Issue 21

VOLUME CLI, ISSUE 21

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2022

amherststudent.com

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Community Celebrates Fifth Annual Black Art Matters Festival Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Managing Arts and Living Editor

Photo courtesy of Alex Brandfonbrener ’23

Student artists were highlighted at the fifth annual Black Art Matters Festival on March 24. Members of DASAC performed at the end of the festival for a crowd of fellow students in the Powerhouse.

Language Assistants Petition for Compensation Theo Hamilton ’23 and YeeLynn Lee ’23 Managing Editor and Editor-in-Chief This morning, three Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTA) for the Spanish Department sent a petition to the administration requesting compensation for room and board for the 2020-2021 academic year, a part of the Fulbright grant they did not receive that year when they worked and studied remotely due to the pandemic. The petition had been circulating among students for several days, garnering over 400 signatures.

FLTAs are Fulbright grantees who serve as language assistants

OPINION

at the college, holding discussion sections and extracurricular events for students, in addition to taking a half course load themselves. For their year-long term, FLTAs are typically compensated with half tuition, room and board, and a cash stipend, which equaled $6,900 in the 2020-2021 academic year.

In the petition, the authors — Johann Kevin Mafla Orjuela, Emilia Farias Ferreira, and Carlos Pech Guzmán — state that after signing their Terms of Appointment (ToA) for the 2020-2021 academic year, they were informed by the college that they would not be able to come to campus in the Fall 2020 semester. Although their ToAs stipulated that they

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Those Dam Beavers: Dustin Copeland '25 ventures off campus and commends nature's most underrated architect.

receive a financial award covering room and board, as well as daily living expenses, the $15,910 for room and board was subsequently left out of their compensation, the petition explains.

“We were surprised that room and board were omitted from the total grant since the cash stipend was not enough to cover living expenses in our countries,” the petition continues. “This resulted in a financial burden because we had to leave our home jobs and decline any job opportunities in order to continue with the FLTA program.”

The petition notes that the FLTAs’ request for a greater stipend to cover such living expenses was denied by the administration —

ARTS & LIVING

with Provost and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein writing that the program is “actually very expensive” for the college — and that the FLTAs were not able to defer their grant because they had already signed their contracts with the Fulbright program. The college’s failure to cover living expenses “is a breach of contract,” the petition writes.

The authors ask that the college “do good on its financial obligations,” with Orjuela and Ferreira requesting the total sum of $15,910, and Guzmán requesting $7,955 since he had come to campus in Spring 2021 and thus been credited with the cost of room

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Breaking Thesis Boundaries: Madeline Lawson '25 walks through Alistair Edwards' '22 senior thesis, a radio play titled "Boundless."

SPORTS

On Thursday, March 24, students filled the Powerhouse for the fifth annual Black Art Matters Festival (BAM), a celebration of the visual art, poetry, dance, and music of the college’s Black community. The festival highlighted nine student artists, who shared their artistic backgrounds and inspirations in pre-recorded interviews. These clips were projected on a big screen for attendees to watch, interspersed with remarks from hosts Kiiren Jackson ’24 and Grace Nyanchoka ’24 and live performances by student artists.

The event was also live streamed.

Founded in 2018 by Zoe Akoto ’21, BAM was originally a small gathering of artists and their friends, hosted in one of the dorms on campus. Since then, the festival has expanded, and is now formally funded by the Mead Art Museum, the Multicultural Resource Center, the Black Student Union (BSU), and the Arts at Amherst Initiative.

This year’s festival was originally slated to be held in the Mead Art Museum, but was switched to the Powerhouse at the last minute due to structural issues in the Stearns Steeple, which sits right in front of the museum. As a result, the art pieces were physically absent, save for photos in the program video. The exhibition featuring the visual art pieces

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Athlete Spotlight: Hedi Skali '25 interviews captain of the swim team Marie Fagan '22 on her Amherst career and her plans after college.

News POLICE LOG

Fresh Faculty Stefan Bradley

March 15, 2022 – March 28, 2022

>>March 15, 2022 11:34 a.m., Greenway Lawn A detective responded to a well-being check of an individual laying on the ground near Greenway dorms. After contact was made it was determined the student did not need further assistance. >>March 20, 2022 4:43 a.m., Moore Dormitory/Barrett Hill Road A sergeant and detective responded to the area of Barrett Hill Road and Moore Dormitory after hearing what sounded like glass objects being smashed on the ground.

Amherst College Police Department (ACPD) searched the area with negative results. >>March 21, 2022 4:40 p.m., Amherst College Police Department A call was made to the emergency line (x2111) and then disconnected. Caller was unable to be identified because the phone number was blocked.

9:57 p.m., East Drive A detective conducted a motor vehicle stop. Driver was given a verbal warning for traveling through a posted stop sign. >>March 22, 2022 8:42 a.m., Greenway Dormitories The Grounds Department called in a parking complaint after finding an unregistered student vehicle parked in front of a dumpster. Student was contacted to move their vehicle.

1:39 p.m., Jenkins Hall Residential Life (ResLife) staff were notified about the presence of drugs and drug paraphernalia. ResLife staff responded to confiscate these items, which were then turned over to the Amherst College Police Department (ACPD). >>March 25, 2022 10:56 a.m., Keefe Campus Center A 911 hang-up was received. Amherst College Dispatch (AC Dispatch) was able to speak with the party who reported no issues and the call was accidental.

11:46 p.m., Powerhouse A 911 hang up call came into dispatch. A detective responded and did not find anyone in need of assistance. >>March 26, 2022 2:19 a.m., James Hall Caller admitted to accidentally hitting the emergency call button in the elevator.

No further assistance was needed. >>March 20, 2022 2:34 a.m., Exterior of Hitchcock Dormitory Police responded to a request to check an exterior area for an intoxicated person. No one was found in the area. >>March 28, 2022 5:31 p.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory A detective responded to a 911 hang up call from an elevator emergency phone.

Upon arrival, no one was occupying the elevator.

Departments of Black Studies and History

Stefan Bradley is a professor of Black studies and history, who also teaches courses in the education studies department. He received his B.A. from Gonzaga University, his M.A. from Washington State University at Pullman, and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri at Columbia.

—Leo Kamin '25 Q: How did you become interested in the disciplines you now teach?

A: I guess I was exposed to what we call Black studies, to what we call Black history, very early. You know, my father … he didn’t go to college, but he was very well-read, and so we had books in his closet. I thought I was sneaking in to really see something, but these were books on Black history, Black literature, Black psychology, all of these various elements that come together to make Black studies. I got a chance to see those, looking at Jet Magazine and Ebony Magazine — these things piqued my interest early on.

But if I were being forthright, I don’t think I had really considered the possibility of studying — studying intently — Black history until I had a debate with a white student out at Gonzaga University. The debate was over affirmative action … I won’t say that I lost. But I didn’t win the debate. And part of the reason was, I wasn’t as acquainted with history as I needed to be. And so I made a promise to myself at that point, that I would never put myself in a position where I didn’t know the history of Black people, where I wasn’t acquainted with issues that affected the lived experiences of Black people in the past. I’m very competitive, so it hurt my feelings that I wasn’t able to win this debate.

At that point, I think I started reading more … for knowledge, and eventually for wisdom. So that was an early part of it, I think. I had to figure out what I was going to do with my life, too. Everybody changes their major. I started off as a business major, but when I couldn’t pass the qualifying math class, that changed

the trajectory of my life. I had to figure out what I was good at. And the only thing I was good at was being nosy and talking about other people’s business. And that’s precisely what history is.

Q: You’ve written two books. What were they about?

A: My most recent book, “Upending the Ivory Tower, Civil Rights, Black Power and the Ivy League,” deals with the arrival and experiences of African American students into the Ivy League, focusing mainly on the period between 1945 to 1975 or so.

It details some of the everyday experiences [of those students], but also the challenges with admissions, the challenges with retention, the challenges with living amongst white people, the challenges of Black students having to welcome themselves.

Not just Black students, but faculty and staff as well. So one of the major arguments of the book is that these Black students, faculty, and staff — who were relatively new to these very old schools — actually had to lead these schools towards the manifestation of their liberal missions, and [that] it took Black people to help the schools to live out the words that they claimed undergirded their institutions. And so, I made the argument that a minority of a minority was able to change these institutions that existed before the United States ever came to be known officially. I had a great time with that book. It was important to me, and it seemed to do well.

Before that, I had written a book called “Harlem vs. Columbia University, Black Student Power in the Late 1960s.” And that was dealing

with the ability of students to coalesce with working-class and poverty-class Black and brown people in a campaign against Columbia University, which was expanding into West Harlem and Morningside Heights in New York City. I was just fascinated with the idea that students would sacrifice their potential status — if they graduated from an Ivy League school, they would most assuredly go into the middle class or the upper middle class or the elite classes — so they sacrifice that, but they also potentially sacrifice their lives, because if they were kicked out of school, they would be eligible for the draft, and the Vietnam War was happening at the time. The issue was over the school’s desire to build a gymnasium in a park that mostly Black and brown people from West Harlem used. Building a private gymnasium in a public park was a local issue, but because it’s New York City, what happens in New York City has implications all over the United States and even the world. So, the protests against the Vietnam War and the protest against the university’s expansion into West Harlem came to a head, which eventually led to a student strike of six weeks. It was totally fire, the whole thing. I think about the people who were involved: Mark Rudd, who is a member of the Students for a Democratic Society; Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; and the Black Panther Party showed up.

There were community people who showed up. So to me, it was just so interesting. I loved every minute of

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The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

News

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ACPD Unmarks Vehicles, Prompting Student Concern Caelen McQuilkin ’24E and Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 Managing News Editor and Assistant News Editor Content warning: this article contains mention of police violence.

Over winter break, the Amherst College Police Department (ACPD) removed the labeling from three of its vehicles, making its five-vehicle fleet now entirely unmarked. While Chief of Police John Carter stated that unlabeling the vehicles was an attempt to reduce police presence and help students feel more comfortable on campus, students shared that this change makes them feel unsafe, and has left their desires for policing change unfulfilled.

ACPD had already been using two unmarked vehicles to complete administrative, non-patrol tasks, but has now unmarked its remaining three other vehicles, which are driven by sergeants and detectives and used for other officer duties.

The vehicles remain fully equipped with visual warning systems, medical supplies, and other emergency equipment.

Chief of Police John Carter said that the decision was rooted in “various listening sessions over the past two years [where] community members have spoken about policing on campus and indicated that the visual presence was unwelcome.”

The unmarked vehicles are “intended to be less intrusive to individual people’s sense of safety,” said Carter, and are part of the changes to reform campus policing. “There is less of a focus on preventive patrol, which is the general function of marked cars and uniformed police. For that reason, we assumed that the lesser visibility of police decals would be a welcome change,” he said.

The assumption that the unmarking would be a welcome change was largely countered by student reactions to the announcement.

Around a week ago, a poster reading “All ACPD Cars Are Now Unmarked. Do You Feel Safe Yet?” was hung in the foyer of Valentine

Dining Hall. The poster garnered the concern of students in the campus GroupMe AmherstBussin and the Association of Amherst Students (AAS).

In interviews with The Student, many students expressed that it is a right to be able to distinguish between a civilian and a police car.

“I and many people I have talked to would prefer that the cars are marked — this would make us feel safer as we would be able to clearly tell when a police car is near us,” said Nii-Ayi Aryeetey ’23. “Unmarked cars are not a positive adjustment to how safety services are delivered to the college community.

If the function of ACPD is solely to keep students safe, there is no need for unmarked cars, as the function of unmarked cars is so that the cars are able to blend in more easily with civilian cars.”

“It makes me feel uncomfortable,” echoed Edmund Kennedy ’23E. “I don’t like the idea of people hiding in plain sight in order to provide ‘protection.’ I don’t think I am alone in thinking this makes a ton of students feel uncomfortable.”

Ella Rose ’23 similarly reflected that “now students are going to be on edge all the time, because they don’t know where people with guns could be.”

Talia Ward ’23 noted that she and other students had expressed concern with the two originally unmarked vehicles during the Fall 2020 semester. “Last year at a town hall, something we brought up around policing was the unnecessary presence of unmarked police vehicles,” she said. “We were asking the question, ‘What is the purpose of an unmarked car?’”

Student A, who preferred to remain anonymous for their personal safety, was disturbed about the lack of communication around the decision. “To me, going from a marked car to an unmarked car without an email, without anything, that feels like a violation of trust,” they said. “I remember the sinister feeling in my stomach [when I first saw an unmarked car], and I remember calling my father, I was like, ‘Can you believe that we have an unmarked cop car at my tiny college?’”

Photo courtesy of Corri Hickson '25

In a move many students have critiziced, all ACPD vehicles are now unmarked. License plates marked "ACPD" remain.

Some ACPD officers were also critical of the decision to unmark the vehicles.

“The officers, we didn’t really like that decision,” said Senior Detective Cara Sullivan, adding: “We didn’t really have much say.”

Sullivan reported being concerned about students not knowing that they are being approached by a police officer. “As the officers, we’re never trying to hide,” she said.

“If you are approaching somebody, they [should] know that it’s an officer coming.” She also worried that students would think that ACPD officers were “spying on them.”

In addition, Sullivan says, the unmarking “is taking away that visibility, because it is an emergency vehicle.” She cited past instances where she and other officers had been flagged down in their marked cruisers by people looking for help on and around campus.

Once, she said, “I was just slightly off campus at one of our buildings down by Pratt Field, and someone was riding towards me on a bike, and they came into the driveway, and they were like, ‘Hey, I think some girl’s getting assaulted in that vehicle, up by the football field.’ And so then I pulled out of there and was able to go and deal with that situation. But if I was just sitting there in a white car, they probably just would have rode …

I don’t think they would have seen me.”

Kennedy similarly questioned the utility of unmarked vehicles. “I question the function of ACPD,” he said. “If the goal is to use them as a means of keeping the campus safe, how can they do so without being able to be clearly identified?”

The shift to unmarked vehicles comes in the larger context of broader tensions surrounding the purpose and place of policing at Amherst. While Carter describes the decision as a “visibility” issue, years of student activism — including calls to disarm ACPD in the Reclaim Amherst campaign, and abolish ACPD in last spring’s Black Minds Matter walk out — point to the demand to fundamentally alter the presence and role of police on campus, and not just their level of visibility.

Student A stated that tangible changes in line with these demands would be more effective than changes like unmarking vehicles. “I have a history of having a gun pointed at me by cops,” they said. “As a student, especially from a non-traditional background compared to a lot of my peers, I don’t feel comfortable seeing a constant armed presence on campus.”

On the other hand, Sullivan expressed that she sees her role as best supported by a close relationship

with students. She described historic dynamics between students and police in which continued casual contact and involvement in both the smaller and bigger issues on campus contributed to building trust and relationships with students. “I feel like it’s scary now for them if they do see an officer,” Sullivan said, “because they’re not seeing us. It’s understandable.”

Aryeetey testified that he does not see conversations or relationship building as an end-goal. “My problem with ACPD is not that I see their cars and officers as ‘a barrier to conversation and relationship-building.’ It is that all the responsibilities that ACPD has on campus could be assumed by trained professionals who are not police officers,” he said.

His statement echoes statements from the AAS’ call to disarm ACPD last April. “Like s’mores nights or ‘Coffee with Cops’ programming, these public relations stunts misidentify the problem of policing as a lack of trust,” it reads.

“A lack of trust wrongly assumes that the concern lies in relationships. But relationships with police do not prevent them from killing Black people.”

Rose also reflected on visibility shifts like this. “One thing that I

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The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

News

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FLTAs Seek Recognition for Fulbright Scholars at the College Continued from page 1 and board that semester.

In an interview with The Student, Orjuela, Ferreira, and Guzmán explained that the impetus for writing the petition came from seeing a recent Instagram post from the college that expressed pride in being named once again as a top producer of Fulbright scholars this year. Upon seeing the post, Orjuela recalled, “we just felt like, ‘You’re taking pride in the Fulbright program, but you’re not actually honoring the policies of the Fulbright program?’”

“Amherst’s pride in its involvement with the Fulbright program should not just center around its production of Fulbright

Awardees,” the three write in the petition. “Rather, it should also include its pride in having a thriving program for FLTA’s to visit its campus when they are paid what they are deserved.”

Both in the petition and in the interview, the three FLTAs detailed financial challenges that the reduced compensation last year had brought. Ferreira noted that she was living with her boyfriend in Montevideo, Uruguay, at the time and had to rely a bit on him, especially because “the capital city is just much more expensive than other cities.”

She added that “I used to help my family financially, so [no longer being able to do that] was really difficult.” Orjuela and Guz-

mán — who were located in Madrid, Spain, and Yucatán, Mexico, respectively — similarly noted that they were unable to contribute as much to their families while living at home, since their income was now so much lower than what they had been making at their jobs before becoming FLTAs, which they had had to quit due to the schedule and time commitment of the program.

Orjuela emphasized, however, that the effects of the reduced compensation have no bearing on whether they should receive the compensation. “Even if we had, let’s say, the wealth of this college,” he said, “that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t get paid.”

“It doesn’t matter if we were

struggling or not,” echoed Ferreira. “That was part of the deal. And they didn’t commit to that.”

Beyond the hope that the college will honor their requests for compensation, the three FLTAs also expressed wanting the petition to draw the community’s attention to their experiences, in terms of not just the financial challenges during the pandemic, but also the lack of support they feel at the college in occupying a “gray zone,” as Ferreira put it, between full-time students and staff.

“Our expectations are that people really recognize the role that we have and the amount of effort we put into getting the [Fulbright] scholarship,” she said, noting that universities in her

home country make much more of an effort to integrate the Fulbright scholars they receive than she has seen in her own experience here.

Although the challenges in the FLTAs’ experience cannot all be easily solved, Ferreira expressed gratitude for the support that the community has already shown them. “We’re very grateful for everyone who signed the petition,” she said. “It was really nice to feel like the whole community was interested in getting to know what was happening.”

Note: The Student will continue to report on this story as it develops, including the administration’s response to the petition.

Town Hall Overviews Updates to Climate Action Plan Tana Delalio ’24 Managing News Editor On March 21, the college held a virtual town hall to discuss its most recent updates to the Climate Action Plan (CAP). Executive Director of Planning, Design, and Construction Tom Davies; Director of Sustainability Wes Dripps; and Chief of Campus Operations Jim Brassord led the presentation and Q&A. The meeting covered the college’s commitment to pursuing climate action by overhauling its entire campus energy system to move to a low-carbon and eventually carbon-neutral system.

The CAP, which the Amherst Climate Action Task Force began meeting in 2015 to formulate, has the overarching goal of having a meaningful and lasting impact on greenhouse gas reduction and management at the college. The CAP aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

The town hall highlighted the college’s participation in a new solar energy facility in Farmington, Maine, through the New England College Renewable Partnership, which includes Amherst, Bowdoin, Hampshire, Smith, and Williams Colleges, and enables the colleges to collectively purchase

zero-carbon electricity. Administrators in attendance also discussed the planned modernization of the college’s heating and cooling infrastructure. from steam-based fossil fuels to low-carbon ground-source heat pumps. Additionally, they elaborated on the technical and financial feasibility of the project in relation to the pandemic.

Chief of Campus Operations Jim Brassord announced in the meeting that the new solar energy facility now provides roughly 50 percent of electricity consumed on campus, which has reduced the college’s carbon footprint by about 17 percent. He explained that Amherst does not receive physical electricity from the Farmington solar facility. Instead, the partnership enables Amherst and the other colleges to use a financial instrument called a virtual purchase price agreement (VPPA), which provides them with renewable energy credits (REC) from the facility at a pre-agreed fixed price. The facility will sell the energy produced from its solar panels at wholesale market price at the time of the energy’s generation. If the market price is greater than the fixed VPPA price, then the college will receive the settlement difference.

If the market price is less than the

fixed VPPA price, then the college pays the solar facility to make up the difference. “[Purchasing electricity from the solar facility] is carbon-neutral because we are able to retire the renewable energy credits that are generated from [the VPPA],” Brassord explained that, In other words, by supplying money to the Farmington facility, the college offsets the purchased electricity from its actual provider, Eversource Energy, which composes half of its electricity use.

He also noted that partnering with other institutions to form a VPPA was the most cost-effective way Amherst could find to obtain green energy on campus. “It’s scale economy, and that is to say if we went to the market, and it is a complex market that involves developers and permitting and regulations, and state agencies, … as an independent, with only our demand at play, it would really tilt the financial balance on it,” said Brassord.

“By combining our demands with the other institutions, we really increase it to a utility scale.”

The remaining 50 percent of Amherst’s electricity, Brassord added, is derived from the combined heat and power plant on campus.

“We will eventually wean off and

divorce ourselves from that combined heat and power plant and we will derive all of our electricity either through PPAs or on-site generation,” he said.

In addition to a transition to carbon-neutral electricity, the CAP includes switching Amherst’s steam-powered, fossil-fuel-based heating system to a ground-source and air-source heat pump system.

Brassord noted that the new system is three to six times as efficient as the college’s boilers or chillers, which compose the college’s current heating system.

“There’s a range of options for how you generate that heat [using the new system], which gets us away from … fossil fuels; basically, we’re combining heating and cooling [so that] everything goes through the same system, and so you can move heat from where it’s not wanted to where it is wanted,” Brassord said.

In an interview with The Student, Director of Sustainability Wes Dripps said that the college plans to break ground on the new heating system in the spring of 2023. He noted that the college initially planned to break ground this spring, but that the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic and higher than anticipated costs led to

a one-year pause.

The planned changes to the heating system and the solar facility should eliminate the college’s direct emissions from its processes and its indirect emissions from purchased energy, respectively.

However, Dripps noted that under the proposed plan, the college will still have some minor residual emissions because it will rely on its reserve fossil fuel system as a backup system to help meet peak energy demand for a few days a year.

The college will consider and fund a range of means to offset any residual emissions so that it can meet its carbon neutrality goal.

Dripps said that the college will be very intentional about its decisions on how to make those offsets, and will “engage the campus stakeholders to help us navigate that space.”

He added that despite these offsets, the college is still prioritizing making tangible infrastructural changes to achieve carbon neutrality. Dripps noted, “I’m not aware of a single institution in higher ed that’s been able to actually reach carbon neutrality with no offset.”

Senior Lecturer in Biology and Environmental Studies Rachel Levin told The Student that

Continued on page 7

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

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Roxane Gay Brings Wisdom and Humor to Amherst Caelen McQuilkin ’24E Managing News Editor Author and cultural critic Roxane Gay brought reactions ranging from roars of laughter to somber and thoughtful snaps of agreement this past Friday, March 25, when the Women’s and Gender Center (WGC) hosted her for a keynote conversation in Johnson Chapel.

In her talk, Gay spoke about a wide range of topics, including writing about personal trauma, navigating majority-white spaces, and the benefits and drawbacks of social media and the Internet.

Gay is celebrated for her work on modern feminism, as exemplified by her collection of essays, “Bad Feminist.” She is also the author of the bestselling memoir “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body,” and the first Black woman to write for Marvel Comics. Gay’s keynote address capped off the WGC’s Women’s History Month programming, which has included a number of events designed to engage the college community in thinking about gender marginalization and empowerment.

Always ready to crack a joke, Gay opened the talk by commenting on her gratefulness for the warm weather, before noting that “I saw an L.L. Bean today! I haven’t seen that since high school … Sure enough, I see that L.L. Bean has vomited all over this campus.”

The talk started with Gay reading three of her essays aloud, but quickly transitioned to a lengthy Q&A session with students, which Gay prefaced by saying that “I love conversation with students, rather than talking at you for an hour, which would be excruciating, mostly for me, but maybe also for you.”

The first essay Gay shared was a pages-long “food log” she and her wife had to keep for their puppy, Maximus Toretto Blueberry, who was struggling with eating problems.

The final entries of the log detailed Max’s continued love of eating cat litter even after Gay and her wife tried deterring him by putting Sriracha sauce over the litter. When one student asked Gay why she chose to share that essay, she simply responded, “Because it’s funny.”

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Gay read her essays aloud to students and faculty at the WGC's keynote address.

The next essay that Gay read aloud was “Dave Chappelle’s Brittle Ego,” a guest piece published in the New York Times in October 2021.

The essay discusses the difficulty of challenging the messages conveyed in comedic pieces such as Chappelle’s “The Closer.” “All criticism is forestalled with this setup, in which when you object to anything a comedian says, you’re the problem,” Gay read.

Finally, Gay read “The Pleasure of Clapping Back,” which was published in Gay Mag in June 2019. In this essay, Gay shared her thoughts on “engaging with trolls and having nemeses,” whom, in a tone both humorous and somewhat earnest, Gay defines as “people who have slighted me in ways both real and imagined who are now mortal adversaries I must defeat.”

While “one nemesis is Rachel Maddow because my wife loves to watch The Rachel Maddow Show and I don’t believe in cable news and she thinks Maddow is cute,” Gay read, she believes that “a nemesis can give you purpose, can hone your ambition. What I am saying is that having a nemesis is motivational.”

The essay also covers some of what it means for writers and thinkers to have an online presence, where, according to Gay, “the further you are from being a heterosexual white, middle-class able-bodied man, the higher the price you pay. You have

to decide if you are willing to pay that price, if you are able to pay that price.”

The Q&A segment opened with a question from Director of the WGC Hayley Nicholas, who asked Gay about a book that grounds her. “My favorite book is a book that does that, and it is ‘The Age of Innocence’

by Edith Wharton,” Gay said. “What I love about that book is that it’s so

“ I believe that every

young person that walks into my classroom is a great writer. Maybe they don't know it yet, maybe they've been told otherwise, and it's my job to unpack ... their writing ability and help them reach it to the best of their ability — Roxane Gay

”

funny, and it’s not ever billed as such.

But it’s this really trenchant examination of privilege and wealth and the sacrifices that the wealthy make to hold onto their positions. Edith Wharton is really good at skewering

the upper classes and their choices.”

A student in the audience asked Gay about about her thoughts on writing about and sharing trauma, a topic that she currently teaches about in a class called “Writing Trauma” at Occidental College. Gay shared that the class is “a way of asking, ‘What should guide us in writing trauma?’

Because a lot of the time people write about trauma as if trauma is inherently interesting, and that that’s the whole of a story. And that’s not the case, actually.”

“I think that too many writers exploit themselves in ways that are unnecessary and probably really traumatic,” Gay continued. “I wanted to give students a set of guidelines for how [to] write trauma without retraumatizing myself, without traumatizing the reader.”

Answering a later question on her philosophy of teaching, Gay said that “I believe that every young person that walks into my classroom is a great writer. Maybe they don’t know it yet, maybe they’ve been told otherwise, and it’s my job to unpack … their writing ability and help them reach it to the best of their ability.”

Another student asked about what keeps Gay’s love for longform prose alive in an online era of 280-character limits and snappy captions. “I love long-form prose,” Gay responded. “That’s where you can really sit down and sink into your ideas and demonstrate the breadth

of your knowledge, instead of those zingy soundbites.”

“With long-form prose, you can explain yourself more, and justify yourself more,” she said. She used the example of a tweet she had made earlier that day, which relayed that she had seen a “Blue Lives Matter” flag while driving into Amherst.

Gay noted that the tweet garnered responses from Massachusetts residents attempting to defend the liberal credentials of their state.

“What people were engaging with was not the fact that ‘Oh, maybe people are going to see that flag and feel unsafe in this community,’” she said.

“What they thought was ‘I’m not racist, what are you trying to say, I shop at the local co-op.’ That’s why it’s not going to be the place where productive conversations happen. In the long-form place, I could explain sort of what that means to see that kind of a flag flying, and think, ‘What do the Black people who live here think about that?’”

Later in the Q&A, a student asked for Gay’s thoughts on heterosexual marriage, to which she laughed and replied: “Shoutout to all the soldiers out there willing to take that on. I think that any woman who can tolerate marrying a man is a hero.”

Taking a more serious tone, Gay then reflected that she “wish[ed] that the power of balance in the heterosexual marraige was more equal … [that there were] more societal protection for women who choose to stay home to raise their children, so that if those marriages end, they will have protections and don’t have to start over again, oftentimes in poverty.” The final question of the night was from another student in the audience, who asked about “how you deal with being in conversation or community with well-intentioned white folks who don’t always get it … especially when you’re the only Black woman in the space.”

“That’s a good question,” Gay said.

“I try to always acknowledge and see the good intentions, but I don’t allow good intentions to serve as a free pass. Good intentions aren’t enough … if I ignore your good intentions, your feelings will be hurt, but if you ignore my reality, I could lose my life.”

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Stefan Bradley Speaks on Ferguson, History, and Amherst Continued from page 2 researching and writing that.

Q: What research projects are you working on now?

A: I would like to do a piece on the uprisings that occurred in Ferguson, [Missouri]. I was there at the time when the uprisings occurred, and I think they deserve some scholarly treatment for sure. So I’ll be looking into that. Also, I’m interested in the connections between historically Black colleges and universities and the Ivy League. There’s a connection that has been in place for a good while. Some of the early trustees of HBCUs were men who had attended and graduated from Ivy League institutions, and there had been exchange programs in the past. But also the connection is interesting in the sense that some people who graduate from HBCUs go on to do well at Ivy League institutions and then go back to HBCUs. I think about people like Ruth Simmons, who was at one point connected with Smith College.

She graduated from an HBCU and then went on to do her degrees at Ivy League institutions, went on to be a president of an Ivy League institution, and then went back to be a president of an HBCU. So to me, that kind of a migration back and forth between the Ivy League and HBCUs is interesting.

Q: As you mentioned earlier, you taught at St. Louis University during the protests that erupted in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown. You and many of your students were involved in the early days of the protests. As a scholar of Black student activism, how did experiencing it first-hand affect your approach as an academic?

A: I think for me — I’ve mentioned this in other spaces — I’ve always been somebody interested in the rights of others, I’ve always been somebody who believed in justice.

But I’ve never been somebody to, you know, show up on the street pumping my fist, and that sort of thing. That’s never been the way that I approached things. However, when Michael Brown was shot dead, when Darren Wilson shot Michael

Brown dead, when his body was laid out for four and a half hours, I had students texting me and calling me telling me that this had happened.

And then later on that night, I heard from other students who had been tear gassed. One of my students had been pelted with rubber bullets and had been pepper sprayed. I was very scared for my students, because these are the students, literally, that I had in classes where I taught about the Black Freedom Movement, where I taught about civil rights and Black power and all of these various movements. I was very frightened for my students, and I told them, “I don’t want you to go out anymore.” But they, at that point, were like, “We have to go out because Michael Brown is our age, and this could happen to any one of us.” So after [them] not listening to me, I decided that maybe I should listen to them. And so, I’m not a day one Ferguson person; maybe I’m day two, day three. But I showed up to be with my students and we stayed out there for over a year.

For me, it changed so much, in the sense that things became very real. This is something that I learned as a scholar, that I can’t quite tell a story unless I feel the fire of a burning building. And I did feel the fire burning buildings and burning cars.

You can’t quite explain the chaos of everything until you’ve seen armored personnel, vehicles chasing crowds of people. So, to me, this was instructive. It was also instructive in the sense that you get to really see how power is distributed, and how people can take advantage of power and momentum. You get to see what happens when you push typically powerless people too far. I wrote about this before. And I think I did a good job, but I think it’s helped me immensely to understand what it means to come to the end of one’s proverbial rope. One, at that point, has to figure out how to survive and what to do. And rebellion was one of these things. I hate that it had to happen this way. But people had to react, people had to rebel. And I, as somebody who was there, learned a lot from the people. I learned a lot about politics and policy really, really quickly. All of the stuff they were supposed to learn in civics. All that

stuff became important when we were sitting in city council meetings, when I was talking to sheriffs, to police chiefs, to elected officials. This experience was one that I’ll never forget. But also one that will inform the way that I approach history, always.

Q: Why did you decide to come to Amherst?

A: I had no [previous] intention of coming to Amherst College. I was doing fine looking at palm trees and Teslas. Life was good on the West coast. But I got to speaking to some people from Amherst College — I had the wonderful opportunity to speak with students at an event that was run through the educational studies program. I was just so impressed with the students and how bright they were, how incisive they were. I thought, “Wow, they are sharp, sharp as a stick over there at Amherst College.” And so I started talking to people later on about the potentiality of coming to work at Amherst College. And I was looking at the temperature at the time, and I said, “There’s no possible way that I’m going out to Massachusetts.” But we kept talking about things. And I started to learn about the rigor of the education at Amherst College, and the willingness of students to dig in a certain kind of way. For me, and I speak for myself personally, I’ve never needed to have an extensive relationship with a graduate student program. I’ve cared mostly about undergraduate education and developing young people to be better people. And so that’s always been important to me. That’s the one thing that everybody at Amherst College values, is this devotion to developing undergrads. And, to me, this was an exciting opportunity. I liked the idea that the people that took your class weren’t taking your class because it was some kind of core requirement, but because people really wanted to take your class. I liked the idea that I didn’t scare anybody with the number of books on the syllabus, or if I did scare somebody, they weren’t scared to try to do it. I liked that. I liked the fact that the colleagues here were the brightest in their fields, that I was reading their work. Even when

I was at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, I was reading the works of people from Amherst College. And so, to have the opportunity to come here was a big deal.

But the clincher, as far as I’m concerned, is the fact that one of my all-time heroes, Charles Hamilton Houston, was an alumnus of Amherst College, that Charles Drew was an alumnus, that William Hastie was an alumnus of Amherst College.

These are people that I read about that were inspirations to me. And so I thought to myself, “I guess I could do well at a place where Charles Hamilton Houston was, where Charles Drew was, and see what I could do for undergraduates there, and see how I could develop myself.”

Q: What would you recommend to students who want to know more about Black history?

A: I studied students from the 1960s.

And one of the most admirable qualities about many of those students is their ability to read about systems.

The books that they were reading were about systems of power. I think that’s the one thing that I’m hoping for students today. I know reading is tough. But if students could continue to read about the systems that either help or hinder the experience of African Americans or Black people in general, worldwide, I think that would be essential. I wish students would study the Garvey movement.

I wish students would study the Pan-African movement. I wish students would dig into some of these movements that would get a lot of books banned in certain states right now. So I’m thinking: study Black leftists. For that matter, study Black conservatives too. But I want people to be able to see Black as as diverse as anything else. And I think that’s one of the things that doesn’t happen often is, we tend to see Black as kind of a monolith. And so for students, I want them to be able to see Black as something that is diverse unto itself.

There are various class aspects that I would love students to dig into.

That’s the economic and socio-economic class aspects that I would want them to dig into. But also, I would want people to understand that all Black history is not pain and

misery, that much of Black history is inspiration and joy and heroics, that Black people have done so well to contribute to this country and to the world. I would want young people to dig into that as well. So in short, what I’m saying is that I want students of Amherst College to go and spend time in the E 185 section of the library, and take a turn in learning about the Black experience so that people don’t have to learn history from Twitter alone, so that people don’t have to learn history from the ground, that there’s plenty of opportunity to expand our minds, so that we don’t have to exist the way that we’re existing right now.

I know this is a long answer, but I need to get this off my chest. We’re existing in a moment where ignorance is celebrated, and I find it to be incredibly dangerous that you have people that have troubles with students reading Toni Morrison.

I wondered what it would be like in the Dark Ages, and I’m starting to understand. I wondered what it would have been like in a time when people were banning and burning books, and now I understand. I understand why it was dangerous back then. We’re in a moment where you can say whatever you want, and you don’t have to prove anything, you don’t need any evidence for it. That’s not what Amherst College students should be. And they should try with all their might to confront and, moreover, to defeat these kinds of sensibilities. So I guess, the long answer cut down to the short is, I want people to understand the systems that affect the lives of the most marginalized people. That’s, in my mind, a duty and a responsibility and an obligation for those who are the most privileged. And let’s be clear about this: those who get a chance at an institution like Amherst College have a certain kind of privilege. I’m not saying everybody is rich, I’m not saying everybody is wealthy or has a whole bunch of entitlement. I’m saying that we have a privilege here that most people in the world don’t have. With that privilege, let’s see to our obligations and to our duties of being people who change the world for the better. And we can do that by way of study.

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After ACPD Unmarking, Students Question Police Presence Continued from page 3 have noticed is an increase in ‘copaganda,”’ they said, noting the department’s recent adoption of a comfort dog. “They’re trying to make themselves look better without actually addressing student concerns.”

Student A believes that a lack of trust is inevitable no matter what changes ACPD makes to its visibility. “The point is that nobody is going to like them because nobody trusts them. We tell them, ‘I don’t want to wake up in the morning and see your gun in your holster while you’re washing your hands

in my bathroom,’” they said. “How does that make me feel safe? I’m waking up to go use the restroom and there’s a gun in my face. In no way is that going to make me feel safe.”

The subject of unmarked vehicles also led students to ask what ACPD’s response to student concerns should ideally be. “The reaction to ‘We feel uncomfortable with your presence on campus’ should be ‘Okay, how can we make you more comfortable with our presence and reduce it when possible?’” said Cameron Mueller-Harder ’22.

Sullivan also spoke on her desire to communicate more with

students, reporting that “the individual officers themselves often feel excluded from conversations often had with the chief about what exactly the students want, and what would make them feel safer on campus.”

“We would love to talk with the students, because obviously, we don’t want you guys to be uncomfortable around us,” she said, “It would be really great to actually just have a conversation with them and say, ‘What is it that makes you scared?’ Or like, ‘What can we do?’”

“It is kind of difficult because we don’t know … the issues,” Sullivan said. She referenced conversations

that had been facilitated on campus between police officers and students after incidents of police brutality in the 2010s, which she views as being “a really great, raw conversation.” She relayed that she had attempted to reach out to Community Development Coordinators and others to engage with students following debates about ACPD’s role on campus, but had not ever heard back.

Student A reflected on the overall disconnect evident in this dissonance. “The unmarked cars tie back to everything else. It’s the way that ACPD is so out of touch with the Amherst community. You have

people from different backgrounds.

You have people here who are super pro-police, you have people who are abolitionists. And then there’s a spectrum in between,” they said.

“But ACPD — and I know they did the talks, and I want to give them that credit, because I’m assuming they opened themselves up to criticism — they are still so out of touch.”

For Kennedy, the overarching and fundamental issue in his mind is “simple: the interests are different. ACPD wants to continue to validate its position and necessity on campus, but the students don’t necessarily want or need that.”

CAP Relies on Infrastructural Change To Reduce Carbon Footprint Continued from page 4 the CAP is similarly ambitious to other institutions’ plans, but that its emphasis on infrastructural changes makes it relatively unique.

“The plan itself was originally quite similar to other higher ed institutions, though in its original design the committee (Amherst Climate Action Task Force), of which I was a member, was especially cogni-

zant of the dangers of offsets, in that they are hard to monitor and don’t necessarily provide true carbon emissions reductions,” Levin said.

While Levin praised the college’s commitment to obtaining green energy, she noted that there are additional ways Amherst can reduce its carbon footprint. “There is also some low-hanging fruit in terms of increasing building ener-

gy efficiency with smart thermostats — for example, a constant, solvable problem are dorm rooms that are so hot in the winter that students have to open the windows,” she said.

Levin also added that, “given current technologies, it would seem that the college could easily shift its vehicle fleet to EVs [electric vehicles].”

Although the CAP’s initia-

tives are expensive, Dripps said that the main cost is the upfront infrastructure, such as physically implementing the new heating system. He described the CAP as a strategic long-haul play that will eventually turn-cost effective as the price of fossil fuel energy rises.

A graph shown in the town hall revealed that the college predicts to break even with the spending associated with the CAP around 2045

to 2050.

“We’re really committing to making the infrastructure changes that are necessary to upgrade our kind of aging system,” Dripps said.

“I know others have just gone out and bought green oil and things like that without really addressing the infrastructure side to it, and I think, although ours is going to be maybe a little bit of a longer process, it’s the right process.”

From the Red Room: March 28 AAS Meeting Updates Liam Archacki ’24 Managing Editor On Monday, March 28, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) met for the seventh time this semester. The meeting was held in the Red Room, with several senators joining over Zoom. The meeting’s agenda included funding requests, interest requests, officer reports, and an impromptu motion to amend AAS bylaws.

Once attendance had been taken and the previous meeting’s minutes were approved, the Senate reviewed the Budgetary Committee’s (BC) discretionary funding recommendations and Senate project funding requests. The largest requests came from the Middle Eastern North African Association, Model United Nations, and the Anime Club.

The BC recommendations totaled $15,970.30.

In atypical fashion, Cal Gelernt ’24 made a last-minute funding request for the Transportation Committee. The committee asked for $283 to refund four students who had purchased bus tickets to Boston after erroneously believing they had reserved spots on AAS-sponsored shuttles, as the confusion was the result of a mistake on behalf of the Transportation Committee. After discussion, the Senate voted to approve the request.

The Senate also reviewed two funding requests for Senate projects.

Sophie Sweeney ’23 requested $3,000 to facilitate building a garden on campus. As part of her effort to revive the college’s bike share program, Gavi Forman ’22 requested $6,450 to pay for seven new bikes, mainte-

nance on eight existing bikes, and 15 helmets. The motion to approve both the BC recommendations — excluding the transportation funding, which was approved in a separate vote — and the Senate project requests was passed unanimously.

Two AAS members then presented a pair of interest requests.

Vice-President Basma Azzamok ’22 announced a plan to request a meeting with Chief of Police John Carter to discuss campus safety concerns, including the recent conversion of several Amherst College Police Department cars from marked to unmarked. Several senators expressed interest in participating in that meeting. Lori Alarcon ’24 relayed her plan to establish an AAS committee dedicated to supporting undocumented and non-citizen students. After discussion, a number of senators

expressed interest in sitting on the committee.

Afterward, the AAS officers provided their weekly reports. Azzamok relayed that, as a result of their biweekly meeting, Dean of Students Liz Agosto will be hosting a town hall on the topic of loosening masking requirements.

Secretary Lucas Romualdo ’24 brought up the possibility of buying an additional AAS van to meet student demand, particularly given the high frequency of repairs that make the two existing vans impossible to use. He also advocated for the hiring of an additional van clerk to hold accountable students who damage the vans. After some discussion, an informal vote revealed support for hiring another van clerk. An amendment to the AAS bylaws, which was necessary to facilitate the hiring, was

introduced and passed by the Senate.

Lastly, President Angelina Han ’22 reported on her exchange with Agosto regarding the Housing Selection Process for the 2022-2023 school year. Han was told that the room group system was only utilized due to Covid, and that the implementation of a process based on selection numbers was a reversion to pre-Covid practices. Some senators remarked that the pre-Covid housing process relied on averaged selection numbers among a group — rather than forcing students to defer to the lowest selection number among their desired housing group — which mitigated the possibility of conflicts among friends. Han agreed to bring up the concern with Agosto via email.

The next AAS meeting will take place on Monday, April 4.

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Rethinking the Open Curriculum Sam Spratford ’24 Managing Podcast Editor A 2019 white paper published by a consortium of open-curriculum institutions — including Amherst — asserts that “the open curriculum is based on a belief in the power of student choice exercised in collaboration with faculty.” This principle seems powerful and effective, promising to free students from the confines of general education requirements and allowing them to explore their passions in creative ways with the attentive guidance of faculty advisors. Given many students’ diverse course loads and close faculty relationships, reality has mirrored this ideal, to a certain extent.

Amherst’s open curriculum enamored many of us during the college application process, often being one of the decisive qualities that set Amherst apart from its peer institutions. Even as a prospective chemistry major (at the time), my head was spinning with ideas for an interdisciplinary, freshman-year schedule as I perused course catalogs from recent semesters.

Not every Amherst student shares this excitement about interdisciplinary education, though. I have friends who are double-majoring in STEM departments, for instance, who cram three lab science courses into each semester and then, reluctantly, a random fourth course, — usually something that doesn’t require much effort (understandably). In a vacuum, there’s no problem with this mindset, and under normal circumstances, none of us should be in the business of telling someone how to design their education.

But we are not living in normal times: at this moment, American society is reckoning with its history, its violent group relations, and its democracy’s vulnerabilities. The college must

rethink its academic philosophy to ensure that every student graduates with the ability to communicate and act for the betterment of their communities.

A core curriculum would not be a productive change: it would force students to take classes they are entirely disinterested in, eliminating the classroom enthusiasm that makes our courses engaging. Moreover, it would make our educational backgrounds much more homogenous, thereby depleting the classroom’s collective knowledge base.

Instead, we should implement distribution requirements comparable to those of Williams College. Distribution requirements (DR) typically require students to take a certain number of courses from each of the overarching academic disciplines: in Williams’ case, these are “Languages and the Arts,” “Social Studies,” and “Science and Mathematics.” Additional requirements highlight ways of thinking relevant to contemporary issues, like “Difference, Power and Equity” or “Quantitative Reasoning.”

DRs would ignite a variety of constructive changes. For students who have flexibility in their schedules but choose to take homogenous courseloads, distribution requirements would compel them to diversify their education.

Many students are in a different boat — their major qualifications (for instance, the Biochemistry and Biophysics major’s 13-plus requirements) restrict their freedom, especially as they rush to complete their foundational courses. To accommodate DRs, academic departments would have to integrate more interdisciplinary content into their normal courses. A far more pervasive problem, however, is that nearly half of Amherst students are double majors, which severely limits their educational diversity.

The most common combination is computer science and math-

ematics, which leaves students with only three free courses each year. In this case, DRs would force students to abandon double majors that are demanding and fairly redundant.

I want to clarify that I’m not at all interested in labeling humanities departments as more important than STEM departments. Rather, I’m advocating for interdepartmental equity, for STEM departments to treat the humanities’ unique insights with the care they deserve and vice versa. While neither party is perfect, I’m emphasizing the ways in which STEM departments are lacking because I believe there is a great, unexplored potential for STEM students to participate in dialogue with humanities students.

On campus, the humanities are already rigorously engaged with scientific perspectives, and DRs would only improve upon this engagement. As anecdotal evidence, a required course for the religion major is RELI210, “What Is Religion?” As I’ve learned from my friends who are religion majors, including Dylan Byrne ’24, students must read cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer’s explanation of religion in the terms of evolutionary biology. In my own experience in philosophy, LJST, and political science courses, I’ve had no choice but to familiarize myself with psychological concepts, basic statistical analysis, and economic models.

At a more structural level, humanities students must pay attention to the sciences, while the inverse is not necessarily true. Since the turn to an empirically-founded social “science” in the late 19th century, most “Western” academics have approached their questions with a skeptical attitude, relying heavily on quantitative evidence for authority. Furthermore, as scholars

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Amherst Must Establish Distribution Requirements Continued from page 9 of the social sciences examine society, they inevitably run into the world of scientists — their institutions, their ways of thinking, and their worldviews. It’s a shame that the scientific community itself is not a more integral part of this dialogue.

More than any other event in recent history, the Covid-19 pandemic has underlined the interwoven fates of science and society and exposed the communicative failures between the two worlds, especially regarding the vaccine debate.

In his book, “State of Immunity: The Politics of Vaccination in Twentieth-Century America,” historian James Colgrove reveals that this fraught relationship has deep roots. America’s first anti-vaccination organization was

founded in 1879 in response to states mandating smallpox vaccination. The proliferation of anti-vaccine outcries throughout the Covid-19 pandemic signifies that this conflict has not been subdued: if anything, it has grown in intensity due to the heavy-handed politicization of the debate.

Perhaps the most critical takeaway from Colgrove’s book is that vaccines are the product of society as much as they are the product of science. Population density, economic demands, and structural inequities make some more vulnerable to disease than others — without these prerequisite social conditions, vaccination would be much less necessary. As a function of the very same developments that created these conditions, Amer-

ica’s scientific research complex was able to invent the vaccine, prove its efficacy, and convince governments to implement mandates. Vaccination exists because of certain social conditions; we are urged to get vaccinated to protect the collective as much as — or more than — to protect ourselves.

For these reasons, the vaccine is a powerful symbol of the reality that science is entangled with society. Science’s knowledge is embedded in our laws, its research is nourished by our collective capital, and its truths are vulnerable to political distortions as much as any other.

On their own, scientific achievements can greatly help our society; in the wrong hands, they also have the potential to do great harm. With the growing

popularity of the “Being Human in STEM” movement on campus, certain STEM departments implemented internal distribution requirements. The chemistry major, for example, now requires “a course focusing on structural and systemic issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

But this is still only one course out of 32 that requires majors to confront the reality that science is not a haven of objectivity, removed from the messy world of social studies. Sociologists have come to realize over the years that “Western” science is a social institution like any other — it can act as a tool of governance, be mired in profiteering interests, and, in extreme instances, be exploited to oppress entire classes of citizens, as “scientifically advanced” colonial powers did for

centuries. Above all, science is forced to communicate with society at every turn — it cannot serve its purpose otherwise.

The truth is that, even if you aren’t going into an explicitly public-facing career in STEM, you will be a part of society. It is imperative that we be aware of that fact, lest we allow ourselves to live and work ignorant of our place in the broader community.

The troubling social conditions we see today were created by people who only knew one way of thinking about the world, and who were never taught the value of a critical, interdisciplinary perspective, supported by active listening to those different from yourself. To safeguard against history repeating itself, Amherst must establish academic distribution requirements.

Coping With Campus: Dam Good Builders Dustin Copeland ’25 Managing Opinion Editor An integral part of living healthily in the at-best semipermeable bubble of campus is to, once in a while, intentionally break it. Recontextualizing the space we live in is vital to continuing to live in that space — something that begins to feel prohibitively difficult once in a while without careful attention.

Leaving campus is hard, and often I find myself realizing, as if waking out of a daze, that I haven’t broken its borders in weeks.

If you are a student with a car on campus, you don’t need to read this article.

Luckily for the rest of us, our campus is in pretty much the perfect location, and as such, has several easily accessible changes of scenery. There is town, of course, and the veiny network of buses and bike lanes that brings closer the Five Colleges (however inconveniently), Hadley, and even comparatively metro Holyoke and Springfield.

But crucially for this article, the Mass Central Rail Trail cuts

right through the south end of campus proper. With a maintained paved surface running continuously from Northampton to some road off of Route 9, a few miles southeast of campus, the rail trail is a ridiculously easy-to-access conduit bringing hiking trails, tree cover, and nature preservation land close to campus. The ideal way to travel the rail trail is by bike, but walking is the most common and certainly the most contemplative. And, if you walk or bike far enough, you might happen across something truly awe-inspiring.

Beavers, for example.

Beavers create their homes, called beaver lodges, in ponds deep enough to prevent ice from blocking lodge entrances.

Mostly, those ponds are created by beaver dams, which flood an area around a river until the beavers are satisfied with the size and depth. Whether or not the beaver pond I found down the Rail Trail was a pond created by beaver damming is unknown, but the presence of beaver lodges is certain. Open-water beaver lodges like those in the

Photo courtesy of Dustin Copeland '25

A picture taken by the author of a beaver pond near campus. Visible in the far left of the frame is an open-water beaver lodge. beaver pond are freestanding structures built over a foundation of sticks. The domed roof is sealed with mud, and an air vent on top provides fresh air and light to the rooms below.

Entrances to the lodge are underwater, but the living chamber is kept above the waterline.

A dining area is often set aside near the water, and experienced beaver families can build lodges 20 feet in diameter and over six feet high. Moreover, in just two nights, families can build a lodge sturdy enough to survive all of winter.

Beavers produce their own

living environments by taking advantage of an area’s natural resources. They create a new ecosystem by diverting rivers, changing stream flows, and flooding dry land. They engineer their living space while

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Demonstrably Cuter Than Any Living Architect Continued from page 9 paying attention to their needs in a residential environment, and with experience and skill, create long-standing and complex homes to specifications that they decide. In other words, beavers make buildings.

They’re architects!

It might seem that the story of the beaver is one familiar to human ears: while magnificent, their designs are a drain on their environments, destroying river life and cutting down an area’s tree cover. Beavers, in their selfish species-centered commitment to their own survival, put the existence of the very planet they live on as a secondary concern as they reshape the Earth as they see fit.

But beavers aren’t just like humans. Not only do they manage to create buildings and use their evolutionary abilities to change the environment as is necessary for their survival, but their doing so is invariably good for the places where they live. This is the opposite of what it should be! Urbanism and nature are diametrically opposed!

Structural reconfiguration of one’s environment seems to be

universally bad for non-human life when it is humans doing the configuring, but the same just isn’t true for beavers.

Beavers are a keystone species in their habitats, which means that the ecosystems they live in rely on the presence of beavers — their removal would dramatically change the nature of the ecosystem. As literal habitat creators, beavers’ roles as engineers and architects make them indispensable to the variety of life that lives alongside them. Beaver ponds increase the area of open water so much that beavers are able to build and sustain wetlands even during extreme drought.

That same open water means that waterfowl thrive in environments with beavers, and beavers’ interaction with trees at the pondside is strongly associated with the richness and abundance of migratory bird species. Beavers’ destruction of riparian trees — those lying on the interfacing area between land and pond — doesn’t drive tree populations down, but rather increases the amount of trees and vegetation, as well as their diversity. Beavers have

Photo courtesy of Steve Hersey

An American Beaver sitting with its tail poking out form underneath it. Also not taken by the author.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

A beaver chewing away at a tree, coating the snow in sawdust. This picture was unfortunately not taken by the author. been used by the United States Civilian Conservation Corps to prevent soil erosion, and employed by various state governments, as well as Canadian provinces, to restore streams and wetlands across those countries. There’s a Wikipedia article entitled “Environmental impacts of beavers” wherein every single subheading is unambiguously positive. Study after study shows that beaver ponds serve as firefighters or that salmon population reduction is related to declines in beaver population or that most studies claiming that beaver dams act as barriers to fish were unsupported by data. And while it’s certain that beavers aren’t truly good 100 percent of the time, the volume of positive effects they have on their environments mean that, even when they are literally invasive, they are not wholly detrimental to local ecology.

That day on the Rail Trail was a welcome jaunt away from the Amherst bubble. Frog calls and distant birds combined with the steadily-rippling water

which was silvery and gleaming in the waning sunlight. It was a wild experience, so deeply tranquil and so essentially satisfying. I saw beavers swimming silently before slipping under the surface. Gathering for dinner, maybe.

I thought (as my friend on the trail suggested) that beavers were as vicious as humans, that their buildings were a product of environmental exploitation not at all dissimilar from the stair-welled straight-lined dorm I would eventually return to. I thought about the difference between people and animals, and how creatures like beavers are perfect examples of how we humans are not uniquely endowed with the ability to change the planet on which we live. We are not the only creatures who build, not the only animals to design a space.

But my thinking was still incomplete. “Human” forms of interacting individually with spaces are not at all unique to us, and we don’t share them solely with beavers — octopuses, for example, decorate their

dens. Our intelligence is also a useless measure: it makes no sense to call us better than other species based solely on the quality we happen to be best at!

How convenient.

I think that humans aren’t the greatest species on the planet for a wide variety of reasons, but is it fair to say that we’re the best at building? Luckily, since we are not the only species to do architecture, we can compare our home-building to that other venerable constructor. Both of our homes are complex, unique to the builder, and provide for the spaces essential for comfortable living, protected from the world outside. One style of home-building, however, is so integrated with the ecosystem around it that its engineering and the health of the surrounding earth are essentially symbiotically related. The other, unfortunately, is so harmful to the planet that it threatens the well-being of all living things, even the home-users themselves. In other words: not only do beavers do architecture, they do it better than us.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

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Seeing Double: The Adventures of Tom and Dick Thomas Brodey ’22 Columnist Dick Hubert, Amherst class of 1960, slid into my DMs about a year ago. “Tom Brody,” his email began. Dick introduced himself as a journalist and former Amherst trustee, and explained that he had come across one of my columns in The Student. Somehow, he had found my email address and was now offering to circulate my articles among his alumni friends. I admit I was surprised and a little baffled at the unexpected message, but I decided to see where things went.

Over the next few months, Dick and I began to exchange more and more emails. I sent him a variety of Student articles, and he replied with his own pieces about the need for elite schools to share their resources more equitably. I wrote to him with my perspective on modern campus life, and he told me about his own investigative journalism as a student, which had led the school to threaten him with expulsion. It soon became clear that despite our six-decade age gap, Dick and I had a shared interest in campus issues.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Among college students, it’s hard to escape the stereotype of the old, out-of-touch alumnus: a

white man who resents any hint of change. But that’s an unfair generalization. When I worked in the Amherst Phonathon, I found that most alumni don’t cling to the idea of Amherst as they remember it, and can accept the need for constant evolution. Alumni aren’t a monolith. My friends who graduated last year are now alumni, and (horrifying though it may be) we’re all headed for the same fate.

So enough with the stereotypes.

Students and alumni need each other. It’s no surprise that alumni can sometimes lack a clear picture of what’s happening on campus.

Their main source of campus information is the glossy Amherst Magazine, a publication that depicts the campus as existing in the kind of photogenic paradise seen only in brochures. Alumni reunions take place on an empty campus, as though to reinforce the idea of Amherst as a static and ossified institution. Any student hoping to provide alumni with a more critical perspective through participation at alumni meetings must pass through a formidable array of red tape and receive permission from no fewer than four separate offices and departments.

Unless we students make more effort to intervene, alumni will have little idea of today’s campus issues,

and thus will remain instruments of the status quo.

Students, in turn, can tap into the power and influence of alumni. Every member of the Board of Trustees is an alum, and alumni donate more than $10 million a year to the school. The school’s rankings depend upon an active and supportive alumni network.

You could argue that the administration cares a lot more about the opinion of an active alum (who will be involved in the college for their whole life) than a student (who will, in all likelihood, become disengaged after four years).

Alumni also have huge professional networks. Dick Hubert, for example, has sent Amherst Student articles to a slew of the country’s best reporters, from local journalists to staff members of the New York Times.

Alumni have a lot of influence but aren’t able to learn about the priorities and concerns of the student body. Students, on the other hand, have a clear idea of the campus’ problems but lack organization and power. The two go together like first-years and FOMO. The issue from my pieces that most energized Dick was financial aid. In 2020, my co-columnist and I wrote a series about how Amherst’s financial aid system

sometimes fails in its mission and makes unrealistic promises. Dick and a posse of his associates from the Class of 1960 spent the summer of 2021 indefatigably urging President Martin to address the issue. I remember feeling shocked by how invested these alumni were in campus reform. Through innumerable cc’s and bcc’s, I watched from the sidelines as the alumni of the Class of 1960 engaged in a duel of words fought in endless chains of emails. In the end, the alumni won. The Amherst financial aid department changed its advertising, and a few months later, the college revamped its financial aid program, adopting several of the recommendations that the Seeing Double series had made. I can’t prove that the alumni had a direct role in the latter change, but they certainly didn’t hurt.

The point here is that Dick and company would never have been aware of problems at Amherst if students hadn’t reached out to them (that, or “Dick Hubert” is about the most elaborate email scam in the history of the world).

However, I know that I can’t even begin to speak for every student or every problem on campus, and Dick certainly can’t speak for all alumni. That’s why I urge students to make more of an effort to dis-

cuss campus issues with alumni.

We can do so through the alumni directory, or even at Homecoming weekend. I’d suggest looking for alumni whose careers and majors match the issues you are most concerned about. Dance groups worried about event spaces might look for performers. Language assistants who receive inadequate support from the school could reach out to Spanish or French majors.

My co-columnist may even be able to pitch his gazebo fetish to real architects. The school encourages us to use the alumni network to learn about careers — why not use it to push for the change we want to see on campus?

It’s easy to poke fun at alumni for being homogenous and out of touch. We, as students, however, have the ability and responsibility to change that. If we reach out to alumni, we can inform them about the issues that concern the campus of today. And if we ourselves join an active alumni network after graduation, we can help future generations of Amherst students in the eternal fight for a better campus. If Dick Hubert can remain passionately invested in students’ concerns more than 60 years after graduation, I challenge every one of you to beat his record.

Rants and Raves: “Scrape Your F — king Plates” Priscilla Lee ’25 Contributing Writer We all love to complain about Val, but we seem to often forget that Val probably has much to complain about us. Only, they don’t get to make funny Instagram posts about our entitled, thoughtless, and sometimes disgusting behavior. So, in a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance, I hereby submit a summary of complaints that I’ve heard from a friend who works in the dish room.

We begin with the basics: scrape the food off your plates before putting it on the conveyor belt. When dishes enter the dish room, the staff spray off the re-

maining food before putting them in the dishwasher. Breadcrumbs, grains of rice, sauce, and the like can be easily sprayed off. But a plateful of half-chewed food?

That’s just inconsiderate. It holds up the process and slows everything down. Val has already set you up for success: the compost bin is right there, on your way out.

Dump out your food. It’s not that hard.

Scrape your food especially well if we’re using the reusable green containers. They only get brought back to Val every couple of days. The food rots. You’ve definitely already noticed that they make the dorm entryways stink; imagine how much worse it smells

when the containers are opened in the dish room. So please take care to dump all the food out of the container. Better yet, bring the containers back to Val earlier so they don’t sit for ages before being washed.

Then there are the people who don’t even bother bringing back their dishes and cups, leaving them on tables and or on the floor.

Sometimes Val staff find them underneath the orange couches or between the booth and the wall.

Is this chronic negligence or a practical joke? Are people actively trying to set up a treasure hunt for Val staff? Is it possible to drop a whole plate onto the floor midmeal without noticing? In Russ

especially, there are always stacks of cups left on the table. Don’t be lazy. Do the bare minimum.

Another thing: the stir-fry station is terrible to clean, especially since people keep burning their food. Reflect on the following

questions: Is your food smoking?

Do you burn your food every time you use the stir-fry station? Are you bad at cooking?

Lastly: Val closes at 9 p.m.

Leave at 9 p.m. The staff have things to do.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

An example of a typical table in Russ Wing — much cleaner than many left after hours.

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Amusements

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The Amherst Student Crossword | March 30, 2022 ACROSS 1 Slapped by 59-Across at the Oscars 5 Less of these is better in 14-Across 8 ___-fi 11 Pungent 13 Branch of Islam 14 *"'Echo, Foxtrot, ___ Hotel" 15 Near-centenarian Betty 16 Go sky-high 17 Caustic solutions 18 Leading actor in "Goodfellas" and "Taxi Driver" 21 *Known for its diamonds 25 *Canadian national game 31 Screenwriter Ephron 32 Town where the Pixies formed 33 Burma's first prime minister 34 Housebreaking thief 35 Smooth-talker 39 "Mr. Blue Sky" grp.

40 Cone holders?

41 Secondary theorem, in math 44 *Usually done in seven, compared to 21-Across' nine 45 "Take care," in other words 48 What the starred clues are to 32-Across, or competitive slinky playing and pogo-stick bouncing?

55 Van Gogh's brother 58 South Asian expat, say 59 See 1-Across 60 Educator Horace 61 Cassini of fashion 62 What 59-Across did to 1-Across, e.g.

63 Acct. accrual 64 Aves.

65 "Forget it!"

DOWN 1 "___ ×d" (Dinosaur speak) 2 Cuatro y cuatro 3 Baby's bed 4 Toy with a tail 5 Bridgers or Waller-Bridge 6 "The Princess and the Frog" princess 7 Delhi dresses 8 Sauce source 9 The Browns, on sports tickers 10 Conditions 12 "___ Spiegel" 13 HDD's modern counterpart 14 Shakespeare's theatre 19 Ice dancing great Virtue 20 "But loving him was ___" 22 Sarah Bloom Raskin or Lauren Groff to 32-Across 23 Hereditary 24 One might rest on several of these 25 Tags 26 Talisman 27 Intensity of color 28 Bylaw, for short 29 NBA's Magic, on scoreboards 30 Orch. section 35 ___-Magnon 36 Tests the weight of 37 Telecom initials 38 Tease 42 "Beware the Jabberwock, ___!"

43 Cleopatra's killer, by some accounts 44 Has a hunch 46 Zeal 47 *Track's partner, in phrase 49 Band booking 50 L.A. hours 51 Mideast sultanate 52 The R in RNA 53 Sporty car roof 54 Loafer, e.g.

55 "Don't need to know that!"

56 Chinese dynasty 57 Tolkien tree creature

Ryan Yu ’22 Editor-in-Chief Emeritus

Solutions: March 23

g Arts&Living

Breaking Thesis Boundaries in “Boundless” Madeline Lawson ’25 Managing Arts and Living Editor Unlike many senior theses in the Theater and Dance department, Alistair Edwards’ ’22 “Boundless” had no stage or costumes. It took place in a bare studio with only eight rows of chairs and four tall, electronic speakers creating a bubble of sound. “Boundless,” which ran on March 25 and 26, is a radio play that, without live actors, utilized lighting and sound design to create a truly spectacular and multidimensional production.

The play follows Eddie, a young man played by Christian Daniels ’23 who, after his premature death, becomes a guest on God’s radio show. God, played by Gina Pasciuto, a junior at Mount Holyoke College, judges Eddie’s life “in front of a live studio audience on Afterlife TV!” — presenting evidence in the form of defining moments from his life to decide his eternal fate.

In Exhibit A, Eddie is a high schooler with his friend Henry, who is played by Ayo Eniola ’24.

They are waiting for an Uber to leave a party when the police show up. Eddie and Henry are both Black, which is established during this scene by the play's first physical description, setting up a racial tension that carries throughout the play. The police demand to search them, and since Henry has weed, they run into the forest and hide in a bush. Eddie pushes Henry out of the bush so that he can make a run for it, and the scene ends with the cops finding Henry, but not Eddie.

Eddie begins arguing with God about what happened, but she jumps instead to Exhibit B, where Eddie is going grocery shopping with his girlfriend, played by Yaffa Segal ’25, who has just moved to D.C. They have a conversation about gentrification and how his girlfriend now lives in a food desert, although Eddie insists that she’ll begin to love D.C. While racial tensions aren’t explicitly addressed in this scene, their discus-

sion of income inequalities and gentrification displays how race factors into much of Eddie’s life, even in the background. When they leave the grocery store, Eddie sees that his car is being broken into. He beats up the man trying to break in, even when his girlfriend begs him to stop.

Exhibit C shows Eddie trying to relax. The scene is not described, but the background noise paints a serene picture disrupted by Eddie’s intrusive thoughts, including one about how he could smash someone’s skull in with a cinder block.

He tries desperately to ignore them, but they only get stronger. The lights grow red, the sound booms, and when a passerby comes to ask Eddie if he is alright, he kills him.

God speaks to him non-confrontationally after this, to the point that the audience believes Eddie didn’t really kill anybody.

Eddie explains this Rage as something that’s always been inside him, but that it doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person. He says that he always had to hide it, in order to appear non-threatening, and that he didn’t know how to control it.

The audience desperately wants to believe that we’ve somehow interpreted Exhibit C wrong, but God confirms that Eddie did kill the person. Yet, the viewer still feels some sympathy with Eddie and desperately hopes that he will somehow make it to Heaven. Eddie begins to suspect that God has intentionally selected evidence to make him look bad, and he in calls his own evidence in an attempt to redeem himself. Right after he killed the passerby, he ran away, Rage still screaming in his head. He worries about how he would fare if the police found him, a mirror of the police brutality he experienced as a teenager. He promises to atone for his crimes and try to be a better person, but he gets hit by a truck before he can.

Does it make a difference that Eddie was trying to change, or did his actions outweigh his inten-

tions? God argues that there is no way Eddie can justify himself as a good person after what he’s done, and she brings in Eddie's girlfriend and Henry as guest callers who say that they don’t think he can ever become a better person. Eddie grows angry, the lights go red, and he is sent to Hell. The audience is left in the dark, hoping that — despite all that he had done — Eddie could have gotten a second chance.

From my perspective, “Boundless” is a play about morality in an immoral world. Can you be a good person when everything is against you? It is obvious that Eddie wanted to be a good person, but when facing racial discrimination and his mental health struggles, he thought he had no choice but to do what he did. He is a person who acted on impulse, but he is judged against the metric of a perfect human being.

Although “Boundless” was written as a radio play, it was not strictly performed as one, making effective use of the studio space to imitate a radio recording studio mixed with memories. Lighting was one aspect of this, as bright lights washed over the studio when God was interviewing Eddie, then dimmed each time a new piece of evidence was shown. The most creative use of the lighting in this work came when Rage entered, washing the studio in red. When Eddie is sent to Hell and the radio show ends, the lights abruptly cut off, leaving the audience in darkness. The positioning of the chairs also added to the performance. While the rows were facing each other for sound design purposes, this also contributed to a feeling of togetherness in the audience. We realize that we are the live studio audience that God speaks of.

Staring at the faces of everyone else in the audience allowed you to feel the full emotional impact of Eddie’s decisions and ultimate demise.

Edwards says that his thesis process was different than he expected it to be. “I thought it was going to be a lot easier than it was [to write the

Photo courtesy of Alistair Edwards '22

Managing Arts and Living Editor Madeline Lawson ‘25 walks through Alistair Edwards' '22 senior thesis, a radio play called "Boundless." play] … It took about six months.”

He cast the play, and they began rehearsing over Zoom in late January.

“After about a month, we went over to Seeley Mudd [Building] and went to the recording booths in IT. We went scene by scene, improvising lines sometimes. It was a lot of fun.” He then spent about a month mixing the sound and composing the music before the play was complete.

When asked why he wrote a radio play, Edwards said, “I wanted to see if I could tell an effective story with as little visual media as possi-

ble … I was inspired by a lot of the NPR shows that my dad would put in the background of long car rides when I was younger.”

It is clear that “Boundless” is most effective in radio format.

With just the sound, you feel the same panic and tension as Eddie without being distracted by anything else. Edwards’ background is in music and sound design, so it’s no surprise that the background noise and special effects used in the play were incredibly effective, making for an unforgettable senior thesis.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Arts & Living

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Black Art Matters Celebrates Artists and Performers Continued from page 1 from the festival will reopen at a later date.

“I wasn’t particularly invested in it being in the Mead, although it was kind of unfortunate that people couldn’t see the actual artworks up close as planned,” admitted Zachary Rivers ’24E. His piece, an 8-by-8inch woodblock print titled “Moonsight,” was inspired by a friend from UMass, who asked Rivers to make an album cover for his music. He wished attendees could have had the chance to see his print in person: “You would be able to see, ‘Oh, this is ink on a piece of paper, as opposed to it being pixels on the screen.’” But, he acknowledged, “the Powerhouse is a very good performance space. And so, for the purposes of the event, I think it actually went just fine.”

It was clear that the festival was focused on the artistic visions and perspectives of students. “[The artists] brought a sense of creativity that was experimental,” said BAM Student Coordinator Kai Ahmadu ’22. “Every single artist really gave it their all and put a lot of their spirit and personality into their work.”

Alongside Kendall Greene ’24, Ahmadu was involved with nearly every aspect of planning the event: searching for hosts from the BSU and the African and Caribbean Students Union (ACSU), securing funding for food trucks and the livestream service, and coordinating with the student artists.

Ahmadu is an artist too, and participated in the festival in 2019. His art evokes themes of sustainability and Black liberation, informed by his identity as a third-generation African from Sierra Leone. He said his background allowed him to more easily connect with artists and use the same curatorial mindset that he uses with his art to plan the festival.“I feel like when you go to a ‘Black Art Matters’ festival, you expect an open mic that might be about race relations, or you expect a painting that incorporates diasporic themes,” Ahmadu said. “But the way that [the artists] incorporated their personal lives and their unique and diverse backgrounds was pretty interesting and just special.”

One artist that resonated with him was Abadai Zoboi ’24, whose painting and dance were featured in the festival. “In the rehearsal the night before, the way she was preparing for it, I could tell that she was putting a lot of emotional intention.

It kind of felt sacred, and it felt vulnerable,” he said. Ahmadu was also drawn to one of her paintings in the festival, which depicts a globe painted on a pregnant woman’s belly.

He summed up his feelings on the importance of the event: “Black art, to me, is a demonstration of Black imagination, and how Black people my age and the generations that we never got to talk to are conversing with each other in an artistic way.”

How did the artists in the festival converse artistically? I asked some artists what inspires their art, and what their art means to them.

Neviah Waldron ’24, whose piece “Floating in a Gentle Abyss” was featured in the festival, replied, “My art is inspired by nature and the elements, probably water and its movement, especially. I also love space, and I love painting the moon and planets.”

It is clear how her painting reflects her inspirations. A hand rests on the surface of bubbling, rippling water, cradling delicate pink and purple flowers in its palm. But Waldron says her art also moves beyond aesthetic beauty and iconographic motifs, taking on a personal importance: “What inspires my art the most is definitely my feelings, which change like the phases of the moon.

I used to bottle up my emotions and try to will them away. But lately, I’ve been learning to channel them onto a canvas. I feel like I can express myself best this way and not feel clouded and oppressed by my feelings.”

Not all of the artists used inkon-paper mediums for their artistic and emotional expression, however.

Maëlle Sannon ’24 usually uses pencil, but pushed herself to experiment when she took “Photography I” with Conway Professor in New Media Justin Kimball. Her photo series “Maëlle in Bloom” employs similar imagery as Waldron, featuring flowers alongside self-portraits. Tight shots of her face catch the setting

sun, as if she herself were a flower. The actual process of taking the photos was a little less picturesque, she admits: “I was in the middle of the soccer field, just rolling around in a bunch of dandelions, trying to capture these photos. Sports teams were going by; the whole track team was wondering, ‘What the hell is this girl doing?’ Like, in the middle of the field, one arm up holding the camera like trying to act like I’m not holding the camera. But I don’t know, it just felt very organic.”

Sannon hopes that her photos reflect her background: “Growing up in New York, having this Caribbean influence, there’s so many motifs that I carry with me, and I pull them out

when I feel it’s appropriate. Flowers and bright colors: that’s something that’s very key to my Haitian heritage. And motion: that’s something that I get from New York.”

The importance of heritage was shared by Tiia McKinney ’25, whose painting “Roots” was featured in the festival. She told me that she is inspired by her Bahamian roots, as well as by racial justice movements.

A formative project was one she did for her AP art class in high school: she painted Lydia McKinnon, a woman who was beaten by police during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963. Her painting in the festival drew on more recent activism: “Over the summer, during the re-

surgence of Black Lives Matter, I saw so much art on my [Instagram] feed from Black creatives. The picture that I was inspired by was actually from a social media influencer, I don’t recall her name. (It was just on my ‘For you’ page, and then I screenshotted it. And after I swiped up, it was gone. So I don’t remember who the person was at this point.) But I really liked how she was sporting the durag and braids in that piece.”

The live performances were just as magnetizing as the visual art. The vibe was lively, and the audience was free to move. It was nice not being bound to chairs, especially because at intermission, there were food

Continued on page 15

Photo courtesy of Kai Ahmadu ‘22

Kai Ahmadu ‘22: Mixed media.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Arts & Living

15

Black Art Matters 2022: A Vibrant Celebration Continued from page 14 trucks. The free space also allowed the audience to see and approach the performers, unobstructed.

First up were two poets, Quincy Jones ’25 and Ernest Collins Jr. ’23, who gave reflective contemplations that offered moral context with a somber yet playful mood.

Jones read two pieces, titled “Ignite” and “There’s something in my throat.” He spoke confidently and played with rhythms. It was fun and emotional. I liked the start of his second piece: “The little boy ran, until his knees cracked under him. Other little black boys screamed metal at his eyes. The ground / shook with pressure…” The Student published his first piece on March 9, which you can find on our website.

Collins also read two pieces, the first of which stuck out to me sharply: “Ferguson is burning, like they said London Bridge’s falling / A game not so appalling, but y’know what galling? / Another black kid is dead…” It was an impactful performance, well executed and spoken with clear intent.

The festival also featured musical artists like Stanley Jackson ’25, who rapped an original piece titled “Sicker Than You.” His motivations were simply stated: “I really like rap music, of course, and R&B, too. I listen to all types of stuff … like Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Chance the Rapper, and Smino. [My music] is basically just my life experiences, anything that comes to me as I’m living.” He shared that the inspiration for “Sick-

er Than You” was equally simple: “I was bored one day.”

His performance, conversely, was smooth and confident. Jackson fluently flew through bars with precise diction and creative rhythms, even though the festival was only his second live performance ever. The first was at the BSU Black Harlem Renaissance event in 2018, the year Jackson originally started at Amherst as a first-year. This time, “I was very nervous before I got on stage,” he said. “But once the music started, it kind of went away. There were more people at this thing than who were at the [BSU event], though I do think I did a better job this time.”

Rounding out the musical performances in the festival were singer Joseph-Jerome Raymond ’24 and guitarist Gregory Smith ’24. They played four songs, including a mashup of Stevie Wonder’s “Isn’t She Lovely” and Grover Washington Jr’s “Just the Two of Us,” as well as two of Raymond’s original songs from a new EP. Both musicians accentuated groovy, wistful vibes with improvisational rhythms.

I asked Raymond about his songwriting, which he said he only started during the pandemic, noting that it was then that he found time to slow and process his art, and examine what is important to him. “I love telling stories, and accounts of my past always find their way into my music,” he continued. “But recently, I’ve found that I can also [write about] things I’ve yet to experience, or things I yearn to experience. I started writing about love before I

even found love. I started contemplating loss before ever experiencing it.”

Raymond also shared a list of artists who have inspired him “for their voices, candor, and creativity: Ari Lennox, SZA, Brandy, Rihanna, Miguel, Lucky Daye, Summer Walker.” He also said that they stand out to him because these are “artists that choose to make music for themselves, [and] that’s how I think it’s supposed to be.”

The festival closed with a performance by members of Dance and

Step at Amherst College (DASAC), a lively step routine to Bankroll Freddie and Megan Thee Stallion’s “Pop It” that captured the celebratory feel of the event. Ahmadu noted that the unified feeling of the festival was especially remarkable, that Black people from vastly different cultures — from the Caribbean, from Brazil, from Ghana, from South Carolina, and more — could so deeply connect with each other through art: “Their voices and the diversity of their backgrounds pulled together into a mosaic” — a piece of art in itself.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Zachary Rivers ‘24E: “Moonsight.” Woodcut print.

In an effort to further support Black student artists at Amherst College, The Student is providing the social media links of all students interviewed for this article: • Zachary Rivers ’24E: @zach.rivers.art (Instagram) • Kai Ahmadu ’22: @chi.creates (Instagram) • Stanley Jackson ’25: @s.i.k. jackson (Soundcloud) • Joseph-Jerome Raymond ’24: J. Jerome (Spotify) • Gregory Smith ’24: Gregory R. Smith III (Spotify)

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Tiia McKinney ‘25: “Roots.” Acrylic paint on paper.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Arts & Living

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“Sur vivor” Season 42: Episode 3, Reviewed

Photo courtesy of besttvshow.mirahaze.org

The third episode of “Survivor” Season 42 kept viewers on the edge of their seats. Vaughn Armour ‘25 recaps the strategy and drama of this week’s episode, which he deems “one of the greatest episodes in [the show's] 42 season-long history.”

Vaughn Armour ’25 Contributing Writer This week, on March 23, “Survivor” released one of the greatest episodes in its 42 season-long history. Strategic decisions were made, relationships were destroyed, and the fans enjoyed it all, watching on the edges of their seats.

The episode started with Maryanne telling her tribemates about her three-way shared idol. It was a funny moment, but a questionable strategic play, as it only painted a larger target on her back. However, it did confirm that two of the three idols have been found, which means that Mike and Maryanne have gotten closer to regaining their votes. As soon as someone on Ika finds theirs, Mike, Maryanne, and the third idol holder will be able to activate their idols by each saying their phrase at the same immunity challenge.

Featuring ladders on the bottom of the ocean floor, floating sandbags, and miniscule targets, this week’s immunity challenge was one of the hardest the show has seen. Jonathan’s performance was impressive, single-handedly bringing Taku to a decisive victory. A long while after, Ika finished in second place, sending the Vati tribe — made up of Chanelle,

Daniel, Hai, Mike, and Jenny — to tribal.

At this point in the episode, there were still over 30 minutes left, which is an unusually large amount of time to fill with discussion about the vote.

Each and every minute, however, was packed to the brim with glorious content.

After winning, Taku had to choose one member of Vati and one member of either their own tribe or Ika to journey to the same island as in the previous episode. They chose to send Chanelle and Omar. At the island commonly referred to by fans as “shipwheel island,” the two castaways were given the same prisoners’ dilemma as before. The difference was that with only two of them, the risk of losing their vote was much higher. Chanelle and Omar built a quick bond, with Chanelle seeming to assert to Omar that she couldn’t afford to risk her vote. Omar took her at face value, risking his vote to gain an advantage. But Chanelle talked herself into making the “big move” and ended up risking her vote as well.

Many contestants feel like they constantly need to take big swings and “not play scared” in “Survivor.”

Chanelle let this cloud her judgment. She was going into a vote with

a four-person majority against two, but Mike already couldn’t vote because the three-way idol hadn’t been validated yet. If Chanelle lost her vote, they would have been deadlocked at 2-2 — a dangerous proposition. Yet she fell for the trap.

Back at Vati camp, Chanelle came up with a plan to get Hai and Lydia to split their votes between Mike and Jenny under the guise of fearing an idol. She and Daniel would then shift their votes to take out Lydia. It was a genius plan to get around the loss of Chanelle’s vote, but the execution wasn’t there. Hai immediately suspected Chanelle, because her split vote pitch was uncharacteristically forceful.

At Tribal Council, Hai picked up on Daniel’s suspicious behavior as well. Host Jeff Probst asked Daniel who calmed him down when he was stressed on the island. Daniel mentioned Chanelle and Mike: not Hai or Lydia. Because Daniel was supposed to be voting against Mike and with himself and Lydia, Hai was even more suspicious than before, and with good reason. He chose to flip his vote to Jenny instead of Mike.

This fantastic play foiled Chanelle’s plan by forcing a 2-2 split.

In “Survivor,” if two people receive an equal number of votes, there

is a re-vote without those two voting.

So only Mike, Chanelle, Daniel, and Hai were eligible to vote for the next round. However, since Mike and Chanelle had lost their votes, only Daniel and Hai actually cast votes.

This was an incredibly rare moment in “Survivor,” and fascinating from a gameplay perspective. Neither Daniel nor Hai changed their vote, so they faced the classic dilemma: make a decision or go to rocks. If they could unanimously decide that either Jenny or Lydia should go home, they would go. If not, Jenny and Lydia would both be safe, and the other four would draw rocks, with the odd rock going home. Their fate in the game would be reduced to pure throw of the dice, a 25 percent chance at a lifetime of regret.

“Survivor” players tend to avoid rocks at all costs, and Daniel was no different. His mistake was making that position too clear. At the beginning of the discussion, he told Hai that he 100 percent wasn’t going to rocks. As soon as he said that, Hai knew he could get what he wanted, and he did. Hai dug in, and Daniel eventually agreed to send Jenny home. In getting there, Daniel made even more mistakes. He chose not to own up to his obvious lie to Hai and Lydia that he was with them. Dan-

iel instead threw Chanelle, his best ally, under the bus as the reason he voted for Lydia. Not only is this an unrealistic statement because he’d never just blindly do someone else’s bidding, as Chanelle pointed out, but it’s also the quickest way to ruin your best relationship in the game. Not great from Daniel. Conversely, Hai committed to his alliance member, was honest with Jenny about voting for her, and came out looking fantastic. Jenny went home, and Hai somehow got less blood on his hands than Daniel, all while getting exactly what he wanted.

This episode was exactly what “Survivor” should be. It was fastpaced, energetic, and fun. It was full of social strategy and momentous decisions. It allowed the viewer to put themselves in the players’ shoes and question what they would do alongside them. It was “Survivor” at its purest, all thanks to a twist.

The discourse around the show can sometimes be a bit one-dimensional. Fans tend to rail against anything production chooses to add, thinking it will detract from the game. However, this episode showed that twists can enhance the gameplay and provide engaging entertainment. It’s a great time to be a “Survivor” fan.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Arts & Living

17

“Licorice Pizza” and the Spectacle of Banality Cole Warren ’24 Contributing Writer

Nominated for three Oscars, Director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, “Licorice Pizza,” is one of the most widely discussed and controversial movies of the season. Despite these simultaneous commendations and condemnations, the film is arguably one of the least watched movies to be nominated this year. Although the film was released in November and is still available in independent theaters (“Licorice Pizza” is currently playing at Amherst Cinema, for instance), it has failed to make back its budget of $30 million and has only recently become available on streaming services. This is a disappointment, because “Licorice Pizza” is one of the more unique films I have seen in the theater recently.

Although elements of the film rightfully deserve criticism, Anderson’s latest picture provides a much-needed revitalization of the tired genre of 20th century period pieces.

Eschewing a linear plot, “Licorice Pizza” revolves around the exploits and adventures of Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) and Alana Kane (Alana Haim) in 1970s Los Angeles. Gary, a precocious 15-year-old child actor/con-man, falls in love with Alana, a driftless 25-year-old, and loops her into numerous get-rich-quick schemes. As they navigate Los Angeles, encountering the bizarre and petty figures of old and contemporary Hollywood, these two characters grow more dependent on each other, culminating in a romance that both the characters and the audience know is inappropriate.

Concerned primarily with the evolution of Gary and Alana’s friendship, the film resembles a series of vignettes, as if the movie were recreating how a person recalls past experiences with a close friend. This style proves to be a double-edged sword; while it gives an aura of authenticity to the characters’ relationships, the lack of a concrete plot makes the

movie drag at times, resulting in a feeling of aimlessness.

However, “Licorice Pizza” undeniably manages to craft a spectacular depiction of 1970s America. The movie is ripe with the music of David Bowie, images of Nixon on television, waterbeds, pinball machines, the trappings of the most cliched retellings of this period of American history.

Yet, unlike many other films that depict the past in this manner, what separates “Licorice Pizza” is its continued insistence on the banality lying beneath this veneer of spectacle. Movies like “Forrest Gump” and “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” offer a nostalgic look at the late 20th century, if not outright glamorizing it. And when the pervasive social problems of this era inevitably come up, the films often sanitize their protagonists, absolving their hyperreal depiction of the past of any culpability in America’s long history of injustice. “Licorice Pizza,” on the other hand, is able to deviate from this cliche and immerse the viewer in the shallowness and desperation of both the time and of its main characters.

The film does not shy away from presenting the vanity of Hollywood, where the performers and socialites of the past are revealed to be nothing more than washed up has-beens, addicted to the control over others their fame guarantees. Gary and Alana do not escape this either, which is why I found the criticism regarding their age difference to be unfounded. Over the course of the film, it becomes apparent that both Gary and Alana are selfish in their own ways, and their relationship toward each other is ultimately portrayed as toxic, satisfying Gary’s desire to be perceived as an adult and Alana’s desire for purpose in her life. Like the aesthetic veneer of the 1970s that hides the corruption and desperation of the time, Gary and Alana’s seemingly triumphant declaration of love at the film’s conclusion is nothing more than a facade for

Photo courtesy of Alex Brandfonbrener '23

Cole Warren ‘24 reviews the Oscar-nominated, controversial “Licorice Pizza,” which follows the romance of a 15-year-old and a 25-year-old in 1970s Hollywood. an unambiguously shallow and unhealthy relationship. The film may present itself as a love story, but its constant hints at the toxicity inherent to their relationship demonstrates that the two characters are simply trying to masquerade their own faults and failures in their pursuit of romance and closure.

Despite the film’s successful depiction of the banal and consumerist nature of the 1970s, however, “Licorice Pizza” repeatedly falls prey to the same shallowness that it tries to criticize.

Early on in the film, there are two scenes where a white char-

acter speaks in a racist caricature of a Japanese accent. While the point of the scene is to criticize the white character’s racism, the film ultimately does no better, unnecessarily repackaging racism for the sake of humor. In this regard, “Licorice Pizza” is a prime example of the repeated failures of many Hollywood films to effectively satirize the bigotry of American culture.

“Licorice Pizza” is a complex and contradictory film. Paul Thomas Anderson undertook the difficult task of balancing a subversion of American nostalgia with a compelling and en-

thralling cinematic depiction of 1970s Hollywood. While the film has earned apt criticism for its failures to navigate this retelling of the past, it emerges as more successful than most American films set in this period by not sanitizing its protagonists. The incredible acting debuts of its leads are able to overcome the difficult task of portraying selfish and complex characters who are nonetheless still empathetic and engaging to watch. “Licorice Pizza” is not a film for everyone, but it is a cinematic experience that will linger in your mind well after the credits roll.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

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Arts & Living

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The Indicator ×

THE STUDENT Originally published in The Indicator’s Fall 2021 issue “Passing,” “Strangers” by Sarah Wu ’25 and “Homecoming” by Gabby Avena ’25 are reprinted here as part of a collaboration between The Student’s Arts & Living Section and The Indicator.

Strangers Sarah Wu ’25 The Indicator Staff Writer I see you on the bus first.

Or maybe, it’s you who senses me, turning around just enough for our eyes to meet. Somehow, past the friend I am talking to, past the earbuds pressed tightly against your ears, our eyes lock. You are skinnier than I remember. Age has sharpened your cheekbones, stolen the roundness from your face. The nest of brown pine needles on your head has softened, curling gently at the tips. It is hard to imagine them as the same “rat hair” your mom used to comb through, her fingers gently untangling the knots, the burrs in your curls.

Even sitting down, I can tell you are taller than me. Your arms and legs dangle off the seats like the long legs of the spiders that I used to pluck from the cobwebs on your attic floor, the spiders that scuttled across the palms of my cupped hands. Back then, the spiders scuttled forward and you scuttled backward; back then, you were the same height as I was, but only I was brave enough to catch the spiders dangling from the ceiling.

You were afraid of a lot of things: bugs and slugs, heights and nights, dogs and frogs, bees and trees.

When you climbed your very first tree, I was the one with my feet planted on the ground and my shoulders underneath your bare feet. Even after you managed to sling yourself over, I stayed on the ground, in case you were too afraid to climb down. When I cried alone

under the tree on my ninth birthday, you were the one there with your grubby, chocolate-covered fingers, clutching a small, misshapen cupcake.

We always went to your house to fight the monsters that slept underneath your bed and slipped into your dreams. You were the king, organizing the valiant troops, barricading the fort with pillows stacked to the ceiling. I was the queen, riding my trusty steed with my sword into battle. It never mattered who was who either way. We ruled over our tiny kingdom that was somehow tall enough to fit both of our crowns snugly perched on our heads.

When we turned 10, the last echoes of childhood faded from the creases of our chubby fingers, the cheeky laughter bubbling from within our throats.

The real monsters didn’t lurk beneath your bed. The real monsters knew how to hide in ways your dream monsters never knew how to, burrowing past the walls of our fortress. They latched onto my thoughts like a tick drinks blood, a fire devours wood. Through the mirror, they stared at me, and I stretched out my fingers to touch the stranger’s face, my growing face, gazing back at me.

The weekends passed by, daily visits turning into Mondays, then just holidays. I stopped turning down the corner of the road to your house. You stopped biking down my street. The kingdoms that were built in your house turned into forts, then soft caves, then just

Photo Courtesy of The Indicator

pillows that lay limply on your bed, dull and gray.

But here on the bus, surrounded by the people of the present and the ghosts of the past, we somehow meet eyes. And just for a second, the world stops.

Just for a second, I imagine our fingers stretching out, your knobbly knuckles reaching for my calloused fingertips, just ever so slightly touching, brushing past each other. Your hands would curl around mine, the same hands that swung the imaginary sword, that

commanded invisible soldiers to rush into battle; the hand that once held the smudged cupcake under the tree.

I don’t know who turns around first.

The moment breaks. The bus is overwhelmed with sound once more. Someone throws a paper ball. The person behind me impatiently nudges my shoulder.

Somehow, you and I are back to our own separate realities: the quiet boy in his chair, the loud girl walking through the aisle. Our eyes

flicker past each other. You resolutely stare at the ground as I push forward, past the tangle of legs and arms, past the silhouette of bright summers and animated laughter stretching further, farther between us. There is a moment when we are close enough that my arm might have brushed against your jacket.

But the moment passes, disappears, swirling down the abyss of what was and what could have been.

We are just humans who once knew each other, now strangers passing by.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Arts & Living

19

The Indicator ×

“

THE STUDENT Homecoming Gabby Avena ’25 The Indicator Staff Writer Ever since the Nabisco factory closed, you can no longer smell the cookies in the air. My Lola keeps telling me this, once as we pass through colorful concrete tunnels on our way from the Newark airport, again as they are replaced by the tall trees that tower over the road, and a final time as we pass the empty corpse of the factory. Its darkened, neon lights welcome me to my hometown: Glen Rock, New Jersey. She tells me that when she first arrived from the Philippines, she wondered how the neighbors could have so much time for baking, day-in and dayout. Now there is nothing but the smell of a fresh frost creeping into the autumn air. I smile and say that’s too bad and I miss it too, but really, I have no memories of ever catching the scent of cookies among the pines.

What I do remember is this: a brick-and-paneled house at the end of a straight street, a driveway whose downhill slope seems to carefully cradle you for a moment before you fall in. I remember a tree — Naomi’s tree — planted for my baby

cousin who passed long ago. Its highest leaves now watch over me. There are still bunnies who burrow under the shrubs, still a scattering of flowers in the front lawn, but the mailbox’s graying green has been traded in for shiny new copper with, on its side, two sparrows embedded in stark relief.

In the end, it’s the interior that has changed the most. I watch as my Lola rests her arm against the walls whose ancient floral wallpaper has been peeled off like sickly skin over bare bone, exposing stark white beneath. The floorboards no longer announce her shuffling steps with great groans, producing quiet clicks instead. The magnets which once crowded the fridge’s old face, one for each place my Lola ever traveled, are now stowed in the basement.

And yet the memories remain, scattered everywhere.

When I pass through the rooms, I find their ghosts tucked into covers and corners: one strains on its tiptoes next to the door frame into which my growing height was etched alongside all my siblings’ and cousins’, where we can see the year when Tim outgrew us all. Another pulls

along a little red wagon (my first favorite toy) with a little stuffed rabbit seated inside (my second). A particularly peaceful figure leaves its light impression on my grandparents’ bedsheets, fiddling with the soft flesh between my Lolo’s thumb and forefinger as he reads the Sunday strip.

I am reminded that after all, no matter what, here is home.

Here is my family’s first place in the States; here it has remained ours for over 20 years. Here in the backyard is a garden; here in the garden is a grove of apple trees. Here I am the tree, I am the fruit, I am the seed.

Memories are more than pictures framed upon the wall; they are not static things. Memories can move, can be passed down like a family heirloom or a family curse, can be lost and found all over again. These ghosts of every present moment grow and change and live and die alongside us. One day, when the house is no longer ours, when someone papers over its whitewashed walls, when my Lola’s heart stalls, when the last apple falls from a barren tree — our home will remain with me, in memory.

Photo Courtesy of Hannah Zhang ’22

Sp ports

Baseball Winless in Return to New England Games Alex Noga ’23 Managing Sports Editor Following their six-game spring break trip to Florida, the baseball team played three games back in New England over the weekend.

After a rather successful start to the season in the warm Florida sunshine, the team went completely cold in their first games in Massachusetts, losing all three and getting outscored by a combined margin of 31-5.

In their home opener at Memorial Field on Friday, March 25, the Mammoths faced off against the Wheaton College Lyons and were utterly embarrassed in a 16-1 defeat.

The Lyons outhit the Mammoths 16-2, with the only Mammoth hits coming from a lead-off single by Ryan McIntyre ’25 in the first inning and a pinch-hit single by Jimin Kang ’23 in the seventh. The Mammoths’ lone run came on a sacrifice fly from Daniel Qin ’22 in the sixth inning with runners on second and third. The two runners reached base following a slew of errors by the Lyons and were on base with no outs and the top of the order up to bat.

Despite the favorable situation, the Mammoths could only manage to get the one run across.

Jacob Ribitzki ’24 got the start for the Mammoths and went five innings against the Lyons, allowing 10 hits and six runs, though only four were earned. He was credited with the loss. The Lyons scored the majority of their runs in bunches, plating five in the second — including a three-run home run — and adding seven in the seventh. Including Ribitzki, six different Mammoths pitched in the game. In addition to allowing 16 hits, the Mammoths issued 10 walks throughout the contest, which did not help limit the damage.

The Mammoths traveled to Waltham, Massachusetts, the next day for a Saturday morning doubleheader against the Brandeis University Judges. The verdict: two more

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Chris Murphy '22 tracks down a popup. Amherst has struggled in their return from their spring break trip. losses for the Mammoths, as they dropped the first game 8-0 and were defeated 7-4 in the second.

Nick Giattino ’24 started on the mound and got the loss in the first seven-inning game, going 5.0 innings and allowing seven earned runs, though he held the Judges hitless through the first three innings.

The Judges eventually broke through with three runs in the fourth inning off an RBI double and a two-RBI single, before adding another two runs in the fifth off a two-run home run and three additional insurance runs in the sixth. The Mammoths strung together eight total hits, but the Judges’ starting pitcher — in just his second collegiate start — went a full seven innings, needing only 79

pitches to do so and notching seven strikeouts along the way. Only one Mammoth base runner made it past second base in the entire game, and the Mammoths did not have any extra-base hits.

In game two, the Mammoths took a lead for first time all weekend, scoring three runs in the fourth inning off of a Luke Padian ’24 sacrifice fly and a Jackson Reydel ’23 two-run home run to go up 3-0.

That lead was short lived, however, as the Judges struck back with a solo homer of their own in the third and a three-run home run in the fifth, both of which were hit by the same player, to take a 4-3 lead. Reydel tied the score at four apiece with his second homer of the contest in the

sixth inning, a towering blast to center field, but the Judges struck back in their half of the sixth inning with three runs of their own, including another multi-run home run, to take a 7-4 lead that they would not relinquish. The Mammoths failed to get a runner on base in the final frame, and the game ended with the Mammoths losing by three.

Sachin Nambiar ’22 started on the bump for the Mammoths and allowed just one run through the first four innings, but he was pulled in the fifth after allowing three runs and giving up the lead. Nambiar allowed five hits and tallied six strikeouts. Tyson Luna ’25 came on in relief in the bottom of the fifth inning and was credited with the loss, giving up two

hits and three earned runs in 1.1 innings of work. The Mammoths were snakebitten by the long ball, as six of the Judges’ seven runs in the second game came via the home run.

The Mammoths play an away game against Worcester Polytechnic Institute on Wednesday, March 30, before opening NESCAC play with a three-game series against Wesleyan on Friday, April 1, and Saturday, April 2. Friday’s game is home, with first pitch scheduled for 4 p.m., while the Saturday doubleheader will be played at Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut. The Mammoths will travel to Rhode Island College for a game on Monday, April 4, and play a home game against Westfield State University on Tuesday, April 5.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Sports

21

Viral Bennett Goal Remains Men’s Lacrosse Highlight Mike Schretter ’23 Staff Writer In last weekend’s win over Bates at the Mustang Classic, midfielder Jake Bennett ’24 had one of the most eye-catching Amherst sports moments of the year so far. His behind-theback goal against the Bobcats went viral, earning significant attention across various social media platforms, which put the Mammoths in the national spotlight. Amherst went on to defeat the Bobcats 22-10 in that matchup, placing them at 2-1 on the season up to that point.

As of Sunday, March 27, the video has over 61,000 views on the Inside Lacrosse Instagram page and over 100,000 views on all platforms combined. The play went down like this: after skillfully beating his defender behind the cage, captain PJ Clementi ’22 delivered a great pass to Bennett, who caught it about 20 yards from the goal, moving to the right, got a step on his defender, and fired a laser behind his back into the top-right corner. Bennett explained, “I was trying to get myself a free look because the defender was being physical and felt that type of shot was one of my better options, and I went for it.”

His Amherst teammates had nothing but praise for their teammate and expressed excitement to see their friend have a successful moment on the field.

Bayard DeMallie ’23 described the goal as an “incredible finish,” and went on to explain his thoughts as that pivotal play unfolded. “He (Bennett) was getting physical with his defender, so I was expecting him to roll back to a shot, but he used his defender’s pressure to lean into a BTB [behind-the-back] from 12 yards and stung the corner.”

It wasn’t just his teammates who expressed excitement about his goal; the world took notice as well. Professional lacrosse players, including lacrosse legend Paul Rabil, commented on the video, expressing their praise for the shot. With his

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Jake Bennett '24, right, and two teammates observe the field during a home lacrosse game. goal, Bennett gave the lacrosse world a remarkable moment, and showcased on a national level the high level play of which Division III athletes are capable.

But on a smaller scale, this was an opportunity for the lacrosse team to show the Amherst community that all the hard work has paid off. The Mammoths had fall practices with first-year head coach Sean Woods, as allowed by the NCAA, for the first time in 2021, and they have been working to prove themselves despite having a completely new roster of players. Bennett brought a lot of excitement to the team with highlight-reel play, and it helped spur an undefeated weekend for the Mammoths down in Maryland. Looking forward, Bennett’s goal has made the team confident they can put another win streak

together. Ethan Opdahl ’23 highlighted that the attention that the goal has received has only reinforced that they have the talent to put wins together, and they are confident they can have more success as the season progresses. Opdahl said, “We have the talent and have played tough with top teams, [so] we are excited for Tuesday [to show that].”

Though Bennett’s goal created some early-season energy, men’s lacrosse has had an upand-down start to the first seven games of their season, earning a middling 4-3 record and dropping from a No. 10 ranking to No. 14. However, despite their uneven results, the Mammoths have shown great talent and promise so far in the early part of their season. They've played two top-five teams closely, los-

ing hard-fought contests to No. 3 Tufts 18-14 on March 13 and to No. 5 Fisher 14-13 in overtime this past Saturday, March 23. They also notched a huge win over No. 11-ranked Gettysburg 18-14 on March 19.

Across the last week, the Mammoth's season again sputtered against Springfield College on Wednesday, March 23. The Mammoths dominated the first quarter 5-2, but they faltered during the middle two periods and were down two heading into the fourth. The Mammoths rallied to take a 14-13 lead with less than three minutes remaining, but they let in a Springfield goal thirty seconds later, forcing overtime. The Pride scored after just thirty seconds — securing the golden-goal victory.

The Mammoths suffered the

same, brutal fate on Saturday, March 26 against No. 5 St. John Fisher College. They pushed one of the nation’s top teams to the limit, leading by 2 at halftime, but they again stumbled in the first overtime period. The ship was righted on the night of Tuesday, March 29, against Western New England University — but just barely. The Mammoths struggled in the first half but turned up with a 5-1 third quarter to carry a three-goal lead into the final frame. Western New England made a lastditch run but the Mammoths did enough to carry the game 11-10.

Amherst is back on the road on Saturday, April 2, at NESCAC foe Bowdoin for a 1 p.m. tilt, as they look for another win and more incredible plays against the Polar Bears.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Sports

22

Marie Fagan ’22 Ends All-American, Record-breaking Career Hedi Skali ’25 Staff Writer Winter 2022 saw Marie Fagan ’22, captain of the women’s swimming and diving team, win four All-American honors and break her own school record in the 200fly event for the fourth time. Her successful senior season came after a challenging year, in which she lost her junior season because of Covid.

Staff Writer Hedi Skali ’25 sat down with Fagan to reflect on her Amherst career. Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and style.

Q: You ended nationals with four all-American honors. That's obviously a pretty big deal. How did you get to this moment, and how were you able to deal with your struggles from last year?

A: I would say a big thing that happens for a lot of, specifically, high school swimmers is that a lot of swimmers peak. We call it peaking, where you’ll reach a certain point in high school where you kind of hit a brick wall and it becomes really difficult to be dropping time. Swimming is all about dropping time. Time is how we measure our success. So, oftentimes, it’s really difficult for high schoolers, specifically, to get over that wall. You know, you’re trying to look good for recruiters.

So before coming into Amherst, my best time in the 200-fly was a 2:06.809 — which was good, and I was really happy about it, but I [swam] that time in my junior year. And otherwise, I was being recruited for backstroke here.

The best times that I had in backstroke were from my freshman year and from eighth grade. I had a lot of successes in high school swimming, and a lot of stuff to be proud of. But in high school, I was really focusing on being a versatile swimmer so that I had something to offer in college. So I worked on all my strokes.

When I got here, there was a spot for butterfly, and I decided to really commit to that. I ended up really finding my stroke. I was

understanding how my body was supposed to feel in the water and I had the help of [Head Swimming and Diving] Coach [Nick] Nichols and all the other assistant coaches we’ve had. I was honestly just really lucky to have them.

Every time I went my best time in college, it was just an incredible experience, and I feel so lucky to have that because not a lot of people get that. A lot of times that brick wall lasts. Somehow my freshman year I got my best time in the 200-fly, and then my sophomore year I did it again, and was even able to do so my senior year.

I threw my hand over my mouth every time. I was just so shocked.

I also don’t think it comes out of nowhere. It comes out of a lot of hard work and a lot of time. A lot of my life changed in college because I was focused on swimming faster and improving my lifestyle, but it’s really shocking and exciting when it comes together like that. I’m just really grateful for being able to see progress, because sometimes people put in the work, and we don’t get to see it. I feel really grateful that that was something that showed up in the numbers.

Q: You mentioned how much time you put into into swimming. How are you able to balance such an important part of your life with being a student?

A: Yeah it’s definitely no easy task.

But now in my retirement, it actually feels impossible to work.

Swimming, for me, is obviously a really difficult and challenging sport, but it also really provides that rest and break. It becomes a home to look forward to in the middle of the day. It kind of allows me to re-enter the world of academics once I’m out of the pool. I definitely am someone that likes to fill their time, so that compartmentalization is key for me. I’m also a part of Choral Society, and that’s another eight hours a week on top of the 20 hours I spend swimming and working out. I always say it’s not easy, but they’re activities that I’m passionate about, and they helped make

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Marie Fagan '22, captain of women's swimming, earned four All-American honors. Fagan has broken her own school record in the 200-fly three times since her freshman year. returning to academics feel easier, because I can look forward to them. So the swimming and the singing are ways that I’m able to recenter and refocus on myself.

It’s sort of my own built-in selfcare.

Q: As a senior, you just finished your swimming career, you're about to graduate. How are you feeling about life after college?

Do you think swimming will still play a role in your life?

A: It’s difficult. I realized that losing two years was really hard. At Nationals I realized the last time I was here, it was freshman year.

And there were two opportunities in between that to be here and be doing this and gaining that experience that didn’t happen. In a lot of ways, I’m very excited to graduate. There’s a lot to look forward to, and I’m really trying to focus on how exciting it is to start this new chapter. I’m not entirely sure and committed to one vision or one pathway. I’m trying to be excited about that, and at the same time, it’s really nerve-wracking.

I’m focused on what’s exciting and what I do know, as I have always done a lot of work with swimming and water. I spent a year working with the Interna-

tional Water Safety Foundation.

I’d love to keep doing stuff with them, because of the importance of combating drowning. And I’ve also been a swim coach for years.

I think there’s definitely a part of me that wants to keep that in some way. I don’t know if that means working as a swim coach.

But I think it will show in many different forms. Swimming definitely won’t disappear out of my life — it’s become such a big part of it. It’s become part of my work, my self care, my exercise. But I’m still focusing on being excited for all the opportunities that I can now look forward to with all this newfound time and energy.

Q: What is the fondest memory of your swimming career at Amherst?

A: I’m very proud of my last 200fly. I had been hoping to qualify for the A final, and in the morning I found out I hadn’t. Meaning I couldn’t place in the top eight, which was really difficult for me to come to terms with because it has been a goal of mine for years now. They had actually just had the senior ceremony and I barely got to warm up for my race because I was, you know, in a line of a billion seniors that were gradu-

ating, and I hopped into the pool thinking I was gonna just be crap again, like I wasn’t gonna swim well, because of how the morning had gone. And I didn’t even get to warm up. I ended up going my best time, which was faster than what I had done at NESCACs. That was an incredible memory because it was honestly the race of my life. I thought that was the culmination of my career. I thought that was what I was going to look back and be proud of.

Being able to go faster after having been so disappointed with myself in the morning, I ended up getting the second-fastest time at the meet. Just by having this whole heat of girls ahead of me, I won my own heat and was the second-fastest time but there was one girl that beat me at the top. And when I finished my race, I looked up to my parents and I just started bawling. That was my last individual race. Given the context, that really summarized so much about my career, which is a lot of lost opportunities; maybe I didn’t make the top eight, but I was right there with them. And I could have swam in the A final, but I think I was proud of just [like] not giving up. So I’m pretty proud of that.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Sports

23

Women’s Lacrosse Wins Both, Shows Owls Hoo’s Boss Ava O’Connor ’24 Staff Writer The women’s lacrosse team continued its streak of six consecutive wins this weekend and showed no signs of slowing down. On Saturday, March 26, Amherst faced nearby Westfield State University and came out on top, notching its first win of the week 17-7.

Coming into the game, the Owls were a relative unknown: the Mammoths had only faced them once before, in 2019, when they won 17-3 on the road in Westfield.

As in 2019, the Mammoths quickly overwhelmed their opponent on Saturday. Sydney Larsen ’23 started off strong, scoring a goal in the first two minutes of the game with an assist by Becky Kendall ’22. Kendall also scored just over a minute later, giving the Mammoths a two-goal cushion before the Owls got on the scoreboard for the first time. Lauren Friedman ’25 scored her first goal of the game with 8:32 to go in the first period before the Owls scored again.

Campbell Moriarty ’24 netted her

first of the day off a beautiful cut and one-time finish in response.

Friedman and Moriarty then both scored their second goals of the day to extend the lead to four.

Moriarty finished with three goals in the game. The Owls scored two more goals to finish the quarter on a high note; but that would be the most they would score in any quarter in the game, and the Mammoths ended the frame with a 6-4 lead.

Remember Friedman? She came into the second period on fire, scoring the first three goals of the quarter. Then, defender Grace Wyckoff ’24 netted her first collegiate goal unassisted to extend the lead. The Owls didn’t manage to score until the last minute of the period, and the Mammoths went into halftime with a commanding 10-5 lead.

The Owls were only able to score two goals across the second half, while the Mammoths recorded three in the third quarter and four in the fourth. As the Mammoths ran away with the game, midfielder Rachel Rogers

’25 scored her first collegiate goal, and Megan Larmann ’22 scored her first goal of the season, sealing a Mammoth victory.

The team came together and absolutely dominated their competition on every front, never trailing in the game. And some individual performances were especially impressive. Friedman set a career-high with five goals against Westfield State and remains the team’s leading scorer this season, with 17 total goals through six games. Ashley Tucker ’22, Kendall, and Kendyl Stewart ’23 each had two assists. Kendall also extended an outstanding 11-game goal-scoring streak and continues to propel the Mammoths toward victory. On the defensive side, senior goalkeeper Caroline Fischer ’22 saved the day, stopping eight of the Owls’ shots and holding them to just one goal in each of the final three quarters.

The momentum didn’t stop in New Hampshire, with the goals continuing to flow in their game against another Owls team, Keene State University. The Mammoths

got the ball rolling early, with Maddie Blalock ’23 scoring the game's opening goal, her first of the season, less than two minutes into the contest. Keene quickly tied the game, but Eliza Marcus ’25E got her second goal of the season off a free-position shot only 20 seconds later. The Owls tied the game a second time, but this would be the last time the game was at all close, as Tucker and Kendall scored backto-back goals to finish the first quarter, resulting in a 4-2 Amherst lead at the horn.

The game’s second period was more of the same, as Bevacqua and Moriarty extended Amherst’s scoring run before the Owls got on the board twice. With the lead again narrowed to just two, the Mammoths looked to be losing their mojo. But then the floodgates opened, with a 9-0 run putting the game away for good. Three of those goals came in the last two minutes of play before the break ­— first, Moriarty got her second of the day off the first career assist from Charlotte Palmore ’24, and Larsen and Bevacqua netted

the final two goals of the period to widen the margin to five.

The third period remained all Amherst, with the Mammoths scoring the remaining six of their nine in a row. One goal from Larsen and two from Friedman got the ball rolling. With less than seven minutes left in the period, Kendall made the score 13-4, before Tucker tallied Amherst’s 14th. A few minutes later, Kendall returned to the scoresheet to make it 15. Keene got one back on the Mammoths with 11 seconds remaining in the period, but the damage was already done.

The game’s final quarter was quieter, with Amherst reaching deeper into its roster, allowing its starters to rest. Keene scored one goal four minutes into the period, and for the final goal of the game, Olivia Stewart ’25 recorded her first career goal from a free position shot, leaving the final score at a definitive 16-6.

The Mammoths will look to continue their winning streak as they face No. 17 Bowdoin at home on Saturday, April 2, at noon.

Men Win Both, Women Split NESCAC Tennis Openers Sylvan Wold ’25 Staff Writer

Amherst tennis kicked off spring conference competition this weekend with matches against the Connecticut College Camels and the Wesleyan Cardinals. The No. 9-ranked women’s team swept Connecticut 9-0 in a dominating performance before falling to Wesleyan in a 4-5 thriller. The men’s team won both their matches, sweeping Connecticut 9-0 and beating Wesleyan 6-3.

Women Due to rain, the Mammoths traveled to the indoor tennis courts at the Ludlow Tennis Club for their Saturday match against Conn, instead of playing at Amherst’s outdoor courts on campus.

The three doubles teams started the match off strong, dropping just four games throughout the entirety of the competition. The No. 2 pair Deliala Friedman ’25 and Julia Lendel ’24, and No. 3 pair Anya Ramras ’22 and Amy Cui ’25 each won their matches 8-2. The No. 1 pair Jackie Bukzin ’22 and Mia Kintiroglou ’25 demolished their opponents 8-0, sending the Mammoths into their singles matches with confidence.

Bukzin, who is currently the No. 1-ranked singles player in the Northeast region, won every single game of her match. In the No. 5 and No.6 spots, Calista Sha ’23 and Anya Ramras ’22 followed Bukzin’s lead by sweeping their opponents 6-0, 6-0. The rest of the team also won their matches, collectively dropping only six games.

The action continued on Sunday with a top-10 showdown against No. 5-ranked Wesleyan.

The Cardinals captured an early 2-1 lead in doubles play, defeating Bukzin and Kintiroglou, along with Friedman and Lendel.

Ramras and Cui held strong to secure a crucial point, though, winning their match 8-3.

At the No. 1 and No. 2 spots, Bukzin and Cui fought hard to win their matches and give Amherst the lead — Cui’s match lasted a close three games. At No. 3 and No. 4, Lendel and Friedman fell to their opponents, but Sha was able to tie up the match again with a dominant 6-4, 6-1 win at No. 5. Unfortunately, Ramras lost her match at No. 6, leaving the Mammoths with a one-point deficit.

Women’s tennis returns to action next weekend, with matches

against No. 16 Bowdoin and No. 32 Colby in Maine.

Men The men’s team also opened their weekend competition in the Ludlow indoor courts against the Camels.

Their match started in similar fashion, with all three doubles teams winning their matches, only dropping five games in the process. In singles competition, Damien Ruparel ’22, who had not lost a match this season, continued his undefeated streak at the No.1 spot. The rest of the Mammoths followed suit, with every athlete winning their match in two games.

The next day, Amherst returned to play Little Three rival Wesleyan, who is currently ranked 26th in the nation. The Mammoths secured an early 2-1

lead in doubles matches, with No. 1 pair Ruparel and Sujit Chepuri ’25 and No. 3 pair Micah Elias ’24 and Kobe Ellenbogen ’25 winning their games in dominant fashion. No. 2 pair Harris Foulkes ’22 and Ed Opie ’25 lost a point in a tight match that ended in a tiebreaker.

Wesleyan came back strong in the singles matches, winning at the No.1 and No. 3 spots. Ruparel lost his first match this season to Peter Anker, while Chepuri was beaten in a match that required tiebreak wins in both sets. Amherst swept the rest of the matchup, though, with convincing wins from Foulkes, Elias, Opie, and Willie Turchetta ’22, which was enough to bring home the win.

The men’s tennis team will also head to Maine next weekend to face No. 7-ranked Bowdoin and No. 33-ranked Colby.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Sports

24

With 2 Walkoffs, Softball Sweeps Weekend Doubleheader Maya Reiner ’25 Staff Writer

The Mammoths took on Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in a doubleheader on Saturday, March 26, where they came out on top in both games.

Amherst swept the Engineers, winning 3-2 in the first game and 5-4 in the second.

Game 1 The Mammoths started the day off strong in the bottom of the second inning, as Jess Butler ’23 crushed a ball to left field for a tworun homer. The blast scored Rachel Lovejoy ’23 from second and gave the Mammoths an early 2-0 lead.

At the top of the fourth inning, the Engineers tied the game with two runs against starting pitcher Dani Torres Werra ’25, though only one was earned.

The Mammoths had a prime opportunity to take the lead in the sixth inning. Autumn Lee ’23 singled with one out in the frame.

Lovejoy followed up with a walk and, following a Mammoth strikeout, Butler walked as well, which loaded the bases with two outs. However, a strikeout halted the Mammoth advance, and the game remained

knotted at two.

The seventh inning was much of the same, so the two teams entered extra innings. As per the international tiebreaker rule, each team began the eighth inning with a runner on second base and zero outs.

Audrey Orlowski ’23, who came on in relief in the sixth inning, remained on the mound for the eighth inning and got three consecutive outs, two with fly balls and the third with a ground out to third.

The Mammoths then had a perfect opportunity to clinch the victory in the bottom half of the inning. Speedy leadoff hitter Megan Taketa ’23 started on second base for the Mammoths and quickly demonstrated her prowess on the basepaths. After a ground ball was hit to the shortstop, Taketa waited until the exact moment when the ball was thrown to advance to third base, just barely beating the throw from third to first. With Taketa on third and only one out in the inning, Lee strode to the plate and hit a fly ball to left field, allowing Taketa to score the winning run on the sacrifice fly without a play at the plate.

Orlowski registered the win

in game one. She allowed one hit and one walk throughout her three scoreless innings before Lee’s walkoff sealed the Mammoths’ first victory of the weekend.

Game 2 Despite the long and mentally taxing first game, there was another one still to play, and this one was just as close. The Engineers struck first, jumping out to a 2-0 lead after the first two innings of play, but the Mammoths scored two runs in the third to tie the game. Following a two-run sixth inning from WPI, the Mammoths then trailed the Engineers 4-2 entering the bottom of the seventh inning.

Orlowski, a key factor on the mound in the previous game, got the ball rolling from the plate in the final frame with a single to center field. Taketa quickly capitalized on the momentum, hitting a line drive to left field to become the second Mammoth to reach base. The two of them advanced to second and third, respectively, when they took advantage of a wild pitch.

WPI immediately made a pitching change to face Lee, but she was walked by the Engineers’ new pitcher. Up next was Lovejoy, who brought in a run with yet another

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Virginia Ryan '22 (No. 10) celebrates with her teammates. walk, cutting the Mammoths’ deficit to one run, 4-3.

Butler, who homered in the first game but had yet to register a hit in the second, stepped up to the plate with the bases still loaded and only one out. She roped a single between first and second base to bring Taketa and Lee home, clinching the second walk-off victory of the day with a 5-4 win for the Mammoths.

Orlowski tallied her second win of the day on the mound, again coming on in relief and holding the Engineers scoreless through 1.2 innings of work. Though the Mammoths only had four hits, they

still got on base, registering seven walks in the contest.

“Our games this weekend were great,” Devynn Wilderman ’25 said. “Even though they were close, we stayed in the games and pulled through in the end.”

After their doubleheader against Western New England University on Wednesday, March 30, was postponed, the Mammoths look to open NESCAC play over the weekend, playing three games over two days against Middlebury College on April 1 and 2. The first game on Friday is set to begin at 5 p.m.

GAME SCHEDULE WOMEN'S LACROSSE April 2: vs. Bowdoin, 12 p.m.

MEN'S LACROSSE April 2: @ Bowdoin, 1 p.m.

TRACK & FIELD April 2: @ UMass Ken O'Brien Minuteman Invitational

BASEBALL March 30: @ WPI, 4 p.m.

April 1 vs. Wesleyan, 4 p.m.

April 2 @ Wesleyan, 1 p.m. (DH) April 4 @ Rhode Island College, 4 p.m.

April 5 vs. Westfield State, 4 p.m.

WOMEN'S TENNIS April 1 @ Bowdoin, 2 p.m.

April 2 @ Colby, 2 p.m.

SOFTBALL

MEN'S TENNIS

April 1 vs. Middlebury, 5 p.m.

April 2 vs. Middlebury, 12 p.m. (DH)

April 1 @ Bowdoin, 10 a.m.

April 2 @ Colby, 10 a.m.