New Principles document embraces simplicity
By Jonas Shellhammer
As the year winds down and both faculty and students look forward to the end of the academic year, so too is Earlham’s review of its Principles and Practices document nearing the final stages of its process.
The review process, which happens every four years, will be complete before the end of the semester. This time around, the committee in charge of the review has spent most of its time on two sections entitled “Simplicity” and “Community.”
In fact, a section on consensus governance was edited and merged with the community section, according to Professor of Classics Stephen Heiny, who served on the review committee.
The rationale behind this decision was to “make sure that Principles and Practices was faithful on how we make decisions,” said Heiny.
The section on simplicity commanded extra attention. According to Heiny, “simplicity is a call to discern the heart, the most important part of a thing.”
Part of the revision focused on the fact that the committee didn’t want to encumber Principles and Practices with verbiage.
“The goal was to say what was most important, rather than saying all that could be said,” Heiny said.
The process started last summer, when faculty members, students and the Board of Trustees began looking at the document. Since then, proposed changes have been drafted out and presented to the Committee on Campus Life and Earlham Student Government, among others.
Sophomore Kento Ichikawa was one of the student representatives involved in the process. Part of his role during last semester was to act as a liaison between students on campus and the committee. This semester, he has worked with Board of Trustees member Lavona Bane on specific sections to draft proposed changes.
“Students were the people who were most concerned about the accessibility of the document,” he said. “They weren’t as concerned with specific wording input. They were kind of apathetic about it, and wanted to know why they should care.”
However, Ichikawa also maintained that he felt positively about the revision process, saying, “I think the changes we’ve made have made it more active and engaging.”
The college’s Principles and Practices document has changed over the years. In the past, its title was the Community Code on Student Life. The copy of this document, available through the school archives in the 1984-1985 student handbook, has various sections ranging from detailing “social violations,” a provision against smoking “outdoors on front campus,” and a clause prohibiting “excessive noise.”
Other items include the “Recommended Minimum Responses for Specific Violations,” which states that a first-time incidence of drunk and disorderly conduct merits disciplinary probation, and that the second-time offense results in 10 days suspension from the college.
Senior Jay Zevin, a member of he Principles and Practices Review Committee, also had some thoughts on student involvement.
“I think that people identify deeply with the values of Principles and Practices more than they are actually familiar with the document,” said Zevin.
He then explained that he thinks students on campus are aware of the central tenets, but not so much of the document itself.
However, Zevin did express a difference he perceived between the freshman class and the rest of the student body. According to him, the freshmen had more knowledge about the document — a fact he attributes to the recently changed New Student Orientation (NSO) procedure as of this year.
The NSO organizers decided to scrap the years-old idea of performing skits to explain Principles and Practices and instead divided the first-year class into three groups and had student/faculty panel discussions about the document’s provisions.
In the end, Zevin thinks that the most important work done this time around was that on the simplicity section.
“That was probably the most rewarding work we did,” stated Zevin. “Personally, I feel like I came to a much better understanding of simplicity through our work on it.”
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