arendt writes in “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” seemed to find it impossible “to admit that an average, ‘normal’ person, neither feeble-minded nor indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong.” When the judges told Eichmann, who oversaw the deportation of Eastern European Jews to concentration camps, t