Issue 12

THE AMHERST THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT

CROSSWORD page 12

VOLUME CLI, ISSUE 12 l WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 2021

AMHERSTSTUDENT.COM

Judiciary Hearing Addresses Constitutionality of PalestineAligning AAS Email Sophie Wolmer ’23 Managing News Editor

Photo courtesy of Eleanor Walsh '25

During halftime at the Homecoming football game on Saturday, students from the Amherst Labor Alliance walked onto the field with banners demanding higher pay and better treatment for Val workers.

College Converts Casual Staff to Benefited Positions Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 Managing News Editor On Wednesday, Nov. 17, President Biddy Martin announced to staff and faculty that the college will be converting a significant number of its casual staff positions to regular benefited positions. The new positions will receive “an increase in pay commensurate with the college’s current pay structures, as well as the full range of benefits,” wrote Martin. She stated that 19 of the new positions will be offered to current casual employees working in excess of 24 hours per week, and workers will be recruited to fill an additional seven benefited positions.

According to Martin, casual positions were created over the years to staff a number of new dining and catering programs,

but “it has been clear for some time that these expanded programs are needed for the long haul.” The college is able to fund the new positions due to the “unusually large endowment gains of this past year,” she noted. While the college will still have casual roles for short-term work the college aims to “use benefited staff for the core, day-in-day-out functions of Dining [Services]” going forward.

The new initiative has been discussed by the Committee on Priorities and Resources (CPR) and the Committee of Six throughout the academic year, and is intended to be completed by the end of the calendar year, the email stated.

The announcement comes on the heels of a banner demonstration held by students in the Amherst Labor Alliance, a newly formed group of students and

staff working for better labor conditions at the college. The demonstration occurred during halftime at Amherst vs. Williams Homecoming football game on Saturday, when students from the Alliance walked onto the field and held up two large banners reading “RAISE WAGES 4 VAL STAFF” and “DECLARE VAL STAFF ESSENTIAL” for the audience of students, staff, faculty, and alumni to see. Many students shared photos and videos of the walk-on on their social media in support of the demonstration.

Both the demonstration and Martin’s announcement took place at a time of heightened student awareness of the mistreatment faced by college employees working on an understaffed and overenrolled campus. Grace Cho ’23E, a member of the Alliance, explained that they chose to call

for raising the wages of casual dining employees — who currently make $15 an hour, down from the $20-per-hour or more hazard pay they received last year due to pandemic conditions — as “the most basic demand that we seem to hear from workers … that would generally improve their situations.”

Members of the Alliance reported that the walk-on was intended to raise visibility for the Alliance and bring more attention to issues surrounding working conditions on campus.

“Amherst College really hates bad press,” said Employee A, a member of the Alliance who works in Dining Services and asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation. “I hope the walk-on adds more pressure to

Continued on page 4

The Judiciary Council (JC) held two separate hearings to address an anonymous complaint filed against the Amherst Association of Students (AAS) Senate questioning the constitutionality of an email they sent last May in which they aligned themselves with Palestine in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. On Oct. 26 and Nov. 8, senators came together in the Octagon to discuss whether the email was appropriate. In the first hearing, those who filed the complaint requested that, moving forward, the AAS be more cognizant of the Jewish perspectives and only comment on complex geopolitical issues if they fairly represent student interests.

In the second hearing, representatives selected by the AAS Senate defended the email as within the Senate’s authority as outlined by the AAS constitution, irrespective of the email’s contents. This article will be updated to report on the second JC hearing in greater depth when its transcript is officially released.

Students who submitted the complaint felt that the expression of solidarity fell beyond the scope of the AAS’s responsibilities. Emma Daitz ’23 argued that senators took advantage of the AAS email platform to advance an

Continued on page 5

News POLICE LOG

Nov. 2, 2021 – Nov. 16, 2021

>>November 2, 2021

10:16 a.m., Jenkins Hall A detective took a report of an individual's concern about a drinking game. >>November 4, 2021

2:21 p.m., Moore Dormitory Student Affairs Community Safety Assistant (CSA) staff responded to a report of someone accessing a balcony not permitted for access. >> November 6, 2021

10:46 a.m., South Hall A detective responded to a report of someone stuck inside the elevator.

The individual was released.

1:00 p.m., Frost Library A staff member reported area closed signs were posted and there was no known reason for these.

10:02 p.m., Hitchcock House Student Affairs CSA staff responded to a report of a door hinge pin moved out of place. >> November 7, 2021

11:48 a.m., Morris Pratt Dormitory 9:17 p.m., Morrow Dormitory A detective took a report of a coat with a car key being stolen from a common room.

9:17 p.m., Morrow Dormitory A detective responded to a report of an individual not affiliated with the college in a residence hall after someone held the door open for them.

The individual left the

Staff Spotlight David Ke

area upon the detective's request.

Office of Residential Life

David Ke is a Community Development Coordinator (CDC). He is responsible for supervising the Community Advisors (CA) in Appleton, South, North, and Williston Halls. David is perhaps most known on campus for his Instagram-famous dog, Potato, who provides joy and delight to countless members of the campus community.

>>November 9, 2021

2:19 p.m., Johnson Chapel A detective responded to a report of vandalism and found it was a poster with writing on it. >>November 11, 2021

12:19 a.m., LeFrak Gym A Sergeant and a detective responded to an alarm and found someone climbed on the roof and took an unknown item.

This incident is pending further investigation.

12:32 a.m., Campus Grounds A Sergeant and a detective responded to a report of someone yelling for help and a group running away from the area. No one was found in the area upon their arrival. >>November 15, 2021

12:48 p.m., Seelye House A Sergeant responded to a report of an unauthorized entry into an office where items were stolen and a smoking device was left behind.

7:09 p.m., Cohan Dormitory A detective responded to a report of vandalism throughout a residence hall including broken furniture, a broken Exit sign, ripped carpet, and a hole in the wall. >>November 16, 2021

8:32 a.m., Mayo Smith House The Senior Detective confiscated two unregistered kegs.

Q: What are your responsibilities as a CDC? A: I think a large part of my job is to assist CA’s in put[ting] on programming. If you’ve ever had a program where a CA has brought different campus partners to your floor, like the Peer Advocates of Sexual Respect, or to just have pizza and talk about “What do we look like as a community?” — that's part of my job, to help order the food and help make connections happen. My unofficial role on campus is as Potato’s dad. He’s a very sweet dog and a lot of students really enjoy hanging out with him.

I try to walk around campus with him, meet students one-on-one, and it helps me create some informal conversations with students to see how they’re doing and get to know students more on an individual level.

And you know, talk about our love for dogs.

Q: What is your favorite part of being a CDC? A: This weekend, I got to see a performance at the Powerhouse [organized by] the African Caribbean Students Union. It's really nice when any student invites me to something that they put a lot of hard work into and says, “Hey, I have this performance coming up, you should really stop by.” I think that means a lot to me in terms of just going out to celebrate the accomplishments students have, not just as academic scholars but as creative individuals.

I’m [also] the staff advisor for the Asian Students Association and some other affinity groups on campus, such as the Southeast Asian [Students Association], and I try to make it to all their events. Attending any program

[students] put on is really nice, just to say “hi” to them. I bring Potato to say “hi” too, [and] they love him. [I’m] just very proud, in essence.

Q: What is your least favorite part of your job?

A: Oh, let’s see. I think my least favorite part of my job is trying to help students with issues that are out of my control. As much as I try to support students with personal issues that they may have going on — with family stuff back at home, or just things happening in dorms — there are things that are in my realm of control, and there are things that are in students’ realm of control. When things fall out of my capacity, that’s where it is a bit frustrating. I do my best to connect students to resources on campus, whether that’s resources at Amherst College or resources outside, especially when it comes to supporting students for mental health. I know it’s a huge need for any community to support individuals in. Just knowing that I can't help out students for every single possible situation is hard sometimes, but it is nice to know that there are options, and there are other resources such as the Counseling Center, the Office of Religious Life, and also our identity resources centers. As a cis man, I can't connect with every single individual in every single way. But I just do my best to connect them with campus partners, campus resources, and student leaders. [I’ll say],“Hey, I know the CA who’s a part of this group is really nice to connect with.” I wish I could do everything.

Q: Potato has come up a few times already, so can you tell me some more about him?

A: In short, Potato is my son. I’m very proud of him. I’m proud of his ability to sit 85 percent of the time, when asked to sit nicely. He’s very adorable.

Maybe his aspirations are my own ingrained in him, but I think he tries to bring positivity in every space he goes to. I think he knows who wants to say “hi” to a dog. So he goes up to them and says “hello,” and I appreciate that about him. He also knows when people are kind of scared of dogs because he will not try to go for it with them. But in short, he supports people’s emotional well-being. He’s always willing to go for a walk with anyone who asks nicely. And he knows his own boundaries — “You can do this.

You cannot do this.” So, I’m very proud.

Q: Is there anything that you would like to say to Amherst students?

A: I know that things are really tough, especially given the pandemic. I think [back to] what helped me in terms of overcoming things like homesickness, or feeling guilty for being away from home and not contributing to my family when they made need it the most. The work that people do here on campus and my students is super crucial. The time we have here will help them gather tools to navigate the world, Amherst College or not. I think that one of the most important skills in any college, in any academic environment, is to figure out how you are going to enter the world outside of this Amherst college bubble, and how to, one, be a good person; two, have fun; and three, succeed in whatever manner that may be.

—Margo Pedersen ’25

News 3

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

The Deadly Stretch: Students, Faculty Report Intense Burnout Tana Delalio ’24 Assistant News Editor In the final stretch before Thanksgiving Break, students and professors report feelings of intense burnout due to seemingly never-ending deadlines and overbooked schedules. Increased frequency of midterms, fatigue from a semester’s worth of work, return to the in-person pace of life, and the constant mental burden of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic are all factors that have left Amherst’s students and faculty counting down the days until the weeklong break.

Even though professors are partially responsible for students’ workload, they have also shared in the unhealthy levels of exhaustion. Professors and students alike have endured weeks of busy schedules filled with in-person classes and extracurriculars.

Further, the persistence of certain Covid-19 restrictions means that students and professors are still facing the tremendous difficulties of learning and teaching during a pandemic.

One reason why students feel more encumbered this semester is that the required course load has increased from three to four classes this semester. In an attempt to return to academic normalcy, these policy changes have intensified students’ academic load this year.

Charlie Sutherby ’23E noted, “I was more intentional with the balance of my workload this semester during course selection knowing that we had to take four classes rather than three classes.

But it’s still been a grind.”

Grace Tarantola ’23 concurred with Sutherby: “The workload is definitely a lot more than last year, just now that we have to take four courses instead of three.”

Furthermore, many students feel that this workload has piled up even more in recent weeks.

Daniel Oo ’24 said that the num-

ber of deadlines students currently have depends on which classes they are taking.“I’ve heard from some people taking multiple math courses that they have math midterms just one day after another this week. For me, everything's also just lined up this week.”

While he feels grateful that in-person extracurricular activities have resumed, he also notes how they have further compounded his workload. “It took me like all of two weeks of being back on campus to be overwhelmed with how many things I had to do,” said Sutherby.

“The crazy week to week time suck of all the extracurriculars has just reduced the time I can actually spend on academics. If this was a semester ago, my workload would totally be manageable, but now I just have half the number of hours in my week to work with,” he continued.

Sutherby noticed that the greater number of assignments due has manifested in increased stress in both students and professors. “I had a professor cancel our final paper last week. She said that’s had more students request extensions for that paper than she's ever had before across all of her classes,” he said. “This return to normalcy is definitely a big deal for a lot of students, and it’s the same case for professors, like I see them struggling to keep up with work. Definitely there's a bit of a shock coming back to a more normal semester after last year.”

Fiona Anstey ’24 echoed Sutherby’s sentiment that work has been particularly demanding in the past couple weeks. “I have lots of deadlines coming up before and after Thanksgiving, and that's definitely been affecting my mental state because I’m often thinking about deadlines and work that I have to get done. I'm worried that I won't be able to take a real break because I'm going to be thinking about deadlines and work. And

I'd much rather be able to take a real break and enjoy Thanksgiving with my family.”

Tarantola posited that this stress is harder to handle because many Covid-19 restrictions are still in place. “There are all these Covid restrictions that we still have to follow,” she said. “The fear of getting in trouble on top of also having to do all this extra schoolwork is definitely a lot on all the students.”

Psychology professor Matthew Schulkind has noticed increased stress levels among his students during this semester more generally, but particularly in recent weeks.

“I started the semester thinking that I was going to try and teach as though it were a normal regular semester, and for probably about two weeks everyone seemed to be in a pretty good mood, especially compared to last year, which was kind of grim,” he said.

Schulkind noted that although public health conditions are “better than last year,” his students and coworkers are still feeling ongoing pandemic-related stressors. “People are still pretty stressed and uncomfortable. I wouldn't say [that] they are less motivated, but [they] are definitely overwhelmed,which interferes with their ability to really get stuff done,” he stated.

Schulkind continued, “So I would say that right now, kids are up against it. This is always a hard time of the year, as is coming back from Thanksgiving, but I would say this year the dip has been a little deeper than normal.”

Just like Tarantola, Schulkind believes that the semester is more tiring than usual due to the constant mental strain of the pandemic.

“The thing about the virus is it affects so many decisions, and affects your thinking so many times throughout the day. I just think after so many months of doing that, it's just tiring,” he

said. “And so situations come up, like having multiple assignments due on the same day, which you guys were used to managing in a normal semester, but now I think it's more difficult because because of the accumulated wear and tear of so many decisions, and so many stressful moments and so many issues that you have to consider on a regular basis.”

As a consequence of all the day-to-day stressors, Schulkind worries that his teaching quality has been negatively affected. “I think there are semesters where I’ve been a better teacher than I have been this semester. I’m trying to let that go. I'm trying to say okay, maybe I've done a better job in the past, but I'm working as hard as I can, and that's going to be enough.”

Ecology professor Ethan Temeles also described greater difficulty teaching this semester, particularly because of the indoor mask mandate. “Humans communicate with their faces, and masks prevent us from seeing each other’s faces, so there’s no stimulus that you get back," said.

“And if you're a professor interacting with students and trying to get feedback, you're missing that,” Temeles continued.

“When I lecture, I very much look at people's faces, and if I see somebody frown, I’ll repeat something or say it in a different way. So now there’s just the general feeling of something doesn't feel right.”

Like Schulkind, Temeles sympathizes with students about the amount of emotional strain imposed by the pandemic. “If you can get through this, it should teach you that you can probably cope with a lot, because it's hard for me to imagine stuff as worse than this.”

Students hope that professors’ awareness about community-wide burn-out will inspire them to be more flexible with deadlines. Tarantola hopes that professors, “Will be more un-

derstanding when students ask them for extensions, or when they say, ‘I'm really struggling at this point.’ They shouldn’t just just be like, ‘You have to get through it and just manage on your own.’”

Sutherby agreed with Tarantola’s sentiment: “I think professors can be more forgiving and flexible and recognize that people are struggling to return to normalcy at an institutional level. Either by easing the work per class, or just [seeing the college revert back] to the three versus four class requirements, could really help.”

“A lot of people I've talked to pretty intentionally choose a fourth class to be kind of like a throwaway class,” he added.

“That’s just kind of like a waste of time when you could have three classes that you're really much more invested in and feel actually meaningful because you’re curious about them or they challenge you in the right ways.”

Sutherby feels that these changes could alleviate many of the pressures that students experience because of the hard-working, over-achieving culture at Amherst. “Even in my fourth year at Amherst, I still feel an impulse to always be doing more, even though I'm very conscious of the fact that I would like to be doing less.”

While this culture is not likely to go away any time soon, Schulkind hopes that students will take off some of the pressure they put on themselves to keep up with everything.

“It is unrealistic to let go of stressing about grades entirely, and that is one of the sources of self esteem that you've had all these years,” he said. “But just give yourself a little bit more space. Say, okay, in another semester, another time, I might have done something differently, I might have done better. But this is where I am now. I worked hard. And that just has to be enough.”

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

News 4

Amherst Labor Alliance to Continue Advocating For Staff Rights Continued from page 1

[Amherst College] since it wasn’t just other students who got to watch — there were also alumni, media, and students’ families attending.”

Indeed, as the group was walking off the field, the students made a decision to stand with their banners behind President Biddy Martin, who was on the side of the field participating in a press interview with Maud Mandel, president of Williams College.

Cho noted that Martin did turn around and address the group after the interview, saying that she “agreed with what we were doing and thought that it was a good thing.”

Martin did also mention the administration’s plan to convert some casual positions to benefited positions while speaking to the group, Cho continued, but the group found the response unsatisfactory as the change had not been officially announced yet.

Even with the new positions, student members of the Alliance described the walk-on as only the beginning of necessary advocacy on behalf of staff at the college, who often feel they cannot openly speak out against their working conditions for fear of retaliation.

“Generally speaking, as students on this campus, we are in a more privileged position than

the workers themselves,” said Kevin Gutierrez ’24, a member of the Alliance. “Because of that, we can use our position and the resources we have access to on this campus to help better the working situation of workers and eventually other workers on campus.”

Among staff, “there definitely is a culture of just accepting the treatment that you get,” elaborated Employee A. “[There’s] a feeling like ‘Okay, maybe it's not worth it to try and fight for this,’ because nobody in the upper management ranks or the more powerful people of Amherst College in general are really going to care all that much.” They noted that they, of course, couldn’t par-

ticipate in the walk-on: “I would lose my job pretty much instantly.”

Jeanyna Garcia ’23, also part of the Alliance, explained that the goal is to eventually create a situation where workers are able to advocate for themselves. This includes “feel[ing] comfortable reporting any issues they may have and having clear channels of communication,” added Cho. Members of the Alliance also emphasized that they hope to reach the student body with their work as well, not just the administration. Addressing “the culture of negligence on campus” and getting students to show respect for staff is as important as bettering their working conditions, said

Gutierrez. Garcia echoed that the group “disrupt the extractive relationship” between students and staff, and “make sure students recognize that the workers they’re [interacting] with every day are humans as well.”

“I think there definitely are a lot of students that support Val workers getting paid more, [but] there's a lot that don't, and don't really care about what the lives are like for the people that feed them,” said Employee A. “I hope that in general, the walk-on can bring these issues more to the forefront and let people know there is something in the works, where people are actually going to try and fight for better treatment for Val workers.”

Photo courtesy of Amherst Labor Alliance

As they were leaving the field, students from the Amherst Labor Alliance intentionally stood behind President Biddy Martin, who was in the middle of an interview with President of Williams College Maud Mandel.

News 5

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Complaintants Argue AAS Email Advanced “Exclusionary Position” Continued from page 1

“exclusionary position on a geopolitical issue” and alienate Jewish students. In response, members of the Senate contended that they are elected to represent student views and that, while the email may not have represented all student voices, it was not a breach in Senate jurisdiction. The second hearing focused on the word choice of the email and the logistics that went into sending the email.

The hearings for the complaint were held this semester because the complaint was filed after the last senate meeting of the spring semester, according to Judiciary Council Chair Jasper Liles. Liles reported that the JC also “experienced delays due to the particularities of the case.”

“Senate members on JC who were party to the hearing had to recuse themselves, and JC only had two at-large members at the time. Because of this, the JC had to find and appoint four new temporary members, which took some time,” Liles said.

The anonymous group of students who placed the complaint did so for three reasons, according to AAS Senator Joshua Kim ’22E. In the first hearing, Kim said that, first of all, the individuals found that the AAS did not have authority to send the email. Second, the complainants were upset that the email was “authored by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and Middle Eastern North African Association (MENAA),” in the words of Diatz. Finally, Kim noted that those who filed the complaint were concerned that Amherst Hillel was not consulted in addition to the MSA before the letter was sent to students.

Outside of the hearing, students have debated the nuances of the complaint through platforms like the campus GroupMe — questioning the Senate’s role in commenting on international conflicts, the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and the broader implications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Student reached out to a number of relevant sources, but eight

students declined to comment on the record for this article.

The first hearing began with opening statements from Daitz and Mason Quintero ’23. Following their accounts, senators and students asked the speakers questions. Individuals attended the hearing both in-person and over Zoom.

At the beginning of the hearing, Daitz argued that sending the email violated the AAS constitution. “The email itself is repugnant to the very purposes granted to it by the preamble of the [AAS] Constitution and the values statement: to respect and hear the voice of every student in the spirit of learning and the free exchange of ideas. We as Amherst students cherish these principles because it is necessary to the processes of legitimate democratic governance, but more critically, to the essence of the liberal arts education,” Daitz stated.

Additionally, Daitz held that the email was an abuse of AAS resources. She said, “The email was a blatant misuse of the AAS email address and mailing list. As stated in section 20 of the bylaws, the AAS email account may only ‘be used for official AAS purposes.’

[The] AAS itself states that its purpose is to ‘represent the student body and be a liaison between students and administration.’”

The second JC hearing gave the AAS an opportunity to respond to such allegations. Senator Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22 specifically noted that bylaw 20 imposes no substantial restriction on the AAS’s use of the email account besides the requirement of getting approval of the email through a Senate vote. Since the Senate voted unanimously in favor of this email, the email was not a violation of AAS bylaws, he argued.

Additionally, he argued that, even if the email were a violation of bylaw 20 of the AAS constitution, the fact that the vote in favor of the email was unanimous should be understood as an amendment to the bylaws, per bylaw 19 of the AAS constitution.

Daitz also expressed extreme disappointment that the AAS did

not engage in dialogue with the rest of the student body when crafting the letter. “It was extremely disappointing to see AAS simply accept the position offered in the letter without considering other views or engaging in a dialogue about the veracity of its content. There was no attempt or even desire to hear another perspective.

As representatives of the student body, AAS members have a responsibility to educate themselves on issues about which they are writing the students — especially when such position papers are so infrequently sent,” she said.

Daitz particularly noted her dissatisfaction with the email’s authorship. She stated, “Originally, [the AAS] was going to co-sign and sponsor a letter written by MSA and MENAA. However, for some reason, the original authors of the letter: MENAA and MSA, were ultimately removed from the email, and their participation in the crafting of the email was not acknowledged.”

In closing, Daitz declared that the crux of the issue is not the politics of the conflict, but rather the fact that the AAS unfairly collected information and failed to represent the student body. Daitz requested that the AAS formally apologize to affected students.

The representational purpose of the AAS also came up at the second JC hearing. Graber-Mitchell posited that representing the student body does not mean that AAS is obligated to share views that are proportional to the public opinion of students, nor does it mean meeting with constituents on particular issues. Rather, he held that, constitutionally, the AAS is able to speak on behalf of the student body as their elected representatives.

Immediately after Daitz, Mason Quintero ’23 spoke about the personal ramifications of the email. Quintero, who had been in Israel while the conflict was unfolding, gave a compelling testimony about the alienation that he and fellow Jews experienced because of the letter.

In a statement to The Student, Quintero said, “I thought it was

important for me to speak because I had a unique view on the situation having been in Israel during the conflict and when the email was sent out. I also heard thoughts from a number of Jews on the topic of the email and I wanted to try my best to represent them.” Quintero emphasized that his goal was to advocate for the individuals he had heard from and not the entire Jewish population on campus.

Last semester, Quintero was studying at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. At the time that he received the AAS email, he described, “I was in the library with a few friends from the city, when the sirens started. We quickly made our way to the stairwell and stayed there for about 10 minutes, as we heard explosions off in the distance. My family friends who live in Ashdod close to the southern border, had to shelter multiple times every single day, and frequently in the middle of the night during those 11 days. And, I feared for them every single day.

I'm not the only Amherst student with people that they love and care about living in Israel.”

When he read the email, Quintero voiced at the JC hearing that the email neither mentioned or alluded to the struggles that he was facing. “I felt like I was going crazy. The fear that I felt for myself, and many of the people that I love and care about, was portrayed as illegitimate. In the days immediately following the email I received messages from dozens of Jewish Amherst students, expressing similar concerns. Many of them told me it made them feel isolated and seriously negatively affected their mental health,” Quintero said.

Quintero argued that, if the AAS wants to issue emails of a political nature in the future, they should be more broadly informed.

Quintero said, “Going forward, if AAS is going to send emails such as these — commenting on complex political or geopolitical issues — they [should] make sure to understand their constitutional duty to be educated and hear all sides of the story and make sure all student interests are represented

in whatever communication they send out.”

This is not the first global conflict that the AAS has commented on, but some students hold that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is different. During the hearing, JC member Alexandre Jabor ’23 asked whether the claim that the violation of the Senate’s jurisdiction “also extends to emails” about other issues that happen outside of the Amherst community. He asked whether the claim that the AAS went beyond its responsibilities applies “to some of the emails that were sent in the past, concerning, discrimination against African American students at UMass or the Black Lives Matter protest, or racism against Asian Americans.”

In response, individuals said that the key differentiating factor is that the other situations are more one-sided. “There is no other side to racism.” Daitz said, “This is not an issue of hatred nor an issue of racist attacks.”

In the initial letter, the AAS also asserted that “We must not conflate critiquing the Israeli government or settlers with antisemitism. We condemn antisemitism in all forms.” In response, Quintero contested the statement, saying, “It’s very nice that AAS doesn’t want to conflate critiquing the Israeli government or settlers with antisemitism, but that doesn't change the facts on the ground, there is absolutely a correlation between the conflict in May and a rise in antisemitic crimes: over 200 to 300 percent between April and May.” During the hearing, some observers interjected, calling for nuance. “The conflict is very emotional and people are dying, and many Americans are invested in a very simple view of it,” Baylar Ratzan ’22 said. “I really wish that this had been taken as an opportunity to have a discussion because we’ll be influential in the future: we’re studying here and we’re preparing to enter the world to be leaders in it.”

The Judiciary Council plans to release the transcript for the second hearing and their official ruling in the coming week.

News 6

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Continuing Covid Restrictions Frustrate Student Musicians

Photo courtesy of Hedi Skali Lami '25

Despite loosening Covid restrictions across campus, practice rooms in the Arms Music Center remain available on a strict reservation-based schedule that is not open to students not affiliated with the Music Department.

Spencer Michaels ’24 and Milo Leahy-Miller ’24 Staff Writers Over 20 months since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the music department is struggling to find a successful balance between Covid safety protocols and students’ desire to return to pre-pandemic practice and performance rules. For student musicians, the current processes involved in reserving practice space have become particularly difficult to work with, given increased bureaucracy and demand. In response to these concerns, the music department is aiming to adjust its practices for the spring semester, depending on how well Covid rules are followed.

Because of the intimate nature of music performance, the music department was required to implement a set of strict limitations to prevent the spread of Covid at the onset of the pandemic. For example, vocalists and wind instrumentalists, for whom it is logistically impossi-

ble to perform with a mask on, have needed Plexiglass coverings to ensure safe practices and performances. Access to practice spaces have also been limited due to issues surrounding air circulation.

As of the fall 2021, each practice room has its own schedule that changes daily. This differs from the system used in the previous semester. Suzette Farnham, the music department coordinator, said, “What used to happen is that people would come into my office after add-drop and sign up for practice time for the whole semester,” Farnham said, “and then every room would have a schedule for the semester.

But this way [the current system, which will remain in use], if you want to sign up for time to practice, that means you really want to practice, so you're gonna do it this week on this day. And a lot of times those rooms [that were scheduled on a semesterly basis] were left empty.”

While the current system may be more intensive for students seeking to practice, it frees

up space and increases flexibility, providing more availability for student musicians. Other changes, such as removing deposits and fees for practice room access (historically, it cost a $25 refundable deposit and a $10 payment for registering late), are also here to stay.

Easy access to practice rooms is essential to those who play immobile instruments, such as the piano or the drums.“I remember before the pandemic, it was a lot easier to get access to instruments, practice rooms like room 210,” said Luis de Pablo ’23E, a musician double-majoring in biology and music. “Post-pandemic, I have no idea even what the process is for getting it.”

De Pablo, who plays multiple instruments, including guitar (his primary instrument), and drums, explained that room 210 is one of the two readily student-accessible rooms on campus which contains a drum kit.

Will Amend ’24, a multi-instrumentalist prospective English and Music major who has used room 210, noted that “you have

to reserve [room 210] … and they’re strict reservations.”

The Music Department currently only gives practice room keys to students enrolled in courses or in private lessons, which cost $775 per semester for students without financial aid, and requires those students to reserve their rehearsal time online. Open time for contested spaces — such as Room 210 — are challenging to find.

Farnham acknowledged the difficulties that musicians have faced and pointed to high student demand as a key reason for them. “You do have to be in a music class, ensemble, or taking lessons, but that's a large number of students,” she said. “I think there were maybe two or three [students] who had nothing to do with the music department and wanted to practice this semester, and we had to turn them away.”

Echoing Farnham's sentiment, Concert, Production, and Building Coordinator Ted Keyes added that, quite simply, “we can't afford to [give everyone

practice space].”

Patrick Spoor ’23, a singer and music major who took private lessons pre-pandemic, recalled: “I remember always having issues with trying to schedule my lessons. You have to email a ton of people; you have to invest a ton of paper, get things signed by a ton of people, including the chair of the music department.” They further described the struggles that they are currently facing in signing up for two music lessons for the upcoming semester.

Farnham stated that the process for starting private lessons has been simplified, noting how the music department has changed its website. “One of the first things you see [on the website] if you want to take lessons is how to do it, right off the bat,” she said.

Because taking private lessons has become far more accessible, Farnham mentioned that there is a large influx of student interest in lessons, with over 180

Continued on page 7

News 7

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Practice Rooms Inaccessible to Musicians Not in Music Department Continued from page 6 students doing so this semester, a large increase from pre-pandemic semesters, according to her. This number is expected to increase as the fall semester nears its end and spring semester course registration is finalized.

The Music Department has directed students to alternative rehearsal spaces while it waits for Covid protocols to change — specifically, the practice rooms in the James/Stearns (“Jearns,” as it’s known colloquially) basement, which are open to the entire community.

However, students have expressed disappointment and frustration with the resources currently available to extracurricular musicians — members of the community who play an instrument but do not take a class in the Music Department or private lessons.

Amend explained that “[in] the [practice rooms] that are … under the watch of Student Affairs, which is all but one of [the

practice rooms in the James/ Stearns basements], there's nothing really for me there.

There are some pianos that are all out of tune, and there's some … drum equipment that I have played, but it's not like a real drum kit. It's just some stuff you can hit.”

De Pablo agreed, emphasising that not all practice rooms are “created equal” and that “many of them are basically useless.” DePablo proceeded to say, “The piano in [the James/ Stearns practice rooms] has not been tuned in 70 years and is also broken. Or it just has a broken keyboard, or the amps don't work, or there's one key amp and nothing else in the room.”

“It's just bizarre,” he continued, “especially the ones that are run by Student Affairs, not the music department [in the James/ Stearns basement]. Both of them are, for the most part, useless and broken.”

The Music Department is aware that students like Amend and de Pablo are disappointed

by the quality of the Student Affairs’s practice rooms. Despite the rooms being outside their jurisdiction, Keyes and Farnham have worked hard to help extracurricular students.

“We have people come back and say, well, those pianos suck,” Keyes told us, “so we've made sure that they are being tuned regularly.”

“Unfortunately, those rooms are open to any student and they don't get treated well. That's not on us,” he added. “But we do our best to get anybody who reached out to us accommodated.”

The disappointment and confusion students like Amend and de Pablo exhibit, as do extracurricular musicians, originates from the fact that the music department’s website is out-of-date, which currently displaying incorrect information as of the writing of this article, including that “students not enrolled in performance courses may reserve one hour per day up to seven hours per week.” This information, as of the writing

of this article, does not hold: students not enrolled in performance courses or lessons may not have access to the practice room, Farnham said.

Correcting these discrepancies is a high priority for the department. Farnham clarified that “a lot of [the inconsistencies] we can't change: we have to go to the Communications Office and have them change it for us. But that, we're definitely working on.”

“You’ll see a huge improvement for the start of next semester,” Keyes added. Farnham also mentioned that the current music department chair, Darryl Harper, is “right on top of it.”

Despite the constant changes of policies in response to the always-changing state of the pandemic, Keyes and Farnham hope that they will be able to reinstate the pre-pandemic protocols regarding access to Music Department resources in the coming semester.

However, Keyes noted that amending the system all depends

on “if [Covid cases and protocol-following] continues the way it's going. But on the other hand, you know, we keep seeing new emails [about protocol violations]; now there are under 90 percent of students getting tested. If that doesn’t change, there aren’t going to be any more changes [back to pre-pandemic protocols].”

He worries that may be the case since he “hears so many kids are showing up, not wearing their masks [in Arms].”

Keyes is expecting to see “a lot more changes [to overall restrictions at the College] next semester, depending on how the winter goes out there, but again, I'm surprised they haven't gone back to… more requirements.”

The Music Department is proactively monitoring Covid and student feedback and constantly changing protocols to make the best student experience possible. Finding this balance between safety and utility is a challenge, but one that the Music Department is addressing.

From the Red Room: Nov. 15 AAS Meeting Updates Sophie Wolmer ’23 Managing News Editor On Monday, Nov. 15, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) held its eighth weekly meeting of the semester. Senators discussed policing at the college, presented Budgetary Committee (BC) requests, appointed committee members, and debated purchasing custom jackets for AAS members.

The meeting opened with a Center for Restorative Practices (CRP) presentation given by Fabio Ayala. Ayala explained that the CRP wants to connect with on-campus groups, like the AAS, to incorporate community-wide restorative philosophies and practices. He communicated that the goal of restorative justice is to shift away from forms of punitive judgement and toward harm rectification practices. Ayala emphasized that restor-

ative justice is about the balance between supporting and holding rule-breakers accountable.

Ayala went on to discuss the purpose and format of restorative circles, harm and impact circles, and reparative circles — all of which intend to be alternatives to punitive forms of recourse. He also spoke about multi-partial mediation, which aims to trust and validate the multiple realities and truths that exist for different parties in a conflict, and shared that the CRP will be offering structured listening sessions for any interested individuals. Going forward, Ayala mentioned, the CRP plans to nationalize, internationalize, and interculturalize its work through interactive training and workshops for skill buildings.

After Ayala’s presentation, senators asked how students can get involved with the CRP and

whether the CRP deals with Title IX cases. Ayala responded that the CRP encourages students to attend its events and is open to all community members, including faculty, staff, and alumni. He also said that the CRP only takes on cases that have not reached the level of a formal Title IX violation.

Next, Treasurer Jae Yun Ham ’22 spearheaded the approval of the BC’s requests. Among approved requests were funds for Mock Trial and Liyang. Ham stated that the BC would be hosting club budgets for the spring semester and requested to move money for that purpose.

He said that he had assigned representatives to all clubs and that the outreach process would start after Thanksgiving. Ham also shared that the AAS currently has $372,000 in liquid cash on hand, and that the cash flow from student activities fees is

$351,000.

President Angelina Han ’22 went on to perform the officer reports. She shared that she had met with the Five Colleges Student Coordinating Board to discuss the proposal of paying student government members. Han also spoke about improving the transparency of the Senate election process. She concluded by mentioning that a student government mixer/social event was being planned for next semester.

Senators then discussed the Campus Safety Survey sent out to students via email on Friday, Nov. 12. Specifically, Vice President Basma Azzamok ’22 said that the college is looking for the AAS to help increase engagement on their campus safety survey. Senators suggested ways that the survey can be improved so that students will actually fill it out.

Senators were also nominat-

ed and elected to serve on multiple new committees. Anna Leake ’23 nominated herself to serve on the Counseling Center Search Committee for Bilingual Staff Counselor. Dania Hallak ’24 was nominated and elected to the Appointments Board. Gent Malushaga ’25 was nominated and elected to the Committee on Education & Athletics.

The meeting concluded with a discussion of purchasing merchandise for senators and holding an AAS formal. Senators debated the ethics of purchasing jackets for themselves. While some thought that the effort would be a great promotional strategy, others thought that it was a needless expense. In the end, senators decided to continue their conversation at their next meeting.

The AAS will meet again after Thanksgiving break on Monday, Nov. 29.

Op pinion

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Burnout: Reigniting the Flame When Amherst made its rapid shift to remote learning in spring 2020, one of the greatest difficulties the college faced was modifying lesson plans for classes that would now be all-online.

How would discussions work? Group projects?

How could professors keep students attentive for lectures that often felt little more engaging than watching a Khan Academy video?

These were tough questions that few professors could come up with answers to on their own — especially after being flung into a fully remote learning environment with little warning from the administration. And so, they turned to the student body to provide answers.

In most classes, these conversations were pretty straightforward. Professors would ask students what they felt would be most conducive to learning in this new format or provide space for students to express new concerns brought up by distance. Lesson plans would often change drastically; sometimes that meant reducing the number of discussions or lectures, increasing collaborative work outside of class, or shifting the way coursework was evaluated.

The most innovative aspect of this system was that classes became, in a sense, collaborative projects between the professors and their students, wherein lessons were theoretically optimized and balanced for everyone in the class. While students may have been struggling with the difficulties of connecting with the material from afar or maintaining the social relationships that they’d had on campus, the professor-student relationship became more of a partnership than ever before.

This semester, however, many courses have reverted back to their previous curricula sans student input — some of which are several years old without having had any major adjustments.

And while this sense of continuity may be a relief for professors who no longer have to do all their work over Zoom, it brings academic life at the college back to its old, constant breakneck pace.

Certainly the students — and we imagine many professors as well — have found this to bring more stress than comfort.

The effects of this return to the old have been made evident as students overwhelmingly express feelings of burnout, often at levels they hadn’t expected or haven’t experienced before the pandemic. For many — including several of us at The Student — this past couple of weeks has been a constant struggle to stay on top of work as we slowly but surely inch toward a much-needed break. The constant back-and-forth between

overworking and recovery, sometimes referred to by students as a “work hard, play hard” mentality, is not a sustainable way to live, and, as we have seen from pandemic-era classes, not a necessary one either.

Unprecedented student burnout, while not entirely unexpected following a year of remote and hybrid learning, is a blow to the academic and inquisitive culture of the college, especially given the more fluid environment that had developed when learning was remote. It makes students less likely to participate in class or even show up at all, and has surely played a role in the college’s mental health care system being overwhelmed this semester.

While some increase in burnout is unavoidable following all we’ve been through over the past year, there are still steps we can take to mitigate its impact on our ability to learn. Change, the kind we’re asking for at least, doesn’t have to be a big hassle, nor does it have to be undertaken alone. In fact, it’s better if it isn’t. It’s not lost on us at The Student that the past year has been hard on professors as well and that current student attitudes are impacting teaching at the college.

After all, exhausted and disengaged students are harder to teach.

Collaborating with students on curricular design would be a good way for professors to share the burden, if only a little bit. That doesn’t mean we have to throw out that trusty 10-year-old syllabus, but ‘if it ain’t broke’ is not a saying that applies well to the classroom either. There’s always room for fine-tuning, and students should be involved in that process. A first step could be as simple as students and professors taking course evaluations more seriously. Then, instead of being confronted by worried students during midterms about lowerthan-expected grades or difficult assignments, problems could be addressed preemptively with early student questions and criticisms of the planned schedule.

We understand that both faculty and students came into this hectic semester unable to foresee the problems precipitated by a return to normal.

And we recognize that it may be too late to make this semester a collaborative one, but we hope that in coming semesters, professors will look to us as partners in the project of learning rather than just their charges. It will make learning a more enjoyable process for all of us.

Unsigned editorials represent the views of the majority of the Editorial Board — (assenting: 17; dissenting: 0; abstaining: 4).

THE AMHERST

STUDENT E X E C U T I V E B OA R D Editors-in-Chief Ryan Yu Rebecca Picciotto Managing News Sophie Wolmer Yee-Lynn Lee Assistant News Caelen McQuilkin Tana Delalio Managing Opinion Scott Brasesco Skye Wu Assistant Opinion Kei Lim Dustin Copeland Tapti Sen Managing Arts and Living Theodore Hamilton Brooke Hoffman Alex Brandfonbrener Managing Sports Ethan Samuels Liza Katz Liam Archacki Managing Podcast Sam Spratford Maggie McNamara Managing Design Anna Smith S TA F F Publishers Emmy Sohn Digital Director Sawyer Pollard Social Media Manager Emi Eliason

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The opinion pages of The Amherst Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community.

The Student will print letters if they are submitted to The Student offices in the Campus Center or to the paper’s email account (astudent@amherst.edu) by noon on Sunday, after which they will not be accepted.

The editors reserve the right to edit any letters or to withhold any letter because of considerations of space or content.

Letters must bear the names of all contributors and a phone number or email address where the author or authors may be reached. Letters and columns may be edited for clarity and Student style.

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All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age. The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student.

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Opinion 9

Seeing Double: “What Is Amherst Uprising?”

Thomas Brodey ’22 and Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22 Columnists Six years ago this week, Amherst’s campus exploded in a burst of student-led activism unsurpassed in recent history. Students occupied Frost Library and presented the administration with a list of transformative demands aimed at reshaping racial and social justice on campus. At the time, students hailed Amherst Uprising (as it came to be known) as a pivotal inflection point for the college.

Yet today, the legacy of the Uprising is in danger. Barely anyone on campus personally remembers the Uprising, and those who knew people involved will soon graduate.

If students (particularly white students like ourselves) recognize the name, they probably only remember that the Uprising caused the college to replace Lord Jeff with the mammoth we all love.

That’s why this week, we’re going to tell a short story of the Uprising and its legacy. If you haven’t heard of the Uprising, it’s crucial that you do. In our view, much of the Uprising’s power derives from how current students remember it.

We will thus cast aside the celebratory rose-tinted glasses common in discussions of the Uprising and look at its unvarnished legacy. The frustrations many students still feel with the college echo those that fueled the Uprising. Addressing those frustrations is only possible with a strong connection to the student movements that came before.

Amherst Uprising began on Thursday, Nov. 12, 2015, as an hour-long Frost Library sit-in.

Three Black students, Katyana Dandrige ’18, Sanyu Takirambudde ’18, and Lerato Teffo ’18, organized the event in solidarity with a wave of racial justice demonstrations at Yale, Oberlin, Ithaca, Mizzou, and other colleges. The act touched a nerve, and what began as a few students sitting on the main floor of Frost swelled to a multi-day sit-in involving hundreds of students, faculty and staff.

Frost became a forum for students to express their frustration,

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Students with protest posters sit on the floor of Frost Library during the Amherst Uprising. anger, sorrow, or confusion at feeling marginalized by the Amherst administration. Fury at issues of equity and justice, long simmering, boiled over. In the words of Kyndall Ashe ’18, “The purpose of [the Uprising] wasn’t like ‘oh let’s do this fun little sit-in and tell [President] Biddy [Martin] we want these things.’ Students are suffering. The number of Black students going on leave who don’t come back is too high; the number of Black students that don’t graduate compared to whites, it is too high; the violence against Black students in certain subfields is too high.”

For days, students remained in Frost, some moving in and out and others sleeping on the chairs and floor of the building. What began as a spontaneous expression of frustration and community turned into a movement. On Thursday night, students drafted their first list of demands.

That list started small, but within a few days, the Uprising organizers compiled a much more substantial list of goals. Many are recognizable from more recent campus protests against racism. They called for mandatory cultural competency

training for faculty, staff, and students; anti-racist revisions to the Honor Code; the creation of a Latin American studies major; diversification of the faculty and various staff offices including the Counseling Center; and more funding for affinity groups and theme houses.

The administration’s initial response was tepid. After the first set of demands, Martin “explained that [she] did not intend to respond to the demands item by item, or to meet each demand as specified, but instead to write a statement that would be responsive to the spirit of what they [were] trying to achieve — systemic changes that we know we need to make.” (A statement that, for many students, neatly summarizes the typical administrative response to activism.) In later weeks, Martin offered more specific responses, but the only demand she committed to meeting was the removal of Lord Jeff as our mascot.

The college, she promised, would consider additional measures over the next few months.

That is where most accounts of the Uprising end, yet the story of what happened after is just as important — and far less inspirational.

Just as Seeing Double began with promise and idealism but (according to our editors) has sunk into mediocrity and routine, the college’s response has failed to live up to its potential.

After the Uprising, the school acted with less and less urgency to meet students’ demands. Until more recent anti-racism protests, the school had met only a handful.

And it’s too early to say if the college’s latest actions will work. True, we now have a Latinx and Latin American Studies major, and La Causa has its own space. The college has also made some progress diversifying varsity teams. And initiatives that were inspired by the Uprising, such as Being Human in STEM and the Solidarity Book Project, show that faculty too took inspiration from the Uprising.

Yet for each of these important achievements, another goal remains incomplete or unaddressed.

The college has hired more faculty of color, but it has also historically struggled to retain them, and new plans for retaining faculty of color are still in their infancy. Over the course of the last five years, the proportion of staff of color in stu-

dent support departments, such as the Writing Center and Counseling Center, has barely crept up from 17 percent to 22 percent. Mental health resources, particularly for students of color, have remained inadequate. The college has been unable or unwilling to enforce strict rules against hate speech, and only recently updated the student code of conduct to deal with the issue.

Despite not addressing many of the Uprising’s concerns, the administration declared victory. The story of the Uprising transitioned from a narrative of opposition against the administration to part of Amherst’s brand. It became “proof ” of the college’s willingness to listen to its students and make change. From the celebratory retrospective offered almost a year after the Uprising

by Cullen Murphy ’74, then-chair of the Board of Trustees, to the memorial website operated by the college, Amherst takes pride in the fact that its students called it out.

On the five-year anniversary of the Uprising last November, the college organized an hour-long public Zoom conversation between President Martin and five alumni who had organized the Uprising,

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021 and two other Zoom events on the Uprising were included in Amherst’s bicentennial celebration.

Right now, Amherst College is the one writing the history of the Uprising — a history that, predictably, goes easy on the administration. Diego Duckenfield-Lopez ’24, the Black Student Union (BSU) historian, summed up the irony: “It was a celebration almost, like how we remember the civil rights movement and glorify it in some ways … It’s a general pattern in how they remember student activism …

Then the movement loses steam, and afterward Amherst doesn’t follow through with the rest of it.” Just as the banal, uncontroversial way we commemorate the Civil Rights Movement stands in the way of further progress, the administration’s celebratory commemoration of the Uprising only weakens its cause.

As we see it, the one of the most important achievements of the Uprising was not policy change, but a feeling of power and community among students. Spending days talking about their frustrations, and having their demands heard, was an exhilarating experience.

“It was like a fundamental shift in power regarding how Amherst was gonna do things from that day forward,” said Christine Croasdaile ’17, one of the original organizers.

Last spring, the Amherst Student expressed a similar sentiment, writing that the uprising has become “deeply embedded in the psyche

of the institution and its students.”

If students want to maintain this fundamental shift, then we have to make sure that the memory of the Uprising doesn’t slip away.

Today, only a handful of students on campus personally remember the Uprising. Even Martin is departing. In BSU, “[Amherst Uprising] honestly doesn’t come up that much,” Duckenfield-Lopez told us. The Uprising seems to be in danger of being forgotten or relegated to a curio of Amherst College history. As we wrote this article, someone we mentioned it to said, confidentially, “I’ve never actually heard what the Amherst Uprising was.” From an admittedly unscientific poll in the campus group chat, more than half of the 211 students we surveyed said they knew “nothing” or only “a little” about the Uprising. Fewer than 9 percent of respondents said they knew “a lot” about it.

Student power and unity have ebbed after two years of Covid. In response to the public health emergency, the administration has exerted unprecedented power over students’ lives, from kicking us off campus to mandating flu shots to telling us where we can and can’t eat.

Our clubs and community traditions have been upended. The pandemic cut us off from our past, and dealt campus activism a serious blow.

And yet, students continue to fight for anti-racist action. In March 2020, after white students

Opinion 10 associated with the lacrosse team chanted racial slurs at two Black students, the BSU called for a “particular policy to handle threats of racist violence and racist violence.”

Immediately after the incident, President Martin sent an all-school email pledging to change the Student Code of Conduct to better deal with racism and bias — one of the Uprising’s demands that never materialized. In response, the BSU outlined a set of demands it called #IntegrateAmherst. They called for a set of by-now familiar changes aimed at making campus a safe, inclusive, and supportive place for Black students. The desire for inclusion and support instead of just diversity was one of the Uprising’s main fuels.

And then a month after George Floyd’s murder in summer 2020, the BSU and two Black alums who ran the Instagram account @BlackAmherstSpeaks, Ashe and Haylee Price ’18, outlined #ReclaimAmherst. It was a new vision for an anti-racist Amherst that often mirrored what students in 2015 wanted: a diverse college staff and leadership; bias training for students, faculty, and staff; the hiring and retention of faculty of color; and a protocol to handle racism. To the college’s credit, Martin responded with an anti-racism plan updated at regular intervals addressing many, but not all, of the demands. Still, immediately after American police killed Daunte Wright in spring

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

A student speaks in front of peers, faculty, and staff during the Uprising.

2021, students walked out of classes in what they called #BlackMindsMatter. One of the major demands from this protest could have been lifted straight out of the Uprising: expand and diversify the Counseling Center.

These protests are undeniably connected, and many students on campus see that. “There’s a continuous struggle going on,” Duckenfield-Lopez told us. But it’s hard to keep those memories alive, and hard to impress on new classes the impact that the Uprising had on those who experienced it. That historical awareness is crucial for social activism. As Ellis Phillips-Gallucci ’23, a previous BSU historian, put it, “the current moment can only be made sense of through the past moments, first of all. And so I think that to move forward, we need to first make sure we understand what came first, where we are right now.”

When movements forget the past, they’re left without crucial ammunition in the fight for justice.

And when students forget the past — our own past as a student body, though we may not have been here — we risk losing that past all together. Once everyone forgets, the power that past movements have to guide, inspire, and strengthen us is gone. There is reason for concern — according to our polling, students are even less likely to know about recent campus activism than they are to know about the Uprising.

Almost three-quarters of the 201 students who responded to another poll said they knew “nothing” or “a Photo courtesy of Amherst College little” about #ReclaimAmherst.

How are we to remember AmStanding in front of President Biddy Martin, student onlookers, and Frost Library’s herst Uprising? Certainly not as circulation desk, a student speaks at the Uprising.

the feel-good triumph the school portrays in its marketing. The college still struggles with many of the crucial changes that the Uprising demanded. Nevertheless, the Uprising convinced Amherst students of the 2010s that they had power.

Today, that success is more in jeopardy than ever before. We won’t ever go back to having Lord Jeff as our mascot, but the sense of student power and community that the Uprising created is breathing its last, ragged gasps.

That’s why it’s our job to tell the stories of our four years to the students who come after — to take seriously the work that we put into growing student power so that we pass the baton without dropping it. The campus protests of the pandemic era, for instance, are nearly forgotten already. If you weren’t on campus last year, then you didn’t see the guerilla posters demonstrating how hard students fought for divestment. And it was nearly impossible to trace the web of Zoom strategy sessions that underpinned much of the #ReclaimAmherst movement.

At a college like Amherst, the student body lives in a state of cyclical amnesia. History may not exactly repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes. If we want future students to push the college to do better, then we should make sure they know how we’ve tried, succeeded, and failed during our time here.

Each student is a temporary trustee of our shared work. In passing on the stories of our shared struggles, we turn student activism into something that exists not just for ourselves, our class, or our community, but for Amherst for generations to come.

Amusements

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Val’s Vagaries | Crossword ACROSS 1 Omega preceder 4 ___ Rendang (Val entrée) 8 Val’s frequent Friday morning feature 14 Plus or minus particle 15 Planetary orbit shape 16 “Now it’s clear!”

17 Coffee-soaked Val dessert 19 “Hi, ___ is...”

20 Crustless Val dessert 21 “Annabel Lee” poet 22 “Pause” move in basketball, for short 23 Cher Horowitz: “___, as if !”

26 “Gimme five!”

30 Limited-choice question 32 Lay down, in a sense 34 Magical power 35 Egg cells 37 Discontinuities 39 Possible desk material 40 Val breakfast item with a misleading name 44 Presumed Val chicken connoisseur

46 “im ___ to val, where u sitting?”

47 Like a good roommate 49 Rejuvenating resort 50 Clarinetist Artie 52 Lost power 54 Story connector 58 Medical privacy law, for short 60 Confidentiality contract, for short 61 End of a threat 62 “Follow your nose” to this Val cereal: Abbr.

64 Hollywood hopeful 67 Frequented Wolff and ate 74A, perhaps 70 Val’s questionable take on a Chinese-American dish 71 Aced, as a final 72 “Silence!”, over text 73 Criticize, as some do to Val food 74 Left side of a certain Val bar 75 “Good” Val option, especially in winter 76 Summer on the Seine

Liam Archacki ’24 Managing Sports Editor Solutions: Nov. 3 DOWN 1 Like an unenjoyable choral performance 2 Evening gala 3 Not sitting upstairs or by the coffee station 4 Flop, as a final 5 Like cutting the Val line, hyperbolically 6 Relent 7 What’s going around campus, perhaps 8 Like the Cohan basement after heavy rainfall 9 “Silly goose!”

10 Half-hour past dinner 11 Olympics chant 12 President pro ___ 13 Take in

18 Cartesian conclusion counter-question 24 Reaction to Val’s ham salad 25 Air quality regulator: Abbr.

27 Cleaver or lever 28 California city that sounds like a surprised greeting 29 Val bowl to jab someone in the eye for?

31 Warmest part of Val 33 Homecoming victors 36 Like sharp cheeses 38 Drains 40 Kid 41 “Err, hey” 42 Quid pro quo 43 Appreciation 45 Those who assess

48 Coach Lasso 51 Off-the-grid Val treat?

53 Approach at a run 55 What UMass dining holds for Val-eaters 56 “There’s a resemblance” 57 Key in anew 59 Astronomically foreign 63 Things you might catch in addition to feelings: Abbr.

65 Vegetarian’s salad bar staple 66 “Rest in peace, Rover, you were just ___” 67 Answer to a long Val line, for short 68 Tide turner 69 Have no leader 70 HTML’s partner in design

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Amusements 12

Red Herring: Hallow-Christmas

by Isaac Streiff ’24

With the holiday season starting earlier every year, our favorite Halloween characters may need to make some adjustments.

Satire

Attendance Rate Increases by 0 Percent After Daylight Savings Andrew Rosin ’25 Satire Columnist Even after clocks were turned back one hour last Sunday, Nov. 7, no additional students attended their Monday classes when compared to the same day the previous week.

“One more hour of sleep is not going to change years of perpetual sleep deprivation,” argued Dusty Cooper ’25, who slept through his 10 a.m. philosophy

course on Monday morning.

Cooper insisted that repeatedly saying “Tonight will be the night that I get in bed early” or “This week I promise that I’m going to fix my sleep schedule” are far more effective strategies for improving sleep hygiene.

“Most people don’t know this, but daylight saving time was invented to trick students into feeling well-rested come November when their burnout is typically hitting a peak,” commented Di-

rector of Health Services Emily Jones. “Modern scientific studies have told us that students’ circadian rhythms shift back as they enter their teenage years, which is why colleges and universities throughout the country came together to invent the daylight savings program.”

Unfortunately for Amherst, allowing students to sleep in one extra hour relative to the previous week did not result in a single student waking up for a class that

they previously slept through. “I regularly sleep through my 10 a.m. lecture and my 1:30 p.m. discussion, so if you want daylight savings to influence my behavior, you’re going to have to turn the clocks back at least six hours,” Cooper added.

“Even with the daylight savings program in place, I have no intention of changing my sleeping habits,” Cooper concluded.

“I’ve spent the past four years flirting with critically danger-

ous sleep deprivation, and I can’t think of any good reason why that should change. The idea of daylight savings is fun, but we all know that the clocks are just going to turn back in the spring.”

Cooper is joined by Lindsay Balow ’25, who got confused, turned her clock one hour forward, and unintentionally arrived two hours early to every class, and Ryan Norman ’22, who “didn’t come to class on Monday because he just didn’t feel like it.”

Arts & Living 13

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

WAMH X THE STUDENT

Brought to you by the WAMH blog, where it can also be found, and The Student’s Arts and Living section. Written by WAMH Music Blog Director Olive Amdur ’23.

“Ladies of the Canyon,” the show I host on WAMH on Sundays at 8, is named for Joni Mitchell’s 1970 album “Ladies of the Canyon.” I spend the hour playing music by women in indie, alternative rock, and folk music, sometimes interspersed with songs that have nothing to do with the theme that I just want to play loudly on the studio speakers.

Save for the few seconds of the album opener of “Ladies of the Canyon” that I play at the beginning of each show, I don’t wind up playing very much Joni. This past Sunday though, I realized in the studio it was Nov. 7 — Joni Mitchell’s 78th birthday.

When I sat down to begin this piece, I told myself I wouldn’t write about Joni Mitchell, and especially that I wouldn’t write about her 1971 album “Blue.” I told myself I’d branch out and do an album review of something new, because everyone had read enough about “Blue” on its 50th anniversary this June. I said that if I were to write about Joni, it would be about “Ladies of the Canyon” or “Hejira,” or maybe her later music.

Then, out of the blue, sitting in a patch of sun on one of the strangely warm days we’ve had recently, I got a text from my mom: the link to a video of Brandi Carlisle covering the song “Blue.” I listened to it. Then I listened to all of the album “Blue” again, and now I can’t think about much else.

“I am on a lonely road, and I am traveling,” are the bare lyrics that open the album. “I want to knit you a sweater, want to write you a love letter,” she admits later in that first song, “All I Want.” “Blue” is an album known for its honesty. Joni sings about love and loss, about moving away from the homes and people

she knows and growing closer to new ones, about the daughter she gave up for adoption, about her disenchantments at the end of the ’60s and the wider-spread aches of her generation.

In the second song on the album, “My Old Man,” Joni sings about a realization, away in Europe after announcing her retirement from performance, that she no longer wanted to marry Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, and Nash renown).

In the third track, “Little Green,” she dreams of a life for her estranged daughter. She sings, “there’ll be icicles and birthday clothes and sometimes there’ll be sorrow.” This is one of my

favorite songs on the album: brutal, honest, and capable of capturing the unique deepening of joy and sadness in growing up.

Then comes “Carey,” and then “Blue,” which I think is the most serene and solemn track on the album, absent of the dynamic guitar patterns I so identify with Joni. She talks about the Vietnam War and that same European trip in “California,” which is a song about both leaving and coming home. “This Flight Tonight” and “River” also carry this sense of motion, and “A Case of You” reminds us that at the heart of home are her people and the love she holds for them.

“I get my gorgeous wings and fly away, only a phase, these dark cafe days,” are the lines that end “Blue.” In an album so focused on home and the many ways it shifts, this moment of freedom is Joni’s step into herself as the first, last, and ultimate home.

“Will you take me as I am?” she asks earlier. By the end, she has found herself in the ability to pose the question.

I first really listened to this album during the September of my first year at Amherst, on a slow and solitary afternoon just before the leaves turned.

Everything around me was — and

felt — new, and I missed Brooklyn: home. Walking wide loops on the paths around campus because I didn’t yet know where the bike trail was, I turned on “Blue” because it was an album I knew my mother listened to when she was my age, and because I missed my mother. I found myself wholly transported.

The lines that stuck out to me then were the ones about loneliness: “Oh, it gets so lonely when you’re walking, and the streets are full of strangers”; “I am a lonely painter, I live in a box of paints”; and in a different way, “I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” I hadn’t yet been able to admit how far from home I felt in those days, and I found comfort in listening to Joni do so.

This June was the 50th anniversary of “Blue,” and I listened to the album over and over again all summer.

This time, walking on the bike trail or sitting in an Adirondack chair, I finally felt settled and at home: in the valley, in Amherst, away from Brooklyn, in myself. Listening to this album then, different things struck me than my first time listening, like the depth of Joni’s expressions of love, the simple sweetness of morning sun and crocuses, and the way she reaches for an embrace of life as

motion between lightness and sorrow.

The first memory I have of Joni’s music is from a summer camp bonfire. I am eight or nine and singing Joni’s “The Circle Game” with my cabin and counselors. Someone is playing a guitar, and I am crying softly because I don’t want the summer to end and because the lyrics “cartwheels turn to car wheels through the town” remind me overwhelmingly that I am growing up.

I have been doing a lot of thinking recently about growing up, growing down, and growing in general. Joni’s music is a music of homes, growths and changes — making home in changes. It is music I keep with me for that reason. Like she sings in the song “Blue,” “songs are like tattoos.”

That last Sunday in the studio, I realized it was her birthday after coming across a birthday post for her on Twitter. There was a photo of Joni: smiling in a red coat and black hat, her hair in a long braid over one shoulder — beautiful. And I filled my queue with her songs to celebrate her, sit with her and find again, like I always do, newness in her songs: new ways of growing, homing, allowing myself to change. So, happy belated 78th Joni, and thanks.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

WAMH Music Blog Director Olive Amdur ’23 chronicles her personal connection to Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album “Blue.” While she was settling into her first year at Amherst, Amdur found comfort in Joni’s music.

Arts & Living 14

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Taylor Swift Re-Records and Reclaims “Red”

Brianne LaBare ’25 Staff Writer

While Taylor Swift is known for telling people to calm down, no amount of reprimanding could have prepared fans for the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version).” The 30-track album contains all 16 of the songs from her 2012 album “Red,” with additional tracks from “The Vault” — songs written but never released at the time of the 2012 release — a 10-minute version of “All Too Well,” and a music video to “I Bet You Think About Me (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault),” directed by Blake Lively.

The Music The re-recorded songs in the album are sung with the same passion as their original release nearly a decade ago, resulting in nearly identical covers of the original album.

Slower ballads like “I Almost Do” and “Sad Beautiful Tragic” reflect the same heartbroken adolescent navigating the intricacies of love.

Much like their melancholy coun-

terparts, upbeat staples of the “Red” era such as “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22” contained the same peppy rhythm that originally compelled fans to turn the volume up.

Introducing nine tracks from “The Vault” expanded these messages of love, heartbreak, and fame first explored in the 2012 original.

From the collection of unreleased material, songs feature prominent names such as Phoebe Bridgers and Ed Sheeran. A standout is “Nothing New.” Bridgers joins Swift, and they describe the predatory nature of the music industry through a constant revolving door of artists.

Amid the warnings of the price of fame come tracks with the tear-jerking lyrics Swift is known for. In the twenty-second track, “Better Man,” Swift doesn’t hold back. She describes a heartbreak where she was forced to leave her partner, while also finding herself wishing they could have changed to be better for her. Ultimately, she realizes that her decision to run from the relationship was her only option. She reflects upon the effort

she put into a failed relationship and accepts that she did the best that she could: “And I gave to you my best and we both know you can’t say that.”

In addition to the new trove of tracks, a nearly 15-minute short film for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (Taylor’s Version) (From The Vault)” starring Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien provides a glimpse into the treacherous relationship of her then partner Jake Gyllenhaal.

Released on Nov. 12 at 7 p.m., the video, which was directed by Swift herself, amassed nearly 30 million views in the first three days. It presents a literary quote from Pablo Neruda, explanatory sequence subtitles, and a lengthy argument scene in the middle of the video.

Accompanying the cinematic presentation of “All Too Well,” Lively made her directorial debut with a video for “I Bet You Think About Me” released on Nov. 15 at 10 a.m.

Featuring vocals from Chris Stapleton, the peppy track details one of Swift’s past relationships, one in which Swift’s ex looked down on

Photo courtesy of i0.wp.com

Prompting rapturous celebration for fans, Taylor Swift re-recorded and re-released her 2012 album “Red” as “Red (Taylor’s Version),” this time with new tracks and music videos.

her. Recalling the relationship, Swift questions whether or not her ex still thinks about her. The opening scene unexpectedly introduces a suited Miles Teller and quickly transitions to a lavish wedding ceremony where Swift skillfully wreaks havoc during the festivities.

Motive Behind the Music Developing such a wide range of unreleased material, Swift’s re-release breathes new life into an album that had been fading into the abyss of 2000’s music history. After her highly publicized back catalog battle with entrepreneur Scooter Braun, who initially bought and resold the rights to Swift’s first six albums, Swift chose to re-record her past studio albums. This move not only solidified her as the icon we all know her to be but reclaiming ownership over her catalogs.

By challenging the power dynamic that typically hinders artists from controlling their discography, Swift received support from old and new fans alike.

When re-recording her previous works, Swift not only paved the way for other artists who might later want to re-record their songs, but she ignited the fire of nostalgia for older fans and created a way for new fans to immerse themselves in the “old Taylor Swift” fandom.

Streaming on all platforms, on the very first night, the album broke the records for the most-streamed album in a day by a female and the most-streamed female in a day in Spotify history.

Swift’s intention to redistribute her albums carries particular significance for fans and Swift herself. Following the release of “Red (Taylor’s Version),” Swift thanked fans for inspiring her to reclaim her art, telling her fans across all media platforms: “It never would have been possible to go back & remake my previous work, uncovering lost art & forgotten gems along the way if you hadn’t emboldened me. Red is about to be mine again, but it has always been ours. Now we begin again.”

After unsuccessful attempts to reclaim her music, Swift rose above the challenges between

her and recreating her early catalog.

While taking back ownership of her works was her goal, a side effect of her actions has been the renewed interest in her work by fans of all ages. Unintentionally, Swift has revived a fanbase that has stood the test of time. The novelty of Swift’s influence despite the many challenges she’s faced stands as a triumph for proud fans.

Beyond the Music Outperforming its original counterpart, the album’s refined production had fans coming together to celebrate in solidarity. Amherst students were no exception to this rule.

At 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 12, over 20 students gathered in the Ford Hall event space to celebrate and listen to “Red (Taylor’s Version).” Over a month ago, Stephanie Zovich ’23 the coordinator of the event, booked the space to provide a setting where Swifties could congregate and listen to the album “on a big speaker.” When entering, attendees were greeted by the album blaring loudly and red production lights that floated around the room, creating both a fitting ambiance and a nod to the album’s namesake. Together, students sat at tables and discussed hidden easter eggs, dancing and singing to the album.

One such attendee was Jess Butler ’23. While she doesn’t identify as the biggest Swiftie, she said that “[she’s] always liked [Swift’s] songs.

[She] just never knew all the songs, but it’s cool to listen to all the new ones.” Her perspective is shared by many who are entering the fandom during a period of musical nostalgia and progress. “I think I have a greater appreciation for Taylor,” Butler expressed.

More than ever before, Swift has inspired unity among fans and rediscovered her sense of purpose, the motivation driving her to create music. As expressed in response to fans collectively celebrating the rerelease, on Nov. 13, Swift commented on Instagram, “THIS is what it’s all about, why I live to make music.

The hope that maybe people might want to come together and feel things.” And with that, the love for “Red” begins again.

Arts & Living 15

VALHACKS

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Audrey Rosevear ’22 presents “Val Hacks,” a column dedicated to exploring the culinary possibilities of Valentine Dining Hall. This week, here is her recipe for chicken tikka masala, D.I.Y. Val-style.

Between copping free food from an event you didn’t go to, ordering buy-one-get-one-free Domino’s pizzas, and braving the Greenway kitchens, Amherst students have developed a variety of ways to escape the inflexibility of Val’s traditional options. And as much as I love lasagna night, sometimes all that’s available are kalbi beef short ribs and tears.

Val is aware of its own shortcomings: this semester has seen the return of the famous stir-fry station, the panini press, the toasters and microwaves, the cereal bar, and more of Val’s diversification of options. But I still often find myself craving something a little different after three days in a row of marinara pasta or broccoli in soy sauce. I created “Val Hacks” with the intent to chronicle my (slightly more successful) experiments getting a little more creative with what Val has to offer. After all, they offer multiple cooking devices and a plethora of raw ingredients. There has to be something we can cook up.

My first recipe, the one that sparked this idea in the first place,

is my attempt at scratching my itch for “chicken tikka masala.” It’s in quotes because... well... it’s not quite chicken tikka masala. But it is damn tasty!

Cooking Device: Stir-fry station.

Daily requirements: Can be cooked on any day that the stir-fry station is available, but it gets better when there are chickpeas in the salad bar.

Time: Long enough that I’ll implore you not to do this in front of a 6:30 p.m. line.

Ingredients: • 3-4 tomatoes, sliced (Available at the Sandwich Bar) • Handful of onions (Salad Bar or pre-cooked from Traditional) • Handful of spinach (Salad Bar, optional) • 2 potatoes, quartered (Lighter Side, optional) • Rice (Lighter Side, optional)

Photo courtesy of Audrey Rosevear ’22

Kick-starting our “Val Hacks” column, Audrey Rosevear ’22 presents her take on chicken tikka masala, using simple ingredients found in Valentine Dining Hall.

•

• • • • • • • • • •

Photo courtesy of Chris Tun ’25

Making their triumphant return to the Val atrium, stir fry pans have become a cooking staple at Val yet again.

Handful of chicken or chickpeas (Salad Bar or Lighter Side) 1 ladle marinara sauce (Pasta Bar) 2-3 tablespoon cream (Tea Station) 2+ dashes of hot sauce (Salt/ Pepper stations) A pinch of Garam masala (Stir-fry station) A lot of garlic powder (Stirfry station) A lot of onion powder (Stirfry station) A lot of chili lime seasoning (Stir-fry station) A little tandoori seasoning (Stir-fry station) A little ginger powder (Stirfry station) Salt to taste (Stir-fry station)

Notes: 1. All quantities are approximate. Taste frequently!

2. Hot sauce is essential. If you don’t like spicy food, add just a

couple dashes to really bring out the flavor.

Recipe: 1. Cut the veggies small. They will cook faster this way.

2. Put the cream, marinara, tomatoes (cut very small), and hot sauce in a bowl.

3. Fry the onions and spinach at the stir fry station. Add ginger, garlic, and onion powders. While they cook, add the rest of the seasonings to the sauce.

4. When the veggies are cooked, add the chicken/chickpeas/potatoes for long enough to warm them up.

5. Turn the heat down to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, then add the sauce. The stir fry station does not allow you to add extra liquids, but if you turn the heat down first they will not have a problem with it.

6. Let sit for as long as possible.

Ideally, this would be around 40 minutes to make the tomatoes truly dissolve, in practice I usually do

five to ten minutes before I start to feel guilty about the line behind me. Make sure to taste often while it’s cooking!

7. Serve with rice and enjoy!

Spice it Up: Here are some things I would love to add if Val had them. First, the key thing missing from this recipe is plain yogurt. If you have some (perhaps from Grab-n-Go or breakfast), add it at the very end and take the curry off the heat as soon as it’s warmed up. This will enhance the flavor and make a creamier texture. Second, cumin and coriander (and cilantro if you’re into that stuff) add excitement and spice. The chili lime seasoning has both of these spices, but it also has other ingredients, making it harder to control the flavor. If you’re going to choose one of the two, I highly recommend cumin due to its versatility. (This is far from the last cumin recipe you will see on this column.)

Arts & Living 16

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Nostalgia and Nothing More: “Voyage” Falls Short Sarah Weiner ’24 Staff Writer On Nov. 5, 2021, the Swedish pop group ABBA released “Voyage,” their first new album since 1981. For those ABBA fans who have been waiting for new music since Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the new tunes do not quite live up to the classics. And if you weren’t already an ABBA fan, “Voyage” surely isn’t going to convert you…

“Voyage” was first announced on Sept. 2. On the same day, ABBA released the dual singles “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down.” These tracks promised a dynamic, exciting, and relevant album.

Although “I Still Have Faith in You” is an emotional ballad pushing five minutes long, which sometimes leaves you wishing the song was already over, it attempts to cover the reunion of the group after four decades.

There’s a lot to cover there, so I’ll cut ABBA some slack. Mostly, as the opener of the album, the song provides a delightful return to ABBA’s music with a calm intro that crescendos into a vibrant climax.

“Don’t Shut Me Down,” the fourth track on “Voyage” and the stronger of the two singles, describes a person (or perhaps a four-person Swedish band?) coming back “reloaded” and “fired up” after a long hiatus, having “learned to cope, and love and hope.” It is a high-energy confidence booster with just the right amount of piano glisses — the perfect song to listen to as you walk across campus to propose a paper topic to the professor who shot down your last idea.

“Just a Notion” follows “Don’t Shut Me Down” as the fifth track, and was released as a single on Oct. 22. The song was originally recorded in 1978, which explains its intense resemblance to songs from “The Album” (1977) and “Voulez-Vous” (1979). It is danceable and lively — everything I hope for from an ABBA

song — but falls short in its onenote-ness. The verses and chorus barely vary in melody and pace, and with no bridge, “Just a Notion” can come off as just one dense block of music.

The other two songs that make up the first half of “Voyage,” “When You Danced with Me” and “Little Things,” are by far the weakest on the album. I was caught off guard by the Irish theme of “When You Danced with Me.” The only thing about the song justifying its Irish folk music influence is the fact that the desperate subject of the song remains in Kilkenny, after being left by her dance partner/lover/ friend? Who knows — the song is vague and lacks any resolution or narrative arc, both of which I expected after the first verse began to tell a clear story. To add fuel to the fire, ABBA mimics the melody of the titular line from their legendary 1977 song “Thank You for the Music” in the track’s line “You’re just here for the music.” I was confused by this callback, but even more so, I wanted to turn “Voyage” off and play ABBA’s reliable older hits instead.

ABBA throws us for yet another loop by slipping in a “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” inspired Christmas song after the arbitrarily Irish tune. “Little Things” depicts “a lovely Christmas morning.” The appearance of the “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” motif on the xylophone, which is paired with a children’s chorus that comes in at the end, transports me out of the disco club I thought I was in and straight back to my second grade holiday concert.

The sixth and seventh songs on “Voyage,” “I Can Be That Woman” and “Keep an Eye on Dan,” share the same weakness: they are musically brilliant and lyrically tragic. “I Can Be That Woman” tarnishes its rich and passionate piano score with the voice of a woman desperately lamenting that she has let her husband down, while also singing about his violent habits…?

What could be a serious song is undermined by the fact that a dog named Tammy is also a main character. I can’t listen to this dramatic saga with a straight face when it is interrupted by updates on Tammy swishing her tail and licking peoples’ fingers.

Perhaps a failed attempt at a “Marley and Me” vibe.

“Keep an Eye on Dan” is more enjoyable, mostly for its similarities to ABBA’s typical disco energy — it is reminiscent of “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!”

Once again though, it is hard to enjoy the song without getting tripped up by its bizarre lyrics, including: “I know that this shouldn’t be / A traumatic event, but it is.” ABBA, if you’re talking about listening to this song, you’re right. That’s harsh, but while its musical score begs for a dance party, the song’s lyrics chronicle co-parenting during a

painful divorce. It’s difficult to let loose when constantly being told to “keep an eye on Dan.” The ninth track on “Voyage,” “No Doubt About It,” is the strongest part of the album’s second half. ABBA uses upbeat electric guitar and quirky percussion to score the narrator’s confession of picking a fight with their partner. Perhaps because the rest of “Voyage” has used up all of ABBA’s available sap supply, this song refreshingly does not take itself too seriously and insists that we all mess up sometimes.

“Bumblebee” and “Ode to Freedom” sandwich “No Doubt About It,” which would have been an exciting close to “Voyage” instead of the melancholy “Ode to Freedom.” The ode includes a lovely assemblage of strings, which is unusual for the disco/pop group. Though, the track gets a little too unusual

with the constant harmonious singing about the “elusive” qualities of freedom — an awkward attempt at a political statement.

If commentary on freedom wasn’t enough, ABBA also endeavours to cover climate change. “Bumblebee” includes endearing moments of flute and luscious vocals, all communicating the fear of being “trapped / Inside a world where all is changing / Too fast for bumblebees to adapt.” To this I say, the song is quite pretty, but global warming isn’t.

If you are curious, give “Voyage” a listen. It won’t live up to ABBA’s older music, and it’s not worth enduring once you’ve had enough. But, if you’re a longtime fan of the super Swedes, it might give you a sense of nostalgia that makes you feel good — and that’s really the reason to listen to ABBA anyways.

Photo courtesy of allwhitebackground.com

While ABBA’s long-awaited comeback album “Voyage” provides plenty of nostalgia, it lacks the spark of the group’s classics and falls prey to shoddily structured songs.

Arts & Living 17

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Richard Powers Perfects His Craft With Recent Works Joe Sweeney ’25 Staff Writer What you have to realize about Richard Powers is that he is completely disinterested in being pretentious.

Nowadays, that is. For a long time it seemed as if Powers was going to be the next big thing in “American Postmodern Pretentious Literature” — i.e., the league of erudite, tastefully ribald, tragi-comically observant writers that blend high and low culture, refined and uncouth speech, and appropriate and transgressive decorum.

It’s one of the U.S.’s signature literary movements, and its entropic brand of high-concept irony marches on to this day in

search of its newest voice. With his formless characters, limited narrative settings, and hyper-specialized motifs, the Richard Powers of the 80s and 90s seemed certain to take up the mantle.

But something happened in the 2000s. Powers’ writing became less abstract, and less desperately disillusioned with his own characters and the situations they inhabit. Slowly but surely, his style became more digestible and straightforward.

With 2018’s “The Overstory,” he had a bonafide literary hit on his hands. It nabbed the Pulitzer Prize, was picked up by Oprah’s Book Club, and scored a Barack Obama quote on the cover saying “it changed how he thought

about the Earth.”

After reading about Powers in an interview Amherst College did with David Foster Wallace, I went to Barnes & Noble to pick up one of his titles. When I couldn’t find “Operation Wandering Soul” (the postmodern masterpiece Wallace touted in that interview as a work that demands acute “cerebration” and “aesthetic apprehension” of its reader), I came across “The Overstory,” which, three years after its publication, was still being ostentatiously displayed in the store with a brief rave review from an employee attached to its place on the shelf. Say what you will about the genius of Powers’ past works — clearly, this is the one that was moving people.

And it’s easy to see why. The novel consists of narratives from the perspectives of eight distinct characters. Some of the more interesting ones include a tech-genius obsessed with perfecting the world, a hermetic artist who carves wooden sculptures he can’t pay people to take off his hands, and a disenchanted college student majoring in actuarial sciences turned pseudo-Messiah figure.

However, despite the willful discreteness of these characters — the sharp edges of their personalities and their past traumas that would ostensibly preclude friendship — the trajectories of their lives nonetheless overlap, evoking a deep feeling that inescapable interconnectedness is

Photo courtesy of Wordpress.com

With 2018’s “The Overstory” and 2021’s “Bewilderment,” Richard Powers continues to develop as an author, cultivating an earnest and solidified style that continues to impress old readers and new fans alike.

the fate of even the most lonely among us. At the heart of all their stories is the very wellspring of all interconnectedness: those great, mysterious providers of clean air, ecosystem stability, and life itself — trees, and the questions that come with them. What do we know about them? What can we know about them? What are we missing out on, and what will we miss out on, forever, if we don’t act, right now, to save them?

And if you would rather gouge out your eyes than read a novel about trees, Powers understands completely. He is painfully aware of the fact that it’s easier to care about the small, inner lives of a few people than the fate of the entire world. Furthermore, his characters reflect the spectrum of this absurdity. Some of them realize that they cannot live without giant redwoods, and others couldn’t give a shit about distinguishing between an oak and a Douglas fir.

What Powers focuses on however, is not the moral righteousness or superiority of any one position. Because, for all their posturing and desperate feelings, no one really gets it — everyone in “The Overstory” is small, weak, inadequate, and ultimately human. The real weight of the story falls to the trees in the novel’s background — waiting to be recognized, but content with waiting.

Even if we protect them, even if we destroy them, trees have been around long before we were here, and will remain long after we are gone. Through this book, the reader realizes that preserving the environment does not have to be about the environment. Richard Powers reveals that people who care about trees are people that need new and better ways to care about themselves. In its earnestness, it is nothing less than a deeply radical novel.

This brings me to “Bewilderment,” Powers’ newest novel and,

Continued on page 18

Arts & Living 18

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Power’s Novel “Bewilderment”: A Simple Yet Strong Story Continued from page 17 unfortunately, the least interesting segment of this article. That isn’t to say that it’s not a good book; in fact, I’d say that it’s a very good book. The massive scale of “The Overstory” has been pared down to two and a half characters: a father, his son, and the dead wife and mother between them.

The father, Theo, is an astrobiologist — he has spent his life investigating what makes life possible, and what form it could take on other planets. He relentlessly explores these possibilities with his nine-year old son Robin, a neurodivergent child who refuses to move on after the loss of his mother.

Escapism isn’t enough for him, though. Theo is drowning in his inability to help and understand his child, not to mention his own

grief. Fortunately, Theo reconnects with an old friend of his wife, a neurologist who studied her mind in a clinical study. He tells Theo that he has preserved his wife’s neural information, and that Robin can, essentially, be trained on her brain waves as part of an experimental study in neurofeedback conditioning. As the training progresses, a change roots itself deep in Robin. He reveals things to Theo that he never knew about his wife, and leads him down the paths of life — through the rapture of scientific wonder, through the quiet of calm observance, through the rebirth of what is sorrowful and beautiful in memory — that Theo suspected he would never walk again.

If that last line leaves a certain taste of cloying sentimentality in your mouth, then know that there is some of that in the nov-

el. There are moments in “The Overstory’’ that are similarly corny, but they feel like inevitable byproducts of a novel that is constantly running up against what you expect it to be. What’s disappointing about “Bewilderment” is that it often lacks this ambition to strain the joints of conventionality. The ‘precocious child who spouts startling wisdom’ trope covers a familiar emotional territory of revelation and sensitive introspection.

The novel’s backdrop is essentially the present day, and there are a few clumsy references that grate on the nerves (most conspicuously, imagined asides from our Ex-Tweeter-In-Chief, and some mild fawning over “Inger Alder,” a Greta Thunberg doppelganger). And then there’s a weird effect where the narrowed focus of the novel paradoxically makes the story feel more direc-

tionless. Sometimes, it feels like the themes are simply flung into the massive distance between people that deeply care for each other.

This might just be the point.

“The Overstory” felt like its goal was to expose how connected everything is, and it was content to revel in the scale of this feeling.

“Bewilderment” is grasping to feel that implication, to know, in a specific time and a specific place with a specific person, what it might mean to be connected — no matter how painful and devastating that ends up being.

The end of this novel is plenty painful and plenty devastating, and plenty of signs tell the reader that this is coming. There are many explicit allusions throughout to the heartwrencher “Flowers For Algernon” by Daniel Keyes, which might have been

the first novel that emotionally destroyed me. But right after that horrible ending, the book flips. There is one more path that waits for Theo, and as he begins his journey along it he can’t help but feel that it is enough. The real ending inspires more hope than the novel could have if it had never been written. That’s a beautiful thing. “Bewilderment” is not a major achievement, but it very well could be a minor one.

At any rate, it’s worth reading. It’s proof enough for me that Richard Powers, at age 64, is at the top of his game, and that he has gotten there through sheer earnestness.

What’s more is that he has come to this earnestness from a literary school that doesn’t allow it.

He walks alongside his settings, his atmospheres, his people. In a world so chaotic and cruel, he is not content with his wonder. But he will not abandon it.

“Florence” Stands Out As a Decent Digital Distraction Ross Kilpatrick ’24E Staff Writer I’m not a huge fan of mobile games. I despise their small ambitions and their sleek addictive interfaces, perfectly designed to exploit the worst, dopamine releasing, misdesigned parts of our fragile ape-brains. I hate how they brazenly ask for money, not coy at all about their greed.

Almost every mobile game is a Skinner box, with us as the helpless and confused pigeons inside.

Why we let them do this, I don’t know.

“Florence,” a short, experimental, expressive mobile game, is luckily not any of those things.

It was originally released in 2018, but I only played it after it made its way to the computer in 2020. “Florence” takes about 30 minutes to play, and follows the story of the titular Florence as she meets and falls into a new relationship. It’s simple, almost obsessively so. There’s no dialogue, just art and sound, and the

palette of colors is simple and expressive. It has the same impulse for simplicity that runs through most mobile games, but it lacks any trace of greed. It’s honest and simple.

For me to even call “Florence” a mobile game is perhaps misleading. I still have never played it on a phone. But the “mobileness” of the game runs deep into its structure. The gameplay in “Florence” is a series of small interactions: picking up things around the house, aligning photos, cooking, making space for new items. Everything is done through a drag and drop interface. The game was clearly imagined for a phone, where one would naturally use the touch screen.

The story is so simple that I can’t say much without spoiling it, but at the same time it isn’t so complex that you couldn’t predict every turn and twist of its 30 minutes from the setup.

“Florence” is a game of primary colors, from its palette to its

characters to its plot. It’s basic, but directly and honestly so. Refreshingly so. It’s sleekness, its simplicity, doesn’t hide greed, or microtransactions, or the repeated suggestion that you should turn on notifications. It’s just a game that wants to tell a story.

It does not yearn for your interaction in the way that most apps do.

But, it doesn’t last long, and it’s not free. The 30 minutes will cost three dollars – an amount which is almost stunning in its audacity. Nowadays we expect more “value” than that from almost every piece of entertainment. This is especially true of free mobile games, which we expect to extract infinite entertainment from without spending a dollar. “Florence” has something to prove then. In the world of apps, three dollars is a king’s bounty.

I’m not sure that “Florence” proves itself worthy of that king’s bounty. But on an app store that’s constantly trying to curry favor through free games and interac-

tions, and then surprising you with the annoyance of microtransactions and notifications and all of the software’s constant begging, it’s nice to know that

someone can still make a mobile game which can just exist and perform its functions honestly.

That, I think, is worth far more than a king’s bounty.

Photo courtesy of Blogspot

Ross Kilpatrick ‘24E reviews the mobile game “Florence,” praising its simple yet evocative gameplay.

Sp ports Second Half Surge Not Enough as Football Falls Short Ian Donahue ’24 Staff Writer A crucial NESCAC showdown between the oldest collegiate rivals in the country did not disappoint, as a strong second-half surge by the Mammoths fell just short against the undefeated Williams Ephs at the homecoming game on Saturday, Nov. 13.

In what has long been touted as the “Biggest Little Game in America” between the two rival schools, the Mammoths looked to put an end to the Ephs’ pristine 8-0 2021 record. The Ephs, who had already clinched the coveted NESCAC championship, rolled into Pratt field with their first undefeated season since 2010 on the line.

The Williams defense wasted no time setting the tone in the early going, maintaining their recent dominance, having held their opponents to just three total points in their previous two games. An interception by Ephs defensive back Edward Manzella on the third play of the game put Williams in the driver’s seat early on. Contrary to the Mammoths, the Ephs worked efficiently on their own first drive — advancing 51 yards in four plays — capped by a 35-yard touchdown connection between Ephs quarterback Bobby Maimaron and tailback Mario Fischetti to open up the game 7-0.

However, Amherst would not remain silent, as they marched 57 yards in 10 plays to set up a firstand-goal on the seven-yard line.

Quarterback Chad Peterson ’23 got into a groove early, completing each of his first four pass attempts during the drive, including a 33-yard dime to wide receiver Owen Gaydos ’25.

However, a sack by Williams’ Calvin Jackson on the ensuing third-andfour halted the Mammoths’ advance — holding them to three points.

The Williams’ offense maintained their rhythm on their next drive, relying on both their running and passing game. This balanced attack enabled the Ephs to march 59

yards on eight plays to set up another first-and-goal. This time though, the Amherst defense showed their resolve, marked by a five-yard tackle for loss on a third-down rushing attempt by Maimaron that would prove crucial to holding the Ephs to three points. Thus, Amherst entered the second quarter down by only a touchdown with the score sitting at 10-3.

Once again, the Ephs struck early to open the quarter. On a second-and-seven around midfield, Fischetti scampered 48 yards downfield, all the way to the Amherst two-yard line, to quickly set up a first-and-goal situation. Ephs tailback Joel Nicholas converted on his second rushing attempt at the goalline to put the Ephs ahead 17-3. For the remainder of the first half, stout defense from both sides forced consecutive, abbreviated drives — including three three-and-outs in the span of four minutes.

But the game’s rapid pace would return, as Manzella came up big for the Ephs defense once again, intercepting his second pass of the day on Amherst’s first drive of the quarter.

The Amherst defense responded quickly, as with six minutes remaining in the half, Raymond Dixon ’24 came up with an interception of his own on a pass attempt from Maimaron.

Amherst would eat into the lead with three minutes remaining in the half, putting together an extended drive of 11 plays for 75 yards. Starting on their own six-yard line, Peterson was instrumental in marching the Mammoths’ offense downfield — completing four straight passes for 58 yards —all the way to the Williams 17-yard line. Once again, however, Amherst could not find a way into the endzone, thus kicking another field goal to bring the score to 17-6 to end the first half.

The Williams offense showed no let-up to open the second half, orchestrating their most efficient drive of the game — marching 86 yards from their own seven-yard line on

Photo courtesy of Amherst Football Parents Association

The Amherst football team watches on as their offense runs a play during the 2021 Amherst-Williams football game, “The Biggest Little Game in America.” six plays. A 67-yard strike from Maimaron later set up a seven-yard touchdown pass from him to tight end Justin Burke, and widened the lead to 24-6.

Following another three-andout from the Mammoths’ offense, the Ephs threatened to score once again, setting up a first-and-goal on the Amherst six-yard line. The Amherst defense would not relent, however, coming up with their trademark clutch play in the endzone. On a fourth-and-one that could have sealed the game, defensive lineman Brett Bates ’22 forced a huge fumble from Nicholas that was quickly recovered by fellow lineman Manni Malone ’23 to halt the Ephs offense in their tracks.

With newfound vigor and a sizable gap to reduce, the Amherst offense worked efficiently to capitalize on their defense’s clutch play.

Finding success with a mixture of their aerial and ground attack, the Mammoths put together their best drive of the game, covering 79 yards in nine plays. Peterson maintained his strong play, finding wide receiver Joe Masterson ’22 on a 13-yard completion to finally put the Mammoths in the endzone with 32 seconds left

in the third quarter. Thus, the Mammoths entered the decisive fourth quarter down 24-13.

After forcing a three-and-out to open the quarter, the Mammoths’ offense kept rolling as their steady diet of run and pass continued to gash the Ephs defense. After entering the red zone in just six plays, a two-yard rush from wide receiver Carson Ochsenhirt ’23 secured another Amherst touchdown, bringing the game to within one score at 24-19. However, the Mammoths could not bring the score to within field goal range, as the Ephs defense thwarted the subsequent two-point conversion attempt. With 12 minutes left in the final quarter, the Mammoths looked to complete their comeback attempt, only down five.

Neither the Mammoths’ defense nor the Ephs’ defense would relent, however, as neither offense put together a drive that put them within striking distance of the endzone.

With the score unchanged, and 3:29 remaining in the game, the Ephs defense forced four consecutive incompletions to give their offense the ball back with little time remaining.

On Amherst’s final, game-deciding

drive with only 12 seconds remaining on the clock, the Ephs defense once again came up with a clutch play, as defensive back James Hemmer came up with their third team interception to seal the game. And so, the game would end with the Williams Ephs securing an undefeated season with a 24-19 win over Amherst.

Masterson paced the Amherst offense with 115 receiving yards and one touchdown on six receptions, in addition to recording 97 yards on five kickoff returns. Peterson threw for 256 yards and one touchdown on 44 pass attempts. On the defensive side of the ball, linebacker Tim Swope ’24 recorded 10 total tackles, eight of which were solo tackles.

Dixon recorded Amherst’s sole interception of the game.

The Mammoths finished their 2021 season with a record of five wins and four losses. Meanwhile, the Ephs secured their first NESCAC title since 2010 with a perfect record of nine wins and zero losses.

With their NESCAC games now completed, the team will look to improve upon their record next year, with Mammoth football returning to Pratt Field in the fall of 2022.

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Sports 20

Women’s Soccer Eliminated From NCAA Tournament in Thriller Violet Glickman ’25 Staff Writer Women’s soccer’s 2021 season came to a heartbreaking end this weekend following the first two rounds of the NCAA Division III tournament, both of which were hosted by Amherst on Hitchcock Field.

Lesley On Saturday, Nov. 13, Amherst faced off against Lesley University, who beat New England College on Nov. 6 to win the NECC Championship.

The Mammoths started the game strong with Ruby Hastie ’22 putting the first goal on the board in the fifth minute. Just two minutes later, Sophia Fikke ’22 sent a corner kick into the box that Natalie Landau ’22 capitalized on with a shot that flew just high off the crossbar.

Purple then notched another goal on the board in the eighth minute, which came from Amherst’s Sierra Rosado ’25 off an assist from Hastie.

The Mammoths continued to keep the Lynx on the defensive for the next 10 minutes before breaking through the back line. In the 19th

minute, the score moved to 3-0 in favor of Amherst thanks to Patience Kum ’25 following a pass from Fikke.

Keeper Mika Fisher ’24 saw her first action 24 minutes into the game, whose incredible playing this season has earned her the title of NESCAC Women’s Rookie of the Year. In the 32nd minute, the Lesley attack managed to find the back of the net to bump the score to 3-1.

The Mammoths held their opponents there, however, and ended half with nine shots to their opponent’s two.

Upon returning to the field, Lesley took charge with a shot in the 52nd minute that was stopped by center back Charlotte Huang ’25. The Mammoths and the Lynx battled for dominance, with Landau, Carter Hollingsworth ’25, and Hastie all firing off shots in six minutes, and Fisher recording two more saves. In the 62nd minute, Landau found an opening and passed the ball to Hollingsworth, who sent it soaring past the Lesley keeper’s hands into the goal. The tensions began to rise with several fouls called on each team, including one that resulted in a penalty

kick by Kum in the 72nd minute.

Even with the home team now controlling the pitch with a score of 5-1, Lesley was determined to go out fighting. With just seven minutes left in the game, Sarah Sullivan ’23 broke through the Lynx defense and buried the ball in the net with the help of Isabel Stern ’23. The Mammoths ended the first round of the 2021 NCAA tournament with an incredible score of 6-1.

Johns Hopkins On Sunday, Nov. 14, women’s soccer took to Hitchcock Field once again, this time against Johns Hopkins University. Spirits were high following the previous day’s success, but this team was sure to be much tougher than Lesley. Both teams stepped onto the field with intensity but it was Hopkins who took the first shot of the day just one minute after the whistle blew.

In the ninth minute, Julia Ralph ’22 notched the first shot for Amherst which she saw saved by the Hopkins keeper. The Blue Jays retaliated with seven shots in the next nine minutes; the two that made it on frame were both stopped by Fisher.

Not to be outdone, the Mammoths

countered with six shots of their own and kept blue defending their goal for the rest of the half. The first half may have been scoreless but was full of energy and tension with eight fouls already called against Johns Hopkins and seven against Amherst.

Blue began the second half much like they had the first, notching off a shot against Fisher only a minute into play. The Mammoths were determined, however, and Hastie led the offensive charge. Less than a minute later, with the help of a well-placed header by Landau, she found an opening and drilled the ball into the back of the net, turning the score to 1-0 in purple’s favor.

The Mammoths continued to keep the pressure high following their goal, with Hastie, Hollingsworth, and Kum all firing off shots. In the 56th minute, the Blue Jays capitalized on their corner kick, sending a ball past Fisher into the goal to tie up the game. The two teams continued to battle it out, both testing each other’s keepers, but ultimately it was Johns Hopkins who managed to find the back of the net in the 64th minute. With the score now 1-2 and just 15 minutes left in the game, the

nervous energy from both teams was evident. Amherst continued to fight, with Alexa Juarez ’23E, Hastie, Rosado, and Landau all taking their chances against the Hopkins keeper. In true Mammothian spirit, women’s soccer continued to fight until the final whistle blew.

The scene that ensued was not an easy one to witness, the disappointment and upset clear on each Mammoth’s face. But AWS did not walk off the field with nothing to show for all of their hard work, ending the season with an incredible 15-2-2 record and five players selected for all-NESCAC awards.

In addition to Rookie of the Year, Fisher was picked as the NESCAC goalie for the first team, joined by Hastie and Kim Zhou ’22. Firstyears Kum and Huang also earned second team honors.

The team will certainly not be the same without the 10 seniors who played their last game on Hitchcock Field this weekend, but its potential can be seen in its newest class and the continued dedication that its players possess, both to the sport and to each other. Here’s to another incredible season for Amherst women’s soccer.

Mammoth Runners Qualify for NCAA National Championships Anya Ramras ’22 Staff Writer

After two weeks off from competition, the Mammoths were back in action this past Saturday, competing in NCAA Regionals at Harkness Memorial State Park in Waterford, Conn. With the men running the 8K and the women running the 6K, the Mammoths performed outstandingly across the board. Both teams qualified for NCAA Nationals, with the men’s team finishing in fifth place overall out of 26 teams, and the women’s team finishing third overall out of 24 teams.

In the 6K for the women, there were 172 total runners from 24 schools competing in the race. Despite a large pool of competitors, Amherst managed to place third out of the 24 competing teams.

Mary Kate McGranahan ’23 was

the top finisher for Amherst, with her time of 21:50.5 putting her in third place. Following close behind was Sidnie Kulik ’25, who finished in fifth place with a time of 22:03.9.

Fellow first-year Julia Schor ’25 finished in 24th place with a time of 23:04.8, and Sophia Price ’25 was only 15 seconds behind Schor at 23:19.5, good for 32nd place. Firstyear Claire Callon ’25 finished another 15 seconds later, at 23:35.4, placing 38th. Rounding out the scorecard for the Mammoths were Eline Laurent ’22 and Maggie Drew ’22, notching times of 24:14.3 and 26:00.3, good for 61st and 126th place finishes respectively. Overall, the Mammoths’ average time was a very strong 22:46, an improvement of 16 seconds from their previous outing, and just five seconds behind Williams.

Laurent described the race and reasons for the Mammoths’ suc-

cess: “It was a day where all our hard work from the past season came together and paid off. All the pieces fell into place on the perfect day. It was a course we had been on earlier in the season during the Conn. College meet so we knew the course and used that to our advantage. Everyone fought hard in the race and never gave up, we knew the places where we struggled last time and used that to our advantage. We ended up coming in third thus earning ourselves a spot at nationals next week! We are super excited to go to nationals as a team!”

In the men’s 8K, the field featured a total of 174 runners from 26 schools running. The Mammoths finished in sixth place out of those 26 schools. Seven Mammoths competed for the team in this race, with Owen Daily ’23 being the first to cross the finish line,

finishing in ninth place with a time of 25:21.6. Billy Massey ’22 finished just behind, at 25:35.0, which was good for 14th. Ajay Sarathy ’22 and Nick Edwards-Levin ’25 finished within 15 seconds of each other, with times of 26:03.7 and 26:16.7 and finishing in 29th and 37th place, respectively. Theo Dassin ’24, and Oliver Spiva ’24 finished with respective times of 26:23.1 and 26:33.7 in 40th and 43rd place, respectively. Keon Mazdisnian ’23 was the final Mammoth to finish the race with a time of 26:43.5.

The team’s average time was 25.56, a near 30-second drop from two weeks prior.

Daily commented on their incredible performances: “Regionals was the best team race we have had all season. With all the setbacks we have faced this season, it was incredible to see everyone run a race they can look back on and be

proud of. We have a great opportunity to go back to nationals and prove that we deserve to run with the best teams in the country.”

This is the first time since 2014 that both the men’s and women’s teams have qualified for the National Championship meet. Specifically, for the men’s team, it marks their seventh consecutive season qualifying for the National Championships. With their performances this weekend, Sarathy, Massey, and Daily earned All-Region honors on the men’s side, while Price, Schor, Kulik, and McGranahan earned All-Region honors for the women. Next up for the Mammoths is the NCAA Division III Cross Country National Championships on Saturday, Nov. 20 at Tom Sawyer State Park in Louisville, Kentucky. The men will begin their race at 11:00 a.m. and the women will begin at 12:00 p.m.

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Sports 21

Women’s Basketball Starts 2021 Season With Three Big Wins Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor The 16th-ranked women’s basketball team returned to the court for the first time in two years this past week, going 3-0 in three opening weekend contests. They started their season with games on Friday and Saturday against Oglethorpe University and the United States Coast Guard Academy at the Gordon Classic, played at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. They then returned home to take on Rhode Island College on Monday, Nov. 15.

Oglethorpe In their season opener, the Mammoths didn’t seem to miss a beat, notching their first win of the season at the Gordon Classic, held at Gordon College in Wenham, MA. They did so in dominating fashion, beating the Stormy Petrels by a score of 53-36 in a game in which they never lost the lead.

From the tip, Amherst’s offense was firing on all cylinders, starting the game on a 13-2 run. The offensive explosion was capped off by a beautiful buzzer-beating floater from sophomore point guard Reeya Patel ’24 that stretched the Mammoths’ lead to 29-15 points going into halftime.

Even with the lead sitting at 14 points at the start of the third quarter, they kept their foot on the gas, with senior forward Dani Valdez ’22 hitting a pull-up jumper to stretch the lead to 19. However, the Stormy Petrels would use the growing deficit to spur them to battle back in the contest, and outscored the Mammoths 15-13 in the third quarter. Not to be deterred by that setback, the Mammoths would match their offensive firepower with defensive effort, holding Oglethorp to only six points in the fourth while scoring 11 points themselves, and widening the gap to the final 17-point margin.

Valdez had one of the best games of her career against Oglethorpe, recording a 19-point, 10-rebound double-double, the first of her career. Patel also had a stellar collegiate debut, scoring 11

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Senior guard Courtney Resch ’22 goes up for a layup during the Mammoths’ 2019 NCAA Tournament Sectional Final at LeFrak Gymnasium.

points and dishing out four assists in 39 minutes of action. Abbey Skinner ’24, Nicole Stanford ’24, AnLing Vera ’25, Alix Stuart ’25, and Maya Cwalina ’25 also made their collegiate debuts in the game.

Coast Guard The Mammoths didn’t rest on their laurels after wiping the court with the Stormy Petrels, returning to the court the following day and winning their second game by an even larger margin, 70-42 over Coast Guard. Just like the day before, the Mammoths started the game on an offensive hot streak, scoring 15 points in the first frame.

However, unlike the Stormy Petrels, the Bears didn’t go down right away, keeping up with the pace of the game and trading baskets with the Mammoths until the first quarter ended with the score tied at 15-15. But most teams can’t keep up with Amherst’s firepower, and just like Oglethorp, the Bears succumbed to the pressure. In this game, it was senior guard Gabi Zaffiro ’22 that provided the spark, out-scoring the entire Coast guard

team in the second quarter, contributing 13 of the Mammoths’ 24 points. With this offensive effort, the score stood at 39-27, with Amherst leading going into halftime.

From here, the Mammoths rode their big second quarter to victory, playing another impressive quarter of defense in the third and stretching their lead to 20 after outscoring the Bears by 10 points in the frame.

The game would mercifully end soon after, with the final margin of victory at 28 points and the Mammoths returning home with yet another win.

Zaffiro’s final statline of 19 points, three rebounds, and three assists paced the team, as did her 75 percent clip from the three-point line. Patel and Valdez also notched big games, with Patel recording 11 points, seven rebounds, and three assists, and Valdez scoring 10 points in addition to bringing down eight boards and recording two blocks and two steals. Senior guard Lauren Pelosi ’22 led the Mammoths’ effort from the free throw line, going six for six in the contest.

Rhode Island College In their final game of the week, the Mammoths returned home to LeFrak Gymnasium to take on the Rhode Island College (RIC) Anchorwomen. Just like in their previous two games, the Mammoths started the game on an offensive run, out-scoring the Anchorwomen 22-7 in the first quarter with the help of a 14-4 run. Valdez was the main contributor to the team’s initial run, going four for four from the field and two for two from the free throw line on the way to 10 opening-quarter points.

Defense was the name of the game in the second for the Mammoths, holding RIC to six points, and stretching their halftime lead to 23 points with help from two three-pointers from Pelosi and one from Courtney Resch ’22. However, while the lead would rise as large as 31 points after back-toback threes from Vera in the third quarter, the Anchorwomen would storm back with a vengeance, closing the frame on a 15-1 run that narrowed the margin back to 17 at the beginning of the fourth quar-

ter. It was here that the Mammoths would end RIC’s hopes for a miracle, with forward Jade DuVal ’22 dominating in the paint on the way to six points in the final period, and shutting the door on the Anchorwomen’s comeback attempt. After a few more minutes of game action, the contest would end with a lopsided final score of 64-42 in favor of the Mammoths.

Underclassmen paced the Mammoths against RIC, with Patel and Vera each recording 13 points for the best scoring outputs of their young Amherst careers. Patel also recorded eight rebounds and a steal in the contest, and Vera led the Mammoths in made threes with three of her four shots from beyond the arc going through the nylon.

Zaffiro and Valdez also recorded double-digit points in the win.

The Mammoths will return to Hixon Court at LeFrak Gymnasium on Thursday, Nov. 18 at 7:00 p.m. against the Gordon College Fighting Scots, before travelling to Jersey City, N.J. to play New Jersey City University on Sunday, Nov. 21 at 3:00 p.m.

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Sports 22

Men’s Soccer Returns to Winning Ways, Rolls to Sweet 16 Leo Kamin ’25 Staff Writer The men’s soccer team is peaking at the right time. They dispatched Rosemont College 5-0 on Saturday, Nov. 13, in the opening round of the NCAA Division III tournament. The momentum carried into Sunday, Nov. 14, which saw the Mammoths lay siege to Babson College’s home field in a 3-0 win.

Rosemont Contrary to expectations in a win-or-go-home contest, Head Coach Justin Serpone reached deep into his bench: 19 out of 20 players who got on the field saw at least 20 minutes of game time, including both goalies. Three Mammoths tallied their first collegiate goals.

The Mammoths dominated more than the headline numbers, too, outshooting the Ravens 23-4.

Rosemont mustered just one shot on net across the 90 minutes.

The game — which was also played at Babson’s home field in Wellesley, Mass. — was safely within Amherst’s grasp after two rapid-fire goals in the 19th and 22nd minutes respectively. Declan Sung ’24E and Ada Okorogheye ’24 connected for

the first — Okorogheye’s second goal of the year. Defender Felix Wu ’22E claimed the second.

But the Mammoths didn’t stop there, piling on in the final 20 minutes.

With 18 minutes left to play, Sung played Fynn Hayton-Ruffner ’25 through into the box. Hayton-Ruffner’s low shot was saved, but the Rosemont keeper failed to corral the ball, with the rebound falling to the well-positioned Ryan Gomez ’25 for an easy tap-in. It was Hayton-Ruffner’s first collegiate assist and Gomez’s first career goal.

Just over a minute later, Wyatt McCarthy ’24 received the ball on the edge of the 18-yard box, spun past his defender, and calmly slotted the ball past the keeper for the first goal of his college career.

Goalkeeper Max Landa ’24, who played in the field against Rosemont, added insult to the Raven’s injury in the 85th minute. Hayton-Ruffner played a cross into the box. A Rosemont defender headed it directly upward, sending it looping across the face of goal into the path of Landa, who nudged it home. Keeping with the pattern now forming, it was the first score of Landa’s collegiate career.

Babson

The Babson game followed a similar pattern initially, with the Mammoths dominating possession from the starting whistle. But in this Sunday contest, their breakthrough came almost immediately. German Giammattei ’22 dribbled through a crowd of Beavers defenders, firing a low right-footed shot toward the right post. The shot proved too powerful for the Babson keeper, who could only parry it away from his net. Sebastian Derby ’22 got on the end of the rebound, opening the scoring with a classic poacher’s finish.

Down a goal, the Beavers increased the tempo of the match, putting up more of a fight than Rosemont. They never seemed in serious danger of taking back the game, though. While they forced goalie Kofi Hope-Gund ’22 to make four saves, he never seemed overly troubled.

The Mammoths found their insurance goal near the end of the first half. The Babson keeper lost his footing on a goal kick, sending his pass short, directly into the path of Okorogheye, who sprung forward into the 18-yard box, cut past a defender, and scored — his second goal in his second NCAA tournament

game of the year.

The third came with just over 30 minutes remaining in the match. The Mammoths sent a corner into the box from the left side. The Beavers’ keeper punched the ball out towards the opposite sideline — seemingly out of danger. However, in a move more reminiscent of schoolyard pickup than a collegiate elimination game, Giammattei threw his legs into the air, somersaulting backwards to connect with the ball a good three or four feet off the ground: a bicycle kick. In his words: “I just launched myself.” It turned out to be not just an acrobatic display but a good ball — directly to Derby in front of goal.

His header was batted away by the Beavers’ keeper, but only as far as Laurens Ten Cate ’25, who nodded it home for his third goal of the season.

The full-time whistle in Wellesley marked the Mammoths’ 10th consecutive win against Babson and their 11th-straight sweet-sixteen berth.

The Mammoths, who reached the final of the tournament in 2019, have emerged from the first two rounds as legitimate title contenders once again. Giammattei says that the team has capitalized on a mix of fresh talent and experience: “There

are a lot of guys who weren’t on the team, or didn’t play many minutes [in 2019]” who have “stepped up.”

Their defense has been stiff all season — allowing just seven goals all year — but they have struggled for offense at times. The first two tournament games indicated an ability to score at will that will surely put the remaining teams on notice.

Coach Serpone is encouraged by his team’s form over the past few months, despite a penalty-kick loss in the first round of the NESCAC tournament on Oct. 30. “We’re playing well,” he said. “I believe in this group.”

But he also made it clear that despite the Mammoths’ form and championship pedigree, nothing will be handed to them. “Experience is a little bit overplayed in sports,” he said. “You still have to go win the game.”

That said, the team’s confidence levels ahead of the game are high.

“If we go out and play how we know how to play, most of the time things go our way,” said Giammattei.

The Mammoths return home to host the next two rounds of the tournament, and will face SUNY Cortland at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 20 on Hitchcock Field.

Men’s Basketball Opens Season With Dominant Win Jackson Reydel ’23 Staff Writer

In Head Coach Marlon Sears’ first game at the helm, the men’s basketball team came out firing on all cylinders, defeating Rosemont College by a score of 92-56 on their own court. Five Mammoths scored double-digit points in a game where the team relied on a balanced offensive attack. In the win, the Mammoths shot 56 percent from the field, including an impressive 44 percent from beyond the three-point line, and 76 percent from the free throw line demonstrating efficient offensive execution. But the team also played a complete game: the Mammoths’ defense was just as stout as their offense was clinical,

forcing 18 turnovers which they turned into 23 points on offense.

In the game’s early minutes, Amherst and Rosemont traded baskets in a back and forth affair, but the Mammoths didn’t let that last long. They went on a 15-2 run to take control of the game, leading 18-7 at the 13-minute mark of the first half. Amherst wouldn’t stop there and continued to build their lead, scoring 23 of the last 32 points of the first half and took a 46-24 lead into the locker room.

Rosemont battled back to start the second half narrowing the score to 57-38, but senior guards Garrett Day ’22 and Grant Robinson ’22 hit back-to-back threes to finish off an impressive 19-4 run which pushed the Mammoths’ lead to 35 points with 7:27 left in

the game. From there, the Mammoths rode their big lead to an impressive 36 point road victory.

Seven Mammoths made their first appearance at the NCAA level in Saturday’s game, led by sophomore Mohammed Alausa ’24 and first-year Canin Reynolds ’25, who each scored in double figures in their collegiate debuts. Senior guard Tim McCarthy ’22 led all Amherst scorers with 15 points, including knocking down four of his five three-point attempts. Forward Mike Schretter ’23 notched a double-double, contributing 10 points and 10 rebounds. Robinson led the team with five assists, while also chipping in seven points. This great first win should help the Mammoths as they shift their focus to their home open-

Photo courtesy of Amherst Athletics

Senior guard Tim McCarthy ’22 goes up for a layup during a game from the team’s 2019-20 season. er against Colby-Sawyer on Wednesday Nov. 17, with tipoff scheduled for 7 p.m. They will then host the Ken Wright Invi-

tational this weekend, with their first round game against Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts on Friday, Nov. 19 at 7 p.m.

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Sports 23

The Jack Eichel Chronicles: As Told by a Disgruntled Sabres Fan Alex Noga ’23 Staff Writer Jack Eichel was supposed to be the savior of the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. When Buffalo drafted him in 2015 after years of intentionally tanking, Sabres fans (yes, we actually exist) celebrated with tremendous optimism. The future looked brighter than it ever had. Buffalo sports fans were finally justified in their dreams of witnessing the city’s first major hockey championship, as they had a truly generational talent as the face of their franchise in Eichel, who could foreseeably lead their team to the promised land of the Stanley Cup. However, no part of Eichel’s marriage with the Sabres was successful, and it ended in an ugly divorce complete with a major injury dispute between player and team. After six years of playoff-less hockey and not a single winning season to show for it, the Sabres traded Eichel on Nov. 4 to the Las Vegas Golden Knights, ushering in yet another rebuild for a team and fanbase desperate for success. Fans are now once again left in what feels like a never-ending state of mediocrity, perpetually waiting for the day when the young, highly touted prospects finally bloom into legitimate pieces to create a contending team.

That fateful day seems more like a fantasy than a possible reality for a Sabres organization that has been so consistently dreadful in the past decade. This past spring marks the 10year anniversary of the last time the Sabres made the playoffs, giving the Sabres the highly coveted award for longest playoff drought in the NHL. Buffalo fans are no stranger to such droughts, as the Bills held the record for the longest playoff drought in all of American professional sports before they finally snuck into the playoffs in 2017. They were the last team in the four main professional leagues to qualify for the postseason in the 21st century.

Since that magical 2010-11 Sabres season, in which they fell in seven games to the Flyers during the first round of the playoffs, the Sabres have finished with a winning record only once, and it came in the 2011-

12 season directly following their brief stint in the playoffs. In the 10year span since their last postseason appearance, the Sabres have cycled through a carousel of seven head coaches and four general managers, evidence of a severe lack of continuity. They have selected in the top 10 of the NHL entry draft every year since 2014, including two first-overall picks in 2018 and 2020 and two second-overall picks in back-to-back years in 2014 and 2015. Out of these nine total draft picks, only five remain with the organization, all of whom were selected in the past five drafts. Two of these players have yet to actually play for the Sabres NHL roster.

Though the Sabres have been no stranger to high draft selections, the hype surrounding the 2015 draft class was different. The undisputed top two picks were Connor McDavid and Jack Eichel, two generational talents who were advertised as the type of players who could single-handedly turn around a franchise. Comparisons were made to the 2004-05 draft, when Alexander Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin were the first two selections. They have since gone on to have Hall of Fame-worthy careers, complete with Stanley Cup victories and Hart Trophies (the NHL’s Most Valuable Player award) for both players.

The Sabres had been intentionally losing — sorry, rebuilding — for the two seasons leading up to the 2015 draft, trading away talented players and playing with a substandard lineup in order to obtain high draft picks and set up future success.

A lottery determined which team would choose first, and the rest of the draft order was based on seeding, meaning that the team that finished last would have the highest odds of selecting first overall but was guaranteed to select no later than second overall. The fans knew this, and for the most part, embraced it. During a late-season matchup between the Sabres and Arizona Coyotes, the two teams with the worst records in the NHL, home Sabres fans actually cheered when the Coyotes pulled out an overtime victory to put six points between them and the lowly Sabres.

Buffalo ended up finishing with the

worst record in the league.

In true Sabres fashion, Buffalo still lost the lottery to the Edmonton Oilers and missed out on the chance to select arguably the most talented player since Sidney Crosby in McDavid. They were instead forced to “settle” for Eichel, who likely would have gone first overall in virtually any other year. Optimism abounded among fans following the Eichel selection, and Eichel seemed to embrace the city and its love for hockey as well. Two months prior to the draft, a video surfaced of a drunken Eichel exclaiming, “Buffalo, I’m coming for ya!” In a pre-draft meeting, he told Buffalo executives that they had won the lottery by getting the chance to draft him. Over 17,000 people showed up to watch him for the first time in development camp during the summer. And in a sign of things to come, Eichel scored in his first game as a Sabre, and Buffalo lost the contest 3-1.

Eichel went on to play 375 games with the Sabres, amassing 139 goals and 355 points during that span.

He has been selected to the All-Star game three times during his career, was a contributing member of the under-23 North America team in the 2016 World Cup of Hockey, and finished eighth in Hart Trophy voting in the 2019-20 season. However, wins never followed Eichel’s individual success. The best any Eichel-led Sabres team has finished was 23rd overall in his rookie season. For 399 out of the 453 games that the Sabres played while Eichel was on the roster, Buffalo came into the contest with a losing record.

The losses wore on everyone, especially Eichel. As a Boston-area native accustomed to the success of Boston’s professional sports teams and his own individual success as a talented youth player, losing was a foreign concept for Eichel. Prior to joining the Sabres, Eichel played one season for Boston University.

As a freshman, he led the nation in scoring, won the Hobey Baker award for the nation’s top college player, and led his team to the final of the Frozen Four. With the Sabres, Eichel essentially became the face of the franchise as soon as he was drafted, placing an enormous weight

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Eichel warms up before a late-season game with the Sabres during the his rookie season in April of 2016. on his shoulders. He was named captain prior to the 2018-19 season, which was just his fourth year in the league, and at 21 years old he was the youngest captain in Sabres franchise history. However, in hindsight, it is unclear whether Eichel was deserving of the role because of his leadership ability, or if Sabres management awarded it to him simply because he was meant to be their franchise player. Fans commonly criticized Eichel’s body language on the ice and his tendency to avoid taking accountability for his mistakes following losses, and after the 2020 season he publicly expressed being sick of losing.

The relationship between Eichel and the Sabres already seemed to be deteriorating, but a recent interview with Eichel following the trade with the Knights revealed that it was already over after the 2020 season.

Eichel confirmed that he requested a trade following that season, stating that he could tell the Sabres were on the cusp of another rebuild and didn’t want to be a part of it. Firstyear General Manager Kevyn Adams, now thrust into an incredibly tricky situation, made moves in an attempt to improve the short-term success of the team, such as signing former first-overall pick and Hart Trophy winner Taylor Hall. On paper, it looked to be the most talented roster in over a decade. However, the team imploded and finished with their worst points percentage since the 2013 and 2014 seasons, when the Sabres were in the prime of their tanking days.

Then came the final nail in the coffin. Following the conclusion of

the 2021 season, in which the Sabres finished in last place once again, Eichel revealed a massive disconnect between himself and the organization at a press conference in May. After playing only 21 games due to a herniated disc in his neck, Eichel publicly exposed the Sabres organization for not allowing him to undergo the surgical procedure that he felt was most appropriate for his situation and best for his long-term health.

Eichel has been adamant about wanting to have an artificial disc replacement, which would insert an artificial disc between the vertebrae in his neck, replacing the damaged disc. This surgery has never been performed on an NHL player but has been performed worldwide for nearly two decades, and beneficiaries of the surgery include athletes like Minnesota Vikings defensive end Danielle Hunter and UFC fighter Chris Weidman. The Sabres, on the other hand, wary of the lack of evidence that such a surgery could be successful for hockey players, refused to allow Eichel to get his preferred procedure and instead wanted him to undergo the more common spinal fusion surgery. This surgery has been performed on athletes such as Peyton Manning and David Wright towards the end of their careers, but Eichel’s concern is that those who undergo fusion surgery have a much higher likelihood of needing repeat surgeries later in life.

Eichel is considering his long-term health following his playing career

Continued on page 24

The Amherst Student • November 17, 2021

Sports 24

Jack Eichel Breakup Signals Beginning of Sabres Rebuild Continued from page 23 in his decision, while the Sabres are only considering his health as it pertains to his role with the organization.

Both parties were steadfast in their assertions. The players’ collective bargaining agreement (CBA), however, sides with the Sabres. It would be one thing if Buffalo was denying Eichel treatment or doubting the existence of his injury, but the situation instead involves a player who is refusing the treatment that his team is recommending. Eichel cannot get his preferred surgery and get paid while remaining a member of the Sabres under the current CBA. This arrangement makes sense for most injuries, but Eichel’s injury is not most injuries. To fix his herniated disc, a surgeon will literally be slicing into Eichel’s neck and removing part of his spinal column. Given the potentially life-altering circumstances of his injury, it seems only right that the player should have control regarding the treatment of his body.

The massive dispute made it abundantly clear that Eichel would never play another game in a Sabres uniform. The Sabres confirmed this

widely held belief when they stripped Eichel of his captaincy after he failed his physical prior to the beginning of this season. Though he is a prized commodity and arguably a top-10 player in the league when healthy, finding a proper return for Eichel proved to be a long and strenuous process for the Sabres. For one, the Sabres lacked leverage — every team in the league knew that Buffalo had no choice but to trade Eichel. Just as importantly, Eichel is coming off a severe injury that will leave him sidelined for the remainder of this season and is undergoing a surgery that has yet to be tested in the NHL. The Sabres had to find a team that would be willing to bear the risk that Eichel’s injury presents and also be able to take on the $50 million over five years that remains on Eichel’s contract, all while meeting their massive asking price of four first-round assets in return.

Trade rumors circulated for months following Eichel’s end-ofthe-season press conference until the eventual trade agreement with the Golden Knights. In exchange for Eichel and a 2023 third-round pick, the Sabres receive Vegas’s 2019 first-

GAME SCHE DULE

THU Women’s Baskeball vs. Gordon College, 7:00 p.m.

round selection Peyton Krebs, 2014 first-round pick Alex Tuch, a top-10 protected first round pick in 2022, and a second-round pick in 2023.

Given the difficult circumstances Adams was forced to work with, it is all-in-all a decent return for the Sabres, with the trade haul being just one first-round asset away from their reported asking price. Krebs is extremely young and a fantastic playmaker who projects as a topsix center for the Sabres. Tuch has much-needed playoff experience, but is still young at only 25 years old and, as a Syracuse native, grew up a Sabres fan and has expressed excitement to be playing for his hometown team.

Eichel, on the other hand, is rewarded by playing on one of the best teams in the NHL since they entered the league as an expansion team in 2017.

When healthy, he will likely play alongside forwards Max Pacioretty and Mark Stone, a line that projects as one of the most dominant in hockey.

The Knights have allowed Eichel to undergo his preferred surgery, which has been reported to be a success.

So where does this leave the Sabres? At the doorstep of another rebuild, of course! The media has

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com

This is just another loss for the Sabres, long plagued by bad seasons, low morale, and poor management. largely written off the Sabres this year, projecting them to be one of the worst teams in the league, but they have exceeded expectations so far, sitting at an even record of 6-6-2 through their first 14 games. The team is built around a solid young core, with players like Dylan Cozens, Casey Mittelstadt, and Rasmus Dahlin already taking on the largest roles of their young careers. 2020 first overall pick Owen Power is in the pipeline, waiting to make an impact. While they may lack top-end talent, these Sabres

grind day in and day out. Virtually every game has been competitive, and that’s about as much as you can ask of a roster that looks like this one.

The future appears to be bright, but Sabres fans have said this too many times in the past. “There’s always next year” has become a depressing mantra for Sabres fans. It’s hard not to be hopeful, but fans should exercise caution in their optimism for the future given the events of the past decade.

As Mae in Ted Lasso said all too well, “It’s the hope that kills you.”

SAT

SUN

MON

Men’s/Women’s Squash @ UPenn vs. Dickinson College, 9:00 a.m., vs. Navy, 3:00 p.m.

Men’s/Women’s Squash @ Drexel University, Time TBD

Men’s/Women’s Swim vs. Wesleyan, 5:00 p.m.

Men’s Soccer vs. SUNY Cortland, 11:00 a.m.

Cross Country NCAA National Championships, @ Louisville, 11:00 a.m.

FRI

Men’s Basketball Ken Wright Invitational, Time TBD

Men’s Baskeball vs. MCLA, 5:00 p.m.

Men’s/Women’s Swim vs. Colby, 2:00 p.m.

Men’s Hockey @ Hamilton, 7:00 p.m.

Women’s Hockey @ Hamilton, 7:00 p.m.

Men’s Soccer NCAA Elite Eight, 1:00 p.m.

Women’s Basketball @ New Jersey City University, 3:00 p.m.

Women’s Hockey @ Hamilton, 3:00 p.m.

TUE Men’s Hockey vs. Saint Michael’s College, 4:00 p.m.

Men’s Basketball vs. Westfield State University, 7:00 p.m.