…only to withdraw the absurd document in the face of faculty objections:

“I think that if the document had sort of laid out the context, so to speak, on the sides of how these terms are contested and who contests them, it would have been much more helpful,” philosophy professor Nishi Shah said. “Even if I agree with everything in the document … I would still have a problem with the document because it’s taking sides on contested issues.”

“These guidelines pretend to freeze, in definitional ways, concepts that are so complex and so fluid and so rich that they made a mockery of such matters, and make conversations about them more difficult,” history professor Francis Couvares said. “I think what’s going to promote some useful conversation is the rejection of these guidelines and the opening up of the conversation that we should have been having.”

What's shocking here is that there are plainly administrators at Amherst, and no doubt elsewhere, who "think" in the ways the document records, and don't realize that in so thinking, they are a threat to the integrity of academic life.