OPINION

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Opinion 9 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, America’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 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

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.

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 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.

Photo courtesy of Steve Hersey 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.

The Amherst Student • March 30, 2022

Opinion 11 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 discuss 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 remaining 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.

w Amusements

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