Amherst magazine fall 2016

AMHERST We All Get Captured

FALL 2016

David Kessler ’73 says a common mechanism underlies much of human suffering, from depression and addiction to everyday worries. Understanding this phenomenon may be the key to ďŹ nding release.

IN THIS ISSUE

18 Fall 2016 Volume 69 No. 1

Before Dallas

A police officer remembers a fallen friend and colleague. / By Ed Ducayet ’89

22 How to Spark Imagination and Inspire Debate

The renovated Mead Art Museum unveils six new exhibitions and installations. / Photographs by Bob O’Connor

34

We All Get Captured Former FDA commissioner David Kessler ’89 says we’re wired for addiction and emotional struggle. / Interview by Lisa Raskin

The exterior of the Mead may look the same as you remember. But go inside, and you’ll get a whole new perspective.

Photograph by BOB O’CONNOR

ONLINE amherst.edu/magazine

2 Voices Readers weigh in on Professors Arkes and Hawkins, early photojournalism, life on the first coed floor, and more 4 College Row New Greenway Residences integrate academic and social life; studying email scammers; calling all potential mascots; what kids gain from losing; and more 16 The Big Picture Converse in autumn 39 Beyond Campus SOCIAL MEDIA / Using Pinterest to teach about racism ENVIRONMENT / John Tucci ’87 rehabilitates lakes HEALTH / Helping communities help women and babies MUSEUMS / 26 years leading Ithaca’s Sciencenter BUSINESS / Johnny H. Nesbitt ’72 left Florida for a job in Saudi Arabia

Video l Providing greater access to higher education requires more than just financial aid, said President Biddy Martin during the Ford Foundation’s Sept. 12 panel discussion on “FUNDING FUTURES: SCHOLARSHIPS AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL CHANGE.”

l Attorney and Amherst trustee Paul Smith ’76, who has argued 19 cases before the Supreme Court, delivered the annual DEMOTT LECTURE on Sept. 8, urging the class of 2020 to “do more than tolerate diversity”—to “celebrate and embrace it in all its forms.”

More News l Frost Library’s Archives and Special Collections created an online guide on the history of LORD JEFFERY AMHERST and the AngloAmerican colonies during the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War) and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 (Pontiac’s Rebellion).

l EMILY JONES, a physician with deep roots in the local community and extensive experience in sports medicine, is the College’s new director of Student Health Services. l Angie Tissi-Gassoway, director of the QUEER RESOURCE

CENTER, talks about its move to a larger and more welcoming space in Keefe Campus Center: “What that comes down to is having visibility for our community and also accessibility.”

“

45 Amherst Creates TV / Two alumnae bonded in an MTV writers’ room PROFILE / Julie Galdieri ’88 cofounded a theater collective FILM / Amy Fox ’97 wrote of Wall Street’s women THEATER / A pair of premieres by playwright Jihae Park ’02 NONFICTION / Matthew Karp ’03 busts a Civil War myth

T

here’s no America without slavery.

This was not a mistake we made while walking somewhere else. This was the somewhere else we were walking to.”

† MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner TA-NEHISI COATES, speaking in LeFrak Gymnasium on Sept. 14. Page 6

52 Classes 118 In Memory 124 Amherst Made Night flying

EDITOR

Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst. edu

MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Ann Hallock ’89 Darcy Jacobs ’87 Ron Lieber ’93 Meredith Rollins ’93

Amherst welcomes letters from its readers.

Please send them to magazine@amherst. edu or Amherst Magazine, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

Letters must be 300 words or fewer and should address the content in the magazine.

ALUMNI EDITOR

Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031 DESIGN DIRECTOR

Ronn Campisi ASSISTANT EDITOR

Katherine Duke ’05

COVER

Illustration by Anthony Russo for Amherst magazine

Amherst (USPS 024-280) is published quarterly by Amherst College at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000, and is sent free to all alumni.

Periodicals postage paid at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 to Amherst, AC # 2220, PO Box 5000, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000.

VOICES

AMHERST IN TCH CA

G FIRE Come al ong a

OTHER VOICES ON ARKES I enjoyed Susannah Black’s testimonial to Professor Hadley Arkes (“Might and Right in the Pioneer Valley,” Summer 2016), and I salute him on retirement.

But she said: “To “Compliments on your inclusion of two think there are people countercultural items. It was reassuring to read out there who believe that Amherst remains a place where many Professor Arkes to be a conservative.” Well, voices are raised in discordant harmony.” he is, and I for one am forever grateful he introduced me to was ashamed of myself for feeling “conconservative thought, a guiding principle strained by awkwardness or diffidence” of my life. and “afraid of saying or doing the wrong I was adrift with an aimless thesis thing,” as Cullen Murphy ’74 writes and about the Russian Revolution my senior quotes. I did not have many friends of year at Amherst, when Professor Arkes different races while at Amherst. brought to my attention that a ComHowever, I took several courses that munist Party (Lenin’s “vanguard”) was dealt directly or indirectly with discrimiutterly foreign to Marxist theory, and nation and traditionally disenfranchised perverted socialism necessarily into togroups, most notably the LJST class talitarianism. He turned my thesis, and “Persons, Identities and Groups” and my life, around. I owe him a lot, and ran the economics course “Poverty and across him years later during my time as Inequality.” In my first post-college job as a public-interest paralegal, I worked TELL US WHAT YOU THINK with many people of different races and Please go to amherst.edu/magazine to classes, both clients and co-workers. take a brief survey about the stories in this issue. Your answers will help ensure But waiting tables for two years in a that Amherst magazine gives you the pizza joint (not exactly a “respectable” types of stories you want to read. post-Amherst job) did the most to make 2 Amherst Fall 2016

I quite enjoyed the piece on my favorite Amherst professor in the Summer 2016 issue. A poli sci major, I took every course Professor Arkes offered. His brilliance was and is undeniable.

What remains with me, after some 39 years, is his sense of humor. One cold and extremely snowy February morning, I made my way to the Gerald Penny ’77 Cultural Center for Professor Arkes’ class. This was before coffee. Of a class of some 25, nine of us made the Doctor Zhivago-like trek to the Octagon. After a suitable wait for any potential stragglers, he began with: “If 10 are enough for God, 10 is good enough for me.”

I still use that line when only 10 gather together. Thank you for a reminder of how much this great man meant to all of his students.

KEN OLENA ’77 Buffalo, N.Y. (and, yes, another lawyer) ig h

l

THINKING ABOUT RACE “Home” (Summer 2016), about Amherst Uprising, was interesting and moving.

When I arrived at Amherst in 1993 (as a white, Jewish, bisexual woman), one of my first impressions was how diverse it was (even then!) in comparison to where I had grown up. A white friend of mine from Manhattan had the exact opposite reaction. So, in my first week of school, I was already thinking about race at Amherst and how different people’s perspectives can be. I felt dismayed at how segregated Amherst felt at the time, and I

nd

a pro-life lawyer in New Jersey.

MIKE PELLETIER ’71 Maryville, Tenn.

st ate gre er’s

In the field and lab, biologist Sarah Sander ’06 works to unravel the mystery of fireflies.

c1_Amherst_SU16_r1.indd c1

SUMMER 2016

m sum

me more comfortable with difference. Working in Philadelphia with many black co-workers who grew up in the city in very different circumstances from mine, and becoming good friends with many of them, was eye-opening.

I wish that Amherst Uprising had taken place when I was a student. I am glad that Amherst is creating a representative, diverse community, even though it isn’t exactly prepared to do so.

The analogy to coeducation is an apt one.

And I’m also glad students are reminding the College of the work still yet to accomplish.

REBECCA ROSE-LANGSTON ’97 Northampton

the tch wa

DISCORDANT HARMONY Compliments on your inclusion, in the summer issue, of two countercultural items: Susannah Black ’99’s gently spirited encomium to Professor Hadley Arkes, and Dick Hubert ’60’s philippic on Lord Jeff ’s recent defenestration. It was reassuring to read that Amherst remains a place where many voices are raised in discordant harmony.

JAMES MONTANA ’08 Arlington, Va.

t sho w

7/19/16 4:59 PM

The recognition and praise of Professor Emeritus Hadley Arkes by those like Susannah Black ’99 whom he inspired over his many years of service to the Amherst community must be balanced with acknowledgment of the fact that there are many members and supporters of the LGBTQ community who suffered, sometimes irreparably, under the lash of the strident homophobia that Arkes proselytized on campus, in the media and in front of federal legislators and Supreme Court justices. Acknowledging this reality does not tarnish his career; his own bigotry does.

DAVID DORWART ’70 Mansfield Centre, Conn.

While it’s understandable that, in her tribute to her mentor, Political Science Professor Emeritus Hadley Arkes, conservative Christian commentator Susannah Black ’99 would gloss over criticism of Arkes’ adamant pro-life stance, it is

unconscionable that she fails to mention his abominable preaching against samesex love and relationships. No invocation of “natural law” and “moral realism” can disguise the fact that Arkes testified to Congress in favor of the unconstitutional Defense of Marriage Act and has authored so many articles opposing samesex marriage as to make one wonder if he wishes that the Inquisition would be born again.

As Idalia Friedson ’15 so clearly laid out in her Amherst Student opinion piece of April 10, 2013, Arkes’ assertion “that the matter [gay marriage] should even be arguable, or treated as plausible, is already the measure of a culture that has lost its moral coordinates, or even its clarity of mind” is as unsupportable as his suggestion on March 26, 2013, in The Catholic Thing that allowing same-sex marriage is the moral equivalent of permitting a man in Maine to marry his 37-pound dog, Lady. He took another tack in his April 14, 2015, article in First Things, when he opened the old “from this to anarchy” floodgates by suggesting that legalizing same-sex marriage would pave the way By Susannah Black ’99

Illustration by Melinda Beck

Might Right and

in the Pioneer Valley

From one professor, students across generations learned to think more clearly, to read more carefully, to state their cases more precisely.

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32-36_Amherst_SU16_r2.indd 32

7/20/16 12:34 PM 32-36_Amherst_SU16.indd 33

On the Octagon Wall The Spring 2016 article on the Octagon mural (“History on the Wall,” College Row) asked for help in identifying three people pictured in the mural. Thank you to those who informed us that one of those three is the late Sidney Davis ’73, pictured in the mural’s top left corner. Davis co-chaired Black Alumni Weekend 2008 and was a key member of its committee for many years.

for the return of polygamy, “throuples” living in retirement communities, the marriage of father and son, and [fill in your favorite shock stereotype here].

In her paean to Arkes’ teachings, Black may wish to sweep both his absurdities and LGBTQ people under the rug.

But we who have experienced the transcendent beauty and inherent rightness of same-sex love will not remain silent as Arkes continues his crusade in the name of Terras Irradient.

JASON VICTOR SERINUS ’67 Port Townsend, Wash.

7/18/16 2:53 PM

In her encomium of Hadley Arkes, Susannah Black ’99 claims Arkes taught her to deplore “unjustified or vague

SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS What did your first year of college teach you? On the Amherst Facebook page, alumni offered advice to new students.

Nothing can replace a study abroad experience, or a college which is so supportive (academically and financially) of it.

CHRISTINE MURI BOEHM ’89:

Listening is not a weakness, but saying incredibly stupid things can, at times, be startlingly valuable.

DAVID WINTON ’84:

CHIP OSUR ’15: A study routine is important! Try to study in the library, Rao’s or Lime-Red while listening to music right after classes are done for the day, so you’re free on nights and weekends. Take a foreign language! It’s a lot of work, and still is for me, but it allows you to fully appreciate another culture.

premises and muddled reasoning,” reading which she compares to “witnessing a slow disaster.” I wonder if she has this reaction when she reads Arkes’ own arguments against marriage equality, in which he claims that sexual orientation is an unstable category “that may now include the bisexual, fetishistic, transvestic, zoophiliac (sex with animals).”

Drawing legal conclusions from such “airy things that people are too delicate to describe, and too foggy to define,” he writes, may force us to allow a woman to marry her son or a man to marry his dog.

I am not surprised Black buys the idea that “if the argument worked … then the actual carrying out of any physical-world consequences was a sort of mopping-up operation.” Conservative scholars are often blind to the nitty-gritty details of actual citizens’ lives, things like homophobia. Black says Arkes taught her that legal rights derive from “human nature that was stable and not subject to willful redefinition, either by individuals or by societies.” That very argument was used in my lifetime to support segregation, just as today it is used against equal rights for lesbian and gay and, most recently, trans citizens. Arkes’ premise in his testimony in favor of DOMA in 1996 was based on a similar abstraction, the “natural teleology of the body.” Appeals to “human nature,” “moral realism” and “natural law” are often used to cause real harm to real people in real life: physicalworld consequences. It is precisely these abstract concepts that are “airy things … too foggy to define.” Arkes has appealed to them consistently over his career to harm LGBTQ citizens, and it is unfortunate that he is praised in our college magazine.

KEVIN MOSS ’77 a 123 Middlebury, Vt. Fall 2016 Amherst 3

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM CAMPUS

6 Speaking in LeFrak, TaNehisi Coates reframed the American dream.

The Greenway Residences have seminar rooms, study areas and many social spaces.

College Row

7 It’s important to let kids lose at games, say a professor and her student.

New Dorms Integrate

ACADEMIC, SOCIAL LIFE The four residence halls are part of the greatest physical transformation of campus since the College’s founding.

BUILDINGS U The four new residence halls that opened this fall are more than just places to sleep; they’re blurring the line between inside and outside the classroom.

Now home to 296 sophomores, juniors and seniors, the Greenway Residences have seminar rooms and study carrels, as well as social spaces large and small, including two-story lounges with spiral stairways. They offer room options from singles to suites.

These dorms—grouped around a central courtyard and linked by bridges—are meant to foster connection, enrich how students learn and interact, and provide a new model for integrating academic and residential life.

In fact, said Greenway Resident Counselor Beselot “Bessy” Birhanu ’17 at a fall ribbon-cutting, they’re becoming “a haven for creativity, a space where everyone can come together and, honestly, a home away from home.”

Karen Blake ’17, president of the Association of Amherst Students, said at the ribboncutting that the buildings “make it easy for students to make connections across groups, across class and hopefully across difference.”

Located to the south of Merrill, with views of the Holyoke Range, the dorms are part of a major building and landscaping project that 4 Amherst Fall 2016

is transforming the eastern part of campus. The other components are a landscaped walkway and a new, interdisciplinary Science Center.

Construction is under way for the Science Center on land previously occupied by the Social Dorms. It is designed to be a hub of discussions encompassing not only the sciences but also math, the humanities and the arts.

The building will enhance the College’s leadership in science, technology, engineering and math education and in reimagining the liberal arts for the 21st century.

The landscaped walkway— called the Greenway—will run from Valentine Dining Hall past the new Science Center and down to the new dorms, extending the campus with curving pathways, an amphitheater, recreational areas and a scenic orchard.

Both the Greenway and the Science Center are scheduled to open in fall 2018. EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER

Cost Breakdown After moving away from a previous, more expensive Science Center design, and with close attention to costs, the College used the savings for the four Greenway residence halls.

Originally Proposed Science Center

May 2013 cost estimate: $302 million New Science Center

Contracted cost: $231 million Sunk costs from original Science Center plan: $20 million Total: $251 million Savings

Net savings: $51 million Residual benefit from planned repurposing of Merrill (which would have been torn down under the old plan): $30 million Total savings: $81 million

MARIA STENZEL (5)

Greenway Residences

Construction cost for dorms and site: $79 million

l ONLINE Learn more about the projects and watch the Science Center construction on a live webcam: amherst.edu/go/greenway

Fall 2016 Amherst 5

REFRAMING THE

American Dream In a talk in LeFrak, author Ta-Nehisi Coates said the mission of his life is confronting racism.

SPEAKERS U Before Ta-Nehisi Coates began his talk, before he could say a single word, the entire 1,400-capacity crowd in LeFrak Gymnasium was on its feet to welcome him to Amherst.

As the applause died down, an audience member shouted, “We’re excited to hear you speak!”

“I’m excited to hear me speak, too!”

Coates said with a laugh.

In her introduction, President Biddy Martin described the National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow as a “genuine intellect” on an “uncompromising and humble quest for understanding.”

“He writes directly and unapologetically about racism,” she said, “and he does so in very personal terms.”

Coates began by reading a passage from his memoir Between the World and Me, about his experience growing up in West Baltimore and a moment in which another young boy pulled a gun on him.

Coates contrasted that moment, and the fear that his and other families felt in their neighborhood, to the idealized version of the white experience he saw on TV, as represented in shows such as Mr. Belvedere.

“Why didn’t I know any families like that?” Coates asked of those fictional households. “That’s been the great mission of my life: the constant exploration of that why.”

The American Dream, he said, is a dream of privilege and abundance with roots stretching back through the origins of slavery. Since the 1600s, he said, there has been a slow legal separation between the white and black experiences, a “cleaving away,” that helped create a “definitive working class that could always be depended on.”

In reframing the American dream, and in describing slavery as an economic institution—and the reasons why so many people would continue to fight for slavery in the Civil War and beyond— Coates drew an analogy: “The dream of 6 Amherst Fall 2016

“The dream of slave ownership is not so different from the dream of home ownership,” Coates said.

slave ownership is not so different from the dream of home ownership,” he said.

“Many people in this country do not own homes. And yet, if they felt that the government was going to take everyone’s home and liquidate the wealth, and they could be restricted from ever owning a home again, they might fight for that.”

A legacy of aspirations built on oppression continued through the Jim Crow era and created “racism implicit even in the best efforts,” he said. The GI Bill is

one example: Widely considered a great piece of legislation, it required that veterans seek approval from local officials to reap its benefits—a nearly impossible prospect for African-Americans in some areas of the South.

The United States tends to believe in its own exceptionalism, he said. “There’s no America without slavery. This was not a mistake we made while walking somewhere else. This was the somewhere else we were walking to.” RACHAEL HANLEY

At Convocation the Choral Society performed the College standard “Three Gifts.” Its composer, Lisa Smith Van der Linden ’89, was on hand, as was her daughter Anna Van der Linden ’20.

When Students Think

OTHERWISE Or, how Amherst is like a good loaf of bread

MARIA STENZEL (4)

ADJECTIVES U Welcoming new students at Convocation, President Biddy Martin unpacked one of the more curious adjectives used to describe the College: yeasty.

“When I agreed to be interviewed for the presidency here,” she said in Johnson Chapel on Labor Day, “there was a summary statement about Amherst’s culture that made me laugh: ‘Amherst,’ it read, ‘with its independent faculty, committed staff and actively engaged alumni and students, has a distinctive, yeasty culture.’”

When the first-years laughed, she said, “That’s ex-

actly my reaction.”

“It turns out that the adjective yeasty has a figurative meaning that seemed perfect—‘characterized by unrest or agitation, in a state of turbulence, typically a creative or productive one.’ And now I’ve decided Amherst is yeasty,” she said.

“To some degree, yeastiness ought to characterize every college and university community,” Martin added.

This culture stands for diversity, discussion and people who, according to a German saying quoted by historian Carl Becker, “think otherwise.”

Martin spoke of the community that new students are entering, a family that she first observed through the College’s alumni.

“The alumni like to argue with one another,” she said.

“Good-natured argument, but argument nonetheless.

About what a professor said in this or that class, who taught what, whether the College was changing for better or for worse, and, always, about the open curriculum. Always.”

“What their arguing proved to me was that Amherst faculty had done a great job of encouraging their students to ‘think otherwise’ in their own ways and to value differences of opinion,” she said. “I came

away from those meetings expecting a bunch of wickedly smart, quirky and demanding professors who allowed themselves to be what I call, following my mother, ‘real characters.’ That’s what I found. And that’s what you’ll find—teachers who will support you in developing yourselves as ‘otherwise-thinking’ adults.” BILL SWEET

Fall 2016 Amherst 7

EXPERT ADVICE / BY Constance Congdon, Playwright-in-residence /

Best Shows of the Season THE BOOK OF MORMON. Yes, it’s still running. Go see it at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.

THE SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS, at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. As crazy, funny and beautifully produced as a Broadway musical, the plot was adapted (by me) and then made ever more crazy and funny by the lead actor, Steven Epp, and the director, Chris Bayes, with a company of actors and musicians. First preview on Nov. 7.

SUSTAINABILITY U A Plexiglas arch protects them from the elements, and a few purple stickers mark them, but it would be easy to walk past the row of 10 silver bicycles beside James Dormitory without realizing how special they are.

C

AN’T GET HAMILTON TICKETS? Amherst’s resident playwright offers five recommendations on what to see on and off Broadway.

BLACK ANGELS OVER TUSKEGEE. Closes too soon: Dec. 7. Theatrical and realistic—about the Tuskegee Airmen. At St. Luke’s Theatre.

Building Community,

TWO WHEELS AT A TIME A student-led bike share is making campus more open and more green.

There’s certainly nothing to declare them the culmination of student-led efforts and research, or to note that they’re part of a campus trend toward sustainability in ways both small and large (a new $2 million Green Revolving Fund— see page 13—is the most recent example).

Nor is there a sign to tell passersby how the bikes are among ongoing gestures to make the College more open, diverse and community-centered.

8 Amherst Fall 2016

THE HUMANS won four Tonys and deserved them. “Family comic tragedy” doesn’t begin to describe it. At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.

THE FRONT PAGE, starring Nathan Lane and John Goodman, opened Oct. 20 at the Broadhurst Theatre. One of the greatest American classics with two of the greatest American comic actors of our time. When people talk about this play, you’ll be able to say, “Well, I saw it with Nathan Lane and John Goodman,” and you will have had an amazing time in the theater.

They may not look it, but as any one of some 200 student members of the Amherst College Bike Share could tell you, these are special bikes.

The Office of Environmental Sustainability helped interested students navigate legal liability and other hurdles.

Funding from the Association of Amherst Students purchased bikes, racks and shelters from Laughing Dog Bicycles in Amherst. To keep costs low, student volunteers serve as bike share managers and mechanics. Membership is free, although students are responsible if they damage or fail to return the bikes.

The row of new bikes addresses a “very real need on campus for an easyto-use and environmentally conscious transportation system that all students could access,” says Alisa Bajramovic ’18, who helped launch the project. “Whether a student would want to use it to get to class, to go to a store or to just enjoy a nice autumn day, we did not want cost to be a barrier.” RACHAEL HANLEY

NEW WAYS TO TALK ABOUT

GUNS

ILLUSTRATION: MATTHEW HOLLISTER; BIKE PHOTO: TAKUDZWA TAPFUMA ’17

At Amherst this year, a subject of intense national debate is inviting close scholarly scrutiny.

CULTURE U To some, the gun is a symbol of a society crumbling into violence and chaos. To others, it’s a necessary tool to protect society from crime and disorder. It’s a subject that invites fierce debate, and, at Amherst this year, close scholarly scrutiny.

For this year’s Copeland Colloquium, a perennial gathering in which invited scholars examine a particular topic, the theme is “The Social Life of Guns.”

Alongside this colloquium, the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought will present the lecture series “Guns in Law.” “People are talking about guns a lot, but they’re only talking about guns in certain ways,” says Jonathan M. Obert, assistant professor of political science, who serves on the colloquium’s proposal committee. “They are talking about them as objects to be regulated, or as a public health concern.”

Both are important debates, he says, but the committee wanted to ask another set of questions: What do guns mean to people? Why are guns so important in today’s political debates? Why are people so fascinated with guns?

The committee chose four Copeland Fellows to spend this academic year on campus. They are Chad Kautzer, associate professor of philosophy at Lehigh University, who is working on a book tentatively titled Good Guys with Guns: Whiteness, Masculinity, and the New Politics of Sover-

eignty; Nathan Shelton, doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, who is writing about civilian interpretations

of gun law and starting a project about the gun market; Jennifer Yida Pan, doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago and

Guns in Law While the Copeland Colloquium presents cultural and sociological views on guns, the LJST department’s “Guns in Law” lecture series focuses on the status of guns as objects of legal regulation.

All year, this lecture series is looking at how the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms has been interpreted and debated, and controversy over the U.S. Supreme Court’s understanding of that amendment. Organizers say this controversy provides a touchstone for larger debates on how the Constitution gets interpreted in the courts, public opinion and the historical record.

doctoral fellow with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, who is investigating fictional firearms and narrative form; and Alex Trimble Young, a recently minted Ph.D. in English at the University of Southern California, who is investigating anti-statist rhetoric of right-wing gun culture and of radical leftist movements.

The lectures that the fellows present will be published in a collection edited by Austin D. Sarat, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Andrew Poe, assistant professor of political science. BILL SWEET Fall 2016 Amherst 9

Photography FOR THE MODERN WORLD Through art, a professor is helping students examine the concept of what it means to be human.

PERSEVERANCE U Justin Kimball, professor of art, has traveled around the country photographing small towns brought to the brink of obsolescence by the nation’s economic crisis. He’s now compiled many of those photos into a book, Elegy, published in November.

It examines a growing, yet often overlooked, portion of the American landscape. As a photographer, Kimball says, he examines the concept of what it means to be human in the world today, and in his teaching, he encourages students to do the same.

WHERE ONLY DOLLAR STORES REMAIN Kimball began the Elegy project in 2012.

“It was right around the last presidential election,” he recalls, “and I remember listening to the news as I was driving through these places where there’s no real economy left—where the only things left are bars, dollar stores and pizza joints—and I realized there was little to no national discussion of how these people are really living. Economically speaking, they’re struggling. And so I just started photographing.”

A SPECIFICALLY AMERICAN STRUGGLE “While the book itself is sort of political, because it can’t help but be, it’s really meant to be a series about struggle in a broad sense, and what it means to be a person living in today’s world,” Kimball says. The photos “look at how we as humans in these kinds of situations, and maybe specifically Americans, persevere.”

WHY NON-ART MAJORS STUDY ART Many take art courses to find their voice, Kimball says. “Art can change the way you perceive not only the world around you, but also yourself. There’s a lot of room in a photography class to have conversations about identity, which is something students at Amherst have always been interested in.”

RACHEL ROGOL 10 Amherst Fall 2016

Kimball photographed towns brought to the brink of obsolescence by the U.S. economic downturn. The project shows how Americans struggle and persevere.

MASCOT SUGGESTIONS WANTED In 2017 Amherst will adopt an official mascot for the first time, and that mascot will be chosen by the community at large.

The background In January the Board of Trustees announced that the College would no longer use Lord Jeff in any official capacity. They also raised the possibility that the College could adopt an official mascot for the first time. Since then, a Mascot Committee composed primarily of students and alumni (from classes ranging from 1958 to 2013), along with members of the faculty, staff and administration, has met regularly to formulate a plan.

MARIA STENZEL; OPPOSITE PAGE: JUSTIN KIMBALL (2)

The criteria “The aim will be to generate as much engagement as possible, and to find something— something organically associated with Amherst, reflecting our collective history—that we can all rally around,” wrote Board of Trustees Chair Cullen Murphy ’74 in the January statement. “That is what mascots are supposed to provide.” The committee decided that the new mascot needs to unify the campus and larger community, represent positive qualities or ideals, be broadly relevant across generations, represent the Amherst experience or history, work equally well for women’s and men’s sports teams, and have the potential to translate well visually.

Now seeking submissions An open submission process began Oct. 24 and will conclude Nov. 30. All

Amherst alumni, students, faculty and staff may submit mascot suggestions at amherst.edu/go/mascot or direct them to Mascot Process, P.O. Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

Winnowing the list In early December the Mascot Committee will create a list of all suggestions that meet the basic criteria and will make that list public.

Next it will use the same criteria to winnow the list to fewer than 30, and alumni will have the opportunity to provide feedback. In January and February, the committee will share that feedback with a broadly representative delegate group of students and alumni, and, soliciting input from those delegates, will further winnow the list to five.

The Vote All alumni, students, faculty and staff of the College will be able to vote in March on the five finalist mascot selections.

The mascot’s debut The College will announce the new mascot in the spring.

This mascot will officially debut next fall.

SUBMIT a nomination, read letters from the committee and more: amherst.edu/go/mascot

MEET THE NEW CLASS The applicant pool was 8,406 13.8% were admitted into the Amherst class of 2020, and 471 enrolled THEY COME FROM: 40 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico 26 countries They speak 35 languages They come from 378 high schools (59% public, 34% independent, 7% parochial) 47% self-identify as U.S. students of color 52% receive Amherst financial aid 8% are non-U.S. citizens 14% are first-generation college students Fall 2016 Amherst 11

NAME CHANGE FOR THE

Career Center A seven-figure gift is helping the newly named Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning expand its work in connecting students’ intellectual interests to possible career choices. tion smoothly into post-Amherst opportunities. While the center doesn’t train students for specific careers, it does help them pull together what can seem like wildly disparate skills and present them in a way that’s directly relevant to the workplace.

“With our career preparation,” Griffen says, “I want to mirror the College’s open curriculum and liberal arts philosophy.”

Staff counsel students in seven main areas: business and finance, education professions, health professions, science and technology, government and nonprofit, arts and communication, and law. Other offerings include the Pathways Alumni-Student Mentoring Program and the Select Internship Program. The Career Trek program offers multiday, deep-dive expeditions into various professional fields.

Before Heinrich became a mentor, the center helped her land an internship in historic restoration in Alaska and a volunteer position in Peru, and also connected her to an alumna mentor, who helped her overcome her reluctance to network.

Michael Loeb is founder and CEO of Loeb Enterprises and Loeb.nyc. “As someone who hires many new college graduates each year, I want to ensure that Amherst has a best-of-breed ability to develop student career aspirations and professional opportunities,” he says. “In an intensely competitive world, this has never been more important.” RACHAEL HANLEY PLANNING AHEAD U It’s a Tuesday in September and the Career Center is a hive of activity. Staff advisers pop out of their offices to call students in from the lounge. Hadley Heinrich ’17 is manning the Peer Career Advisers’ desk, which bears a small plaque with her name.

Less than an hour into her shift, Heinrich has counseled three underclassmen on their résumés and cover letters. She speaks quietly but firmly, drawing students into the process and giving them a foundation from which to build: change tone here, add references there, cut back on this section, expand that one.

“Every student comes in with so much stress,” she says. They want to know right away: What should they do with their lives?

The center, Heinrich says, helps them “to take a step back. You don’t need to have results within the next few seconds.”

Heinrich is one example of how the Career Center is recreating itself as a hub of information and as a place for alumni, students, faculty and staff to connect with one another. That effort got a boost this fall with the announcement that Marjorie and Michael R. Loeb ’77 had made a seven-figure commitment to expand the center’s offerings.

Emily Griffen, director of the newly named Loeb Center for Career Exploration and Planning, says the gift comes as the center expands its capacity to help students clarify their interests, build their skills, develop professional contacts and transi12 Amherst Fall 2016

“I want to mirror the College’s liberal arts philosophy,” says Director Emily Griffen, above. Above left: Associate Director Laura Litwiller with a student.

Environmental Leaders:

THE NEXT GENERATION A $2 million revolving fund will reduce greenhouse gas emissions, cut campus energy use and help students develop real solutions to today’s environmental problems.

SUSTAINABILITY U Save the environment—right here at Amherst. That effort got a boost this fall when Prince Albert Grimaldi ’81 of Monaco made a commitment to give $2 million to help cut greenhouse gas emissions on campus.

The Prince Albert II Foundation (PA2F) Green Revolving Fund will finance projects that reduce energy use in campus buildings and support the College’s larger goal of carbon neutrality through the application of renewable energy. Among other efforts, it will also support student-led climate-solution research and community engagement.

The goal is “to frame sustainability as a long-term investment,” says Prince Albert, whose gift is the single largest

donation for any similar fund, according to the Sustainable Endowments Institute.

Here’s how the funding process will work: The College will identify an initial list of projects based on an energy audit conducted by an independent consultant.

After that, any member of the campus community can submit a new energy-saving proposal to the GRF committee, made up of students, faculty, staff and alumni.

That committee will choose which projects to fund based on their projected energy and greenhouse gas reductions. Money saved or earned through the projects will replenish the GRF and finance future projects. The committee will also evaluate projects on their ability to engage

students in meaningful ways.

In fact, a portion of the GRF will be set aside for a “student innovation fund,” which will finance crowd-sourced ideas.

“Our students are critical stewards of the College as well as the environment,” says Laura Draucker, director

of environmental sustainability. “The hope is that empowering them to think creatively and realistically about the future of sustainability at Amherst will result in out-of-thebox ideas that could be used beyond the confines of our campus.” CAROLINE HANNA

TOP ILLUSTRATION: ADAM MCCAULEY; OPPOSITE PAGE: SHANA SURECK (2)

p

A

Q&A

NEW GRANT FROM THE NAstudy is very interesting. There’s / Michael Hood, tional Institutes of Health a fungus that lives on the wild associate professor will support Hood and colrelatives of carnations and grows of biology / leagues from two other instiamong the cells. When the plants tutions as they study the evolutionflower, it replaces the pollen with Exposing Plants to Disease ary ecology of disease transmission. the spores of the pathogen. What What does it mean to study would normally involve reprodisease ecology? All organisms get diseases, and the duction of the plant is now in fact the way the disease gets majority of species on the planet are parasites or patho- transmitted. It’s used as a model for sexually transmitted gens. We use a set of plants and their fungal pathodiseases in all types of organisms. gens in natural populations to try to get at these Why use plants in this way? They’re good modecological interactions. els. You can grow lots of them, and you can exWhat is an example of an interaction bepose them to disease. They can be chopped up tween a plant and a fungus? The one we and looked at in an anatomical way.

Fall 2016 Amherst 13

Beyond the

PUNCH LINE To gain perspective on a novel, 25 students learned about the real people behind a Nigerian email scam.

COURSES U It’s a subculture often dismissed with a punch line: Nigerians who email unsuspecting victims and convince them to send money in return for nonexistent goods or deals. This semester, 25 Amherst students looked beyond the punch line to the young perpetrators of the infamous scam.

The students are taking the course “Digital Africas,” taught by Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander and crosslisted in English and black studies. Through various readings, the course examines how African writers incorporate digital technologies into their work.

The first reading was Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s 2009 novel I Do Not Come to You

by Chance, which tells of an unemployed college graduate who becomes enmeshed in the Nigerian scammer society. For perspective on

Students blog about their observations, and the posts inform class discussions.

14 Amherst Fall 2016

In “Digital Africas,” Professor Rhonda Cobham-Sander and her students examine how literature has evolved with technology.

the novel, Cobham-Sander turned to a guest lecturer, Kamela Heyward-Rotimi, who has conducted ethnographic research on the so-called “419 culture”—named for the section of Nigeria’s criminal code outlawing the scam.

When Heyward-Rotimi came to campus in Septem-

ber, she challenged the onedimensional perception of Nigeria and the fraud. As she said, 80 percent of Nigeria’s 15-to-24-year-olds are unemployed or underemployed.

Some turn to fraud for money and status, or as way to “fight Western exploitation of Nigeria, by fleecing Westerners.”

Some scammers prosper; many do not.

While scammers are hardly unique to Nigeria, it’s that country that’s labeled “a scam nation,” she said. “Their national identity is marred due to the scamming of a few.”

A backlash against the scheme comes from Nigerians worried about their country’s image. “At the heart of these debates,” HeywardRotimi said, “is a battle for the national ideal that they feel is threatened by globalization through Western popular culture.”

All semester, CobhamSander and her students are exploring how literature has evolved with technology, in-

cluding how authors use digital formats and the Internet to transform their relationships with audiences.

“The class is about genre,” Cobham-Sander says. “What happens when you start writing in a different genre? This could mean anything from a street sign, to an email, to a blog. What happens to form when you do that?”

Students keep blogs about their observations for classmates to read. “We talk about the parts of the reading that we, as a group, have found the most compelling,” says Zachary Yanes’17. “This leads to more interesting discussions, both online and in class.”

A few weeks after Heyward-Rotimi’s visit, the class discussed Chimamanda Adichie’s novel Americanah.

“By the end of the course we’re looking at experimental listicles and Twitter novels,” Cobham-Sander says. “I tell students, ‘The form changes the user and the user changes the form.’” WILLIAM SWEET

LET KIDS

Lose

ILLUSTRATION: REBECCA CLARKE; PALMQUIST: ILANA PANICH-LINSMAN; OPPOSITE: MARIA STENZEL (2)

Unearned victories can make it harder for young children to assess situations, make decisions and figure out whom to trust.

RESEARCH U While you may think it builds self-confidence to let your preschooler win at Go Fish, you could actually be doing your child a disservice.

Carrie Palmquist, assistant professor of psychology, and Ashleigh Rutherford ’16 have found that when young kids experience “illusory success,” it hinders their ability to formulate and act on judgments they make about their own performance. As a result, children may become conditioned to ignore valuable information they could use in future decision-making.

In a series of experiments, Palmquist and Rutherford asked 4- and 5-year-olds to play a hiding game with objects as two adult “experimenters” offered them clues. One of these adults gave the children accurate clues; the other gave inaccurate ones.

Palmquist and Rutherford then manipulated the game for half of the children so that no matter where the kids looked, they always found the hidden objects.

The successes of the remaining children were left to chance, meaning that the kids were more likely to find hidden objects with the helpful adult than with the unhelpful one.

After the games, the scientists asked the kids which of the two adults they would like to ask for help in finding additional hidden objects.

“Kids who had been in the rigged version of the game showed no preference for the previously helpful person,” says Palmquist. “In fact, they didn’t even

Children may be less savvy than earlier research suggests, says Carrie Palmquist.

think of her as having been helpful.” The kids in the unrigged version, however, showed a clear preference for the helpful adult.

“When children were extremely successful, they seemed to ignore otherwise relevant cues as to who would be a better source of information,” Palmquist says.

Why is this important? “First, it suggests that children may not be as savvy as previous research has suggested,” Palmquist says. “Second, it suggests that in the real world, when children experience a great deal of success on a task— Mom or Dad always letting them win at a game, for example—they may become less aware of important information that they could use to learn about the world, because they see it as less relevant to their future success.”

Palmquist and Rutherford co-authored a paper on their findings that will appear in December in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. Rutherford is now a clinical research assistant at the Laboratory for Affective and Translational Neuroscience. For her work with Palmquist, she received a summer stipend from Amherst’s Gregory S. Call Undergraduate Research Program. CAROLINE HANNA Fall 2016 Amherst 15

COLLEGE ROW

THE BIG PICTURE “O HUSHED OCTOBER morning mild,” wrote Robert Frost, who knew something of autumn in Amherst, “Thy leaves have ripened to the fall; / Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, / Should waste them all.”

e Adam Grimm

e If you would like a reprint of this photo, email magazine@amherst.edu with your name and address, and we will send you a complimentary copy.

Before Dallas A police officer remembers a friend and colleague.

BY ED DUCAYET ’89 Illustration by Keith Negley

18 AMHERST FALL 2016

I want to

tell you a story about a friend of mine. Pat Zamarripa grew up in south Fort Worth, Texas, in a close-knit Mexican family. He went through the Fort Worth public school system. A pleasant boy with an easygoing attitude, he made friends easily and was well-liked and respected. He loved sports, and especially took to baseball, as both a player and a spectator.

As soon as he could after graduating from high school, Pat enlisted in the Navy and became a master-at-arms. In the old British and early American naval service, masters-at-arms were charged with enforcing the sometimes brutal discipline on board ship and at shore facilities. This was especially needed during times of war, when nonmilitary sailors (and sometimes common farmers and tradesmen) were forcibly “pressed� (basically kidnapped) into service on warships, sometimes for years. Mutiny was very much feared, and the master-at-arms and his group, along with a small group of Marines, were the only thing keeping the crew from taking over the ship.

The job evolved over time, and as reforms were implemented and service became voluntary, the master-at-arms became responsible for enforcing standard rules and apprehending and detaining disorderly sailors and sometimes officers. Before 9/11, you most commonly saw masters-at-arms guarding ships and bases and escorting drunk sailors back to bed after a rough night on the town. It is difficult for civilians to appreciate, but when you’re stuck on a ship for eight months at a time, working seven days a week for 14-hour shifts, sometimes down in an engine room with no windows and sweltering heat, you tend to want to blow off a little steam, and so these young sailors tend to drink a little too much when the ship pulls into port. Many times on the Enterprise, where I served as a young officer from 2000 to 2002, I saw masters-at-arms handling out-of-control kids.

20 Amherst Fall 2016

They did their jobs with respect and professionalism and were measured in their responses.

Pat knew, even at age 17, that serving others and being of assistance to shipmates was his calling, and he chose to be a master-at-arms. This is traditionally not a career path with much possibility of advancement. It is difficult to make chief rank (the goal of most enlisted sailors). He was certainly smart enough and motivated enough to have attempted to become an officer, but he knew that once that happened he would be relegated to administrative, management duties, and he preferred actually working for a living. He loved being a sailor. He did not mind the bad hours, the long days standing guard in the desert with all the heavy gear in Afghanistan and Iraq. He did several active-duty tours overseas.

Then, back in 2005, Pat made the same decision that I had made. He wanted to continue to serve, but he also wanted to be closer to home.

Family was important to him, and so he left active duty and affiliated with the Navy Reserve in Fort Worth. He started looking for a civilian job, as I had. Although Fort Worth was his home and I am sure he would have been welcomed into the Fort Worth Police Department, he chose to join Dallas, because he believed it was a more diverse city with more interesting work and potential, and he would have more opportunity to make a difference. He made it through the academy, made it through his field training, and began work. He also had a daughter whom he dearly loved, and he lit up

RON T. ENNIS/FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM/TNS VIA GETTY IMAGES

whenever he spoke of her or thought of her. That was something we had in common, as well.

For about seven months Pat worked for me when I was a supervisor at the Dallas County jail. I say supervisor, but he was such a model officer and hard worker that he needed no supervision. He volunteered for the jobs nobody else wanted to do, and he had a smile on his face every day. After he went back to patrol duties, I would see him about every other day when he would make an arrest and bring someone in. We often chatted about family and his reserve duties. I always felt better after seeing him.

On July 7, 2016, Pat was working southwest Dallas. Because a protest march had been scheduled for that evening downtown, officers from different divisions were selected to help maintain the march route and keep everything peaceful, blocking traffic with patrol cars and making sure everyone got along and knew the route. This is a very common occurrence. I have worked such marches many times. I also worked a recent visit by a presidential candidate where we anticipated unrest. During that visit, I worked the area just north of the Convention Center on Lamar, about a block south of where Pat was stationed.

My job several weeks ago was uneventful. Pat’s was not. The protest was ending. The march leadership had spoken with police leadership ahead of time and agreed on the route and length of the march, and everything had gone according to plan.

A couple of angry things had been shouted by just a few people, but no one was hurt and there were no real confrontations. People were starting to go home.

I’m sure you have all read about what happened next. First, a gunman shot and killed two officers— friends and co-workers of Pat’s—and wounded others around him. With the growing darkness, the crowds of screaming people, the surrounding tall buildings with multiple echoes, and the rapid rate of fire from the shooter, it was at first impossible for officers to tell from which direction the shots were coming. I will never know exactly what was going through his mind at the time, but at some point Pat, too, was shot and killed.

Based on the kind of person I knew him to be (and I know this is subjective), I choose to believe that Pat was trying to help a fellow officer, maybe dragging him to cover, or possibly engaging the shooter himself so others could escape. Pat had been in combat in the Afghanistan/Iraq region, and he knew the risks as well as anyone. But it is against our way of life to take no action when others are being threatened.

I was not working that evening. I only found out my friend had been lost the next morning. I am sad to say he was not the first officer we’ve lost

since I joined the department almost 12 years ago, but of those, he was the one I’ve been the closest to. I am also sad to say I’ve seen more officers lost to suicide than to murder. The stresses of this job are not well-understood by most. When something like this happens (and I’m sure the military people out there can attest to this), along with the usual thoughts of, “I’m lucky I was not there,” or, “I wish I’d been there so maybe I could have helped or taken action,” both of which are felt at the same time, comes a quiet resignation that this is the new “normal,” that life is fleeting, and that the important thing is to attempt to live a model life so that, to paraphrase from one of my favorite films, you can “enter your house justified” at the end of the day.

I attended the rosary service on Friday, the formal funeral mass on Saturday and the military burial at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Cemetery on Saturday afternoon. I believe Pat was able to enter his house justified. I am proud to have known him, proud of his service, proud of the way he lived.

Nationally, the conversation about race and law enforcement continues. Other stories have eclipsed ours. At first, we wondered why the shooter had singled out Dallas. Our police leadership had seemingly done everything right. Community relations have been very positive. One of my high school friends was marching the protest with his wife and son when it all happened; they had to take cover for hours, shielded by an officer against whom they were protesting. During the week of memorial services, Dallas residents set up a makeshift shrine in front of our headquarters building downtown. My office worked that site 24 hours a day. I have never been hugged by so many kids in one week. An 11-year-old boy wrote us a note of support: “Most people think cops are the Joker but you’re really more like Batman or Wonder Woman.”

I’ve had to answer tough questions from my 6-year-old daughter about mortality. “Daddy,” she asked me, after hearing other kids talk at school, “you mean even police officers can get killed?”

But in general, our working lives go on; crime does not take a holiday or have a mourning period.

Like me, Pat joined the department to help people who were unable to help themselves, to set a positive example for young people and to be of service to this community. Here in Dallas, we want to keep doing that job, and we will take whatever comes our way. k

The flag is lifted from Patrick Zamarripa’s casket at Dallas Fort Worth National Cemetery on July 16.

Ed Ducayet ’89 majored in Asian studies. A former teacher, naval officer, library worker, actor and opera singer, he is now a Dallas police sergeant.

Fall 2016 Amherst 21

How to spark imagination and inspire debate

22 Amherst Fall 2016

FROM recently acquired contemporary works to permanent collection objects that haven’t been shown in more than a decade, the reimagined Mead Art Museum offers a fresh perspective on a distinguished collection.

Photographs by Bob O’Connor

After two months of

interior renovations, the Mead Art Museum has unveiled six new exhibitions and installations. Their purpose: to encourage deep contemplation of art across centuries, continents and media.

“In the spirit of the liberal arts, we want to create a museum that sparks the imagination and inspires debate,” says David E. Little, Mead director and chief curator. “This reinstallation has been a pivotal opportunity to rethink the collection and allow us to engage students, professors and the public in new ways with art across time and the globe.”

The most dramatic renovations are to the Mead’s main gallery, Fairchild Gallery, which has been opened up to reveal a bright, expansive space. The historic Rotherwas Room now features contemporary art. The remaining galleries showcase curatorial reinterpretations of the Mead’s well-regarded holdings of African, American, European and Russian art. All of these exhibitions run through the fall semester.

24 Amherst Fall 2016

On Tuesdays this fall, visitors created “living sculptures” by having informal, unscripted conversations with faculty and staff members on Liam Gillick’s interactive Discussion Bench Platform Red (2010). Gillick’s benches are meant to convert traditional gallery spaces into areas for discussion. Pages 22–23: Some of the modern and contemporary works in the main gallery.

The 17th-century Rotherwas Room meets contemporary art in a new, biannual series, the Rotherwas Project.

Works by Amanda Valdez now bring a fresh palette and iconography to the oak-paneled room.

25 Amherst Fall 2016

26 Amherst Fall 2016

In donating hundreds of American artworks, George Dupont Pratt, class of 1893, and Herbert Lee Pratt, class of 1895, established American art as a cornerstone of the Mead’s collection.

The artworks in Fairchild Gallery underscore how museum collections are built in part by chance: objects accumulate over time, largely thanks to the collecting passions and generosity of supporters. The Mead’s 19,000 objects, given by more than 500 people, span 5,000 years and numerous cultures. Above, David Nash’s Unknown series, gifts of Andrew G. Galef ’54 and Bronya Galef.

28 Amherst Fall 2016

Nicola Courtright, the William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art, curated the installation of European art. Two of her courses inspired the effort, and some of her students researched the objects on display. Above, a detail from Frans Snyders’ Larder with a Servant (Hunting Still Life), ca. 1635–40. Below, center, Madonna and Child with Angels, ca. 1485, by Guidoccio Cozzarelli.

29 Amherst Fall 2016

The founding of museums is one theme of the European exhibition, which looks at how European princes, scholars and merchants of the past gathered objects that fascinated them. From these private collections, museums as we know them today emerged. Above, Cherubs: Allegory of Autumn, a 1780 marble sculpture by the French artist Jean-Antoine Houdon.

30 Amherst Fall 2016

American art on display includes Tall Clock, ca. 1780, from the estate of Isabel J. Turner, and portraits by John Singleton Copley from 1763. Such pieces chart the founding of a nation and a museum.

Monet’s Morning on the Seine, Giverny, from 1897, is the sole work of art in a small, peaceful room in one corner of Fairchild Gallery.

31 Amherst Fall 2016

Selections from the Thomas P. Whitney ’37 Collection of Russian Art include (clockwise from top left) Oleg Kudriashov’s 1988 Architectonic Project, Alexander Archipenko’s 1912 Femme Assise, Natal’ia Sergeevna Goncharova’s 1907 Self-Portrait and Ernst Neizvestny’s 1977 Portrait of Dmitrii Shostakovich. Whitney lived for a time in Russia, which “planted the seed of his collection,” says curator Bettina Jungen.

32 Amherst Fall 2016

Gourds, cloths and wood figures are among the objects in the Art from Africa exhibition, which presents an array of works, including ritual objects used in divination rites in Central and West Africa.

This early-20thcentury Kuba textile, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is a gift from collector Evan Maurer ’66.

The majority of works on display are gifts of Evan Maurer (in whose honor Allen Roberts ’67 also gave works) and Barry Maurer ’59.

The Fairchild Gallery renovation and exhibition were made possible through the generosity of Mead Advisory Board members Suzannah Fabing, Kenneth Rosenthal ’60, Bette and Thomas R. Sturges II ’66, and Helen and Charles C. Wilkes ’71.

33 Amherst Fall 2016

We all Interview by Lisa Raskin Illustration by Anthony Russo

A former FDA commissioner says we’re wired for mental illness and emotional struggle.

Understanding why we suffer may be the key to finding release.

get

35 Fall 2016 Amherst

captured

David Kessler ’73

Kessler’s new book is Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering.

He is a professor at UC San Francisco.

36 Amherst Fall 2016

opens his new book on mental suffering with the suicide, at age 46, of David Foster Wallace ’85. “He left more than a dozen lamps burning in his workroom,” Kessler writes. “They shone upon the desk, and on the unfinished manuscript neatly stacked on top of it. Next to the manuscript was a two-page letter.”

As commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration from 1990 to 1997, Kessler became well-known for his crusade against tobacco. He is the author of A Question of Intent, about the tobacco industry, and The End of Overeating, about the food industry and the American diet. Now, in Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering (HarperCollins, 2016), Kessler argues that a common mechanism underlies addiction, depression, anxiety, mania, obsessive thoughts and violent anger.

“What was the underlying cause of the depression that governed Wallace’s deep unhappiness?” Kessler writes. “‘Depression’ is a label used to describe a group of symptoms. It is not a cause.”

An independent scholar at Amherst, Kessler is also a graduate of Harvard Medical School and the University of Chicago Law School. He is a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology and biostatics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was previously dean of the School of Medicine.

This fall he spoke with Amherst’s Lisa Raskin, the John William Ward Professor of Psychology (Neuroscience), about the hypothesis he presents in his new book.

RASKIN: Your new book pulls together litera-

ture, neuroscience, psychology and philosophy to understand the theory of capture.

Can you start by explaining the concept?

KESSLER: The hypothesis is that a common mechanism underlies many of our emotional struggles and mental illnesses. Simply put, a stimulus—a place, a thought, a memory, an object, a person— seizes our attention and there’s a shift in our perception. I may sense that shift, but I don’t necessarily understand where it comes from when it happens. The experience occurs outside our conscious control, and we surrender to it before we perceive that it’s going on.

You hear, “I can’t resist sugar,” or “I can’t resist nicotine.”

My hand reaches for that chocolate chip cookie before I even think, Do I want that chocolate chip cookie? A drug, a food or a behavior can affect how I feel, and the next time I get exposed to that stimulus, I arouse that same neural circuitry and get caught in a cycle. I pick up that one cigarette and then 781,000 more for the rest of my life. Out of all the stimuli bombarding me, I can only focus on certain things; I’m going to pick out those that are important to me, based on past learning and past memory.

Clinicians in my field have said that between the stimulus and the response is freedom.

That’s key. There’s always a moment where the more rational, higher cortical circuits allow me to possibly change course. I’m stimulated. I feel a certain way. I’ve not yet acted. But certain stimuli become so strong, so powerful, that in certain instances, after repeated experiences, we probably sense very little opening for freedom.

Your book begins with David Foster Wallace ’85. What did you learn from talking with his parents, siblings and Amherst friends?

His depression started in late adolescence. I became interested in whether depression involves a continual focus

Photograph by Jen Siska

Fall 2016 Amherst 37

“No magnetic on negative thoughts, experiences and memories to the exclusion of all else, and how someone who’s depressed gets captured by these thoughts and experiences and narrows his or her attention, focusing on only the most negative stimuli. In his writing, Wallace explained the feedback cycle: I focus on the negative, that makes me feel sad, and I end up focusing on what makes me feel sad.

A negative thought creates the emotion.

When you live in that emotion, you think it’s real.

I’m broken, I’m a failure, I’m never going to feel better: The output of that cycle becomes the input, the next round. It’s selfsustaining. That chocolate chip cookie I can walk away from. Tobacco I can walk away from. But myself—I’m always there.

So I focus internally, but I can also focus on external stimuli— you slighted me; you made me feel bad. And I can be captured by an abiding sense of rage.

So is it an addiction, almost, to your own feelings?

Look at psychopathic behavior. It has been viewed as lack of conscience, a failure of empathy. That focuses only on what’s absent in the mind of the psychopath. But take any mass shooter: Something made him enormously angry.

I think there are neural circuits that underlie that response.

You write about the author William Styron.

He decides to commit suicide, but after listening to the Brahms Alto Rhapsody, his feelings for his mother are so strong that he decides to save himself. He’s overwhelmed by sadness, and then he’s reminded of his mother and is instantly changed.

As bad as he felt about himself, something even more meaningful captured him. The most important secret about capture is that one of the most effective ways to be released from it is to find something else that is more meaningful—to replace a form of negative capture with a positive one.

I think about people who have generalized anxiety disorder. One symptom is that they’re anxious about being anxious. They 38 Amherst Fall 2016

resonance imaging, no experiment on a snail, is going to allow me to understand the subjective feelings associated with capture.”

worry about going outside because they worry they’ll become anxious. What would happen if they could lose themselves in something else?

Look at Alcoholics Anonymous. What gets substituted for alcohol—fellowship, sobriety? Something takes the place that’s more important. It’s easier said than done. At Amherst, David Foster Wallace was a student having bad thoughts, and those bad thoughts isolated him: I can’t share what’s going on in my head because people will think worse of me. If you can get to young people at an early stage and explain to them that they’re not bad, that we all get captured by certain things, can you at least alleviate the pain that accompanies the isolation?

Medicine can attenuate the bad feelings, but somebody with social phobia, for example, then has to learn how to live in the world. Studies show medication combined with therapy is most effective.

My sense is that antidepressants quiet the circuitry, and psychotherapy allows those who are suffering to change the context—to find something else that captures them, or at least to manage the negative thoughts.

If you can learn to turn down the noise, to quiet the thoughts, you can understand what you’re saying to yourself.

Being able to understand how our minds work—isn’t that a key part of a liberal arts education?

Absolutely. The liberal arts is also about challenging what we think and the way we think, and being brave enough to challenge assumptions that we’ve always held. That is essential to an Amherst education.

The sciences are essential to understanding the neural circuitry; any hypothesis has to be grounded in that neurobiology.

But no magnetic resonance imaging, no experiment on a snail, is going to allow me to understand the subjective feelings associated with capture. My book focuses on great writers who explain what they are feeling much better than I ever could. You need learning across disciplines. Plato looked at disparate parts of the mind. Socrates asked if we do things that are not in our interest. And a retired Amherst political science professor, George Kateb, helped me understand what captured us in this political cycle.

Some infants will respond differently to stimuli than others will, and that difference might set them on a course: depending on how they respond to stimuli and how the world responds to them, they’ll be captured by one thing or another going forward.

Many of us enter Amherst being captured by certain ideas and thoughts. Can the Amherst experience teach us how to be free of some biases or broader experiences, so that when we leave we are captured by different things than when we entered?

One comforting thing you’re saying is that we all have these circuits. We will all get captured by one stimulus or another, depending on our history. So, go easy on yourself.

We can’t look at the neural circuits of Virginia Woolf and David Foster Wallace.

That’s not possible. Are some of us more susceptible to capture? No doubt, even if this is a common mechanism, there are different thresholds. The thing that was most important to me was to try to show how we are all vulnerable to capture. It’s not that we’re broken. It’s the way that we’re wired. k This interview has been edited and condensed from an audio interview for the Amherst Reads book club. Listen to the full Q&A at amherst.edu/magazine.

41 A bad experience with an invasive weed changed a career path.

42 Chris Galavotti ’78E is improving health care for women and babies.

Photograph by Jessica Scranton

ALUMNI IN THE WORLD

Beyond Campus

Alicia E. Ellis ’98 used Pinterest to help students explore racism, white privilege and violence. Page 40

Fall 2016 Amherst 39

BEYOND CAMPUS

BY NAOMI SHULMAN SOCIAL MEDIA U

Have you spent any time on Pinterest lately? Alicia E. Ellis ’98 admits she had thought of the social media platform as self-indulgent and consumer-oriented, but then a teaching colleague challenged her to look at it in a new way. Perhaps, her colleague said, it could be used as a teaching tool.

“She said, ‘Break Pinterest. Use it in ways it wasn’t created for,’” Ellis recalls. Which is why, tucked in among the wedding shower idea boards and smoothie recipe collections, you’ll find a board that explores racism, white privilege and violence in America. The juxtaposition is both brilliant and beside the point. Ellis is breaking Pinterest—but only because her students are getting so much out of it.

It started at Hampshire College, where Ellis was teaching Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, a blistering book-length poem about racism in America that had just been released to great acclaim. Ellis knew it would elicit strong reactions in her students— some of them hard to articulate in a conventional five-to-seven-page paper. Her colleague’s Pinterest suggestion rang in her ears.

Consider the “pin” in Pinterest.

What might one traditionally pin to a board? Index cards—a throwback to an earlier academic age. “I remember doing history research papers with notecards, going to the card catalog and heading out to the stacks,” Ellis says. “Students don’t do that anymore.”

But maybe they’re missing something, Ellis realized. “I think a lot of them want that textual materiality.”

Here was an opportunity to create a digital bulletin board where thoughts and connections could be easily shared and cross-referenced. And her students took to the process like the digital natives they are. Articles about pop stars 40 Amherst Fall 2016

Putting a Pin in It appropriating black culture, mugshots of civil rights workers, an essay on Black Lives Matter activists speaking at political rallies. All these pieces intersect and play off each other in the context of Rankine’s work, building the digital conversation.

Now Ellis uses Pinterest as a regular part of her arsenal of hightech teaching tools, which include Moodle, Wordle, Prezi and Google Maps.

“These are tools my students are already using,” she says, noting that because these platforms are mostly cloud-based, they lend themselves to collaboration.

“That’s really important—they’re not alone with a novel trying to figure out what it means.”

The digital platform also allows for students to shine in ways they might not have otherwise.

“Students have more of a personal stake,” she says. “In classroom settings, often some voices are heard

A colleague advised her to “break Pinterest.” So she did—but only because her students get so much out of it.

Alicia E. Ellis ’98 MAJORS: GERMAN AND WOMEN’S AND GENDER STUDIES

Her students are “not alone with a novel trying to figure out what it means.”

and some aren’t.” On the Pinterest board, every voice can be heard— at an equal volume.

But Ellis’s students also like to kick it old-school. “Not everything works in a blended learning classroom,” she admits. “I once suggested students do collaborative work over instant message or Skype, but they just met over tea on a Sunday night!” When a teaching tool works, Ellis has learned, there’s no need to force it.

That Hampshire class where students put together the Pinterest page? It’s been over for a while now; Ellis has moved on to a teaching position at Colby. But guess what? Students are still pinning to that old Pinterest page— engaging with the text, adding to the conversation.

Naomi Shulman’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, Yankee, Real Simple and many other publications.

Photograph by Jessica Scranton

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 ENVIRONMENT U John Tucci ’87’s love of lakes began with family vacations to a lake house in Maine when he was a kid. Decades later, he and his wife bought property on Michigan’s Sherman Lake. But something alarming was happening in and around that water. “The first time I tried to take our newly adopted daughter for a swim,” he says, “instead of being on a nice sandy beach—which we’d had four years before— we’re in this mucky goo. The water turns brown; her bathing suit turns brown.”

Sherman Lake was being taken over and deprived of oxygen by Eurasian watermilfoil, an invasive weed now found in bodies of water across most of North America. Tucci feared that within just a few more years, it would render the lake completely unsuitable for swimming, boating or fishing. Meanwhile, the standard treatment—killing the watermilfoil with herbicides—seemed to be merely “loading the bottom of the lake with compost that fueled the next year’s growth,” he says. “I started researching for alternatives to chemical treatment that would not only address the weed growth but make the lake healthier over time.”

In 2007, Tucci founded a business called Lake Savers to help Sherman Lake and others experiencing similar problems; it’s grown into his full-time job.

Drawing from his geology major and his many years in business management, consulting and technology—and in partnership with scientists and environmental regulatory agencies—his team installs a system of tubes, compressors and diffusers in each

John Tucci ’87 MAJOR: GEOLOGY

His business has helped both recreational lakes and reservoirs.

When he took his daughter for a swim, the water turned her bathing suit brown— and shifted his career path.

lake to mix and aerate the water. Over months and years, this helps to control the watermilfoil and harmful blue-green algae, allowing beneficial microorganisms, insects and fish to make a comeback.

“We started out with a technology that was produced by another company, and we worked with them to scale it up for application in larger lakes,” he says, including Michigan’s Sherman and Indian Lakes, Illinois’ Turnberry Lakes and New York’s Greenwood Lake, among others. Lake Savers’ process, he says, has also helped improve the drinking-water supply in reservoirs in several states and Puerto Rico.

Tucci hopes to expand Lake Savers into larger national and international projects, “to clean up polluted waterways that have large economic consequences.” The company has started a small pilot project on Cape Cod, for instance, to figure out ways to address the excessive nitrogen in saltwater estuaries that is affecting the shellfish industry. Many bodies of water are polluted by runoff of fertilizers from surrounding farmland; Tucci would like to develop technology to harvest those nutrients from lake bottoms and reuse them in fisheries and on farms.

He would also like to publish scientific data relating to Lake Savers’ work. More systematic research needs to be done into how the company’s process affects local flora and fauna—but his customers’ anecdotal evidence about fish, frogs and birds, he says, is consistently positive.

Take Tucci’s own Sherman Lake: Not only has much of the brown “mucky goo” given way to clearer water, but “for the first time ever, we had a loon living on our lake for most of this summer.”

Katherine Duke ’05 is the magazine’s assistant editor.

COURTESY JOHN TUCCI

Water, Un-Mucked

Fall 2016 Amherst 41

BEYOND CAMPUS

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 HEALTH U Chris Galavotti ’78E has always

focused on community support in her work.

Today, as senior director of the Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health program at CARE USA, she helps communities around the world provide better support for women and babies.

Early in her career Galavotti worked with teens in foster care. This led her to a Ph.D. from the University of Texas in the emerging field of community psychology, which explores “how individuals in communities function and overcome challenges or mobilize to address issues,” she says, “and how communities and the environment and structural conditions shape, constrain, the choices people are able to make.”

Next came a job developing anti-smoking interventions among Mexican-Americans in South Texas, followed by 22 years at the Centers for Disease Control, where Galavotti led an initiative in several African countries to encourage prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS through radio soap opera narratives. (See “Hope on the Air” in Amherst’s Spring 2002 issue.)

In 2010 she joined CARE, a nonprofit that runs 890 projects in 95 countries. Fifty-one of those countries—mainly in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America—have programs related to CARE’s Sexual, Reproductive and Maternal Health initiative. “There are so many women dying in childbirth in the developing world,” she says. “There are huge numbers of 42 Amherst Fall 2016

A healthcare program finds uncommon ways to care for women and babies around the world.

Chris Galavotti ’78E MAJOR: ENGLISH

“There are huge numbers of refugees who have no access to contraception.”

refugees who have no access to contraception, no access to safe delivery services, newborn care.” With a 15-person team based in Atlanta and many international team members and stakeholders, Galavotti works to empower communities to change all that.

In crisis-affected parts of Chad and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, CARE has helped more than 82,000 clients access and use contraceptives. For the mostly young and female garment workers around Dhaka, Bangladesh, Galavotti says, CARE is working with retailer Marks & Spencer and pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline to bring doctors’ services directly into factories, along with classes and demonstrations on birth control, breastfeeding and hand washing.

Among the most important and promising CARE efforts, Galavotti says, is its work to help citizens hold service providers accountable. She points to the Community Score Card process developed by CARE Malawi, through which CARE facilitates discussions among community members and health service providers about the issues and challenges they face. Each side assigns scores from 0 to 100 on various factors— such as “Relationships Between Clients and Providers”—and then they come together to identify steps to solve problems and increase the scores.

Taking a page from the tech world, Galavotti’s team is now developing an “accelerator” program: they’ll figure out how to replicate and adapt their most successful projects, to bring them into yet more communities in need.

COURTESY CARE USA; OPPOSITE: COURTESY SCIENCENTER

Sending Doctors to Factories

Science, Kids and Building Things

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 MUSEUMS U When Charlie Trautmann ’74 went to work for the Sciencenter in Ithaca, N.Y., he was not just its executive director—he was its first paid employee.

But he saw in the small, volunteer-staffed nonprofit museum an opportunity that combined three things he really liked: “science, kids and building things.”

Much of his 26-year career building up the Sciencenter, he says, has been about nurturing connections with other organizations and businesses around Ithaca, as well as inviting “people from the community to come to us with ideas for exhibits, for programs, for events.”

But perhaps an even bigger priority for Trautmann, who joined the Sciencenter in 1990, has been expanding access for children and families. “We want to touch the life of every child in our region,

Charlie Trautmann ’74 MAJORS: GEOPHYSICS

“We want to touch the life of every child in our region, not just the ones whose parents can afford to get them here.”

In a small museum, he saw a chance to combine three things he really liked.

not just the ones whose parents can afford to get them here,” he says. But how to do that? “Any family that has a child in free or reduced-price lunch at school, in a seven-county region around us, can get a free one-year membership,” he says. He’s a co-founder of Ithaca’s Discovery Trail, a network of seven museums and a library, through which every local secondgrade class takes a free field trip to the Sciencenter. He says the museum welcomes 3,800 secondgraders annually.

Overall, thanks to these and other programs, “out of our 100,000 visitors a year, 14,000 of those don’t pay anything.” The museum also has an early childhood education program that involves a partnership with Head Start.

The Sciencenter has gotten help along the way from other Amherst folks, including Bill Bassett ’54, a geology professor at Cornell; historian and organizational consultant Bill Weary ’64; and Lara

Litchfield-Kimber ’92, the museum’s director of development from 2004 to 2012. When she was provost at Cornell, Amherst President Biddy Martin promoted collaborations between the university and the museum, Trautmann says.

In his work, Trautmann has drawn from his summers as a Boy Scout camp counselor, his interdisciplinary geophysics major at Amherst, graduate degrees in engineering from Stanford and Cornell and a lifetime of visiting science museums around the world.

He’s also father to two children who grew up visiting the museum and are now scientists.

Next spring he will retire from executive directorship of the Sciencenter and move on to a sixmonth sabbatical at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. Supported by his third fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, he will travel throughout Europe, visiting museums, universities, nature schools and other institutions for insight into promoting environmental consciousness, cooperation and lifelong learning in young children.

Fall 2016 Amherst 43

BEYOND CAMPUS

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER BUSINESS U When you hear that someone has dropped everything to take a multiyear position thousands of miles from home, you might imagine an ambitious, adventurous 22-year-old.

But for Johnny H. Nesbitt ’72, an overseas post holds equal appeal now that he’s well-settled in his career.

Nesbitt was enjoying a spring day in Miami last year when a

44 Amherst Fall 2016

Dubai-based headhunter called with a question: Would he consider moving to Saudi Arabia to work? The idea had never crossed his mind.

Nesbitt earned an M.B.A. after Amherst and has spent his career in executive recruiting and employer branding (that is, helping companies develop their reputations as employers). He’s done this work at Unext.com, Lockheed Martin, Monsanto and, at the time of the phone call, Randstad. Flattered by the headhunter’s call, he did a Skype interview with a team from the Saudi Electricity Co. In March, work visa in hand, Nesbitt arrived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to oversee employer branding at the state-run electric company on a multi-year contract.

He says he chose the job in part because of his lifelong interest in other cultures, and also because he’d enjoyed an earlier experience working and living in another country (England). Riyadh brings him closer to his girlfriend in England, too. And the job is a natural extension of work he’s done throughout his career.

As important, he says, is that the Saudis were looking for some-

An out-of-theblue phone call brought an alumnus to a new job in Saudi Arabia.

Johnny H. Nesbitt ’72 MAJOR: ANTHROPOLOGY

He moved for the job in part because of his lifelong interest in other cultures.

one with a deep and rich résumé.

“Many of the expats I work with here are Canadians or Brits with 30 years-plus of professional experience,” he says. “I see a lot of gray hair. This approach is the exact opposite of the hiring practices of Silicon Valley.”

Here are a few other things he’s learned about Saudi business culture during his time in the country: On the 10th floor of a large tower, his office has an international feel, with colleagues from places ranging from Canada to Sudan to the Philippines. Most are fluent in English.

The work day starts promptly at 7 a.m. and finishes abruptly at 3 p.m. At noon work stops for midday prayer time.

No one talks about politics at work, he says, and no one keeps family pictures on their desks.

Enter any cubicle and the person who works there will immediately offer coffee or tea, served by an attendant.

Riyadh is an energetic but dusty city. Work colleagues are friendly and open. American fast food restaurants sprinkle the street. His own office window looks down on a Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk. k

FROM TOP: ABDULLAH AL-EISA, COURTESY JOHNNY H. NESBITT

A Job in Riyadh

48 Hollywood’s first female-dominated depiction of Wall Street 49 Playwright Jihae Park ’02 on the spiritual cost of success

Photograph by Beth Perkins

ARTS NEWS AND REVIEWS

Amherst Creates

In This Vast Southern Empire, Matthew Karp ’03 takes a critical gaze at antebellum America from the perspective of foreign policy. Page 50

Fall 2016 Amherst 45

AMHERST CREATES

SPEAKING TEEN

AWKWARD Writers Jenna Lamia ’00E (left) and Sarah Walker ’03 MTV

The show followed a group of teens as they quipped and squabbled.

At right, Ashley Rickards as Jenna Hamilton and Beau Mirchoff as Matty McKibben. Below, a scene from the graduation episode.

46 Amherst Fall 2016

TV U Jenna Lamia ’00E and Sarah Walker ’03 met in the writers’ room for the MTV teen comedy Awkward. “Of course I was instantly intimidated by her,” Lamia says, “because she’s very tall and beautiful, and she had been on the Amherst basketball team.”

The respect is mutual: “I love Jenna—she’s the best,” Walker says. That first meeting took place in 2014, when both had come onboard as writers in the show’s fourth season. By that time each had spent years pursuing a career as a comedy writer.

While at Amherst, Walker had landed internships at the David Letterman and Conan O’Brien shows, and after graduation she’d worked as a writer on MTV and VH1 talk shows and game shows, while also contributing to the humor magazine McSweeney’s and publishing a tonguein-cheek self-help book, Really, You’ve Done Enough (“It was definitely the most amount of work for the least amount of money,” she says).

Lamia, meanwhile, had gueststarred on TV shows including Strangers with Candy, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Oz. It was her work with David O. Russell ’81E, in a supporting role in his film The Fighter, that got her on track for the writing career she had always wanted, when Russell passed along one of Lamia’s original screenplays to his agent. “Once I got my foot through that door, I just knew I had to walk through all the way,” she says. “So acting went on the back burner.”

Walker and Lamia worked together on the final two seasons of Awkward, which ended this

COURTESY MTV (2)

Two alumnae bonded in the writers’ room for an MTV comedy. | BY JOSH BELL ’02

past May. Each season “we had to write 24 shows in the span of about 25 weeks,” Walker says.

For Lamia, who was both a writer and a recurring guest star on the show, Awkward was pretty much a dream job. “Knowing I was going to get to act some of the

stuff we were writing just made me more excited to write it,” she says. “One day I was in wardrobe in my trailer, waiting to shoot something, rewriting someone’s script, and I had this moment of, ‘This is the best.’”

The chronicle of quirky

PROFILE

“

Josh Bell ’02 is the Las Vegas Weekly film editor.

How to Launch a Theater She was in a creative wasteland and worked to find a way out. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05

presented a new take on Macbeth. “We stripped the script down to its bare bones to create a feverish, 90-minute version, using just five cast members (two women, three men),” says Galdieri. “Each of us assumed the title role for one act, transferring it from one performer to another, initially seeming like a gift, eventually becoming a curse.”

Galdieri played Lady Macbeth throughout.

“It was such a satisfying ride to switch into the role of Macbeth for Act IV (the only act in which Lady M is absent),” she says. “And since all of us inhabited multiple roles, there were plenty of opportunities to play with power and gender.”

This year, the SET Collective has done a reading of Richard II as part of the Gallery Players’ “enormously ambitious project to host readings of every single word that Shakespeare wrote.” They’ve also staged The Birds & The Bees, a trilogy of plays by the late Louis Catron that “explore how trust and intimacy express themselves throughout the stages of life,” Galdieri says.

And she continues to seek balance, both managing “the practical and unglamorous realities of producing theater”—“division of labor, navigating deadlines, negotiating contracts”—and pursuing work outside the collective. She runs her own speech and performance coaching business, lends her voice to the new animated feature Nerdland and is “writing and developing a television show about millennial artists.”

The SET Collective’s next production, she hopes, will be a contemporary comedy. “We also plan to revisit an original piece that we co-wrote, which focuses on the 1969 moon landing.” Eventually, they expect to develop a series of educational plays and a concept for a TV show.

Galdieri as Lady Macbeth.

For one act in the same show, she played the title role.

DARIN REED

teenager Jenna Hamilton (Ashley Rickards) and her on-again, off-again relationship with hunky Matty McKibben (Beau Mirchoff ), Awkward followed Jenna and her friends through high school and slightly beyond, as they quipped and squabbled and hooked up in various combinations.

Writing a show about teenagers meant creating believable—or at least entertaining—slang, especially for Jenna’s best friend Tamara (Jillian Rose Reed). “Tamara speaks in these crazy—we call them Tamara-isms,” Walker says. “It’s sort of like a high school student on speed, whatever crazy things they put together. That was fun, making up jargon that maybe trickled down into real life.”

Walker and Lamia each majored in English (Walker doublemajored in art history), Writing and both cite about teen- Amherst proagers meant fessors as formative influcreating ences. Walker believable was able to get (or at least course credit funny) slang. for her Letterman and O’Brien internships thanks to support from her adviser, Helen von Schmidt. And in Professor Judith Frank’s fiction writing class, Lamia learned to give positive feedback to fellow writers, a skill that proved invaluable in TV writing. Of that class, Lamia says, “I would go so far as to say it did change my life.”

Walker and Lamia have now moved on to new writing jobs— Walker on Netflix’s Santa Clarita Diet, Lamia on The CW’s No Tomorrow. Eventually, each hopes to create and run her own comedy show. And they continue to appreciate their Amherst bond. “To be honest, it’s a little bit comforting, because Hollywood can be an intimidating place,” Lamia says.

As Walker says, “I could talk about Amherst forever.”

Every actor sets out to balance creative work with work that pays the bills. At the start of her career, Julie Galdieri ’88 found that balance by performing with New York theaters such as La MaMa and The Barrow Group and doing voiceovers and independent films, while also dedicating some time to “business theater”—writing scripts for corporate campaigns and launch events.

“But after a while, the balance shifted, and I found myself in a creative wasteland,” she says. She realized “it was up to me to create the sort of work that I was longing to do. So, I began to think about launching a theater.”

It turned out that her friend and fellow actor Marika Becz was experiencing similar frustrations. “Unbeknownst to the other,” Galdieri says, “we each had a goal to start an actors’ ‘collective.’ Our separate imaginations were even using that same word.”

They invited several other actors whose work they admired, and called their new venture the SET Collective. The name has two meanings: it’s an acronym for “still enough time,” and the collective helps actors “set” their ideas into place.

“Our goal was to foster a nonhierarchical model of leadership in performance, playwriting and production,” says Galdieri, who has a master’s in acting from Trinity Repertory Co. Another goal was “to discover a fresh resonance and relevance in original and established works, and their importance in the cultural landscape of today.”

At the off-Broadway Lion Theatre in October 2015, for instance, the SET Collective

Katherine Duke ’05 is the magazine’s assistant editor.

Fall 2016 Amherst 47

AMHERST CREATES

THE WOMEN OF WALL STREET In Hollywood’s first female-dominated depiction of corporate America, there are just as many women behind the camera as there are on screen. | BY RACHEL ROGOL EQUITY Written by Amy Fox ’97 Sony Pictures Classics

SONY PICTURES (2)

At right, Anna Gunn as one of the film’s investment bankers. Fox, pictured below, wrote Equity after interviewing women in finance and law. The film is inspired by those women’s stories.

FILM U Equity, Hollywood’s latest film about Wall Street, has the telltale signs of a financial flick. It is, of course, set in New York City, and power, money and greed abound.

But the film—written by Amy Fox ’97 and directed by Meera Menon—is unlike others about Wall Street in a groundbreaking way: it’s Hollywood’s first female-dominated depiction of corporate America. And there are just as many women behind the camera as there are on screen.

Directed, written, produced and financed by women, Equity tells the fictional story of Naomi Bishop, a senior investment banker played by Anna Gunn of the AMC series Breaking Bad. Producers and co-stars Alysia Reiner (Netflix’s Orange is the New Black) and Sarah Megan Thomas (Backwards) developed the concept for the film and found the backers to fund it. “Our investors were primarily women who had worked on Wall Street and wanted to see this story told,” Fox says.

Fox studied acting and English at Amherst. After graduating, she moved to New York City and began her career as a playwright for the Ensemble Studio Theatre. “They produced my first play, got my work noticed by The New York Times and are still one of the first places I go to develop a new project,” she says.

Fox’s first screenwriting gig stemmed from her work with EST. A play she’d written there caught the attention of Merchant Ivory Productions, which asked her to adapt it for the screen. The film, Heights, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2005, starring Glenn Close and Elizabeth Banks.

Equity is Fox’s second foray into screenwriting. Thomas and Reiner approached her in 2014 with the idea of deAmy Fox veloping a story about female

48 Amherst Fall 2016

financial investors. Together, they interviewed women in finance and law whose experiences became the foundations for Equity. “Although it is not a documentary,” Fox says, “the film is inspired by the hundreds of real stories these women told us about working in male-dominated fields.”

Based on those interviews, and on her own experiences working in Hollywood, Fox concluded that the financial and film industries are similar in that they fail to give women and men equal opportunities to advance. “One of the fastest ways to change this is for women to mentor and invest in each other,” she says, “and this film is a great example of that.”

Equity premiered at Sundance this year with positive reviews from critics, and it was released in theaters nationwide late this summer. “It’s an independent film that started on four screens and has now spread to 250, so that feels terrific,” Fox says. “I want the film to have a long life, because I’m proud of the work of everyone involved, and also because the film portrays complicated, powerful women that we don’t often see on screen, and prompts important conversations about gender in the workplace.”

Rachel Rogol covers the arts in Amherst’s Office of Communications.

AMHERST CREATES

THE SPIRITUAL COST OF SUCCESS

PEERLESS Various theaters HANNAH AND THE DREAD GAZEBO Oregon Shakespeare Festival Jihae Park ’02

Peerless, at right, is a comedy of high-schoolachievement manners. In 2017 it will be staged at theaters in Chicago, California and Boston.

“

THEATER U Ever since graduating from Amherst and earning an M.F.A. in acting, Jiehae Park ’02 has followed a dual-skill path as actor and playwright, earning a suitcase full of prizes, fine-tuning her writing in half a dozen major workshops and staging multiple readings of her plays.

In 2015 the Yale Repertory Theatre staged her first full-length premiere—a comedy of highschool-achievement manners, peerless. In the coming year, peerless will move on to other theaters, and another of Park’s plays will see its world premiere.

“If there were standardized tests for emerging playwrights, it’s a good bet that Jiehae Park would ace them,” wrote Sylviane Gold in the The New York Times, describing peerless as “darkly comic.”

It’s the story of two Asian-American girls immersed in major-college admissions rituals at a Midwestern high school. Park’s handling of the topic did not surprise her mentor, Amherst’s Playwright-in-Residence Constance Congdon: “She is a very sharp comic writer, and her plays have a bite to them.”

The Barrington Stage Co. produced peerless this past summer, and in 2017 the play will be staged at Chicago’s First Floor Theater; Marin Theatre Co. in Mill Valley, Calif.; and Company One in Boston.

Also in 2017, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival will present the world premiere of her play Hannah and the Dread Gazebo from March 29 to Oct. 28.

Gazebo has laughs, but it also portrays potentially Gazebo begins more fraught cultural effects with a FedEx of South Korean immigrabox containing tion, separation from the North and industrialization. ‘a wish and a The play begins when a suicide note.’

South Korean-born American woman receives a mysterious FedEx box from her grandmother, containing “a wish and a suicide note.”

“South Korea,” says Park, “is a model of Western capitalist ‘success.’ After the war, the nation pulled itself up (by some pretty brutal tactics) to become a high-tech economic powerhouse. And yet it has the highest suicide rate in the developed world.”

“On some level, everything I’ve written so far feels related to the spiritual cost of ‘success,’” she says. “What do we give up in order to get to the place we think we want to be, and how does it feel once we get there?”

CHASI ANNEXY

In two premieres, a playwright explores “what we give up in order to get to the place we think we want to be.” | BY PAUL STEINLE ’61

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Artistic Director Bill Rauch sees promise in Park’s writing.

“She is gentle and open and collaborative, but really clear about what her play needs and fiercely articulate about how to achieve that.”

Park received her M.F.A. from UC San Diego and worked as an actor and producer with the performance group title3 in Los Angeles. Her journey into playwriting began at Amherst, where she majored in theater and dance and graduated magna cum laude. “Intellectually,” says Park, “it was mindblowing to get to pick what I wanted to study. That freedom hadn’t been part of my high school education at an intense math/science/computer magnet program. And the idea I could act in plays, major in something like theater and spend time with Professor Congdon was ridiculous and wonderful to my little 20-year-old brain. I basically wrote a play for my thesis so I could hang out with Connie.”

That play was Happy Moon Day, Holly Woo, a light satire that Congdon remembers well. “It’s about a Korean family that moved to Los Angeles and lost their identity. In the opening scene,” recalls Congdon, “the father is wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig and the mother has a dress that matches their wallpaper.”

Says Congdon, a devoted follower of Park’s current and future efforts, “she’s in this for the long haul.”

Paul Steinle ’61 is an Oregon-based writer.

Fall 2016 Amherst 49

AMHERST CREATES

THE MYTH OF STATES’ RIGHTS In seceding from the Union, the South imagined a strong central government and a global economy that rested upon slave labor. | BY ROBERT E. WEIR THIS VAST SOUTHERN EMPIRE: SLAVEHOLDERS AT THE HELM OF AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

By Matthew Karp ’03 Harvard University Press

Karp casts doubt on numerous popularly held views and sheds new light on America on the eve of the Civil War. He denies, for example, that the South was embattled and isolated.

50 Amherst Fall 2016

NONFICTION U A student recently asked me why new books are written on slavery and the Civil War when they are already the most written-about subjects in American history. One good reason is that things look different when the frame of reference changes. Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire takes a critical gaze at antebellum America from the perspective of foreign policy. Diplomatic history is often pegged as “dry,” but this one certainly isn’t. Karp casts doubt on numerous popularly held views in lively prose that sheds new light on America on the eve of the Civil War. Karp denies, for example, that the South was embattled and isolated, or that slavery was—to invoke John Calhoun’s phrase—a “peculiar” institution. Most Southern appeals to states’ rights were in fact dissimulation in which few ardent theorists or powerful leaders actually believed.

And why would they? As Karp bluntly asserts, proslavery elites held a “vise-like grip on the executive branch.” From the time John Quincy Adams left the presidency in 1829 until Lincoln assumed it in

1861, all Oval Office holders either owned slaves or supported the institution, and only Zachary Taylor (1849-50) opposed its expansion. Southerners also controlled most diplomatic posts, held secretaryof-state posts two-thirds of the time and spearheaded military modernization. President Franklin Pierce’s secretary of war was none other than Jefferson Davis.

About diplomacy and war, Karp looks deeply into the views of powerful prewar Southern thinkers who get surprisingly short shrift in standard texts— among them: Duff Green, Robert Hunter, Thomas Butler King, Abel Upshur and Henry Wise. Most Southern elites did not see Northerners as threats until after 1850. Britain, not U.S. abolitionism, was on their minds.

To Duff Green, for example, Parliament’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, Britain’s imperialism and its powerful navy were rapacious attempts to monopolize global trade. Southerners countered first by advocating for a strong navy. Not what you’d expect from states’-rights advocates? Karp sharply notes, Photograph by Beth Perkins

“

“Southern navalists were seldom troubled by the constitutional implications of their views on foreign policy and military power.”

Far from feeling isolated, slaveholders saw the South, together with Cuba, Brazil and Texas, as the cornerstones for a Western-hemisphere slave system—possibly with Virginia as a breeding incubator.

With so-called “scientific racism” on the rise, they articulated “slaveholding visions of modernity”—an American-led slave labor system that required a strong central government to assure that “global economics trumped domestic politics.” In Karp’s words, “the antebellum South’s commitment to states’ rights seldom went much further than the region’s commitment to slavery.”

Karp blames Southerners for unhinging well-oiled plans. Incidents such as overly speedy attempts to annex Texas, manufactured reasons for war with Mexico and William Walker’s 1854 conquest of Nicaragua served mainly to inflame a Northern public that was hitherto lukewarm to abolitionism. Southern diplomats made matters worse.

As abolitionist sentiment grew, slaveholding ambassadors abroad encouraged their domestic counterparts to think that Britain now viewed the abolition of slavery as a mistake. This was untrue, Separatists imagined that but it led separatists to imagine that a commodity-driven an alliance alliance with a chastened with Britain Britain could sustain an indecould sustain pendent slaveholding South.

Karp sees secession as the the South. ultimate expression “of the national state.” The Confederacy relied upon centralized authority to preserve slavery and promote its chimerical global economic ideals. It paid lip service to states’ rights, but lip service was all it was.

Karp agrees with past scholars who argued that the South was controlled by an elitist slavocracy, though he thinks its character wasn’t quite as assumed. A deft epilogue focuses on W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1890 graduation speech at Harvard that linked the “Rod of Empire”— as expressed contemporaneously in racism, eugenics, jingoism and unbridled imperialism—to the antebellum period. The empire Du Bois referenced was not what slaveholding elites would have conjured, though it inexorably “grew out of the master’s whip.” John Locke coined the phrase “the doctrine of unintended consequences.”

If we shift the Civil War frame as Karp has done, William Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” has a whiff of foreign-policy miscalculation. This is why scholars take new looks at old issues. k Robert E. Weir, Ph.D., is a freelance writer and semiretired professor of American history at UMass. He has authored or edited seven books.

HANNA BARCZYK

SHORT TAKES

Amherst alumni and faculty offer plenty of music and reading material for cozy autumn evenings. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Make yourself comfortable in The Guest Room, by Chris Bohjalian ’82 (Doubleday).

Turn on Songs from the Headland, by Bluebird Parade, with lead vocalist Ming Nagel ’94 (Ghost of Ruffian Records).

Hungry? Try Eating Words: A Norton Anthology of Food Writing, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Roger J. Porter ’58 (W.W. Norton), or Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, by Ted Merwin ’90 (NYU Press). But, Diana Ohlbaum ’84 reminds you, Ketchup Is Not a Vegetable: A Teen Guide to Conscious Eating (self-published iBook).

Crack open A Dictionary of Literary Works, by Mike Goldman ’56 (Small Batch Books), and examine A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht, by Jonathan F.S. Post ’70 (Oxford University Press).

Check out Doug Magee ’69’s President Blog (Reel Lies Books), as well as A Survival Guide to the Misinformation Age: Scientific Habits of Mind, by David J. Helfand ’72 (Columbia University Press).

Encounter Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection, by Edward Dallam Melillo, associate professor of history and environmental studies (Yale University Press). Then get to know The Permanent Migrants: Modern China Explained by Mushroom Hunters, Noodle Chefs and Undercover Police, by Amos Irwin ’07 (CreateSpace).

Catherine Besteman ’81 writes of Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugees and Lewiston, Maine (Duke University Press).

In case money matters are on your mind, Patricia M. Angus ’86, Esq., provides The Trustee Primer: A Guide for Personal Trustees (Angus Advisory Group LLC), and David R. Martín ’84 describes Puerto Rico’s Future Entertainment Economy (CreateSpace).

Anand Pandian ’94 shows you the Reel World: An Anthropology of Creation (Duke University Press), before Jim Balzotti ’75 brings down The Wrath of God (Creation House).

Fall 2016 Amherst 51

VOICES

e CONTINUED FROM PAGE 3

The article on Hadley Arkes fails to examine his more controversial contentions. Imagine you are gay and you encounter these words: “Do liberals want to break through conventions with ‘sex education’? Then education it should be: The life-shortening hazards of homosexual behavior should be conveyed, along with information about the other hazards of incautious sex; the record of conversions from homosexual life should be put in texts along with the inconclusive arguments over the ‘gay gene’” (Arkes in The Weekly Standard, May 23, 2005).

In years to come, Professor Arkes’ writings will continue to be part of America’s political dialogue, even far from Amherst. Here is a claim repeated by former Rep. Todd Akin: “the number of pregnancies resulting from rape in this country is minuscule [since] … the fear induced by rape may interrupt the normal operation of hormones in the body of the woman, which in turn may prevent ovulation and conception.” (Arkes, First Things: An Inquiry into the First Principles of Morals and Justice, 1986.)

As Professor Arkes retires, let us cast light on all of his scholarship. He would ask no less from his students.

ERNEST TITO CRAIGE ’70 Chapel Hill, N.C. NOT THE FATHER The latest issue of Amherst just arrived, and looks very good. But I take issue with the headline on your interesting piece about Grosvenor and the National Geographic. It’s a big-time overreach to call him the father of photojournalism.

Mathew Brady and others from the Civil War certainly have a prior claim to the title, and so do many others both here in the U.S. and in Europe.

That said, a tip of the sombrero for the way you keep improving the quality of the magazine.

CLAUDE E. ERBSEN ’59 New York City LIFE ON THE FIRST COED FLOOR The cross-generational alumni friendship Mark Rigg ’89 described in “A College in Common” (Point of View, Summer 2016) painted a lovely portrait of how he and Robert Snedeker ’49 shared an educational connection across four

CORRECTION Bob Glickman ’60 co-authored the Summer 2016 In Memory piece for Bob Ittel ’60. Because of a formatting error, Dr. Glickman’s name appears not at the end of Mr. Ittel’s remembrance, as it should, but instead in blue type at the start of the remembrance for Stephen Bunker Rohrbaugh ’60. This makes it appear as though Dr. Glickman is among the deceased. Please be assured that he is very much alive. We apologize for the error.

decades of age difference. Mark’s essay brought me up short, however, when he wrote that as they compared experiences, “I would try to shock him with my stories of being on the first-ever coed hall.”

Sorry, Mark, but you were probably in second grade when I lived on Amherst’s first coed hall in 1974. There were 13 women on campus that fall out of 1,300 students, and a few Amherst “coeds” lived on the mostly male third floor in South (or was it North?). As the only one from a coed school (Wesleyan), I lobbied administrators for amenities so a coed hall with one bathroom could work—like shower curtains and an enclosure for the urinals—because our male hallmates wouldn’t abide by the “Women Only” sign that hung on the bathroom door.

Our hall’s culture was probably unlike Mark’s hall. Male-female friendships were rare at Amherst in that era when road-tripping, dating and mixers were the norm; resident women were not part of the picture. While the guys on my hall were friendly, I used to say that if I died in the dorm on Friday afternoon, no one would notice until Monday!

Coming from Wesleyan to Amherst in 1974 was like time-traveling to the late ’60s, when elite men’s schools first considered coeducation. The community was divided and on edge as we awaited the board of trustees’ vote, uncertain about how admitting women would change the College’s established culture and traditions.

It was fun to pioneer the coed hall, celebrate the vote and now see precoeducation alumni revel in their daugh-

ters’ and granddaughters’ opportunity to carry on the Amherst legacy.

CYNTHIA M. ULMAN (WESLEYAN CLASS OF ’75) Mill Valley, Calif.

REMEMBERING PROFESSOR HAWKINS I read with sadness of the death of history and American studies professor Hugh Hawkins (In Memory, Summer 2016). As my thesis adviser, Professor Hawkins was a steady and reliable supporter. He encouraged my efforts to connect with a broad range of people and helped me secure a grant to travel to the Mississippi Delta, where I visited the small town founded by Isaiah Montgomery, the controversial African-American leader from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout my yearlong study of Montgomery, Professor Hawkins helped me to discover the joy of research and writing.

Yet his impact went well beyond that.

One day in November, we were walking across campus when he asked me, “So, what history graduate schools are you applying to for next year?” At the time, I was focused on going to medical school; I had not even imagined history graduate school. His question jarred me into rethinking my assumptions about what I should do with my life. I ended up applying for teaching jobs in independent schools. Twenty-plus years later, I am the head of an independent elementary school.

Professor Hawkins’ ability to see something in me that I didn’t see in myself helped me to step off of the path I was on—a path tied to what I thought I should do with my life, not what I was passionate about doing—and explore other possibilities. The power of his question has stayed with me throughout my career, reminding me that our influence on others happens in fleeting moments and at unexpected times. I strive to be present in each moment, as I never know how my engagement, or lack of engagement, might influence someone’s life.

Professor Hawkins was a mentor, an inspiration and a kind, generous man. He will be missed.

MARK SILVER ’93 Los Gatos, Calif. k Fall 2016 Amherst 123

AMHERST MADE

NIGHT

FLYING

The red-eye might not be your first choice for coastto-coast travel, but you don’t question that it is there for the taking. Why wouldn’t it be?

In the early years of aviation, flying at night would have been a counterintuitive proposition. Flying without seeing where you were going required breakthroughs in lighting and navigation.

Both fascinated Preston R. Bassett, class of 1913 (and namesake of Bassett Planetarium).

His key patents in the application of arc

124 Amherst Fall 2016

lighting and gyroscopic instrumentation helped enable night flight.

Bassett’s writings include a disquisition on maximizing the intensity and projection of a light source, as well as wideeyed reports such as “My Day with Orville Wright.”

He also published biographical sketches of early pilots. One recounts a record-setting 1924 transcontinental journey. In this “Dawn to Dusk” flight, it took 21 hours and 44 minutes for Russell Maughan to get from Mitchell Field in Long Island, N.Y., to San Francisco. Maughan departed as light cracked

the horizon and “he raced the sun across the continent,” landing at twilight on that long summer solstice day.

Four years later, in 1928, Bassett—an engineer at Sperry Gyroscope Co.—was “busy equipping airways with automatic beacons so the airmail could go through by night,” he later wrote. These first night routes were between New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C., and Bassett’s luminescent markers allowed pilots to orient themselves.

Equally important for night flying were

instruments that could guide an aircraft in the absence of visible landmarks. Early in his career at Sperry (where he rose to be chief engineer and president), Bassett directed research on using gyroscopes in compasses and in other instruments pilots use for guidance. “Little did we realize that we were pioneers in the new field that is now called automation,” he later reflected.

Automatic pilot, it turns out, is more than a cockpit convenience. It makes the red-eye possible. ERIC GOLDSCHEIDER

MICHAEL DZAMAN/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

A 1913 alumnus helped make red-eye flights possible.

Submit your ideas for the new official mascot of Amherst College SUBMIT:

Does it have to be an animal?

Something Positive and Forward Thinking?

amherst.edu/go/mascot •

#AmherstMascot

It Just Needs To

What Does Only Amherst Have?

Can It Be Literary?

SHARE:

Bleed Purple Please, Nothing Scary!

Everyone

Likes Birds

It Should Be Scary!

Maybe Something with Dinosaurs?

#AmherstMascot

Can I volunteer to wear the costume?

Whatever it is, it should start with the letter “A” I love alliteration.

What Is

Uniquely Amherst?

amherst.edu/go/mascot

AMHERST PO Box 5000 Amherst, MA 01002

“EVERYTHING I’VE WRITTEN so far feels related to the spiritual

“GLOBAL ECONOMICS TRUMPED DOMESTIC

cost of ‘success.’ ”

POLITICS.”

Jiehae Park ’02, Page 49

Matthew Karp ’03, Page 50

“IT WAS UP TO ME TO CREATE THE SORT OF WORK THAT I WAS LONGING TO DO.” Julie Galdieri ’88, Page 47

“She said, ‘Break Pinterest.

Use it in ways it wasn’t

CREATED FOR.’” Alicia E. Ellis ’98, Page 40