In a promising step away from the slippery slope of government-funded religious education, a decisive seven Supreme Court justices have voted to allow states to withhold scholarship money from students enrolled in religious training. An all-too rare act of Constitutional clarity had Chief Justice William Rehnquist authoring a majority opinion that honors the state of Washington's firm provisions against funding religious instruction.
Though President Bush and his ally Pat Robertson tried hard to use this case to bolster their push for voucher programs, the Court chose not to further blur the line between church and state -- something it failed to do in the unfortunate 2002 Cleveland voucher decision.
The ruling does not prevent the study of religion common to schools like Dartmouth, where students learn about spiritual history and development in a secular environment. It does, however, allow states to keep public funds from going to "devotional study" -- a prospect at which many taxpayers and indeed, the founding fathers, would cringe.
Religious discrimination, some have said. Hardly so. The Court's decision does not infringe upon the First Amendment's promise of freedom of worship. In an insightful move, the Court's majority has kept taxpayer money from falling into the collection plate of the church. We can only hope that it continues in this direction.
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Can there be a Dartmouth without BlitzMail? It's hard to imagine campus social interaction without the venerable electronic institution, and it is confounding that the College's Council on Computing might push to abandon the e-mail application.
While Blitz has its shortcomings -- its inability to read HTML messages conveniently, for example -- the program allows for a time-saving network of terminals around campus and immediate notification of newly-arrived messages.
Time need not be spent weighing other e-mail alternatives in committee. Rather, the administration ought to simply allocate the funds it would take to revamp and improve the status quo. This isn't rocket science -- it's computer science.
Allow the College's computing experts to do their job. Once Dartmouth develops an updated program, the community's concerns will be placated. An upgrade is long overdue, but we shouldn't allow BlitzMail's minor inadequacies to take away from the College's unique history of wired independence.
