WINTER 2015
Keys to
the City
On an island where apartments sell for $90 million, Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen ’88 has an ambitious plan to make New York housing more affordable.
IN THIS ISSUE
Ì WINTER 2015 | VOLUME 67
FEATURES
NUMBER 2
DEPARTMENTS
16 KEYS TO THE CITY BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80
2 VOICES 4 COLLEGE ROW
As a deputy mayor of New York City, Alicia Glen ’88 is working to make housing more affordable for the 99 percent. 22 WILD SIDE PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM GRIM
VALENTINE Dining Hall as grocery store A SPACE DISCOVERY by a new professor A WEDDING in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom STUDYING one painting for an entire semester AND MORE
10 SPORTS
Half of Amherst’s 1,000-acre campus is protected wilderness open for recreation and research. 24 ROSE OLVER: AN APPRECIATION BY ELIZABETH ARIES
Rose Richardson Olver, the first woman hired to a tenure-track position at Amherst, died Nov. 19. A colleague remembers her friend and mentor. 28 THE LOUDEST MOMENTS BY MELIH LEVI ’15
In conversations with an alumnus and their mutual professor, a student finds a way back to himself. Ì
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ON THE COVER
Alicia Glen ’88 photographed by Joshua Paul in New York City Hall, January 2015
BASKETBALL The Amherst women broke UConn’s record for consecutive wins at home
12 THE BIG PICTURE An aerial view of campus
14 POINT OF VIEW George Bria ’38 on his life as a World War II correspondent in Italy, and as a 99-year-old today
33 BEYOND CAMPUS LAW Jessica Rothschild ’06 helped free an innocent man SOCIAL ACTION Immigration, women’s rights and poverty in New Mexico EDUCATION Beth Foley Swanson ’96 on the Chicago teachers’ strike CULTURE Editing Lena Dunham’s best-seller CONSERVATION Fish stocks in Lake Victoria
39 AMHERST CREATES CARTOONS Billy Lopez ’03’s Welcome to the Wayne MONEY The Opposite of Spoiled, by Ron Lieber ’93 ART Sonya Clark ’89’s Hair Craft Project BIOGRAPHY John William Ward: An American Idealist, by Professor Kim Townsend THEATER Shakespeare from Brooke Bishop ’10
46 CLASSES 106 IN MEMORY 112 AMHERST MADE Bill Wasik ’96 invented the flash mob
“I was not a great student. Even professors who liked me will tell you that.” PAGE 40
ONLINE
Ì WWW.AMHERST.EDU/MAGAZINE
MORE NEWS l Meet the new president of the Association of Amherst Students, OLUWATOMI WILLIAMS ’16, who wants to create a closer relationship between student government and the student body.
l The College’s new Office of Sustainability has its first director, LAURA DRAUCKER, who wants to “integrate sustainability into the daily life of the campus.” She previously worked at the World Resources Institute and the EPA. VIRTUAL LECTURE l Even young children are sensitive to certain cues people use to indicate they are sharing important information. Assistant Professor of Psychology CARRIE PALMQUIST explains how one gesture—pointing— affects children’s learning and interactions. BLOG l Well Mixed, the new Amherst guest blog, features, among others, photographer STEPHEN PETEGORSKY ’75, private chef and cookbook author Molly Gilbert ’06 and clothing designer Alex Casertano ’05. PHOTO SETS l Peek inside the BENESKI MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. Plus: see what students did on campus during interterm and browse photos from men’s and women’s basketball, hockey and squash games.
VOICES
TALKING ABOUT DEATH “STORIES OF LIFE,” BY TRACY JARRETT ’11 (Fall 2014), courageously explored terrain that we too often avoid. We don’t talk about death. Certainly we don’t talk about death by AIDS; even in 2015, these topics are taboo. That’s why Jarrett’s piece, and its prominent positioning, was significant. It was an invitation to us, as a College community, to be more human together, to know and accept our mutual sorrows and vulnerabilities and to support each other in the kind of searching that Jarrett has done. She sought to better understand her mother’s death, its meaning in her own life and a tangle of issues surrounding AIDS. Surely all of us wrestle with our own brand of questioning the circumstances of our own lives, and though our specific questions may look very different from Jarrett’s, she has set an example for
THE PEOPLE IN THE PHOTOS THANKS TO ALL who identified the cheerleader on page 65 of the Fall 2014 issue as the late Milton Moss ’53. His former roommate Carl Apthorp ’54 writes that in the 1950s there was also “an impromptu pep band” that marched “to Pratt Field (dressed in motley but appropriate attire) playing the Amherst songs heartily, and then sat in the center of the
BETH PERKINS
“Though our specific questions may look very different from Jarrett’s, she has set an example for us all to bring our vulnerabilities out of the shadows.”
us all to bring our vulnerabilities out of the shadows, to shine a light on them and to discuss them as a community. Mattea Kramer ’07 AMHERST, MASS. MORE ON THE COFFEE MUGS THANK YOU FOR “THE CUP’S GREAT DEfeat” (Amherst Made, Fall 2014), about
bleachers during the game to cheer on the Jeffs.”
On page 81 are, from left, Angelo Saladino ’73, Ted Smith ’73, John Rain ’72, Paul Chapman ’72, Greg Ellis ’72 and Bill Dunlap ’73. “The shot was taken at Boltwood House (formerly Beta),” writes Dunlap. And on page 85, the Theta Delta members are, from left, Tom Bruno ’74, Bill Healy ’74, Rick Manstein ’74, Pete Buchert ’74, Chris Hankin ’74, Pete Diskint ’76, Dave Moriarty ’74 and John Hollister ’74.
ALSO IN THE FALL ISSUE:
THE PHOTO ON PAGE
of the fall issue was taken on the front steps of Delta Upsilon. As Dan Lyons ’69 writes, “The occasion was Rushing—the weekend social event where fraternities sought out new brothers from the freshman class. Thus, the jackets and ties. Certainly not a common sight in the late ’60s on campus. In fact, the only other time I remember wearing a coat and tie on campus was when the football team got on the bus to travel Milton Moss ’53 to an away game—a
2 Amherst Winter 2015
my father, John Howard ’49; his brother Bob Howard ’45; and their business partner, Grant Holt ’47. In addition to the $9,000 in seed capital they raised from their parents, they also secured funding from a post-Amherst cross-country trip in a beat-up station wagon selling cookbooks, bibles and other items. When they set up shop in New York City, the startup enterprise secured a swanky Park Avenue mailing address while the work was done in a humble East Side apartment. One particularly fun story involved a coffee mug they designed with an image of Richard Nixon’s scowling face on a fake $3 bill. Something to do with “odd as a $3 bill.” President Nixon did not take kindly to this version of free speech, and he had the Secret Service destroy all the inventory of the mugs in a West Coast warehouse. Fortunately, Dad saved a few for us to have for posterity.
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Rushing at Delta Upsilon
requirement imposed by Coach Jim Ostendarp.” Lyons was among those to identify these classmates: Ron Kaczynski, Mark Dickinson, Brian Boyle, Bobby Sproul, Yogi Levine (’70), Dick Thistlethwaite, Russell Garland, Alan Brightman, Lyons himself and Tom Kelly.
Betas on the roof
Row, Fall 2014): I’m encouraged to read of Mr. Gaura’s and the College’s efforts to address the limited and timid discourse amongst the general population on religious and philosophical belief systems. As a nascent humanist artist coming of age during the Counterculture, I found open and vibrant discussions were at the heart of my development and continue to inform my present life. Education must address and promote ethics, personal responsibility and understanding as the very core of a life of consequence if we hope to find peace and preserve our natural world. We must acquire the tools necessary for constructive sharing as well as shift our perspective to embrace a common humanity. Without such empathy, then bigotry, oppression and conflict persist, whether on a global scale with xenophobic battles or on the Fairest College’s campus with abiding racism, homophobia and misogyny. David Dorwart ’70 MANSFIELD, CONN.
EDUCATION MUST PROMOTE ETHICS RE: KATHERINE DUKE’S ARTICLE ABOUT Tim Gaura (“This He Believes,” College
ADAM GRIM
Bob was the design genius, Grant oversaw operations and administration, and John built a sales rep network. Holt-Howard was a pioneer in securing offshore manufacturing locations in Portugal, then Japan, then India, China and elsewhere in the South Pacific. As a child, I marveled at the odd toys and amazing stories my father brought back from his frequent trips to foreign lands. While coffee mugs and other placesetting goods provided the most volume, the Holt-Howard legacy is best seen today in the many SKUs of Holt-Howard Pixies, salt-and-pepper sets and Christmas decorations hotly traded on eBay. Type in “Holt-Howard” and you will see literally thousands of items for sale. If only we had known that those $6 Pixies would later sell for hundreds! Chip Howard ’77 EDINA, MINN.
AMHERST VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 EDITOR
Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst.edu ALUMNI EDITOR
Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031 DESIGN DIRECTOR
Ronn Campisi
On Twitter and Facebook, alumni commented on the Fall 2014 cover story on author Theodore Rosengarten ’66, as well as on the 1940s alumni who popularized the coffee mug. In addition, many shared their memories of Professor Rose Olver, who died in November. SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Katherine Duke ’05 MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE
Lawrence Douglas Mark Edington Darcy Jacobs ’87 Ron Lieber ’93 Elizabeth Minkel ’07 Megan Morey Meredith Rollins ’93
“Turns out not only that All God’s Dangers is a wonderful book, but the author is a remarkable guy.” CHARLES
WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU Ì WE Amherst welcomes letters from
C. MANN ’76
“One of my favorite classes was Childhood Development with Prof. Olver my senior year. As a high school teacher now, I still think back to some of the conversations we had in that class and in her office. … She made me a better person and a more mindful teacher.” MICHAEL A. JOHNSON ’93
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.
JOHN McWILLIAMS
“The mug I drink my tea from every morning is an Amherst class of 1924 25th Reunion mug, found by a friend in an antique shop years ago. It’s heavy Walker china and solid. Was the class of ’24 ahead of its time, or have I been drinking my tea out of a beer stein for all these years?” SUE DICKMAN ’89
“To me she epitomized the essence of a classic scholar. Amherst is better for her long tenure there, and she will be missed.” JACK HODSON ’70 “I was a student in one of her classes that examined gender and sex role socialization, and I think the lessons that were taught in that class have helped me in my career, and will stay with me throughout my life.” PATTY CHANG ’01
WWW.AMHERST.EDU/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 010025000.
Winter 2015 Amherst 3
07 Professor Guttmann got married in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. 08 Students in “The Art of Beholding” spend a full semester on one painting.
NEWS AND VIEWS FROM CAMPUS
“When else will you have all these ingredients available? Now’s the time to take advantage of it.”
College Row
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FOOD U For some Amherst students, it’s easy to fall into a pattern of choosing the same cereal, making the same salad or opting for the traditional dinner each day at Valentine. Student Health Educators Morgan Brown ’15 and Liz Mutter ’15 are inspiring their classmates to approach eating at Val with more imagination. Brown and Mutter created a Facebook page, Amherst Cuisine, where
they post nutritious recipes easily made from ingredients in the dining hall. The page has more than 1,200 friends. “We watch a lot of Food Network shows in our suite to get inspired,” says Mutter, “and sometimes we just get obsessed with certain ingredients.” Like apple butter: “Try it as a topping instead of syrup next time you
have pancakes!” they suggest on their page. Or mix it with Greek yogurt, cinnamon and cereal. Denise McGoldrick, assistant dean of students and director of health education, taught Brown and Mutter to view the dining hall is as a grocery store. “When else will you have all these ingredients available?” asks Brown. “Now’s the time to take advantage of it.” MADELINE RUOFF ’18
VALENTINE AS
Grocery Store
Liz Mutter ’15
Morgan Brown ’15
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Two seniors are inspiring their fellow students to approach college dining with imagination.
Amherst Winter 2015
Photographs courtesy of Amherst Cuisine
CREATIVE DINING HALL RECIPES 1 Mix together Greek yogurt, cherry jam and a squeeze of lemon juice “to create this awesome dip” for sliced apples or rice cakes. 2 Combine greens, one grilled chicken breast, one apple, a bit of Parmesan and blue cheese and a dash of red wine dressing. 3 “This gorgeous recipe submission” contains brown sugar, bananas, cranberries, Greek yogurt, cereal and peanut butter. 4 Flavor a cup of plain Greek yogurt with a sliced banana, honey and cinnamon. If you’d like, include dried cranberries, sunflower seeds and flaxseed. 5 Build a salad with ingredients of your choice. Then add whole wheat pasta and a few shakes of crushed red pepper flakes. “To finish off the dish, make a rich and flavorful Tomato Cream Sauce by mixing a dollop of plain Greek yogurt, a shake of garlic romano and a cup of marinara sauce. Pour the sauce on top of the salad/ noodles.” 6 Spread peanut butter over toasted cinnamon-raisin bread and top with thinly sliced banana coins and a shake of cinnamon. Or melt shredded cheese over toasted cinnamonraisin bread and a sliced apple. 7 This salad contains greens, red onions, cucumber slices, apple slices, Feta cheese, sunflower seeds, dried cranberries, sriracha tofu and a mustard vinaigrette. To make the sriracha tofu, generously sprinkle uncooked tofu cubes with adobo seasoning. Cook the tofu on medium-high heat at the stir-fry station, then drizzle on sriracha while continuing to stir-fry. Add a little water and cook until no moisture remains.
The Moose
ABIDES The mysterious sculpture is hollow, but there is no evidence it’s a Trojan moose. WILDLIFE U A mysterious moose has taken up residence at Frost Library, and no one is asking him to leave. The large, black, detailed metallic sculpture was discovered in the Frost foyer when staff opened up the building the Sunday after Thanksgiving. “I think it’s beautiful,” says Susan J. Kimball, head of access services at the library, who saw it first. The moose’s only identifier is a cryptic—and mellow—note, written on birch bark. It reads, in part: I CHOOSE WHAT I CHOOSE AND I CHOOSE FROST, HERE I RANGE FREELY. I MOVE AS THE SPIRIT MOVES. “The sign says he chooses us, and we’re happy to be chosen,” says College Librarian Bryn Geffert. “We’ll have to decide what we’re going to do with him. There are probably all kinds of things one can do with a moose. We just have to figure out what they are.” As a native of Maine, Kimball feels compelled to point out that the scale of the moose’s antlers is a bit off, but that doesn’t detract from the fine craftsmanship. As writing on birch bark does qualify as a written work, she says she
expects the moose’s note “will need to be catalogued, once we enter it into the archives as a monograph.” While Geffert hasn’t decided what the library will ultimately do with the moose, he is treating it as a gift: “As far as we can tell, he’s housebroken. He hasn’t bitten anybody.” And while hollow, there is no evidence that the metal sculpture is a Trojan moose. As of this writing, the moose is not on display. That’s because some would-be tricksters tried to make off with it. They had a change of heart and offered it back, but it suffered some cosmetic damage. Geffert expects it to be back in top condition soon. The motives behind the moose will likely come under considerable analysis. The author of the moose’s missive hopes to minimize the scrutiny. Sometimes a moose is just a moose, according to the rest of the birch bark note: I AM A MOOSE. I AM NOT A STATEMENT. I AM WHO I AM … I ABIDE. ABIDE WITH ME. The moose abides, for now, at Frost. WILLIAM SWEET “The sign says he chooses us, and we’re happy to be chosen,” says the College’s librarian.
ROB MATTSON
8 In a blender, combine spinach, Greek yogurt, milk and a banana “to create this yummy, nutrient-rich smoothie!”
Winter 2015 Amherst 5
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EXTREME SPACE
Astronomers noticed the largest X-ray flare ever from Sagittarius A*.
DISCOVERY A professor’s observation of an X-ray flare is big news in astronomy circles.
What is a supermassive black hole? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a very large black hole, the largest in a galaxy. The one at the center of the Milky Way is named Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A*). This monster contains about 4.5 million times the mass of our sun. Scientists working with Chandra have observed Sgr A* repeatedly in the years since the telescope was launched into space in 1999.
What they hoped to find
ROB MATTSON
Haggard and fellow astronomers were originally using Chandra to see if Sgr A* would consume parts of a cloud of gas, known as G2. “Unfortunately, the G2 gas cloud didn’t produce the fireworks we were hoping for when it got close to Sgr A*,” she says. “However, nature often surprises us, and we saw something else that was really exciting.”
What they found instead
On Sept. 14, 2013, Haggard and her team detected in Sgr A* an X-ray flare 400 times brighter than its usual X-ray output and nearly three times brighter than its previous flare record. Chandra observed another unusually large X-ray flare in October 2014. These flares seem unrelated to G2. Haggard and her team have two main ideas about what’s causing Sgr A* to erupt in this extreme way.
Theory one One idea is that the gravity of Sgr A* may have torn apart a couple of asteroids that wandered too close. The debris from such a “tidal disruption” would become very hot and produce X-rays 6 Amherst Winter 2015
BEFORE
AFTER
before disappearing forever across the black hole’s point of no return. “If an asteroid was torn apart, it would go around the black hole for a couple of hours—like water circling an open drain— before falling in,” says Haggard’s colleague and co-principal investigator Fred Baganoff of MIT. “That’s just how long we saw the brightest X-ray flare last, so that is an intriguing clue for us to consider.” If that theory holds up, it means astronomers have found evidence for the largest asteroid ever to be torn apart by the Milky Way’s black hole.
Theory two A second hypothesis is that, within the material flowing toward Sgr A*, the magnetic field lines are packed unusually tightly, causing them to occasionally interconnect and reconfigure themselves. As this happens, their magnetic energy converts into the energy of motion, heat and the acceleration of particles—which could produce a bright X-ray flare. Such magnetic flares are seen on the sun, and the Sgr A* flares have a similar pattern of brightness.
About Daryl Haggard She is a new faculty member who aims “to inspire non-majors, majors and the public with the depth, richness and excitement of astrophysics,” and to lead cutting-edge research and cultivate scientists. An observational astronomer, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 2010. This spring she’s teaching “Astrophysical Black Holes” and “Astrophics 1: Stars and Galaxies.” CAROLINE J. HANNA
NASA/CXC/NORTHWESTERN
After years of watching, a team led by Assistant Professor of Astronomy Daryl Haggard observed and recorded the largest-ever X-ray flare from a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The astronomical event—detected by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and revealed at an American Astronomical Society meeting in January—puts the scientific community one step closer to understanding the nature and behavior of supermassive black holes.
FACULTY VIEW | ALLEN GUTTMANN During my first sabbatical, 1968–69, I was a Fulbright exchange professor at Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. I was not a great success. Students complained that I was too personally involved in the texts I taught and “unscientific” (unwissenschaftlich). While lecturing on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, I paused to observe that Addie Bundren’s doctor came too late to save her life. I mused aloud, “Doctors in Faulkner’s novels always come too late. I wonder why they bother to come at all.” The students reported my lapse to the Rektor. My lamentably unscientific approach to literature was especially evident when I lectured on Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, but I came to a sentimental crescendo when I said goodbye to Bochum by reading (and discussing) Richard Wilbur ’42’s poem “Altitudes,” which beautifully contrasts a European cathedral with “Emily Dickinson’s father’s house in America.” (Wilbur read the poem at Biddy Martin’s inauguration in 2011.) My valedictory Unwissenschaftlichkeit did not offend my best student, Fräulein Doris Bargen. She was moved to read Dickinson’s poems, to purchase the three-volume edition and—after my return to Amherst—to write me poetic letters that might almost have been mistaken for Dickinson’s. I responded in anachronistic German markedly influenced by Goethe and Schiller. I thought she was rhapsodic; she thought I was odd. After two years of this asymmetric correspondence, Doris came to America and earned a master’s degree in English at UMass. She returned to Germany and began doctoral research on one of my
AN AMHERST
Love Story A professor emeritus remembers the day he got married in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom. favorite contemporary novelists, Stanley Elkin. Doris returned to Amherst, a better site than Tübingen for her research. One thing led to another until the fall of 1974, when I called Lewis Mudge, a colleague from the religion department. Lew and his wife, Jean, a Dickinson scholar, actually lived in “Emily Dickinson’s father’s
ALUMNUS JOINS BOARD The newest college trustee is from the class of ’96. began his term on the college’s board of trustees in the fall. He is a managing director and the director of portfolio management at Hall Capital Partners LLC,
SIMON KRINSKY ’96
an independent investment adviser that manages multi-asset class investment portfolios. He serves on the firm’s executive committee and investment review committee. Krinsky joined Hall
house in America.” (See “Our House, Emily’s House,” Fall 2013.) I told Mudge the good news: “Doris and I have decided to get married.” He answered as was proper: “I’m delighted to hear that.” I went on: “We’d like for you to perform the ceremony.” He replied collegially, “I’ll be happy to.” And then, after a slight pause: “We’d like for the ceremony to be performed in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom.” There was a longer pause, and then a good-sport agreement. Jean graciously agreed to be the legally required witness. On Nov. 11, the ideal time for a German-American alliance, we gathered in the candlelit bedroom. Lew asked if he should say a few traditional words and we replied that he should not. We handed him a copy of “Altitudes,” the poem that had been my German swan song. Lew took our paganism with Christian forbearance. After the ceremony, we went down to the kitchen for a quiet celebration. The next day I wrote to Richard Wilbur and informed him of what we had done. “I wrote you a dozen years ago and received permission to quote your wonderful poem, ‘Altitudes,’ in an article and then in a book. I thought it might amuse you to know that I was married on the 11th, in Emily Dickinson’s bedroom, with your poem as the only text. Lew Mudge read it beautifully. The future of poetry is immense.” (The last six words, as Wilbur surely knew, were from Matthew Arnold.) Wilbur was kind enough to send me a postcard: “I am pleased to have committed liturgy.” Guttmann is the Emily C. Jordan Folger Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus.
Capital in San Francisco in 2002, later transferring to New York. He was promoted to managing director in 2006 and into his current role as director of portfolio management in 2013. Krinsky began his career at Goldman Sachs after receiving a B.A. in economics from Amherst. He had several roles at Goldman Sachs, including convertibles sales and trading in New York,
and private client services in San Francisco. In addition to his work on the Amherst board, Krinsky serves on the board of directors of Summer Search New York City and is chairman of the investment committee of its parent organization, Summer Search. He is also on the investment committee for the New York Historical Society. E.G.B . Winter 2015 Amherst 7
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BEHOLD! In one art history seminar, each student spends four months on a single work of art. COURSES U How long do your eyes linger on an object in an art museum? Thirty seconds? Two minutes? Ten minutes? Imagine studying a single painting for an entire semester. It’s not a luxury; it’s an Amherst course. In Professor Joel Upton’s seminar “The Art of Beholding,” each student picks one painting to focus on for four months. Through a series of steps and presentations, the 10 students in the class move ever closer to what Upton calls “the threshold of beholding,” when “the art of the work of art” emerges before them. “Beholding is not a synonym for observing or viewing,” Upton says. “It’s meant to introduce a radically different approach to works of art, and implicitly to our relations with human beings.” In beholding art, he says, students’ “deepest sense of their own unique being gets revealed to them.” 8 Amherst Winter 2015
To Will Kamin ’15, the class “makes a statement against today’s predominant culture of scurrying around museum galleries, from painting to famous painting, expecting some grand epiphany to present itself in each piece on the wall, but never taking the time to patiently, meaningfully engage with a work.” Students come to see “their” painting “as an old friend,” says JinJin Xu ’17. They also learn to think in a new way. “Most courses teach reasoning, problem solving, pattern recognition and the incredibly important skill of making distinctions,” says Abe Kanter ’15. “Professor Upton teaches contradiction, dissolving distinctions and intimating reconciliations of infinite wholeness.” As Marie Lambert ’15 identified contradictions in van Gogh’s Mountains at
Saint-Rémy, she grew “aware of contradictions in my own life, contradictions between my duty to my family and my dreams, between what is practical and what I believe is right.” The seminar “is the most important course I will take at Amherst,” says Xu. “Not only did I learn to look, listen and be with one painting, I also learned to be with my own solitude, and thus, respect and be with the solitude of another.” This was life-changing. “My relationship with friends has slowly evolved from being a supplement for my own loneliness to a deeper understanding and respect for another individual,” Xu says, “and I feel that I am truly learning how to love for the first time.” E.G.B. Madeline Ruoff contributed to this article.
l THE COURSE READING LIST AND MORE FROM THE STUDENTS www.amherst.edu/magazine Illustration by Ellen Weinstein
WHAT DOES IT MEAN UPTON’S SIX STEPS TOWARD THE THRESHOLD OF BEHOLDING
to Behold? Three students explain.
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DAVID WALCHAK ’15 on Rockwell Kent’s Clover Fields
Understand and acknowledge that to exist is to be separate and “to be separate is to long to be whole.” “Only in that contradictory tension,” the professor says, “can beholding occur.” FRICK COLLECTION
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Study the painting’s form.
4 Examine its iconography.
5 Find pictorial contradictions in the painting with which their artist struggled. Some are metaphorical (time contradicting space, for example), while others are physical (brushstrokes contradicting the image as a whole).
6 Now at the threshold of beholding, “intimations of reconciliation of contradiction” slowly emerge. By engaging with these “fleeting intimations,” students “meet the painter’s own beholding face-to-face.”
I’M CONVINCED THAT BEHOLDING IS THE highest form of art, that it is something we all need in order to survive and that it is something none of us do enough. You can never really know what an act of beholding is going to be like until you do it. In the case of the painting I chose, I ended up touched by the way Bellini painted a deeply religious and religiously important story as identical to what everyone sees every day. The light to which the saint submits in the painting is the sunrise.
MEAD ART MUSEUM
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ABE KANTER ’15 on Giovanni Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert
JINJIN XU ’17 on Ary Scheffer’s Paolo and Francesca I BEHELD FOR THE FIRST TIME AT THE VERY END OF THE SEMESTER. THE CONTRADICTIONS within the painting had been laid out, and it pained me to see them all together, without seeing a way to reconcile them. As the contradictions overwhelmed me—the warmth of the background versus the coolness of the figures, the contradictory angles of their limbs, the paradox of a loveless contractual marriage versus the love found only outside of this contract, the judgment of Virgil versus the understanding of Dante, and their gaze on the lovers versus ours from outside of the painting— the distance between the embracing adulterous lovers grew until I realized the greatest contradiction: that they were inseparable in their embrace, yet separate for infinity. I saw my own solitude mirrored outside of the painting. I felt that I was rising up, in suspension with the lovers. I was brought to tears. MEAD ART MUSEUM
Research the artist, origin, function and provenance of the painting.
THE BEHOLDING METHOD BUILDS TO A very personal experience with a painting. It has to be different from the informational experience of reading a plaque about the work or hearing a curator discuss it. We researched our paintings throughout the semester, but we were discouraged from relying on that research to solely inform our presentations. It starts with the notion of not merely glancing at a painting. Professor Upton teaches us how to let the painting work on us a bit, how to give the painting time to do that. The class changed my experience of going to art museums.
Winter 2015 Amherst 9
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Ì SPORTS
The Amherst women broke UConn’s record for consecutive wins at home. Who holds the NCAA women’s basketball record for consecutive wins at home? It used to be UConn. Now it’s Amherst. The Amherst women won their 100th straight game at LeFrak in November, surpassing UConn’s previous record of 99. With the win, Amherst became only the second team in NCAA basketball history, including both men’s and women’s programs, to win at least 100 home games in a row. (The Kentucky men’s basketball team holds the alltime record of 129, which they achieved between 1943 and 1955.)
The Amherst streak continued well past 100; it was 106 at press time, following a decisive win over Williams. The record was six years in the making. The streak began on Jan. 31, 2009, during G.P. Gromacki’s second season as head coach. In 2013 the women set the Division III record for consecutive home wins, surpassing the 88-game mark set by Rust College. The women hit 100 in a Nov. 23, 2014, win over Baruch. Amherst had maintained a lead for much of the second half, but with less than eight minutes remaining, the visitors tied the game
q Fighting off Baruch, Ali Doswell ’17 drives to the basket.
e Meredith Doswell ’17 (Ali’s twin) goes for a layup during the recordbreaking match.
10 Amherst Winter 2015
106
AND COUNTING
at 59-59. However, the momentum soon shifted in Amherst’s favor as guard/ forward Marley Giddins ’16 grabbed a defensive rebound and went the length of the court for the fast-break basket. Shortly after, guard Ali Doswell ’17 finished a pretty reverse layup to put the Purple & White up six. Amherst never looked back. The streak attracted the attention of NPR’s Only a Game, which interviewed Gromacki a few days after the 100th win. “You’re not going to have streaks without a little bit of luck,” Gromacki said in the interview, “but we definitely like playing at home.” The win tally continued to grow, and on Jan. 10 the women jumped out to an 18-point lead within the first nine minutes of play against Williams, bringing the home streak to 106 consecutive games. The Williams matchup earned a New York Times article, in which Geno Auriemma, who has coached UConn to nine NCAA women’s titles, weighed in on Amherst’s success: “It’s further proof that when your expectations are really high, you tend to meet them.” MICHAEL O’BRIEN
Securing
HER PLACE After an injury, one senior came back to break records.
This year Megan Robertson ’15 surpassed 1,000 career points.
Co-captain Megan Robertson ’15 has secured her place in the annals of Amherst women’s basketball. In January she became Amherst’s all-time leading shot blocker, reaching 175 during the team’s 74-50 win at Arcadia University. Later that month Robertson surpassed the 1,000 career point mark and also became just the fifth player in program history to record 700 rebounds. Not bad for someone who suffered a seasonending injury last year. After a stellar first two seasons in which Robertson played all 66 games, including 43 starts, her junior season was cut short when the 6-foot-2-inch forward injured her knee during a game against Tufts. With that, the Jeffs lost the 2011-12 NESCAC
Photographs by Mark Box/Clarus Studios (left) and Rob Mattson
Rookie of the Year and 2012–13 Second Team All-NESCAC selection. Robertson had led the team in rebounds and was second in scoring during her first and second years, and she’d led the squad in blocked shots as a sophomore. Robertson—a mathematics, statistics and history major—says her dream job is to work for an NBA or MLB team doing data analysis. “Ideally, I’d like to be working in professional sports, but I’ll be happy if I can work with any large amounts of data,” she says. “She’s an incredible inside presence like we haven’t had here,” says Coach G.P. Gromacki. “Her injury last year really set her back. But it also set our team back. Without her we’re a much different team; with her we’re a much better team.” CHRIS ATTWOOD
Winter 2015 Amherst 11
THE
BIG Picture AN AERIAL VIEW of campus on a winter morning. 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.
Photographed on Jan. 23, 2015, by JOVAN TANASIJEVIC / ABOVE SUMMIT
Winter 2015 Amherst 13
POINT OF VIEW
Last Man STANDING IN ITALY, HE SAW A BULLETRIDDLED MUSSOLINI. BY GEORGE BRIA ’38
George Bria ’38 is secretary of his Amherst class. He retired from the Associated Press in 1981 and lives in New York City.
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AMHERST | Winter 2015
INTRODUCING ME AT A JOURNALISM event in New York, the moderator asked, “How old are you now, George?” I said 96 (that was three years ago), and the auditorium burst into applause. It was the loudest cheer of the night, as I recall, and nothing had happened yet except the mention of my age. What’s so special, anyway, about very old age except that only a tiny minority reaches it? The 2010 U.S. census counted 371,244 men and women ages 95 to 99, or just 0.1 percent of the population. And only 82,263 were men. Life expectancy, at last report, was 78.3 for men and 80.93 for women. So cheers for us 99-ers. What’s our secret? Pure luck for me, I say. I never aimed for great age; it just came along. I did eat fish, grow my own veggies, play a lot of tennis. But so did people who died young, relatively. I’m just glad I seem to have most of my marbles, am free from severe pain, can walk (carefully) and, most of all, have a healthy 98-year-old wife with mutually enjoyable memories. At breakfast the other day, we were trying to remember the signature tune at the end of dances. I hummed “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” but it didn’t sound right. We paused a bit and then, in a low voice, Arlette came up with “Goodnight Sweetheart.” That’s it, of course, I said, and we both laughed as our thoughts went back to dimming lights at long-ago proms. Small things, but—returning to journalism—what am I still doing here? Why are reporters interviewing me, videorecording me, turning our living room into a cinema studio? An Italian corre-
spondent did a full page of me for the distinguished Turin newspaper La Stampa. He built it around the flash I sent to the Associated Press reporting the German surrender in Italy in World War II. Of 180 correspondents who covered the war for the AP, the venerable nonprofit news cooperative, the only two still alive are a photographer who reported from the Pacific theater and I, who was in Italy because Italian is my native language. I’m sure many of my departed colleagues could tell better stories than mine. Fate, however, has me still standing. I saw the bullet-riddled bodies of Benito Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci, lying seminaked on the bare floor of an improvised morgue in Milan. Their self-proclaimed executioner was a Communist partisan leader with the nom de guerre of Col. Valerio. He told me that “Il Duce,” the vainglorious name of Mussolini in his heyday, died a coward, stuttering “but, but, but” and offering “an empire” to be spared. Valerio said he had not meant to kill Claretta, but she threw herself in front of her lover and died in the machine gun bursts. The two had fallen into partisan hands while trying to escape to Switzerland aboard a German troop train. Their bodies and those of other slain Fascists were then hanged upside down at a Milan gasoline station in one of the war’s most macabre scenes of retribution. Another event I’m interviewed about is the surrender of the Germans in Italy. The fighting there had faded in interest after the capture of Rome in June 1944 and the D-Day landings in France. Top Illustration by ADAM MCCAULEY
news became the drive for Berlin. But fierce fighting continued up the Italian peninsula. And let’s remember that, from 1943 to the end in 1945, overall Allied casualties in Italy totaled about 320,000, and the Germans suffered about 336,650. Historians estimate that was the heaviest toll of infantry dead and wounded in the whole Western front. As a kindergartner I had rolled a hoop in a Florence park. Who could imagine I would return to that same park in May
1945 to witness the German surrender? It took place in a big Quonset hut, with the overall commander, American Gen. Mark Clark, and the British, French and other Allied brass standing at the far end. The formal surrender had been signed a few days earlier, but this was the actual turnover of more than a million German troops to Allied control. As a German general arrived with retinue, Gen. Clark’s little terrier dog, which somehow was loose, went snap-
ping at the German’s high boots. The man stumbled a bit, but recovered. As he neared his Allied counterparts, I saw him hold out his hand. Was this a proffered handshake, some runic Prussian ritual? None of the Allied officers responded, however, and the hand just hung there for a long moment. Who among the Allied soldiery would have wanted to shake hands after that horrendous war? It happened 70 years ago, and I was there. k Winter 2015 Amherst 15
Keys to the City
On an island where apartments sell for $90 million, what’s the 99 percent to do? Alicia Glen ’88 is leading New York City’s ambitious plan to make housing more affordable.
AMHERST
WINTER 2015
BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80
16
/ Photograph by Joshua Paul
“If you want to make change at scale, you’d better be where the action is,” says Glen, pictured in New York’s City Hall. The constant goal, she says, is making cities better and fairer places to live.
18 Amherst Winter 2015
© PAUL MARTINKA/SPLASH NEWS/CORBIS
TO THOSE AMERICANS WHO LIVE ELSEwhere, New York City real estate is surreal, its funhouse-mirror numbers difficult to comprehend. In Manhattan the average apartment sale price currently checks in at $1.8 million, and on the Upper East Side it’s $6.23 million; one penthouse in a new Midtown glass tower recently sold for $90 million. As for renters—and New York is a city of renters—a two-bedroom in Manhattan runs, on average, $5,900 per month, and in Brooklyn $3,345. The median annual family income of New Yorkers who rent, meanwhile, is $40,000. Such figures raise an obvious question: How can any normal person afford to live in New York? Increasingly, they can’t. Stoked with mad money, the city’s housing market today is a machine that takes in the ultrawealthy at one end and disgorges the modestly paid at the other. The New York Times regularly reports the poignant tales of working people who can no longer pay for a roof over their heads: The custodian living in an illegally subdivided basement. The warehouse worker who camps out in his van. The grandparents who move into their son’s garage. And on and on. Federal subsidies for public housing have shrunk, and citywide a quartermillion households sit on the waiting list. Residents lucky enough to be in rentstabilized housing live beneath a sword of Damocles, as landlords pursue ways to yank rents up to market level. Currently 58,000 New Yorkers—almost half of them children—live in shelters. The 2013 election of Mayor Bill de Blasio promised change. Calling inequality “the issue of our time,” de Blasio vowed at his inauguration to end “economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love.” Affordable housing topped his list of priorities. When it came to appointing a deputy mayor to spearhead his housing campaign, de Blasio raised eyebrows among progressives by tapping Alicia Glen ’88, an executive at Goldman Sachs and head of the firm’s Urban Investment Group. Skeptics noted the irony in recruiting a tribune for social justice from Goldman—to many observers the avatar of Wall Street greed, “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,”
as journalist Matt Taibbi memorably wrote in a 2009 Rolling Stone article. But de Blasio was undeterred. “I don’t care about any stereotypes or assumptions,” he said at the press conference announcing Glen’s appointment. “I care about who shares my values and can get the job done.” Praising Glen for her “fresh ideas and bold outlook,” he called her “a strong and forceful champion for fighting inequality” who would give New Yorkers “a better shot at working their way into the middle class.” When Glen took the microphone, she quickly displayed her liberal bona fides by defending the mayor’s proposed tax on the wealthy to fund universal prekindergarten, noting that such a tax would cost a typical colleague of hers at Goldman about $3.50 per day—“a latte,” she pointed out. Aligning herself with de Blasio’s progressive social vision, she urged New Yorkers to reject the inequality that has become routine over recent decades in the city. “The tale of two cities,” she said, “is not OK.”
I WENTto Manhattan on a sunny day in November to meet Alicia Glen and learn about her life as deputy mayor, and in particular her work on affordable housing. City Hall is undergoing major renovation, and the building was scaffolded and draped with diaphanous canopies. Only the topmost section was complete, revealing the cupola and its statue of Lady Justice holding a balance with scales. It was Veteran’s Day, but Glen was
working and led me through empty, majestic halls. Her office is small and unostentatious, but comfortable—a good thing, since in the weeks following her appointment, she told me, she pretty much lived there. The mayor had promised a housing plan, after all, and Glen was its chief architect. “We got it done in a hundred days!” she enthused. “I didn’t leave this building! Slept here every night!” Affordable housing is just one of the duties in Glen’s portfolio, but it’s the one that takes up most of her time. She laid out the elements of the city’s housing crisis. More than half of all New Yorkers are “rent-burdened,” she told me, spending more than half their income on housing. And 20 percent live at or below the federal poverty line. “That’s $22K a year, for a family of four. Can you imagine one out of every five families in the city living on that? We have over 50,000 people living in shelters! That’s totally unacceptable!” And it isn’t just the poor who can’t afford New York. Glen cites the plight of young people—“come-to-New-York-andbuild-your-dream creative types,” she calls them—who are being priced out. “We’re also really worried about essential workers: teachers, cops, people who keep the trains running on time.” One basic problem is a chronic lack of new housing overall. The average number of housing starts citywide in the past decade has been 20,000 per year, the great majority of them priced well above the affordable level. Boosting housing production is one foundation of the plan Glen designed for de Blasio. It calls for spending $8.2 billion in city money over
At the press conference announcing Glen’s appointment, Mayor Bill de Blasio praised her as a “forceful champion for fighting inequality” who would give New Yorkers “a better shot at working their way into the middle class.”
10 years, and leveraging that with state, federal and private funding for a grand total of $40 billion. The goal, which The New York Times deemed “lofty,” is to create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing over the next decade. De Blasio announced the plan in May, at the construction site of a Brooklyn building where half of the residences will be affordable. (Affordable housing in New York is pegged to the median household income for a given area; families with up to 165 percent of that figure are eligible, and their rent will be limited to 30 percent or less of their income.) The Brooklyn site was chosen to highlight a linchpin of Glen’s strategy—namely, using zoning laws to require developers to include affordable units within new market-rate projects. This so-called inclusionary zoning, voluntary in the past, will be mandatory from now on, a step that makes some developers nervous. Writing in Real Estate Weekly, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, Steven Spinola, worried that the mandatory policy could stifle development, warning that “it is unreasonable to assume builders will continue to build regardless of growing costs and difficulties.” Glen nodded when I raised Spinola’s concerns. “Look, I know that people don’t have to build buildings. They can buy widgets; they can trade hedge funds. So we have to be sure, when we’re ne-
ing you more air rights, and you can build more, we want a piece of the action; if we’re giving you huge tax incentives, we want more.” To illustrate the de Blasio plan in action, she singled out a project called Astoria Cove, on the Brooklyn-Queens waterfront, whose developer bought a manufacturing site and wanted to rezone it for residential. “This was really our first large-scale opportunity to say, ‘You know what? If we do that for you, you need to give us a significant amount of affordable housing.’” The project will include more than 1,700 units, with 27 percent of them priced as affordable. “And we’re letting them know we want those units to remain affordable in perpetuity—because, by the way, the stuff you’re building, you’re getting in perpetuity.” Glen calls the project “a huge victory for our agenda.” Housing supply is just one aspect of the affordable-housing crisis. As Rosanne Haggerty ’82, president of Community Solutions, a New York-based organization working to end homelessness, had explained to me, city housing policies can distort costs and create perverse incentives. For example, the city spends what Haggerty calls “a fortune” paying for court-mandated emergency housing for homeless families: “That prompts exploitative landlords to hold affordable housing off the market and rent it to the city for temporary use by
Glen told me, on two counts: “It’s a lot cheaper to maintain units than to build them. And there are human beings here, right? Letting these units go is bad economic policy and terrible social policy.” And so the second key prop of the Glen/ de Blasio plan is to ensure that affordable units stay affordable. Glen has publicly vowed to work aggressively with landlords, using both carrots and sticks. The carrots are mostly tax incentives. And the sticks? I asked. Glen laughed. The city has ways to gain leverage over bad landlords, she said—watching for code violations, instituting tax liens. “The stick is: We’re gonna come and get you if you treat your tenants like crap!”
THIS KIND of blunt honesty,
graced with a smile, is Glen’s default mode. When I asked her what it was like to be at Goldman after the Wall Street disaster, she didn’t hesitate: “It sucked,” she said. “It was terrible. The public couldn’t see the difference between the bad actors in finance and the vast majority who are honest and hardworking.” Smart and confident, she balances no-nonsense assertiveness with a sense of humor readily turned to selfdeprecation. Confessing that the actor Mark Ruffalo had called to lobby her on a film tax-credit issue (she is also deputy mayor for media and entertainment), she affected a mock swoon. “I almost had a heart attack! He is every middle-aged woman’s dream—he is so hot!” She “Our goal is to make sure we get the right amount of public benefit loves joking about being when the city is creating economic opportunities for developers. So if the mayor’s liaison to the fashion industry, a duty that we’re giving you more air rights, we want a piece of the action.” occasionally puts her in the company of models. “I’m, like, three of them mushed together.” gotiating with the private sector, that homeless families, at a multiple of the When it comes to the tougher parts of we don’t go too far. We don’t want to typical rent—which skews rents further, her job, Glen exudes a distinct esprit de stop the market dead in its tracks.” The and pushes more families toward homecombat. It traces to lessons learned at requirement for set-asides, she says, will lessness.” Amherst, where she majored in politibe applied flexibly, with the percentage In the city’s many gentrifying neighcal science. “Alicia enlivened the classof mandated affordable units varying acborhoods, meanwhile, pressure to bring room,” remembers her thesis adviser, cording to the nature of the building and stabilized rents up to market rates is Austin Sarat. “She was quite fearless, its neighborhood. But she insists on the intense. As a result of such realities, the always willing to probe and push and basic premise. “Our goal is to make sure pool of affordable housing has actually question. And she brought a terrific we get the right amount of public benefit shrunk in recent years, with units being sense of humor to many conversations.” lost faster than they’re being created. when the city is creating economic opIt’s crucial to stanch this bleeding, For her part, Glen recalls the classes she portunity for developers. So if we’re givWinter 2015 Amherst 19
took with the noted conservative Hadley Arkes. “Even though I fundamentally disagreed with Arkes’ politics, taking his classes taught me things I still think of today. Like: Don’t be scared of your enemy; just get in there with them.” In a similar vein, she recalls how vigorously Sarat challenged her to do better. “He pushed me so hard, I was like, I hate you. But it’s good for you, being pushed. It makes you better, if you want to be an advocate or be in the mix.” Being in the mix is an apt way to describe what Glen has done with her career since Amherst. Both law and public service run in her bloodstream. Her mother, Kristin Booth Glen, is a former New York State Supreme Court judge, and her father, Jeffrey Glen ’62, has spent most of his career doing public law. After graduating from Columbia Law School, Alicia Glen worked for Brooklyn Legal Services, providing free legal counsel to low-income New Yorkers. She joined the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development during the Giuliani administration. From there it was on to Goldman to run the Urban Investment Group, where her efforts eventually caught de Blasio’s attention. The Urban Investment Group harnesses private capital to solve public problems, financing projects most investors are reluctant to risk. Under Glen’s direction, the group helped start the Citi Bike program and financed one of the city’s first “50/30/20” residential buildings—50 percent market-rate rentals, 30 percent middle-income, 20 percent
ductions in recidivism. A similar scheme generated $4.6 million in “early-education social-impact bonds” to help fund preschool. All in all, in her dozen years running the group, Glen oversaw publicprivate partnerships that invested more than $5 billion. Some on the left view her—and her corporate background—with mistrust. Max Rivlin-Nadler, a blogger for the website Gothamist, complained about her appointment as deputy mayor, asking rhetorically, “[D]id people voting for de Blasio back in November really think this is what they were going to get?” Writing in The Nation, Jarrett Murphy commented, “The question that even some de Blasio fans raise is, at what point do you surround yourself with so many insiders that truly substantial change becomes impossible”? Glen shrugs off these doubters. She believes deeply in using the power of markets to address social problems, and she’s unabashed about her insider status: “If you want to make change at scale, you’d better be where the action is.” The constant goal, she says, is making cities better and fairer places to live. “You can do that if you’re an advocate, or in government, or on Wall Street. You can do that from any number of seats at the table.” She has held several of them. Glen says her work as a legal-aid lawyer shaped her understanding of New York. “I also think it gives me credibility now, with the advocates,” she told me. “I’m not just some evil Wall Street monster.
woman who worked her way up through government?” That respect, Glen says, helps level a playing field tilted against women. “It’s like, if I can be on the bankmanagement committee at Goldman, I can probably follow what you’re saying to me. So don’t patronize me!” “You always know where you stand with Alicia,” says Haggerty, of Community Solutions, who has worked with Glen on several projects. “She is smart and clear and in a hurry to get things done. These are exactly the qualities needed to drive the city’s housing plan.” She can also play hardball. Last March, the Times reported that the city had reached an agreement with the developer of a $1.5 billion redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar plant. When Glen insisted the number of proposed affordable set-asides—660 units out of 2,300—was too small, the developer threatened to drop the project. What followed was a high-stakes game of chicken in which Glen prevailed, succeeding in getting the developer to up the figure to 700, boost the proportion of larger units for families and commit to keeping the units affordable in perpetuity. Her career has kept Glen up on a tightrope between the public and private sectors. “The biggest joke is that when I was at Goldman Sachs, the leadership there would always say, ‘OK, so what does the Communist Department think about this?’ And now at City Hall I come in every morning and it’s like, ‘What does the Capitalist Department think of this?’” Asked how developers and investors have responded to her, she reflected for a moment. “You know, generally When I asked her to name the worst thing that’s been said about her developers don’t love being publicly, she ran through a list of crude sexist slanders, only to single told they have to do things. I think they perceive me out the sting of being called “amateurish” in New York Magazine. as someone who will push pretty hard. And I think most low-income. It funded the $43 million would say, ‘She’s pretty smart, and she I was an advocate.” Conversely, having redevelopment of a historic movie palace Goldman on her résumé gives her credunderstands what the issues are.’” in Brooklyn into a charter school and It is a revealing comment for Glen, an ibility with developers and investors, retail complex. Glen experimented with executive who values intelligence and especially as a woman. “Do you know novel mechanisms, pioneering so-called competence very highly—so highly, in what characteristic almost all develop“social-impact bonds,” whose returns are ers share in common?” she asked me. fact, that when I asked her to name the tied to policy outcomes. One such project “They’re all men! Ninety-five percent worst thing that’s been said about her was a $9.6 million loan for a program publicly, she ran through a list of crude of them. Now, do you think a man sitto decrease recidivism among inmates sexist slanders, only to single out the ting across the table from a woman who released from Rikers Island; Goldman’s sting of having been called “amateurish” ran a business at Goldman Sachs has a returns were pegged to benchmarked rein a New York Magazine article. “These little more respect than he might for a 20 Amherst Winter 2015
GEORGE ROSE/GETTY IMAGES SHOP ARCHITECTS
In the $1.5 billion planned redevelopment of Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar plant, Glen got the developer to increase the number of affordable housing units and commit to keeping those units affordable in perpetuity.
developers basically said I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was completely out of my league. It was a very, very big article.” She winced, recalling it. “Look, I’ve been called all sorts of things: I’m difficult, I’m a maverick, I look fat in a picture, I’m too pretty, I’m not pretty enough, I must have ‘known’ someone very well to get this job, if you know what I mean. ... But that article in New York Magazine really upset me.” The comment startled me. Was she really saying that being called an amateur bothered her more than being accused of sleeping with someone to get her job? “Yes!” she said. “Look, you can substantively disagree with what we’re doing, but don’t call us amateurs!” She shook her head, then returned, with a laugh, to the cruder accusation. “Somebody told me, You should be happy they even think that about you at your age! I mean, I’m 48.”
AS DEPUTY mayor, Glen has a jam-packed calendar. One night she’ll be offering somber remarks at the closing of the City Opera, another night hobnobbing with celebrities at the Made in New York Awards, a few days later discussing innovation at a Future of New York City conference. “I don’t sleep a lot,” she confessed. She recalled the previous winter, when she was being vetted for her job while tying things up at Goldman. “Meanwhile my daughter was applying to college, and I was cooking Christmas dinner for 20 people. I was running around like a lunatic.” Glen lives on West End Avenue with her husband, attorney Daniel Rayner, and two daughters, one a ninth-grader, the other a college freshman. She describes her parenting philosophy as “less is more.” There’s way too much parental involvement in the culture these days, she insists. “My kids are pretty awesome,
and they’re awesome because I didn’t spend that much time with them.” Glen likes to cook and to eat out (her favorite big-night-out restaurant is The NoMad.) She’s an experienced hiker and an “obsessive” skier. Her bucketlist dream is to go helicopter skiing in the Canadian Bugaboos. “I’m a maniac about skiing. When I took this job I said to the mayor, ‘I know I’ll work harder than I ever have, so I’m gonna go skiing whenever I need to!’ He’s like, ‘You’re so bougie-bougie,’ and I said, ‘OK, so I’m bougie-bougie. But I’m going skiing!’” A lifelong New Yorker, she lives just a few blocks from where she grew up, and she makes it clear that she’d never live in any other city. “If you’re interested in food, culture, big ideas—if you want to spend your day taking on social problems, then go to the coolest piece of performance art you ever saw in your life, and then take a walk along the river—where else are you going to live?” But she worries that if the city becomes inhospitable to all but the wealthy, it will lose the very diversity that made it what it is in the first place. “How can you be a great global city,” she asked me, “if one out of five residents is living in poverty?” Glen’s chief of staff, James Patchett ’02, leaned in to tell us our time was up. As a final question, I asked Glen to envision herself in 20 years, retired, telling her grandchildren about the long-ago de Blasio administration. What would she want to be able to say about her role in it? Glen squirmed, and I could tell that the prospect of being retired—being out of the mix—made her shudder inwardly. But she quickly put her thoughts together: “We’re at a game-changing moment right now. I think we’re going to lay the foundation for the balance of the 21st century by creating a whole new generation of housing, a whole new generation of kids who will be better educated, and a tech ecosystem that will help New York City continue to be the most competitive commercial center on the globe.” She fell silent for a moment, as if gauging how to speak more personally. “I would like to say that we actually, in a measurable way, made a big difference in how this city functions.” k Rand Richards Cooper ’80 is a fiction writer and essayist. Winter 2015 Amherst 21
Wild Half of Amherst’s 1,000-acre campus is protected wilderness— a collection of fields, trees and water
Side
sources open for recreation and research, and home to creatures large and small.
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WINTER 2015 AMHERST
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADAM GRIM
Am quam et aut pedi ut aut adionsed ut fugitiae essitis autempos dipiet omni que non consequibus poritatur aut od quam velesed
THE STORY GOES that in 1929 College Treasurer Charles Andrews was out gathering pinecones for kindling when he hit upon the idea that cleaning and beautifying 60 acres along the College’s eastern border might be a good way to provide wages for students in need of financial aid. Four years later students and residents set to work cleaning up the woods, uncovering a natural arboretum with rich soil and a diverse assembly of indigenous plants. Alfred S. Goodale, then head of the botany department, oversaw the first conservation work on the land, which included clearing brooks, establishing ponds
and developing hiking trails. This was the start of the College’s Wildlife Sanctuary. Over the years even larger parcels of land to the south and west were cleared of invasive plants to establish a grassland bird habitat. Today the sanctuary provides an open-air laboratory for teaching and research. Here Amherst students and faculty study the plant, insect and bird life that abounds in the fields and forests. White-tailed deer frequent the western fields, and during the spring migration, strollers have observed blue-winged warblers, field sparrows, brown thrashers and eastern bluebirds. WILLIAM SWEET
ROSE A colleague and friend reflects on the work of her late mentor, the first woman hired as a tenure-track Amherst professor. / BY ELIZABETH ARIES
OLVER
R
OSE OLVER, WHO died Nov. 19, was the first woman hired into a tenure-track position at Amherst. When she joined the faculty in 1962 the students as well as the faculty were all male. Rose encountered sexist behavior and attitudes in the early years, but she never took to blaming the College. Rather, she worked ceaselessly to make Amherst a better place for women. And throughout her 50 years at the College, she committed herself to making Amherst a better place for all. I joined the faculty in 1975, 13 years after Rose came. By then, she was a full professor and chair of the psychology department. It was my enormous good fortune to enter the only department that had a senior tenured woman. Under Rose’s leadership, the psychology department was a safe space where colleagues taught
Olver in the early days of her 50-year career as an Amherst professor
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APPRECIATION Winter 2015 Amherst 25
In 2013 Olver became the first woman to have her portrait hang in Johnson Chapel.
on a computer, finishing each other’s sentences. Rose is the only person with whom I have ever been able to work in that way. Collaborating with Rose turned difficult department work into a pleasure.
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26 Amherst Winter 2015
OSE’S RESEARCH CENTERED ON cognitive development. She was interested in the underlying changes in thinking and conceptual ability as children develop, and in matching teaching materials and methods to the inherent capabilities of children at different stages of development. She authored Studies in Cognitive Growth with Jerome Bruner, director of Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies, and Patricia Greenfield. Her research interests expanded over the years to encompass the study of gender differences in a variety of areas, a topic that received little research attention by psychologists until the 1970s. Rose and I were both intrigued by the psychoanalytic arguments advanced by Nancy Chodorow that sex differences in the experience of a separate sense of self in adulthood (e.g., exercising independent judgment and possessing internal criteria for self-worth) had their origins in the mother-child relationship during infancy.
ROB MATTSON
together, laughed together, had fun together and supported one another. Rose and I had much in common. We were both sent to college to get a “Mrs.” degree. But the role of housewife never attracted either of us. We were fortunate that with the advent of the women’s movement, times were changing, and new opportunities were opening up for women to pursue professional lives. We both had fathers who were doctors and Jewish mothers who were talented but demanding and critical. No surprise that we would go on to collaborate on a series of studies looking at the mother-daughter relationship. At Amherst we ventured into new experiences together. Rose turned 40 the year after I arrived and decided it was time to get in shape. She signed up for a gym class working out on weight machines and found herself in the uncomfortable position of being surrounded by male students. She needed reinforcement. The next thing I knew, I was in the gym on a bench, pressing 70 pounds. Rose was next to me pressing 140. The next semester we formed a gym class led by Amherst’s first female coach, Chris Zampach, and filled it solely with female colleagues. The safe space Rose had created within the psychology department was expanding outward. Rose and I bonded over shared sensibilities, including our style of always planning ahead. She taught me the real meaning of anticipating and preparing for contingencies: I showed up at the college in a blizzard proudly announcing I had a snow shovel in my car so that I would be able to shovel my way into my driveway after the town plows had left a barrier. Rose was three steps ahead of me. Her house has a long, curving driveway, and of course she, too, had a snow shovel— along with a flashlight and snowshoes in case her driveway remained unplowed. Despite my many years of education, it was Rose who taught me how to write—a skill I now pass on to my students. We wrote a great deal together: research articles; a coedited book; reappointment, tenure and promotion cases; and requests for new faculty positions. One of our special bonds was our ability to write collaboratively. Rose taught me that the first step in writing is to lay out the argument. When we worked together, we would talk through the argument to be made, divide up the pieces and then write them separately. Over time, though, we shifted to writing together
Chodorow postulated that mothers experience daughters as more like themselves; there is a stronger identification and smoother communication with daughters. By contrast, mothers experience sons as a sexual other; there is difference and separateness, and thus boys are pushed out and develop firmer ego boundaries. Together, Rose and I sought empirical support for these theoretical claims. We developed empirical measures of selfother differentiation and of the permeability of boundaries in mothers’ relationships with their adolescents, and we gathered data on two samples of college students. Drawing on examples from our own experiences with our mothers, we greatly enjoyed developing the permeability-ofboundaries scale. As hypothesized, female students reported greater maternal involvement and intrusiveness in their lives than male students did, and a high degree of maternal involvement and intrusiveness corresponded to a lower degree of self-other differentiation. Our published work provided some of the first empirical support for Chodorow’s theoretical arguments. Rose’s involvement in faculty governance will likely not be surpassed. She fought for coeducation on the President’s
B
ECAUSE OF HER WISDOM AND good judgment, her colleagues elected her five times to serve on the Committee of Six. Rose served on two presidential search committees and chaired the search for a dean of students. She was faculty marshal for 14 years, served seven times as chair of her two departments—psychology and WAGS—and at one time or another was on most other Amherst committees. Her contribution was not just to
changing the student body and the curriculum; it was also to bettering student life. She was dean of freshmen for two years, chaired the orientation committee and was on several other committees that addressed the student experience. Regardless of illnesses, in 50 years of teaching Rose never missed a class. To her, the give-and-take of discussion courses was much more exciting than delivering lectures. She would challenge students to think through their assumptions. With her honors students, she did not delineate a project of her own for them to pursue. Rather, she guided them as they immersed themselves in the literature on a topic of their choice and helped them develop their own hypotheses to test, as well as methods and measures to do so. She read and reread drafts of their work, pushing them to articulate their arguments and ideas more clearly. Rose inspired me in her concern and care for students and colleagues. When it came to possibly making an exception
OLVER ON TEACHING
Ten years ago she reflected on how her teaching style and discipline had changed over time. ROSE RICHARDSON OLVER, the L. Stanton Williams ’41 Professor of Psychology and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies, Emerita, was 77 when she died in November 2014. She lived in Amherst with her husband, former U.S. Rep. John Olver. She is also survived by a daughter, Martha, and a brother, David. Olver arrived at Amherst after earning a B.A. from Swarthmore and a Ph.D. from Radcliffe. In a 2005 interview with Amherst magazine she reflected on how her teaching style and discipline had changed over time: “My husband, who left the academic world to go into politics, said, ‘How can you just teach the same thing, year after year?’ The answer is, I’m not teaching the same thing. There have been some really wonderful changes within my discipline of psychology. The addition of gender opened up practically every known psychological principle to question. “More recently, there have been two additional changes.
One is an intensification of our knowledge of human biology and our ability to do noninvasive brain studies, [allowing us] to study the biological basis of psychological behaviors. At the same time, we have added the notion of diversity—psychologists studying class. This is something that psychologists didn’t do; sociologists did. “And then there’s been the whole addition of women’s and gender studies, which is interdisciplinary. I’ve been teaching
Olver at a lectern in the late 1960s
to a department rule in order to help a struggling student, Rose was always for it. Where others might be quick to blame, Rose could be counted on to see another’s perspective, slow things down and look from all sides. Rose was there most especially for her daughter, Martha, and her husband, John. She was also the go-to person for practically every woman on the faculty in the early decades, as well as for male colleagues. For 40 years I sought Rose’s wisdom whenever I faced a difficult decision. This happened frequently. Invariably Rose was able to grasp the complexities involved, to avoid rushing to judgment and to see her way clear to what must be done. Rose enriched my life with her friendship, kindness, generosity and support. She remained ever hopeful, ever understanding, ever giving, ever thoughtful, ever loving, ever wise. k Elizabeth Aries is the Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in Social Sciences (Psychology).
frequently with people who are in the humanities, and I have learned a tremendous amount about literary analysis. I’ve now informed some of my psychology courses with short stories and plays. “So yes, doing anything for 40 years would be terribly dull, but I’m not doing the same thing. And it’s been exciting to be at an institution that has allowed me to grow along with the discipline. “I was trained in the givethe-lecture-and-then-engagein-hand-to-hand-mentalcombat-with-the-students approach—putting the students down, and so forth. My first Scrutiny reviews said things CHIP WITTEMORE
Select Committee. She worked to establish the interdepartmental program in neuroscience, and by hiring two psychologists who would become mainstays of the neuroscience program, she remade the psychology department. As more women faculty arrived and began engaging in feminist research, she saw the importance of creating a Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and chaired the committee that led to its creation.
like, ‘We went away after the seminar and licked our wounds.’ It suggests that I was a skilled swordsman. I no longer do that. I would be embarrassed beyond belief if students said that now about my classes. “Back in the early ’70s I taught courses with female faculty from Smith and Mount Holyoke, and they pointed out to me that I didn’t have to teach that way, that it was possible to teach in a much more discussion-built consensus, where everybody lays out an idea and everybody shapes it, rather than putting it out and defending it. So I have moved very much in that direction. I’m not always sure what we’re going to find out, and in fact I see things in a new way because of what the students have said. “What I’m about is challenging students’ views, no matter what their views are—even if I agree with them. The idea is to get them to know why they believe in them. When they say, ‘My family’s always felt this way; this is the way I think,’ I say, ‘Well, you may end up thinking that way, but you’ll know why you think that way.’” l WWW.AMHERST.EDU/ MAGAZINE: The full interview
and an oral history Winter 2015 Amherst 27
In conversations with an alumnus and their mutual professor— and in the silences— a student finds a way back to himself. BY MELIH LEVI ’15 Illustration by Andy Martin
THE LOUDEST MOMENTS
WINTER 2015 AMHERST
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“MELIH: I ADMIRE THIS a lot—don’t hear this as a negative comment… But by attending to the manner so carefully and at such length the larger feelings can get obscured, at least not get the attention they deserve.” These were the words Professor Kim Townsend half-illegibly wrote on my first paper on Wordsworth. I’d tried to do a close reading of that famous section of the Prelude where Wordsworth
“I couldn’t find you,” a professor said of Melih Levi’s writing. Where had he gone? Levi found the answer through a course on Wordsworth and Keats.
remembers the Winander Boy imitating the owls and expecting an answer from them. The Winander Boy succeeds, and the owls respond, but for the poet, the real source of fascination is not in the response but in the “deep silence” that follows it: Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, received Into the bosom of the steady Lake.
In his experiment with the owls, the Boy intentionally invites a certain experience. The silence, however, is devoid of such purpose: the Boy absorbs the evocative sounds involuntarily, and Nature, although powerful, has no other choice but to surround the child and make itself available to him. In reading the poem, we go through a similar experience. Wordsworth creates silence by isolating phrases, signaling that they deserve their own space. The Winander Boy is not the only one “hung Listening”: the reader comes across this enjambed word literally hanging there before arriving at the act that is central to the poem: Listening. Wordsworth wants us to listen. By synchronizing our experience with that of the Boy, he demands that we participate in the poem. The line break, or shall we say the edge of the line, allows us to inhabit the silence and manipulate it to bridge the two words “hung” and “listening.” The connecting silence, in other words, “tease[s] us out of thought,” as Keats would have it. I went to Professor Townsend’s office hours to talk about the paper. Although he’d made it clear that his
into my writing was in my first-year seminar, “Big Books.” I remember the day Professor Andrew Parker came into the classroom with three huge books and threw each on the table to release their authoritative sounds: thud, thud, thud. Then he passed out the syllabus, which introduced a question that would occupy our minds for the entire semester: “How do we lose, or find, our place in colossal fictional worlds?” When Professor Parker returned our first papers, I saw criticism but no grade. The same with the second, the third and the fourth paper. Eventually I forgot that grades were even a part of this course. I didn’t write to get an A but rather to test myself, to see where the readings took me and why I ended up where I did, and to observe the changes that happened in these profound intervals. It was only at the end of the course that I realized what the thud, thud, thud sounds had really meant. They were invitations to find what was hidden, not only in the texts but also in ourselves. After thinking back to this course, I wondered why I had gradually departed from my own writing. Where did I go? I found the answer through a course on Wordsworth and Keats. Whenever we entered a new territory within the poet’s life, Professor Townsend asked us to write “a
I felt the urge to leave my room at night, walk to the quad and stare at the chapel. Had my mentor felt a similar urge? words should not be taken negatively, I couldn’t help reading disappointment on his face. I asked for advice about my writing and watched him clear his throat, nod carefully and get ready to address me. “I couldn’t find you,” he said. “It felt like you put your lab coat on and tried dissecting the poem with precision. That’s great, but you weren’t there.” After the meeting, I rushed to my room and reread the paper. He was right; I really wasn’t there. In fact, I hadn’t been there for years. The last time I had injected myself 30 Amherst Winter 2015
Photograph by Rob Mattson
couple pages.” The prompt could be: “So, now what do you think?,” or, if he wanted us to join him in his search for an answer, “I need help!” He didn’t want the answer; he wanted us to “live the questions” together, as Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet. These spontaneous, brief assignments asked us to respond, to bring ourselves into conversation with the texts. This ultimately taught me what Coetzee eloquently argues in Doubling the Point: “Writing reveals to you what you wanted to say in the first place. In fact, it sometimes constructs what you want or wanted to say.” THROUGH THE PATHWAYS ALUMNI MENTORING PROgram, which Amherst started two years ago, I made the acquaintance of a dean and English professor at Yale, Joseph Gordon ’70, whose specialty is Victorian literature. I was taking a course at Oxford on the Victorian novels and thought this connection could create a wonderful occasion for intellectual exchange. I learned from his Pathways profile that he had taken a course with one of my English professors, John Cameron, who had taught me Proust! What an experience it would be, I thought, to get to know an alumnus who’d studied with some of the same people, in the same classrooms, almost 50 years ago. We decided to start by writing and then meet in person when I returned to Amherst. For almost a semester we
exchanged emails once or twice a week and talked about all sorts of subjects: literature, academia, history, growing up. His questions provoked me to reflect more deeply on my writing, to have a regular dialogue with my mind and to challenge my own assumptions about literature. Quickly, this relationship became one of the most important that Amherst has allowed me to build. After returning from Oxford, I wrote to Dean Gordon about the courses I’d soon be taking at Amherst. In response, he said he had also taken an English course on Wordsworth and Keats with Professor Townsend! He ended the email by saying, “If you like, please greet the professor for me.” I was in for yet another treat. I passed my mentor’s greetings along to Professor Townsend after class. He said my mentor had used Keats to challenge political institutions during the Vietnam War. As we discussed Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence” during office hours, Professor Townsend remembered the paper my mentor had written on the very same poem. My relationship with the Amherst campus began to change. The Robert Frost statue started losing its “invisibility,” to use Robert Musil’s word. Musil argues that “there is nothing in the world more invisible than a monument.” Consistently, I felt the urge to leave my room at night, walk to the freshman quad, stare at the Frost statue Winter 2015 Amherst 31
and then stare at Johnson Chapel, home of the English department, standing so majestically among the trees. I wondered whether my mentor, some 50 years ago, had felt a similar urge to lose himself before the grandeur of the lighted-up chapel, whether he’d pondered his connection to humanity while reading Wordsworth and walking between the aged trees of the freshman quad. Did the famous lines of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” also inhabit his mind during his nightly strolls? While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.
Like me, did he try to “see into the life of things”? After corresponding through email for a considerable time, we thought it appropriate to finally meet in person, and to invite Professor Townsend along. Dean Gordon drove to Amherst on a cold but sunny day last March. We met in Converse Hall, which, he told me, was once the library. He showed me where a receptionist used to connect phone calls within the College. We walked by some dorms and he told me about student life back when the College was all male. He briefly touched upon the politicized environment on campus during the war, and we talked about how, today, the distractions of technology make it difficult to spend time with one’s self. We remembered Montaigne’s “On Solitude”: “we must reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherin to settle our true liberty, our principal solitude and retreat.” Later, we, along with Professor Townsend, settled at the restaurant in the Lord Jeffery Inn, where my mentor had eaten dinner with his family before moving into his freshman dorm. The three of us talked about teaching, literature, Wordsworth and Keats, and the history of the College. At some points, I retreated and watched the two professors grow nostalgic over changes in literary education. Melih Levi ’15 is an They reminisced over classmates, English major and a former teachers and school years. Schupf scholar. A native These were magical moments: to of Turkey, he recently inhabit the same space as two completed an English literary scholars of different translation of Ahmet generations, and in their intersecMithat Efendi’s 1875 tion, to feel the resurgence of Turkish novel, Felâtun two poetic pasts. Bey and Rakım Efendi. I was hypnotized by the sound To learn more about of their conversation, by the very becoming a Pathways act of being with them and sharing mentor, go to amherst. the same medium. The short siedu/go/pathways. lences that interrupted our conversation were the loudest moments of the meal. I felt, in those “deep silences,” the connection we’d established “unawares.” Before the meeting, in one of our email exchanges, Dean Gordon had directed my attention to the line in “Tintern Abbey” in which Wordsworth tries to capture the emotions he felt as a child. Although Wordsworth fails in that effort, his attempts make way for a different out32 Amherst Winter 2015
come: “The picture of the mind revives again,” he says. The important thing is not accessing a former emotion, but rather observing the human mind at work, participating in this process and finding there “life and food for future years.” Watching the two professors, I witnessed the beautiful human mind at work and began to think about how I’d changed, how Amherst had changed me and what that meant. As the three of us talked about the modern novel, Professor Townsend remembered Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. He wondered if he should return to it. Upon my affirmative response, he asked why I thought this novel mattered. I talked generally about the text and how it so nicely embodied the modernist condition. But then I decided to resort to a poet. I asked for their permission to read a stanza from Frank O’Hara’s “Mayakovsky.” It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again.
This is why you should return to the novel, I said. It reminds us that we need the other to make sense of our own existence, to challenge our perspective and to situate ourselves in this world. That thought led me back to Wordsworth and the significance he attaches to the act of becoming. Professor Townsend told Dean Gordon that he should write down his memories. He also talked about how certain memories defy precipitation, rise to the surface and demand a voice. I knew this dinner would be one of those memories. It will demand a different voice as I redefine myself through life. This thought redirected me to the question Professor Townsend had asked about my first paper on Wordsworth: “Where are you in this paper?” I now understood why I needed to be there. I walked Dean Gordon to his car, and we exchanged small presents, which were, unsurprisingly, books. He gave me a copy of the Letters of John Keats that he’d used in Professor Townsend’s course. It was an old edition, with a blue cover, and a picture of Keats looking ponderously into the future. In this gift, my mentor was giving me permission to participate in his own ongoing journey with Keats. I was allowed a glimpse into his experience with the poet. I watched him start the engine and slowly get going. I wish I could make these moments last longer, I sighed. Outside my dorm, tears in my eyes, I paused and looked at Johnson Chapel. Then I turned the Keats book to a random page and read the lines my mentor had underlined so many years ago: You perhaps at one time thought there was such a thing as Worldly Happiness to be arrived at, at certain periods of time marked out—you have of necessity from your disposition been thus led away—I scarcely remember counting upon any Happiness—I look not for it if it be not in the present hour— nothing startles me beyond the Moment. k
36 Beth Foley Swanson ’96 helped end the Chicago teachers’ strike. 37 Andy Ward ’94 edited Lena Dunham’s new book, Not That Kind of Girl.
Photographed by Arturo Monreal
ALUMNI IN THE WORLD
Beyond Campus
Diana Torres ’13E is the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.
Winter 2015 Amherst 33
BEYOND CAMPUS
Freeing an Innocent Man A newly minted J.D. helped to end the long legal battle of a man wrongly convicted of murder. BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05
Rothschild, an associate at Steptoe & Johnson since 2011, worked on the case pro bono with a partner at the firm.
LAW U Jessica Rothschild ’06 will never
On the night of Oct. 5, 1994, Baltimore police found Burgess in the basement of the home he shared with his girlfriend Michelle Dyson and her children. Burgess was holding Dyson, who had just been fatally shot. The following year, he was convicted of firstdegree murder, largely on the basis of gunshot residue found on his hands. He began serving a life sentence. In 1998, however, Charles Dorsey—already incarcerated on another conviction—wrote to Burgess’s mother and defense lawyer, confessing that he had committed the crime with Howard Rice, a suspect in numerous other murders. Burgess’s team asked for a retrial in 2001, but a judge denied the request. A decade later, the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project (MAIP) and lawyers from the Washington, D.C., office of Steptoe & Johnson—including Rothschild, a newly minted J.D.—began reinvestigating the case, aided by a new Maryland law that “allowed for consideration of newly discovered evidence,” Rothschild says. This evidence included two affidavits signed in 2012: One was from Dyson’s son, Brian Rainey, asserting that he had, as a 6-year-old, been awake on the night of the murder (contrary to the prosecution’s narrative at the trial) and had watched two unfamiliar men enter the house. The other was from Dorsey, who said he and the late Rice killed Dyson after searching the house for money and drugs. In addition, evidence from gunshot residue had since been, in Rothschild’s words, “completely debunked as junk science.” The residue on his hands didn’t prove that Burgess had fired a weapon; he might have picked it up merely by touching Dyson’s body. Rothschild, a Stanford Law graduate and an associate at Steptoe since 2011, worked on the case pro bono with a partner at the firm. She interviewed Burgess and Rainey and wrote a “Petition for Writ of Actual Innocence,” filed in December 2013. Two months later, “a week before their opposition was due, the State’s attorney called to tell us they were conceding,” she says. In fact, the state soon argued 34 Amherst Winter 2015
BROOKS KRAFT
forget what Sabein Burgess said when he learned his long legal battle was finally coming to an end. “We told him that we won and that he was going free,” Rothschild remembers. “We then asked him if he had any questions, and all he asked was: ‘I’m going home?’ Three little words with so much meaning.”
Jessica Rothschild ’06 MAJORS: COMPUTER SCIENCE, POLITICAL SCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY
Not often does the opposing party make your case.
the defense’s case in front of a judge. “It’s not often that the opposing party makes your case.” “The judge signed the order,” Rothschild says, “and before we knew it, Mr. Burgess had been released onto the streets of Baltimore.” He’d been in prison for 19 years. Today, according to Rothschild, he does custodial work and lives with his girlfriend, daughter and baby granddaughter. The Steptoe attorneys earned a Defender of Innocence Award from MAIP. The glass trophy and certificate now reside in Rothschild’s office. The Memphis, Tenn., native also recently argued her first motion in court (“for Mr. Burgess, but related to post-release issues”) and co-chaired a federal jury trial involving a pretrial detainee beaten by prison guards. She says simply, “This has been an amazing year for me, workwise.” Katherine Duke ’05 is the assistant editor of Amherst magazine.
New Mexico on Her Mind
organizations or formal institutions,” she says. “At the beginning, they were shy and didn’t know much about the political system. But their leadership skills took off, and that was one of the most meaningful aspects of the job.” Although she enjoyed working on the ground, she missed using the writing and research skills she’d learned—and learned to love—at Amherst. Knowing how important those skills are to advocating for social justice, Torres decided it was time to move on, with the New Mexico fellowship giving her a place to land. Today her work is less hands-on, but it offers her the opportunity to bolster her critical thinking and writing skills. She spends her days researching immigration issues and poverty, and the intersection of the two. She is working on a report on the criminalization of poverty—the way the criminal justice
In the Southwest, issues of immigration, women’s rights and poverty all intersect. BY SUE DICKMAN ’89 SOCIAL ACTION U For
Diana Torres ’13E, New Mexico is home, the place she grew up and where she has returned both during and after Amherst. Though she now lives in Washington, D.C., her job title hearkens straight back to the Southwest: Torres is the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank. There, she researches and writes on issues of immigration, women’s rights and poverty.
MAJORS: BLACK STUDIES, HISTORY
She is conducting research on the barriers to employment for children of undocumented immigrants.
Sue Dickman ’89 blogs at www. lifedivided.blogspot.com. Although she’d imagined a future in community organizing, Torres is now applying to law schools.
ARTURO MONREAL
Torres has long been interested in social justice; a mentor in high school inspired her, and courses and conversations at Amherst, particularly with professors José Celso de Castro Alves and Rick López ’93, cemented her commitment. During a semester off, she worked at the Center of Southwest Culture, a nonprofit focusing on indigenous and Latino communities in Albuquerque. After graduation she returned home with the aim of giving back to the working-class immigrant community in which she’d been raised. Torres found work as a community organizer and an administrator at the Southwest Educational Partners for Training and Albuquerque Interfaith. Her deepening relationships with immigrant women ended up being the most fulfilling part of this work. “As an organizer, you develop relationships with women who haven’t had a lot of contact with
Diana Torres ’13E
system penalizes people who can’t afford to pay fines, for example. She’s also researching barriers to employment for children of undocumented immigrants in New Mexico. Her monthly op-ed pieces have been distributed to media outlets and websites including The Nation, Truthout and dream.org. The fellowship has also given Torres a new vantage point from which to think about what comes next. Although she’d imagined a future in community organizing, she’s now applying to law schools and considering the possibility of earning a public policy degree. Eventually, she hopes to work on immigration policy. And, she says, New Mexico is “on my mind.” Not surprisingly, she can see herself returning once again to where it all began.
Winter 2015 Amherst 35
BEYOND CAMPUS
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Wonky Progress An aide to Mayor Rahm Emanuel was pivotal in ending the Chicago teachers’ strike. BY BILLY TOWNSEND ’94 EDUCATION U Beth Foley
36 Amherst Winter 2015
COURTESY BETH FOLEY SWANSON
Swanson ’96 wasn’t looking for fights when she signed up as the top education aide to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Rather, as a veteran Chicago Public Schools administrator with three children in the CPS system, Swanson saw the chance to deliver the type of on-the-ground educational progress that shapes cities without making much news. That is the legacy Emanuel cited when Foley left his administration in June: “Beth has been dedicated to ensuring the success of universal kindergarten, a full school day, and in expanding Chicago Public Schools’ STEM and IB programs. She has worked 24/7, and I am grateful for her service to not just my administration, but to the children of Chicago.” But a funny thing happened on the way to boring wonky progress: Chicago became the epicenter of the pitched national battle over education reform, culminating in a seven-day teachers’ strike in 2012. The strike is considered a Gettysburg in the American civil war over public education. At its heart, this war pits “reformers” against public school teachers’ unions and their allies. Reformers advocate for standardized testing and nonunionized charter schools. Unions and their allies accuse reformers of a “testand-punish” approach that undermines traditional schools, teacher pay and job security. Emanuel—like President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—is generally seen as an ally to reformers. But Swanson says the truth is more complicated,
won a raise, as well as concessions on the longer school day and a modified evaluation structure. “Principals retained the right to hire and fire teachers locally,” Swanson says, “rather than being governed by systemwide rules.” Swanson moved to Chicago in the 1990s with her husband, Brian Swanson ’94. She earned a master’s in public policy from the University of Chicago, where she occasionally crossed paths with a slightly older couple named Barack and Michelle Obama. At the time, Duncan was leading CPS. He hired Swanson, and she rose quickly, serving as director of after-school programs and then as budget director before leaving to lead a Chicago nonprofit. When Emanuel was running for mayor, Swanson wrote a briefing for him. He liked what he saw and kept turning to her for insight. “I started spending more and more time with the campaign,” she says, “and eventually I sort of worked myself into a job.” Now a vice president at the nonprofit Joyce Foundation, Swanson is advocating for education and social policy in a less nakedly political setting. She believes that reformers and traditional advocates have much more room for cooperation than education wars suggest. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” she says.
During the strike Swanson hammered out deals on an extended school day and autonomy for local principals.
Beth Foley Swanson ’96 MAJORS: AMERICAN STUDIES, ENGLISH
Chicago became the epicenter of the pitched national battle over education reform.
and more Chicago-specific. The key issues in Chicago included an uncompensated extension of the school day, which had been the nation’s shortest; a rescinded raise for teachers; a state law reducing teacher bargaining power; autonomy for principals in the hiring and firing of teachers; school closings; and a new teacher-evaluation system. The city and the union eventually resolved these issues in a way that doesn’t neatly align to the contours of the national conflict. Swanson was the lead player in hammering out deals on the extended school day and autonomy for local principals. The Chicago Sun-Times called her “a pivotal figure in the tense and difficult negotiations that ended the sevenday walkout.” Education analysts tend to see the strike as a victory for the union, yet Swanson was happy with the final deal. In the end, teachers
Billy Townsend ’94 is the author of Age of Barbarity: The Forgotten Fight for the Soul of Florida.
Editing a Cultural Commotion He’s polished the words of David Sedaris and George Saunders—not to mention Lena Dunham. BY BILLY TOWNSEND ’94
© EDWARD LE POULIN/CORBIS
Lena Dunham says so directly. It’s there, verbatim, in the acknowledgments of her first book, Not That Kind of Girl. Dunham would know. She writes and performs with granular, comical honesty about a young woman’s fraught experience with her body and sex and love. This makes her a star, and a target—an emblem for almost any agenda, loving or hostile. So how does one edit the cultural commotion that is Lena Dunham? “The editorial relationship was easy,” says Ward. “Working with her was no different from working with any other writer. The commotion never seemed to affect the process. She works in a zone that seems to exist outside of all the noise.” As editorial director for Random House, Ward won the Dunham book sweepstakes not long after her HBO series Girls became a hit in 2012. A collection of personal essays sprinkled with advice, Not That Kind of Girl echoes the form and sensibility of intimate literary humorists like David Sedaris, whose work Ward has also edited. It is the Lena Dunham says, most anticipated and culturally “I love how much Andy’s empathy freighted book of Ward’s career, plays into his and it could become the most editorial work.” successful. It’s already a multiweek New York Times best-seller. “[Fame] can sustain a book for about a week,” says Ward. “But after that, if it’s not any good, no one will care. So it was gratifying to do a few tour dates with her and see all the young people, mainly women, in the crowd. It was clearly speaking to them on a fairly intense level.” Ward describes Dunham as talented, disciplined and eager. Her book proposal came with 65 pages of fully written essays, an almost unheard-of level of diligence for a star writing a book. “She taught me a phrase from TV: ‘beat this.’ As in ‘you can beat this passage’ and make it better,” Ward says. “I’d send something back to her, and, boom, a few days later, it
COURTESY ANDY WARD
CULTURE U Andy Ward ’94 is the best editor a girl who uses the word vagina a lot could ever want.
Ward won the Dunham book sweepstakes after her HBO series Girls became a hit. “She works in a zone that seems to exist outside of all the noise,” he says.
Andy Ward ’94 MAJORS: AMERICAN STUDIES, ENGLISH
“It was gratifying to do a few tour dates with her and see all the young people, mainly women, in the crowd.”
would come back to me and she had elevated it every time. People talk about her privilege, but she has an incredible work ethic.” Ward has been cultivating relationships with writers—including National Book Award finalist George Saunders—since his days as an editor with GQ and Esquire. It starts at home. His wife, Jenny Rosenstrach ’93, is the author of Dinner: A Love Story and Dinner: The Playbook, both based largely on their family’s almost sacred attachment to eating together each night. The couple and their two daughters (who will get to read Dunham’s book when they’re 18) have welcomed Dunham, and many other writers, into their dinner/ love industrial complex. When Ward left GQ, editor-in-chief Jim Nelson’s epic goodbye note made the rounds of media sites. It gushed over Ward’s “warmth and openness and always-willing-to-help-anyone-at-anytime-fulness, his reflexive mentoring and nurturing of talent and assistants and assistant editors and anyone smart enough to get close enough to learn from him—his basic and undeniable decency—basically, his Andy Ward-ness.” So the vagina joke in the acknowledgments hints at something deeper. “I love how much Andy’s empathy plays into his editorial work,” Dunham says. “Not only does he have this incredible command of language, he also has an emotional intelligence that makes working with him a pure pleasure. I would not be keen to write a book without him.” Winter 2015 Amherst 37
BEYOND CAMPUS
Where Are All the Fish?
ALEC JACOBSON
A photographer will go to the shores of Lake Victoria to study the depletion of its fish stocks.
research projects in three areas, including “conservation of species, habitats, ecosystems and biological diversity.” At least 70 percent of the population of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda practice subsistence agriculture, according to Jacobson, and “fishing is one of very few ways to make money” without other skills. Though Lake Victoria supplies only a tiny percentage of the European fish market, fishing provides a much larger percentage of the regional economy. “It’s not a lot of money globally, but it’s a heck of a lot of money locally,” Jacobson says. He is particularly interested in this aspect of the “globalized economy having very localized causes and effects.” Jacobson will return to Uganda this spring. His plan is to talk to as many people as possible about the issues around overfishing, with the goal, ultimately, of creating a multimedia project. He hopes to produce something that emphasizes local efforts to address overfishing and “catalyzes support for these efforts rather than provoking a reaction like ‘Let’s stop buying these fish.’” Jacobson knows that one young man with a camera will not be able to combat the complicated scenarios that have led to overfishing in the world’s secondlargest freshwater lake. His hope, though, is that his project can contribute to a conversation that might eventually lead to change. And even though Western consumers are a likely audience for his work, he hopes it will be of most use to those living on the shores of Lake Victoria, where the problem began and where the main hope for a solution lies. k
CONSERVATION U Photographer Alec
Jacobson ’12 went to Uganda expecting to learn about AIDS. Instead he found himself learning about fish. Or lack of fish, as it turned out.
During his brief stay in Kasensero, on the shores of Lake Victoria, in 2013, Jacobson heard over and over again that, because of overfishing, the lake’s fish stocks are dangerously depleted. Jacobson was intrigued. Thanks to the support of a recently awarded Young Explorers Grant from the National Geographic Society, he will soon return to Uganda to study the issue in greater detail. Jacobson first visited Uganda between his junior and senior years at Amherst, on an internship sponsored by the college’s Center for Community Engagement. When he returned in 2013, he was working on a project for Danbury (Conn.) Hospital, which, in conjunction with the University of Vermont College of Medicine, sponsors a residency program in global health in Uganda. Jacobson had assumed that AIDS would be of primary concern in Kasensero, given the high percentage of the population that is infected. Instead, people kept telling him about the fish. When he returned to the United States, Jacobson began to research overfishing in Lake Victoria—and to contemplate getting himself back to Kasensero to study the issue. His work as a photographer, combined with the nature of his project, made the Young Explorers Grant a good fit: the program is open to people between the ages of 18 and 25 and supports 38 Amherst Winter 2015
During his previous stay in the village of Kasensero, Uganda, Jacobson photographed fisherman on Lake Victoria. He will soon return to study the issues around overfishing.
Alec Jacobson ’12 MAJORS: ANTHROPOLOGY, FRENCH
He hopes to create a multimedia project that “catalyzes support” for Ugandan efforts to address overfishing .
ROB MATTSON
BY SUE DICKMAN ’89
41 New York Times columnist Ron Lieber ’93 on kids and money 44 Professor Kim Townsend’s biography of Amherst President Ward
Photograph courtesy of Sonya Clark
ARTS NEWS AND REVIEWS
Amherst Creates
Artist Sonya Clark ’89 became a walking gallery when hairstylist Jamilah Williams created this design on her head.
Winter 2015 Amherst 39
AMHERST CREATES
CRAZY PLAYGROUND Two 10-year-olds find adventure in a New York apartment building where strange things are afoot. | BY JOSH BELL ’02
WELCOME TO THE WAYNE Created and written by Billy Lopez ’03 Nickelodeon
Lopez worked his way up to head writer on The Wonder Pets and 3rd & Bird after getting his start in animation thanks to his brother, whose credits include Frozen.
40 Amherst Winter 2015
CARTOONS U “I was not a great student,” says Billy Lopez ’03 with a laugh, describing his time at Amherst. “Even the professors who liked me will tell you that.” Lopez was more likely to be practicing with his band or writing poetry or composing music than sitting in a classroom. All of that whimsical messing around has paid off, if the childlike wonder of Welcome to the Wayne, Lopez’s animated series on Nickelodeon, is any indication. Debuting in short episodes of about four minutes each on the network’s website, Welcome to the Wayne follows the adventures of 10-year-old buddies Ansi Molina and Olly Timbers (the latter voiced by Lopez himself ), both residents of the titular New York City apartment building, where strange things are afoot—spies with laser guns, secret portals, a bear-shark. Lopez took inspiration for the show from his upbringing in an offbeat New York City apartment building. “These four 1960s towers were surrounding a big playground and garden, so all the kids that lived in them got to play together all the time,” he says. “It just sort of came out of that—that memory of getting to take the boring place you live and transform it into this crazy playground.” Before creating Welcome to the Wayne, Lopez got his start in animation thanks to his older brother Robert Lopez, a songwriter and composer whose credits include Frozen, The Book of Mormon and Avenue Q. When Robert got a job writing music for
the preschool cartoon The Wonder Pets, he brought along his little brother. (The effort earned the brothers a Daytime Emmy in 2008.) Lopez graduated from composing to writing scripts, working his way up to head writer on The Wonder Pets and 3rd & Bird, another preschool cartoon from the same production company. Welcome to the Wayne is targeted at a slightly older audience (ages 7 to 11), but Lopez uses the same writing method for all ages: “My personal approach is just to make sure it’s fun for kids, and that it’s fulfilling the fantasies of the kid inside of me.” For the music on this show, Lopez is working with Andrew Barkan ’02 and Polly Hall ’04. Although Lopez credits the animated shows of Loren Bouchard (including Home Movies and Bob’s Burgers) as a major influence, he also cites a more unlikely source of inspiration: “Lost kind of spoonfeeds you secrets, but they always lead into a bigger secret.” He’d like Welcome to the Wayne “to be something that slowly opens up around you, and asks more questions than it answers, but also gives you satisfying answers every now and then.” For now, Welcome to the Wayne is primarily online, but Lopez is actively developing a more traditional half-hour TV version. He’s also working with his brother on a sitcom pilot for adults. Plus he’s continuing to compose music and even poetry. That downtime at Amherst is reaping its rewards. Josh Bell ’02 is the Las Vegas Weekly film editor.
AMHERST CREATES
PERSONAL FINANCE, FOR KIDS A New York Times columnist gives advice on how—and why—to talk to your children about money. | BY RAND RICHARDS COOPER ’80
THE OPPOSITE OF SPOILED: RAISING KIDS WHO ARE GROUNDED, GENEROUS, AND SMART ABOUT MONEY By Ron Lieber ’93 HarperCollins
MONEY U How should we talk to our kids about money, and how soon? As author of the “Your Money” column in The New York Times and father of a school-age daughter, Ron Lieber is doubly qualified to take on this tricky subject. His book addresses the myriad money questions children raise, from “Can I have an allowance?” to “Can we buy that homeless man an apartment?” The Opposite of Spoiled seeks to combat “the epidemic of silence around money” in many families, which Lieber attributes largely to our fear of raising spoiled children. He argues that this silence leaves young people unprepared for the realities of adult life. Worse, it lets us neglect what he views as a powerful tool to impart values “—from generosity
RANDY MARTINEZ
Lieber’s advice: Don’t tie allowance to chores. Don’t skip over TV ads. Take an interest in your child’s point of view.
to judge priorities amid limited resources. Lieber admires the Smiths of Utah, a farm family whose sons help with every aspect of the family business. His trickle-up m.o. in this book is to gather lessons from such families and import them into wealthier, more leisured ones. He cites approvingly a Times colleague who makes his kids save to pay for their first semester of college; this “symbolic deprivation,” as Lieber calls it, reinstalls a sense of limitation into affluent lives and gives them “a bit of a reality reset.” This book is not for everyone. Lieber candidly pegs his readership as those families with $75,000 of annual income or higher, noting that in doing so, he’s excluding three-quarters of American households (including, one should add, those in which deprivation is not symbolic but real). The Opposite of Spoiled is not a guide to changing inequality, but to raising kids within it—specifically, kids who are the winners within it. Is that enough? Lieber clearly has qualms about the more arrant displays of status that define our new Gilded Age. Take, for example, wealthy families who pay extra to cut the long lines at Disney. “[M]arching right by the other kids in a park that’s supposed to be full of amusements for all,” Lieber comments, “sends an awfully confusing message.” Actually, it sends a blunt message: We can. I wish Lieber would call this behavior out for the crass assertion of privilege that it is. But parents looking for smart advice will find this book a resourceful guide. Lieber’s idea of fun can get a bit actuarial—like his excitement over offering a kid the choice between paying a 15 percent allowance tax or a 30 percent set-aside which you match, dollar for dollar, helping your kid practice for her 401k. He also seems like a great dad: smart, fair and funny (“It’s not like parents lack leverage; we control dessert, first and foremost”). His advice— have conversations, take an interest in your child’s point of view, tell the truth—is no less true for being familiar. Above all, Lieber understands that in any family, time is the most precious resource. Spend as much of it with your child as you can, and you will be truly rich.
and curiosity to patience and perseverance—[that] could be taught using money.” To that end, he offers an action plan for parents, covering topics ranging from the economics of the tooth fairy, to charitable giving, to saving for college. He consults specialists and culls tips from families. A recurring theme is the importance of nurturing your children’s innate desire for a role in family decision making—and for responsibility. When I gave my 7-year-old her own cart in the supermarket last year, sending her off with half the shopping list, she thrilled at the chance to show competence, even coming back with extra savings. This is the classic Lieber kind of breakthrough moment for parents. You’ll find plenty of advice in this book. Don’t tie allowance to chores. Don’t skip over TV ads. Don’t hesitate to give your child a $100 debit card on your weeklong trip to Disney; it will help her learn AMHERST READS featured book: www.amherst.edu/magazine
Rand Richards Cooper ’80 is a film and book critic for Commonweal Magazine. Winter 2015 Amherst 41
AMHERST CREATES
A WALKING GALLERY Sonya Clark ’89 asked 12 hairstylists to create works of art on her head, and then on canvas. The result: an award-winning project. | BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER THE HAIR CRAFT PROJECT By Sonya Clark ’89 1708 Gallery Richmond, Va.
COURTESY SONYA CLARK
Sonya Clark ’89 makes art out of human hair and hairlike silk threads. The Hair Craft Project began when she wondered: what could professional hairdressers do with the same materials?
42 Amherst Winter 2015
“
FIBER ART U Sonya Clark ’89 walked into a hair salon near her home in Richmond, Va., and presented her head as a canvas. She also presented an actual canvas. Eleven hairstyles later, she put on an exhibition that showcases African American hairdressing— and that garnered $120,000 in prize money. “Hairdressers are my heroes,” says Clark, who chairs the Department of Craft/Material Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She makes art out of human hair and hairlike silk threads.The Hair Craft Project began when she wondered: what could professional hairdressers do with the same materials? “I asked them to demonstrate their expertise in a familiar medium—hair—and translate it into a less familiar one, thread-on-canvas,” says Clark, who has long believed there’s a strong connection between hairstyling and textiles as art. Ultimately, 12 Richmond stylists braided and twisted 11 designs on her head, and created 11 other designs on canvas. “I became a walking gallery,” Clark says. Eventually, she took the project to an actual gallery, the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, where she exhibited each thread-on-canvas creation—“a permanent example of the craft,” she says—as well as photos of each hairstyle and stylist. Visitors at the exhibition voted on their favorite designs, as did two jurors: Lowery Stokes Sims, curator of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, and A’Lelia Bundles, author and great-granddaughter of famous black hairstylist and civil rights activist Madam C.J. Hairdressers Walker. (Both the jurors and help people the visitors chose the same negotiate their winners: second row, fourth from left, by Jamilah Williams; own sense of and fourth row, far left, by Kabeauty.” mala Bhagat.) The premise of the show— hairdressing as a textile art form—is not new. “Europeans were doing this in the Victorian era, and many African and Indian art forms use human hair,” says Clark. Hair Craft developed in part from her personal experience: “I grew up in Washington, D.C., across the street from the home of the ambassador of Benin,” whose daughters “would do my hair in elaborate, sculptural hairstyles.” For Hair Craft, Clark was one of two winners of the ArtPrize 2014 Juried Grand Prize, for which she received $100,000. She also won its $20,000 Juried Award for Best Two-Dimensional Work. And she is gratified to have drawn attention to hairstylists, who “help people negotiate their own sense of beauty and pride,” she says. “These women maintain and improvise off a longstanding African legacy.” Clark had no prior relationship with the 11 stylists. She’s been doing her own hair since college, when she cut it short and stopped having it relaxed. “Ever since then I’ve been low-maintenance,” she says. “So it was nice to be treated like a piece of artwork.”
LUC MELANSON
SHORT TAKES
Amherst professors, poets, musicians, mystery writers, journalists and doctors alike have plenty to offer you this winter. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Do some detective work in Death Hampton, by Walter Marks ’55 (Top Tier Publishing), or Face Value: A Rachel Gold Mystery, by Michael A. Kahn ’74 (Poisoned Pen Press). Set a mood with Jacob Cooper ’02’s album Silver Threads (Nonesuch Records), or listen as jazzman Darryl Harper ’90 tells you The Need’s Got to Be So Deep (Hipnotic Records). Then you might feel like Getting Back on Top: The Uncensored Guide to Sex, Dating and Relationships After Divorce, by Ian Oliver (Mausner) ’82 (True Love Publishing). But Dr. Aaron E. Carroll ’94 and Dr. Rachel C. Vreeman warn: Don’t Put That in There! And 69 Other Sex Myths Debunked (St. Martin’s Griffin). Paul Steinle ’61 and Sara Brown report on Practicing Journalism: The Power and Purpose of the Fourth Estate (Marion Street Press), while Jon Peirce ’67 presents Social Studies: Collected Essays, 1974–2013 (FriesenPress). Aaron Panofsky ’96 writes of Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Behavior Genetics (University of Chicago Press). Robert Yarchoan ’71 has edited a volume on Cancers in People with HIV and AIDS: Progress and Challenges (Springer). In addition to After Ten, poet Seth Frank ’55 explores American Dreams (New Eden Press). Sandra R. Levitsky ’93 describes Caring for Our Own: Why There is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (Oxford University Press). Inda Schaenen ’82 is Speaking of Fourth Grade: What Listening to Kids Tells Us About School in America (The New Press). And Ilan Stavans, the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, has teamed up with cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz for A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States (Basic Books).
Winter 2015 Amherst 43
AMHERST CREATES
UNKNOWABLE MAN It would be difficult to name an Amherst president who served during a more influential time—at the college and in the nation—than John William Ward. | BY RICHARD READ ’80
Anyone seeking to understand the College and the 1960s and ’70s would do well to read Townsend’s meticulously researched biography.
BIOGRAPHY U Eighteen men and one woman have led Amherst College since 1821. But it would be difficult to name a president who had more influence, or at least served during a more influential time, than John William Ward. For that reason, anyone seeking to understand the College and the 1960s and ’70s would do well to read Kim Townsend’s meticulously researched and vividly told biography of Ward. Townsend presents Ward as an idealist, and that he was— generating controversy by protesting the Vietnam War and by ushering in coeducation during his presidency from 1971 to 1979. Ward was also a pragmatist with political skills that took him from Amherst to lead a Massachusetts commission that exposed corruption and generated reforms. Yet Ward was ultimately a tragic figure, a man who exhausted his idealism and took his own life in 1985, at age 62. His suicide, in his room at the Harvard Club of New York, devastated those of us who thought we knew him, including friends who had dined with Ward that day. When I first learned of his death, a memory flashed through my mind. While handling tense campus race relations in 1979, Ward called me and the other Student editors into his office. One student expressed exasperation. He said he just felt like giving up. Ward pounced on him. “You never give up,” he declared. Then how could Ward—a former Marine, captain of his Boston Latin School football team, a born leader and, above all, a teacher—give up on himself? It’s a vexing question, all the more so because, as outgoing
AMHERST READS featured book: www.amherst.edu/magazine
and eloquent as Ward was, those closest to the master of the diversionary anecdote describe him as unknowable. “No one was close to Bill Ward,” Julian Moynahan, a colleague from his Princeton teaching days, says in the book. Such a character would defy the average biographer. But Townsend nails his subject. The author dug through letters and speeches, and interviewed former students, faculty colleagues, trustees, fellow commissioners, employees and news reporters. The result is a balanced and compelling portrait of the dapper, self-made man who favored unfiltered Lucky Strikes. The
only missing dimension is Ward’s family life as the father of three, although his wife, Barbara, doles out caustic remarks, often directed at her husband. Townsend deals with Ward’s death at the book’s beginning. The lingering mystery of the suicide partly drives the narrative, but the book offers much more. It traces Ward’s roots as the grandson of illiterate immigrants, his burning intellect and his passion for democracy, diversity and equality. It follows his rise in the emerging field of American studies as author of Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age. Ward held those around him, ROB MATTSON
JOHN WILLIAM WARD: AN AMERICAN IDEALIST By Kim Townsend, Class of 1959 Professor of English, Emeritus Amherst College
INTERVIEW
Richard Read ’80, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, covers higher education for The Oregonian. He got to know Ward while editor of The Student, and he worked for the state commission Ward headed.
Like Watching TV with Friends Brooke Bishop ’10 brought Shakespeare on the Quad to Amherst. Then she recreated it in L.A. | BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER
How did you develop this emotion-focused approach? I’ve always been interested in why people think and feel the way they do. When I got to Amherst I was interested in psychology and neuroscience; I was pre-med for a couple of years. My freshman seminar was “Performance” with Suzanne Dougan. I think it was my third choice; I was disappointed! But it was awesome, and here I am.
JASON COVIELLO
and himself above all, to high standards in the service of society. As an Amherst professor in 1964, he taught a course on Vietnam, becoming opposed to U.S. policy. Townsend writes that, by 1972, giant planes flew over Amherst from Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, carrying military equipment to Southeast Asia. That May, Ward told a Johnson Chapel crowd that he had hoped not to lose his sense of self while leading the college. He said he would—not as Amherst’s president, but “for myself ”—commit civil disobedience. Later he claimed to be “flabbergasted” by the headlines reporting his arrest for joining a sit-in at Westover. Ward’s protest endeared him to students but alienated prominent alumni. Strained alumni relations almost certainly led Ward to take a more cautious position on admitting women than widely assumed. Townsend presents an inside view of Amherst’s coeducation debate. Among the nuggets: trustees voted on coeducation in 1974 at New York’s Century Club, which excluded women. The three women on the advisory committee rode a service elevator to the meeting. Ward’s high hopes for Amherst foundered in acrimony over faculty compensation. Townsend describes Ward’s subsequent unpaid work on the state commission as the American idealist’s finest hour. But Boston’s aristocracy blackballed Ward the reformer, forcing him into exile in New York, where he headed a prestigious council. Ward fell into a depression so private that, as his marriage unraveled and his career lost meaning, his oldest friends didn’t see it. The unknowable man died alone. But his ideals live on, in the college, in politics and in the lives of so many he influenced and taught.
is producer and director of a new feature film adaptation of Macbeth, “a contemporary retelling of the play from Lady Macbeth’s perspective,” she says. A double-major in theater and women’s and gender studies, Bishop lives in Los Angeles, where she founded The City Shakespeare Company (CityShakes.org) with Allison Volk. Bishop was also the Shakespeare consultant on a 2014 short film version of Othello, part of the Kenneth Branagh-founded Shakespeare Film Festival. (Michelle Lukiman ’11 played Desdemona.) Bishop spoke to Amherst magazine while in postproduction on the Macbeth film, which is due for release in April.
BROOKE BISHOP ’10
What is a Shakespeare consultant? I was there to help the actors understand what they were saying and why. A lot of productions assume Shakespeare is incomprehensible to modern audiences and kind of leave it at that, but I help the actors use emotional specificity to find clarity: Why do these characters say these things to each other? Why do they feel the way they do?
You co-founded Shakespeare on the Quad at Amherst, and your senior thesis was a ’90s teen comedy version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Why did you do these productions? At Amherst I had the impression that theater is a weird, marginalized, artsy subculture. I wanted it to feel more like watching TV with your friends. I couldn’t figure out how to get students to come to the theater, so I thought we could bring the theater to them. People were sitting on the Quad anyway. Then you set out to recreate Shakespeare on the Quad in L.A. When I moved out here I noticed that L.A. was isolating. How do we get people in the same space? What is an L.A. thing that people are doing anyway, and can we bring the theater to them? The first show CityShakes did was a free production of The Taming of the Shrew concurrent with an art opening, in a gallery. Why tell Macbeth from a new perspective, first on stage, with CityShakes, and now in film? Most approaches to Macbeth felt judgmental and unrelatable to me. They paint the Macbeths as evil and that lets me off the hook as a viewer. If I learned anything at Amherst, it’s to fight for compassion. Allison and I were compelled to figure out what it would take for real, sympathetic people to kill King Duncan. By taking Lady Macbeth’s perspective, we’re seeing why the murder happens. We then started brainstorming about a screenplay set in the modern world. We wanted to tell this story with as much immediacy and relevance as possible. k Winter 2015 Amherst 45
AMHERST MADE
MOB
MENTALITY
A flash mob pillow fight in 2011 in Rome
FOR YEARS HE WAS “Bill”—no last name—who cryptically told reporters he worked “in the culture industry.” In May 2003, Bill Wasik ’96 wrote an anonymous email inviting people to “take part in MOB, the project that creates an inexplicable mob of people in New York City for ten minutes or less.” He forwarded it to friends and acquaintances and asked
112 Amherst Winter 2015
them to send it to others. The email said to gather at Claire’s Accessories near Astor Place at a precise time, but police blocked the entrance. His second mob, two weeks later, was a success: 200 people came to a Macy’s rug department and told salespeople they all lived together in a converted warehouse and were looking for a “love rug.” A trend was born. Blogger Sean Savage coined the term “flash mob,” and as CNN reported in August 2003,
“The craze for ‘flash mobs’—where jokers gather en masse at a moment’s notice, perform an inane activity and then disperse quickly—is spreading across Europe.” A New York Times headline announced, “Guess Some People Don’t Have Anything Better to Do.” Today there are 6.9 million flash mob videos on YouTube. People propose marriage by flash mob. They perform flash mob concerts. In 2014 the Huffington Post re-
ported on “The First Ever Polygamist Flash Mob!” Wasik organized eight mobs, all in 2003. In 2006 he shed his anonymity in an 11-page article for Harper’s, where he was an editor. (He is now deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine.) “Not only was the flash mob a vacuous fad,” he wrote; “it was, in its very form (pointless aggregation and then dispersal), intended as a metaphor for the hollow hipster culture that spawned it.” E.G.B.
ISTOCK
Bill Wasik ’96 invented the flash mob.
Alumni and Parent Programs SPRING SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
AMHERST READS
FEBRUARY 9-13
M AY 2 7 - 3 1
Love My Alumni Week on Campus
Reunion
SELECTIONS OF THE MONTH
Students show their appreciation for alumni donors and volunteers.
MARCH The Opposite of Spoiled BY RON LIEBER ’93
APRIL Hungry for France: Adventures for the Cook & Food Lover BY ALEXANDER LOBRANO ’77
M AY
APRIL 10-12
Black Alumni Weekend
amherst.edu/go/reunion
Renew friendships, attend “mini classes” with faculty, and network with students. Historian and commentator Blair L.M. Kelley will deliver the keynote, and Hermenia Gardner, who founded the Bi-Semester Worship Services over 20 years ago, will be honored.
SUMMER 2015
amherst.edu/alumni/baw
The Gentleman Bat BY ABRAHAM SCHROEDER ’01
The Partisan Divide
Join us in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Amherst College Glee Club. Offerings include music faculty lectures and the option to sing with the Choral Society.
BY TOM DAVIS ’71
amherst.edu/alumni/learn/amherst_today
John William Ward: An American Idealist BY PROFESSOR KIM TOWNSEND
APRIL 11-18
Music @ Amherst Today
JUNE
J U LY
Reunion 2015 will offer over 100 inspiring talks, tours and events, lively entertainment, and the camaraderie of classmates. A complete schedule is available online.
A P R I L 1 5 – M AY 1 8
Alumni Trustee Election amherst.edu/alumni/election M AY 2 4
Amherst College’s 194th Commencement
Time, Money, and the Environment: A Geologist’s Perspective on “Fracking” Anna Martini, Professor of Geology
This four-week Mini Online Class (MOC) is open to members of the Amherst community and is a pilot program of the Dean of the Faculty’s Office. More information and registration is available online. amherst.edu/alumni/moc
amherstwellmixed.wordpress.com
Well Mixed – A biweekly blog featuring guest posts from Amherst writers, artists, scholars, professionals, teachers, parents, students, and everyone in between. Interested in contributing? Contact Carly Nartowicz at cnartowicz@amherst.edu.
Visit amherst.edu/alumni for upcoming Virtual Lectures, regional events, and other programs.
AMHERST PO Box 5000 Amherst, MA 01002
“HAIRDRESSERS are my heroes.”
Sonya Clark ’89, page 42
“Fate has me
STILL STANDING.” George Bria ’38, page 14
“The addition of gender OPENED UP PRACTICALLY EVERY KNOWN PSYCHOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE TO QUESTION.” Professor Rose Olver, page 24
“MOST APPROACHES TO MACBETH FELT JUDGMENTAL AND
UNRELATABLE TO ME.” Brooke Bishop ’10, page 45