Issue 8, Homecoming

Photo courtesy of Haoran

Schedule of Events

4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Inauguration of Michael A. Elliott ‘92: The Am herst College Board of Trustees invites faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends of the College to the inauguration of Amherst College’s 20th president.

5:15 p.m. to 7 p.m. Inauguration Celebration: Following the ceremony, there will be a reception on the Main Quadrangle featuring live music, giveaways and a menu of seasonal favorites paying homage to Amherst’s 20th president’s journey from Georgia.

8:30 p.m. to 10 p.m. Homecoming Bonfire: En joy hot beverages, donuts and student performanc es. Presented by Campus Activities Board.

10 a.m. - 11:15 a.m. Conversation with President Michael A. Elliott ‘92: Join Presi dent Michael A. Elliott ’92 in conversation with Amherst College Trustee Chantal Kordula ’94 as they discuss observations and reflections from his first months back on campus. Kathy Chia ’88, P’22, President of the Society of the Alumni, will provide an introduc tion to the conversation. This event will be lives treamed for those who are unable to attend in person.

12 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. Choral Society Home coming Concert: The Am herst College Department of Music presents the annual Homecoming Con cert, featuring the 157th

Amherst College Glee Club, directed by Dr. Arianne Abela, in con cert with the Williams College Concert Choir, directed by Dr. Anna Lenti.

1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Amherst Football vs. Wesleyan Univer sity: Please join us at Pratt Field for the Homecoming football game!

8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Amherst Symphony Orchestra Homecom ing Concert: John Williams Tribute: The Amherst Symphony Orchestra (ASO) cel ebrates Homecoming 2022 at Amherst Col lege with a concert of music by “Mae stro of the Movies”

John Williams, who celebrates his 90th birthday this year.

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Yee-Lynn Lee

SENIOR MANAGING EDITORS

Liam Archacki, Theo Hamilton

EDITORS

Tara Alahakoon, Alex Brandfonbrener, Sonia Chajet Wides, Dustin Copeland, Nick Edwards-Levin, Ethan Foster, Yasmin Hamilton, Leo Kamin, Liza Katz, Madeline Lawson, Kei Lim, Michael Mason, Caelen McQuilkin, Alex Noga, Tapti Sen, Sam Spratford, Eleanor Walsh

ASSISTANT EDI TORS

Cassidy Duncan, Noor Rahman, Sarah Weiner

CONTRIBUTORS

Julia Gentin, Priscilla Lee, Karina Maciel, Pho Vu

DESIGN

Brianne LaBare Andrew Kim

PUBLISHER Robert Bischof

The Amherst Student is pub lished weekly except during college vacations. The offices of The Amherst Student are located in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, Amherst College. All contents copy right © 2022 by The Amherst Student, Inc.

All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not dis criminate on the basis of gen der, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age. The views expressed in this publi cation do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student.

Photo courtesy of Haoran

Rick

’93

Mohamed Ahmed Ramy

Stacey Kennard

Bryan Bradshaw ’13

Julie Ajinkya ’03

David Rubin ’78

Brooke Diamond O’Brien ’03 Building Bonds and a Coaching

Andy Wood ’88

Modeling Water for the

Sarah DiLorenzo ’03

Reporting the World:

Jeanne Nishimoto ’08

Fighting for

Erica Lee ’03

Luis Torruella ’88

Passionate Determination:

Stanton ’08

Amherst Hillel

Michele Berdy ’78

The

of Place

Jillian Stockmo

Kyle Mitchell Virgien

Joe Katuska

Intern to the

Andreas Georgiou

Alumni

Seeking Challenges, Embracing Community

Most people on campus know Rick Lopez ’93 for his steadfast guidance of the freshman class and his exciting new class on wine, but my conversation with him kept spiralling back to two themes: his restless enthusiasm for new challenges, and his em phasis on community. At first, those two themes might feel con tradictory — how can this con stant search for new challenges be reconciled with his interest in established community?

However, looking at Lopez’ history both at Amherst and be yond, their connection becomes clear. Whether working as Dean of New Students to help stu dents settle into campus life by reorganizing orientation around squads, or helping organize the takeover of Converse Hall as co-president of La Causa in or der to advocate for faculty di versification and better support for students, Lopez has spent much of his life putting his rest less drive to work finding new ways to build up the community around him.

“A Whole Cluster of Us Took Off”

Although he now works at the intersection of history and envi ronmental studies, Lopez grew up thinking about engineering. “I was the academic one in my family,” he said. “I was interested in everything, but so much when you’re successful [in school] tends to emphasize the sciences.”

This was especially true growing up in El Paso, Texas. “If you’re a smart kid in Texas, you think, ‘Yeah, okay, I’m gonna be an engineer,’” Lopez said. “That’s just what you do.”

Outside of school, Lopez en joyed building things, borrow

ing tools from his father, who worked in construction. “He let me do whatever I wanted with his tools — as long as I didn’t use the good ones,” Lopez said.

He also worked closely with his peers to support each oth ers’ educations in an under-re sourced, primarily hispanic school within a racially divided city. “We were where [the oth er schools] sent all the teachers they wanted to get rid of,” Lopez reflected.

Additionally, Lopez’ high school had not historically of fered the SAT, and only began doing so during his time there. “[The] principal didn’t want SATs in our school,” Lopez said. “He thought it would be wasting money on Mexican kids.”

Nonetheless, as the result of a few teachers fighting for it, the SAT was finally offered. “We all took the SAT, and we all did re ally well, to the principal’s cha grin,” Lopez recalled. “A whole cluster of us sort of took off … one friend went to Princeton, another friend went to Cornell, one went to Yale, all of us from a school where [previously] usual ly nobody went to college.”

Lopez found out about Am herst through the U.S. News and World Report’s college rankings, and was drawn toward the idea of a liberal arts education, which appealed to his desire for a broad range of intellectual pursuits.

After a visit to Williams College, which flew him out to tour the school, Lopez took a bus to Am herst and was immediately taken in by the campus’s energy.

herst, Lopez says that “those four years changed my whole life di rection.”

The combination of the col lege’s flexibility and his own restless curiosity was electric, and ultimately led him toward his current career in history. Along the way, Lopez would also explore the college’s open curriculum and work as co-pres ident of La Causa to secure bet ter support from the school for an increasingly diverse student community.

That isn’t to say that the tran sition to college was immediate ly easy. Although he had high school friends at various schools throughout the area, arriving at Amherst also presented some challenges for Lopez. “I had a really exciting experience, I had great roommates, I was excited about stuff,” he reflected. “But I was also trying to figure out this culture shock of what histories are taught and what histories aren’t taught. It was hard to find a space back then where I could feel, in a meaningful way, my self.”

Early on, Lopez tried joining La Causa, the college’s Latinx cultural organization, as a possi ble place of community. Howev er, he initially found the experi ence off-putting, noting that his class, which arrived in 1989, was really the first in which Amherst had tried to recruit students at a national level from outside its normal feeder schools. As a re sult, most of La Causa’s members at the time were upper-class Lat in Americans.

Lopez has now been involved with Amherst, on and off, for over 30 years, a period in which he has contributed to countless posi tive changes at the college.

As a result, he did not initial ly become heavily involved in the club. Instead, he started connect ing with other Latino students across the Five Colleges. “We started putting together reading lists for each other, like a cur riculum within a curriculum of all the things that weren’t really taught at the time,” he said.

Some of the books he read during this period, like Mario Garcia’s “Desert Immigrants: The Mexicans of El Paso, 18801920,” played a major role in shaping his intellectual inter ests. Fascinated by the way the book managed to open up what he described as “a window into a whole other universe,” Lopez decided to invite Garcia to speak at the college. “That talk was fan tastic,” he reflected, “and it was just like a moment of realization [for me], like wow, at Amherst, you can do that.”

what this community could be,” he explained.

One step he took was to work to increase the dialogue between La Causa and the Black Students Union (BSU). As a result of this dialogue, when BSU began orga nizing to occupy Converse Hall after the acquittal of the police officers responsible for the Rod ney King beating, La Causa was invited to join. Together, the or ganizations discussed a variety of issues on campus and came up with a list of demands for the diversification of faculty, in creased support for minority and low income students, and the expansion of topics taught at the college to include more diverse literature and histories. Among other things, the takeover led to the hiring of the first professor at Amherst teaching Latinx studies, an accomplishment Lopez re mains proud of today.

Reflecting on his time at Am

“Coming from a work ing-class background, I felt real ly disconnected, and there was a lot of racism within the commu nity,” Lopez said.

Eventually, Lopez and a large group of his friends joined La Causa all at once, in order to help change the culture of the organization. Lopez was later elected co-president. “At that point, I started thinking about

A Circuitous Path to His tory

Academically, Lopez found the freedom offered by the col lege exciting, and quickly real ized that he was less interested in

“I Started Thinking About What This Community Could Be”

Rick Lopez’ ’93 career has been defined by a combination of restless drive and dedication to community which has brought countless positive changes to the college.

— Theo Hamilton ’23

Photo courtesy of Rick Lopez ’93

physics and engineering than he had initially thought. “I sort of wandered around departments, taking everything that looked exciting, until I declared art his tory,” he said.

During his junior year, Lo pez, took his first research-based history seminar. “I realized I had to be a history major,” Lopez re called, “so I canceled my study abroad plans, and figured out how to complete the entire major [in two years].”

For Lopez, much of the ap peal of history was rooted in its ability to narrate stories, and in particular to access the types of stories that aren’t normally told. He pointed to the book “San José de Gracia,” which explores the history of what most peo ple might dismiss as “this kind of nothing town in Mexico” in depth, as an excellent example of this.

However, after graduating, Lopez remained unsure about whether he wanted to pursue a career in history, and decided to keep exploring his options. After working for a time as an intern at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Lopez moved back to El Paso to help support his family,

who were struggling financially at the time. “But there were no jobs in El Paso back then,” he said.

Eventually, he ended up do ing contract archaeology in the area, documenting the geological makeup of areas to ensure that they could have construction on them. Despite having no ar chaeological experience, Lopez’ endless curiosity worked well for him, leading him to hole up in the library while he wasn’t work ing in order to study archaeolog ical practices and techniques.

During this time, he also started looking through docu ments describing the transfer ring ownership of the land he was examining. He wrote up a computer program to analyze the data, and tracked the gradual dispossession of the area’s Mexi cano community as white land owners began monopolizing the land in the region.

“Then my boss stopped me and said, ‘Rick, this is really in teresting, but it’s not what we’re paying you for,’” he recalled, “and at that point I realized I had to be doing historical research.”

After a year teaching junior high, Lopez applied to graduate

school and ended up at Yale, where he initially studied the Cristero Wars, a series of reli gious conflicts in 1920s Mex ico that arose in response to state-enforced secularization. But as he worked, he realized he was less passionate about the project than he had thought. He refocused toward the type of intellectual and cultural histo ry he preferred, and ended up writing a dissertation on the role artisan communities played in constructing ideas of Mexican nationalism in the years after the Mexican Revolution.

Lopez’ path to graduate school was circuitous, but he wouldn’t have preferred it any other way. “Taking some time off to figure out what on earth I [was] really interested in doing was really useful,” he reflect ed, adding that it can be easy to burn out in graduate school if you don’t remain flexible and committed to finding the work you are passionate about.

Back to Amherst

After receiving his Ph.D., Lopez worked for a time as a postdoc at Northwestern Uni versity. At the time, he thought

he wanted to teach at a large uni versity, but at one conference he ended up talking to Tim Burke, a professor of African history at Swarthmore, about his plans. “I was saying that I love being able to teach, I love being able to re search, and I want to be able to have conversations with my stu dents,” Lopez recalled. “Then he stopped me and said, ‘Everything you’re describing exists at like 10 schools in the country, and they’re all liberal arts.’”

Fortunately, Northwestern had just hired Amherst’s Latin American historian at the time, Brodie Fisher, and Lopez imme diately applied for her old job. He got it, joking that “I was really lucky no one asked me about the Converse takeover, that would’ve thrown me off my game.”

At Amherst, Lopez quickly settled into a rhythm of teaching, writing, and publishing as he looked to secure tenure. During this time, he also became in volved in the Five College Latin American Studies Program, and soon became its chair. Again, he looked for ways to use this posi tion to improve the Five College community, and began working with his colleagues to increase

the number of speakers from Latin America at the colleges as well as the number of events that could bring together students in terested in Latin American stud ies from all Five Colleges.

In 2014, Lopez became the college’s dean of new students, a role he says has been one of the most rewarding parts of his time at the college. Reflecting on his own difficulties in feeling like he could “bring [his] full self to Amherst” as a student, Lopez formalized the use of the FLI (first-generation and/or low in come) label at the college, which he explained “makes it into not just something you can talk about, but something you can own. If you don’t talk about it, it feels like no one is supposed to talk about it.”

As dean of new students, Lo pez has also worked to reform orientation week, moving the focus away from big lectures and more toward small, intentionally diverse squads of students, who can immediately start to get to know each other and feel like part of a group on campus.

Looking Forward

Lopez will be on sabbatical next year, writing full-time about his current research, which fo cuses on the development of the idea of a specifically Mexican na tional landscape, and asks what processes need to occur for a vision of an environmental land scape to be “claimed” by a na tion. After that sabbatical, Lopez will return to the college, where he will continue to teach, and explore ways to further enhance the campus community.

Whatever Lopez works on next, one thing is certain: His combination of restless enthusi asm and interest in community building makes Lopez a unique fit for Amherst’s philosophy, which is itself based around intellectual curiosity and un bounded exploration within a supportive community.

It’s no surprise then, that Lopez describes himself as “a genuine booster of Amherst, [someone] who is unabashedly excited about this college.” Over the course of more than 30 years of on-and-off involvement with Amherst, first as a student, and now as a professor and dean, this excitement has helped contrib ute to a huge range of positive changes in the campus commu nity.

Photo courtesy of Rick Lopez ‘93

Lopez

exploring

histories, the students met

his

Bridging Worlds and Healthcare Disparities

When I Zoomed in to my in terview with Mohamed Ahmed Ramy ’18 last Saturday evening, he was sitting in a cafe in Puer to Escondido, a port town in Oaxaca, Mexico. He joked that his brother compares him to the medieval Muslim scholar and explorer Ibn Battuta, who trav eled the lands of Afro-Eurasia, bridging its people’s differences as a student of the world.

Certainly fitting of this nickname, Ramy has long been characterized by his receptive outlook, adventurous spirit, and analytical mind. Once an Egyp tian international student and neuroscience major at Amherst captivated by new ideas, he has since traversed the world on a Thomas J. Watson fellowship to study refugee displacement, examined healthcare systems as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsin ghua University in China, and collaborated with various inter national NGOs. He now serves as both a Programme Analyst for the United Nations Develop ment Programme’s Global Fund Implementation Team and an impact consultant on a health equity project for Boldly Go Philanthropy, and worked as a Clinic Coordinator for the Ref ugee Health Alliance after his recent move to the border city of Tijuana, Mexico.

From Cairo to Amherst

Ramy was raised in Cairo, Egypt, a place he describes by its chaotic nature: “One of the things that I learned from Cai ro was how to adapt — how to move among older people, how

to deal with traffic, the govern ment, the police.” Ramy recalled how in such an unstructured en vironment, he could organically determine what he wanted his principles to be.

He reflected on his family us ing two adages that they taught him and his brother. The first, said by his father, was that “you have to give your Saturdays to earn your Sundays,” meaning that the work has to be put in today to earn the rest tomor row. And although he does not identify as religious, the second adage he emphasized was “those that humble themselves to God are raised by him.” “One of the most important values that they tried to instill in me was the idea of humility,” he explained. “That you can learn from anybody no matter where you are in life.”

While he had never heard of a liberal arts education growing up, Ramy entered his college search knowing that he desired a small community in which he could truly get to know people and have depth over breadth. Amherst had resonated with him, particularly because he could freely explore his curiosity through its open curriculum and avoid financial stress through need-blind admission. He liked that he could be introduced to the United States through the microcosm of a small town, and while he was aware that the town wasn’t indicative of its reality, he was intrigued by the United States as a concept. “I do be lieve in a form of the American Dream,” Ramy said. “I feel that the United States is a country

that’s constantly trying to push itself to the brink, and while that can be very tiring for certain people, for me with that adage of ‘you have to give your Saturdays to earn your Sundays,’ I felt that it was the place where I would thrive the most, and the place where I could perform the most.”

Chasing Thrills

Ramy characterizes his Am herst experience as “exhilarat ing,” providing the feeling that anything was possible. During his sophomore year, Ramy took an 8:30 a.m. English course on the work of Emerson. Although he started the class simply hop ing to teach himself the self-dis cipline needed to get to class by 8:30, it turned out to be one of his favorite classroom experi ences in its sense of “horizontal leadership”: its impression that each student owned the space. When he wanted to design his own course in his junior year on “Readings in Arabic Philoso phy,” he did so as a special topics student with Associate Profes sor of Religion Tariq Jaffer, the two of them writing papers and discussing Arabic texts. “I think that Amherst does propel peo ple who ask,” he advised current students on the topic of seeking such opportunities. “And I think there’s a lot of courage in learn ing to ask, because we’ve been taught by institutions and by the concept of what respect means to not ask, to make ourselves small er, to not take up space. Amherst was exhilarating in the sense that it taught me how to take up space — well and in an informed

Photo courtesy of Mohamed Ahmed Ramy ’18

Ramy is a Programme Analyst for the United Nations De velopment Programme’s Global Fund Team and a health equity consultant for Boldly Go Philanthropy. He is cur rently in Tijuana, Mexico, serving as a Clinic Coordinator for the Refugee Health Alliance.

way, of course.”

He found himself drawn to the neuroscience major as he was fascinated by learning how the brain works, thrilled by the idea of humans still being in the mak ing. He remembered his sopho more year Intro to Neuroscience course in which Associate Pro fessor of Biology Josef Trapani, his future thesis advisor, mim icked sodium and potassium channels opening and closing by slamming doors. “I’ll never forget the intensity with which some professors bring their top ic to life.” He liked the notion of training as a scientist, learning to understand hypotheses and evidence, to disaggregate data to see a story and act on it.

“There was always this sense of thrill [about] what is to come next, and I think I still hold that with me in everything that I do.”

I think there’s a lot of courage in learning to ask, because we’ve been taught by institutions and by the concept of what respect means to not ask, to make ourselves smaller, to not take up space. Amherst was exhilarating in the sense that it taught me how to take up space — well and in an informed way, of course.

A global migrant himself, Mohamed Ahmed Ramy ’18 has traversed the world in pursuit of more equitable healthcare systems and policies for the displaced.

— Tara Alahakoon ’25

Shouldering Responsibil ity

He reflects on his roles at Am herst–such as resident counselor and co-chair of the Charles Drew Health Professionals Society–not as “accomplishments,” but rather as responsibilities to give back to the community. Ramy noted taking particular pride and joy in being a resident counselor for three years, twice for first-years, and meeting about 150 residents in total. “I tried my best to leave people respecting one another, seeing cultural differences, en gaging with them … being this resource [was] an accomplish ment in that people were willing to lean on me, people were okay to trust me.”

Ramy also faced challenges at Amherst. He explained that one of the most transformative of these was leaving the track and field team, which he had worked hard to make the cut to walk on part of the way through his sophomore year. “I felt that one

of the things that was difficult about Amherst was that you felt that you always needed to do a lot, and that you could always do more. And I think every single Amherst student struggles with these two feelings until they ei ther learn to let go or they reach their break point … I realized that if I stretch myself too thin, I break.”

Traversing the World

Awarded a Thomas J. Wat son fellowship, Ramy traveled during the year after his grad uation. He traveled to Jordan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, and Colombia to study how refugees and migrants rec reate a sense of home after suf fering the trauma of dislocation. With each country came a dif ferent lens of study — through food security and business de velopment in Colombia, law and psychosocial care in Jordan, a family hosting program in Can ada, language in Germany and art and cinema in the U.K. “It was traversing different worlds with this undertone of policy ripping these lives apart.”

Having observed health pol icy rip lives apart, Ramy’s cu riosity was piqued by the mak ing of successful and inclusive healthcare systems. This interest led him, during his second year after graduation, to take on a po sition as a Schwarzman Scholar

at Tsinghua University in China, where he studied the implemen tation of such systems up close. From there he pivoted from a reproductive health NGO in Egypt to a life sciences consult ing group in Hong Kong, before eventually landing his current position with the United Na tions Development Programme (UNDP).

As a Programme Analyst for the UNDP Global Fund Team, Ramy contributes to work help ing 22 country offices implement HIV, TB, and malaria programs. He continues this work while also acting as a remote consul tant for Boldly Go Philanthropy on a current project with a U.S. health equity foundation. Fol lowing a recent move to Mexico, Ramy now additionally serves as a Clinic Coordinator for the Refugee Health Alliance, devel oping strategies for health edu cation and managing operations behind provider-patient interac tions along the Mexico-United

States border. “The balancing component of all of these differ ent responsibilities comes with the time difference,” he said. “So these are not happening simulta neously, but rather in parallel.”

Looking Ahead

Ramy made sure to end our conversation on a note of grat itude. “I’ve been very lucky to rely on the education that Am herst provided for me to be able to be adaptive, open, and critical — of others, of myself, of organi zations. It will always be a place where I feel like home. And it’s part of the reason why I always donate every year to Amherst … because they basically paid for my education, and I’m very grateful for that. Even if it’s just $50 a year. The reason why I can go to all these different places and adapt and leave something of impact surely comes from other experiences as well, but they have been built up by the base that Amherst provided for me.”

Ready to take on the MCAT and the upcoming application cycle, Ramy’s next step is medical school — after being propelled around the globe to understand medicine’s multinational compo nents, he now intends to narrow his focus. Although his time with the Refugee Health Alliance will end come December, he plans to continue fundraising efforts for the organization. Uncertain of where in the world his pursuits will take him, Ramy neverthe less continues “moving from what Dean Aronson calls ‘cul tural competence,’ moving from the perspective of ‘if I make you feel like you have a stake in this, you’re going to try to make this work with me.’”

It was traversing different worlds with this undertone of policy ripping these lives apart.

I tried my best to leave people respecting one another, seeing cultural differences, engaging with them … being this resource [was] an accomplishment in that people were willing to lean on me, people were okay to trust me.

Photo courtesy of Mohamed Ahmed Ramy ’18

In his four years since graduation, Ramy has traveled the world as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow and a Schwarzman Scholar. His next step is medical school. Photo courtesy of Mohamed Ahmed Ramy ’18.

Life as a Juvenile Public Defender

In choosing her career path, Stacey Kennard ’03 has had to juggle a fascination with ideas — the romance and rigor of philosophical thinking — and a commitment to social justice and making the world a better place.

Teaching middle school math right out of college wasn’t quite the right fit. A philosophy Ph.D. program was too short on engagement with real people and real problems. In working as a public defender, Kennard found the perfect balance.

Since 2011, Kennard has worked at The Bronx Defend ers, representing those who are accused of crimes but cannot afford to pay legal fees. Draw ing on her experience teaching in the New York public school system, she has developed an expertise in defending juvenile clients who are tried as adults.

Kennard was raised in Mad ison, New Jersey, as the child of

two therapists. She attended a small, suburban high school and then set off for Amherst, drawn by “the small community” and the prospect of working closely with professors and classmates.

Though she arrived at Am herst thinking of a career in cognitive science, she was quickly drawn in by her philos ophy classes, which early on in cluded “Logic” and “Introduc tion to Ethics.” The draw was the “approach to crafting and defending arguments” com bined with the “mind-blowing ideas,” Kennard said.

“That combination appealed to me,” she said. “I was drawn to examining our beliefs in this very detailed, in-depth way.”

Though philosophical think ing can often feel removed from everyday life, Kennard said that she was able to build vital real-world skills in her philos ophy classes: “I think I learned how to communicate effectively and how to develop strong argu ments in philosophy.”

lege to arrange similar oppor tunities for fellow students. She tutored children in the local Cambodian community. She served in the Student Govern ment Organization and saw it transition into the Association of Amherst Students.

Kennard also sang in the women’s chorus, served as a tour guide, and worked with the admissions office to pair pro spective students with current students for overnight stays.

She could often be found napping in Frost, enjoying a non-Val meal at The Black Sheep, or reading at the now-de funct Rao’s Coffee.

In philosophy, we’re always talking about what’s at stake, but I wanted there to be something more tangible at stake, and I wanted to be doing more social justice work. I also missed engaging with people who were not academics.

She has fond memories of philosophy professors Nishi Shah, Alexander George, and Jyl Gentzler, for whom she dogand babysat.

In addition to her engage ment with big ideas, Kennard long had a deep care for and interest in the ways that indi viduals behave and the way that social context influences behav ior. Not straying too far from the family business and her ini tial interest in cognitive science, she completed a psychology ma jor on top of philosophy.

Outside the classroom, Ken nard knew early on that she was interested in “some kind of so cial justice work.” She pursued internships in Washington, D.C., and worked with the col

Her four years were not en tirely idyllic, though. The na tional events that boisterously marked the passing of the mil lennium popped the Amherst bubble. She described her ex perience of the 2000 election as “going to sleep thinking [Al] Gore had won and waking up to learn how close the race had been and that there would be a recount.”

Forever seared into Ken nard’s memory will be the events of Sept. 11, 2001. “I was in statis tics class when I started to learn what was happening in N.Y. that day,” she said. “I remember a big all-campus meeting in the gym later on where there was a lot of fear and confusion as some stu dents were still trying to track down family members.”

“They had TVs in Valentine showing the news all the time for a while,” she continued. “For the rest of the year, that grief, the violence of that day, and the violence of the aftermath were kind of always in the back ground.”

By her senior year, Kennard was “mostly focused on apply

ing to teaching jobs,” which would allow her to pursue her commitment to social justice and public service on a local lev el. Before graduating, though, she completed a philosophy thesis in “metaethics” — “the concept of what is good for an individual,” she said.

The thesis centered around Yale philosopher Stephen Dar wall’s “Welfare and Rational Care,” which “look[ed] at what [it means] for something to be in a person’s welfare,” said Ken nard.

Right after college, Kennard became a New York City Teach ing Fellow, which includes a two-year commitment to teach in the New York public schools.

She spent the time teaching middle school math in Long Is land City, Queens.

“It was a struggle as a 22-year-old to learn how to communicate with a roomful of 12- and 13-year-olds who are much more interested in talking to each other than anything else, when I kind of looked like a 12-year-old,” said Kennard with a laugh. “I got asked for a pass in the hallway a lot of the time.”

Though she enjoyed “teach ing students one-on-one,” Ken nard began to “miss[] the types of arguments and the discus sions that I had done in philoso phy classes.”

She also felt that her skills would be best used outside of

Photo courtesy of Stacey Kennard ‘03

Intellectually curious and social-justice-oriented, Stacey Kennard ’03 has found the right balance as a public defender for juveniles charged as adults.

Leo Kamin

Kennard was married in 2018. She and her husband wel comed the first child, Rosie, a “pandemic baby,” in 2021.

the classroom, especially con sidering the care she felt for her students. “I wanted to be good at the job if I were doing it, be cause it felt important to me,” she said. “As someone who was (1) young, (2) not from the com munity where I was teaching, (3) still developing the skills needed to engage large groups of kids in a room at one time, and (4) not well-supported by the school administration, it was hard to achieve the level of skill that I felt my students deserved. By my second year, I had developed many strong relationships with my students and become much more effec tive in the classroom, but by then I was already on my way to grad school.”

After working for the two years required of all New York City Teaching Fellows, Ken nard chose to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy at Yale. But after three years, this too began to feel not quite right.

“I really loved teaching, cri tiquing other people’s works, and classroom discussions,” she said. Still, she felt that her phi losophy work lacked grounding. “In philosophy, we’re always talking about what’s at stake, but I wanted there to be some thing more tangible at stake, and I wanted to be doing more social justice work. I also missed engaging with people who were not academics.”

She thus chose to pursue a

career in the law and entered Harvard Law School with the intention of becoming a public defender. She was a recipient of the Sumner Redstone Fellow ship, which provides scholar ships to students interested in public service work.

“I also had students who had parents who were in jails or prisons,” she said. “You’d see the kind of the trauma and the sadness that just permeates ev erything.”

After graduation, she landed a job at the well-respected pub lic defense organization The Bronx Defenders, which con tracts with the city to provide criminal defense services to cli ents who cannot afford lawyer fees.

She began as a general crim inal defense lawyer, before moving to a position that in volved legal and policy research surrounding the death penalty and unconstitutional punish ment. After that, she worked as The Bronx Defenders’ sole education lawyer, representing adolescent clients in cases re lating to issues such as school disciplinary hearings and ac commodations for disabilities.

This decision was informed by her time in the classroom, where she witnessed the prob lems with the criminal legal system first-hand. “I do re member having a student, when I was an eighth grade teacher, who told me he had to go meet with his probation office,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it at first.”

In 2018, Kennard moved back to the criminal defense side, with a specialization in defending adolescents who are tried as adults. She is now the Supervising and Training At torney for The Bronx Defend ers’ Adolescent Defense Project.

Though teaching and phi losophy were ultimately not for her, Kennard’s experiences working in the classroom and thinking through big ideas at Yale have informed her work as a public defender.

“I see the criminal legal sys

tem as racist and classist and overly punitive,” she said. “Each of those aspects are definitely things that I thought about in philosophy and ethics. In phi losophy you think about these concepts in broader terms, and the work I do now is very ac tive.”

Kennard has enjoyed being able to continue her work with young people beyond her teach ing career. “Sometimes it can feel to teenagers like no one is listening to them,” she said. “It’s my job to listen to my clients and to follow what they want.”

She contrasted her public defense work with her time in the classroom. “When you’re a teacher, the students have to be there,” she said. “But as a lawyer, I have to be there for my clients. That shift immediately affects the dynamics of the relation ships I build with my clients. I’m going to give advice, but ul timately the decisions about the case are up to my clients.”

Working with adolescents ensnared in the criminal legal system can certainly be emo tionally draining, though.

“I witness horrible things,”

she said. “There certainly is a level of vicarious trauma that you get. The things that are said to and about my clients, they are not even directed at me. It’s so much worse for my clients and their families who are harmed by these systems everyday. And yet it is still horrible to witness. There certainly is a level of vi carious trauma that comes with this work.”

Nevertheless, Kennard said that she “get[s] to do something where I’m building these client relationships that are incredibly important to me.”

She also said that she “get[s] to work with fantastic col leagues — lawyers, social work ers, and advocates who are deeply compassionate humans operating with shared goals and shared outrage.”

Kennard said that she plans to continue working at The Bronx Defenders for the fore seeable future.

“Even though I lose more often than I win, it’s powerful to argue on behalf of clients who amazingly trust me to stand next to them and fight for them,” she said.

Photo courtesy of Stacey Kennard ‘03

Photo courtesy of the New York City Council

Kennard (second from left) testified before the New York City Council in 2019.

Kennard with Dee Brace, the former coordinator for the phi losophy department, at the 2002 philosophy spring picnic.

I see the criminal legal system as racist and classist and overly punitive. Each of those aspects are definitely things that I thought about in philosophy and ethics. In philosophy you think about these concepts in broader terms, and the work I do now is very active.

”

Alumni

Promoting Justice Through Architecture

It’s a magical feeling for Bryan Bradshaw ’13 to imagine an idea in his mind and have it come to life. The reward lies in the chal lenge of it all, of adapting the idea to the tools available and the con straints present.

His fascination with this pro cess has driven Bradshaw’s pas sion for art from a young age, and sustained his subsequent interest in architecture — where a simple two-dimensional sketch can be come a real, tangible space that people experience and inhabit.

As much as Bradshaw is an artist and a designer, however, his work isn’t just about creating. Also an activist, Bradshaw is in tentional in centering voices that have historically been neglected in traditional design processes. A Black man in a white-domi nated field, he is also committed to tackling tough questions sur rounding how the profession as a whole can better promote equity and justice for disadvantaged groups.

A Chance Introduction to Architecture

Coming from a family with several artists and musicians, Bradshaw had always been around art growing up. A ce ramics class he took at a middle school summer program piqued his interest in sculpture making, and his love for the craft grew as he took more sculpture classes in high school.

It was in high school that Bradshaw had his first real en counter with architecture, but it came from a perhaps unlikely place: the school nurse’s office. A member of the school’s soc cer team, Bradshaw was always getting patched up at the nurse’s office for various injuries he sus tained from the sport. One day,

the nurse told Bradshaw that she’d been enjoying seeing his sculptures around the school and asked him if he wanted to be an artist for a living.

“I was like, ‘Well, I don’t know. It’d be great to be an artist, but I don’t know what other possibili ties [there] are. Like, architecture is something I’ve been hearing about a little bit, but I don’t know too much about it,’” Bradshaw recalled. “And she was like, ‘Oh, well, I think you should check out the architect, Antoni Gaudí, because his architecture kind of reminds me of your sculptures.’”

The next day, the nurse brought two books on Gaudí for Bradshaw to look at, and they “just blew my mind,” Bradshaw said.

“To me at that time, I thought architecture was just like box buildings, like very stan dard-looking things because of various high rises that I would see in the city, growing up in New York, but Antoni Gaudí’s sculptural buildings had so much form and texture, and it just real ly opened up the possibilities of what I thought architecture could be,” he explained. “So at that point, I really saw architecture as like habitable sculpture, and [started] thinking of it in terms of spaces that can be formed to various experiences.”

Bradshaw went on to take an introductory drafting class, and shadowed at an architecture firm the summer before his senior year of high school. Although many dissuaded him from pursuing a career in architecture, Bradshaw was not deterred.

“Up until that point, a lot of people discouraged me to be an architect, saying like, ‘Don’t be an architect, it’s a thankless pro fession. There’s a lot of time com

mitted to it and not the level of gratification that you may want,’” said Bradshaw. “For me, I never wanted to be an architect to be rich and famous — like, that’s not the goal. Essentially, why I orig inally wanted to be an architect was to create spaces that people can be happy in and people can have great experiences in.”

Navigating Spaces, En gaging Community

Nonetheless, when Bradshaw first got to Amherst, he wasn’t entirely sure yet he wanted to go into architecture. All he was cer tain of was that he wanted to keep making art — he quickly got in volved with the art and history of art department, which he would eventually join as a major.

Since he also initially consid ered becoming a programmer instead of an architect, Brad shaw took some computer sci ence classes, but found that it just wasn’t a passion.

Bradshaw thus continued to dabble in architecture, all while keeping tabs on the discussions that were taking place at the time about establishing an architectur al studies program at the college.

Simultaneously, Bradshaw took classes across the Five Col leges from a diversity of other de partments, including classes that helped him navigate his identity at Amherst and eventually in his career.

“There are English classes that I took that were really great just to think about how Caribbean art ists and writers navigated space, … [which] was important to me, mostly because my family is from the Caribbean,” he said. “Just hearing, reading about the sto ries of these individuals and their coming-of-age stories and how they’re able to navigate spaces

was something that, at the time, was important for me as someone at a predominantly white insti tution. How do I navigate that space as a young Black man, as well as how do I later navigate a profession that’s dominated by mostly older white men?”

All the while, Bradshaw in terned at various architectural firms during his summers, expe riences that provided him with more validation for his interest in the profession.

The summer before his senior year, the architectural studies ma jor at Amherst was approved, and Bradshaw was able to join the first class to graduate from the pro gram. He completed a thesis in the department, which was about revitalizing an abandoned train station in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, into a community center.

The idea for the thesis came from Bradshaw’s own experi ence seeing skaters in the area not have a designated space to skate. Through interviewing peo ple from the area, he also found that mothers liked to frequent the workout center across the street, but there was no childcare at the

facility. The project thus sought to tie multiple communities and their needs together.

The thesis was Bradshaw’s first taste of a community-engaged design process, and started him on a path of intentionally design ing spaces for people who had previously been overlooked.

Embracing a Radical Design Approach

Following graduation, Brad shaw started working at William Rawn Associates, Architects, Inc. — the firm that designed the col lege’s King and Wieland Dormi tories. He was able to get the job despite not having a professional architecture degree like all of his colleagues, something he credits Amherst for.

“I do think that going to Am herst had a large part in me get ting that job, because they knew the quality of work that students do at Amherst, and from working with Amherst on their buildings, they were familiar with the uni versity,” he said. “So they gave me a chance to work with them, even though I had the least amount of experience in the office. … And

An artist, designer, and activist, Bryan Bradshaw

works to design spaces that center the needs and stories of historically marginalized groups.

Yee-Lynn

Bradshaw considers the needs of historically marginalized groups to design spaces that all people will feel welcome in.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Bradshaw ’13

that kind of set the path for where I am now.”

After a year at the firm, Brad shaw decided to attend graduate school for architecture, which was necessary for him to con tinue working in the field. He applied to a few places and ulti mately chose the program at Tu lane University for its emphasis on community engagement.

When he started grad school, Bradshaw was the only Black stu dent in his year, something that initially made him feel like he had to conform in his work. “In my head, I was like, ‘Oh, I have to blend in, do work like everyone else, so that I don’t stand out too much,’” said Bradshaw. “But I re ally came to learn that that differ ence and setting myself apart was extremely important in terms of how my work can be seen as spe cial or unique.”

“If I’m digging deeper on an issue or thinking about how to apply techniques in different ways that [potential employers] might not have seen, that’s where it really just draws people in to be like, ‘Okay, who is this person? Like, let’s know more about him,’”

he added.

This change in mindset al lowed Bradshaw to make grad school what he wanted it to be, as he focused on figuring out his own interests and honing his craft. He described the way he has come to approach his projects: “I often approach things by first thinking of like, ‘Okay, what is the wildest idea that this can be?’ And then reeling it in from there many times.”

“I approach things trying to be somewhat radical and being like, ‘Okay, how can this have the biggest impact and be a moment where people would really want to come back to this space?’” he added. “And hopefully, every time they come back, they’re having a different experience, or they’re noticing something new about it, so that they have more reasons to keep coming back.”

After completing his master’s in architecture in the spring of 2017, Bradshaw worked for a few years at an architectural firm in New Orleans. It wasn’t un til March 2021 when Bradshaw found a place that “check[ed] every box for things I wanted to

be doing” in Colloqate Design, a nonprofit design justice practice started in 2017 that works to ex pand community access to, and build power through, the design of social, civic, and cultural spac es.

“We are a radical firm, where we’re pushing boundaries, we’re pushing limits,” he said. “We’re trying to create spaces that … are primarily for people who have been overlooked in those spaces.”

Bradshaw noted how this ap proach differed from other firms he worked at previously, which were more formulaic in their de sign and “less about the actual direct individuals that use those spaces.”

“I think that the nature of actually considering the specif ic individuals allows for a more creative design process,” he said. “Because it is harder — it’s hard to have everyone feel heard and feel like their input has been val ued when there’s so much input from community and stakehold ers. So there’s a balance and a ne gotiation of like, ‘Okay, how do we incorporate various elements of this without it being too cha

otic, and while having everyone still feel like their voice is a part of that process?’”

Future Aspirations for Change

Looking forward, Bradshaw hopes to continue combining art and architecture to design spaces that will bring joy to people.

Bradshaw also cares deeply about working to diversify the architecture profession. He cur rently runs the National Orga nization of Minority Architects’ Project Pipeline Architectural Summer Camp in Louisiana, a program that teaches students about architecture and design through a social justice lens, with the aim of increasing the number of underrepresented minorities, especially Black people, pursuing careers in architecture.

Bradshaw also teaches in Tu lane’s design program and aspires to be part of changing how design education is delivered to students.

“I think the curriculum of archi tecture schools is oftentimes too focused on Western architecture and not enough on what is hap pening in various parts of Asia

and Africa,” he said. “We know a lot about what’s happening in Eu rope, but I think there’s a lot we can learn on what’s happening in those continents of Asia and Af rica.”

“I think that a lot of [the lack of diversity in architectural pro grams] has to do with how the design education is being deliv ered, what type of work is being used as precedent, [and] when we’re designing the projects, the stories that are being told [and] the communities that are being worked with for the design pro cess,” Bradshaw added.

There are other challenges to diversifying the field as well, challenges that Bradshaw thinks about constantly. He also grap ples with questions of how to get the profession as a whole to adopt more inclusive and intentional design practices.

In many ways, Bradshaw is well-equipped to take on these challenges. For it is just another application of the process he un dertakes every time he designs or makes art: imagining radical possibilities and bringing them to fruition.

Photo courtesy of Bryan Bradshaw ’13

Bradshaw (center) mentors high-school students in the Project Pipeline program, which teaches architecture through a social justice lens.

Alumni

Ajinkya

Fighting for Equity in Education and Beyond

“I really like seeing tangible change, and I really don’t like seeing systems that don’t work well,” said Julie Ajinkya ’03 after I asked why she decided to go into the field of higher education pol icy. “I’m a pathological problem solver.”

These “pathological” prob lem-solving tendencies quick ly became apparent during our conversation. The desire to work toward equity and solve the prob lems of racial and gendered injus tice has driven Ajinkya’s life, from her time as a student at Amherst throughout her remarkable ca reer.

As the current Senior Vice President of Asian Pacific Islander American (APIA) Scholars, and a Visiting Professor of Government at Cornell University’s campus in Washington, D.C., Ajinkya’s com mitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion in education and pub lic policy are clearly evident to anyone who meets her. Over the course of our interview, Ajinkya and I discussed the fundamental aspects of her life and work, and how her time at Amherst shaped her into the person she is today — someone whose life’s mission is to push the boundaries of high er education, ultimately making it more inclusive and open to all.

Finding Community at Amherst College

Ajinkya’s journey starts in New Jersey, where she was raised in a South Asian American com munity by Indian immigrant par ents. She went to a diverse high school, and engaged in activities like debate, which she credits with first cultivating her love of political philosophy and diversity of thought. According to Ajinkya, she didn’t know much about Am herst before applying, but some

of her friends through her debate network attended the college, which piqued her own interest in the school.

“I was expected to go down a traditional path, and maybe go to Rutgers or another large universi ty where a lot of folks in our com munity had gone before,” she said. “Frankly, at the time in India, lib eral arts were kind of a field that you went into if you didn’t make it into any other more lucrative, successful track. My parents were surprised at my decision and weren’t the most supportive. But I still decided that I really, really thought Amherst was the place for me.”

Indeed, Ajinkya was able to find her place at Amherst. Indi viduals who may have been “out liers” in high school, she recalled, were able to find their niche at Amherst with relative ease, add ing that Amherst was a place where they could “work hard, party hard, and make a difference in the world.”

The desire to chart her own path caused Ajinkya to try sever al different major pathways, but she ultimately settled on political science — partly due to the class es, but also because of the depart ment’s faculty. One of Ajinkya’s most important mentors was Domenic J. Paino 1955 Professor of Political Science and Sexual ity, Women’s and Gender Stud ies Amrita Basu, a trailblazing South Asian woman in political science. Basu took Ajinkya under her wing and set her on a trajec tory of studying gender justice and social movements. “I really credit [Basu] with changing the way I looked at the world,” said Ajinkya.

Outside of the classroom, Ajinkya developed her own voice and political consciousness in

other ways, connecting what she was learning in her academics with student social and political activism. “I was really learning how to be a rabble rouser,” she said, citing her involvement with groups such as Amherst Students Acting Politically (ASAP) and the Amherst Feminist Alliance.

Through ASAP, Ajinkya led a takeover of Valentine Dining Hall to have a “No Sweat” fashion show, in an effort to draw atten tion to sweatshops and garment workers. And through the Am herst Feminist Alliance, Ajinkya and others fought to see “femi nism in practice, not only on our campus, but at national rallies,” a natural extension of her learning in the classroom.

“We were really trying to fig ure out what our place was in the world, in particular because Amherst was teaching us how to think instead of what to think, and to always be critical of every thing that was around us,” said Ajinkya, whose activism and ad vocacy work as a student is some thing that can be seen even in her career today. “I really, really remember those times fondly.”

Ajinkya credits her time at Amherst for shaping her into the person she is today and expos ing her to diversity of thought and perspective. Her education on political philosophy and the activist work she engaged in, in particular, is the “reason I have centered justice and fairness in my own career, and in the way I’m raising my family and the way I live my life,” she said.

Resilience and persistence were hallmarks of Ajinkya’s time at Amherst, and both are also qualities that she continues to carry today — qualities that have driven her to dedicate her career to educational equity. “When I

was at Amherst, there were mo ments where it was definitely made clear that there was a type of student that was just expected to do well at Amherst,” she said.

“And I knew I wasn’t part of that definition, but I made it my life’s purpose to basically make it so that students of color would feel like the norm at Amherst, instead of feeling like the margins.”

Where Policy, Activism, and Education Intersect

Following graduation, Ajink ya worked for the Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist think tank in Washington, D.C. How ever, because she was just out of undergrad and did not have the doctoral degrees that some of her coworkers did, she felt that there were times where her “credibility was checked at the door,” and she was seen as less capable or qual ified.

This led Ajinkya to go back to school and pursue graduate stud ies in political science. She at tended Cornell University for her master’s and her Ph.D., where she studied social movements and

political theory, focusing on race and gender in particular.

“I was working in the space of social movements in practice with that think tank, but I really had questions about how pow erful social movements could be, and what the difference was between social movements that worked and accomplished change versus others that sort of petered off,” Ajinkya said. “I chose to go to Cornell because there were some fantastic social movement scholars there … [and] it was like a nice through line. [I] was trying to follow in the footsteps of peo ple I admired but also trying to forge my own path and my own ideas in graduate school.”

After graduating from Cor nell, Ajinkya returned to the world of public policy instead of pursuing the route of traditional academia. “Instead of stopping at identifying and describing prob lems, which is what I felt like graduate school was helping me do, I wanted to take it one step further and understand how you could try to solve those social problems,” she said. “So to me it

As an expert in public and education policy, Julie Ajinkya ’03 is paving the way for racial and gendered justice in the world of higher education.

— Karina Maciel ’25

Julie Ajinkya ‘03 majored in Political Science at the college before pursuing a career in public and education policy, eventually fo cusing on equity in higher education.

Photo courtesy of Julie Ajinkya ‘03

was just a no-brainer that I had to [return] to the field of public policy.”

Ajinkya spent a few years at the Center for American Prog ress (CAP), a liberal think tank, where her research focused on a wide variety of policy issues and how they intersected with race in particular. While working at the CAP, Ajinkya also taught night classes at Cornell, which allowed her to see clearly how students, and especially students from marginalized backgrounds, felt that they could “fall through the cracks.”

“I thought, ‘Wow, if stu dents are having a hard time in this type of environment, I can’t imagine what the majority of stu dents are experiencing,’” Ajinkya recalled, adding that the majori ty of today’s college students are students of color, students who are working, or students who have dependents — students that the system of higher education in the U.S. was not originally de signed for.

The power of higher education as one of the few systems that “can change an entire family’s trajecto ry” ultimately led her to focus on education policy. “That’s the kind of fight I wanted to be part of —

constantly pushing the system of higher education to do better and be more inclusive, and to not just keep [that type of] opportunity an exclusive privilege for a few,” she said. “That’s something that could help us as a society grow.”

Thus, Ajinkya began working at the Institute for Higher Edu cation Policy (IHEP), a nonprofit research and policy organization focused on making access to higher education equitable for all students. At IHEP, she worked on increasing equity in higher education and increasing col lege degree completion rates for marginalized students, centering diversity, equity, and inclusion in her research. One of the most impactful campaigns from her time at IHEP, Ajinkya said, was working alongside policymakers to open up Pell Grant eligibility to incarcerated students.

“We worked in coalition with businesses, faith leaders, correc tional advocates, justice advo cates, [and] education advocates to convince policymakers with strong research, that it was in ev eryone’s best interest to remove the barrier for Pell Grants for incarcerated students, and ul timately it worked,” she said. “I definitely credit my long history

with learning about justice and equity, at Amherst, at Cornell, with [accomplishing] that type of change in practice.”

Educational Equity for A/P/A Students

Currently, Ajinkya is the senior vice president of APIA Scholars, a nonprofit organiza tion dedicated to creating edu cational equity and opportuni ty for Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian students. According to Ajinkya, she was originally drawn to the position because of its specific focus on the Asian American/Pa cific Islander community, which aligned with the previous work she’d done throughout her career focusing on race, and which also aligned with the development of her own racial and ethnic iden tity.

Ajinkya stated that she was also drawn to APIA Scholars because of the role it plays in disproving the model minority myth, which, she says, “is such a perfect example of how poorly understood race is in this coun try.”

“[The model minority myth] uses this incredibly vast label [of Asian/Pacific/American] that

pulls together 50+ subgroups, and treats them as a monolith,” Ajinkya added. “[It] just assumes, that, despite [the] different po litical, immigration, and conflict histories that all of these commu nities come from, A/P/A students are unquestionably succeeding and affluent, and just don’t [face the] barriers that other commu nities of color have. I just knew fundamentally how wrong that was, because I’m a researcher and I know what happens when you disaggregate the data. So I felt like it was really important at this point in my life to be fo cusing on students’ success from the community I came from, and also serving as a role model in the field of public policy.”

At APIA Scholars, Ajinkya has been particularly involved in raising awareness about the im portance of AANAPISIs, or Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institu

to the institutions that are helping the most underserved students in our community.”

Leading By Example

While she has made such an impact in the world of public pol icy, Ajinkya also hopes to serve as a role model for others who might want to follow in her footsteps.

“Back when I was trying to figure out what my next step would be, I didn’t have policymakers who looked like me and made [policy making] feel like a realistic path,” she said. “And so I’d like to be a role model for students who also want to work in public service, or [want to] change systems for progress.”

This desire shines through in her personal life as well. “I have two boys,” Ajinkya said. “One is six, and one is ten. And honestly, my dream for them would be that they are able to understand their place in this world, in a way that I didn’t have the ability to enjoy.

That’s the kind of fight I wanted to be part of — constantly pushing the system of higher education to do better and be more inclusive, and to not just keep [that type of] opportunity an exclusive privilege for a few.

I want to help them understand the importance of representa tion, and how they are not at the margins of society, but that they are very much what American society is. If I can [show] that by example, personally and profes sionally, that would be a dream come true.”

tions. ANAPISIs are similar to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) or His panic Serving Institutions (HSIs), but they are specifically meant for A/P/A students. Ajinkya has worked on policy campaigns to increase federal funding for AANAPISIs, the amount of which is now four times what it was just two years ago.

“I really felt strongly that higher ed needed to do a better job as a system of highlighting the importance of AANAPISIs, the same way that we’ve been able to invest in meaningful ways in HBCUs and HSIs,” said Ajinkya. “[With increases in federal fund ing] we have been able to see im pact and to drive more resources

Throughout our conversa tion, Ajinkya’s efforts to trans form higher education resonated with me deeply. She is not the kind of person who sits idly by when there is change to be made or work to be done, and her ex tensive research and advocacy, drawn so strongly from her per sonal experience and education, make that clear. When I asked if she had any advice she’d go back in time to give to her undergrad uate self, Ajinkya paused.

“I think I’d tell my undergrad uate self, don’t shy away from try ing to convince people of things that you know are right,” she said.

“Always listen to folks and try to understand where people are coming from — but really dig in when you feel something is wrong and you know how to fix it.”

Such advice truly shows the extent of Ajinkya’s “pathological” problem-solving tendencies. But as anyone can see, she is a patho logical problem solver for the better — someone who is dedi cated to creating positive change, and who perseveres to make an impact in her chosen field no matter what.

Photo courtesy of Julie Ajinkya ‘03

Ajinkya (right) poses with her former professor and mentor Amrita Basu (center) in 2022.

Casting the Big Screen

David Rubin ’78 doesn’t want to be typecast. He’s not an actor anymore, but “just like an actor doesn’t want to be typecast in playing the same role over and over again, I’ve never wanted to be known for a particular kind of film or television show,” he told me.

As a casting director, Rubin has certainly achieved his goal. On the walls of his Los Angeles office hangs a poster for “The En glish Patient” alongside “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guan tanamo Bay,” two vastly different films — but both cast by Rubin.

Rubin has cast a diverse vari ety of more than 100 films and TV shows, has been nominated for eight Emmy Awards, and has won twice. Characteristically humble, Rubin mentioned none of this in our interview — instead, he talk ed about his appreciation of an actor’s craft, the theater commu nities he found at Amherst and beyond, and his current favorite shows, to name a few subjects. What shines through his words is his absolute love and understand ing of acting as an art form, and it’s this quality that enables him to find exactly the right actor for each part he casts.

A Young Audience Mem ber and Actor

Rubin went to high school in Long Island, New York, but lived so close to the city that Manhat tan was “definitely [his] play ground, particularly as a teen ager.” His proximity to the New York theater scene exposed Rubin to performing arts at a young age.

Rubin’s mother was part of a “theater party,” as Rubin dubbed it — a group of women who would get together to attend shows. If one of the women couldn’t make it, Rubin would occasionally get the opportunity to fill in and see the play.

“I think as a result, there are a number of very adventurous, very adult plays that I saw at a young age that I might not normally have been exposed to,” Rubin said. “That gave me a real breadth of understanding of what the the ater could be.”

In particular, Rubin recalled an Off-Broadway production that was composed of two one-act plays — “Adaptation” by Elaine May and “Next” by Terrence Mc Nally. Rubin remembers “Adapta tion/Next” as “very adult comedy … very smart, sharp-witted com edy that was the stuff of Elaine May’s and Terrence McNally’s writing.”

Rubin enjoyed his time in the audience, but he also loved being onstage. He performed in plays throughout his schooling, and in high school he took on the ad ditional role of director. Rubin would carry this passion with him to college.

Amherst School Years, Vermont Summers

At Amherst, Rubin jumped at the first opportunity to act. “Even though I knew that as a first-se mester freshman I should have been paying attention strictly to academics,” he said, “I took the first opportunity to audition for the very first play that was being

produced my freshman year in Kirby theater.” Rubin was cast as one of the leads, and thus began his Amherst theater career.

Rubin demonstrated an inter est for the performing arts both inside and outside of the class room. He majored in English and dramatic arts, was music director of the Zumbyes, and participated in numerous plays.

Walter Boughton, a drama professor and director of Kirby Theater at the time, mentored Ru bin during his time at Amherst. Boughton was also the director of Weston Playhouse in Vermont, and often invited people from the Amherst theater program to spend summers putting on plays there, often referred to as “sum mer-stock theater.” Boughton in vited Rubin the summer after his freshman year, and then again the next summer.

“Summer stock is a kind of environment where everybody does everything — you help paint the sets, you’re part of the whole process,” he told me. “And that was very formative for me and my connection to theater.”

During those summers, Rubin was surrounded not only by other Amherst students, but by young actors from all over. It was a way of being in community with other artists, which has been “a big part of my life, and my creative lives, too,” Rubin said.

A New Role

After Amherst, Rubin knew he wanted to work in show business, but “was happy to land almost anywhere.” He landed as a page

at NBC, where he worked as a part-time usher and was assigned to various offices and television shows. What really interested Ru bin, though, was Saturday Night Live (SNL).

“There wasn’t a lot of produc tion in New York,” he said. “There were some soap operas, and there was the news division, but Satur day Night Live was the only really cool, hip place to be.”

Rubin landed a job as an SNL usher, and got to know some of the executives who worked on the show, right around the time that a job as a production assistant on Weekend Update — a classic SNL segment — opened up. Rubin was hired for the job.

“Obviously [the positions] were highly sought after, and I still have no idea why I was lucky enough to get [one],” he said.

I think it helps that Rubin is, as he put it semi-sarcastically (even though it’s actually true), “riotously funny.” He also alluded to his time as music director of the Zumbyes, which “had its own comedy element to it.”

“I’m not saying it’s lofty com edy” he added, “but that’s always been a part of my life.”

Rubin also appeared on SNL a number of times as an extra, and loved the “ensemble nature of [SNL].” When he left the show, Rubin was gifted a script cover that also contained the contract for his work as an extra — he made $114.75.

After SNL, Rubin began work ing for Mary Goldberg, head of casting for NBC. It was here where Rubin discovered his true calling.

“I think having the experience of both performing and direct ing myself made me uniquely qualified for a career that I never knew existed before I was actually getting a job,” he said. “Being em pathetic to the actor’s plight, and also being understanding of what their process is, uniquely quali fied me for the job.”

Uniquely qualified indeed — Rubin went on to cast films and TV shows such as “Romeo + Ju liet,” “The English Patient,” “The Big Easy,” and HBO series “Big

Emmy Award-winning casting director David Rubin ’78 approaches his job through the lens of a former actor, and eternal lover of theater.

Eleanor Walsh ’25

Rubin stands in front of a photo of the ninth Academy Awards.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Little Lies,” for which he won his second Emmy.

The project that stands out for Rubin is the 1999 film “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” which he worked on with director Antho ny Minghella (who also directed “The English Patient”). Rubin and Minghella worked closely on a number of films until Minghella’s tragic, premature death in 2008.

Rubin remembers “The Tal ented Mr. Ripley” fondly both because of Minghella and because of the cast he assembled. The film stars household names like Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, and Cate Blanchett — but at the time, most weren’t yet household names. They had all worked be fore, and Rubin knew they were talented, but as he puts it, by and large “they were basically kids.”

Since that film (and in some part due to it) those actors have achieved great professional suc cess and won countless accolades and awards. More importantly to Rubin, “they created the best version of those characters that I could possibly have imagined.”

He remembers “The Talented Mr. Ripley” as “the apotheosis of what a great casting experience is, which is using my knowledge of actors’ abilities to find a role that gives them full flower as artists to

create something.”

Rubin stepped into a new role himself in 2019, when he be came the first casting director to act as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci ences. In his tenure as president, which ended this year, he was involved in the academy’s Gover nors Awards, which is when “the Board of Governors bestows hon orary Oscars to people who have done great work but have not nec essarily been honored sufficiently for it.”

It was Rubin’s job to pick up the phone and call the winners — one of whom was the playwright Elaine May, whose one-act play Rubin watched all those years ago in New York.

“I did have a flashback to my self as probably, I don’t know, an 11-year-old, seeing the one-act Elaine May play off-Broadway with my mom and her friend,” he said. “It’s what Oprah Winfrey would call a full circle moment.”

These days, Rubin is as busy as ever. He just finished working on “Welcome to Chippendales,” a Hulu limited series about the male dance troupe best known for its striptease performances. It’s a story of “ruthless ambition, murder, suicide, and drug abuse,” he told me.

“Big Little Lies” fans (myself

and my mom included) will be happy to hear that Rubin’s next project is another Hulu adapta tion of a Liane Moriarty book, “Apples Never Fall.” At this point, he thinks he understands Moriar ty’s tone, and he’s excited that it’s a family drama.

“I tend to be drawn toward dysfunctional family stories, and I think it’s because I was an only

child of a single parent,” he the orized. “And so family stories are fascinating and exotic to me.”

When he’s not working behind the scenes, Rubin finds time to be in front of the screen.

“As a casting director, it’s my obligation to see something of nearly everything because it’s my job to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the acting com

munity, so I do see a lot when it comes to television,” he said “I’m more someone who samples be cause I have to move on to the next show.”

Rubin’s recommendations? TV’s “The Bear,” “Ozark,” and “White Lotus” are among the ti tles he’s recently been “hooked by.”

“You wouldn’t be surprised to hear that I am drawn toward ac tor intensive pieces rather than special effects intensive pieces,” he said. “Not that I don’t admire the special effects achievements … but as an audience member, as well as a casting director, I’m drawn toward very human sto ries, and never happier than when I’m watching something on screen which has two close-ups of two faces going at it.”

As for the future of film and television, Rubin looks for the in novative and provocative.

“What I’m drawn toward are filmmakers, both on film and television, …who are not re peating themselves or repeating things that have already been on the screen,” he told me thought fully. “[People] telling stories in new ways, and telling new stories in new ways — material that feels like fresh territory.”

Photo courtesy of David Rubin ‘78

Photo courtesy of David Rubin ‘78

Photo courtesy of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

The SNL cast while Rubin worked on the show as an usher and then as a production assistant.

The SNL script cover Rubin received when he left the show, which also contains a contract for his work as an extra.

Rubin speaks at the annual Governors awards.

Building Bonds and a Coaching Career

When it was announced this June that Brooke Diamond O’Brien ’03 would return to her alma mater to take the position of head women’s lacrosse coach at the helm of a team that had done so much for her develop ment as a person, it felt like a full circle moment for her. But that journey was not complet ed overnight. Though the first thing that pops out when read ing through O’Brien’s long list of accomplishments is her athletic career — she was a three-sport athlete at Amherst and eventual ly found her way into coaching — O’Brien is not just an athlete or just a coach. She has always known that helping people was her calling, and Amherst was just one piece of that puzzle.

An All-around Athlete

While O’Brien’s path to Am herst was windy, it was certain ly short — she grew up in only 30 minutes south of campus, in the town of Longmeadow, Mas sachusetts. Despite growing up in what she described as a “re ally big lacrosse town,” O’Brien didn’t even pick up a lacrosse stick until high school, after she had left the Springfield area. She entered her freshman year at The Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut, play ing soccer at the club level as a goalkeeper and basketball in the winters during the offsea son. It was through soccer that she made her first contact with Amherst, through the women’s soccer program and then-head coach Michele Morgan.

From talking to O’Brien, it seemed like Amherst was the perfect fit. Like many stu dent-athletes, she knew she wanted to go to a school where

she could receive a great edu cation, while also getting the opportunity to play the sport she loved. And, coming from a small high school environment like that of Loomis Chaffee, she knew she wanted a college ex perience similar to that of her high school, where she thrived. To top it all off, as a local kid, she already knew a few of her future teammates. Additionally, she would have the opportunity to get on the field right away, as the team needed a goalkeeper, and her parents would only be a short drive away. It’s no won der that, for O’Brien, Amherst “checked all the boxes.”

From Soccer to Lacrosse

While she didn’t anticipate it coming into high school, it was her experience playing goal keeper in soccer that jump-start ed her career in lacrosse. The Loomis Chaffee girl’s lacrosse team needed a goalkeeper. With her experience playing the posi tion in soccer, and all the simi larities between the position in the two sports, O’Brien not only fit the bill — she excelled. But despite her up-and-coming la crosse career, her inexperience playing the sport meant that she spent her college recruiting pro cess looking to play soccer, not lacrosse.

So, it was at Amherst that her lacrosse career found an unex pected footing. “I think, late in the spring, [then-women’s la crosse Head] Coach [Chris] Par adis reached out and said, ‘Hey, I heard you’re coming to Am herst, and we’d love to have you come out for the lacrosse team,’” O’Brien said. “And that was ex citing. I thought, maybe I’ll play a couple years of lacrosse; I

wasn’t thinking lacrosse [would be] my main driving sport at that point.”

And, although she got a late start, and her soccer career was laden with success — she started in goal right away and reached the NCAA National Champion ship game in her junior season (2001) — it was on the lacrosse field where O’Brien really found her home. During her four years as a member of the women’s la crosse team, O’Brien was a twotime First Team All-America selection and two-time winner of the Kelly Award, given to the Division III National Goal tender of the Year. She was also named the Intercollegiate Wom en’s Lacrosse Coaches Associa tion (ICLA) Division III Schol ar-Athlete of the Year and the Division III Women’s Lacrosse Tournament’s Most Outstand ing Player in 2003, when she led Amherst to a National Champi onship victory.

But despite all of her suc cess on the field, after her la crosse career ended with that 2003 National Championship win, O’Brien didn’t initially re turn to the field. A psychology and law, jurisprudence, and social thought (LJST) major at Amherst, she took her liberal arts education and transitioned into the world of finance, where she spent two years working at Goldman Sachs. But despite her good relationships with her co workers, she longed to connect with people on a deeper level. While working in finance was rewarding, it just wasn’t what she was passionate about. And so it was then that O’Brien made a life-altering decision — she left Goldman Sachs and returned to Western Mass., to the place

While her first love was soccer, and O’Brien was initally re cruited to play that sport at Amherst, she found her home on the lacrosse field once she arrived on campus.

where it all began.

Following Her Gut

This decision didn’t come out of nowhere, as her journey to this point started while she was still a student at Amherst. While on campus, she was entrenched in student life at Amherst, both on and off the field. She was a Residential Counselor (RC, now Community Advisor) in both Crossett House (one of the old social dorms) and Mayo-Smith House, which she credits as be ing one of the best parts of her college experience. Her desire to form relationships with people also showed itself on the field — she was elected captain of not one, not two, but three varsity sports teams: soccer, lacrosse, and basketball, a team she joined as a first-year walk-on once she arrived at Amherst.

These different types of rela tionships were what she missed the most in the years imme diately following her gradua tion from Amherst, and were ultimately what drove her to the realization that she need ed to return to sport, this time, through coaching. “I think [my

desire to coach] branches a lot off of my experiences, managing and guiding and helping people in the dorms,” O’Brien said. “[It came from helping] to connect them to resources and knowing how to help them have the best experience they can during their time [at Amherst].”

And so, the local girl returned to her roots, applying to and get ting accepted into the Exercise and Sports Studies Program at Smith College (which is dedi cated to the practice of coaching women’s intercollegiate sports), in addition to taking a job as a graduate assistant coach for the Smith soccer team and coaching women’s lacrosse under Paradis at Amherst. And while soccer was still her first love, she found coaching lacrosse to be her call ing. Lacrosse had been the sport that made her love being a part of something bigger than herself, and she wanted to bring that love to other people. Her reasoning?

“It’s my turn to start to give back and pay it forward, and start to influence, coach, and hopefully mentor positively the next gen eration of women,” she said.

Over the course of those

much of

teams,

has made building relationships

Photo courtesy of Washington and Lee Athletics

two years, while learning how to coach at Smith and putting that education into practice with the Mammoths, O’Brien realized that coaching, espe cially at schools like Amherst and Smith, was what she wanted to do. So, even though she was relatively young and very inex perienced, she applied to, and eventually received, the head women’s lacrosse coaching job at Washington and Lee Univer sity, a Division III school in Vir ginia. And so, she moved down to Lexington for her first head coaching job, where she inherit ed a top-20 program and, at 25 years old, turned the Generals into a perennial championship contender.

How was she so successful? O’Brien credits the relationships she built and the people she was exposed to during her time in the Amherst area. “Every one of those programs every single year has a different team culture and a different way of doing things,” she said. “I think I was able to look at all of those situations and say: These are the things that

were really great that I want to recreate, capture, and make sure I take with me, and these are the things that maybe weren’t as good that I want to make sure I don’t make that mistake again.”

Returning to Amherst

But while she formed close bonds and put down roots in Lexington, when the Amherst coaching job opened up, she could not pass up the opportu nity to coach at her alma mater. Getting the job as the new Am herst women’s lacrosse coach was a “dream come true” for O’Brien, and even though she now has the job she’s always wanted, her mentality and approach to coaching have not changed. Like her time in Virginia, she’s build ing her program here one step at a time, with player-coach rela tionships at the forefront of her mind.

And while she’s spent much of her time this fall working with her new team, O’Brien says that her next step will be con necting with the community she loves and the professors that she

came into contact with when she was a student herself. She wants to give back to the com munity that has done so much for her. Her advice to current students? “Follow your gut and follow your interests,” she said. “Don’t get swayed by what the crowd thinks or what other peo

ple are doing and carve out your own experience, and do some thing that’s a little bit different from your normal experience … Don’t overthink it, and just find something that makes you excit ed and fulfilled in terms of your professional life. And if you do that, then, hopefully, you’re on

the right path.”

Without a doubt, O’Brien’s advice has rung true for her, and I, for one, am excited to see what her passion, not just for sport, but for people themselves, will bring to the Amherst communi ty both on and off the field for years to come.

O’Brien started her head coaching career in 2007 at top-20 ranked Washington and Lee University (VA) before returning to Amherst earlier this year upon the retirement of longtime women’s lacrosse head coach Chris Paradis.

Photo courtesy of Washington and Lee Athletics

O’Brien enjoyed an accolade-laden lacrosse career: She was named the ICLA Division III Scholar-Athlete of the Year and the Division III Women’s Lacrosse Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player in 2003, when she anchored Amherst’s National Title run.

Photo courtesy of Anherst Athletics

Modeling Water for the Planet’s Future

I went to high school in Piscat away, New Jersey, at a public school with a much higher enrollment than Amherst’s — and with a very differ ent composition of students, teach ers, curricula, and opportunities for students.

My teachers always told me that I was a pretty good writer, so I liked my English classes, but I have also felt a very quantitative connec tion with the world for my entire life. Plus, my father said I would be a good scientist. The flexibility of Amherst’s curriculum and the op portunities across disciplines that the college offers were therefore at tractive to me even as the school’s promises felt impossible (not to mention unachievable). Even now, I feel stuck whenever I think about what I might want to do after all this education stuff: My interests are still disparate, and I’m still terrified that I’ll choose wrong, or worse, that I’ll only realize my mistake long after graduation.

As a result, Andy Wood’s ’88 name on the shortlist of alumni The Student chose to profile for this year’s Homecoming issue felt some what pointed at me.

Wood is a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and will soon be splitting time between that job and a research professorship at the Col orado School of Mines. His work is in hydrology, or the study of water, especially water on and underneath the earth’s surface and in the atmo sphere. He has contributed to in ternational efforts to fight climate change both by leading the develop ment of systems to evaluate and pre dict worldwide hydrologic data, and by organizing national and interna

tional conferences and workshops on climate prediction and applica tions of that work. He has edited the American Meteorological So ciety’s Hydrometeorology Journal, mentored dozens of students, and co-authored an astounding number of papers.

In short, Wood is an absurdly accomplished scientist whose work has had a direct hand in shaping the tools used across the nation and the world to quantify the effects of climate change. But here’s the thing: He graduated from Amherst as an English major.

As a probable English major currently taking a class called “Hy drogeology,” I felt that just the sim ple facts of Wood’s life would make for a fascinating interview that was relevant to me. However, it was clear from just the first minutes of our conversation that my initial assump tion was a vast understatement.

“Water” You Going To Study?

Reflecting on his time at Am herst, Wood said, “I didn’t have a strong feeling of a major … I was always a very good writer — at least that’s what I’d been told, you know, by my teachers and things like that. So [an English major] was always an option, but I took a big smattering of courses.”

Sound familiar? I could hardly believe my ears. Here was an Am herst graduate from a city public school in St. Louis, who had nev er stepped foot on campus before attending, and who only applied because he was impressed with the vision of the college presented by a visiting admissions representative.

Once he got to campus, more

over, the resonances between Wood’s academic journey and my own didn’t stop. Always a quantita tive person, Wood took math and chemistry classes alongside political science and, of course, his English credits. He studied abroad at St. Andrews in Scotland and took psy chology and philosophy there while also continuing with literature, and, upon coming back to campus, found himself nearing graduation with enough classes to grant him an English degree. And so an English major he became. But, in a fateful moment, it was during that same se nior year when Wood took his first geology class — an experience that led him to apply for a fellowship in the geological sciences as soon as he graduated. He got the fellowship, but because it didn’t turn out to in clude very much coursework, he turned it down.

After college, Wood pursued a number of small jobs, from carpen try, to local construction, to bar tending, and eventually a teaching position in language arts at Land mark School, a boarding school for dyslexic students in Beverley, Mas sachusetts. “But as I was [teaching], I thought very strongly about get ting away from that kind of a career and more toward a science career,” Wood said. “I actually was quite envious of the teachers who were teaching things like, you know, biol ogy or environmental science.”

A Shift in Focus

Finding myself in a position after graduation of wanting to the point of envy to do something dif ferent from what I’m doing is one of the central nightmares of my college experience. Wood, though, never

resigned himself to eternally envy ing his peers.

Instead, he left Massachusetts. He would eventually move to Seattle with plans to enroll in a civil engi neering program at the University of Washington, but he also took time to travel. During the time be tween leaving Massachusetts and his return to school, Wood lived not only in Seattle but also in Qui to and elsewhere in Ecuador and Colombia. There, Wood said, he would “experience water outages and power outages during the day” unlike anything he had experienced in the U.S. He lived with a family “where the mother would have to go out and carry back a huge pail of water to be used each afternoon,” reflecting a basic difference in wa ter infrastructure across countries. During this time, Wood’s firsthand experience of the importance of water infrastructure and the conse quences of poor management in the U.S. and in South America began to combine with his nascent interest in earth science and his desire for fur ther education.

Wood’s Seattle roommate was already attending graduate school in the field of quantitative econom

ics, using advanced mathematical models to try to improve fisheries.

“That led me to start thinking about how those more sophisticated tech niques [and models] are being used in things like water management,” Wood explained, “and I ended up going into civil engineering.” He ended up with a Master of Science in Engineering (M.S.E.) from the Department of Civil and Environ mental Engineering at the Univer sity of Washington, focusing on water resource systems and climate change in the Savannah River sys tem.

With his M.S.E., Wood ended up working with the U.S. Corps of En gineers in Washington D.C. — the largest federal manager of water in the U.S. There he worked in the pol icy and the Special Studies divisions at the Institute for Water Resources, where some of the reports he did brought him in contact with the in dividuals who made policy related to the things Wood cared about.

For instance, after Wood com pleted a study regarding a lake in the Upper Midwest that had unexplain ably fluctuating water levels which threatened the infrastructure of a nearby town, he told me, “I briefed

shapes

mentoring

Andy

Wood works at the NCAR lab in Boulder, Colorado, a rather unique structure in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.

Photo courtesy of Andy Wood ’88

the congressional designation and the [U.S.] Senator from North Da kota … I was still pretty young then, and I saw all these levels at which our infrastructure and policy over water and climate is being managed, so that was really very eye opening.”

After two years in D.C., Woods decided to once again go back to school. “In part,” he explained, “that’s a function of living in a place like Washington, D.C., where many people working for government and for various organizations all have doctorates.” At the time, he observed that “these people were forming policy, were very young, and had advanced degrees. So I thought I should probably keep go ing in my education.”

Wood obtained a Ph.D. in hy drology and water resources back at the University of Washington, and continued his work on the im pacts of climate change on hydrol ogy, from surface water to snow to drought. He also got into forecast ing, the science of predicting weath er and climate events in the future.

Following his dissertation, Wood says he stayed at the uni versity for about four years to run

research on “building forecasting systems for the Western U.S., pre dicting reservoir inflows and floods, and trying to use climate forecasts to do better prediction.”

This began another period of wandering in Wood’s life, though this one was far more productive than the last: Wood taught a few courses and mentored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows before leaving the university to join a friend’s company for two years in downtown Seattle, which he said “was focusing on renewable ener gy assessment forecasting.” Wood became their chief scientist before the firm began to turn away from assessment of hydropower in favor of wind and solar power, and Wood left while looking to either take a faculty position at Oregon State or work again for the federal govern ment.

He ended up turning down the university job, and instead “worked for [the National Oceanic and Atmo spheric Administration (NOAA)] for about three years, working in some centers to do streamflow pre dictions, or help manage water.” He worked for three years in Salt Lake

City and in Portland, Oregon, in that managerial role, developing new scientific techniques and man aging a team of forecasters.

That experience was valuable for a couple of reasons, Wood said: It allowed him to see “the guts of this federal operation to do prediction, but also [let him work] with stake holders who manage municipal water supplies and reservoirs for fisheries, salmon, recreation, hy dropower, water supply … all these objectives.”

A Career in a Time of Cri sis

From policy-facing forecasting, to academic research, to private enterprise, and government water management, Wood had seen and done a huge swath of his field, and intimately understood its relations to scientific study and to every day lives. His route was circuitous: He said that he “tried to follow the things that were interesting,” and he certainly succeeded.

Even more than that, he says he “tried to find ways to take the latest science to benefit the management that we do that is very important for society,” keeping in his practice an awareness of his research and how it relates to the most essential aspect of life on Earth. Water management is necessary, and it has also been getting more and more difficult. Human-caused, or anthropogen ic, climate change has led to more extreme weather across the globe. More destructive floods and longer and more extreme droughts mean that water management is more im portant than ever: Climate science that deals with Earth’s water and the atmosphere is vital for understand ing the details of climate change and finding tools to combat its effects.

Wood has now been working at the next stop on his path, NCAR, for 10 years. NCAR’s lab in Boul der, Colorado, is devoted to trying to build global and regional climate models that, Wood says, “can proj ect climate out to the end of the 21st century or beyond, and really try to understand where we are right now with this climate change problem.”

The computer models Wood uses are enormously complex, with different groups working on sec tions of the model relating to the

atmosphere, or the ocean, or sea ice. Wood has been trying to build better representations of how the program models water in and on the Earth’s surface, bringing his hydro logical research “back to the climate change focus.”

There is endless work to be done, and the field is rapidly transforming due to machine learning and the ad vent of ever more powerful comput ing, which improves daily the gran ularity and accuracy of the models NCAR uses.

Wood also works with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), “who are trying to develop systems to do prediction to help un derdeveloped countries,” using the combined efforts of the global sci entific community to integrate ad vancements across the world, an ex perience which Wood says has been one of the most rewarding parts of his career.

Throughout his career, Wood has integrated a love for academia with a drive for work connected to public policy. His experience and base of knowledge mean that he has been able to advise on federal poli cy,water management and modeling across the country. At the same time, he has continued to mentor students and even fund student research with various universities and grants.

Looking forward, Wood will soon split his time between his work at NCAR and a research position at the Colorado School of Mines, one of the most prestigious engineering schools in the country, in the Civil Engineering department. His En glish major hasn’t even been a hin drance, Wood says. After all, he now “spend[s] a lot of time writing grant proposals and papers, and mentor ing students or post-docs in writing their papers.” In science, the only thing more important than the ex periments themselves might be how well their results are communicated.

Throughout our conversation, Wood seemed to be exactly the kind of scientist I have idolized: one devoted to the process and specif ics of their work, one who did sci ence because they heard a calling and had no choice but to answer. Wood has learned and worked in the way he has because, I think, he fell completely in love with the do ing of hydrology. It called him, and

he answered, again and again. If his work can help humankind resolve the most existential of crises, then all the better.

At the end of our conversation, Wood articulated a final and culmi nating focus for the future of his life’s work. “In being involved in some of this work on climate change,” he said, “I really am increasingly mo tivated by the idea that some very alarming changes are taking place in our world. … Each year, there are results that come out from within the national centers that are fairly shocking about what could be ahead of us in the next 20 or 30 years. I could not say strongly enough that this is an important area for students and faculty and everyone to be re ally concerned about, [to] really be advocating to do something about.”

It is certain that anthropogenic climate change will change the lives of everyone living on the planet, now and far into the future. Wood is one of the scientists who is devot ed to the understanding and fore casting of climate change, all in the service of developing ways to pro tect the planet from the most apoc alyptic of eventualities. His story, of a scattered and winding education propelled by interest and seizing op portunity, has given me a new kind of assurance that what I am doing is okay, that my education here is not only worthwhile but will serve me well no matter what I do for all time afterward — as long as all that can be done with regards to climate change is done.

A fantastic college education, after all, is only worthwhile if there remains an Earth to use it on: a fact which will likely inform every de cision I make while I remain a stu dent, and for long afterwards.

Wood looks back on his time at Amherst with the kind of nostalgia reserved for a very special period in one’s life. Studying next to col lege record players in the music li brary, cooking off of the meal plan at Humphries — where he lived his senior year — and stargazing from the roof of the observatory are snap shots of a time spent at the college which reflects exactly on the expe riences of students here right now.

I can only hope that I am lucky enough to make even half as good a life out of it as Wood has.

Photo courtesy of Andy Wood ‘88

Wood on a tour of the Hoover Dam’s turbines.

Reporting the World: An Unexpected Journey

As a top stories editor at the Associated Press (AP) in London, Sarah DiLorenzo ’03 has worked in New York City, São Paulo, Da kar, Paris, and Bangkok, among other cities, since graduating.

Given DiLorenzo’s variety of editing and writing experienc es, it’s surprising that during her senior year of college, she had doubts about a journalism career in her future.

“I applied to like a hundred small newspapers and I didn’t get a single one,” DiLorenzo said. “I was bemoaning to my French ad visor like: ‘I’m not going to get a job, what am I going to do?’”

This was when DiLorenzo’s advisor suggested that she apply to a fellowship in Dijon, France, to teach English for a year, as a backup.

“It was an incredible experi ence and I enjoyed it at the time, but behind it, I had this worry that I was never going to be a journalist,” DiLorenzo said.

That worry was assuaged when the French visa DiLorenzo obtained from the Dijon program gave her the chance to work for the International Herald Tribune (IHT), an English newspaper in Paris. It was her first foray into professional journalism.

“I realize now that I actually should have done more mean dering,” DiLorenzo said. “The knowledge I gained was so help ful to me when I was a correspon dent in Paris years later.”

“Planting a Seed” for Journalism and Amherst

DiLorenzo’s English teacher was constantly trying to get her to expand her writing in essays.

“He said to me at some point: ‘the only place your brev ity is appropriate is journalism,” DiLorenzo recalled.

Because her teacher was also the newspaper advisor, he urged DiLorenzo to join the paper, which nurtured her desire to pur sue journalism as a career.

However, when considering colleges, fitting journalism cri teria was not the top priority for DiLorenzo.

Even though she didn’t end up playing the sport in college, it was lacrosse that “planted the seed of: ‘Oh, maybe, I should go to Am herst,’” DiLorenzo said. “It’s so silly, it’s kind of the reasoning of a teenager.”

While at a lacrosse camp after her freshman year in high school, her favorite coach was from the college.

To DiLorenzo, her initial dream of Amherst, a small school in New England, fit the image of what a college should look like.

Despite the fact that DiLoren zo researched and became inter ested in other schools, she never let go of that experience at the lacrosse camp.

The Benefits of a Broader Education

DiLorenzo saw college as a place to grow socially and emo tionally, more so than academi cally or professionally.

“I wasn’t very mature when I got to Amherst,” DiLorenzo said. “I needed to have experiences to mature a bit, and those [experi ences] fed back into my career later on.”

That’s not to say that individu al topics from college didn’t have clear applications to her career.

Early on in DiLorenzo’s work for AP, the newsroom was dis cussing the death of Jacques Der rida, an Algerian-born French philosopher.

“Derrida is kind of obscure but I had this moment of ‘Wow,

Amherst prepared me for the world,’” DiLorenzo said. “I feel good. Here I am in this news room with lots of sophisticated adults and I can hold my own — it seems to me more and more that I didn’t need Amherst to teach me journalism.”

DiLorenzo, an English and French major, placed greater im portance on the liberal arts edu cation that the college provided her.

“I needed Amherst to teach me how to learn, how to write, how to think, how to be curious, and how to seek out informa tion,” DiLorenzo said. “In a way, that is how to be a journalist, but I’m grateful that I had that broad er education rather than a more journalist-focused education.”

DiLorenzo also wrote for The Student for two years, which provided her with a communi ty of like-minded people from different backgrounds that she wouldn’t have met otherwise.

“The cool thing about jour nalism is that it’s always an en tree to learning,” DiLorenzo said. “[Working for The Student] al lowed me to learn more about Amherst — it gave me an excuse to ask questions and call up peo ple I normally wouldn’t have.”

Branching Out as an In ternational Reporter

Despite all this time “shining a light” by helping people tell their stories, there’s a regret that sits with DiLorenzo.

As a freelance journalist in Li beria, an article fell through.

DiLorenzo aimed to write about a rise in teen pregnancies in the country, which she had heard about anecdotally from NGOs, in order to investigate the effect of the government’s hyper focus on ebola on reproductive

healthcare.

“I remember interviewing a girl who recently had a baby; [the girl] was orphaned and liv ing with her aunt. It was the most tragic scenario you could imag ine,” DiLorenzo said. “One of her friends grabbed my arm at one point and said: ‘You have to help her.’”

But DiLorenzo couldn’t prove the rise in teenage pregnancies; the country’s health services were too preoccupied with ebola to gather the data. Because she was a freelancer without the same resources that come from being associated with a publication, it never became a story.

“It felt hollow to say, my story is how I help, and having nev er written that story felt even worse,” she added.

Reporting and Editing: Dealing With Disaster

Apart from this experience freelancing in West Africa, re porting on disaster sticks out the most to DiLorenzo, largely because those stories were less

common in her career, she said.

In these cases, DiLorenzo was sent somewhere for breaking news to help out another bureau.

“That’s always very intense be cause usually it’s a pretty big story if they’re drawing in people from other places and also, you’re play ing catchup,” DiLorenzo said.

Logistics such as finding a place to sleep or navigating trans portation can pose additional barriers, she added.

When Mount Merapi in In donesia erupted, DiLorenzo and her colleagues were set to fly into an airport close by, but the ash resulted in the airport closing and thus a long, exhausting drive from an airport far away.

“It’s kind of your nightmare scenario because everyone’s waiting for you to get there and get lovely details for the wire,” DiLorenzo said. “But no, it’s 10 p.m., you’ve been traveling for 12 hours by road and you’re not go ing to know where to go or what to cover.”

Walking into a disaster and being able to garner trust is an

an international reporter, Sarah DiLorenzo ’03 devotes herself to shedding light on the truth.

Julia Gentin

Sarah DiLorenzo ‘03 currently works as a top stories editor at the Associated Press, but didn’t plan for her life to go that way.

Photo courtesy of Sarah DiLorenzo ‘03

other difficult layer to situations like these, DiLorenzo added, rais ing ethical issues.

She tries to keep in mind: “What is my place here? How can I be sensitive? Is what I’m doing causing more harm?”

Because the traditional vision of journalism is illuminating clearcut wrongdoings in cases like political malfeasance and corruption, it can be difficult to balance roles as both a human and as a journalist when the situ ation is more ambiguous.

“We’re trained [as journalists] to press on and ask the next ques tion without being embarrassed,” DiLorenzo said. “But there are times when we respond as hu mans by pulling back, saying, ‘I need to leave this person now.

I’m not going to get enough for my story by asking them to talk about this [grief].”

In the case of the volcanic eruption, DiLorenzo continues to reckon with her portrayal of the disaster.

“I still remember seeing peo ple who were burned beyond recognition,” DiLorenzo said. “Those stories stick with you … I come back and think about whether I handled it well, wheth er I’m proud of it.”

Another moment where DiLorenzo covered a disas ter, faced with the question of whether to react as a human or as a journalist, was during Ja pan’s 2011 tsunami, which had knocked out a nuclear plant.

DiLorenzo reported from an

office in Tokyo, putting together what colleagues had investigated on the ground.

“I remember my colleagues were sent out to places where they were arriving before rescue crews … we did a story on some of those people,” DiLorenzo said. “We took some heat for it: ‘how can you not help these people?’ that sort of thing.”

Their internal editor at the time responded by clarifying that the reporters did give water and food to victims of the disaster, but his larger point was that the journalists helped by telling the story.

“There are countless times where journalists get there first and rescuers know to go there,” DiLorenzo said.

DiLorenzo emphasized that her time as a reporter was not all natural disaster-related. She joked that, in fact, she spent a lot of time covering another disaster: Europe’s debt crisis.

As a business reporter in Paris from 2011-2014, DiLorenzo went to European summits and finance minister meetings to cover poli cy.

Between 2014 and 2018, she worked as a freelance journalist in places like Senegal with a focus on the effects of ebola, and in São Paulo, Brazil covering culture, politics and economics.

Her editorial experience started in 2018, when she began working as a news editor at AP in New York before taking on her current role in London as a top

stories editor at AP.

“A Little Bit of Life Really Helps You”

Although DiLorenzo initially had some doubts about not going to a journalism school, she said she feels like it was the right de cision.

“It’s easy for me to valorize the things I did were the right things because it worked out. And there are obviously many other paths to take,” DiLorenzo said.

She noticed that in any profes sion, but particularly in journal ism, “a little bit of life really helps you. Sometimes I think: ‘what else could I have learned if I had meandered a bit more? What oth er major life experiences would I be able to draw from?’”

Photo courtesy of Ricci Shryock

Sarah DiLorenzo ‘03 has traveled the globe, reporting on events like natural disasters in London, New York City, São Paulo, Dakar, Paris, Bangkok, and more.

Fighting for Justice Beyond the Courtroom

Jeanne Nishimoto ’08 likes to take a step back and understand how systems work. In school, she liked learning about religious systems and globalization. As a young attorney, she liked learning the ins and outs of the eviction court system. Today, as the execu tive director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at the UCLA School of Law, she works to change the systems of oppression that affect her clients’ access to housing and disability benefits.

The Path to Public Ser vice

The child of two teachers, Nishimoto grew up in Southern California surrounded by a tightknit extended family. She came to Amherst in search of a change of pace and environment.

Nishimoto dabbled in many humanities disciplines while at Amherst, not yet sure of her pro fessional aspirations. She remem bers one class called “Race, Place, and the Law,” her first exposure to the direct influence the law has on everyday life. She recalled, “That was the first time I was re ally exposed to the ways in which the law literally created locations where people were allowed to be and where they weren’t allowed to be.” The topics covered in the class would become the issues she would work on as an attorney: structural racism, housing law, and houselessness.

Nishimoto’s academic interests led her to the religion major. She describes her transition from re ligious studies to a career in law:

“[Religion is] a set of principles around which people organize how they think society should work, essentially,” she explained.

“Law is another version of that, where you can also have opportu nities to work within that system, challenge that system, change that system to varying degrees of suc cess.”

Before she ever knew she wanted to pursue law, though, she knew she wanted a career in public service. While at Amherst, Nishimoto volunteered for a stu dent-run non-profit organization.

“I always had something of a pub lic service mindset,” she said. “And so I thought that law was a good place for that interest.”

After graduating from Am herst, Nishimoto went on to

the University of Michigan Law School. She recalled a class called “Public Interest Advocacy,” which solidified her path as a social im pact lawyer. Taught by an attor ney based in Los Angeles (which Nishimoto calls her “hometown”), she learned the specifics of LA housing law through the class. The class also helped her “formu lat[e] her professional identity” and “who [she] wanted to be as a lawyer.”

A Career in Housing Jus tice

Inspired to return home, Nishimoto worked at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles after graduating from law school. The first cases she worked on were eviction defense cases, which she described as a “highly technical” and “extremely fast-paced” field. In addition to learning about landlord-tenant law, the experi ence helped her come to under stand the systems and dynamics that led people to end up in evic tion court to begin with.

Nishimoto also worked on other landlord-tenant issues while at the Legal Aid Foundation, such as work on disability justice in housing law. She helped work on cases suing landlords for abusive practices throughout an entire property, she worked with other groups to sue the city because of its housing laws. Before leaving the Legal Aid Foundation, she helped develop a statewide pro bono training program, so that organizations could spend more time supervising cases instead of

training attorneys.

Nishimoto then worked at the Inner City Law Center, where she worked on cases to help end houselessness at the individual level. This work taught her the value of chipping away at larger social issues, such as houseless ness, by helping one individual at a time. Her time with the Inner City Law Center also taught her a lot about the barriers that existed for people, especially for people of color, to obtain housing.

Full Circle: Veterans Legal Clinic

When Nishimoto became aware of a job at the Veterans Le gal Clinic at UCLA School of Law, she felt it was a “perfect opportu

nity.” It was the type of clinical, Los Angeles-based housing work that she had fallen in love with as a law student. “I’d done clinical, experiential work when I was a law student, and I thought it was like a really important piece of me and my professional identity,” she explained. “I just really believe in this as a piece of education for law school.”

Nishimoto’s current role as the executive director of the clinic has three main components: ad ministrative work, teaching her law students and overseeing their cases, and working on her own cases. While she had done this type of social impact law before, the teaching component of the position was new to her. But it

[Religion is] a set of principles around which people organize how they think society should work, essentially. Law is another version of that, where you can also have opportunities to work within that system, challenge that system, change that system to varying degrees of success.

Born with a passion for helping her community, Jeanne Nishimoto ’08 is now the executive director of the Veterans Legal Clinic at UCLA School of Law.

— Noor Rahman ’25

Jeanne Nishimoto ’08 works with her clients to obtain government benefits and housing.

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Nishimoto ’08

quickly became one of her favorite aspects of the job; she loves when her students have “breakthrough moments” working on their own cases.

“There are a lot of things that can be very challenging about the work or a lot of places where there’s not a correct answer,” she said. “So watching [the students] process through that and then get to … an understanding [of] how they may use that in the future for wherever they’re working … [is] a huge component that is really rewarding. And that’s a process. It can take some time to get there.”

The relationship Nishimoto has with her clients has remained central to the work that she does. It’s not always the case that an at torney has a good personal rela tionship with the majority of cli ents they have; Nishimoto is lucky enough to have these relation ships. “It’s nice to even get to talk to them a little bit on the phone,” she said “You know, when we’re checking in about a case, they’ll

just tell me about their grandkids or something like that.”

In part because of her com mitment to social impact work

and in part because of these per sonal relationships with her cli ents, Nishimoto feels her clients’ victories very personally: “When I hear that a client has obtained housing… [and] we played a part in that, I always think that’s excit ing.”

Moving beyond these indi vidual relationships Nishimoto also believes in the importance of understanding the systems of oppression that affect each of her clients; for her, this is a key part of building the trust between client and attorney that she so deeply values. “[Clients are] able to tell me, ‘Look, I grew up as a Black man in South LA during the War on Drugs,’” she said. “And then we don’t have to talk about that much more. I understand what that means.”

Nishimoto mentioned a spe cific client whose case is a source of pride for her. The client is a veteran suffering from severe Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after being attacked by soldiers

while serving in the military in the 1980s. She helped him secure benefits (including retroactive payments) from Veterans Affairs. Although the money was an im portant victory, the vindication that came with victory in a 40year battle was equally important for the case. Throughout our con versation, Nishimoto was most passionate when describing these personal victories that she helped her clients secure.

One new project that she is

excited about is a qualitative re search project about the relation ship between nuisance evictions and disability. The intuition be hind the research is that behaviors influenced by disability are often used as justification for nuisance evictions. The project will both examine this correlation and an alyze the legal protections (or lack thereof) that exist to protect against these ableist practices.

Nishimoto’s line of work is emotionally taxing, but she re mains committed to the cause.

“One thing that keeps me in the work is necessity. It’s the thing that got me started in a lot of ways. And it’s the thing that will contin ue to have me in it,” she explained.

“For me personally, I think it’s very hard living in Southern Cali fornia and not feeling like I should be doing something that’s going to be useful or helpful to people.”

Nishimoto came to Amherst with the spirit of a public servant; that spirit has only grown stronger over the years.

One thing that keeps me in the work is necessity. It’s the thing that got me started in a lot of ways. And it’s the thing that will continue to have me in it.

“

”

There are a lot of things that can be very challenging about the work or a lot of places where there’s not a correct answer. So watching [the students] process through that and then get to … an understanding [of] how they may use that in the future for wherever they’re working … [is] a huge component that is really rewarding.

”

Photo courtesy of Jeanne Nishimoto ’08

Latinx Student Activism:

Celebrating 50 Years of La Causa and 5 Years of LLAS

Since the early 1970s, Latinx students at Amherst have worked to make the college a place where their identities, academics, and self-exploration could thrive. For this year’s Homecoming Issue, The Student explored this 50-year history of Latinx activism and involvement on campus, speaking to students, faculty, and alumni about what being Latinx at Amherst means to them, and the gains that several generations of students have made.

Introduction

What does it mean to be Latinx at Am herst College? This question has followed generations of Latinx students who’ve come to Amherst since the college’s earliest at tempts at diversifying its student body. However, class after class of students have found that there’s no single answer to this perpetual question — rather, the answer has changed over the past 50 years, with students constantly redefining and pushing the boundaries of Latinx identity through activism, community building, cultural ex pression, and student-led organizations like La Causa, Amherst’s Latinx affinity group, and more recently through academics by way of the LLAS department.

Latinx History at Amherst

In 1972, Les Purificación, Tomás Gonza lez, and Edmundo Orozco founded La Causa, Amherst’s first working-class Latinx student organization, with the goal of “creat[ing] a viable Latino social, cultural and political body” on campus and increasing Latinx stu dent enrollment.

The LLAS program was officially launched in 2017, and has produced a steady number of majors ever since. Becoming a “space for progressive scholarship,” The de partment has also enabled students to crit ically study their own histories, as well as nurture “radical scholarship,” said Soledad Slowing-Romero, the first ever student to write a LLAS thesis.

Below are some key highlights across 50 years of activism on the part of Latinx students, including the es tablishment of the college’s Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) Department five years ago.

1972

Tomás Gonzáles ’76, Edmun do Orozco ’74, and Les Purifi cación ’76 founded La Causa with the goal of “creat[ing] a viable Latino social, cultural and political body” on campus and increasing Latinx student enrollment.

1977

The Student Allocation Commitee refuses to fund La Causa, despite growing student enrollment in the club and the lack of a physical meeting space.

1975

La Causa organizes “Pa’lante,” the Five Colleges’ first annual Latinx talent show. The event unites Latinx students from all of the Five Colleges in a vibrant display of cultural unity — one of the first of its kind on Amherst’s campus.

1978

The Student’s editorial board published a piece titled “‘The Cause’ Celebre,” which scolded La Causa for their protest, stating that they were “dismayed at the lack of respect which La Causa displayed,” and claiming that the organization needed to meet the administration halfway.

1978

Students hold a sit-in at the snack bar in Fayerweather Hall, disrupting the snack bar’s usual activity and occupying the space until their concerns were addressed. The sit-in lasted three days and grew to include approximately 100 students.

Photo courtesy of Amhherst College

The Latinx History event in September drew around 100 attendees, including alumni ranging from the class of 1974 to the class of 2020.

Reflecting on the Past

Ricardo Morales ’78

“La Causa created that vehicle of social change, of voice. Letting people know that we’re here … to be counted upon, and to provide change in a way that’s meaningful not only to ourselves and to our families, for our own prosperity, but also for those who come behind us, or are on the side, or are ahead of us.”

Edwin Camacho ’79

“We felt that it was important for us to own that, and to present our identity as a group and not have it be imposed upon us.”

Voices from the Present

Victoria Foley ’23

“There’s so much activism that’s not recorded or even seen here at Amherst, it gives you appreciation, like someone fought for what I have today.”

Lexy García ’23

“The more I read about the struggles and activism that the first generations of Latinos on campus had to deal with and fight with, the more I felt connected to this vision.”

Valerie Rosario ’26

“In La Causa you find solidarity. It’s an affinity space where you can let go of your frus trations but also celebrate who you are with people who also share the same feeling.”

Elias Villanueva Gomez ’25

“[La Causa] is the meeting ground. It’s the place where I tell others, this is happening to me, is it happening to you?”

Left image: Admissions letter sent out by La Causa to prospective Latinx students, Dec. 1974. Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel ‘25 via the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections.

Right image: Article published in the Student, discussing success of the Fayerweather Sit-in, Dec. 1978. Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel ‘25 via the Amherst College Ar chives and Special Collections.

Banner from the Latinx History at Amherst event held on Sept. 15, 2022. Signed by alumni, faculty, and current students, currently on display in the Archives and Special Collections. Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel ‘25.

2015

La Causa partnered with the BSU and other affinity groups to hold the Amherst Upris ing, a multi-day sit-in of Frost Library led by students who demanded attention and change surrounding racism on campus.

2017

2022

The Latinx History at Amherst event was held. Three panels addressed the history of La Causa, Latinx student activism over the years, and the founding of the LLAS department.

After the beating of Rodney King and unsatisfactory treatment of Black faculty at Amherst, members of La Causa joined the Black Students Union in their takeover of Converse Hall.

The Latin Americam Studies Depart ment (LLAS) is officially launched. The department enables students to critical ly study their own histories, as well as legitimizing the experiences of Latinx students and alumni at Amherst.

Alumni

Researching Inequities in Education

When Erica Lee ’03 was in high school, issues of structural racism began to compel her. Being sur rounded by diverse classmates, Lee was deeply conscious of the ways that the racial and socioeconomic backgrounds of her peers affected their educational outcomes. These early experiences fueled Lee’s pas sion for history and sociology, in an effort to answer her frustrated question: “How in the world could our education system allow this to happen?”

Completing a sociology degree at Amherst, Lee began to explore the answers. Years after her graduation, Lee further developed her knowl edge of the topic through MMP in Social Policy in 2017, which was then followed by a Ph.D. in Policy Studies from the University of Mary land School of Public Policy in 2019.

She brought her interest and skills to the U.S. Department of Ed ucation (ED), where she worked as an Education Research Analyst for 14 years. In her current position as a researcher at Mathematica, Lee is working alongside her team on de signing solutions in the area of hu man services.

Admission to Amherst: An Ambition in Sports

Lee developed a love for softball in high school, and described it as “a big part” of her life at the time. Re flecting on her college applications, Lee still vividly recalls grabbing a U.S. News and World Report college list ing and writing to 20 to 30 Division III small colleges on the East coast — where she grew up — about her in terest in joining the schools’ softball

teams. Hearing back from Amherst’s softball coach was a big factor in Lee’s decision. “The Amherst coach was one of those who wrote back,” Lee said. “Looking back, it may be a silly reason to choose your college, but I was so happy [I chose that way] since I really enjoyed Amherst.”

After Lee received her accep tance letter, she made a visit to the campus. Meeting and learning about the college’s sports culture with the softball team that day validated Lee’s sense of belonging at Amherst.

Life in the Herd Lee adored Amherst’s famous ly small class sizes because they gave her the opportunity to exer cise her preferred mode of learn ing-through-discussion.

Lee took “Intro to Sociology” in her freshman year, and she fell in love with it. Lee credited her knowl edge of sociology with informing her growing interest in education.

Understanding sociology, for Lee, meant understanding society, and understanding society can help peo ple create and analyze the public pol icies needed to improve society.

Lee’s first year at Amherst did not only revolve around things that complemented her strengths, but also those that challenged some parts of her worldview. Lee recount ed one of her first experiences of cul ture shock at Amherst, as someone who had grown up in public schools: “Half of the student body here had gone to private [high] schools.”

Lee had thought that a boarding school, based on what she saw in movies and books, was more like a place for problem kids. “I was just

completely unaware of the prep schools, so I was shocked. There were some people who said that Amherst was easier course wise than their prep school — that was not my experience at all. It was a different workload than I was used to.” De spite this, Lee’s academic experience was as enriching as it was challeng ing.

When it came to freshman mem ories, what was most near and dear to Lee’s heart was her time living in Valentine Residence Hall. “I love Valentine. We [were] kind of like our own thing.” Lee attributed her close connection with her friends in the hall to the residential life experi ence. “Because, you know, if it was cold you didn’t want to go out too far, you’re just hanging out with your friends there and it was really nice to be able to walk down to get food from Valentine [Dining Hall].”

During her free time, Lee also volunteered as a tutor for Amherst for a Better Chance, helping lo cal high school students with their homework. This helped feed into her interest in education. Lee was also part of the Amherst College Diversity Coalition, an organization that advocated for diversity and in clusiveness on campus.

Studying Abroad: A Way to Fall for Amherst, Again.

During her junior year, Lee stud ied abroad in Australia, attending the University of Melbourne for one semester. She spoke of this expe rience positively, with particularly fond memories of a criminology course that was surprisingly simi lar to sociology and the many Aus

tralian friends she made. Studying abroad also made her realize how excellently the Amherst education and faculty had prepared her for the world outside the Amherst bubble. “It’s amazing [the resources] we had there, and [I] became more appre ciative of it,” added Lee.

Writing a Thesis in Sociol ogy

Inspired by her hometown in Columbia, Maryland, Lee wrote a thesis about that town’s planned community — a neighborhood that was planned from its starting point on a previously undeveloped land for the priorities and convenienc es of the local residents, which was founded in the late sixties of the 19th century. “The man who founded it, James Rouse, wanted to create a community that was very integrated across race and class lines. My the sis was looking to see how his vision for an integrated community played out in the school system.” During fall break, she went home and con ducted over 25 interviews with locals and leaders in the community with

regard to their responses about the direction that the place grew into.

Lee received funding for her re search through the Bevans Scholar ship. “It was really cool to win,” said Lee. Looking back, Lee is certain that the research for her senior thesis set her on the path to becoming a re searcher in multiple ways. “I think my senior thesis definitely put me where I am now.”

Soon after graduation, Lee land ed her first job as a research assis tant on education studies at ICF, a social science research firm. Over the two years she worked there, she found her true calling in education research.

In the world of public policy, Lee focused on social policy. At graduate school at the University of Mary land, she applied to be a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF) and was accepted into the program. With her completion of the PMF program in 2009 and her previous research experience, Lee was then offered a position in the U.S. Department of Education that involved working with contractors who were evaluat

Moved by the systemic disparities she observed throughout her education, Erica Lee ’03 dedicates herself to research on issues of educational equity.

Pho Vu ’23

Lee is a researcher for Mathematica interested in sociologi cal systems that cause unequal learning.

Photo courtesy of Erica Lee ’03

ing federal education programs.

For her dissertation, Lee carried out research on whether Maryland had had an effective system to offer monetary incentives for higher qual ity childcare. “It’s actually kind of funny that I didn’t do a dissertation on education [but] on childcare,” said Lee.

Her work as a research analyst in the U.S. Department of Educa tion enabled Lee to retrieve data from early learning programs for her dissertation while simultaneously networking with crucial contacts in the Department of Health and Hu man Services (HHS), who provided her with important data about the childcare industry. “I had colleagues [from the Department of Health and Human Services] who could help me think through research questions that made sense in my dissertation.”

Lee did not let anything stop her from furthering her education. When she found out that she was pregnant with her first child just af ter the start of her Ph.D. program, she took a year-long leave to ensure her focus on classes.

Public Sector: Working for

the U.S. Department of Ed ucation

In the early days of her employ ment at the U.S. Department of Edu cation, Lee took on multiple respon sibilities that consisted of writing reports on parental involvement and assessing programs during budget seasons. Lee’s aforementioned duties enabled her to interact closely with Congressional Services and the Of fice of Management and Budget.

These years were crucial to Lee, and she credits them with building the skills needed for her later role as an education research analyst within the Department of Education.

As Lee stepped into her new position as an education research analyst in the Department, she provided technical expertise and peer-reviewed reports for a variety of high-visibility programs at ED and HHS.

Another big task for Lee was to manage P–12 program evaluations and studies on a variety of important topics such as early learning, Title I of the ESEA, and Promise Neigh borhoods — a federal initiative with the vision of providing children with access to a strong system of academ

ics, family, and community support by reconstructing poverty-stricken neighborhoods into areas of oppor tunities.

She also co-led an interagency early education research subgroup of the Interagency Policy Board on Early Learning, run by ED and HHS. Her most notable work was when she practiced leadership in the developing and authoring of a joint ED-HHS report on early childhood integrated data systems.

In her last two years working with the department, Lee continued to partner with contractors on longterm education projects. Lee also managed surveys on how states and districts responded to the coronavi rus pandemic and the development of measures of “capacity” to inform understanding on the effectiveness of technical assistance. These works were completed for the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance and Insti tute of Education Sciences — agen cies nestled within the U.S. Depart ment of Education.

During Covid, as Lee got more involved with studies of children’s recovery from learning loss and

dedicated a large amount of time to her two children, her research inter est experienced a shift from racial justice in education into the early childhood area.

Private Sector: Working as a Human Services Re searcher

In 2022, Lee transitioned to the private sector by joining Mathe matica, one of the education con tractors of the U.S. Department of Education. In making this decision, Lee says she hopes to diversify her knowledge in education by working on the other side.

“I think what schools do is so im portant, but in this country, I think a lot of the reasons why we have these disparate outcomes between chil dren who are in poverty and chil dren who are not, is not because of the schools,” Lee explained, “I think it’s because the children are in pover ty and they’re in a stressful situation, and their parents are in a stressful situation. I would like to work on studies that are [broader than] just [focusing on] schools … and this is kind of where it goes back to my in terest in sociology. What’s the whole system? How can we improve [it]? How can we improve kids’ lives?”

At Mathematica, Lee’s work is to test strategies for the improvement of K-12 programs and to leverage her expertise to provide the develop ment team with access and insights into the research evidence and eval uations of products’ effectiveness — items that inform the project leaders’ future solutions.

One of the most interesting proj ects that Lee is currently working on is enhancing federally-funded teach er-friendly practice guides. “My team is working to make a toolkit for teachers to actually use — a practice guide — to help them improve their instruction for writing in grades two through four.”

Lee notes that, “There are so many challenges that are always popping up but I’m really enjoying thinking through things like, ‘how do we fix that challenge?’”

“If [students] have a less stressful life, if they’re getting food, if they’re healthy, they might end up doing better in school.” As much as Lee still enjoys research on education programs, she also wants to explore

what other policies can help kids be prepared to learn at school.

Messages to Amherst Students

Lee was grateful that her years at Amherst taught her how to write and how to think about problems from outside the box. Amherst showed her how to both solve a problem and pinpoint the problems that need to be solved.

When I asked her what advice she’d give current students on how to make the most out of Amherst’s resources, Lee said, “Visit faculty during their office hours. They are there to help you learn and figure out what your questions are in aca demia.”

She also added that: “One [im portant] thing is to not feel like you have to have a career path.” Lee ex plained that when she applied for Teach for America and was not shortlisted, the experience was dev astating at first.

“In my mind, I was going to do Teach For America for a few years and then go to policy school.” She recalled. “I just had this in my mind and when that didn’t happen, it was really hard. I remember I called my parents crying and sad about it.”

In the end, Lee quickly decided to change into the research route and still managed to secure her Master’s in Public Policy.

She explained that, “The thing to keep in mind is that you might have to start [by] doing non-glamorous duty in the research, like coding data. You’re gonna be doing stuff that might not be super exciting, but [that stuff is] really important. If it’s not done well, then the whole study falls apart. Be humble [alongside] other people … who’ve been doing this for a long time. When you step back and you listen, it makes a dif ference. Find a good mentor to help you think through what your ca reer goals are. If you’re interested in something, as long as it pays the bills, go and do it, and then see where that takes you.”

“At Amherst, we could be very successful, but all of a sudden, when you leave college, there will be disap pointments. And it is just important to not get down. At the time, it will seem like such a big deal, but in the end, everything is going to be fine.”

Photo courtesy of Erica Lee ’03

Lee hopes to improve academic outcomes for children through research on educational policies and programs.

Alumni Profile

Torruella

Passionate Determination: An Artistic Pursuit

Rhythmic, geometric shapes of aluminum painted in bold col ors work in perfect harmony to create a dynamic composition in Luis Torruella’s ’88 evocative sculptures.

I spoke with Torruella about his experience as a working art ist. His days begin early, putting in hours in his studio, carv ing out time for his creativity. Through his evocative works, Torruella exemplifies the fact that passion and discipline can run in parallel.

Early Life

Growing up in Puerto Rico in a family of professors, Torruella’s early life was shaped by the sci ences. During his first two years at Amherst, Torruella planned to continue in their footsteps by studying math. It wasn’t until the final semester of his sophomore year that he had an epiphany in his “Introduction to Sculpture” course and discovered his pas sion: “It was one of those mo ments,” he proclaimed. “It’s cli che, but it’s so true. Everything went from black and white to color.”

Before coming to Amherst, Torruella’s only prior art ex perience had been during his final two years of high school. Torruella credits the opportuni ty to switch his course of study almost two years into college to his sculpture professor, James Sullivan, who motivated him to explore his passions.

When Torruella looks back on his time at Amherst, he recounts joyous times he spent in social clubs, at a time when Amherst had just abolished fraternities. He particularly remembers en joying spending Interterm on campus. He found that the free time before the spring semester

— a time that promoted exper imentation, allowed him to take whatever class he wanted — was fun enough to leave the beautiful Puerto Rican weather behind.

His epiphany to pursue sculp ture drove him to spend hours in the studio, putting in the active dedication needed to become a successful working artist. To him, it felt like he was shifting his studies from “going through the motions” to laying the foun dation for the career he loves: “I’m so grateful that, you know, 90 percent of the people around me that work don’t really love what they do. They do it for the money, they do it for this. So it’s such a bonus to really want to get up and do it. That doesn’t mean on Monday mornings, you [are never] dragging your feet, but it means that you’re interested [in] and you love what you do. It makes such a huge difference.”

Starting a Career

After a post-grad hitchhike across the U.S. that helped him come to terms with the reality of his decision to pursue art, Toru ella began an apprenticeship in Iowa where he learned about the intensities of being a working art ist. The demands of the intense, occasionally unglamorous, and tedious lifestyle he experienced there didn’t work out for him. He accredits this to a number of things, innocently admitting “my mind was probably still hitchhik ing somewhere.”

But he didn’t give up on his passion for sculpture and left for New Jersey to begin a second ap prenticeship at the Johnson Ate lier Technical Institute. Laboring in the heat of the summer forced Torruella to do some soul search ing. With the decision to com plete a minimum of two years

at the institute, he reinstated his drive to put in hours at the stu dio to go through a multitude of departments to learn as much as possible.

A trip back to Puerto Rico between apprenticeships, incen tivized by the prospect of mak ing money as a waiter, ended up being the serendipitous catalyst of his career. The owner of the restaurant asked to display some of Torruella’s works in his estab lishment. He obliged but didn’t think much of it.

Meanwhile, a renowned gal lery owner in Puerto Rico saw Torruella’s work displayed in the restaurant and was enamored. She reached out to him after he had finished his apprenticeship in New Jersey, and asked if they could talk on the phone. “Thank fully, I did; I called,” he said with a sigh of relief. “She was awesome. And we struck up an awesome, beautiful relationship for the next 12 years.” Suddenly, Torruella went from being an un known artist, who used to hunt down scrap metal at junk yards to create sculptures, to one who was featured in a gallery; think ing back, he stresses the impor tance of making “those little con nections.”

While his career accelerated, Torruella began running sculp ture workshops at a Puerto Rican high school and soon became the head of its art department. He made rewarding connections with the students he taught and enjoyed watching kids who oth erwise struggled in the school’s academic setting flourish in his workshops. Graciously forming bonds with the people his artistic endeavors brought forth remains a constant theme in his career.

As sales at his solo shows in creased and the demands on his

time stretched the hours of his day, Torruella ultimately chose to leave his teaching job and be come a full-time artist. 30 years have passed, and he has had a steady flow of work ever since.

His Art

Torruella’s artistic language is directly shaped by his medium of choice: aluminum. He gravitated towards metal ever since he saw a welder and torch in use at the Amherst sculpting studio. Akin to his personality, aluminum facilitates spontaneous imper manence. Pieces can be melded together and taken apart quickly, allowing him to brainstorm with his materials.

Made in his private studio in San Juan, Puerto Rico, his sculptures appear to be mov ing, a conglomeration of rhyth mic shapes. The elements of his sculptures capture the energy of being quickly assembled and tak en apart, all while remaining in perfect harmony.

Aluminum also allows for large-scale creations. Torruella does not shy away from work

ing big; he told me about the excitement of creating art from the perspective of the observer: approaching the piece, walking around and under, and observing every angle. “Regata,” located in Paseo Portuario, San Juan, stands 40 feet tall, demanding to be seen by its audience. Its bold blues and towering archways wrap around each other, en capsulating the viewer, drawing them in.

His instinct and artistic pref erences constantly lead him to new discoveries: “I like a work if in the first 10 seconds, you can decide if it works for you or not, and then discover other stuff as you look at it more carefully … that’s kind of my instinct. This style is like a language, and [as an artist] you just [have to] evolve it and perfect it over the years and push yourself to keep evolving. But [it’s] also in a sense [about] holding on to what you think is really very, very dear to you and what works really well.”

Bold saturated colors have been plentiful in Torruella’s work ever since an exhibition on folk

Discipline, dynamism, and captive creativity have fueled sculptor Luis Torruella ’88 in his pursuits.

— Cassidy Duncan ’25

Torruella stresses the importance of “controlling the con trollables” when it comes to succeeding in the art world.

Photo courtesy of Luis Torruella ’88

lore songs in African Antillean folklore poetry required him to fit a colorful theme for his sub mission. “It’s an awesome tool to lead the viewer,” he said. “I want you to look at this piece, but I want you to look at it overall and I want you to steal your sight over to this side. You can change and accentuate a piece. Color is an awesome variable.” The dyna mism of his art and his impactful use of color makes his work dis tinctly unique.

Torruella stresses the impor tance of experimentation, but also acknowledges that artistic success is contingent upon be coming your harshest, objective critic. Avoiding perfectionism and restraining himself from at taching emotional sensitivity to his work is a skill he accepts as being a part of the creative pro cess. “You’ve got to learn how creativity works, how it works for you,” he stressed to me. “ It took me a long time to understand myself. Understand what creativ ity means, how to coax it out of

you, and that creativity is not on demand … I gotta eat well and sleep well on an evening to have a chance to be creative. So you know, if I’m tired I’m no good in the studio.”

Torruella’s art feels singular; you know it’s his piece when you see it. There is purity and inno cence in his creations, as well as confidence. He has won several distinguished art awards, repre sented Puerto Rico at the Univer sal Exposition of Seville (Expo ’92), and created for interna tional audiences on both hemi spheres, such as his sculptures in Hong Kong.

Find Your Place (or Lack Thereof)

When I inquired about his intentions when creating inter nationally displayed work, and if he changes anything about his style versus his usual creations, he emphasized how his work continuously manages to stand out amongst others: “[You want to] export your particular flavor

and brand. That’s what will be interesting, especially interna tionally. You want to stay true to your callers, and if they like it, awesome, if they don’t, so be it, but do not adjust your style.”

There are many worlds in side of the art world. It can be a tricky web to navigate, finding one’s place amongst a group of extremely talented individuals. Torruella resonates with archi tects and designers, but he cat egorizes himself as “somebody that’s been slightly on the out skirts of the art world in a sense.”

“I just like going to my studio, doing my stuff, working hard, then going home to my family, you know,” he said. “It’s worked phenomenally well because I’ve managed to be a presence all these years but [always stayed a] little on the outskirts, which al most worked in my favor.”

His down-to-earth answer is part of a greater theme for Torruella as an artist. He is suc cessful because of a sense of au thenticity that elicits his artistic

creation; he does not put himself into a box. This works because he understands who he is and what he can do. His work is admirable because it doesn’t try to be some thing it is not. It’s both playful and mature, showcasing the nat ural element of his artistic vision, motivated by his robust drive.

Advice to Amherst Students

Torruella wanted to give advice to Amherst students, specifically those who want to work in the arts. He shared a quote by Steve Jobs: “‘Stay hungry. Stay foolish.’ It’s about really embracing that kid [who] is fearless. [It’s] been talked about a lot that you need to fail and [things] don’t feel fair. Fear of failure, it’s so true. Failure can’t be this abstract context,” he emphasized. “It has to be some thing that is painful, [that] you feel [in] the bottom of your gut. Those lessons [from] the projects that you don’t get are the ones when you learn. Keep that spark, keep that spontaneity.”

Our conversation ended with a piece of realistic optimism:

“[I’ve] been doing this for 35 years, I’ve done very well. My message [is] if I can make it, you can make it. Whatever you de cide, at the end of the day, feel like you exhausted all possibil ities, you have no excuses. It’s a weird world where very talented people cannot succeed. And if you don’t succeed, it’s not nec essarily reflective of the fact that you’re not talented. It’s a world with a lot of weird [rules] we get to know. Use those rules to your advantage or figure out how to thrive in the system, there’s opportunities everywhere, but you’ve got to look at it and see which is the best avenue for you to enter [the art] world.”

Harnessing and maintaining your creativity is essential for an artist’s development. Having confidence, perseverance, and discipline has allowed Torruel la to be successful at a career he loves. In his words: “If I can make it, you can make it.”

Torruella works with aluminum, and has an ability to create eye capturing pieces that take up space.

Torruella’s sculptures feature strong vivid colors and bold lines that give them dynamic, upward motion.

Photo courtesy of Luis Torruella ’88

Photo courtesy of Luis Torruella ’88

Alumni Profile

Stanton

From Amherst Hillel to New York Rabbi

When Rabbi Joshua Stanton ’08 described his honors thesis as “poorly written,” I had a hard time believing him. A recently published author, religious lead er, and co-founder of the fore most journal on interreligious studies, as well as the director of leadership for The Nation al Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), Rabbi Stanton is an expert in commu nication. Each time I have had the privilege to hear him deliv er a sermon at East End Temple (EET), our Reform congregation tucked away in the East Village of New York, I am struck by the precise intention with which he selects his words. When Rab bi Stanton speaks, you know he means what he says.

Rabbi Stanton also mentioned that he has plans to address his dissatisfaction with his thesis. “I am considering reworking it and trying to publish it,” he told me. This is exactly on brand: If re turning to your 15-year-old un dergraduate thesis because you know there is more to learn is not a Rabbi Stanton move, then I don’t know what is. In every part of his life, Rabbi Stanton cherishes the chance for growth. He is in constant pursuit of the unasked question, the unheard perspective, and the opportunity to learn something new — and he does so, invariably, in precise terms.

Finding Amherst

Rabbi Stanton grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, thinking he wanted to be an aeronautical engineer, or perhaps go into fi nance. He described his educa tion there as “selective,” a result of Bethesda’s high population of “policy wonks” given the town’s proximity to D.C. “I didn’t know

anything about popular culture,” Rabbi Stanton said, “or nearly enough about music.”

He also knew nothing of Am herst College — at least until his family took a trip to Tangle wood, Massachusetts, during the summer before his junior year of high school. His mom suggested they take a look at Amherst, and as soon as he stepped foot on campus, he was hooked. “I just didn’t want to leave,” Rabbi Stan ton said. “And it was almost such a strong reaction that I had to double check and make sure that was the case.” So he came back to visit not one, but two more times before applying early.

Na’aseh V’nishma

Based on Rabbi Stanton’s Am herst diploma, you would not as sume he became a rabbi. A triple major in economics, history, and Spanish, Rabbi Stanton took full advantage of the open curricu lum and its invitation to explore what intrigues you. And this breadth of inquiry paid off. “My majors taught me how to think and change the way that I am a rabbi,” he explained.

In the courses required for his majors, Rabbi Stanton learned how to read spreadsheets, write effectively, and work with prima ry source texts in order to share them with people who don’t read the language in which they were originally written. These are all skills he now uses on a daily ba sis as he leads the administrative and religious communities of EET. “I remember [Lewis-Se bring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture] Ilan Stavans, my thesis advisor and a wonderful pro fessor, said that we were going to study ‘Don Quijote’ ‘Talmu dically,’” he said. “That was in

many [ways] an introduction to Talmud for me — not in content, but in methodology.”

So what was it, then, that put Rabbi Stanton on the path to rabbinical school? Amherst Col lege Hillel. When he was a soph omore, Rabbi Stanton became the co-president of Amherst Hillel, where he spent about 40 hours a week working to strengthen the Hillel communi ty. Here, he gained the practical skills he needed by doing them. “There’s this Jewish idea, na’aseh v’nishma : do and then you un derstand,” he said.

Rabbi Stanton explained that his work with the Hillel board “was the closest thing to getting to be a rabbi without being a rab bi.” He fondly recounted bring ing the Zumbyes to a Shabbat dinner, organizing speakers and events, and experimenting with different ways to grow the com munity.

But it wasn’t just Rabbi Stan ton’s participation in Hillel that inspired him to become a rabbi. He also found a mentor in Rev erend Dr. Paul Sorrentino, the director of Religious and Spiri tual Life for almost 20 years until his retirement in 2018.

Sorrentino was “the first per son who approached [him] about considering the path to the rab binate, and considering religious leadership, not only as a hobby or something fun to do, but as a way of life,” Rabbi Stanton said.

Is it surprising that Rabbi Stanton was first motivated by a pastor to pursue rabbinical studies? Perhaps for most peo ple, yes. But for those who know Rabbi Stanton and his work, this is almost to be expected. This re lationship, in addition to Rabbi Stanton’s eventual Spanish hon ors thesis, was one of the first of

many celebrations of interfaith community to come in his life.

Amherst gave Rabbi Stanton long-lasting connections, career inspiration, intellectual stimu lation, and one more incredi ble piece of his life puzzle: his wife. Rabbi Stanton threw Mirah Curzer ’08 her 18th birthday party the winter of their fresh man year, and they were married two weeks after graduation.

Rabbi Stanton thinks the sto ry is “gag worthy,” and advised, “don’t try this at home kids,” but I say congratulations to the hap py couple. They are still married, and have since become parents to an awesome little boy. Rabbi Stanton told me that his thesis topic was actually very much inspired by Curzer’s own learn ing as a philosophy major; the thesis was on medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides,

who was born in Córdoba, Spain and turned to scholarship to re build Jewish community after persecution. For Rabbi Stanton, Curzer is his “partner in learn ing, and ... partner in growing.”

“[Having that type of partner] does something amazing,” he said. “It fills out your learning because you also learn whatever they’re studying.”

Planting Seeds

After their honeymoon in Eu rope, Curzer and Rabbi Stanton moved straight to Jerusalem for a year. It was an enormous tran sition in every way, and not an easy one at that. Not only was Rabbi Stanton newly married and adulting for the first time in a foreign country, but he was also frustrated by his experience as a first-year rabbinical student in Jerusalem.

Rabbi Joshua Stanon ’08 has built his life’s work around interfaith studies, cultivating community, and proposing the unasked question.

— Sarah Weiner ’24

An economics, history, and Spanish triple major, Rabbi Stanton picked up his rabbinical instincts from serving as Amherst Hillel’s co-president.

Photo courtesy of Joshua Stanton ’08

“We were not even studying other Jewish denominations, much less other religions,” he explained. “I was not going to be an effective religious leader unless I was conversant and reli giously literate in traditions oth er than my own.”

Given the vacuum of multi-perspective learning and conversation, which his pro fessors and other students also recognized, Rabbi Stanton con ceived of a way to fill it. He reached out to the student body president of Union Theologi cal Seminary in New York City, now one Dr. Stephanie Var non-Hughes, director of the Cla remont Core at Claremont Lin coln University, and proposed they create a journal together.

With 6,000 miles between them, the pair founded the “Journal of Interreligious Stud ies” (JIRS), a peer reviewed ac ademic journal that explores the interactions between differ ent religious communities and schools of thought. It is available online and free, just one indica tion of the journal’s strong prin ciples of accessibility and inclu sion.

Rabbi Stanton noted, “It’s a beautiful thing when something that you seed, and you support, outgrows you.” And when Rabbi Stanton says outgrows, he means to say that the JIRS grew to be brought under the American Academy of Religion and was the academic journal that helped to establish interreligious studies as an academic field, both within and outside of the Academy.

Rabbi Stanton worked on the journal for five years after it was founded, and Dr. Var non-Hughes stayed for seven, before they both left, allowing the JIRS to grow in new ways they never expected. They both continue to serve as advisors for the journal.

After spending a year in rab binical school in Jerusalem, Rab bi Stanton was happy to move back to the U.S. and settle down in New York. He continued his studies at Hebrew Union College (HUC), while Curzer started law school at New York University just a few blocks away.

Once again, Rabbi Stanton just couldn’t pass up the oppor tunity to absorb as much in formation as possible. “I found myself gravitating to Mirah’s learning as much as my own,” he told me.

It is apparent that this learn ing has in part manifested in Rabbi Stanton’s commitment to social justice work, including his advocacy for immigration rights and partnership with “Starts with Us,” a movement to con front social, cultural, and polit ical polarization in the U.S.

Rabbi Stanton was ordained from HUC in 2013, and it was not long before he was leading religious communities of his own.

Amherst in the Real World

In the four years between completing rabbinical school and joining EET, Rabbi Stan ton served as Associate Rabbi at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun and before that as Associate Di rector of the Center for Global Judaism at Hebrew College and Director of Communications for the Coexist Foundation. Upon joining EET in 2017, Rabbi Stan ton realized the community was the “Amherst of synagogues.”

“This small gem in the mid dle of Manhattan … brings to gether a lot of the smartest and kindest people that I know,” he proclaimed.

Rabbi Stanton noted that what is unique about his role within the temple, as opposed to the roles of many other religious leaders today, is that he is able to think and speak freely.

At EET, he does not expect that everyone will agree with him, but* that they will engage in dialogue. Not only is that free dom of expression of deep per sonal value to him, but it is also a critical institutional response to the absence of free thought and just leadership plaguing many religious and political commu nities. “Our ideology is loving, respectful, and open inquiry, using Jewish texts as a source of inspiration,” Rabbi Stanton ex plained.

I don’t think I have ever heard Rabbi Stanton deliver a sermon in which he does not bring to our attention one (or sometimes more) pressing incident of po litical or social injustice afflict ing a community not just in our city or country, but anywhere in the world, Jewish or not. And he never lets tragedy just float limply in the air on the bimah, but rather, with the support of Jewish leaders, texts, and advice behind him, provides a sense of direction through which we can envision and, more importantly,

enact a more just world.

In addition to the interdisci plinary approaches apparent in Rabbi Stanton’s work, Amherst clearly left him with another im portant tip: “find a good study partner,” he told me. Taking this to heart, Rabbi Stanton is most recently celebrating the publi cation of a book he co-authored with Rabbi Benjamin Spratt, “Awakenings: American Jewish Transformations in Identity, Leadership, and Belonging.”

The book seeks to understand why many American Jews are

proud to be Jewish, but are not connected to any Jewish institu tions. Rabbi Stanton and Rabbi Spratt reimagine the Jewish in stitution to encourage leadership and empowerment with the goal of serving as many people as possible, and go on to highlight institutions and initiatives that are currently inspiring this type of transformation. What links this book to his time at Amherst, Rabbi Staton articulated to me, is its expression of the key lesson he learned in his time at the col lege: “Don’t be a hero, be a learn

er, and ... be intellectually honest and rigorous, even if it challeng es the status quo.”

This sentiment has permeated Rabbi Stanton’s life well beyond his four years at Amherst. He has performed the dual role of both learner and leader in religious communities, academia, and so cial justice initiatives. And his deep value for the unconsidered has not only helped him initiate conversations about novel topics with diverse interlocutors, but it inspires his colleagues, students, and congregants to do the same.

Photo courtesy of Joshua Stanton ’08

Rabbi Stanton leads a service at Manhattan’s East End Temple.

The Art of Place and Translation

ally hard to assimilate, so we only spoke English.”

the rise of Vladimir Putin.

When I spoke with Michele Berdy ’78, she had just arrived in Washington after a transcontinental flight from Latvia. Despite the jet lag, she was energetic and excited to talk about her experiences with the Russian language and her time at Amherst. Her speech sounded like well-composed prose, with picturesque metaphors and strong narratives that emphasized her skills in translating and interpreting into

English.

Today, Berdy is the arts editor at The Moscow Times, an indepen dent English- and Russian-language newspaper, and lives in Riga, Latvia, where she and her dog fled after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even after decades of studying the de tails of the Russian language, she is still passionate about it and the art of translation, a love she first found during her college years.

Exploring Russian at a Coed Amherst

Berdy began studying Russian in high school and continued at Smith College, where she first matriculat ed. Her decision to learn Russian was in part fueled by her heritage.

“My parents were born in the U.S., and my mother’s family came from the Russian Empire,” she explained.

“I didn’t grow up in a Slavic house hold — my parents were trying re

Amherst College began admit ting women in 1975. After taking a few years off of college, Berdy was in her sophomore year at Smith and had been taking Russian courses at Amherst, but at that point in the year, it was too late for her to apply as a transfer student. She took an other year off and studied part-time at Connecticut College in order to begin studying translation. “There was a professor I wanted to work with there,” she said. “I wanted to become a translator even though I had no idea what translation was.”

She transferred to Amherst for her junior year, largely because of the college’s strong Russian depart ment.

Berdy stayed out of the social life at Amherst, saying, “It was still pretty frat boy. I’ve been glad to see Amherst shut that [culture] down.”

She lived off campus but thinks back fondly on her time in the Rus sian community around the Five Colleges. In particular, she reflected on when Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who won the Nobel Prize for Literature a decade later, lived in Holyoke and often recited his own poetry in the original Russian at public readings. “It was like going into a church and listening to this kind of wild priest or something ut ter an incantation to the crowd,” she said. “It was just the most exciting and fascinating and intellectually stimulating thing I’d ever heard.”

She also had the opportunity to work with a Russian emigré who was teaching at Amherst and spent a semester reading Anna Akhmato va’s “Without a Hero,” which, while difficult, presented a completely new world for her to explore. To Berdy, Russian was an outlet for intellectual stimulation and a means of explor ing emotion through words.

From Massachusetts to Moscow

It’s fair to say that Berdy under stands contemporary Russia better than most. After graduating in 1978, Berdy moved to Moscow, where she remained until March of this year. She has lived through Mikhail Gor bachev’s perestroika reforms, the fall of the Soviet Union, the establish ment of the Russian Federation, and

She worked as a translator and interpreter throughout her time in Russia, though in various sectors. In 1989, she was hired for her first simultaneous interpreting job on a series of documentaries called “In side Gorbachev’s USSR with Hed rick Smith.”

She taught herself to interpret, as she never received any formal inter pretation training, before switching to television production and finally health communications, a field in which she worked for about a de cade.

In 2002, Berdy started working for The Moscow Times, an indepen dent publication that is not affiliated with the Russian government. At The Moscow Times, she took over The Word’s Worth column, which covers the intricacies of the Russian language and the art of translation for English speakers. She takes great pride in maintaining the column to this day. “A column about Russian grammar that goes on for 20 years is, I think, a fabulous achievement,” she said. Her most recent article concerned the possible ways of ad dressing a mistake in Russian.

During her time at The Moscow Times, Berdy has also branched out to writing about daily life and cul ture in Moscow, and she became the newspaper’s arts editor in 2015, a position she still holds.

From Russia to Latvia

Two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, Berdy escaped to Latvia with her dog. She had lived in Mos cow for more than 40 years. She not ed the irony of the situation, saying, “100 years ago, my grandparents were fleeing the villages that they were born in for a better life … and then 100 years later, I packed up a suitcase and in four days I essential ly fled overland with my dog out of Russia, leaving everything behind.

… Here we are 100 years and three months later, doing exactly the same thing.”

She detailed her relocation in an article that was published in the Summer 2022 edition of Amherst Magazine.

In Latvia, she’s continued to write for The Moscow Times, which has been banned in Russia for its an ti-war position, but which still has

Photo courtesy of Michele Berdy ’78

Michele Berdy ’78 has explored the intricacies and evolution of the Russian language, even after she fled Moscow.

— Madeline Lawson ’25

Berdy works as the arts editor for the independent Moscow Times.

a strong online presence. Berdy says that the Russian department at Amherst prepared her to critically examine Putin’s Russia. “I do think that the people that I listened to and worked with at Amherst were on the dissident side of Russian culture, and I really think that set me on the path that I went on, and I suppose, in a way, prepared me for packing up my suitcase … and fleeing Rus sia.”

Berdy continues to explore the Russian language and its relation ship to English through her column, but she hasn’t lost her love of trans lation. Currently, she’s working on translating six stories by Nadezhda Teffi, a turn-of-the-century hu morist writer. “When you translate, you see from the inside and kind of deconstruct it to some extent,” she said.

Since she started translation, the field has changed drastically. “There was almost nothing [written] on translation from Russian at all,” she said. “As I was translating, I would come up with rules for what you do. … Now, there is this huge body of practical and theoretical knowledge out there, and it will help, but a lot of [translating] is just practice.”

Today, there are entire M.F.A. programs dedicated to the art of translating, as well as many lan guage-specific workshops, some

of which Berdy has taught herself.

At one point, she even taught in the Department of Translation and Lexicography at Moscow State Uni versity.

For the aspiring translator, she warned that it is not a very high-paying job (“I have a knack for working in professions that pay terribly,” she joked), and that it is difficult to make a living without a professorship or a technical special ty. However, she emphasized the excitement of translation, and while describing the hunt for an equiva lent English word or talking about the connotations of Russian words throughout the years, it was clear that she’s no less enthusiastic about it now than she was when she grad uated from Amherst.

Although Amherst provided Berdy with a robust education al foundation and deep cultural knowledge about Russia and the USSR, it helped her cultivate a crit ical eye. “That kind of grounding that was at Amherst of the intellec tual dissident in you set me off into the world,” she said.

For an American translator working at an independent Russian newspaper during Putin’s reign, the ability to persevere and remain vig ilant is essential. Berdy is grateful that Amherst provided her with that.

Photo courtesy of Michele Berdy ’78

Photo courtesy of Michele Berdy ’78

Berdy in her Soviet apartment in the 1970s, shortly after graduating from Amherst.

Berdy published a book based on her column, “The Russian Word’s Worth,” as a guide to Russian translation and culture for English speakers.

Alumni

Stockmo

A Life Anchored in Education, Community

Jillian Stockmo Chapman ’13 greeted me with a warm smile in the middle of a busy Saturday morning. It was only the night before that we had decided on this time to meet over Zoom, and when I apologized for it be ing so early, Stockmo Chapman laughed and reassured me that her 10-month-old son had al ready kept her awake for quite some time.

Stockmo Chapman is cur rently obtaining her Doctorate in Education (Ed. D.) and transi tioning to work in Bloomington Public Schools. Her personal ties to this district are strong: Her son will one day attend a Bloom ington school, and Bloomington lies just outside Stockmo Chap man’s hometown, Minneapolis, where she herself attended public school before Amherst.

Her passion for education grows out of the points of inter section between her own expe riences, her love for her family, and her identity as a Black wom an. “I entered education in the first place to make a difference for students of color and low-in come students, for students who I believe should be most served by public institutions,” Stockmo Chapman explained.

“[Working in public schools] wasn’t something I had real ly dreamed was going to be my path,” Stockmo Chapman admit ted, “but once I found it, I knew the work I needed to do was in my community, making sure that education outcomes for students who look like me and for my … children alike are not predict able.”

Stockmo Chapman cultivated an academic and extracurricular experience at Amherst that in structed her in the importance of balance: between idealism

and realism, feeling and nuance, exploration and stability. Even years prior to the institution of the education studies major in 2021, Stockmo Chapman used her time at Amherst to prepare herself for a career in public ed ucation, where she has to work within a system toward which she feels a complex ambivalence.

Systemic Problems, Sys temic Solutions

After Amherst, Stockmo Chapman did a stint at Teach for America in Minneapolis, and she ended up staying with the organization for five extra years, doing work for their Communi ty Partnerships program. She left right around the time she start ed her Ed. D., when she realized that she couldn’t effect systemic change by working at the level of individuals, alone.

“I worked with them coaching teachers in the Twin Cities, and I kind of came to an understand ing of systemic problems,” Stock mo Chapman reflected. “There can be so many amazing, strong, wonderful people working in education … But systemic prob lems require systemic solutions, and I believe that education in the United States is doing exactly what it was designed to do,” she asserted.

The systemic problem that Stockmo Chapman is current ly focused on in Bloomington schools is the inequitable iden tification of elementary-age students for the gifted and tal ented program — an accelerat ed academic track that provides students with exceptional tal ents the resources they need to enrich these gifts. According to Stockmo Chapman, the failure on the part of public schools to equitably identify BIPOC gifted

students widens education gaps along racial lines.

In thinking about this ineq uity, Stockmo Chapman has to balance individualistic and insti tutional ways of thinking about systemic oppression. These forc es coalesce in the ways Bloom ington teachers choose kids for the gifted and talented program.

“[Two] of the big things that they [teachers] rely on are IQ tests and academic achievement,” Stockmo Chapman explained. “So I’ll be working with kinder garten[ers] and first graders and their teachers to think about al ternative means of identification and how we look at other aspects of creativity.”

“How do you identify a stu dent who is a creative problem solver in physical education? How do you then give them the academic support that they need to thrive in gifted education, because they should be offered that same opportunity?” In all, Stockmo Chapman hopes that casting a wider net will create a gifted and talented program that is more inclusive of BIPOC and low-income students, and there fore more representative of the Bloomington district it serves.

The distribution of funding also plays a major role in the systemic problems in public ed ucation. Stockmo Chapman’s Ed. D. focuses on the interaction be tween the state forces that “pre scribe” funding allocations and the decisions that are left up to local administrators. According to Stockmo Chapman, the met rics that public officials use to determine the success of funding allocations are, at best, only su perficially indicative of their ac tual impact on students.

“One of the funding brack ets that they [Minnesota] have

is called achievement and inte gration revenue. We fund them [integration programs] on the premise that you just need to integrate buildings,” Stockmo Chapman stressed, “not learn ing from Brown v. Board that you have to integrate students but you also have to change your system.”

Along with state funding, public schools receive philan thropic grants. Up until recently, Stockmo Chapman was working with the Graves Foundation, a Minneapolis-based trustee ship focused on funneling their money to imminent community needs, where she managed the foundation’s education portfolio.

The inclusive relationship between state funding and ed ucational equity is paralleled in philanthropy. “I think I saw both the good and bad of philanthro py. If philanthropy is treated as an innovation space, it’s amaz ing, but if it’s treated as a [re source to] plug the holes [left by state funding], then it’s extreme ly problematic.”

Stockmo Chapman said that

this misconception equally man ifests itself in politics, and con tributes to a stalemate around public school funding. “In Min nesota, Republicans are like, ‘We give [public schools] too much money, and there’s no account ability,’... and then the [Demo crats] say, ‘We need to invest in our schools!’ But it’s a balance — both of these things can be true,” Stockmo Chapman concluded.

According to Stockmo Chap man, gifted education is one as pect of public education where these tensions arise. “We should be putting money towards gifted education. And also we should understand that when it was in vented, it was in essence exclu sionary and problematic,” she elaborated. “And I like to think about exploring that nuance.”

Authenticity and Anthro pology

To Stockmo Chapman, Am herst was a training ground for learning how to deal with even the most thorny or emotional ly-taxing nuances. She specif ically points to the three years

Confronting systemic racism in Minnesota public schools, Jillian Stockmo Chapman ’13 is guided by the twin values of nuance and authenticity.

— Sam Spratford ’24

Stockmo Chapman’s anthropology and religion double major and her work with the Graves Foundation have given her ample tools to address the equity issues in Bloomington Public Schools.

Photo courtesy of Jillian Stockmo Chapman ‘13

she spent as a Resident Counsel or (RC), a role replaced by the Community Advisors in 2020, and a Student Health Educator (SHE) as integral to her learning how to thoughtfully engage with communities and institutions.

Speaking about her expe rience in the first-year dorms, Stockmo Chapman let me in on her RC philosophy. “I really wanted to make sure that halls that I was on, were just a safe … place where you [could] be who you needed to be. And I’m not a crazy extrovert, but I do hope that my authentic self … at its best, like, makes you feel heard, makes you feel respected, and that builds a sense of communi ty,” she said.

“I think I take pride and I took pride as a RC that like you could come to me when things were great, and then you could come to me when things weren’t, because guess what — for me at Amherst things weren’t always great,” Stockmo Chapman said. “And I think that that’s an im portant function [of the RCs], especially as a Midwest girl who

was miles miles miles away from her family. Being able to be that person [for the first-years] was huge.”

Just as Stockmo Chapman was learning the intricacies of com munity in the residence halls, she was studying them in the class room. As a Religion and Anthro pology double major, Stockmo Chapman was able to explore from numerous different angles the reasons why people interact with their peers, communities, and institutions in specific ways.

Although she now views these disciplines as relevant to her work in education, the relationship be tween her academics and her ca reer wasn’t always so clear. “I had a very traditional understanding of what college was,” Stockmo Chapman said. “I remember the day I called my parents and told them I was going to declare reli gion and anthropology — I think my mom actually thought I was going to be a priest.”

Stockmo Chapman’s thesis, “Revitalizing Political Rhetoric: Religious Narrative in the Ca reer of Barack Obama,” is an ac

ademic point of pride for her. “I looked at Obama’s career from when he started in the political sphere as it led up to the presi dency,” she explained, “and how his conversations of God became more explicit, versus how they started as conversations of mor als and values.”

“I think writing my thesis at Amherst gave me the confidence — as someone who came in and wasn’t the strongest writer — to continue that into my profes sional years,” Stockmo Chapman reflected. “I wrote a graduate thesis, and now I’m writing my dissertation.”

Stockmo Chapman’s educa tion was supplemented by ex tra-academic experiences that greatly exceeded her expecta tions of college as a place for career preparation. Over winter term one year, for example, she went to India through a Smith College program for Tibetan Buddhist Studies.

“I got to meet the Dalai Lama,” she laughed, in disbelief. “As a public school kid, I never imagined this was something I’d

be able to do.”

A Balanced Life

Looking back, Stockmo Chapman has a great appreci ation for certain aspects of her Amherst experience. In par ticular, she recognizes that the college’s need-based aid was in tegral to empowering her to con tinue her education. “There were things that Amherst afforded me because of essential assistance that I wouldn’t have had access to other colleges. It’s something that you don’t understand how amazing it is until you’re grad uating and you’re taking on your graduate school,” Stockmo Chapman said. “I took on grad uate school loans without under grad loans — that’s insane.”

But, Stockmo Chapman’s personal attitude towards Am herst is, in many ways, similar to the ambivalence she holds to wards public education. And, as in her career, this nuance serves a purpose. “As you go off into your professional career and your personal life you want true anchors and core experiences,”

she said. “Core experiences are ones of nuance; they aren’t ones of perfection or ones of pres tige.”

Rather than romanticizing her time at the college, Stockmo Chapman carefully holds the au thentic contours of her Amherst experience in her memory. Sim ilarly, while she admits that her life since Amherst is not “pres tigious” by typical accounts, Stockmo Chapman takes pride in its balance.

“I have no dreams of be ing a superintendent, but I do have dreams of making a differ ence,” Stockmo asserted. “I have dreams of being an amazing mother and an amazing partner to [my husband] Tyler. I think that that’s something I didn’t un derstand at 21, when I just want ed to achieve, and I think I have a better understanding now.”

“It’s something we should be shouting from the rooftops, be cause it makes people healthy,” she said. “And my story is one I’m proud of because it’s pas sionate, it’s true to who I am, but also it’s balanced.”

Photo courtesy of Jillian Stockmo Chapman ‘13

Stockmo Chapman met her spouse, Tyler Chapman ‘11, at Amherst. She’s pictured above with her 10-month-old, Parker.

Alumni Profile

Mitchell

Protecting the Rights of the Incarcerated

Kyle Mitchell Virgien’s ’08 life reflects, in many ways, the prom ises of a liberal arts education.

A physics major and the sis writer, jazz pianist, and now a civil rights attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Virgien has utilized the wide range of skills he gained throughout his time at Amherst and beyond to seek justice for the incarcerated and bring awareness to their lived experiences.

Upbringing and Journey to Amherst

Although the majority of his formative years were spent in Los Angeles, Virgien called many places home through out his childhood. Yet, across frequent changes in location, Virgien maintained an inquisi tive and curious mind. “A lot of my upbringing was really just [spent] playing in the woods and exploring the world around me,” Virgien said.

It was in large part this in quisitive spirit that led Virgien to Amherst. The college’s open curriculum and encouragement of exploration made it a natural fit for him.

Virgien was also attracted to Amherst because of the opportu nity it provided to build deeper connections with both professors and the broader student body.“I was applying to big and small schools, but I was just really drawn to certain aspects of [Am herst],” Virgien said. Ultimately, the friendly, welcoming environ ment he hoped to find on campus was born out by his experiences once he arrived.

Life at Amherst: Explora tion and Experimentation

While at Amherst, Virgien experimented with a variety of

classes in both the sciences and the humanities before finally set tling into the physics major. Hav ing been enamored with science from a young age, his love for physics was reaffirmed by his re search outside of the classroom.

The summer after his fresh man year, Virgien found a po sition working in a physics lab at the college. He enjoyed the opportunity it provided to ex plore the underpinnings of the physical world in greater detail.

“It was incredibly fun learning, digging into deeper questions about why the world works, the way it works, and learning about a new way to think and explore and learn,” he said.

Virgien’s close friend, Morgan Holland ’08, added that when Virgien’s scientific curiosity wasn’t properly satisfied through the typical academic framework, he occasionally took matters into his own hands. “We would some times borrow liquid nitrogen to conduct experiments in our dorms, including on the effects of liquid nitrogen on toys, water fountains, stuffed animals, and various drinks,” Holland recalled.

Virgien’s work in the physics department ultimately culmi nated in a senior thesis project, which he credits with inculcating several valuable skills, including the ability to formulate and exe cute long-form projects.

“It was one of the first times I had the opportunity to direct a big project,” he said. “I definite ly had a lot of collaboration and support from my mentor, [Stone Professor of Natural Science] Larry Hunter, but it was very helpful to just start working on a project and have to figure out how to finish it myself.”

In addition to affording him experience in directing large

intellectual undertakings, Vir gien’s time in the physics de partment instilled in him a new perspective on the world that he has continued to find invaluable post-graduation. “I think phys ics engenders a specific way of thinking that’s really helpful,” he remarked. “You always start from basic first principles, and from there you have to reason to a con clusion about the way the world works. You can’t take things for granted.”

Virgien also emphasized the parallel between scientific and le gal reasoning. “There’s a lot more overlap than you think,” he said.

Much of his time at Amherst outside of academics and re search was spent playing piano in the jazz ensemble, which he has continued to play since his time at the college.

Yet, many of Virgien’s favor ite college memories come from moments outside his academic or extracurricular pursuits. “When I look back on college, the most rewarding experiences were re ally just the [impromptu] discus sions I had and the people I met,” he said.

Virgien highlighted the con tinuing importance of the friend ships he made at Amherst. “I think the really strong friend ships that I’ve kept to this day are the biggest thing that I got from the college experience,” he noted.

The large impact that Virgien had on campus life was reflected in Holland’s characterization of him as defined by “a brilliance contrasted with humanness and humility.” Holland also empha sized Virgien’s continuing ded ication to the relationships he cultivated at Amherst. “He’s a loyal friend who makes the effort to stay in touch over decades and thousands of miles.”

Setting the Stage for Civ il Rights Work

Though Virgien’s academic work at Amherst primarily cen tered around physics, his love for science didn’t restrain him from pursuing other intellectual inter ests outside of the classroom.

Intrigued by the idea of the law, and passionate about the protection of civil rights and lib erties, Virgien decided to pursue an internship with the ACLU of Southern California the sum mer after his sophomore year. Monitoring inmate conditions at the Los Angeles County Jail, he quickly realized that, despite the work’s difficulties, he had discov ered his passion.

“I just knew that [civil rights work] was what I wanted to do,” he said. “It was incredibly de pressing and heart-wrenching to go into the jails and see the conditions that people were liv ing under, but also so rewarding every time I could make positive change.”

Virgien also expressed grati

tude to the college for the grant funding that made his internship with the ACLU possible.

Carrying this passion throughout the remainder of his college career, Virgien applied to and was accepted by Harvard Law School. He credited his lib eral arts education at Amherst with helping him develop a broad foundation of knowledge that prepared him well for his law school journey.

“I think what people say about a liberal arts education, that you learn how to learn, even if you don’t learn particular prac tical pieces of knowledge, is very true,” he opined. “I arrived at law school not knowing everything but very well-equipped to learn it.”

While at Harvard, Virgien said that his primary focus was on gaining practical experience in work that he was passionate about, rather than simply con structing a compelling resume. As a result, he thoroughly en joyed his time in law school.

From his time at Amherst to the present day, civil rights attorney Kyle Mitchell Virgien ’08 has dedicated his life to seeking justice for the incarcerated.

— Ethan Foster ’25

Kyle Mitchell Virgien ’08 was a physics major and jazz pianist at Amherst prior to attending Harvard Law School.

Photo courtesy of Kyle Mitchell Virgien ’08

“I think it’s important to not take yourself too seriously or to focus too exclusively on what you think you should do to have a good resume,” he said. “I didn’t do Law Review, and I didn’t wor ry a ton about grades, and I don’t regret that.”

Instead, Virgien spent the ma jority of his time working with the Harvard Prison Legal Assis tance Project (PLAP), in many ways continuing the work he had previously done for the ACLU, albeit from a more legally-orient ed perspective. While working at the PLAP, he was able to rep resent inmates while addressing pressing policy issues facing the prison system.

After graduation, Virgien spent several years as a lawyer in the private sector, where he primarily worked alongside tech companies in patent litigation. Yet, his work in civil rights con tinued as he took every oppor

tunity to pursue pro bono work, primarily working on cases con cerning incarceration and deten tion alongside the ACLU. This further prepared him for the work he would do full-time only a few years down the road.

According to Holland, who was also Virgien’s roommate for several years following law school, Virgien’s passion for ad vocacy extended far beyond just a professional interest. In addi tion to his pro bono work, Vir gien also dedicated much of his personal time to advocating for the rights of the incarcerated.

“Kyle has always been pas sionate about prison reform, volunteering for prisoners’ rights even while working insane hours as a lawyer in San Francisco,” Holland said.

In addition to working in private practice, Virgien also worked briefly as a law clerk for a Federal Appeals Court, which he

found both intellectually stimu lating and highly useful through out his shift to public interest work. “It’s been very valuable to know how courts work, and to have some experience with the decision-making process,” he re marked.

Advocating for the Rights of Detainees

In May of 2021, after several more years of private practice, Virgien began working full-time at the ACLU, where he is now a senior staff attorney. His cur rent role in large part echoes the work that he first began as an undergraduate intern, and con tinued throughout law school and the first few chapters of his legal career.

As a litigator, Virgien primar ily represents individuals and classes of people in immigration detention and within the prison system, both in federal and state

courts. So far, one of his princi pal focuses has been on ensuring prisoners’ safety throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, which has included, according to Holland, “su[ing] multiple state govern ments that dragged their feet on providing the vaccine to in mates.”

Virgien has also dedicated much of his time to policy ad vocacy, a large part of which in volves sharing his clients’ stories with reporters and the broader public.

“I think something that’s very often lost [in political discourse] is the fact that people behind bars, whether you’re talking about people in criminal custo dy or people in immigration de tention, are people with families and loved ones and friends and hopes and dreams,” Virgien said. “It’s incredibly important that the world listens to their stories.”

Apart from his day-to-day

work representing clients and communicating their stories to the public, Virgien has several longer-term aspirations that he hopes to help effectuate through his work at the ACLU.

“The goal is to end the mass immigration detention system, to stop locking people up while the system processes their claims, to release them into the community systems that we know exist and work,” he remarked. “And, along the way, to work to make sure that those who remain in deten tion are treated as humanely and [in a way as] consistent with the Constitution as possible.”

Virgien stressed that his work is rarely glamorous. “It’s a lot of standard lawyer stuff,” he said. “Brief writing, arguing in court, that sort of thing.” Yet, for him, it’s all in service of a larger mis sion: protecting the rights and dignity of our country’s incar cerated.

Photo courtesy of Kyle Mitchell Virgien ‘08

Virgien regularly conducts inspections to evaluate prison conditions across the nation.

Alumni Profile

Joe Katuska

From Intern to the Top: An MLB Scout’s Journey

Every year, hundreds of young men’s dreams of playing profes sional baseball come true when they hear their name called in the MLB First-Year Player Draft, but the intensive behind-the-scenes process leading up to the actual selections is mostly unknown to the general public. For Joe Ka tuska ’03, though, the process is no mystery. In fact, it’s his liveli hood.

Over his 17 years with the Cincinnati Reds, Katuska has traversed all parts of the country

on a mission to identify baseball diamonds in the rough — and ensure that they end up in Cin cinnati. Beginning in an arduous entry-level internship role and working his way up through gru eling scouting positions, his ef forts have paid off. Having risen through the organization’s ranks, Katuska was named the Reds’ Director of Amateur Scouting in 2021 and now holds the most responsibility in the department.

What Eddie Did

Katuska took a unique path to Amherst. Already young for his grade, Katuska only applied to four highly selective colleges during his senior year of high school, with the idea that if he didn’t get in anywhere, he would take the year off to work before going through the process again. When this came to pass, he did just that, working for a newspa per and in a bookstore while also playing baseball.

The second time around, Ka tuska went a perfect six-for-six on his applications but chose to attend Amherst, where he was recruited for baseball. It was the only college he reapplied to from his first cohort of schools. Grow ing up just outside of Boston, Amherst was close enough to home but provided an appropri ate amount of separation and, as Katuska describes, was “the right fit for everything that I wanted to do — it was really the right spot for me.”

Upon arriving at Amherst, Katuska planned on going to medical school, but realized “a couple courses into the chemis try requirements … that wasn’t going to happen.” Katuska in stead turned to American stud ies, where “the flexibility and the breadth of what you could study was appealing to me.”

In his spare time, Katuska was also an active member of The Student, occupying essentially every role in the sports section. Initially a staff reporter, he later became a columnist, managing sports editor, and eventually “se nior sports consultant” in his fi

nal year. His column, “What Ed die Heard,” showcased both his love for sports and his analytical mind for baseball. Some of his articles are still accessible online today, including a full breakdown of the 2001 World Series and Ka tuska’s thoughts on a potential contraction of MLB teams.

The column’s title is an hom age to Katuska’s nickname, given to him by seniors on his baseball team when he was a first-year. “I’m the oldest of six kids, my mother’s one of 10 — very big family,” Katuska explained. “So, [the seniors] started quizzing me on names in the family, and there wasn’t an Eddie. And they said, ‘Any family that big has to have an Eddie.’ So — I became Eddie.”

The nickname was “much to the chagrin” of a player actual ly named Eddie who joined the team in a subsequent year. “He couldn’t be Eddie anymore,” Ka tuska said with a laugh.

It was at Amherst that Katus ka met his future wife, Abby Oui met ’03. Katuska described her as

the “achiever of the group,” and for good reason — Ouimet was a three-sport athlete and five-time all-American, twice in field hock ey and three times in lacrosse while at Amherst. Ouimet is also the all-time leading points scor er for the women’s lacrosse team and powered the 2003 squad to a National Championship. Katuska proposed to Ouimet in front of Jenkins, then known as B-Dorm, on the common space that is now occupied by Beneski Hall.

Amherst’s MLB Pipeline

Though his plans for medical school faded, Katuska never lost his love for baseball. He still re members going to Red Sox games at Fenway Park as a kid and fall ing in love with the sport, and as he progressed through college, he decided he wanted to keep that love in his life. However, Ka tuska recognized that he needed to hang up the cleats in order for that to happen.

“I figured out pretty early on that no one was going to pay

Photo courtesy of Joe Katuska ’03

Joe Katuska ’03 embodies the hard work and dedi cation necessary to make it in the professional base ball world.

Alex Noga

After 17 years with the Cincinnati Reds, Joe Katuska ’03 earned the Director of Amateur Scouting position last year.

Photo courtesy of Joe Katuska ’03

Katuska, who was a catcher on the baseball team for four years, catches up with former teammates at last year’s doubleheader against Williams. Pictured left to right: Jo nah Ansell ’03, Jarrett Solomon ’03, Brett Nicol ’03, John Schneider ’03, Joe Katuska ’03.

me to play, so I wanted to find a way to stay in the game,” he said, chuckling. “And Amherst was re ally the perfect spot for that.”

Katuska started pursuing summer internships in the MLB during his sophomore year rath er than playing opportunities. He credits the strength of Amherst baseball’s strong alumni network, which he says fostered connec tions between groups of players who never overlapped and was instrumental in aiding in his in troduction into the professional baseball world.

Amherst has a long track re cord of producing successful professionals in the MLB — Dan Duquette ’80, Neal Huntington ’91, and Ben Cherington ’96 are three alumni who have served as general managers — and a strong network of alumni permeate through various levels of MLB front offices in a variety of roles. In fact, many of these former players — Katuska included — were coached by the same man,

the legendary Bill Thurston, who led the baseball team for an in credible 44 years.

Katuska and Thurston had a great relationship, so Thurston gave Katuska an open invitation to return to the baseball program in a coaching role if or when he thought it would help his career. After graduating from Amherst and spending a year doing home improvement work while simul taneously trying to get into base ball anyway he could — which included sending out hundreds of resumes to teams and going to the MLB Winter Meetings, where he tried to “corner people [who] didn’t really have any interest in getting cornered” — Katuska took Thurston up on his offer, returning to Amherst as an assis tant coach for the 2005 season. It was at this time, however, that he received the break he was look ing for — the Cincinnati Reds had offered him an internship for that summer.

“It worked nicely from a cal

endar perspective,” Katuska said. “I was able to come back [to Am herst] and coach, and then go out to Cincinnati and move on to the next chapter.”

The Next Chapter

Katuska’s first position with the Reds was as a “Baseball Op erations Intern,” which entailed charting major league games us ing video and compiling clips for the team to use in preparation for upcoming games. As time went on and Katuska was able to prove himself, his responsi bilities grew to include writing advanced scouting components to pair with the videos he pro duced.

During his second year in that position, Katuska was given the opportunity to go to Scout School, a now-defunct MLB-run program. It involved spending two weeks in Arizona watching various levels of baseball, from high school to the major leagues, and learning from members of

the league’s Scouting Bureau. It was there that Katuska picked up the important skills a scout needs in their toolbox, like how to write a scouting report and how to conduct oneself profes sionally. “I think [a lot of people] think that we just watch baseball games, and there’s a lot more to it than that,” Katuska said.

Because most Amherst alum ni have gone into player develop ment or front-office roles, scout ing was not the path that Katuska originally imagined for himself. Thinking back to his decision to pursue scouting, Katuska re members important advice that Duquette had given him while at Amherst: To make it in baseball, you need to be able to evaluate talent for yourself, or you need to have a right-hand man who will always be there to evaluate it for you. Wanting to maximize his prospects by adding this skill to his resume, Katuska jumped at the opportunity and officially be came a scouting supervisor (area scout) for the Reds in 2007.

Embracing the Grind

Over the next 14 years, Katus ka gradually ascended the ranks of the Reds’ amateur scouting department, proving his commit ment and value to the organiza tion. After spending eight years covering Kentucky, Tennessee, and Arkansas, he was promoted to regional crosschecker for the entirety of the Midwest, where he spent two years. Katuska then became national crosschecker before finally earning the role of Director of Amateur Scouting in 2021. As director, Katuska heads the entire amateur scouting de partment and has final say on who the Reds actually draft each summer.

Katuska’s rise to the head of the table is emblematic of what many Amherst alumni had told him years ago: You have to pay your dues. “A lot of people want to work in the game, and that supply [and] demand equation means you’re not going to get rich off your first job,” Katuska said.

In his original intern posi tion, Katuska remembers work ing over 100 hours for about 30 dollars per week. In scouting roles, travel responsibilities are

absurd — for parts of the year, Katuska says scouts are “on the road six, if not seven, days a week for months on end” — and can be taxing on families in the industry.

Katuska, who has four children, says that maintaining a healthy work-life balance is crucial to not burning out.

“I need to be able to flip the switch when I come home and just be a dad, and backburner some of the work stuff,” he said.

Now, as the head of the de partment, Katuska has obtained more power within the organi zation than ever before — and, of course, greater responsibility, too. He is in charge of using the detailed information and mul titude of opinions provided by scouts to make the final call on draft day. In explaining his suc cess, Katuska credits his continu ity within the Reds organization.

“Knowing the people and knowing everyone’s strengths and weaknesses — I’ve worked with this group, some of them, for the entire time that I’ve been here with the Reds since ’05 — is real ly beneficial,” he said. “We build our department from the ground up so that everyone’s voice is heard. There isn’t one super scout who makes the decision.”

Ultimately, however, it is up to Katuska to make the pick, some thing he did for the first time on July 17, during the 2022 MLB Draft. He relishes this opportuni ty — for him, the pressure is “cer tainly part of what makes it fun.”

“There’s no formula,” he add ed. “You have to weigh things differently for different types of players.”

Katuska took Cam Collier, a 17-year-old junior-college star and the youngest player to ever participate in the prestigious Cape Cod League, 18th overall with the Reds’ first pick in 2022. Collier joins a slew of other top100 prospects in the Reds’ farm system, ranked fourth overall by MLB.com during the 2022 sea son’s midpoint, who will look to take the team, which hasn’t fin ished better than third in the NL Central in a decade, to the next level.

Katuska is optimistic about the team’s future. “Obviously, we have had a couple tough years, but [we] hopefully [are] seeing the light at the end of the tunnel and can turn things around,” he said. “And I’d definitely like to be a part of that.”

Photo courtesy of Joe Katuska ’03

Katuska with 17-year-old Cam Collier, the Reds’ first draft choice with Katuska at the helm.

Exploring Identity and Writing Stories

Nalini Jones ’93 is a fiction writer, a professor, a former mu sic festival programmer, and a mother. But above all, she is a reader, and my conversation with her was delightfully book-filled. Any reader would, I’m sure, come away from listening to her speak with a long list of books and au thors to check out.

In fact, her biggest piece of advice for aspiring writers is to read “in every direction.” Read first for enjoyment, then reread to “think about the choices that the writer was making” — a method she recommends as “the most instructive, exciting way to figure out what choices might work for you.”

Jones’ short story collection, “What You Call Winter” (2007), centers around a family from Santa Clara, a Catholic neighbor hood on the outskirts of Mumbai. Its intertwined tales explore what it means to be family across cul tures, oceans, and generations. It’s about “what you call winter” in India being different from “what we call winter” in New York, how, though everyone is speaking Christian-school En glish, language and relationships continually shift with time.

I am not alone in being re minded of Jame Joyce’s “Dublin ers” as I read about a small com munity of characters conflicted over whether to emigrate, wheth er to give up family houses to real estate developers, and whether it is possible to connect or re connect with the complexities of home. There’s a copy in the Frost

Catacombs, perfect for weekend (or procrastination) reading.

Reading Beyond the Canon

Like many English majors, Jones’ favorite subjects in school were English and history. Her high school curriculum was “su per canonical,” focusing on Brit ish and American authors, with bits of Russian literature sprin kled in. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t finding great things in that mate rial,” she clarified. Charles Dick ens in particular charmed her with his “rollicking long sagas” — perhaps a seed that inspired her own short stories’ masterful leaps in time.

She also read a lot of poetry in high school because, she jokes, “poetry is short.” Her favorite po ets were Sterling Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and, like any good Amherst student, Emily Dickinson, whose work helped shape her interest in dic tion “in the most fundamental way.”

A turning point came when she was following anti-apart heid movements in South Africa, which led her to the Heinemann African Writers Series, featur ing books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Alex La Guma, and Bessie Head — texts she would continue to work with at Amherst. Encoun tering a totally different world view and aesthetic was “exciting,” even “mind-blowing,” and she added that it expanded her sense of “what literature was and what

it could be.”

“To have family in India and be the first generation born in the states, to sort of try to bridge those differences and bridge that distance, to figure out how you could be a family across all that time and space — I hadn’t really understood that as, in a way like anything anyone would be inter ested in, or would write about,” Jones said.

When she eventually found her way to the works of V.S. Naipaul in college, it was a “real revelation.” As a first-generation Indian American whose family took trips to India as often as they could afford, Jones explained that reading Naipaul’s work made the

To have family in India and be the first generation born in the states, to sort of try to bridge those differences and bridge that distance, to figure out how you could be a family across all that time and space — I hadn’t really understood that as, in a way like anything anyone would be interested in, or would write about.

“personal, natural, authentic ex periences I was having within my family feel like something that actually could be written about.”

Becoming a Writer

In Ben Lerner’s novel, “10:04,” the narrator says that asking a writer how they became a writ er is essentially asking them to compose an origin myth. If that is the case, Jones is a more honest myth-maker than most. She ad mits she thought her passion for reading meant that writing would come naturally to her — “and bad writing did come naturally,” she jokes. Back then, she said, she had no idea what to write about nor how to shape a narrative.

Looking back on her Amherst days, the first memory that came to mind was sledding down Me morial Hill on a cafeteria tray (“very, very fun”), followed by memories of professors who were “completely life-changing.” Three professors in particular led her

on the path to becoming a seri ous writer.

Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, William Pritchard taught her modern British poetry and, according to the Summer 2007 issue of the “Amherst Magazine,” was “re nowned for his dry wit, his de manding courses and his finely tuned critical ear.” Jones still very clearly admires and respects him, and although she says she barely spoke a word in his class, she has “never forgotten” the experience.

“I can remember comments that he wrote on my embarrassingly weak papers,” she says, “because it was such a big deal to hear from someone that knowledge able and intelligent.”

Another impactful professor was Senior Lecturer in English, Emeritus, Helen von Schmidt, who happens to be Jones’ aunt, and taught what Jones called a “high valued, very beloved com position class.” Enrolling for cre

A passionate reader, Nalini Jones ’93 turned to the craft of fiction to explore “essential” questions about family and identity.

—Priscilla Lee ’25

Jones is the author of the story collection, “What You Call Win ter.” She is currently professor of creative writing at Columbia University and is working on a forthcoming novel.

Photo courtesy of Nalini Jones ’93

ative writing courses was just as difficult then as it is now: Jones had to wait until her senior year to be allowed in. It was “the hard est writing I’ve ever done,” she said, adding that it taught her “about prose and structure,” as well as how to write with a “fi delity to character.” In her class, Jones was rigorously trained to look for the right word — “not the word that is close, and not the word that is exaggerating, but the word that really expresses what you want to say, which is anoth er way of figuring out that you might not be sure what you want to say.”

Finally, Caryl Philips, a successful novelist, essayist, and playwright, who was writ er-in-residence at Amherst at the time, introduced Jones to authors like Salman Rushdie and Peter Carey, who were “writing back to empire.” Philips’ own work on the African Diaspora and Black Atlantic experience was also “crucial” to her development as a writer: “the boldness and the ex traordinary essence of his char acters is always a joy, but also instructive.”

Philips would go on to be her senior thesis advisor. Un conventionally, Jones wrote cre ative nonfiction, a genre she says “wasn’t really a thing then,” about her grandmother in India. She says she wrote memoir because she had not yet figured out basic story structure, and “certainly not novel structure.” Even so, her thesis proved useful and end ed up “animating” her stories in “What You Call Winter” — not in actual material, but in themes and ideas.

After graduation, Jones re turned to doing what her father had trained her to do: program ming jazz music festivals and producing music. She enjoyed the work (she had done it as an extracurricular at Amherst, and is still Backstage Manager at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival), but it was also a sort of stopgap while she tried to figure out what she’d really like to do.

Being a writer felt like a “dim career prospect,” and she also had some self-doubt, especially when

comparing herself to classmates like Cordelia Lawton ’93 and Ma ria Barcel ’93, whose fiction the ses she thought were “spectacu lar” and “so much further along” than her own writing. Despite all this, she found that she “kept writing anyway.”

Then, crediting her parents for instilling in her an apprecia tion for education, she pursued an M.F.A. in creative writing at Columbia University. “I went in with a really specific idea that I was going to study craft, but not necessarily ever try to publish anything, because that would be getting ahead of myself,” Jones said.

tify “very strongly” as a South Asian student and “would not have felt quite right showing up” at Indian cultural spaces. She felt she did not have the same cul tural references as other South Asians in terms of religion and languages, and she did not know of any language or discourse that expressed what she felt.

It’s not that Amherst wasn’t a politically aware space, she clari fied. It wasn’t the case for every one, but “if you cared — and I cared —” there was a lot of stu dent activism surrounding the Gulf War, Planned Parenthood, and fighting for more class and racial equity on campus, espe cially for African American stu dents.

and “read everything I could from India.” Some of her favorite works are “Baumgartner’s Bom bay” by Anita Desai (“daring and exciting”) and Rohinton Mistry’s “Family Matters” (one of her fa vorite novels of all time). She adds that Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” “meant a great deal to me,” but she finds herself going back to his other books, “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Imaginary Homelands,” even more.

er answers more fruitfully and imaginatively than otherwise.

I went in with a really specific idea that I was going to study craft, but not necessarily ever try to publish anything, because that would be getting ahead of myself.

That turned out to be the right attitude for her and allowed her to discover what she enjoyed about writing, as well as to think through creative problems on her own terms. She is now a profes sor at the Columbia M.F.A. pro gram, and has also taught writing at Yale University and at the Ar cadia Center in Greece.

Writing Indian American Stories

The setting of Jones’ short story collection, “What You Call Winter,” is based on her mother’s family in India, English-speaking Catholics from Mangalore who now live in Mumbai — “much more interested in what is com ing out of Rome than, say, what’s coming out of Delhi,” she says laughingly. Her father is white, and she grew up in Connecticut and Ohio, feeling like “a swirl of … different cultures and ideas.”

At Amherst, she did not iden

One of the things that writing can offer the person, the writer, is a possibility of coming to terms with a lot of the questions that you have through your life. And one of the questions that I had was like, well, what does it mean to — in this very, very particular, distant, disjointed way — have a foot in India?

Ultimately, writing was what helped Jones come to terms with her identity. “One of the things that writing can offer the per son, the writer, is a possibility of coming to terms with a lot of the questions that you have through your life,” Jones said. “And one of the questions that I had was like, well, what does it mean to — in this very, very particular, distant, disjointed way — have a foot in India?” Now, she has “no difficulty at all identifying as someone who is part of an Indian diaspora.”

Of course, she then went back

For Jones, writing is about ex ploring questions that are “puz zling to me, bewildering to me, or intriguing to me, but also some how essential to me” — questions like, “how does somebody leave home?” or “how do you figure out being a family across a cou ple of oceans?” It’s not that others haven’t already figured them out, she says, or that her questions are particularly unique. “But it turns out that those are some things I needed to know,” and she’s found that through fiction and charac ter, she has been able to discov

Jones believes that other ques tions, like how to represent an underrepresented culture, or how to translate between spatial and temporal borders, are for read ers and critics, not writers. They should be put aside, especially while writing the first few drafts. Instead, she focuses on writing her characters as authentically as possible. By doing this “with real attention, and care, and sensitiv ity,” she advises, other concerns of representation and translation will naturally “fall into place” in a way that doesn’t feel fabricated or dogmatic.

In her writing career, Jones has also written many essays and articles, especially during the era of the one she calls “Mr. Trump.”

She is currently at work on a nov el, set to be published with Knopf, hopefully in 2024. Whatever it is about, we can be sure that it will be carefully crafted, and full of honesty and essential questions.

Photo courtesy of Nalini Jones ’93

“What You Call Winter” (2007) is a collection of interconnect ed short stories centered around the Almeida family, spanning generations across India and America.

By the Numbers: Professor Fights for Justice

With a solid frame, stout jaw, and strong brow, Andreas Georgiou ’83 might look more like a retired Olympic wrestler than a macro economist — that is, if he weren’t always dressed in business attire: at least a sportcoat and more often than not a tie.

He was wearing a full suit last fall when he entered Seeley Mudd 205 on the first day of “Statistical Principles and Ethics,” the course he teaches once a year at Amherst. Despite his imposing appearance, he spoke softly when he began to walk us through the syllabus. Ev erything he said was precise, rea soned — fair. But his eyes, tired yet cautious, were those of a man who knew what it meant to fight.

The class — which I had signed up for less on a whim than a prayer after being scared off by the first day of “Multivariable Calculus” — was a three-hour lecture struc tured around a series of slide shows, which Georgiou explicated in his characteristically neutral and pre cise manner of speaking. But over the course of the term, hints of Georgiou’s personality — the single father to a 12-year-old girl, a “John Wick” fan, a dry sense of humor — snuck through the cracks, as did the harrowing personal backstory on which the class was based.

As we soon learned, for Geor giou, doing the right thing is syn onymous with being true to his principles — and it hasn’t made life easy. His path has been one of the hardest imaginable: leaving his home in Greece to attend college nearly 5,000 miles away, toiling to make ends meet as an economics

Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, and risking his life to im prove the economic conditions of developing countries while work ing for the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

But far and away the most gruel ing ordeal of his life is still ongoing. For nearly 10 years now, Georgiou has been embroiled in a series of legal disputes with the Greek gov ernment that has, for its absurd bureaucratic oppressiveness, drawn comparisons to the work of Franz Kafka.

The trouble started after Geor giou, in 2010, took over as Presi dent of the Hellenic Statistical Au thority, Greece’s national statistics office. He rectified the country’s perennially unprincipled statistical practices, which had concealed the government’s long-running fiscal profligacy — culminating in 2009 — and leading to a debt crisis that ravaged the country’s economy. His numbers earned approval from the European Commission 10 straight times. But — in an ironic twist — Georgiou was met with accusations from Greek politicians that he in tentionally altered the data to make Greece’s situation seem worse than it was.

Since then, he has faced a seem ingly endless sequence of investi gations, virulent attacks from the Greek media, the financial duress of paying for legal services, and the very real threat of a lengthy pris on sentence. But even as his future continues to hang in the balance, Georgiou has “no regrets” about any decision he’s made — he’d do it all the same.

For him, the fight is about more than just his own freedom. “It is a human rights issue,” he said. “This is bad for the legitimacy of liberal democracies around the world.”

A Classical Education

Up until he left for Amherst at the age of 18, Georgiou lived in Greece, where he says his upbring ing was characteristic of the coun try, “in the classical sense.”

He recalled “sitting at the Acrop olis on an August night with a full moon — just absolutely magical.”

His educational outlook was also characteristically Greek. “I was never one of these people whose mind was focused on one thing,” he said. “I’ve always considered myself to be a kind of mind that’s sought a lot of different experiences, and interested in many different things.”

One of the teachers at his high school — a Greek-American insti tution called Athens College — was an Amherst alumnus, and he en couraged Georgiou to consider the college on the grounds that it would fulfill the young Georgiou’s desire for broad intellectual stimulation.

During a summer studying at Phillips Andover Academy, Geor giou had a chance to visit the Am herst campus. “I remember it was a beautiful summer day,” Georgiou recalled. “And I remember Memo rial Hill. It was a very idyllic place.” It didn’t hurt, either, that Amherst was the top liberal arts college in the country.

As his teacher had predicted, Amherst fulfilled Georgiou’s crav ing for broad intellectual stimula tion.

Enamored with all the college had to offer, Georgiou remembered poring over the course catalog, ex ploring the possibilities, as being “some of the most pleasant mo ments” in his life.

He enjoyed the classes he took on economics and politics most of all, and several of his professors in those areas — including Geoffrey Woglom, the Richard S. Volpert ’56 professor of economics, emeritus, and Jan Dizard, the Charles Hamil ton Houston professor in American culture, emeritus — became his life long mentors and friends.

While Georgiou explored a diverse range of subject areas — STEM early on, the Russian lan guage, linguistics at Smith, and more — he found himself thinking most about the structure of society.

“It was the question of [what is] the appropriate society to live in, and how to organize it,” Geor giou said. “And I grappled with that for many years, and my mind has evolved over the years tremendous ly about this.”

With this passion uncovered,

Georgiou decided to double-major in economics and an interdisciplin ary major of his own creation, econ omy and social thought. His senior thesis, which earned him summa cum laude honors, investigated the ories of class structure in the Greek left.

Though Georgiou didn’t always feel connected to the core of the social scene at Amherst, which was then dominated by fraternities, he pleasantly recalled discussing pol itics and culture with many differ ent types of people, forming bonds with the international student com munity, and exploring the Pioneer Valley.

More than anything else, Geor giou credits his time at Amherst with providing him the tools and capacity to always pursue his in tellectual curiosity — which he has continued to do over the course of his life.

Economic Exploration

At Amherst, Georgiou had come to realize that he wanted to continue his study of economics,

Facing persecution from the Greek government, Andreas Georgiou ’83 has never compromised on that which he holds most dear: his principles.

— Liam Archacki ’24

Georgiou teaches a course once a year based, in part, on his personal experience: “Statistical Principles and Ethics.”

Photo courtesy of Andreas Georgiou ’83

with plans to eventually launch an academic career and become a pro fessor. So graduate school appeared a requisite next step.

He decided on the University of Michigan, but his education there, while “reasonable,” didn’t provide the same opportunities for explora tion that he had found at Amherst.

“I couldn’t open up the course book, and say, ‘OK, am I interested in taking linguistics or French the ater?’” Georgiou said. “I took some things, but it was much more limit ed in that sense.”

But in the broader environment of Michigan, a far cry from Western Massachusetts, Georgiou was still able to have “a lot of very interesting discussions.”

By the time he had earned his Ph.D., Georgiou still planned to earn a post as a professor and climb the academic ladder until he had earned tenure. He only applied to one non-academic position: a job as an economist for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United Nations organization that aims to promote global economic develop ment.

When he was offered the po

sition, the allure of being able to have a tangible impact was too compelling to pass up. “I was able to actually do macroeconomic pol icy instead of studying and writing articles,” he said. “This was a way of actually doing something.”

Georgiou had found a path to address in the real world the soci etal questions that had defined his academic experience.

His first role was a desk officer for Romania. As part of a larger team, he tracked economic develop ments in the country during a time of turmoil, the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union was beginning to fall apart. Georgiou felt “quite lucky” to be able to have the influence he did at such an important moment.

After that, Georgiou worked on cases in a number of developing countries across the globe — Tu nisia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya, to name a few.

He would travel to his assigned country and work on-site. “I would spend nights doing my spreadsheets in the hotel,” he said, “and there would be people with machine guns fighting down the street.”

Though Georgiou actually faced

a few instances where he feared for his life, he appreciated the “degree of excitement” that his early work at the IMF gave him.

Georgiou spent an extended period of time working for Slovakia soon after the country had sepa rated from the Czech Republic; he described it as one of his “most re warding experiences.”

“Everybody was expecting the Slovaks to come crawling back on their knees to the Czechs,” Geor giou recalled. “But I was quite confident that they could do it.” Working as a liaison between the government there and the IMF, Georgiou was able to help the new country make economic improve ments.

Through his work at the IMF, Georgiou increasingly came to see high-quality data as crucial to solv ing the economic problems that plagued the countries he was help ing. “We would spend 80 percent of our time trying to figure out, What is the picture?” Georgiou said. “We had to learn how to do this, put to gether a consistent picture of what was there.”

As Georgiou would later teach us in “Stat Ethics,” sound statistics enables us to see what is actually happening in the world.

A Troubled Homecoming

In 2010, Georgiou’s life had reached a comfortable hum. He had now spent more than 20 years as an IMF economist. He had four German shepherds, an established presence in D.C., and a newborn baby girl to take care of.

But this was also the moment that a new challenge called out to him. The Greek economy had spi raled in the wake of the Great Re cession — and a large part of the problem was that their macroeco nomic data had been found once again unreliable. Public confidence was dangerously low.

Georgiou became aware of an opening for the position of Pres ident of The Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), the Greek national statistics office. Although he knew it would be challenging, Georgiou felt a sense of duty — he knew he could help.

“I had not really served my country,” he said. “I just left when

I was 18. I left for 31 years.” So he decided to return, with the under standing that he would essentially be protecting the Greek govern ment’s statisticians along ethical lines, ensuring that they were able to employ sound practices.

When he got there, though, Georgiou realized the situation was more fraught than he had anticipat ed.

The statistical perimeter — that is, the boundary between the offi cial statisticians who produce the government’s statistics and outsid ers, who should not be involved — wasn’t being maintained. Political influence was seeping into statisti cal production.

“When you have this kind of environment,” Georgiou said, “bad things are bound to happen.”

But Georgiou was resolved to help. He set to work on revising the deceptive previously published data, and reforming the practices that had allowed it to be produced.

“We had certain rules,” Geor giou said. “They existed as stan dards enshrined in European legis lation. We were supposed to apply these rules like every other member state of the European Union.”

He faced resistance from the other members of ELSTAT’s board, who wished to be involved in the compilation of the statistics, negoti ate them with the European Statis tical Authority (Eurostat), and vote on them before they were released.

Georgiou objected that the Eu ropean Statistics Code of Practice assigned him full responsibility for statistical output — there was no room for negotiating or voting on the figures. “It just doesn’t work like that,” he said.

The tension was further aggra vated when it came to light that another board member had hacked Georgiou’s personal email account and had been sharing his private communications with the other members of the board. Under standably distressed, Georgiou de cided to stop holding the monthly meeting of ELSTAT’s board, pend ing a police investigation into the matter.

Against this troubling backdrop, Georgiou’s reforms were work ing. In November 2010, Eurostat published without any qualms the

2006-2009 Greek government fiscal figures produced under Georgiou’s leadership. In fact, during Geor giou’s five-year tenure, Eurostat would find no issues with Greece’s statistics — a clear reversal of course from before Georgiou arrived.

The revised 2009 deficit figure had been increased significantly, by 1.8 percent of Greece’s GDP com pared to the figure published in April 2010. A stark image was com ing to light: Greece’s economy was suffering more than anyone had thought, and the data had been in tentionally manipulated to conceal this reality.

“When I understood the mag nitude of the problems,” Georgiou said, “it was very disappointing to me.”

Nevertheless, Georgiou was hopeful for the future. “My expe rience was that [the statisticians] did their job, when the right ethical framework was given,” he said.

The Trials

When I asked Georgiou about his legal troubles, he paused. This part of the story, he told me, “is al ways a little bit tiring to the heart to think about.”

Throughout 2011, some of EL STAT’s board members had been publicly proclaiming that the re vised deficit figure had been artifi cially inflated under Georgiou.

And with the Greek econo my still in a nose dive, a narrative emerged, and was promoted by politicians across Greece’s partisan aisle, that Georgiou was “acting on instructions from abroad” to make the deficit appear greater than it ac tually was.

The conspiracy theory’s logic, Georgiou told me, centered on his previous position at the IMF — and his ties to “the West” more general ly. He was being painted by leaders of his home country as a “foreign agent” intent on bringing Greece to its knees before the global powers that be.

The theory wasn’t even coher ent, Georgiou told me. “What was fascinating to me from day one was, How was it possible to inflate the figures and not have any money left? Because if you have a small er deficit, then you have a smaller hole to cover with borrowing, but

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

In 2010, Georgiou became the president of Greece’s national statistics office. Trouble was soon to follow.

we were using every single penny of what we were borrowing.” Not to mention that discrepancies in ELSTAT’s data had been uncovered before Georgiou even arrived.

But, as a “technocrat who had no party affiliation,” Georgiou made for a convenient scapegoat amid a rapidly shifting Greek political en vironment. Greece’s center-right and far-left parties were quickly gaining control of parliament, and despite being unlikely bedfellows, the two were united against him.

“And you can imagine, of course, what the national sentiment was,” Georgiou said. “People lis tened to their political leaders.”

On Sept. 19, 2011, the first crim inal investigation into Georgiou’s work at ELSTAT was initiated. He was informed that the prosecutor for the government’s “economic crimes” division wished to ques tion him and two of his senior staff about the alleged inflation of the 2009 deficit.

“At the beginning, I thought that this was to just be a few weeks’ time; we would go through the motions, present the arguments,” he said. But the saga has since stretched so long that it took Georgiou nearly two hours to convey it to me in full. The extent of the injustice he has faced is too great to describe here in all its detail.

While Georgiou’s numbers con tinued to earn approval from Eu rostat, the investigation proceeded, with felony charges for the artificial inflation of the deficit formally pressed against Georgiou and his two senior staff in January 2013.

But Georgiou’s faith in justice remained strong. And in July 2013, the investigating judge in his case concluded that the charges were baseless. Yet, in the wake of public pressure from politicians, the Greek supreme court intervened, and the case remained open.

In 2014, additional cases for both criminal and civil slander, stemming from public comments Georgiou made in defense of his statistics, were opened against him.

Georgiou was called for ques tioning on the charges that he ar tificially inflated the 2009 deficit, causing 171-billion-euro damage to the Greek economy, and that he had “violated his duty” by not put

ting the statistics up to a vote of the ELSTAT board.

If the investigators weren’t con vinced by Georgiou, they could hold him for up to 18 months, awaiting trial. “I remember vividly

I said goodbye to my daughter,” he told me. “She was just five years old. And I feared I wasn’t going to see her for a year and a half.”

After questioning him for eight hours, the investigators let Geor giou go. They recommended that the charges be dropped.

In July 2015, the Greek ap peals court made what Georgiou called a “Solomonic decision.” They dropped the charge related to in flating the deficit, but proceeded to trial on the charge that Georgiou had “violated his duty.” The charge of civil slander would also reach trial.

At the end of his five-year term atop ELSTAT, in August 2015, Georgiou chose not to seek a sec ond term, instead returning to the U.S.

Even as Georgiou has been back stateside, his trials have continued, resulting in a back-and-forth series of acquittals and reversals, verdicts and appeals.

In 2016, the Greek Supreme Court annulled the decision of the appeals court to drop the charges related to inflating the deficit, and Georgiou was subjected to anoth er round of “in camera” trial at the appeals court for the same charge. The appeals court, under a different composition, then decided again in 2017 to drop these charges. And yet again the Greek Supreme Court an nulled that decision and sent it back to be reconsidered by the appeals court. Finally, in 2019, following another “in camera trial,” the ap peals court decided for a third time to drop these charges. This specific felony case — with potential life in prison at stake — was closed.

Also in 2016, Georgiou was convicted of and sentenced to 12 months in prison for the slander charge, though it was a case of “simple slander” — making true statements that happen to damage someone’s reputation, which is not illegal in most countries. He was also sued for damages related to the alleged slander, also losing that case the same year.

After being acquitted in 2016 of the charge that he “violated his duty,” Georgiou was in 2017 sub jected to a double jeopardy trial — which is legal in Greece — and was convicted on the charge that he should have put the ELSTAT’s sta tistics up for approval by the board, acquitted on the two other charges, and sentenced to two years in pris on, suspended for three years.

After first losing an appeal on the slander conviction in criminal court, that conviction was eventu ally quashed in 2018 by the Greek Supreme Court on account of “sig nificant legal errors” in the origi nal convicting decision. However, Georgiou lost the civil appeal of his slander case. The court’s deci sion now requires that Georgiou pay a fee for damages and publish a public confession of guilt in the one Greek newspaper that had come out in support of him. If he doesn’t pay and does not make this confes sion, his mother’s house in Greece, which is under Georgiou’s name, faces seizure.

“It has been very difficult to tell my mother I will not do it,” Geor giou said. “But that’s the way it is.”

Now Georgiou is trying to get the slander loss in civil court an nulled by the supreme court, with a decision set for January 2023. If it is approved, Georgiou will receive another trial — a chance to clear his name and avoid the confiscation of his assets. “So, hopefully, the Greek supreme court will do the right thing,” Georgiou said.

If that doesn’t work out, Geor giou has plans to go again to the European Court of Human Rights, where he is already awaiting a de cision in reference to his other con viction. He expects this to be decid ed by the end of the year.

As if that weren’t enough, Geor giou has also had to deal with three other legal cases in Greece, again related to his work at the national statistics office. Two had to do with his efforts to protect the confiden tiality of the data households and enterprises provide the statistics of fice. Finally, an additional criminal investigation of the alleged infla tion of the 2009 government deficit was initiated in 2016, but this case has been dormant in recent years.

Despite all that he has experi

enced, Georgiou maintains hope that justice will prevail. “I was de fending the statistics,” he told me. “I was also exercising my democratic rights and my human rights to ex press myself.”

An Examined Life

Being a philosophy major, it was impossible for me not to draw a comparison between Georgiou and another famous Athenian upon hearing his story. “Crito,” a Platon ic dialogue, describes Socrates’ last days. The philosopher is unjustly imprisoned on charges of corrupt ing the youth, and his execution is imminent.

Crito, a wealthy friend of his, visits Socrates and offers to help him flee Athens, to escape his death. But Socrates declines. An in justice cannot be rectified by a fur ther injustice, he tells Crito.

“We should not then think so much of what the majority will say about us,” Socrates says, “but what he will say who understands justice and injustice, the one, that is, and the truth itself.”

Georgiou found the comparison “presumptuous.” He’s perhaps more down to earth than I.

With no capacity to make the wheels of the legal system turn any faster, Georgiou presently spends

his days focused on the here and now. His “number one priority” is raising his 12-year-old daugh ter, from whom he answered two phone calls during our interview (the first time she was just check ing in; the second, she had unfor tunately dropped her cellphone in the toilet).

He has also used his newfound free time to pursue his one-time dream of being an educator — and he gets to do so at the place where he experienced his own intellectual formation.

During the fall, Georgiou boards a plane in D.C. each Thurs day morning, drives into Amherst that afternoon, and teaches a sec tion of “Stat Ethics,” only to fly right back the following morning.

Part of the appeal of teaching at Amherst — what perhaps makes it worth the intense commute — is that Georgiou gets to relive, for one day out of the week, his highly for mative time here.

“I love Amherst,” he said. “It does not mean that everything is perfect here. However, … when I walk around campus or among the book stacks at Frost, I find myself marveling at how wonderful the place is, both the beauty of its set ting and the idea of the liberal arts education it embodies.”

Photo courtesy of Andreas Georgiou ’83

Georgiou said that, as a single father, raising his 12-year-old daughter is his “number one priority.”

Men’s Soccer Ends Regular Season Seeded Third in NESCAC

Staff Writer

The No. 10 men’s soccer team played their final regular-season NESCAC matchups this week, taking on Connecticut College at home on Wednesday, Oct. 19, and then Hamilton and Trinity away on Saturday, Oct. 22, and Wednesday, Oct. 26, respectively.

First up, a clash with the de fending-National-Champion Camels. Both teams opened with aggressive offensive pressure, but neither team would find the goal until the 30th minute. Amherst was awarded a penalty kick after Ada Okorogheye ’24E dribbled the ball into the box and was tripped up. Ben Clark-Eden ’25 converted, giving the Mammoths a 1-0 advantage. Conn, however, was able to equalize in the 81st minute, and while the Mam moths kept up the pressure in the

final minutes, the match conclud ed in a 1-1 draw.

Next up was NESCAC foe No. 25 Hamilton. Amherst drew first blood in the 39th minute, as Wyatt McCarthy ’24 blasted a rebound past the Continentals’ keeper to give the Mammoths a 1-0 lead. Then, in the 58th minute, a giveand-go between Okorogheye and Niall Murphy ’25 gave Murphy a wide open lane that he capital ized on to give the Mammoths a 2-0 lead. But the Mammoths weren’t done yet: They kept up the intensity and were rewarded 10 minutes from full-time when Fynn Hayton-Ruffner ’25 sent in a cross that Shawn Rapal ’24E deftly headed past the Continen tals’ keeper for a 3-0 lead. Just two minutes later, the Mammoths iced the game via Ioannis Hadji yiannis ’26 who received the ball from Simon Kalinauskas ’25 and was able to head it home. In a

complete team effort, the Mam moths walked away with a dom inant 4-0 victory.

For their final NESCAC regu lar-season game, the Mammoths headed to Trinity, where they dis patched the Bantams 4-1. Three first-half goals, courtesy of Aidan Curtis ’25, Ryan Gomez ’25, and Declan Sung ’24E, set the tone early and brought the Mammoths into the halftime break up 3-0. Though Trinity tried to respond with a goal of their own in the 58th minute, Amherst finished them off via Gomez’ second goal of the game just three minutes later, putting a bow on their vic tory.

With the regular season now over, the Mammoths head into the playoffs having secured a top-four seed in the NESCAC tournament, which guarantees a home game on Saturday, Oct. 29, during the quarterfinal round.

No. 10 men’s soccer will host a quarterfinal game in this year’s playoffs.

Women’s Soccer Wins Second Straight Regular Season Title

Leo Kamin ’25 Managing News Editor

The No. 10 women’s soccer team closed their regular sea son on a tear, ripping off seven straight wins and securing the NESCAC regular season title and home-field advantage for the con ference tournament. Their season ended with a pair of 1-0 league victories, the first over Hamil ton on Saturday, Oct. 18, and the second against No. 23 Trinity on Tuesday, Oct. 25. The Mammoths’ late-season success has been driv en by a strong play from forward Patience Kum ’25, who has won two of the last three NESCAC Player of the Week awards.

The Hamilton match began with an offensive onslaught from the Continentals, who sought to keep their postseason hopes

alive and fired the first five shots of the match within the first 15 minutes. But the momentum then swung towards the Mam moths, and their breakthrough eventually came in the 34th min ute. A Mammoth counter attack started with a through ball from Sarah Sullivan ’23 that found the feet of Kum. She sprinted past two defenders to collect the ball and then dropped the goalkeep er before passing the ball into an empty net. Behind the play of goalkeeper Mika Fisher ’24, who notched eight saves in the contest, the Amherst defense held firm in the second half, and Kum’s goal proved the difference in a 1-0 Mammoth win.

The team maintained that mo mentum in Hartford on Tuesday night against the Bantams, scor ing the game’s only goal after just

nine minutes. After an offsides call, Fiona Bernet ’25 roped a beautiful pass that barely clipped a Bantam defender’s head be fore bouncing straight to Abby Schwartz ’24. She calmly headed the ball past the Trinity goalkeep er for a 1-0 lead. From there, the Mammoths kept up their trade mark pressure, winning loose balls all over the field and hold ing Trinity to just three shots over the course of the 90 minutes. When the final whistle blew, the Mammoths walked away with a 1-0 win and the NESCAC reg ular season title for the second straight year.

The Mammoths’ quest for a NESCAC Tournament title be gins on Saturday, at home against Connecticut College in the quar terfinals. Kickoff is set for 12 p.m. on Hitchcock Field.

No. 10 women’s soccer clinched the NESCAC regular season title for the second straight year.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Photo courtesy of Lee Huynh

Kate Becker

Field Hockey’s Winning Streak Ended by Loss Against Trinity

Kate Quigley ’26 Staff Writer

This week, No. 4 Amherst field hockey finished its regular season with 12 wins after a 4-0 win against Smith on Wednesday, Oct. 19, a 3-2 win against Hamilton on Saturday, Oct. 22, and a 2-1 overtime loss to Trinity on Tuesday, Oct. 25.

Within the first five minutes of the Smith contest, senior Natalie Hobbs ’23E set up Muffie Mazam bani ’24 at the top of the circle for the first goal of the game. Then, a defensive clearance by Kate Smith ’25 found Sam Maynard ’25, who put in her own rebound after an initial save for a 2-0 lead. After half time, Amherst sealed their win with two more goals in the third quarter: Maynard scored her second of the game just five minutes into the sec ond half, and Abbey Kays ’25 ripped a shot into the lower left-corner off a Mazambani penalty corner to close out the scoring just two minutes later and seal the 4-0 win.

They extended their winning streak on Saturday, Oct. 22, against Hamilton. The Mammoths took an early lead — in the first minute, Kays

scored off another penalty corner. And towards the end of the quarter, they got their second via Maynard: Justine Ligouri ’26 sent the ball through the Continentals’ circle to a wide-open Maynard, who put it into an open goal for the 2-0 lead. Unde terred, Hamilton scored twice in the second half to tie the game early in the fourth. But just three minutes lat er the Mammoths got the game-win ner. After passes from Sage Geyer ’23E and Kays, Mazambani finished the play to shut the door for good.

However, the Mammoths’ win streak ended on Tuesday against No. 6 Trinity, falling 2-1 in a heartbreaker. Trinity scored first, striking early in the third quarter, but the Mammoths tied the game with five minutes to go: Hobbs sent the ball into the arc, where Anna Aiello ’26 put it away to send the game to overtime. However, it was not the Mammoths’ day, as the Bantams scored eight minutes into extra time and sent them home with their first loss in 10 games.

Seeded fourth, the Mammoths will look to extend their season in the NESCAC tournament at home against rival Williams on Saturday, Oct. 29 at 11 a.m.

Despite falling to Trinity on Tuesday, the Mammoths will host a NESCAC quar terfinal game on Hill Field on Saturday, Oct. 29.

Volleyball Sweeps Emerson 3-0 on Senior Day

Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor

On Saturday, Oct. 22, the Amherst volleyball team cele brated their four seniors in style, blowing out non-conference foe Emerson 3-0 in a matchup that was never really all that close.

The Mammoths came out fir ing from the opening set, taking the first two frames by identical 25-14 scorelines. In both sets, the team jumped out to early leads, with an 8-1 margin in the first and a 6-1 gap in the second, with runs of 8-2 and 5-0 respec tively icing the sets only a few points later. Lizzie Papalia ’25 had the hot hand in these two sets, with the Mammoths tak ing 11 total points on her serve through the two sets. Howev

er, with their backs against the wall and trailing 2-0, the Lions fought back. They held a nar row lead for most of the set un til Charlotte Rasmussen ’26 and Kinsey Croinin ’25 teamed up for a combined-block to tie the score at 19-19. From there, both sides continued their back-andforth play, but with the score tied at 22, the Firedogs took over. Kills from Rasmussen and Anaya Thomas ’25 gave them the lead, and a Lions attack error gave the Mammoths the set, 2522, and the 3-0 sweep.

The Mammoths will go on the road for two NESCAC con tests this coming weekend, tak ing on Bates on Friday, Oct. 27, at 7 p.m. and Colby on Saturday, Oct. 28, at 2 p.m, to finish the regular season.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Caroline Tilton ‘23 spikes the ball against Emerson College.

Front and Center: Title IX Turns 50, But Still Not Done Growing

Melanie Schwimmer ’23 Staff Writer

When the editors of the sports section asked me to write about Title IX 50 years later for this Homecom ing issue, I did not know how to start. On paper, the act does not mention athletics at all, but in practice, Title IX is primarily associated with gen der equity in sports. I assumed they wanted me to celebrate the new op portunities for women, and it is true that female participation in college athletics has skyrocketed since its passage. A few years prior to the act’s passage, only 15,000 women partic ipated in college athletics — from the recreational to the elite level. Fif ty years later, over 200,000 women play sports across all divisions of the NCAA alone, including hundreds of women at Amherst. Increased participation of women in athletics helps challenge traditionally-held stereotypes about gender divides and the ability of women, and Title IX helped facilitate these opportuni ties. But, while participation is one thing — and an important one at that — experience is another.

The primary author of Title IX as we know it was Representative Patsy T. Mink of Hawaii, the first woman of color and first Asian American in the House of Representatives. Mink was a vocal advocate for the rights of women of color in particular. As written, Title IX prohibits discrimi nation based on sex, and 1964’s Tile VI prohibits discrimination based on race in educational environ ments. No such law currently exists that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation. These laws are blind to the intersection of race and sex and are completely ignorant of sexuality all together. As Kimberé Crenshaw argues, the missing inter sectionality of race and gender in laws leaves women of color largely unprotected.

While it is true that many wom en gained increased opportunities, when looking at who benefited from Title IX, it is essential to examine the demographics of those new female athletes. And as it turns out, Title IX heavily benefits wealthy white wom en over women of color. Currently,

only 14 percent of female collegiate athletes across the divisions of the NCAA are women of color. In com parison, as of 2021, 32.7 percent of male collegiate athletes were men of color. Even in sports where Black women are often hyper-visible, such as collegiate basketball, the percent age of Black women in these sports has actually declined over the past ten years, from 30 to 28 percent. Outside of basketball and track, Black women made up only 7.8 percent of female collegiate athletes in 2021. And Latina, AAPI, and In digenous women’s participation in collegiate sport remains heavily un derstudied.

In terms of socioeconomic sta tus, a longitudinal study of 7,810 college-bound students showed that among the wealthiest students, 23 percent of high school seniors that participated in varsity athletics went on to play college sports compared to only 9 percent of students from the poorest families. Wealthy stu dents often have the luxury of not working in high school, and thus have more time for sports. They can also pay for travel teams and college identification camps, allowing for in creased exposure to college coaches. Some travel sports cost over $1,000 annually and can easily enter into five figures. And, due to the parity expectations from Title IX, universi ties and colleges must balance their athletes by gender. The female sports that universities most often use to balance out their massive football teams — field hockey, rowing, and beach volleyball, for example — are often dominated by wealthy white women.

In addition to providing oppor tunities to white women, Title IX inadvertently advanced the careers of male coaches at the expense of their female counterparts. Before the act was passed, women coached more than 90 percent of women’s collegiate teams. Five years after the act, that number plummeted to 58.2 percent, and today, fewer than 50 percent of women’s teams are coached by women. Sports historian Victoria Jackson explains that male athletic directors could be to blame, hiring who they knew for the newly

created roles. Male assistant coaches were more willing to step into head coaching jobs of these new teams once Title IX dictated essentially equal pay for both positions. She adds that “part of this was, ironical ly, a fear that coaches were lesbians, and that they were predatory, [but they were] never thinking that male coaches might be abusive or preda tory, of course.”

One of the biggest forces fighting against Title IX in the 1970s were not sexist people trying to defend male sports, but the female leaders of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), the organization that governed women’s collegiate sports before the act. The AIAW had 1,300 women in leader ship roles in 1972, who “envisioned a model of intercollegiate athletics that accepted the desirability of or ganized competition, but rejected the commercialization rampant in men’s sports.”

Two weeks ago, I wrote about how the captalization of sports helped create the current state of women’s soccer, one that is funda mentally based upon networks of sexual and emotional abuse. The reason that Britney Griener went

to Russia — where she is current ly wrongfully detained — was to help supplement her WNBA salary because, as an eight-time all-star and one of the best players in the league, she only makes approximate ly 20 percent of some NBA rookies while playing in the U.S. Perhaps the NCAA should have adopted the AIAW model for all collegiate ath letics rather than the current model employed when taking over wom en’s sports.

At Amherst, the college has made some strides to increase ra cial diversity on our athletics rosters and present more opportunities for female coaches and administrators. For example, two male teams (cross country and golf) have female head coaches and our rosters are slowly becoming more diverse. Diversity is an important step, but as Aidan Park ’22 argued at the Council of Amherst College Student-Athletes of Color (CACSAC) Walk Out of Practice Protest last fall, “diversity without inclusivity is irresponsible.” We saw this ring true my freshman year when three members of men’s la crosse chanted the n-word outside of their Black teammates suite in 2020.

As of 2018, 79 percent of NES

CAC athletes and 65 percent of Ivy League athIetes were white. When our rosters are full of students from elite prep schools and top public high schools, is it possible that our sports recruiting practices have be come affirmative action for the white and wealthy? If the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and SFFA v. University of North Caroli na, how will Amherst athletics and those at our peer institutions serve as a place to further cement the white ness of our institution?

We must start writing intersec tional acts and demanding intersec tionality in practice to ensure that advances for women do not simply mean advances for white women. As Title IX turns 50, we can acknowl edge and celebrate the hard-fought battles by people like Representative Mink and other trailblazers in wom en’s sports, while also remembering that we have lots of unfinished busi ness.

Front and Center would like to conclude by calling attention to the fact that Britney Griner has been wrongfully detained in Russia for 253 days. Bring her home.

Title IX was an important step in creating a level playing field in sports, but equity still has a ways to go, Melanie Schwimmer ‘23 argues.

Photo courtesy of Amherst Athletics

Football Notches First Win of Season Against Tufts

Mike Schretter ’23 Staff Writer

Amherst football has hit bumps in the road early in 2022, as they have started their season 0-5 with heartbreaking losses to both Bates and Colby in recent weeks. However, Amherst stayed locked in, and a field goal from Conor Kennelly ’23 propelled the Mammoths to a 20-17 win against Tufts in Medford, Mas sachusetts, on Saturday, Oct. 22.

Tufts threw the first punch, with a 56-yard run giving the Jumbos a 7-0 lead. But Am herst immediately responded: Quarterback Mike Piazza ’24E ran 50 yards to the endzone and tied the score at 7-7. However, Tufts took back the momentum and expanded their lead to 10 with a field goal and a 75-yard touchdown drive. But despite the adversity, the Mammoths clawed their way back into the game once again. A 23-yard

touchdown throw from Piazza to Austin Pieck ’25 made the game 17-14 late in the third. And Amherst’s defense stepped up, forcing a fumble and giving the offense the ball in Jumbos’ ter ritory, leading to a game-tying field goal from Kennelly.

The game got more frantic in the fourth quarter, but Am herst stayed tough and fought through the chaos. Piazza took charge and led Amherst on a 12play, 58-yard drive in the final minutes, setting up a potential game-winning field goal. Ken nelly answered the call, sending the ball through the uprights as time expired. Amherst players promptly rushed the field in cel ebration of their 20-17 victory, their first of the year.

Football will be back in Am herst this weekend for their an nual Homecoming game on Sat urday, Oct. 29, taking on Little Three rival Wesleyan. Kickoff is set for 1 p.m. at Pratt Field. The Mammoths celebrate their first win of the season against Tufts.

FOOTBALL

Oct.

GAME SCHEDULE

WOMEN'S SOCCER

Oct.

VOLLEYBALL

Oct.

FIELD HOCKEY

Oct.

MEN'S SOCCER

Oct.

CROSS COUNTRY

Oct.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios