I’ve kept a copy of Spring 2000 Editor in Chief Megan Purn’s last letter from the editor in the bottom drawer of the Editorial Board desk all year. The letter has haunted me throughout my semester–I come across it every few weeks as I rummage through the other files. Until tonight, I hadn’t told anyone that I’d been keeping Megan’s letter, but the almost psychic way in which it echoes my own experience with the newspaper has repeatedly paralyzed me: someone else has perfectly articulated why I do what I do here.

At recent meetings of an organization unrelated to The Student Life, Director of the Campus Center Neil Gerard made thinly veiled insults to Editor-in-Chief Nora Lawrence attacking the integrity of The Student Life and its staff. His comments implied that TSL staffers are ethically bankrupt, and that writing for the paper is not something to be proud of. While Gerard surely would excuse his comments as harmless jokes, they are hostile on both personal and professional levels.

I would like to offer my sincere and profound apologies to the entire college for my behavior and what I did to Professor Sontag last Halloween eve. For someone who takes a great deal of pride in always being "right," it is a very humbling experience to have been deluded–to having interpreted a situation wrong, to having had an incorrect view of things. For days, maybe weeks before the incident, I was rushing headlong into a gaderene mania so intense I could not distinguish true from false or illusion from reality.

The administration here can’t quite seem how not to screw up. The study abroad fiasco two years ago. The housing crunch last year, where Pomona ended up paying people to leave campus. This year, denying freshmen the option to live off campus? Because they’re freshmen?

I enjoyed your recent article on faculty approval of the new Environmental Analysis (EA) major, but hasten to correct the statement that I shall be running the new EA program. This is not true. In fact, my involvement with EA is transitional and diminishing, and as far as running the program goes, the coordinators for 2001-2002 will be professors Richard Elderkin (Mathematics) and Gene Fowler (Biology).

We are writing in response to David Park’s ASPC candidate statement. We were shocked and upset to read that he recommended himself for the office of Vice President of Pomona College based partly on the fact that he had had (implied) sex with a prom queen.

The Department of Anthropology is pleased that you decided to cover our aborted search for a new colleague in Women’s Studies in Anthropology. However, we feel that the article by Peggy Liao in the April 6 edition of the paper ("Joint Professor Search is Aborted Due to Disagreement") requires some clarification.

I’m told this issue of TSL will contain an ad congratulating the senior class for its "Class Gift." I would like each reader of TSL to imagine for a minute that he or she had $4,500 to be donated in any way he or she deemed fit.

$4,500 could purchase thousands of meals, maybe preventing a few of the deaths that occur in every day due to starvation (see Oxfam International).

When did it become "cool" to attack people (i.e. certain faculty) by labeling them as gay? I am specifically referring to an article in your joke issue referring to Professor John Seery and his sexuality.