Issue 13

VOLUME CLII, ISSUE 13

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2022

amherststudent.com

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Ankit Sayed ’24 To Become AAS VP Leo Kamin ’25 Managing News Editor

Photo courtesy of Slate Taylor '25

The AAS Senate voted 19-12 against an impeachment petition filed against AAS President Sirus Wheaton '23.

AAS Senate Votes Not To Impeach President Leo Kamin ’25 and Michael Mason ’25 Managing News Editors The Association of Amherst Students (AAS) held an impeachment trial of President Sirus Wheaton ’23 on the night of Monday, Dec. 5. Senators voted 19-12 against impeachment, with one abstention, well short of the 21 votes required to remove him.

The impeachment hearing, widely believed to be the first in the AAS’ history, was initiated after Ankit Sayed ’24, who just two days before had won a tightly contested election to become AAS vice president, filed a removal petition with the AAS Judiciary Council.

Sayed claimed that Wheaton was guilty of “gross negligence” for

FEATURES

shirking some of his duties as president and of “malfeasance” for what Sayed saw as disrespectful conduct towards a senator earlier in the semester.

The hearing, which started at around 9:30 p.m. and concluded around 1 a.m., drew a massive turnout of students, who packed the seats, floor, and stairways of Converse Hall’s Red Room, and took on something of a carnival atmosphere at times.

Some students, anticipating fireworks, brought popcorn. Others reported “pre-gaming” the impeachment trial. A student in a fake powdered wig at one point rose to give a spoof, 18th-century style speech before being shouted down and asked to leave. The AAS’ Instagram livestream of the hearing

8

From Eggshells to Energy: Sonia Chajet Wides '25 looks into the college's newly instituted composting program.

drew more than 200 viewers at one point; the live chat had to be shut down after anonymous accounts began leaving offensive comments.

During the Senate’s deliberations, a spectator interjected in response to a senator’s comment — saying, “Isn’t that hearsay?” — drawing massive applause from the audience and leading to subsequent reprimanding for the interruption.

Nevertheless, Sayed and Wheaton remained serious and professional throughout the trial, and multiple attendees who spoke with The Student commended Alex Jabor ’23, chair of the AAS’ Judiciary Council, for his performance presiding over the hearing and keeping the proceedings flowing.

The hearing was structured like a court trial, with Sayed and

OPINION

Wheaton each giving opening statements, calling witnesses, and conducting cross examination.

Sayed began by explaining his decision to bring the removal petition. Pointing to high turnover on the AAS, issues of property damage on campus, and “immense campus apathy,” Sayed asked the audience whether they felt that the AAS in general and the president in particular were effectively representing the student body and its concerns.

“I would feel that the president of the student body has not done his job in these regards,” he said, before laying out his specific charges.

The first charge was negligence.

Continued on page 2

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Where Was the Constitution?: Tylar Matsuo '24 reacts to the AAS' presidential impeachment hearing, decrying the lack of attention to AAS' constitution.

ARTS&LIVING

Ankit Sayed ’24 will be inaugurated as vice president of the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) next semester as the winner of the special election held on Dec. 3.

Sayed’s inauguration, which was supposed to take place at the AAS meeting on Monday, Dec. 5, was delayed after AAS Senator Zane Khiry ’25, who lost the election by one vote to Sayed, filed a motion with the Judiciary Council (JC) that day challenging the results. As of Wednesday, Dec. 7, the JC has found all claims in the petition to be invalid.

According to an email sent by the AAS to the student body on Tuesday, Dec. 6, the motion contained three complaints. The first regarded concerns about the vote-counting process. According to Khiry, the second identified a “conflict of interest” between Sayed’s candidacy for vice president and his having filed an impeachment petition for AAS President Sirus Wheaton ’23. The third accused Sayed of fraud for having not revealed his role in the impeachment to the student body until after the election.

In a JC vote that took place the day the petition was received, the second and third charges were “deemed invalid,” according to the email.

The JC met again on Wednesday, Dec. 7, to determine the validity of the first claim. An email sent to students later that evening reported that

Continued on page 6

27

"Hostages" Documentary: Theo Hamilton '23 reflects on the new HBO docuseries, on which Shahruz Ghaemi '19 served as a producer.

News POLICE LOG >>Dec. 1, 2022 6:11 p.m. East Drive ACPD conducted a motor vehicle stop for a car that failed to stop at a stop sign and was operating in excess of the speed limit.

The operator was given a verbal warning. >>Dec. 1, 2022 10:31 p.m. Lee Hall

ACPD received a report of suspicious activity. The involved party was determined to be an employee and the activity was resolved by their supervisor. >>Dec. 2, 2022 9:39 p.m. Tyler House ACPD, AFD and Community Safety responded a report of an odor of natu-

ral gas. After investigation, no source of natural gas was found and the odor had faded. >>Dec. 3, 2022 12:26 a.m. Hitchcock Hall Community Safety responded to a noise complaint. An unregistered event was shut down. >>Dec. 3, 2022 9:41 p.m. King Hall Community Safety responded to a noise com-

plaint. A registered party was asked to quiet down.

ing was checked and no other issues were found.

>>Dec. 3, 2022 10:07 p.m. James Hall Community Safety responded to a complaint of marijuana smoke.

>>Dec. 4, 2022 2:23 p.m. Charles Drew House ACPD took a report of a past assault that occurred outside of a residence hall.

>>Dec. 4, 2022 8:37 a.m. Off Campus Location ACPD and Amherst Police Department responded to an open door of a College owned house. The build-

>>Dec. 5, 2022 4:43 p.m. Mayo-Smith Hall ACPD took a report of vandalism that occurred over the weekend.

Wheaton Withstands Impeachment in 12-19 Vote Continued from page 1 Sayed claimed that Wheaton failed to execute some of the duties of the president outlined in the AAS bylaws. He argued that Wheaton failed to fulfill specific obligations, such as giving a speech at the beginning of the semester, holding an all-campus meeting, serving on the College Council, and setting the agenda for Executive Branch meetings, while also failing generally to serve as “the official representative and spokesperson” of the student body.

Sayed also pointed to Wheaton’s treatment of former AAS Vice President Jaden Richards ’25, who resigned last month citing a dispute with Wheaton. “Sirus neglected to do the bare minimum in acknowledging the resignation of his immediate subordinate; to foster a good working relationship; to, honestly, do his job — and instead defaulted to putting that onto Jaden’s shoulders,” Sayed said.

Addressing the potential counterargument that his claims were minor, Sayed stated, “that’s that apathy speaking.”

“If you vote ‘yes’ to this impeachment, you are making a vote that we can have a different kind of Senate, a different kind of e-board, and a different campus culture at large,” said Sayed.

Sayed then called Richards to

testify. Richards elaborated on his relationship with Wheaton, testifying to what he saw as the president’s poor communication and tardiness to events, and claimed that he ended up taking over some of the duties of the president, such as organizing e-board meetings, in the absence of direction from Wheaton.

Richards recalled a series of text exchanges with Wheaton that he found particularly frustrating, as Richards attempted to prepare for the coming semester. Richards claimed that Wheaton was unresponsive to Richards' messages, and when Wheaton did respond, the result was unfulfilled promises. "I suggested a time… he's like, 'that's not going to work. I will message you.' He doesn't," Richards said.

AAS Secretary Jeffrey Ma ’24 then took the stand and echoed Richards’ testimony.

AAS Senator Taha Ahmad ’24 then testified to what he saw as Wheaton’s failure to publicize Senate office hours, which provide other opportunities for dialogue between the student body and the AAS. Sayed concluded his case by highlighting text messages sent by Wheaton to an anonymous senator after the senator declined to be on the AAS’ Title IX committee. Sayed said that Wheaton had also previously confronted the senator in

person following an AAS meeting, creating what Sayed said was a pattern of inappropriate contact.

Wheaton texted the senator, “Why did u [sic] say no to title 9 [sic].” The senator did not have Wheaton’s number saved and responded, “Who is this?,” to which Wheaton responded, “No way.”

Sayed said that senators have the right to say no to being on committees. He then argued that, given the “power dynamic” at play in the exchange, it could rise to the level of malfeasance.

Sayed offered a brief closing statement then rested his case.

Wheaton then offered his case.

He began by characterizing the “three main arguments” against him as either containing “halftruths” or being “written in bad faith.”

Wheaton said the claim that he failed to hold weekly e-board meetings was “not an accurate description of events.”

“I will concede that I wasn’t aware of this presidential duty; this is my fault,” he said. “But I also want to highlight that no description or responsibility of the job was ever told to me by the previous president.”

“Jaden voluntarily led these meetings and it was never an issue,” he said. “There was no discussion of me not fulfilling my duty.”

In response to the second claim — that he failed to attend College Council meetings — Wheaton provided evidence from an email from Dean of Students Liz Agosto, later corroborated by senators, that he was never included on the email chains for those meetings.

Wheaton described the third claim, that he did not give a speech at the beginning of the year as “the

Continued on page 3

courtesy of Sandor Weiss '25 Photo courtesyGraphic of Hantong Wu '23 via Shutterstock

Sayed, who was tentatively elected vice president in this week's special election, is set to replace Richards, who Sayed called to testify during the impeachment.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

News

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AAS Infighting on Display in Failed Impeachment Continued from page 2 weakest of three incredibly weak claims.”

He recounted that the speech was not given by the last two presidents, who both began their tenures amid heavy Covid restrictions.

“Perhaps a loss of the speech was due to the fact that I have not started a Senate year not on Zoom,” said Wheaton.

Wheaton then interrogated Sayed’s motives. “I have questioned how much this impeachment claim is truly about my lack to fulfill [sic] my presidential duties, and rather if the newly elected vice president and others have a personal dislike of me,” he said.

He defended his text messages. “There’s nothing wrong with asking someone whose number I have had for over a year because of our shared extracurricular why they turned down a Title IX nomination,” he said. “That simple question came after a public Senate discussion where we talked about how men repeatedly are leaving the work of sexual assault and harassment committees to women,” he said, insinuating that the anonymous senator is male.

Wheaton expressed frustration with the fact that Richards’ concerns were never communicated to him before Richards’ resignation.

“This whole trial is setting a horrible precedent for the impeachment process, as no senator or president or e-board member should enter this process over incredibly small mistakes like this,” he said.

He stated that he was just 21 years old and “the first president out of Covid.”

“Trying to impeach me during my first semester as president allows me no room to grow,” he said.

Wheaton then displayed a screenshot from his laptop showing texts between him and Richards.

Wheaton claimed that, contrary to Richards' claims, no effort was made to plan for the upcoming semester. "It is untrue … that he was repeatedly hitting me up and trying to have this [meeting]."

Following the impeachment

trial, Richards reached out to The Student claiming that Wheaton had “lied.” Because he had left the meeting following Sayed’s initial address, Richards was unable to dispute Wheaton's claims at the trial. Richards sent The Student screenshots of texts between him and Wheaton from Aug. 23-31, including the messages discussed in the impeachment trial, in which, in at least one case, Richards attempted to set up meetings with Wheaton.

In a follow-up interview, Wheaton defended his statement. When shown the screenshots, Wheaton said, “there is no way I would have deleted any of these photos.”

He claimed that the photos “didn't show” on his computer, suggesting that when he had screenshot the conversations they hadn’t appeared.

Wheaton also suggested that the new evidence was irrelevant, considering the texts’ temporal proximity to the new school year.

He argued that the difference between Aug. 23 and Sept. 19 was negligible, saying, “That's still when school starts.”

In a statement to the Student, Richards wrote that it was “just too coincidental that a conversation demonstrating his inability to meet me halfway is missing as he argues that we did not communicate over the summer.”

“Even if it was missing,” Richards wrote, “one doesn’t just forget the existence of such a conversation.”

During the trial, after defending his busy summer schedule, Wheaton called his first witness, senator Mia Griffin ’24, who addressed the claims that Wheaton failed to represent the student body. She argued that office hours were not an effective program and that channels of communication between representatives and constituents were less important at a small college.

Griffin testified that Wheaton was deeply involved in the community, including by supporting the Reproductive Justice Alliance’s Spring 2022 walkout and by being an active member of the Black Students Union and a diversity intern

for the admissions department. She also said said that “Sirus has consistently been one of the only male senators who volunteered for [sexual assault-related] commitees.”

Next to testify was Senator Lily Popoli ’23, who provided more context for the text-message incident, explaining that AAS had issues getting senators to serve on committees that did not directly affect them or the identities they held.

Sayed then asked on cross examination whether senators were required to explain their decisions regarding committee assignment.

“No,” she responded. “But [Wheaton] didn’t force [the senator to repeat it]; he just asked.”

The final witness was AAS Senator Gent Malushaga ’25. He confirmed that office hours were not a successful initiative and argued that Wheaton’s personality made him an effective bridge between the student body and the AAS. “He is incredibly communicative and incredibly social,” Malushaga said.

“If you go to Amherst you know who Sirus is.”

He then outlined a number of projects that Wheaton had worked on over the past year, including investigating the college’s ties to slavery, looking into expanding library hours, and bringing free laundry detergent to campus through his work with the brand Generation Conscious..

After a brief cross examination, Wheaton rested his case.

As the hearing dragged on deep into its second hour, the temperature in the packed room climbed and the crowd thinned. Students fanned themselves with notebooks and folders and got up to stretch their legs between breaks in the action.

The AAS then entered deliberations that ultimately lasted more than an hour. The first group of senators to speak addressed what one described as Sayed’s “conflict of interest” in “running for vice president and simultaneously trying to impeach the president.” The vice president serves as the interim president until a new president is elected by special election.

Photo courtesy of Slate Taylor '25

"These are the texts that Jaden and I sent. Jaden was saying that he texted me, alerted me all these times during the summer, right? Very clearly."

Malushaga went so far as to say that it was “not a coincidence that [Sayed] ran for vice president and then filed a complaint.”

In response, Jabor told the Senate that “you can share whatever you want to share.” But cautioned that the JC had recently met regarding claims “tangentially related” before the hearing and had decided that “parts of the complaint that specifically refer to something that has been brought up in this trial are not valid as part of the complaint on the [special] election [for Vice President].”

For his part, Sayed told The Student that he filed the impeachment petition before he decided to run for vice president. He also said that, had Wheaton been removed, he “would have worked with the election committee to get a new president elected as soon as possible.”

Sayed affirmed that he “submitted this petition as a student who cared.” He said that he brought the petition because “nobody’s doing anything about the problems on campus, which the student government shouldn't be addressing.”

Other senators, such as Mollie Hartenstein ’23 and Henry Pallesen ’25, admonished the body to focus on the merits of the accusations against Wheaton, not on the person who brought them.

“I think the way that [the] Senate needs to think about it is, ‘What

are the claims of unconstitutionality? And what can we vote on?’,” Hartenstein said. “Because technically we can’t vote on anything else.”

On the merits, many senators seemed to agree with Isabella Malmqvist ’25. “I think there’s a difference between not being an ideal president and impeachably [sic] being grossly negligent,” she said. “While I would prefer someone that’s more proactive when it comes to this case, I really think about what’s significant enough to be impeachable.”

Some other senators, though, said they were convinced by the case.

As deliberations wore on, they became a sounding board for senators expressing their dismay at the state of the AAS in general.

Lori Alarcon ’24 said that the fall semester had been the most dysfunctional she had seen the AAS. “This is my third year here,” she said. “This year is the most inactive in the sense of progression towards certain issues.”

“I’m so very sad for the first-years, who came to [the] Senate with all this energy that was not directed anywhere,” said Yvette Kiptoo ’23.

First-year Hedley LawrenceApfelbaum ’26 said that the first-year senators “work together

Continued on page 5

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Endowment Declines 10 Percent Amid Nationwide Inflation Cal Gelernt ’24 Staff Writer High inflation and price instability resulted in a 10 percent loss on the college’s endowment over last fiscal year, according to interim Chief Financial Officer Tom Dwyer. It marked the first time the endowment has declined since the 2016 fiscal year.

Because the college relies mainly on its endowment for revenue, rather than tuition, the loss may have an acute impact on the college’s budget in coming years.

Departments such as dining services, whose budgets are especially susceptible to the effects of inflation, are expected to be hit the hardest.

President Michael Elliott, however, maintained in an interview with The Student that the college’s commitment to the “people” in the Amherst community, particularly through its financial aid program and support for low-income students, will not be affected by these changes.

The college also has no plans to reduce its staff in light of the loss, at least for the foreseeable future, Elliott said. “Very clearly we are not considering, at this time, layoffs or anything like that.” Despite these assurances, Elliott said that “there is no way that we can make this pain-free for the cam-

pus.”

The loss follows a 2021 fiscal year (the 2020-2021 academic year) which saw the highest endowment return in the college’s history: 52 percent. While inflation was already elevated during this period, there was still a belief that it might be “transient,” and would return to normal levels after a short period of time, Dwyer said.

But rather than falling, inflation rose even further the following year. “The financial situation became more challenging, not only for Amherst but in the broader world. Inflation continued to rise and became more persistent,” Dwyer said. We also saw significant cost increases in our capital projects.”

According to a list compiled

by Moody’s Investor Services from the 2021 fiscal year, among NESCAC and Ivy League schools with an AA or AAA credit rating, only Princeton University had a higher reliance on its endowment.

This high dependence on the endowment means that much of the College’s revenue is tied up in investments. In fact, according to the Moody’s list, 64.5 percent of Amherst’s total revenue comes from investment income. On the opposite end of the spectrum, that percentage was less than 10 percent for the University of Pen-

nsylvania and Cornell University.

While a heavy reliance on endowment has many upsides, it also presents key challenges. Since high price instability and soaring inflation rates generally have a negative impact on investment markets, these trends will likely have a greater effect on Amherst than its peer institutions. “Given the fact that our endowment is our single largest revenue source, inflation presents special challenges for Amherst,” said Dwyer.

Dwyer stressed that inflation “disproportionately” impacts certain departments. “If you look narrowly at food, food inflation has been significantly higher than [the average inflation rate],” he said. “So that impacts, for instance, our dining services operation more significantly than some other areas within the college.”

Executive Director of Dining and Hospitality Services Joe Flueckiger said that while normal inflation is currently between eight to nine percent, that number is between 16 to 20 percent for food.

Upon receiving the first quarterly report at the end of September, Flueckiger said that “it was like, ‘Wow, this is alarming.”’

While Flueckiger noted that right now the college has been “absorbing” this change and not “withholding product,” he acknowledged that this could chan-

Graph courtesy of Nina Aagaard '26

Robust returns on Amherst's endowment have allowed it to decrease its reliance on tuition over the last 20 years, allowing for more generous financial aid packages.

ge if current inflation trends continue. “What it might mean is if we are buying a specific cut of beef we might have to switch to another one, or buy different poultry, or serve seafood less days a week, for example,” he said.

Among the food products at Val most heavily affected by inflation are staples such as beef, eggs, butter, and chicken.

In addition to food, Elliott mentioned utility and construction costs as areas that could be affected by inflation, though he added that in the long term the college hopes to become less dependent on natural gas and oil.

On Tuesday, the Office of the President sent an email to all students, faculty, and staff which noted that the next phase of the college’s plan to reach net zero emissions by the end of 2030 will commence this spring.

At a faculty meeting last month, Elliott said that incremental new revenue will almost certainly fail to meet inflation rates. He noted that the college may have to think less about injecting money into new programs and more about moving money across these programs. One idea he said the college is considering is a pause on hiring of new staff.

Several months after the 2021 fiscal year concluded, Amherst capitalized on its revenue increase by making a number of new investments, “the most significant of which was on the financial aid side. This was at the same time that the legacy announcement was made — there were a number of investments to further support students,” Dwyer said. Indeed, at an October 2021 board meeting, the college approved a $4.5 million increase in financial aid, $2 million in targeted wage increases, $1.1 million in faculty-student research and more, totaling between a $9 to $10 million increase in the college’s budget.

Due to high returns on the endowment in previous years, Dwyer said that the negative 10 percent return this year will not affect any of these changes.

Following up on Dwyer, howe-

ver, Elliott did say that “we are trying to forecast what the budget will be in two years, three years, four years, and that’s where some of these assumptions about what we think the market returns on the endowment will start to play in,” suggesting that the budget may suffer more in coming years.

With respect to financial aid support for low-income students, Elliott said, “We are absolutely remaining committed to the financial aid program, to committing to supporting and recruiting a diverse student body in every way. Those are the core commitments of the college, everything else falls from that. So there’s no sense that we will back down from that,” he remarked.

In addition to these programs and the “people” of Amherst, Elliott listed two other main priorities in the budget. “We also do want to make sure that we can continue on the path towards the climate action plan, achieving the goal of being carbon neutral,” he said. “And then of course we are hoping to move ahead with the construction of a new student center and dining commons, but we will need to make sure that we have the financing lined up in a way that makes us feel comfortable about the long-term financial health of the college.”

Dwyer and Elliott ultimately stressed the novelty of inflation-related challenges. “A challenge for me and for Tom and for all of us who are in the administration is that we have lived our entire professional lives in a world where inflation has been around 1 or 2 percent. This will be a different reality and will feel different,” Elliott said. For Dwyer, “the unique thing about inflation versus other challenges is that it truly affects every single person on our campus community both personally and professionally.”

The college will be providing budget guidance to departments in January or February before reviewing scenarios in the spring.

The new budget will then be presented to the Board of Trustees at the end of May.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Impeachment Hearing Draws Massive Student Audience Continued from page 3 pretty well.”

“We’re frankly a bit baffled by the personalism of this all,” he said.

Phuong Doan ’26 said that he ran for the Senate knowing it was dysfunctional. “But I think it’s very sad that we reached a point in which we’re like, at each other’s throats, the fact that the student body came here for a theatrical performance,” he said.

Following the deliberations, the senators voted via an anonymous Google Form and the result was quickly announced.

For many students, the hearing confirmed their impression that the student government was in disarray.

“I was overall extremely disappointed with how unprofessional the trial was,” wrote Francisco Reyes ’24 in a message to The Student. “Although I completely understand both how people would

think that the evidence was or was not grounds for impeachment, the arguments laid out by many of the senators [in favor of Sirus] were often just hearsay or unfounded and irrelevant character statements.”

Olly Ajao ’25, who also ran in the special election for vice president, agreed that the issues with the AAS ran deep and took issue with the impeachment petition. “I believe the charges against Sirus were not entirely based off of factual evidence [sic],” she wrote to The Student. “While he did fail to meet some of the standards that he should have upheld, I think the impeachment speaks to a much larger problem in the Amherst community: division and lack of trust.”

“Rather than addressing the issues at its core, it seems that certain members of AAS (I don’t believe every on AAS had a hand in this) tried to use their own personal vendettas against Sirus to look as if they were finally address the issues

in Senate, when in reality they were using an ad hominem of sorts,” she wrote.

Jackson Lee ’24 was unhappy with the way the trial played out, for different reasons. “Several senators seemed to reach the conclusion that they should ultimately forgive Sirus’ failure to perform his most basic duties because they, the Senate, as a whole were unable to perform their own,” he wrote. “Moreover, several senators claimed to be unconvinced by the evidence presented, but never provided (nor, to my knowledge, were they given) any standard by which they should have evaluated the evidence.”

“Was ‘gross negligence’ meant to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt?,” he asked. “Or should it have simply been proved by a preponderance of the evidence?”

For his part, Wheaton said that the impeachment process had made him “pretty sad.” He said that he had felt “hyper-visible” across

the past week as the campus anticipated the hearing.

He said that he didn’t think what he had done “was something to be impeached for, or even to have a trial for.” He said that, even though he remained in office, “it just kind of leaves this negative taste with my name.”

Wheaton said that he felt he and Sayed took two different approaches to the hearing. “Ankit really prepared like it was mock trial,” he said. “I was just trying to talk to my peers.”

He said that, going forward, there were “a lot of things” he wanted to do as president over the next semester. He cited an idea to have more non-business-related events for senators to build camaraderie, as well as a proposal for a “Senate orientation.”

Wheaton also argued that it was not entirely on him to fix the issues with AAS, because the vice president is the person “directly in

charge of the senate.”

He said that he was working with Agosto on a project to address the lack of communication between AAS and the student body and mentioned the idea for an AAS newsletter.

For his part, Sayed said that it had never really crossed his mind that his motives would be questioned during the deliberations. “I had too much faith in the Senate that they wouldn't make ad hominem attacks.”

Sayed said that he hoped that the attention garnered by the trial would lead to higher turnout during the public comment period of AAS meetings in the future.

In regards to the possibility of working with Wheaton as vice president in the future, Sayed stated, “I want Sirus to be a good president.”

“I want us to have a good working partnership,” he said. “As I said before, I have nothing against him.

I think he's a good guy.”

As Enrollment Recovers, Hampshire Students Reflect Liam Archacki ’24 and Maggie Sher ’26 Senior Managing Editor and Staff Writer When Raffey Shakoor arrived in Amherst for his first year at Hampshire College, in Spring 2021, he was surprised to find that he was one of only two students on his floor — it had 10 unoccupied rooms. The campus was inhabited by a meager 500-odd students.

“I would walk around and I would see absolutely no one,” Shakoor said. Today, however, “it feels very full.”

This past term, Hampshire — a liberal arts college known for its emphasis on self-directed study and qualitative evaluation rather than grading — enrolled some 275 first-year students, its largest incoming class since 2018.

Shakoor’s class, composed of students who entered the college in Fall 2020, had an enrollment less than half of a standard class size. The year before, the inco-

ming class was only 13 students.

The severely reduced enrollment was a symptom of the financial woes that have been plaguing Hampshire since its founding in the early 1970s, but which came to a head in 2019. In addition to historically low enrollment, that year featured staff and faculty layoffs and resulting protests from students and faculty alike.

During the turmoil, 26 Hampshire professors took positions at other institutions in the area, with 13 transferring to Amherst.

The arrival of a new president, Ed Wingenbach, in August 2019 brought redoubled efforts to make the college’s operations sustainable and return enrollment to near full capacity.

The college is nearly in the fourth year of a five-year plan to bring total enrollment to around 1,200.

“I have no doubt that we will

Continued on page 7

Photo courtesy of Hampshire College

After a few years of financial difficulty and low enrollment, Hampshire College welcomed 275 first-year students this year, the most since 2018.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Class of ’23E Looks Back on Unusual College Experience Dylan Vrins ’26 Staff Writer As graduation at the end of the fall semester nears for the Class of 2023E, a larger-than average cohort due to the high number of students who took gap years during the pandemic, The Student talked with members of the class about their experiences at Amherst.

Despite its small size relative to spring-graduating classes, ’23E is no less diverse in its members’ experiences. Some of its members are transfers who came to Amherst midway through the year and began during the spring semester.

Others took a semester break from Amherst, with many doing so during the most difficult phase of the pandemic, before returning to resume their studies.

With these students now facing the end of their time at Amherst, many remarked on their beginnings. When asked why they chose to attend Amherst, ’23E members gave a variety of reasons ranging from the liberal arts style of education to the small class sizes.

Alison Farinas ’23E, a biochemistry major, chose Amherst for the latter reason. “In high school,

I knew that I really liked the small class, nurturing learning environments,” she said. “So I knew that I wanted a liberal arts type of school.”

Grace Cho ’23E, an English and Asian American studies major, transferred to Amherst from community college in Fall 2020. Cho expressed that when searching for a college to transfer to, Amherst immediately stood out.

“At Amherst, I found that the college offered [transfer] students support in a number of ways, both with the close-knit transfer community here, as well as the financial aid,” she said.

Mase Peterson ’23E, an English and Sexuality, Women, and Gender Studies major who transferred to Amherst the same year as Cho, described how important the transfer community has been during his time at Amherst. “If Covid gave me anything worthwhile, it was the opportunity to share my time and love with the transfer cohort I entered here with,” they said. “My favorite moments and experiences have to be oriented around those folks.”

When asked about their experience at Amherst, most members of the Class of ’23E said that the pan-

demic was a major force in shaping their Amherst experience in both negative and positive ways.

Peterson described the pandemic and its effects as “hellish.”

But they also said that “it gave me enough perspective to understand what my priorities would be as a student here. I learned way more about how to be a friend to yourself and others in times of crisis.”

Cho explained that because she was unable to visit campus before attending, she was forced to be more open to change. “I think that a lot of my time [at Amherst] has been characterized by adaptation and having to adapt to the different circumstances,” she said.

Others, like Farinas, took a semester off when Covid hit to avoid the lockdown and stress of online classes. She expressed that she has only recently realized how much Covid impacted her overall experience on campus.

“I feel like especially this semester, I’ve realized how many things [I have] missed out on as things have become more normal, and there are more events and that type of stuff again,” Farinas said. She added that she was grateful, though, for the fact that she could experience that sense

of normalcy during her last semester, as a way to come full circle from her first year.

The pandemic aside, the Class of 2023E recalled an array of favorite memories from their time at Amherst.

Farinas mentioned her senior thesis experience, during which she discovered a new protein in a certain species of bacteria. She was especially thankful for the professors who helped her throughout the grueling research process.

Cho reflected on how meaningful it was for her to work at the Book and Plow Farm. “The space allows you to just spend some quiet time in a peaceful environment,” she said.

Peterson expressed their appreciation for the large variety of classes they took during their time at Amherst. “I have four shout-outs: [Professor in Greek Classics] Frederick Griffiths, [Professor of History and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies] Jen Manion, [Professor of Sexuality, Women's and Gender Studies] Katrina Karkazis, and [Assistant Professor of English] Frank Leon Roberts,” he said, when asked about his favorite professors.

Ugo Asonye ’23E is grateful for

all the friends he made, the people he met, and the things he learned at Amherst. The one lesson he’ll take with him as he moves on from Amherst: “No matter how much you want things to slow down, the world keeps moving on.”

The intellectual growth students experienced in their time at the college was especially valuable.

“Amherst has definitely re-engineered in me an earnest desire to know more, question more, and interrogate my own complacencies as much as I'm able,” Peterson said.

Cho explained that she has “learned to reflect and acknowledge the value of my different identities and experiences. And in doing so, bring my authentic self into the activities I do.”

Farinas gave a final piece of upper-classmen advice for students still at Amherst. “Find a balance between stress and enjoying the present,” she said. “I feel like sometimes people stress themselves out way more than they need to.”

The graduation ceremony for the Class of 2023E will be held in Johnson Chapel on Sunday, Dec. 11. All Amherst students are encouraged to attend and celebrate their peers as they reach this important milestone.

Khiry Challenges Sayed’s One-vote VP Victory Continued from page 1 the claim was found to be invalid by a unanimous vote.

In an interview with The Student, Khiry said that, after seeing Sayed speak at the impeachment hearing on Monday night, he no longer believes that he was being deceitful. “Last night, I can definitely say, changed my perception of him,” he said in an interview with the Student on Tuesday, Dec. 6.

For his part, Sayed dismissed claims of a conflict of interest in an interview with The Student by insisting that he filed the motion to impeach Wheaton before he decided to run for vice president.

The challenge was yet another mishap in an election that was plagued by errors. Problems with balloting led to two false starts of the election, forcing students to vote three

times. Later, tabulation errors led to a false result being reported, which declared Khiry the winner, before inconsistencies were discovered, delivering Sayed the one-vote victory.

According to AAS Senator Gillian Quinto ’23, a member of the Elections Committee, the problems with the election began on Dec. 1, which was supposed to be the day of the election. She said that problems with the email list for the class of 2026 provided to the AAS by the IT department prevented some first-years from accessing the Qualtrics survey once they received the email from the AAS. Members of the Elections Committee then consulted IT, who told them they had fixed the error. However, a subsequent attempt to send out the survey again resulted in some first-years not having access.

At this point, the committee delayed the election until Dec. 3 and

decided to conduct it using Google Forms, which could be accessed by all students but would require the committee to tabulate the ranked-choice voting results manually.

At 9:30 p.m. the next day, Dec. 4, the Elections Committee sent an email to the student body announcing the results, which showed Khiry winning the election by one vote.

Khiry, who was attending a play when the results were announced, began to celebrate with his friends and called his parents. But about half an hour later, a senator noticed that five voters neglected to select a firstchoice candidate but selected later options, such as a second or third choice.

After the Elections Committee scrambled to recount the votes, a follow-up email was sent at 12:12 a.m. on Dec. 5, announcing that the

results had been altered. Sayed made up the deficit on the uncounted votes and was declared vice president.

Khiry described being “the most stressed I’ve been in a while” on the night the results were released. As he was waiting for the second round of results to be released, he was on the phone with his mother.

“I could barely get a thought out,” he said. “Which is odd, because I’m usually very articulate. But I was sitting there, and I just kept stuttering.

Very stressful.”

Khiry said he was encouraged by other senators following the election to challenge the results. “People kept texting me the day after the election, like, ‘Oh my God, you need to fight this,’” he said. “I started to believe them.”

Khiry was careful to emphasize in his interview that he regrets characterizing Sayed as deceitful and

that the dispute was not personal.

Regarding the numerous errors in the elections process, Quinto traced the issues back to a faulty email list that prevented the Elections Committee from using Qualtrics, which can automatically tabulate ranked-choice votes.

“It does suck because a lot of it was out of control,” she said.

The JC’s Dec. 7 email affirmed that “[t]he discrepancies in the inaccurate election results are not grounds for disregarding the corrected and accurate results, which carry a presumption of trustworthiness.”

The email concluded by noting that “[p]etitions about the result of the election will still be entertained up until the inauguration of the Vice President next semester, provided the information in the petitions could not reasonably have been known within 24 hours of the polls closing.”

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Students Cautiously Optimistic on Hampshire’s Growth Continued from page 5 be able to continue to increase [enrollment] numbers, particularly since we are continuing to see increases in interest and inquiries and people who are looking for and looking at Hampshire,” Wingenbach said in a May interview with WAMC Northeast Public Radio. “So as those numbers go up and the excitement about Hampshire increases amongst those populations of students, we expect to see the growth continue.”

In light of the sizable first-year class, The Student spoke with several Hampshire students about how the change has affected campus life and the sense of community at the college during the fall term.

The students largely expressed appreciation for the higher enrollment numbers, which they said have contributed to a more lively social scene on campus.

“It’s way different,” Shakoor said. “Events are way more

frequent. Community building is very, very high.”

An international student from Pakistan, Shakoor said he struggled to find community in his early years at Hampshire.

Due to difficulties obtaining a visa during the pandemic, Shakoor wasn’t able to enter the college with the other members of his class, instead arriving in the spring. He found it difficult to break into the already established social scene.

“They have their own friend groups, they have their own circles, they hang out, so it was really hard for me to be social,” Shakoor said.

He eventually was able to find community with other international students, who could relate to his experience, and by reaching out to his Resident Advisor (RA), who invited Shakoor to hang out with his friends. His classes, even though they were online, also helped him make friends, both at Hampshire and the other Five

Colleges.

According to Yahui Liu, who transferred from a Chinese university to Hampshire in Fall 2020, the increased number of students has produced a definite shift in the energy on campus. Student organizations are more properly funded, campus cafés are more crowded, and there is a higher population of workers on campus.

Last year, Liu said, an instructor at the Forum for International Students at Hampshire (FISH) was working two other jobs simultaneously. “[Now,] we have two more instructors helping him, doing the same amount of work he was doing last year,” she said. “Now, everyone can be more professional. Everyone can have more time to handle everything.”

Bridget Ronning, a dancer and a member of the Fall 2022 first-year class, said that she was “a little bit daunted” to attend a school with Hampshire’s enrollment problems.

“In practice, the concerns that I had didn’t really form in the way that I thought they would,” she said.

Hampshire has become a social “home base,” she said, from which she can branch out to meet students from other schools — through the Five College dance community or in her classes.

But Hampshire remains the backbone of her social experience, even though she says it can be “fluid” at times. “But that’s kind of the beauty of it. It’s as concrete as you need it to be,” she said.

Regarding the prospect of future enrollment growth, the students interviewed maintained cautious optimism, emphasizing that it would have to be accompanied by corresponding growth in other aspects of the college’s operations — particularly its academic offerings.

Although he thought more students would bring “a positive impact,” Shakoor noted that it’s already difficult to secure a spot

in many classes. “I believe they should think more on expanding their academics to make sure that plan stays on track,” he said.

Liu was similarly concerned about the academic offerings at the college.

“I talked with our president because I was wondering if we will have more professors and if we have more classes,” she said.

“Although taking classes at other colleges is good, it’s better to have more options on your campus.”

Both noted that some professors have been hired recently, particularly in the computer science and economics departments, but that more ground should be made up as enrollment grows.

But, overall, the students looked forward to a more crowded campus.

“I definitely appreciate it when there’s more perspectives being offered,” Ronning said. “I think you’re going to find more people who are willing to share perspectives the larger a group you have.”

Mammoth Moments in Miniature: Nov. 30 to Dec. 6 The Editorial Board Writing Center Experiences Survey The Writing Center’s Student Equity and Inclusion team has released a survey requesting feedback from students about their experiences and perspectives on working with the center in order to “better accommodate Amherst students.” The survey can be accessed through the Daily Mammoth, and all students who complete it will be entered into a raffle for one of four 20 dollar gift cards to local stores and restaurants.

Climate Action Plan Update On Monday, Dec. 5, the administration released an update on the College’s Climate Action Plan (CAP). The next phase of the plan, which is ultimately intended to result in the college’s decarbonization, will include the decommission of the Merrill science center, including a reduction in

parking availability and increased fencing. The college will also begin installing underground pipes around the Greenways in the Spring of 2023 as part of its eight year plan to shift from steam to low-temperature hot water heating.

AC Alert Follow-Up An update on the administration’s efforts to improve the AC Alert system was issued on Tuesday, Dec. 6. The message announced that, in addition to revising its agreements with its current alert software providers to include stipulations to prevent false alerts, the college will be conducting tests of its “door-locking hardware” and other existing mechanisms for building security to ensure proper functionality. Students are encouraged to provide or confirm their current emergency contact information to ensure that they are prepared in case of an emergency.

Photo courtesy of Kaelan McCone '19 and Karen Blake '17

The Writing Center's new student survey will allow individuals to share their experiences at the center in the interest of improving access to its resources.

Features

Thoughts on Theses

Melanie Schwimmer Melanie Schwimmer is an American studies major who is writing a thesis on fatness and fatphobia throughout history. Her thesis advisor is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English Karen J. Sánchez-Eppeler.

Photo courtesy of Rebecca McGeehan '26

Melanie Schwimmer ’23 is challenging people’s negative associations with fatness in her American Studies thesis on fatness and fatphobia throughout history.

Through her work, Schwimmer examines how anti-fatness animates various systems of oppression — such as white supremacy, antisemitism, and homophobia.

She asks “What does fat liberation look like?” and studies how fat liberation formed from the feminist movement of the twentieth century.

Academically, Melanie came to this subject during her American studies class, “The Embodied Self,” in sophomore year — a class she cites as pivotal towards her understanding of fat liberation politics. In that class, she read the book “Fat Shame” by Amy Erdman Farrell, one of the few novel-length secondary sources that examines anti-fatness in depth. “Fat Shame,”

she says, “answered some questions, but ultimately, like any good academic book, helped me ask so many more.” Another essential text referenced in “The Embodied Self ” was “Fearing the Black Body”

by Sabrina Strings, which helped Schwimmer understand the intersection between fatphobia and racism.

On a personal level, she explained, “I am someone who identifies as fat … it’s an identity that’s fraught.” She says she wants to use her academic voice to show that “fat is not a bad word. Fat people are not stupid or lazy.” Schwimmer finds that her personal investment within the subject helped strengthen her thesis, as it made her work “more emotionally charged.”

Her research stems from archival work, interview work, and media analysis, as she utilizes “cultural items around us.” One of the challenges of Schwimmer’s thesis

“I am someone who

identities as fat ... it's an identity that's fraught. ... Fat is not a bad word. Fat people are not stupid or lazy.

— Melanie Schwimmer

” research is deciding what to include and to exclude, as she notes that there are “so many amazing things that fall slightly out of the time frame and slightly out of the scope of this project.”

While writing her thesis, Schwimmer has learned how to blend academic and journalistic

writing styles, drawing from her years of experience writing for The Student, which includes founding her sports column Front and Center this past semester.

Melanie hopes that her thesis will challenge people to acknowledge the “touchy” subject of anti-fatness. She said that, when sharing her thesis, people “often look at me, look at my body, and give me a once-over,” and that “everyone has different takes on what it means to write about fatness.”

Furthermore, Schwimmer hopes more classes at Amherst will talk about how anti-fatness enlivens other systems of oppression. One specific example that she mentioned was her analysis of fatphobic, anti-feminist postcards from 1909 and tweets from 2016 that reflect the long history of anti-fatness undermining feminism in American movement politics. Schwimmer is particularly concerned with the way feminists respond to anti-fatness, as throughout history they have often embraced anti-fat messages, and in doing so, contribute to the problematic and dangerous rhetoric.

On a personal level, Schwimmer wants to prove to herself that “I can write something I’m passionate about with care and critical analysis” and truly interrogate the question “What does fat liberation mean?” Although her thesis is a work-in-progress at this point

in the year, her reclamation of the negatively-charged word “fat” and her comprehensive contribution towards the emerging field of fat studies provides something of an answer — perhaps seriously asking the question alone is its own answer.

Schwimmer’s advice to other students considering writing a thesis demonstrates the extent to which she views her work as a labor of love. “Writing a thesis, in my opinion, should be fun,” she said. “It should be enjoyable, it shouldn’t be something that gives you agony.”

Schwimmer acknowledges that deadlines can be stressful, but ultimately, it’s important to “[make] sure that what you’re writing about has meaning to you in some way, as your care for the project will help you through the high workload.”

She also credited her thesis advisor, L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English Karen J. Sánchez-Eppeler, as an invaluable resource. “She’s a 19th century scholar by training,” Schwimmer said, “but has come to the 20th and 21st century with me.”

Schwimmer’s thesis marks an exciting new contribution to the burgeoning field of fat studies, and will hopefully contribute towards further research in this discipline at Amherst and beyond.

—Willow Delp '26

Eggshells to Electricity: Tracking the College’s Compost Sonia Chajet Wides ’25 Managing Features Editor

A peach pit, a crushed eggshell you couldn’t quite peel off in one go.

A teabag, the cod cake you tried but didn’t like. Your disposable fork, the empty packet once filled with sugar.

This smattering of items is a sample of what’s left after a meal in Valentine Dining Hall (Val) — and all of it goes to the same destination: the compost bin.

The college produces a staggering amount of organic food waste which, thanks to a new contract

this year, is sent to Vanguard Renewables, a company that processes the waste into low-carbon fertilizer and renewable natural gas. The new composting program is also part of a broader conversation about food systems and food waste at the college.

Most of what we consume in Val, including packaging and disposable ware, is compostable. Anything that’s not is from outside producers: soy sauce packets, chip bags, and ice cream bar wrappers, to name a few.

This means that every year, Amherst College produces around 50

tons of compost — that’s 100,000 pounds — according to Executive Director of Dining Services Joe Flueckiger.

When a piece of waste goes into one of the compost bins on campus, it’s compiled in a compactor at Val. From there, it’s transported to a nearby facility run by Vanguard Renewables. There, Amherst’s organic waste will mingle with cow manure in an anaerobic digester, and become three different products: low-carbon liquid fertilizer, solid bedding for cows, and pipeline-quality methane natural gas.

But let’s back up.

Compost, Carbon, and Cows Composting is a process in which food waste and other organic matter is kept under certain conditions, and eventually breaks down through microbial activity. What’s left is rich, soil-like fertilizer that contains all of the nutrients from the organic material. These nutrients play the same role as synthetic plant fertilizers in supporting plant growth, but they also go above and beyond in feeding healthy soil conditions with abundant nutrients.

“The way I think about it is just as sort of a model system for understanding decomposition,” said Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Rebecca Hewitt. “It’s this important mechanism for reducing the negative impacts of food waste … by allowing the nutrients and the carbon in the food to be feeding the soil.”

In the past, Amherst trucked its food waste to Martin’s Farm, a business in Greenfield that uses a largescale manual process to make and

Continued on page 9

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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New Contract Turns Food Waste Into Electricity Continued from page 8 sell compost. There, organic material is mixed and ground by machine, and then carefully monitored, turned, screened, and cured to make a final product. The process works well to produce useful compost to sell to farmers.

However, Flueckiger said his office came across “a number of reports” containing findings about some of the drawbacks of large-scale composting. While Flueckiger made clear that the problems were not related to Martin’s Farm specifically, that style of large-scale composting has reportedly caused contamination in land and water areas.

While exploring further options this past summer, the college was approached by Vanguard, and made the choice to contract with them instead of Martin’s Farm. The switch was decided upon by Flueckiger, along with staff from Landscaping and Grounds, Campus Operations, and the Office of Sustainability.

Vanguard engages in what they call “organics-to-renewable energy projects,” which are different from conventional composting. The company’s goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from food waste and recycle the waste into “a powerful source of renewable energy and low-carbon fertilizer.”

Here’s what that means. As any pile of decomposing organic matter breaks down, it emits greenhouse gases, whic trap heat in earth’s atmosphere, leading to global warming. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that each year U.S. food waste accounts for 170 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions — about equal to annual emissions from 42 coal plants.

That doesn’t even include annual emissions of methane gas from waste, which is more potent, and a major emission from landfills — 15 percent of all U.S. methane emissions comes from landfills.

In the case of landfills, not only are greenhouse gases emitted, the matter itself goes to waste, and much of it does not ever decompose. Compost provides an alternative to this setup, in which some emissions do occur, but the product can be reused in sustainable agriculture, replacing

synthetic fertilizers that have heavy carbon footprints of their own.

Vanguard takes this process a step further by not only reusing the organic product, but also capturing the methane emissions, and purifying them into pipeline-quality methane gas — what has been coined “renewable natural gas” (RNG) — which has a smaller carbon footprint than conventional natural gas obtained from below-ground source.

The Vanguard Way At Vanguard facilities, the organic food waste is heated to 108 degrees Fahrenheit for five days, and then mixed with cow manure from their dairy farms in an anaerobic digester. Anaerobic digestion is the process by which microorganisms, in the absence of oxygen, decompose organic waste. This process naturally releases biogas. In Vanguard’s digesters, this biogas is contained by a rubber membrane, allowing it to be collected, extracted, and purified into natural gas. It can then enter existing infrastructure and be used to power electricity.

The remaining liquid is sold as fertilizer for crops, replacing chemical fertilizer. The solids become bedding for the cows on dairy farms.

“It’s super exciting to be able to utilize that [biogas] in a way that we would just be lost otherwise, and that is what’s happening in other types of composting,” said Flueckiger, who visited the facility with Director of Landscaping and Grounds Kenny Lauzier over the summer. He described what he saw as “amazing.”

“Typically, natural gas is something that you have to get from fossil fuel extraction,” said Director of Sustainability Wes Dripps, “and so in our efforts to minimize the impacts of … fracking, which has all kinds of negative effects, this provides a mechanism where we’re … generating renewable natural gas that then can be used and burned just like any other natural gas for energy.”

According to its website, thus far, Vanguard has generated enough electricity with its RNG to power 7,268 homes.

The company has taken off in recent years — this past summer, it was acquired by the investment compa-

ny BlackRock, which has itself come under criticism for its investment in the fossil fuel industry and companies that engage in deforestation.

Vanguard has also taken the lead on the Farm Powered Strategic Alliance (FPSA), which includes groups like Unilever, Starbucks, Chobani, and Dairy Farmers of America, and aims to reduce food waste and recycle remaining waste into renewable energy production.

While the combustion of natural gas required to produce electricity still emits greenhouse gases, Hewitt said “a lot of people talk about natural gas as a bridge fossil fuel” on the way to a renewable energy future, because its emissions are still lower than coal and oil. Vanguard’s approach finds a renewable, less ecosystem-damaging source for that gas while our infrastructure still relies on it — as Dripps mentioned, fracking, the process of extracting natural gas from underground, has well-documented catastrophic environmental and health effects.

“You’re using … the methane [emissions],” Hewitt said, “Either that’s gonna get used as a fuel source or it’s not.”

Dripps shared information that Vanguard sent to the college about their first quarter contracting with the company. In that time period, the college recycled 15 tons of organic waste and produced fertilizer for an acre of land. According to Vanguard, the greenhouse gas emissions mitigation is equivalent to 142 trees being planted. Amherst’s average continued contributions will likely be even higher than this, since the data was from an incomplete first quarter and accounts for summer months with less activity at the college.

Food System Sustainability The college’s composting protocol fits into a larger continuing conversation about our food system and the waste it produces. Student groups like the Food Justice Alliance (FJA) and Sustainable Solutions Lab have continually addressed this topic, and Dripps says it is one of the main issues that community members bring up to him as the director of sustainability. Perhaps most

notably, this year’s brand-new Food Systems Committee has brought together stakeholders from around the community to work on issues related to the college’s food system.

Food waste, in particular, is a highly relevant issue in both a local and national context. In the U.S., 40 percent of all food produced is wasted. “[Food waste] plays into all of the major issues: climate change, food insecurity, issues around diversity and privilege, labor relations, poverty,” said Flueckiger. “There's just a multitude of concerns.”

So while composting is a beneficial solution, these various campus offices have maintained their focus on reducing food waste overall.

“The sustainability scientist in

me would say, ‘I think compost is an integral part of the solution,’” Dripps said, “but … you back up and look at the whole system and ask, ‘why are we generating so much food waste?”

If we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have to worry about composting.’”

Of course, some food waste is unavoidable — according to Flueckiger, 30 percent of the college’s food waste is prep waste, such as inedible stems and peels of vegetables — and that’s why being proactive about composting is important. But, as Dripps put it, “the easiest waste to figure out how to repurpose is the waste you don’t generate.”

The other 70 percent of food

Continued on page 10

Photo courtesy of Vanguard Renewables

A Vanguard Renewables facility in Vermont.

Photo courtesy of Sonia Chajet Wides '25

A sign atop a compost bin in Val.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Campus Groups Evaluate Food Waste, Sustainability Continued from page 9 waste comes from what is thrown away after the meal. A program piloted by FJA last year has worked with existing programs at Val to donate untouched leftovers from our meals to local organizations. According to Flueckiger, though, plate waste accounts for much of the college’s waste footprint.

Beyond food leftovers, the biggest obstacle to reducing our waste is the abundance of single-use products used for to-go dining. Val currently goes through about 1,000 single-use to-go containers per day.

“It’s killing me to see,” said Flueckiger, “The expense is really not the part that bugs me as much. It’s more about how much more material we’re putting into the waste stream.”

The green plastic to-go containers that were used during the 20202021 academic year, as well as in the fall of 2021, attempted to create a solution to this problem, as they

could be washed and reused. But Flueckiger recalls these as “a miserable failure” because a large portion of them ended up in the trash, despite efforts to clarify that they could be returned and recycled.

The culture of to-go dining has created problems for composting, too. “It’s created a back-stream issue of … collect[ing] residential compost in an effective, efficient way that doesn’t create a hot mess for the custodial staff, doesn’t smell, doesn’t have bugs,” said Dripps. “And we don’t have an answer for that yet.”

Plus, he added, much of the food that gets taken out of Val doesn’t end up in the compost. A recent waste audit of the first-year quad done by seniors in the environmental studies department found that about 43 percent of the waste in garbage bins should have been in the compost.

“If we don’t generate [waste] on the front end, we don’t need to worry about people source-sepa-

rating and knowing what goes to the landfill and what goes to recycling,” Dripps said. “Despite all our education efforts, if it comes down to every individual having to follow all the rules, that’s just not a recipe for success. It needs to be, ‘How do we systematically address it on the front end?’”

The single-use products used for our to-go options — including the containers, cutlery, and cups — are all compostable. This softens the blow of the waste, but Dripps cautioned that people shouldn’t become “complacent” in saying “‘Don’t worry, it’s compostable.’”

In reality, this compostable ware will not decompose on its own in just any compost bin — let alone a landfill — if it’s accidentally put in the trash. The pieces require industrial-level processing, which grinds them in order to let them truly decompose. Both Martin’s Farm and Vanguard provided that option to

the college, but that necessity emphasizes the “asterisk” that comes with the “compostable” label.

New Decision-making The question of how to reduce food waste and make our food system more sustainable is a big one.

The new Food Systems Committee attempts to address it by bringing in people from all over the community.

“I think the goal with trying to have an overall Food Systems Committee was to branch out from just dining and also include more stakeholders and more people who are impacted by the food system,” said Willoughby Carlo, green dean in the Office of Sustainability.

Carlo has led the development of the committee, which was ideated last semester by former Sustainability Office Fellow Parker Richardson ’22. It now includes representatives from Dining Services, including Flueckiger, dining staff, and chefs, as

well as representatives from the student body and AAS, Office of Sustainability staff and student fellows, staff and faculty, and representatives from Book and Plow Farm.

In Flueckiger’s words, “The major discussion [in the Committee] has been about, how can we divert some of our purchasing power to more sustainable choices?”

Together, the committee is focusing on a range of topics related to our food system, including waste and composting, but also energy usage, a greater reliance on local food, affordability and accessibility, culturally appropriate foods, and more.

“When you set aspirations for carbon neutrality, you have to address all the different sources,” Dripps said, “​​ [the Food Systems Committee] provides a better forum to [discuss] these kinds of systemic questions about, how we, as a campus, can move ourselves to increasingly more sustainable systems.”

What Happens After a Dorm Gets Damaged?

Caelen McQuilkin ’24E Managing Features Editor

At the end of a weekend at Amherst, it’s common for dorm residents to see exit signs removed from their ceilings, vending machines tipped over and smashed, bathroom stall doors ripped off their hinges, and more — different types of dorm damage from weekend parties.

We know that when these incidents happen, someone has to fix it. What does that actually look like?

Three members of custodial staff, as well as supervisors and directors in the custodial and facilities departments, spoke about labor, time, cost, and how their lives have been impacted by incidents of dorm damage.

The process of work they described — discovering, accounting for, and repairing dorm damage — continues throughout the entire academic year, re-cycling after every weekend. Their voices provide insight into what kind of impact students really are mak-

ing in the spaces we occupy. And while we might imagine the biggest burden of dorm damage as tied to the most egregious examples, custodians testified that even sticky, dirty floors and discarded cans left behind from a registered party can create more than five extra hours of labor for them.

The impact of these kinds of damages often slip below the surface of community perception. As Custodial Supervisor Liz Pereira said, “a lot of students, even faculty and other staff, don’t really know what goes on. We do a really good job covering it up.”

What happens after a dorm gets damaged, then, tells a larger story about the custodial system designed to keep our college clean and safe, and the power imbalances that underscore it.

Discovering the Damage According to Pereira, the custodians who work on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays are often the first people to encounter dorm damage after it occurs at parties over the weekend.

The custodial staff at the college consists of 55 people who work Monday through Friday, and 5 people who work Saturday and Sunday. A few additional custodians who sign up to work overtime often accompany the weekend team. The Monday through Friday team is responsible for cleaning academic, administrative, and residential buildings, and for completing regular disinfecting and cleaning. The weekend team is not responsible for regular disinfecting and deep cleaning, but come in to respond to the needs that emerge over the weekend, including replenishing items like toilet paper in the dorms, and emptying trash and recycling. They also respond to what the department calls “triage areas,” where hazardous dorm damage most often occurs.

When custodians encounter damage that can be hazardous — such as broken glass or biological waste — they must immediately clean it up. This is true every day of the week, but “because [students] party Friday night, Satur-

day night, you’re more likely to run into that stuff on the weekend,” said custodian Bryce Benware. Cleaning and responding to the “triage areas” therefore becomes a regular part of the weekend job.

Benware recounted one time when he signed up to work overtime hours on the weekend in Morris Pratt Dormitory, a “classic example” of a dorm where party damage often occurs. He recounted going up to the third floor bathroom to restock toilet paper and found that “the stall doors were ripped off the hinges and hanging … and inside the toilet, they took a bunch of paper towels, stuffed them into the toilet, threw three rolls of toilet paper on top of it, and then urinated all over it.”

Although cleaning those toilets was not technically part of Benware’s job that weekend, the mess included biological waste and could pose a hazard to students, so, “I had to clean it.”

Because dorm damage is so concentrated over the weekends, taking weekend shifts becomes

burdensome and undesirable. “It seems like in the beginning of the school year, you put the notice [for overtime] up, people sign up right away. And now it’s like, you get to the end of the week, and they’re still looking for people to come in,” said Benware. “I think a lot of people are a little discouraged to come in because they expect to have to deal with these very big messes and damage. It hurts morale a little bit.”

In addition, custodians who work Monday through Friday in dorms that tend to be party hotspots — Hitchcock, Seeyle, Mayo-Smith, Jenkins, and Morris Pratt — continue to bear the brunt of cleaning up party messes throughout the week. Even after the weekend team clears hazardous messes, remaining damage usually persists on Mondays and well into the week.

Ryan Furches, a custodian at the college, said that when he comes into work on a Monday, hhe always checks for outstanding

Continued on page 11

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Weekly Party Damage Impacts Custodial Labor

Photo courtesy of Caelen McQuilkin '24

Collected bags of bottles and cans after a "dry clean" in Hitchcock Dormitory.

Continued from page 10 and potentially dangerous damage first. Furches works cleaning Hitchcock Dormitory, one of the three dorms in the area known as the triangle, which he winkingly called the “Bermuda triangle” — a place where problems happen and things go missing.

“That’s the first thing I do, is check places out for [the] safety … of students as well as the staff,” he said.

Fixing the Damage Once the damage has been identified, the process of fixing it comes next. Pereira said that once a custodian or supervisor assesses and documents the damage with photos, they reach out to the college’s service center, which serves as the “go-to point” in assigning different departments to create new work orders for fixing the different types of damage.

This often means enlisting the work of multiple departments on campus. “Dorm damage impacts … the entire community,” said Mitchell Koldy, Director of Auxiliary Services and Facilities, “but facilities, custodial and grounds, the electrical shops, and the building shops, get the

full brunt of the damage.”

The electrical shop, for example, is responsible for replacing broken exit signs. The maintenance shop covers broken doors, as well as paper towel holders or soap dispensers pulled off the walls. The service center will call in plumbers for toilets clogged with paper towels.

The college’s party policy gives students hosting registered parties a chance to clean up their non-hazardous messes the next day. Reserving a space for a party technically entails the responsibility of cleaning, but Furches said that usually doesn’t happen.

“If they don’t do it, then I have to take over responsibility to clean and use overtime to clean up those messes,” he said.

Furches explained some of the process of cleaning a dorm after a messy party. “The first clean, it’s called a dry clean.

Students leave a lot of cans and bottles … so the first thing we need to do is clean up all that and make sure it’s taken care of,” he said.

He described the process of getting rid of cans and bottles as being “like an Easter Egg hunt … they’re under the couches, they’re over by the window, they’re in drawers, they’re in the bathroom, they’re in the stair-

well. I have to collect all that trash. I don’t feel like playing that game on a Monday.”

After the dry clean, Furches said, “the second thing is a wet mop.” Custodians sometimes use an iMop, a human-driven machine that mops the floor with a wet brush while vacuuming at the same time. Pereira estimated that custodians typically have to mop the entire space two to three times to fully disinfect the floors and eliminate the smell of alcohol, which they use special chemicals for.

Furches estimated that it takes him an hour to two hours to finish mopping with the iMop machine, and more on days when he has to use a regular bucket and mop. The stickier the floor, the more rounds of mopping are required, and because you need to let the floor dry between the mops, he explained that sometimes it can take up to two days to completely finish cleaning a floor.

When the floor is sticky with spilled alcohol, the walls often are too. Their cleaning requires custodians to use sponges, chemicals, and magic erasers, a process Pereiraestimates can take up to two hours by itself.

Custodians are also trained in cleaning hazardous messes from parties, such as vomit and

blood. Furches said that these kinds of cleanups, though small, usually take about an hour or two because of the deep disinfecting required. But “it depends on what it is, and the amount of it. Sometimes, if the vomit is dry, we’ve got to scrape it and put it in the trash, and then we have to do a hand mop, or use a chemical sponge. Then once that’s been cleaned, we have to mop it again,” he said. For safety reasons, everything that custodians use to clean up biological waste has to be discarded after use, even tools such as dustpans.

Messes like these happen after parties every weekend, for the entire year, custodians said.

While cans and a sticky floor are certainly not the most shocking instances of dorm damage that occur, these regular messes make their own heavy impact when added up. “You have a custodian who has two, three times the mess of a normal [day], and it’s a bad mess. It makes the custodians’ work a little heavier,” said Benware. “Which to me is okay, if you all make extra trash or whatever … but when you’re picking up 100 beer cans — and that’s not an exaggeration — they’ll be all over the common rooms, beer all over the wooden floors. It comes off to me as kind of disrespectful.”

This cleaning responsibility comes on top of other expected job duties. According to a fun fact posted on the custodial department’s page on the college

“

There are [custodians] who just do it, who clean it up and don't say anything because it's not worth filing a complaint in the office... they don't do anything.

Do you clean it, or leave it like that?"

— Employee A

” web page, a custodian at Amherst is “responsible for the upkeep of 43,000 square feet each day” — the equivalent of cleaning 35 average sized homes. The added work of cleaning up messes and damages always requires someone to work overtime hours. “To cover for the time that [custodians] spend doing this out of their normal schedule, we give them overtime,” said

Continued on page 12

Photo courtesy of Caelen McQuilkin '24E

The common room in Hitchcock Dormitory after a complete cleaning.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Custodians Speak on the Impact of Dorm Damage Continued from page 11 Pereira. “Either they stay at the end of the day, which is [at] 2:30 pm, or they come in early the next day, at 4:00 in the morning.”

Impacts on Custodians While harder to quantify, dorm damage also impacts the lives, thoughts, and emotions of the people who end up fixing it.

“That’s the way they treat us … like trash. Because we are the ones who clean,” said Employee A, another custodial employee who preferred to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation from students or the administration.

“Every morning is filled with stress and frustration because you don’t know what might happen during your shift,” they said.

“We are all adults,” said Employee A, but they don’t feel that the behavior reflected in dorm damage acknowledges that.

Pereira reflected on the impact of damage on staff as a whole. “Especially after the Plimpton incident, we had a couple of custodians come forward and say, ‘this is a morale killer.’ You’re always cringing on a Monday to come to work and

[see] what you’re going to find in the dorm,” she said.

Koldy brought up one incident he found particularly disturbing, when students in Seelye defecated in feminine hygiene boxes and smeared feces on the walls of the bathroom. He recounted the impactful way that staff told him about how the incident affected them: “Mick, can you imagine a custodian coming home and having to explain to their family going around the dinner table [saying] ‘hey, what did you do today?’ ‘I’m going to tell somebody that I had to clean feces off of a wall or out of a feminine hygiene box.’ How disrespectful is that?”

Imagine someone asks you, “‘How was your day?’” he said.

“What do you say?”

Furches says when he comes into work on a Monday, “I just do it, I finish it, and then afterwards it actually feels good to have it all done and cleaned up. But at the start, I’m like, ‘ugh, come on,’” he said. “I don’t look forward to going to work every Monday … because of the weekend.”

Benware emphasized the difference between messes that are made irresponsibly and messes that are made deliberately. “I was

18, 19, 20, too. And I lived like an 18, 19, or 20 year old. And so I try not to take things personally,” he said. “But when you come into those deliberate messes, that’s when it kind of gets a little discouraging.”

Employee A spoke about a power imbalance between students and custodians on campus.

Students will always have the ability to keep making the kinds of messes and damages that are not strictly prohibited by the college, but make work significantly more difficult for custodians, they said. For this reason, if a custodian were to “tattle” on students for behavior that makes cleaning harder, students could get angry and retaliate. Because of this, Employee A said they do not feel comfortable reporting damage, let alone the actions of specific students or student groups.

For this reason, Employee A said that oftentimes, the damage custodians have to clean goes unreported and unrecognized.

“There are [custodians] who just do it, who clean it up and don’t say anything because it’s not worth filing a complaint in the office … they don’t do anything,” said Employee A. A lack

Graphic Courtesy of Nina Aagaard '26

The impact of dorm damage often slips below the surface of community perception.

of meaningful response to official reports leaves custodians without much choice when they encounter damage or a mess they feel they should not have to clean. “Do you clean it, or leave it like that?” Employee A ironically questioned.

Custodians also shared their broader reflections about why the damage might be occurring, and what it means for the college in the bigger picture.

Benware said that his perspective has been shaped by spending so much time caring for buildings at the college, and feels that “the college tries to provide nice spaces for you all … I really don’t know what to say about it, because a lot of people pay to be here, to be in these buildings. They live in them. It kind of makes you wonder why they treat them the way they do.”

He feels that dorm damage has gotten to a point where it is “so frequent that I would consider it a behavior … and you have to kind of wonder, why is that?

If you can’t figure out why, you can try to ask, is there anything you can do to maybe address the issue and deter students from damaging the property?”

Employee A said the pay custodians receive is not enough compensation for the work they have to do. When dorm damage occurs, “it’s more work, but they don’t consider that in the pay,” they said. Employee A brought up the fact that they could work in a restaurant for the same wage they receive to work in custodial and clean messes that require large amounts of labor.

Benware said he and other custodians don’t know whether the college is making efforts to change this behavior. “It seems like that type of behavior isn’t really addressed by the college, and staff notices that,” he said.

“For all I know, the college could be trying to do some things to address the issue, but … they’re not very transparent about how the behavior is actually treated, and I think that’s an issue too.”

Thoughts on Community Custodians said that dorm damage connects to a broader feeling that students don’t recognize their importance in the community and the scope and impact of their jobs.

“

I really don't know what to say about it, because a lot of people pay to be here, to be in these buildings. They live in them. It kind of makes you wonder why they treat them the way they do.

— Bryce Benware

”

“Janitors are part of the front line … of this college,” said Furches. “I wish [students] understood how much we keep the college clean — and [that] we keep it safe, as well … That our job is a very important job.”

Benware emphasized that students only see a fraction of what goes into the job. “You might see a custodian mopping the floor, or vacuuming, or whatever. So you know they mop or vacuum, but you might not realize how much of everything they do,” he said.

He recounted working in a dorm on the first year quad where, “it kind of felt like walking through New York City … you just go about your business, and the students go about theirs. You don’t know much about them, and they don’t really pay much mind to what you’re doing. You’re just two separate beings doing your thing in the same space.”

Benware hopes to build more community among staff departments and students. “We work for the same people … the same person signs our checks. You all are part of that same institution. So I think it should feel like [that],” he said.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

Features

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Photo Spread: Students Enjoy Fall Colors at Amherst

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The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Pho’s Photography: Fall, Foliage, and Fun Times 1. The iPhone flashlight gave a

smiling Jack O’ Lantern a fullon spooky look at The Amherst Student’s “Pumpkin Fun Night” carving event.

2. Batch of vibrant fall foliage finds home at the base of the maple tree at Amherst Common.

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3. Someone was enjoying a peaceful nap on the wooden bench under the iconic signature mixed-color Merry Maple tree at the North Common during the weekend.

4. The men’s soccer team was en route to warm-up exercises in the afternoon all the while listening to the coach’s words of wisdom before the competition.

5. A row of color-changing trees by the railroad behind the Powerhouse is an ideal and Instagrammable photo spot for many students on campus.

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6. Amherst Farmers Market encouraged others to support local businesses and was a nice get-together event for the weekend.

7. The McGuire Life Science Building stood in silence to the southeast of the campus, alongside Seeley Mudd Building and Charles Pratt Hall.

8. Drooping branches of yellow leaves nodded gently in the evening breeze.

9. Little Three Game Day featured Amherst Men’s Soccer competing against annual rival Wesleyan University for NESCAC Quarterfinal at Hitchcock Field during Homecoming 2022.

10. The Eighmy Powerhouse blends harmoniously with the campus landscape.

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Photos and captions courtesy of Pho Vu '23

Op pinion

w

Exit Letters YEE-LYNN LEE

My journey with The Student began, fittingly, with an issue published by The Student.

It was May 2020, the end of my freshman year, and two and a half months after the pandemic had dispersed Amherst students across the world to continue their learning remotely. As the national news reported on a seemingly non-stop barrage of suffering, loss, and injustice, The Student published its annual Commencement issue, highlighting the stories and accomplishments of 13 graduating seniors who had left their mark on the college, even as they had to navigate a final semester that nothing could have prepared them for.

Having just finished a semester that left me with a profound sense of helplessness, and a year that left me feeling lost, unfulfilled, and altogether unsure of what I was supposed to be doing with my time at Amherst, I read those profiles with great attentiveness, hoping to find some sort of guidance or inspiration — anything that might help me also make my college career a meaningful one.

THEO HAMILTON On March 9, 2020, I received two of the most significant emails I’ve opened during my time at Amherst. Other members of the Class of 2023 probably remember the first as clearly as I do: a 641-word blast which announced that, in response to the global spread of Covid-19, students were expected to leave campus over the next week and begin remote learning for an unclear duration. The second, which by the time I’d read the first seemed almost minor in comparison, was an invitation by then-Arts & Living editor Seoyeon Kim ’21 to take an editing test for the Arts & Living section. Now, however, with the clarity of nearly three years of hindsight, that second email seems like it ushered in just as tectonic a change.

In the months prior to those two emails, I’d started experimenting with writing for The Student.

The topics ranged from my musical interests (as in a review celebrating the 25th anniversary of a favorite Oasis album which the Arts & Living section was kind enough to publish even though that anniversary had passed months prior) to my cinematic interests (like my review of “Watchmen”). These forays into writing had made me interested enough in the paper to apply for a position as an A&L editor. But, ironically, it was only after moving off of campus that I began to fully appreciate The Student’s ability to enhance the campus community. It helped that I was by then a new assistant A&L editor, clicking into editorial meetings every Sunday to hear from editors across all sections about press-

THE AMHERST

Among the different places where the seniors had made their mark — the Association of Amherst Students, affinity groups, resource centers — one stood out in particular. In editors-in-chief emerita Shawna Chen’s ’20 and Emma Swislow’s ’20 profiles, they recounted the intense, fun-filled, and intimate community that was The Student’s newsroom. The image of a tight-knit group of students all investing themselves in the same project and supporting each other in the process stirred something in me, and I decided then that I would join The Student.

Yet, despite my sudden resolve, I didn’t really have any idea of what I wanted to do on the paper. When my sophomore fall rolled around and I was filling out The Student’s interest form, I haphazardly checked off a bunch of things that sounded interesting — arts writing, design, those seem cool; opinions writing, maybe; definitely not news writing, that’s boring. Perhaps it was another stroke of fate, then, that left me determined to write for the news section after I attended The Student’s intro meeting, drawn by then-news editors Ryan Yu’s ’22

Continued on page 16

ing news and week-to-week concerns of students. What really made the difference, though, was the weirdness of life off-campus, as I kept close with friends but felt helplessly adrift from any sense of “Amherst” as a whole. The Student provided a space where the concerns and interests of the college community could still be voiced, representing a unique type of togetherness in a turbulent period.

I took the next year off of Amherst, not wanting to use up another block of credits on remote classes, but I kept working for The Student, driven in part by my experiences of the paper as a vital source of community connecting students on and off-campus. At that point, along with Lauren Kisare ’22, I was one of two editors at the head of the A&L section, and some of my proudest memories at the paper will always be the steps we took to keep the section running during that bizarre period — The Student’s first entirely remote year. These steps included hosting biweekly workshops for writers to learn about the section and discuss each other’s articles, piecing together a writing schedule to spread work equitably across staff writers, and just reading through submissions and (hopefully) providing thoughtful feedback.

Last year, The Student returned to operating fully in-person. Lauren left to study abroad, while Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 and Brooke Hoffman ’23E became my new section co-editors. The return to campus brought all sorts of challenges in and of itself. The Student returned to a weekly paper format with very

Continued on page 17

STUDENT E X E C U T I V E B OA R D Editor-in-Chief Yee-Lynn Lee Senior Managing Liam Archacki Theo Hamilton Managing News Ethan Foster Leo Kamin Michael Mason Managing Features Sonia Chajet Wides Caelen McQuilkin Eleanor Walsh Managing Opinion Tara Alahakoon Dustin Copeland Kei Lim Tapti Sen Managing Arts & Living Alexander Brandfonbrener Yasmin Hamilton Brianne LaBare Madeline Lawson

Assistant Arts & Living Cassidy Duncan Noor Rahman Sarah Weiner Managing Sports Nick Edwards-Levin Liza Katz Alex Noga Managing Puzzles John Joire Managing Podcast Andrew Rosin Sam Spratford Assistant Podcast Karina Maciel Managing Design Andrew Kim Brianne LaBare Managing Photo Claire Beougher Slate Taylor Managing Graphics Nina Aagaard Shani Getz

S TA F F Publisher Robert Bischof Digital Director Sawyer Pollard Social Media Manager Emi Eliason

Letters Policy

The opinion pages of The Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community. We welcome responses 50-800 words in length to any of our recent articles and aim to publish a diversity of views and voices.

If you would like to submit a response for consideration, it must be exclusive to The Student and cannot have been published elsewhere. The Student will print letters if they are submitted to the paper’s email account (astudent@ amherst.edu) or the article response form that can be found on The Student’s website, by 8 p.m. on Saturday, after which they will not be accepted for the week’s issue.

Letters must bear the names of all contributors and an email address where the author or authors may be reached. Letters may be edited for clarity and Student style. The editors reserve the right to withhold any letter because of considerations of space or content.

Publication Standards The Amherst Student is published weekly except during college vacations. The offices of The Amherst Student are located in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, Amherst College. All contents copyright © 2022 by The Amherst Student, Inc. All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not 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 • December 8, 2022

Opinion

An Unforgettable Journey Continued from page 15 and Zach Jonas’ ’22 pitch of it as an immersive way to get to know and engage with the larger community.

That first semester was characterized by a sense of novelty, as, even though I wouldn’t really experience that initial draw of newsroom community until I joined the editorial board the following semester, I discovered the different things I enjoyed about writing for the paper: the hands-on learning, the satisfaction of getting published, the unique connection of interviewing (even when it was happening over Zoom). In a semester that took place within the continuing anguish and oppression of the pandemic, when the discussions in my Zoom classes and the mountain of readings, problem sets, and essays that came with them felt hopelessly detached from anything that really mattered, The Student seemed to offer an opportunity to do something of real consequence, even if its scope was limited to the Amherst community.

I felt this sentiment most acutely when, by then an assistant news editor for the paper, I covered the campus response to the Atlanta spa shootings the following spring. Although it was emotionally draining to have to tune into the reactions and experiences of Asian students during the interview process and again during the writing process, it was also invigorating in a way. By writing the article, I felt that I was able to channel my own grief into something that could potentially have an impact on the community — something that might just mean something to someone.

Certainly there are limits to what the news can do on its own in simply bringing attention to issues. But I came to see this as, at least, a necessary first step to change; in particular, I came to believe in the power of stories to foster a shared understanding, to allow us to see beyond each of our limited perspectives and come together as a community.

At the same time, my love for working on the paper was only deepening from being on The Student’s editorial board. I feel so lucky to have been able to work with Zach and Sophie Wolmer ’23 to run the news section that first semester I became an editor.

Looking back now, I marvel at the sense of teamwork we were able to have in our little section, even as we spent most production nights working from our respective dorm rooms and communicating only over text. Having people to share in, among other things, the excitement over the latest news and the accomplishment of finishing everything for the night made the weekly grind not just manageable, but something to look forward to.

Thus, when my editors-in-chief, Ryan and Becca

Picciotto ’22, offered me the editor-in-chief position last fall, I knew deep down I wouldn’t say no. That isn’t to say I didn’t have very real reservations about the consistency and stamina required for the position.

As that fall semester went on, I watched as Ryan and Becca took on the Herculean task of restarting the in-person newsroom after three semesters remote, which included having to reestablish nearly from scratch the processes and routines of putting together our print issue. On the other side of the lively and chaotic fun that characterized the earlier parts of production night were the long stretches into the deep and dreary hours of the night, which often came with crises that would pop up during one of those late hours and require a last-minute scramble to address.

When I stepped into the editor-in-chief position this past spring, I naively believed I would be able to immediately reform our weekly production timeline and avoid the long nights (and early mornings) I saw my editors-in-chief suffer through. But, as with many things that Covid has affected, the newsroom was not going to recover from the pandemic in just one semester. With the departure of our most senior editors at the end of the fall semester, the gap in recruiting and retention from the previous remote year now left us with leadership breaks in key sections, disrupting the mentorship process the paper so crucially depends on. Production nights began to regularly drag longer than even the worst nights of the previous semester.

It has become somewhat of a tradition for these exit letters to address the question many have when they hear of how grueling this position is: “Why do you do this to yourself ?” Certainly, there is not just one answer and sometimes there isn’t really any answer. If I had to give an answer now, though, I think it would lie in the deep responsibility that The Student has to our community. I will admit that I am kept up on Tuesday nights in part because of a case of perfectionism that often has trouble letting go of even the smallest inconsistencies. But what weighs most heavily on me has always been the pressure of making sure our stories are solid — that they represent their subject clearly and accurately — before they go out. As a campus publication, The Student tells stories that no one else is going to tell, and with that comes an even greater need to get them right.

And it’s not just each individual article we publish, but also the story of the college that we tell with our publication as a whole. How can we tell a more complete and comprehensive story that includes the efforts and experiences of all the different groups and departments that make up the college community?

What are the stories that we’ve told before, and the ones that we leave out? I’m so proud of and grateful to all our staff who have dedicated their time this past year to engage with these questions and to continue

to push the paper forward, even amid the challenges and the other commitments we all juggle.

Indeed, there is much to celebrate. This semester, under the leadership of former news editors Caelen McQuilkin ’24E, Sonia Chajet Wides ’25, and Eleanor Walsh ’25, we brought our features section back from a 19-year hiatus — an effort that was also made possible by the diligence of Leo Kamin ’25, Ethan Foster ’25, and Michael Mason ’25 in taking over and carrying on our news section. Our articles are now often accompanied by stunning graphics courtesy of Nina Aagaard ’26. Our design editor Brianne LaBare ’25 has worked tirelessly to streamline our layout process. Thanks to her and the collective effort of our editors to shift back our editing timeline, production has been ending earlier, finally hitting a few weeks ago the 3 a.m. target I had set before my tenure began (a big improvement from the spring, when the free space on our newsroom bingo board was “Lynn stays up past 8 a.m.”). And this is not to mention the work that every section has done to expand in the past year, and the conversations that take place every week about how we can best serve our community.

Of course, The Student still has much it can improve on, and it always will. I am confident that this work will continue under the next editors-in-chief, Sam Spratford ’24 and Liam Archacki ’24, who will be stepping into my position starting next semester.

As I sit outside our Morrow basement office writing this exit letter on my last production night, though, it is not really all of this that is at the forefront of my mind, but rather the very thing that led me to join The Student in the first place. Listening to the familiar chatter emanating from the newsroom (interspersed with bursts of laughter and the occasional groan of frustration), I can’t imagine what my Tuesday nights next semester will be like without it.

To all the editors I’ve worked with in my tenure as editor-in-chief, thank you so much. As many an editor-in-chief has said before, it really is the people that make The Student a truly unforgettable experience.

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The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

Opinion

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Theo Says Thank You Continued from page 15 little institutional memory, which meant learning and re-learning how to get the paper into print on a reasonable weekly schedule.

I’ve emphasized how much The Student functioned as a bastion of community while being on campus was impossible. But while the experience of learning remotely from all corners of the world is now a remote memory (or not a memory at all!) for most of us, I still constantly see ways that The Student enhances the campus community, especially since becoming a senior managing editor last spring, a position that has meant working with each of the paper’s sections. Sometimes, this takes the form of activism and calls to action for the school, like last semester’s “Better Amherst” series, which made the case for the necessity of offering more service-oriented learning at the college. Of course, it also means accurately communicating the details of breaking news. Frequently, it means reminding us that the campus community is so much larger than is suggested by the tunnel vision that students can

so easily slip into as we move back and forth between classes with our peers and meals with our friends — this week’s article on the impact of dorm damage on college custodians is a great example.

Last but not least, I want to thank the many people who have helped make the newsroom such a rewarding place to work, even when — on nights like tonight — I’m here at 4:00 a.m. poring over line edits (or trying to write an exit letter), falling further and further behind on classwork, and mentally preparing myself to ask my professors for a new array of extensions.

There are too many names to name. I will miss working with the whole editorial board — and I will especially miss all the moments of laughing and notquite-working.. I can’t extend enough gratitude to the other members of this year's leadership team, Editor-in-Chief Lynn Lee ’23 and Senior Managing Editor Liam Archacki ’24, who have put literally countless hours into helping this paper maintain its exceptional journalistic standards and steering it from strength to strength. Lynn, thanks for your stalwart and thoughtful leadership, and for your tireless commitment to the paper. Liam, thanks for being the

best co-senior-managing-editor I could’ve asked for, and I can’t wait to see what you and Sam (Spratford ’24) achieve as EICs next semester. And thank you finally to my A&L co-editors over the years. Lauren, thanks for your mentorship and advice — it basically taught me how to be an editor. Alex, thanks for spending so many nights on InDesign duty, and for all the laughs along the way. Brooke, thanks for thinking up some of the best titles to ever grace The Student’s pages. I’ll always appreciate the friendships I’ve made and the moments I’ve experienced working here, alongside so many other students dedicated to thinking and writing critically in service of the campus community.

Where Was the Constitution in the Impeachment Trial?

Tylar Matsuo ’24 Staff Writer The Association of Amherst Students’ (AAS) troubled semester came to a cataclysmic finale on Monday within the impeachment trial of President Sirus Wheaton. Although the arguments of petitioner Ankit Sayed and President Wheaton proceeded largely without incident (with the exception of a single heckler interjecting at the end of Sayed’s opening remarks), the Senate’s deliberations were sufficiently disorganized hectic to render the trial an entertaining, yet constitutionally bankrupt, dumpster fire. The deliberations opened with attacks on Sayed’s character more fitting for gossip circles than a legislative body, and did not improve much from there. Indeed, it seemed of more concern to the Senate that Sayed may not love the AAS as much as he professed or may somehow stand to benefit personally from

an impeachment than the idea thatat Wheaton may have grossly neglected his Constitutional duties and committed malfeasance.

A particularly disturbing point of the deliberations were the remarks by one Senator about potential instances of sexual harassment unearthed during former AAS Vice-President Jaden Richards’ testimony. The senator, in a confounding twist of logic, suggested by implication that the presence of potential sexual harassment should be a reason for acquittal rather than impeachment. They reasoned that Sayed was using claims of sexual harassment for “political” benefit solely on the grounds that he had failed to elaborate on them outside of Richards’ examination. That the allegations were unearthed in the midst of unscripted testimony, the contents of which Sayed might not have known beforehand, was not considered by the Senator. More disturbingly still, the Senator’s re-

marks were met with approving finger-snaps from other Senators and members of the audience — clearly the view that sexual harassment allegations should be kept firmly under wraps in lieu of overwhelming evidence is not uncommon in the AAS. I do not mean to suggest that President Wheaton had indeed committed sexual harassment.

Richards’ testimony referenced only a single half-remembered and possibly consensual incident that the Senate could reasonably have given little to no weight as admissible evidence, although it nonetheless merited more consideration than the Senate gave it considering that they did not bring discuss the incident much further after these remarks. But to wield a sexual misconduct claim against the party bringing it is a deeply troubling act, and one the Senate should be ashamed to have engaged in.

The Constitution received little to no notice from the Senate.

Only in the refreshingly sane and poignant arguments of Senator Henry Pallesen ’25 did the enumerated Constitutional duties of the President — the very duties that the gross negligence claims of the impeachment case were centered around — receive any direct reference by the Senate (while other senators had hinted at the duties, they minimized the issues at play by treating them as a nebulous body of norms; Senator Pallesen’s arguments differed in that he quoted the Constitution directly and explicitly referred to its mandates).

It would likely surprise the vast majority of Senators to learn that Section B of the Executive Branch section of the AAS Constitution outlines seven duties that the president is obligated to perform. In this section, the Constitution demands that the president shall: 1. Serve as the official representative and spokesperson of the AAS and the Student Body;

2. Chair, and be a voting member of, the Executive Branch; 3. Set the agenda for all Executive Branch meetings; 4. Serve ex-officio on the College Council, the Trustee Advisory Committee on Student Life, and the Budgetary Committee; 5. Have veto power over any action of the Senate; 6. Call an all-campus meeting sponsored by the President of the College and the AAS at least once a year, assisted by the other members of the Executive Branch; and 7. Present a speech at the first Senate meeting of each semester.

It was uncontested at trial that President Wheaton failed to chair Executive Branch meetings and did not set any of their agendas for at least the majority of the semester. It was further uncontested that Wheaton did not serve in his ex-officio role on the College Council, has yet

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Senate Sees Nothing Wrong With Ignoring Duties Continued from page 17 to call an all-campus meeting, and failed to present a speech at the first Senate meeting of the semester. Only in the case of his role on the College Council did Wheaton offer anything approaching a convincing excuse for his failure to perform.

Furthermore, Sayed alleged that Wheaton failed to live up to his duty to serve as the representative and spokesperson of AAS and the Student Body, and that his use of his veto power was unbecoming, although Wheaton contested both points. Even disregarding the Presidential duty to call an all-campus meeting (as this can be performed at

any point during the year), three Constitutional duties remained clearly neglected, one (College Council) was unperformed and potentially neglected, and a further two were either wholly unmet or poorly met, depending on whether one accepts Sayed or Wheaton’s arguments. Not so much as one of these Constitutional duties did Wheaton clearly perform to the extent required of him.

Yet this was evidently of little matter to the Senate. One Senator readily brushed aside the duty to chair Executive Branch meetings as “just two or three text messages a week” which could be easily performed by the Vice-President anyways. This

Senator’s cavalier attitude towards the Vice-President’s workload aside, characterizing these responsibilities as a handful of text messages was a severe understatement of Wheaton’s unmet duties, particularly considering that the President is also required to set those meetings’ agendas, a fact overlooked by the Senate until Senator Pallesen’s remarks as the second-to-last speaker before voting commenced. Certain senators were also all-too-willing to accept the argument that the failure of previous presidents’ failures to present speeches at the Senate’s first semesterly meetings justified Wheaton’s failure to do the same. The Senate apparently

accepted on its face Wheaton’s excuse for not attending College Council meetings – that he had been left off of email chains – with little of the debate as to officials’ obligations to be proactive in performing their duties that it deserved. And they hardly considered the implications of Wheaton’s habits of arriving to meetings with college and AAS officials late and leaving early.

Finally, the Senate was deeply concerned by the precedent that would be set by an impeachment of President Wheaton. They fretted that it would “lower the bar” too much, allowing future officials to be impeached for extremely mild infractions of the Constitution and bylaws. Given

that the trial itself was the first (and hopefully last) of its kind, such debate was not wholly unmerited. Yet the Senate, for all its fears of bar-lowering, did not consider at all the precedent that their acquittal would set – that an official, who had indisputably failed to perform several of their Constitutional duties and arguably neglected every single one of them, had not committed negligence, and that such an official, who had badgered some of their peers to the point of resignation, was likewise innocent of malfeasance. But perhaps it is telling that the Senate sees nothing wrong with officials berating each other while ignoring their constitutional duties.

Experiencing Ableism in Amherst Infrastructure Willow Delp ’26 Contributing Writer When I first came to Amherst this August, I was quickly submerged in the high-energy culture of orientation — the commotion, the activities, and the glee palpable in the late summer air. However, despite my excitement to be on campus and to be engulfed within its vibrant culture, there was something I quickly realized.: Getting around campus could be exhausting.

The seemingly endless, sloping hills wore me out as I tried to keep up with the ambitious orientation schedule, jam-packed with countless activities under the sweltering sun. I found myself exhausted by the end of the day, my head spinning with new names and faces, and my legs groaning from running up that hill (without the glamor of a Kate Bush song.) As a person with chronic leg pain, the briefest walks feel infinitely longer during flare-ups, and since orientation I’ve sometimes had to limp while going from one building to another. This campus, from my initial observations, seemed anything but accessible.

The many hills on the campus pose a challenge for students who have high blood pressure, asthma, chronic pain, or use a mobility device. Furthermore, many of the buildings on campus are very old, meaning they do not have to follow the requirements in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA), which states that all buildings for public use must be “designed and constructed in such manner that the facility or part of the facility is readily accessible to and usable by individuals with disabilities, if the construction was commenced after January 26, 1992.” The far distance between some buildings on campus can also exacerbate existing issues, especially for new students unfamiliar with the campus layout.

Founded in response to these issues — and issues of accessibility for non-physical disabilities — the Disability and Neurodivergence Alliance (the DNA) is a student group that aims to acts as a site of community for disabled students, but also raises awareness towards existing accommodations that students can request, and works to establish positive relationships with faculty in pursuit of a more accessi-

ble campus. I learned about the group over the summer before I came to Amherst, and quickly became involved due to my passion for disability justice.

When I finally arrived, I was curious about the perspective of physically disabled students who have been at the school for years, and have had to deal with the mundane challenges of an inaccessibly-designed campus. I believe that the most well-versed in the disabled student experience are disabled students themselves, who have had to deal with the mundane challenges of an inaccessibly designed campus year after year. Their experiences on campus serve as testimony for the reality of Amherst College life.

Sam Hodges ’23, who serves as publicity director for the DNA, and also uses a cane and experiences joint pain, discussed the challenges of using elevators to get to classes.

Elevators “add a new level of complexity,” as Hodges says they are often tucked away in inconvenient locations. Many buildings don’t have directions for elevators, and the Keefe and Science Center elevators are especially slow. Floor plans are

confusing and unclear, making it difficult for laypeople to determine what is an elevator versus an elevator storage area, further complicating an already difficult process. In some places, like the Loeb Center, the accessible entrance does not connect to an elevator that is student accessible.

To determine what is accessible, the campus utilizes a rubric

for its campus map, available on the college website. Certain walkways cannot be designated as accessible due to the grade of their slope — a crucial challenge for the “college on the hill.” Pedestrian safety is another major concern, and an administrative priority. In my email exchange

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Graphic courtesy of Nina Aagaard '26

Some slopes on the “college on the hill“ are too steep to traverse.

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Disabled Students Discuss Accessibility on Campus Continued from page 18 with director of accessibility strategy and resources Jodi Foley, she noted that “We carefully consider each recommended path based on safety first and convenience second.” Foley mentioned the college’s Facilities Accessibility Study Executive Summary, which outlines the college’s broader plans for increasing accessibility following its recently completed physical accessibility assessment, which “provided Amherst College with a blueprint for enhancing physical accessibility on campus.”

Many college buildings are exempt from modern accessibility policy under the ADA due to their age. The college is aware of this issue — its most recent Facilities Accessibility Study Executive Summary from 2019 specifically notes its aim to “expedite improvements to those facilities constructed prior to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 that have not undergone major renovations since” (a category that includes many of the buildings on our nearly two-hundred-year-old, topographically unique, campus). But as Hodges lamented, “Do we have to rely on ADA technicalities?”

Book & Plow Farm and the Powerhouse have posed major challenges for Hodges, in terms of accessibility, due to their location. This is a troubling observation, considering the numerous

campus social events hosted at these venues, making it more difficult for disabled students to engage with the community.

Tora Koh ’23, a senior with asthma and blood pressure issues, talked about how they struggled with the campus’ layout even before beginning their official tenure as an Amherst student. They participated in the Summer Bridge program as an incoming freshman, where they lived in Hitchcock Dormitory in the triangle and had a class in Webster Hall near Memorial Hill. They recounted struggling daily in a new environment with sleep deprivation, sunburn, and the aggressive summer heat, problems all exacerbated by their long walk to classes.

Since then, Koh’s challenges have continued. While they have been able to choose their classes in a way that maximizes ease, they haven’t been able to participate as fully in non-academic life. They need to be especially motivated to go to events hosted on the First Year Quad, and Johnson Chapel is out of the question due to its distance. In our conversation, they mentioned Mead Art Museum, saying: “It’s a super neat place and I would highly recommend it … I just can’t.” The administration has implemented a program called Mammoth Rides, an ACPD-run service to drive students around campus. Having used Mammoth Rides in the post, Hodges has voiced their concerns about the

service – noting that it’s been difficult to identify which cars are the ACPD cars, and that students have had to wait outside in inclement weather.

Koh explained having to engage in a continual mental calculus to determine what Amherst activities they can participate in. This is the reason they live in Moore dormitory, to remain close to their many classes in the Science Center. “I’ve specifically had to go out of my way to position myself so that I’m not inconvenienced,” they said. With their singing lessons in the Arms Music Center, Koh has to walk up three flights of stairs and wait outside a classroom without benches.

Student experience like this shows the difficulties that all differently-constructed buildings on campus can pose. However, the facilities accessibility report notes that “the practicalities of funding and project management capacity dictate a phased approach” and so in improving accessibility in buildings on campus, they will prioritize “buildings that have not undergone major renovations since 1990 and that host unique programs or services not offered elsewhere on campus.”

Charlie Niedert ’25E, treasurer and social chair of the DNA, uses a wheelchair, and has faced issues with campus inaccessibility even before being physically present on campus. He informed Amherst of his disability after

his initial acceptance and faced hostility from the administration.

Niedert said that “I have been told explicitly that this place was not meant for me …When I started my time here, I was very forcibly suggested to not come to campus and wait until I was healthier.” He explained that the infrastructure rendered the campus inaccessible for him, and that the systems in place have reinforced existing limitations.

Although Niedert was thankfully able to attend Amherst, he struggled with the lack of a disability community on campus in 2019 after his battle with obtaining accommodations. He expressed gratitude for the creation of the DNA. He said, “We have all these resource centers for so many different identities and marginalizations and yet there’s nothing really for disabled students, so I think that having [the DNA] will be beneficial.” The DNA is unique in that it’s grounded by lived student experience, a place in which the messy realities of disabled student life are mutually understood by all.

In his day-to-day life, Niedert noted, “going downhill is great, going uphill is not so great,” and cited his main obstacle as being slow elevators. He’s also had issues going to the Health Center, as people often park in a way that blocks the disabled entrance.

This blocking of the accessible entrance was a constant before

Covid. He has encountered barriers when trying to access campus resources, saying that there are “academic resources [he] simply cannot physically get to.”

The college’s report notes that as new renovation and construction projects begin, “the college intends to convene ad hoc committees of campus stakeholders to review the designs and provide essential practical insights regarding accessibility that will complement our compliance with applicable building codes.”

Niedert noted how intentional these efforts need to be. “Including disabled people requires a lot of active effort and change in infrastructure, and administrative and even teaching approaches. And I think they [the administration] prioritize[s] the idea of prestige and rigor over the inclusion of disabled people.”

For the future of accessibility at Amherst, I believe the most important principle to follow is the evergreen slogan used in the 20th century disability rights movement — “nothing about us without us.” When designing accessibility policy, disabled people must be at the forefront and present in all places where decisions are made.

In Amherst’s continuous quest for excellence, we cannot abandon disabled students. If we want to be a truly diverse, welcoming community, we have to interrogate all of campus life — including the very ground beneath our feet.

43 Amity Street: In Praise of the Jones Library Valentin P. Guergueb 2021-2022 Language Assistant Among the many resources our Valley offers, it has always surprised me to see how few Amherst students were members of the Jones Library.

Of course, many of you readers may already be familiar with this endearing institution that graces our small town. However, for the newcomers, the skeptics, or the busy, I’d like to

share some of the many reasons why I find the Jones so precious.

In front of Amherst Coffee and Amherst Cinemas, two equally important centers of the town’s intelligentsia, stands the main building of our small library system. An historic edifice from the 1920’s, it welcomes visitors with a New-England style carved pineapple as a symbol of hospitality. And indeed, friendly people work there. The whole place has been

designed with the aim of making you feel at home: carpets, sofas, pillows, and even a fireplace make the library warm and comfortable. It’s a convenient shelter for the rainy days, a refuge when things go wrong, and a cozy cocoon when you need to rest.

Surrounded by amazing books, you can spend hours of joyous reading there, till you forget all your troubles.

Of course, you can also study, if you really want to: you’ll find quiet study

rooms in the back of the building.

However, I would suggest keeping the library immune from any boring task and heavy workload. This ain’t a prison; it’s a palace.

Let us compare mythologies: Frost has its catacombs, its offices and its long tables. You’re deemed to silence as soon as you enter. Even now that the “cafe” has reopened and you can access the terrace, this likely ain’t exactly your favorite place in the

whole wide world. Better go to The Black Sheep, right? On the other hand, you’ve got Jones and its garden, its living room and its press corner, all filled with singing toddlers, role-playing teens, ukulele concerts, painting exhibitions and book-clubs.

Needless to say, when I told people, “I’m going to the library”, only seldom did I refer to Frost.

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An Ode to the Public Library Continued from page 19 As a foreigner, I was very curious about the cultural activities that took place in the United-States. Libraries in America appeared to me as real centers of civic life. I’ve visited many during my travels, since they can teach you a good deal about the place you’re in (my favorite is Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library, which is both magnificent and welcoming). In Brooklyn, I even experienced libraries as potential shelters, after I had the brave and foolish idea to have a quick dip into the ocean... during Thanksgiving break. Thank God the Brooklyn Public Library system is so extended they had an open branch right by Coney Island.

Believe me, I’ve never been so happy to find a library by the beach! As I was slowly getting warm again, I came to understand the tremendous importance of libraries as tools for the common good, beyond their already magnificent role as temples of knowledge and relaxing reading rooms. Not only did the heated room save me from the terrible cold of the Atlantic, but it proved a wonderful resource for all kinds of people. I’ve witnessed Russian families trying to pass on their language to their little kids. I’ve seen old folks find a sense of belonging and connection, chat-

ting with librarians. I’ve seen locals spending an instructive hour reading the news. I’ve seen people creating community.

In truth, being a member of the Amherst library system provides you with a real connection with the town. Not only will you be able to attend numerous events, but you can learn about our small town and engage with its citizens. Jones is a collection point for the Amherst Survival Center's Food Drive and it hosts ESL and citizenship programs.

If you’re an American citizen, you can even volunteer to help immigrants become a part of this country.

The Jones definitely finds itself at the heart of local politics as well. Indeed, one of the main debates that took place in Amherst last Fall revolved around the necessity of expanding and rebuilding the library. It even led to a referendum, which saw the local population hugely support the librarians’ proposal. Finally, the library is a keeper of the town’s memory: as you may have seen if you’ve walked Amity Street, the Jones is the Amherst Historical Society closest neighbor, and it’s no surprise if it keeps both an Emily Dickinson as well as a Robert Frost collection.

Now you may think I’m a little bit too enthusiastic. It’s just a house filled with books, after all. Well, as they

say in Toronto, “I’m library people”.

Indeed, I must confess, I’m a little biased: I’ve had a library card since I was two years old, my best friend from high-school works as a librarian, and the one and only internship I’ve ever had was at my neighborhood’s branch library. But come on, there’s a reason for such excitement!

Don’t you ever feel the awe expressed by poetess Nikki Giovanni, whose verses in “My first memory (of librarians)” recalls: The welcoming smile of my librarian / The anticipation in my heart / All those books—another world—just waiting / At my fingertips Indeed, all kinds of documents are at hand! Cook books and travel guides, picture books and graphic novels, CDs and DVDs (although, to be completely fair, Frost Library actually possesses an amazing movie collection)… all for free! Among the thousands of documents that await you at the library, you may find a gem. Some of these books will help you kill time, while some will prove life-changing. There are books that will make your day, and others that will stay with you for years; books that help you understand how your mind and body work; books that make you believe in the power of friendship after someone has let you down; books that teach you valuable

skills.

If this is not enough, if the collection lacks anything you need, well, don’t worry: the Central and Western MAssachusetts Resource Sharing protocol (CWMAS) is simply incredible. Encompassing a hundred libraries in our part of the Commonwealth, it allows you to loan from all those places, all without leaving your own town (although you may see this as an invitation to discover the region). If the book or CD you’re looking for isn’t available in Amherst, maybe you can get it from Northampton or Adams? Just ask the librarian, and next week you’ll get an email: “hold is available for pickup”.

A rainy day in South Hadley? Lost in Belchertown? Stuck in Deerfield?

No-brainer: just go to the local library. Your card will work there.

Despite the banners hanging from the street lamps, I didn’t fall in love with Amherst. Of course, we have the mountains and the Pond, the river and the farms, the forest and plenty of trails. Of course there were cafes and donuts, welcoming parishes and a movie theater. Nonetheless, it was Jones library that had the biggest impact on my daily life.

Out of the blue, or during my Saturday morning routine, I would find myself relaxing on a sofa in the youth section, or browsing The New

Yorker in a comfortable armchair.

In his 1989 book, The Great Good Place, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg developed the concept of the “third place”: a place that’s neither home nor work, where you can go and relax, enjoy the simple pleasures of life, and connect with your environment. It can be a cafe or a community center, but libraries are serious candidates too. That’s pretty much how I see the Jones.

This article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention the two little sisters of our main library. If this letter results in a massive flow of visitors, and the Jones becomes crowded, they would offer a safe alternative.

Even in the current context, they allow you to distinguish yourself from classmates: not only are you not going to Frost, but you’re bypassing Jones as well! If you’re such a hipster, go to North or South, the two complementary locations of our library system. It’s an amazing walk to South Amherst and the elegant Munson Library. If you feel like going to Puffer’s Pond or the Mill District instead, then you can stop by North Amherst Library; just ride the PVTA. Even now that I’ve left Amherst College, I still receive the Library’s newsletter each week, along with the Student’s emails. I’m always glad to read them both.

Mammoth Mind-Pho-ness: Thanks Away From Amherst Pho Vu ’23 Columnist Thanksgiving is a cheerful holiday that you can spend with family, friends, or — if you’ve been planning well for a long time — both. I need to travel 8,500 miles from Amherst to get to my home in Ho Chi Minh City and 3,000 miles to visit my aunt’s house in Anaheim. Fares are proportional to geographical distance, and we don’t need a calculation to conclude that a two-way ticket to either of those cities would cost an arm and a leg. With this knowledge and less than a month left in the U.S., I made up my mind to spend the one-week break venturing into two of America’s biggest cities: Chicago and Saint

Paul.

When I arrived at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, it felt like Christmas had been in the air for eons. Aside from frosty snow and foggy breath, I saw people hugging at the airport as if they hadn’t seen each other in ages in temperatures well-below freezing. Taking 54 Eastbound to The Saint Paul Hotel, I got off at the station, and my jaw dropped at the absolutely luminous scenery in front of my eyes. From the Landmark Center and Landmark Plaza to Rice Park, everywhere was ornamented with light. If Justin Bieber’s “Mistletoe” had been on the radio, I might have been tricked into thinking I was one of the 2011 festive music video extras. As Christmas

was approaching, I was ready for this adventure.

If truth be told, no matter how well prepared you are, you will never be able to comprehend the strange rhythm of life’s troubles. They are as unwavering as Covid, and even if you get the recommended shots and boosters, you can still go down with them. Trying to find accommodations in both cities, I experienced a few of these troubles. In St. Paul, the hotel agent told me that if I didn’t have a debit or credit card, I wouldn’t be able to spend the night at the hotel even though I had already pre-paid for the room.

Of course, I had to use my gray matter to the fullest during my time away from Amherst. I responded

that a good hotel in our time is a commodity that provides both paid lodging and a positive experience to the guests, and that I couldn’t understand how a hotel that only accepted conventional payment methods could survive in the 21st century. I told him that I was an international student visiting Minnesota for the first time. My bank cards were running into problems, and my mother was in Vietnam. Back then, I didn’t know if my argument really held any grounds; all I wanted to do was lie down in a cozy room after a long journey from Amherst to South Station to the airport, two hours of airport delays, an interstate flight, and a Metroline bus downtown. As a result, the hotel agent spoke to the

manager, and I was upgraded to the Queen's room as compensation for the mental damage I had suffered.

That night, I was hungry, and although all the stores were almost closed, my Google Maps detected an Asian noodle shop near my hotel closing at 11 p.m. When I left at 10:15 p.m., walking away from the block of my hotel, lights were still on, but danger started to become more salient. While snapping pictures of the scenes around me, I noticed some men smoking and heading towards me. I took a breath and hurried to the noodle shop at breakneck speed, pretending to be on the phone with my aunt. Yes, I still wanted the

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Reflecting on Trips to Chicago and Saint Paul Continued from page 20 noodles. Next mission: getting back to the hotel. Worrying that criminals would be most likely to attack someone who appears kind, I called my dad on speakerphone as I walked.

Three days later, I was preparing for my trip to Chicago. I stayed at the FreeHand Chicago, and I totally recommend it. From my hotel, it was only a one-minute walk to the Pizzeria Uno — birthplace of deep dish pizza, where I quickly learned that, if you go alone, you can get in faster than a group. In Chicago, I decided to walk between locations as much as possible, both to save money and to familiarize myself with the place.

Roaming Chicago streets is like a chess game, and each skyscraper has its own architectural characteristics that make figuring out your location in the city by looking at the skyline a memory game in and of itself.

Although there were moments of fright and terrors that surfaced as I wandered through Chicago, and unexpected obstacles during my time in St. Paul, I returned from the trip having taken a few more steps forward on the path to becoming a real adult. Progress was made as I went down the list of possible necessities like toothbrush and toothpaste, and when I made the hard choice to pick

out only a few outfits to fit in my carry-on luggage. Progress happened when I realized that there was no Valentine Dining Hall where I could get food without limit, and that a breakfast including eggs benedict, creme brulee, soy milk, and service fees cost me 50 dollars. Progress happened when I bought three bowls of Nongshim noodles and two bottles of Smartwater for a total of 10 dollars, dodging the problem that even just two Smartwater water bottles at the hotel cost 12 dollars. Progress happened when the hotel did not have an electric kettle, and I learned to cook noodles with a Kellogg coffeemaker.

Progress happened when I decided to pay an extra $300 to upgrade to a single hotel room rather than the shared room I was given in Chicago, concerned that sharing rooms with a stranger in a bustling city might put not only my valuables but my life at potential peril.

Progress happened when I learned that you can create your own must-go destinations list without mindlessly checking off an online list of recommendations. Landmarks are only for tourists, but talking to locals will help you find the real hidden gems. Instead of going to the Contemporary Art Museum, I chose the Museum of Ice Cream. By the

end of that visit, I could pride myself on being a short-term ice cream roll maker for a street vendor with Ice Cream Lab, and learning to say “No” to getting more ice cream (even though an entrance ticket guarantees unlimited access to all desserts).

Progress happened when I brought a charger to recharge my gadgets on the go, and progress happened when I combined Google Maps and marked-by-memory landmarks to navigate roads to get back to the hotel safely.

All in all, I was able to reassure my family about my independence when I was traveling alone. I really took heed of everyone’s advice and prioritized my safety when traveling to cities where guns were free to use.

Actually, before arranging my weeklong trip, I asked a Chinese friend of mine to travel with me. Her face turned panicky: “Why would you go to Chicago? It’s not safe there for us Asians, and you’re a girl too.” She told me to be careful and wished me good luck, and I think her blessing worked.

The trip was indeed a perfect opportunity to spruce up my ability to spend time with myself anywhere I am, and those short six days made me believe that I could live alone happily after graduating. It provided an insight to trusting myself more,

Photo Courtesy of Pho Vu '23

Landmark Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota. and maybe one day when I travel with someone, I can show them just how much fun and multifaceted a place can be.

A total of six days spent in Chicago and Saint Paul is probably not enough for me to fully understand those cities, but I can definitely be relied on for useful advice if you’re ever planning to visit these two cities for a short time.

Spending time in two places colder than Amherst is definitely one of

my more unorthodox decisions, and stumbling upon kind-hearted people and underappreciated spots in these two metropolitan areas nonetheless brought me joy in the most unsettling way. I had already had the experience of living away from home in South Korea, but I felt safe there because I was in a country sharing much of the culture I was born and raised in. I’m glad I bit the bullet this Thanksgiving and went to places I was far more unfamiliar with.

We Have a Problem With Paying Attention Andrew Rosin ’25 Managing Podcast Editor These couple of weeks are a little bit different because of the World Cup. I’ve been watching soccer games in every single one of my classes,” one student told me last week. This student is evidently not alone: In one of my classes last Wednesday, which overlapped with the Mexico versus Saudi Arabia and the Argentina versus Poland games, I observed at least six students dutifully tuned-in to the World Cup broadcast. But while we might be tempted to write off the weeks of the World Cup as an anomaly, this past week has exposed issues with in-class distractions that have plagued Amherst students since long before the tour-

nament began.

Throughout the semester, I have informally studied the various activities my classmates engage in when they are not paying attention. I have observed two students, on multiple occasions, spend entire class periods browsing financial analyst internship opportunities on Handshake. I have observed students watching professional volleyball, feature length films, and Super Smash Bros gameplay. I have observed students play Wordle, shop for new bathing suits, and write essays for different classes.

And, of course, I have observed students spend countless hours over the course of the semester checking their emails or responding to texts.

While the things that students do in class might be surprising, the fact

that so many students struggle to pay attention in class is not. A 2010 study

by Wharton Senior Fellow Matt Killingsworth and Harvard Professor Daniel Gilbert found that “​​ stimulus-independent thought or mind wandering appears to be the brain’s default mode of operation.” In other words, humans spend about 47% of the time thinking about something unrelated to what they are currently doing. This propensity for mind wandering is independent of the activity in which an individual is engaged — whether that be watching a movie or attending a lecture.

With that said, there are certain factors that make it easier or harder for students to pay attention in class. The most obvious example is the length of the class. In recent

years, young people who regularly use social media sites like Instagram and TikTok have grown used to the rapid dopamine hits that these platforms deliver. Combined with the long stretch of online classes during the Coronavirus pandemic, when one student told me he would spend class “playing video games and watching YouTube,” it is near-impossible to pay attention during the entirety of an 80 minute — or even 50 minute — class.

While it is unlikely that the administration would ever shorten classes, there are strategies that professors can employ to make long classes more bearable. Certain professors, for example, give their classes a short break halfway through their lecture. And while the correlation

could be entirely spurious, it appears that students in my class with a three minute break spend much less time on their phones than students in my classes without breaks. In support of this conclusion, psychologist Gemma Briggs argues that “we’ve got a wealth of information in our heads about what normally happens in given situations, what we can expect.

And those expectations and our experiences directly mold what we see and how we process information in any given time." So, the expectation of a break after 40 minutes would lead students to more actively pay attention in the time preceding and following the break. For professors interested in improving participa-

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Stop Checking Your Emails During Class Continued from page 21 tion and engagement in their classes, a short mid-lecture break is a simple, low-cost tool.

When I asked Fran Torres ’26 about the cases in which he finds it most difficult to pay attention in class, he told me that “it depends on the style of lecture” and that “when the class size is bigger, there’s not as much one-on-one talking, so your attention can start to slip.” This observation — that students’ attention spans are mediated by the professor’s style of lecture and the size of the class — yields some possible solutions. First, you could find professors whose lecture style requires students to be actively engaged, such as those who cold call students or who integrate activities and small group discussions into their lectures.

Second, you could register for smaller classes in which, as Torres told me, “Not paying attention isn’t an option.”

There are some obvious flaws with the aforementioned suggestions, namely that you cannot always control for your professor’s lecture style nor is it feasible to only take small classes throughout your Amherst career. Does this mean that students have to take it upon themselves to try harder to not get distracted during class? Unfortunately, this strategy is unlikely to prove successful. As University of Pennsylvania psychologist Angela Duckworth notes, “Willpower is a limiting resource, it’s unpleasant and we’re not willing to do it for very

long, so the best thing to do is create a situation where it’s just harder to be distracted.” Duckworth’s research introduces what she terms “situation modification,” which refers to the process of changing your physical environment to remove temptations.

This is in contrast to what she terms “response modulation,” or trying to “voluntarily suppress an undesirable impulse or amplify a desirable one.”

Say, for example, that you frequently find yourself distracted by your phone. In the context of class, Duckworth’s notion of “situation modification” could mean turning off your phone’s notifications or leaving your phone in your backpack, as opposed to relying on your willpower to not pick up your phone every time you receive a notification. This strategy is closely related to what is known as a “commitment strategy,” or a structural constraint that you impose on yourself when you have one set of preferences — “I want to pay attention during class” — that does not align with a set of preferences in the future — “I want to check this text.” Thus, if you know you lack the willpower to not check your phone during class, better to not have your phone accessible in the first place.

As the examples at the beginning of this article suggest, however, eliminating phones as a distraction only solves part of the problem. Most of the time that students spend distracted they do so on their computers, which they have out to take notes, access readings, or use class-specific software. Professors

who do not allow technology, then, are implementing a sort of paternalistic situation modification for their students. If students cannot control how they use their technology, then prohibiting it altogether makes it impossible for students to succumb to their lack of willpower.

Some students support these no technology policies: “You should not be copying down what the professor is saying, word for word, anyway,” Jaden Richards ’25 told me, in response to the argument that having access to Google Docs and Word makes it easier to take notes. He added that not being able to mindlessly write down every word that your professor is saying compels students to think critically and creates a more stimulating learning environment. “The students who don’t pay attention in class are dead weight,” Richards added.

Naturally, many students find having access to technology beneficial. “I hate printing out my readings and underlining them. It just works way better for me to annotate on the computer, and I feel like I can compile my thoughts more clearly,” Inés Rossi ’25 told me. But apart from the practical arguments that computers and tablets save paper, increase efficiency, and aid organization, some students also object to the paternalistic nature of the no technology policies — or at least argue that Amherst students deserve a certain amount of autonomy, and that these students should suffer the consequences if they abuse it. “We’re at the stage of our lives where we

Graphic courtesy of Nina Aagaard '26

Students are faced with myriad distractions in class, from texts, to emails, to the ever-inviting crossword and more. have to be responsible for our own education,” Harrison Lundy ’25 argued. While structural solutions like banning technology are the proven best-practice for eliminating distractions and improving attention spans, they are no panacea.

Ultimately, some of the root causes of students’ short attention spans might be out of our control: “I feel like all of my friends are very tired this year. Everyone’s in a constant state of stress. Everyone seems a little bit less engaged,” Rossi noted. Most of the students I talked to estimated that they spend 70% of class paying attention and 30% of class zoned-out or distracted. If true, it’s a figure that

bests Killingsworth’s and Gilbert’s finding that humans’ minds wander 47% of the time. Nonetheless, 30% is 15 minutes lost during a 50 minute class, and while I would not go so far as to say that students who do not pay attention are “dead weight,” it is detrimental to both our individual and our collective learning experience when some students are scrolling through Twitter or deleting emails during class time. And while there is no simple solution for lengthening students’ attention spans, one thing is clear: if we hope to improve engagement during class, expecting students to simply control their attention will not get us far.

by Alice Burg ’23

Amusements

w

Puzzle Palooza | Sudoku and Minis - Dec. 7, 2022

Liam Archacki ’24 and John Joire ’26 Senior Managing Editor and Managing Puzzles Editor ACROSS 1 Government ID 4 Tiny particle 6 Luigi's love 7 "Down" from Johnson Chapel 8 Way to go

DOWN 1 Fiji neighbor 2 Like a little tea cup, perhaps 3 "Up" from Johnson Chapel 5 Verbal shrug 6 Nile reptile

John Joire ’26 Managing Puzzles Editor Solutions: Nov. 30

Sawyer Pollard ’24 Digital Director ACROSS 1 Impressive achievement, in Gen Z slang 5 Aptly named coffee shop, for short 6 Coffee shop to split a muffin in 8 Annoys 9 Commercial goods, for short

DOWN 1 Amherst degs.

2 "He's me" 3 Informal accreditation of being a gangster 4 Coffee shop fitting as a study spot, with "The" 7 Language suffix

g Arts&Living

Some Amherst Arts Events You Might Have Missed...

Ahead of the end of the semester, many arts groups at Amherst had their final performances. Here’s a quick recap of some of this week’s noteworthy events.

— The Arts & Living Editorial Team 1. Orchestra The Amherst Symphony Orchestra performed pieces from composers Georges Hue, Antonin Dvorak and Pyotr Tchaikovsky for their winter concert on Dec. 3. The concert featured soloists Ashley Kim ’23E on flute and Taz Kim ’23 on cello, and guest conductor Charlotte Wang ’24.

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Photo courtesy of Bianca Sass '23

2. Intersections Intersections Dance Company presented their end-of-semester performance “In Dialogue,” on Dec. 4.

It featured a variety of dance styles, including contemporary, improvisational, tap, and musical theater, with choreography by students.

3. DASAC Dance and Step at Amherst College (DASAC) performed their semester showcase, “The A-List” on Dec. 3 and 4. The performance featured eight pieces, set to music by artists like Beyoncé and SZA. It portrayed the confidence, glamor, and mystery of the A-Lister through dances choreographed by students.

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Photo courtesy of Sterling Kee '24

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Photo courtesy of Sandor Weiss '25

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Photo courtesy of Leland Culver '24

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Photo courtesy of Alex Brandfonbrener '23

4. Green Room Last weekend also featured Green Room’s magnificent production of the musical “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” directed

by Leland Culver ’24. A cast of both new and veteran actors grounded this heartfelt and fun production, which featured spellers from the audience and a live two-piece pit.

5. Jazz@Amherst Jazz@Amherst presented their end of semester Combo Showcase on Dec. 5 and 6, showcasing six student jazz groups: Taurus, Scorpio, Aries, Leo, Pisces and Libra (pictured in image 5). The performances were the culmination of a semester of devoted practicing by all of the students involved.

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Student Play “Workshop” Sparks Imagination Joe Sweeney ’25 Staff Writer The beginning of “Workshop,” an original play from Ghostlight, written and directed by Miles Garcia ’25, is a little boring. Will (Lucas Bernstein ’25) sits alone in an empty room. He stares at his computer. He checks the time. Eventually he just starts making weird noises to himself. In all the chaos that followed — all the strange outbursts, explosive misunderstandings, wince-worthy intimacies — I sometimes wondered what it would be like to just sit with one of the characters. Then I’d remember the beginning: Oh. Right. It would be boring. Well, I guess that’s the question answered.

Shall we bring in the people?

In the next scene they’ve all filed in — eight teens, ranging in age from high school to college freshmen, and Mr. Holcroft (Clay Zachery ’23), their instructor for a week-long summer writing workshop. That’s all there really is to the play's plot, at least in terms of premise. The rest is just kinetic energy: a room of young people in the midst of reinventing themselves, trying to understand each other and trying to be understood, spinning stories that grind, shiver and fly through the air.

They start by going around the room introducing themselves with various notable stories, from which I’ll select a few highlights. There’s Anya (Phoebe Mugford ’25), who the audience learns is an adventurous spirit (she scores a 25 on the Rice Purity Test, to say the least) but who introduces herself with an innocent story from her childhood. Sitting alone at recess, a girl comes up to her and asks to play foursquare. At first, Anya tries to turn her away, but the girl persists, and Anya agrees to play. But while Anya is playing, her pants keep falling down. Trying to save herself from embarrassment, she tells the other girls “My mom must’ve not tightened my pants that morning.” Despite this, she continues to play foursquare with those girls for the rest of year, “and what’s funny” is that she “didn’t even want to.” Recounting this Anya laughs hysterically, in the literal sense of the word, as if she cannot tell the story

Photo courtesy of Gabriella Moore '23

This past weekend, Ghostlight presented “Workshop,” a play written and directed by Miles Garcia ‘25. Joe Sweeney ‘25 reviews the piece, expressing appreciation for its treatment of the unsaid. without losing her mind.

There’s Nate (Tim Carroll ’25), a jock who never gets over his anxiety that he doesn’t quite fit in with the group (an affect that Carroll sustains excellently throughout the play’s runtime). He starts his introduction by saying his dog died, hits a dead end, and nothing more to that story.

He thinks, and then all at once he’s animated with prophetic intensity to tell a bizarre tale about cereal (which everyone seems to enjoy). The story reaches its climax with Nate stealing and devouring cereal with such ferocity that his mom breaks down in tears. “Really?” someone asks.

Uh, no, Nate responds, unsteadied.

“That was an, uh, embellishment.”

He looks over at Mr. Holcroft. That’s called an embellishment, right? Holcroft quietly nods. Right.

There’s Peter (Matt Vitelli ’24) a freshman. “In highschool,” he clarifies. Holcroft smiles wanly. “We know.” Peter smiles back, uncomprehending and slightly fearful. He commences his narrative: “My cat died.” Sydney (Eleanor Walsh ’25) covers her mouth in shocked sym-

pathy: “I’m so sorry.” Peter looks at her, puzzled. “Oh no…did you not…” Turns out he’s only doing a bit; a callback to Nate’s dead dog.

Unfortunately no one gets the joke.

It will be the first of many times Peter renders himself incomprehensible (and for that reason, the audience should never underestimate him. Vitelli’s performance is nothing less than a tour-de-force; if you think you know Peter, then another thing is coming).

What to make of all this? There are many points of focus. Social realism, for one — realism in the portrayal of interactions between kids that don’t really know each other.

The dialogue sounds like natural speech, and so do the monologues.

The characters sound and act like people. “There are people in everyone’s lives that they know that are like these characters,” Carroll said to me in an interview. Moreover, many of the players felt they were essentially typecast for their role.

Bernstein said that his character “reminded him a lot of himself in high school” and even that he felt as

if “[Garcia] wrote the part with him in mind.”

It is this surface of realism that makes the play so tantalizing. Characters act from motives that are obscure, half-intimated and seemingly unconscious. “The relationships are interesting because there’s a lot that’s unsaid,” noted Zoe Jonas ’25, who plays Lexie, a charmingly sarcastic figure (she can’t think of a story for her introduction because her “mind is literally blank,” which “sounds like an excuse but it's not.” This line is delivered perfectly – the moment it was said I knew exactly who her character was supposed to be).

What’s really important about any given scene is anyone’s guess.

While the play admits to being distrustful about blurring the line between fiction and reality (Holcroft expresses these doubts explicitly in an inspired rant), it also embraces the joy of blurring the truth. Thus the guessing-at-what’s-important is not tedious but rather delightful.

Carroll, Jonas and Bernstein all reported that their favorite line in the play is “that is so baller.” Nate de-

livers this line after hearing Anya’s story about a guy who wanted to kiss her while he had mono. Is that something a real person would say?

The play convinces me that the question both does and does not matter.

For me, “Workshop” is all about the imagination. I could go on and on about the play’s details. What I want to do now, though, is focus on how my imagination has been captured. The scenes that speak to me the most are three moments shared between Adam (Slate Taylor ’25, who describes his character as a “well-meaning moron”) and Sunni (Deb Thayer ’24).

The first scene, between just the two of them, is spent sharing confidences. Sunni tells Adam she has difficulty controlling her anger towards people that disappoint her, so much so that she would rather “erase them from her life” to give them “the silent treatment.” The audience never finds out why she tells Adam this: maybe she has a crush on him, or maybe she’s trying to symbolically

Continued on page 26

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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“Workshop” Depicts Tensions Between Young Adults Continued from page 25 make up for all the annoying people in her life by being honest with the most annoying person she knows (in other words, complete opposite motivations – the beauty of the play is held in the moments where its characters could be speaking and acting from one extreme or the other, or from anywhere in between). Either way, Adam commiserates by offering some advice. It falls flat; Sunni acknowledges his good intentions but feels compelled to say that he “actually just sounds like really stupid.” Adam just takes this, deflated.

The scene ends. Awkward.

The second scene is with the whole group. Sunni shares a short story, and Adam lays on needling criticism after criticism (both of Sunni’s story and how she responds to his critique). Tensions reach a near-boiling point, and yet there is a moment when it seems things might

simmer down (it is, after all, only a writing workshop). That is, until Adam slides in one final barb: “You aren’t gonna give me the silent treatment now, are you Sunni?”

Several gasps went out from the audience.

It’s a tease, and all teasing is cruel, of course. But it’s also a testing of boundaries; ‘what can I say to you? will you still like me after I say it?’

And so beneath Adam’s cruelty there is a tone of uncertain need, the desire to know where he stands in Sunni’s affections.

Sunni only hears the cruelty, and blows up accordingly. The fact that it is only a writing workshop does not mitigate her fury. Actually, it only heightens her fury. How is it that people I hardly know, who I’m only related to by this stupid summer camp — how is it that they can make me feel this way about myself?

And so, there’s a third scene with just them two again, trying to fit the

pieces back together. Adam tepidly apologizes for being such a jerk; Sunni affirms that he was a jerk.

He asks her if she forgives him. She pauses, but only for a moment. She says she “doesn’t forgive people.” Still, she says — even though he “actually really hurt” her, there will come a time when she simply “won’t care anymore.”

Adam has no idea how to respond to this and instead pulls up the Wikipedia page on famous people who died on the toilet, reading in loud disbelief while Sunni digests his words in silence. Eventually he realizes that things will remain as they are and stops. The scene ends.

I am still amazed, days after seeing the play, at this moment. Right before my eyes, before I can even notice it, the mere awkwardness between these two characters transforms into something that is almost unbearable. The implication behind Sunni’s words is so painfully obvious:

she does not, or cannot, forgive herself, for anything. The audience has not been given enough information to know why this is the case. All we have is Sunni herself, who we wish we could give a word of advice, a look of sympathy, a hug.

Instead, Adam sits in our place, reading about people dying on toilets. I am genuinely upset watching him – Adam, who wants something so badly from Sunni (he doesn’t even know what) that he hears nothing at all.

There’s tragedy in this, and yet the scene itself is so undramatic. Strangely, as I continue to watch him, my anger fades and is replaced with baffled recognition – as the scene drags on, it resembles more and more a scene from my own life, a memory that I had forgotten because it seemed unimportant. And so, I remember slowly realizing that, in my own life, I am probably more like Adam than I will ever know. I am not the one

who hears. I am the one who hears nothing, and I have always been, and I will always be.

In a way, what I realized is obvious enough. Of course we are all ignorant to some non-zero extent; that is the price you pay for being yourself, and not anyone else. Yet as I watched Sunni and Adam – as I watched what was lost, what no one even knew was there – I wondered if that is something I will ever truly be able to accept.

In the play’s penultimate scene, Sydney reads a poem about rain. She discusses the chaos of the collisions of drops, bonding to each other and tearing apart. Really, though, the poem is about the “river of time,” and moving on. Life goes on after summer camp, after high school, after college, even. So don’t spend your life trying to get over the life you never had.

Unless you have to — ah! Unless you have to.

“The Banshees of Inisherin” Proves a Roaring Success Ross Kilpatrick ’24E Staff Writer Friendships between men tend to disappear, not die. Not so in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” where Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) tells his closest friend Pádraic (Colin Farrell) to stop talking to him forever. They live in a small, isolated Irish village.

Colm wants to focus on his fiddling, on finishing the song that will make him great. But he feels the approaching deadline of death and decides that he doesn’t have time for silly talks with Pádraic. Pádraic doesn’t understand and keeps trying to talk to Colm. Colm threatens to cut off his own fingers if Pádraic keeps talking to him.

The movie fulfills his promise, and fingers do in fact come off. It's no spoiler that the movie is violent. But the violence itself didn’t feel surprising, either. The potential violence simmers underneath the whole movie, beneath every beautiful shot of the Irish countryside, every drunken moment in the pub, and especially the distant cannon shots which echo over the water, a

reminder of the Irish Civil War. But more than just violent, “The Banshees of Inisherin” is lonely, too. Pádraic is continually isolated, pressed and put through increasingly miserable scenarios. His much brighter sister leaves to take a teaching job, and slowly, he realizes he might not be as smart as her. He becomes meaner, angrier and more isolated. All of this makes “The Banshees of Inisherin” feel dark, melancholy and strange.

It’s in this uneven, isolated feeling where “The Banshees of Inisherin” really shines. The film leverages history, especially the Irish Civil War, to amplify its sense of loneliness, and uses the Irish Coast to instill a desperate and austere beauty, of a land and people isolated, abandoned and strange to each other.

But the film never dives into excessive violence or loneliness. Rather, the film follows Pádraic’s attempts to claw himself out of his isolation.

The violence is brief and desperate, more pathetic and pitiable than horrifying or gruesome.

I also shouldn’t ignore the ways that “The Banshees of Inisherin” is

funny and absurd. The premise is a little ridiculous; the escalation of events even more so. And there’s something inherently humorous in violence that comes out of male loneliness, out of the simple desperation of Pádraic and the austere, cold ambitions of Colm, and his desperation to do something worth remembering. They are becoming lonely, each in their own way. They hurt each other. One wishes that maybe things could be fixed, that these friends could go back to the way they were, a way we never see in the film.

At the end of the film, standing on the beach, Pádraic says to Colm, “There are some things which can never be made up for.” He pauses.

“And I think that’s good.” Across the water, The Irish Civil War is quiet, at least for now. There is more violence and misery to come.

Itaewon is designed for pedestrians, and perhaps the lack of accommodation for vehicles impeded timely assistance for victims stuck in the heart of the street.

While the police admitted that their “inadequate” response was

partially to blame for the mass casualty, the impatient individuals pushed and shoved in response to the slow-moving crowd should be identified as one of the major causes of the high death toll. A video depicting a violent push that caused people to topple forward has gone viral.

Amidst the deluge of news reports about the deadly incident, I found an NPR piece that offers eight helpful tips if we ever find ourselves in a massive crowd. I strongly favor the first tip it presents: leave immediately as the crowd builds up.

Living in South Korea as an international student gave me an unusual perspective. When I was in Itaewon, I did not join the crowd for fear of losing my passport and other paperwork that allowed me to stay in Korea legally. As soon as I realized that the exit was going to be blocked by increasing numbers of partygoers, I quickly signaled my friends to leave.

It’s heartbreaking and enraging to see so many young people my age lose their lives in this tragic way.

They deserve a carefree night to celebrate after experiencing so many

pandemic-related constraints in the last three years. As frustrated as I am, I feel grateful for still being here and for all my friends who have made it home safely.

For my Sculpture course’s Halloween wearable sculpture assignment, I decided to commemorate the victims by designing a strapless tank top with a yellow fringe miniskirt. The back of the top is painted with pink and topped with yellow paint splatters, representing the early enthusiasm of the celebration.

I then covered the front of the top with black paint to represent the fatality of the night. The skirt is yellow to evoke the yellow ribbons used to commemorate the victims from the Sewol Ferry sinking incident in 2014. After finishing the assignment, all that was left inside of me was a sense of relief, equal to my gratitude for all my friends in South Korea still doing okay.

Amherst is a community where we care about one another. Make sure that anyone you know in South Korea is safe and sound. This tragic incident is a lesson we can all learn from in the future.

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“Hostages” Enthralls Student, Faculty Audience Theo Hamilton ’23 Senior Managing Editor Last Tuesday, Nov. 29, a group of students and faculty gathered in Paino Lecture Hall to watch a screening of “Hostages,” a new fourpart documentary about the Iranian hostage crisis and its historical context. The event was hosted by Shahruz Ghaemi ’19, who worked as an associate archival producer for the documentary — finding, sourcing, and sorting through archival material. The screening opened with an introduction from Professor of History and Asian Languages and Civilizations Monica Ringer, who had helped organize the event.

Ghaemi also spoke, explaining the importance of narrating histories: “The legacy of the past is always up for contention, as are its possibilities.”

“Hostages” begins with a kaleidoscopic array of clips documenting reactions to the hostage crisis: American news channels breaking the story, Iranian revolutionaries condemning the embassy as “a CIA center” and “den of espionage,” and the hostages describing their fears of execution and hopes of “being home before Christmas.”

The broad strokes of the Iranian hostage crisis are well known: in the midst of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a group of Iranian students stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held its 52 inhabitants hostage for 444 days, torpedoing Jimmy Carter’s chances of reelection and redefining Iranian politics in the process.

“Hostages” digs deeper into the history and provides insightful context and a broad spectrum of viewpoints on the crisis, demonstrating many of the strengths of documentaries as vessels for communicating historical information. Weaving together photos and recordings from the time and new interviews with experts on the hostage crisis, as well as with many of the hostages and hostage takers themselves, the series’ first episode provides a complex view of a period of growing dissent and anti-American sentiment in Iran. At the center of this history is the figure of the Shah,

Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979.

In an interview with The Student, Ghaemi explained that one of the documentary’s goals was to tell the story “[without] taking any one particular side, understand where each of the sides came from.”

“Hostages” accomplishes this goal in its portrayal of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi: it balances interviews between some of the Shah’s supporters, who describe him as a progressive modernizer, and the revolutionaries who deposed him, who see him as a corrupt dictator.

Crucially, “Hostages” does not let the views expressed in these interviews go unchallenged, but also contextualizes these views by portraying events that formed them. .

These events are shocking, but they are crucial to understanding the energy and force of the revolution itself: a lavish, three-quarters of a billion dollar private feast celebrating the 2,500th anniversary of the Persian Empire to utilizing secret police to lock up and torture political opponents and dissidents.

In one particularly moving interview, Iranian photographer Reza Deghati describes months of imprisonment and torture after distributing photos of starving and homeless Iranians from towns across the country. In another shocking interview with the Shah by an American reporter, the Shah is asked about his use of force to repress political enemies. He responds nonchalantly, “My only answer to that is — who cares?”

Throughout all four parts of the series, “Hostages” continues the practice of trying to understand all viewpoints without hiding the consequences of any side’s actions. As a viewer, I found this particularly helpful for navigating the politics of the Iranian Revolution. The opposition to the Shah came from a huge diversity of sources, ranging from reactionary extremists like Ayatollah Khomeini (who would become Supreme Leader of Iran) to moderate parliamentarians and radical left-wing organizations. Representatives of each of these positions, and many in between, appear in videos or interviews throughout

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

On Nov. 29, Shahruz Ghaemi ‘19 hosted a screening of “Hostages." Theo Hamilton ‘23 reflects on the series, on which Ghaemi worked as an archival producer.

“Hostages.”

In an interview with The Student, Ghaemi said that the documentary is able to take this approach in large part because “people were so engaged in making history at the time,” noting that amateur journalists, both American and Iranian, created a huge outpouring of sources. In fact, the archival team ended up working with 8,326 total photos and videos.

One of the most striking parts of “Hostages” was the historical nuance with which it portrays the events of the hostage crisis themself. Without ever losing track of the harm and trauma inflicted upon the hostages and the crisis’s contribution to the rise of Khomeini’s reactionary government, “Hostages” manages to incorporate the voic-

es of many of the hostage-takers.

Ghaemi acknowledges that this was a careful balancing act: “I understand if people view the documentary as overly justifying the hostage takers … but I just hope they see that we are presenting nuanced understandings of each side of the conflict.”

It might sound out of place to say this about a documentary covering one of the most important events of the twentieth century — especially an event marked so heavily by tragedy — but one of the greatest strengths of “Hostages” is that it is genuinely engaging and thought-provoking. In fact, the day after the screening I spent three hours transfixed, watching the rest of the documentary play out on my laptop. With finals week

fast approaching, this was partly a procrastination technique; but it was also a result of the documentary’s ability to capture the emotional context and energy of the events it portrayed, through its use of videos and photos that captured the live moment. By combining a thoughtful and complex view of the past with an ability to capture the engaging, emotional breadth of the events it covers, “Hostages” provides an important and unique window into the past, while demonstrating many of the unique strengths of documentaries as a format for narrating history.

“Hostages” is currently streaming on HBO, and is available free for all Amherst students through xfinityoncampus.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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CONTEXT, CREATION, COME UP

“In order to be refreshing,” says Freeman Rabb ’25, “you have to blow everything else out of the water.” In this edition of “Context, Creation, Come Up”, I spoke with Rabb about the “Context” behind their music experimentation, the “Creation” of what they call a “Special EP”, and what’s on the “Come Up” for this burgeoning artist. You can find Rabb’s music, including “At A Catalyst”, on all streaming platforms.

Freeman Rabb’s stage name is Ernesto Birmingham, the latest in a long line of names with deep and thoughtful significance. “It was Eric Fauna for a while… I used to go by the name Amos Othello.

Amos was the name of my namesake, and Othello was the one Black character Shakespeare ever wrote about.” But Rabb admitted that the actual origin of the name Ernesto Birmingham is unclear, even to him. “[The name] was just in my notes.” Yet even though the name’s appearance is inexplicable, the Philly native had a lot to say about it. “Ernesto was my name in my Spanish class in, I think, high school. Birmingham is where my mom is from. That’s the simple answer, but Ernesto is also the Latin/ Spanish/Italian version of Ernest, which is Donald Glover’s character from Atlanta. And Birmingham almost sounds like ‘Burning Ham,’ [which] is a very interesting biblical story where Ham’s skin was burnt, and that was considered a curse in the Bible.”

Rabb later goes into more detail about the psychological effects of their stage name. “[Ernesto Birmingham is] kind of provocative in a really subtle way… it’s supposed to make you [feel] a little uncomfortable.” They proceeded to philosophize about how liberat-

ing the name Ernesto Birmingham has been for them, “I think about that name as a medium in which I can grow. I don’t feel constrained by it at all, which is something that I’ve felt with previous names both given and created.”

These feelings about names also extend to Rabb’s thought process behind titling their projects.

Starting with their previous EP, “Nevada Robinson,” Rabb told me about a greater motif they had in mind. “[Nevada Robinson] is a name that I came up with I think a bit after I came up with the name Ernesto Birmingham. I came up with the idea for my EPs where it would be a state first name and a Black last name. The original name for ‘At A Catalyst’ was ‘Arizona Harris’. I was also going to have Pennsylvania Davis… Dakota Carter, Illinois Wilson, Montana Moore, Kentucky Taylor, and my final EP was going to be Washington Washington.” Although they abandoned this naming convention, Rabb’s concept reveals the evident sense of humor, planning, and care for their projects.

These qualities also apply to one of Rabb’s older albums “SO REFRESHING!!,” a name they had on their mind for “years.” Elaborating on the context behind this seminal work, Rabb told us, “This [album] was before I ever really put together songs. I would rap, and I would make beats, but I would never really put those two together. But I had this idea that I would have an album or an EP called ‘So Refreshing’ with one or two exclamation points.” Rabb explained how their time spent working on the project gave the title new meaning to them. “When we were going into quarantine I started really thinking about [SO REFRESHING!!]. I keep hearing

Photo courtesy of Maria Stenzel

Kobe Thompson ’24 sits down with Freeman Rabb ’25 to discuss their latest EP, “At A Catalyst.” these interviews with young artists and the interviewer always says, ‘It’s so refreshing to hear this type of art.’ They would just constantly use that [phrase] and I had a mixed relationship with that. I really wanted to be called ‘So Refreshing,’ but I realized… making music puts me in some type of weird competition with other artists. In order to be refreshing, you have to blow everything else out of the water. You have to be the artist that makes people question why they enjoy the music that’s around them.”

Rabb was surprised by the critical response to the album, which challenged some of their approaches to making music. “Then I made the album, then I got accolades. Then I got attention from a lot of people who weren’t just my friends. People who I didn’t think were ever going to listen to my stuff… Now [the title] takes on this other meaning… I’m in

my room, zoned in. My best art comes from the apathy that I have towards how it’s received. That is refreshing to me. The smog for me was always this expectation. The reason I would never finish a project before is because I was scared I wouldn’t like it, it wouldn’t be up to my standards. In reality, it wouldn’t be up to the standards of the World. But I got over that by having this apathy, this real ‘doing-whatever-the-Hell-I-want’ attitude when it comes to music.”

Rabb’s music has been well received and, up until the release of “At A Catalyst”, largely an armyof-one effort to produce. Their album releases garnered support and attention from Rabb’s presence on social media, especially TikTok. From there, they were able to connect with other artists who are prominently featured in their latest EP. “[In] ‘At A Catalyst’ I have two favorite songs: ‘BROTHER WAS-

SUP?’ and ‘Sterling Silver’. Because ‘BROTHER WASSUP?’ has Young Wabo on it, and ‘Sterling Silver’ has Jonah Love. I’m going to talk about ‘Owen Gray Freestyle’ because that’s the first track I’m releasing where it’s not my beat. So my good friend Summer Roman, whom I met at a Berkely music production course when I was 15, it’s their beat. It was cool because it was a very loose song format.

When you listen to it, there’s two choruses, and you have a really long verse. I think it’s some of my best writing ever. But I get to do something a little different because I’m not focusing so much on making the beats in that process.” had a sign that was that clear. It was amazing.”

Read the full interview online at www.amherststudent.com

— Kobe Thompson '24

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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The Indicator ×

THE STUDENT These pieces were initally published in The Indicator’s 2022 issue “Break” and are presented here in colloboration with The Indicator.

“The Persimmon Tree” Kei Lim ’25 The Indicator Staff Writer A lifetime’s worth of spinning, and all virtue stumbles, enmity circling pupils like rings of ebony ink the bark of the persimmon tree.

Branches beckon like the arms of my mother, calloused by the abandonment of men who knew her fragility and whispered honeysuckle promises still — They spooned hope into her mouth and scratched filth into her soul before leaving her to cradle Guilt against a pitted chest.

Sweetness fills the air, wafting from the single persimmon she bears.

But hidden among foliage grown thick and disheveled, it is small and nearly rotten.

Enchanted by the tangled fortress and baited by the promise of fruit, foolish little boys climb high into her leaves.

Dancing drunkenly, she savors the taste of dulcet deceit.

Bitterness has hardened soil to asphalt, and her teeth bare no mercy.

It hardly takes a second — A second split into fragments, and fragments as many as there are bones scratching the ground.

Gabby Avena ’25 The Indicator Editor-in-Chief Trigger Warning: Mention of sexual assault

“Doe, a Deer”

When I am thinking of what to write, I pick at the skin on my lips. I hold the cracked bits between my nails, pinch, and pull transparent flecks of thoughts as a snake peels off its skin, exposing soft flesh underneath. This, too, is an act of translation. I wonder — if I picked, and picked, and picked, maybe I would have a story for you. Maybe I could trade my mouth for the fullness of the world.

Maybe this is what the world would say: It is the warmest day of winter when I decide to walk. On the way down, I hear voices between my steps resounding on the stairs— Why are you outside Just off the path, the fields are as pale as my dried-up-dusted-off-old-bits-of-skin.

—step— The mud skulking below sups at my boots with every squelching step. Clouds crowd I’m not, it’s the staircase of my dorm the air, as they are wont to do after a storm. The earth today is especially ugly, and I —step— If someone attacked you right now, no one would hear you scream breathe it in. The word is not content, but free.

There are birds in the trees; I know this, but I cannot see them. There are only —step— their endless calls, at once close and far, echoes echoing echoes, repeated in such Mom, please rapid succession that the sound becomes a communal, unyielding scream. I, too, —step— wish to hold open my jaw and empty myself to the muffled sky.

Why aren’t you in your room Beyond the birds are two overpasses standing like two shoulders hunched to—step— gether — one across a river, the other across a road. I surprise myself by favoring the My friends are in there and I don’t want to bother them latter. I like how the cars sound like rushing water as they rip past, whistling with —step— the wind, making the structure shake with every element that passes through its Do your doors lock behind you concave gut. I close my eyes and feel nothing but motion.

—step— When the shaking stops, there is a figure approaching from where I came. As he No (and I did not say that I never lock my door) advances I can make out a stocky frame, gray whiskers, something — it could be —step— anything—gripped in his right hand. In him, I see the tall old man from the neighWhen I was in college, our doors locked behind us borhood I left for college, the tall old man who would pull his German Shepherd by —step— the leash in the mornings. Once, while I was walking the half-mile to the bus stop, and one time I was with someone I thought was a friend the man and his dog paused on the other side of the road, turned, and began to —step— follow me. When I stopped at the bus stop he stopped too, bringing his dog to poke and he tried to take advantage of me around an unfinished home next door. When the bus was in sight he and his dog left —step— and I realized that if I screamed no one could come in and save me the house, passing behind me just as the bus pulled its brakes, my brightly-colored kid scissors damp in my grip. I remember how once, when my mom drove me to the —step— bus stop, I saw the old man standing past our winding driveway, into our side yard, Okay, I’m sorry outside my shuttered window. I remember how my mom bought me a rape alarm, —step— this little grenade-like machine that would pour out noise if pulled. I remember Don’t be angry how I accidentally set it off once in school and never wore it again. I remember that —step— it wouldn’t matter; no one would hear it scream above the water and the cars and I’m not the wind. I stand on the overpass as the man draws closer. If the soft animal of my —step— body trembles, it is because of the stream of cars passing beneath my feet. I wonder You don’t understand — how does a deer decide when to run and when to stare, doe-eyed, at the light?

—step— The man walks by me in silence — the cars are gone. The shoulder of the overpass You’re just like a deer who can’t see the car in front of her is steady. I stand still until he walks out of sight. The earth is especially ugly today. I —step— breathe it in. The word isn’t content, but alive, but free.

Silence as my feet give one final bite to the stairs.

It is the warmest day of winter and I want outside. I want the path to swallow me whole. I want the doe to taste the fender. I want.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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“Wakanda Forever”: A Strong Sequel, But Incomplete Mackenzie Dunson ’25 Staff Writer Marvel’s first movie with a Black director, lead and majority Black cast, “Black Panther” (2018) was not a film soon to be forgotten. The film explored what it means to be a Black hero in the modern day, as well as the conflicts this identity creates.

Director Ryan Coogler is no stranger to these challenges, and his films commonly delve into the complexities of Black culture. Coogler’s sophomore film for Marvel, “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” is another impressive achievement that explores themes of grief and unity among Black (specifically African) communities. “Wakanda Forever” also concludes Marvel’s “Phase Four” by continuing to explore themes of the resolution of grief and the passing of mantles. It is a masterful celebration of culture.

But even though the movie was successful in many ways, it had a few shortcomings. I question the strength of POC solidarity within the film, especially since it was the first Marvel film that has featured significant representation of indigenous Latin people: why were they in conflict with the African Wakandans during the whole film? Does a movie based on fighting between two POC populations really create a theme of solidarity?

The film opens with the death of Chadwick Boseman’s character T’Challa. We see that Wakanda is in mourning. Princess Shuri (Letitia Wright) takes it the hardest because she blames herself for his death after failing to recreate the heart-shaped herb, which grants the powers of the Black Panther. Queen Ramonda takes Shuri to the riverside to help her come to terms with her brother’s death when a mysterious stranger emerges from the water. The stranger turns out to be the leader of the underwater kingdom of Talokan — the only other place where vibranium naturally exists. The stranger introduces himself as Namor (Tenoch Huerta). He comes bearing the drill that was used to locate the vibranium in his kingdom and delivers an ultimatum: locate its creator, or the forces of Talokan will attack.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Mackenzie Dunson ’25 discusses the much anticipated sequel to “Black Panther,” which was a successful film that depicted Black grief.

Okoye (Danai Gurira), leader of the fierce Dora Milaje, and Shuri begin their search for the creator of the drill, who turns out to be Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), a student at MIT. On their way out of Boston, Shuri and Riri are taken by the Talokan warriors to their kingdom. Shuri is exposed to the beauty of Namor’s people and kingdom.

She becomes conflicted and notes the similarities between Talokan and Wakanda , and between Namor and herself.

Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), an elite Wakandan spy who Queen Ramonda employs to find Shuri, kills one of Namor’s maids during her quest, and Namor declares war on Wakanda. Queen Ramonda tragically drowns when the Talokan warriors flood Wakanda. Plagued by the loss of her mother, Shuri retaliates against Namor and Talokan. But when Shuri fights Namor alone, she stops herself from killing him, realizing that the solution to her grief isn’t vengeance, but peace.

This film is an impactful demonstration of the resolution of grief alongside the preservation of culture.

Shuri does everything in her power

to protect Wakanda, and likewise, Namor tries to protect his people from the outside world that ostracizes and mistreats them. Ultimately, in such a vulnerable moment, Shuri is forced to choose between seeking vengeance for those she has lost and letting go of her hate to protect both Wakanda and Talokan..

Even though vengeance and grief seems to drive Shuri in this film, she is also motivated by her strong sense of love. Shuri loves her family, her culture and her country, and she is willing to go to war for them. Namor shares a similar sense of love for Talokan. As their acclaimed god and leader, he is willing to go to the same lengths to protect his country. The movie attempts to establish the theme of solidarity among communities of color, promoting the idea that communities of color should rely on each other for strength and support. The movie backs this claim when Shuri uses the strands of the plant in a bracelet that Namor gifts to her in order to biologically recreate the heart-shaped herb. She literally can only become the Black Panther by accepting help from someone who was her enemy

at the outset.

But while I was watching the movie, I remember wishing for a stronger feeling of solidarity between the people of Talokan and Wakanda.

At the beginning of the film, the film establishes that Western powers were trying to take advantage of Wakanda after T’Challa’s death in order to claim the abundance of vibranium within the nation’s borders. This felt like an obvious set-up for an antagonist here, but it didn’t go any further. The film could have taken advantage of this premise as a critique of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism, and the abuse of power that Western countries impose on marginalized nations.

As, Europe and America have historically taken valuable items from “developing” countries in Africa and other parts of the world to exploit them for their own gain. However, both of these themes are left unexplored.

I was expecting Wakanda and Talokan to join forces to stop the countries that were trying to take their vibranium — which symbolizes their power and freedom (a nod back to the idea of neo-colonialism).

Especially because the conflict with Namor started because someone was searching for vibranium on their land, the lack of partnership between Talokan and Wakanda felt like wasted potential. As such, I think the film falls short of its theme of solidarity among communities of color. Perhaps because the film is still marketed toward white audiences, Disney did not want to make white people so explicitly the villains in this film.

“Wakanda Forever” is largely a successful sequel to the first “Black Panther'' film. Like its predecessor, the film expertly addresses the complexities of grief within the Black community. The film displays vivid cinematography, celebrating the diverse and beautiful cultures it contains. But by the end of the film, I felt that it did not develop the complex antagonist that I hoped it would, and the film almost seemed incomplete.

Perhaps this film is setting up for an upcoming project that builds on the critique of Western imperialism. My only hope is that we will see more of the POC solidarity that Marvel claims that it has been trying to uphold.

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“In Worlds, As If ”: A Multimedia Thesis of Dreams Madeline Lawson ’25 Managing Arts & Living Editor From Dec. 1 to 3, the Theater and Dance Department produced “In Worlds, As If,” a collaborative senior honors project by Hee Won Youn ’23, Nick Govus ’23E, and Julian Brown ’23. The performance combined interpretive dance, projections, and an impressive set to imitate a haunting dream world.

The show was split into three parts: “Lacuna” by Brown, “Synapse” by Youn, and “[Beyond]”

by Govus. As in a dream, there were no distinct divisions, and the audience was unaware that the scene had changed until the show had already changed. The set featured a single bed in the center of the stage and walls covered in screens, each projecting videos of the mundane, like a calm walk through campus or a serene starry night. Brown’s character, who remains unnamed, rises out of bed in an old-fashioned dressing gown and hippo slippers, haunted by the dreamlike world around him.

A commanding voice resounds throughout the space, and the

screens flash glimpses of dancers intruding on the previously empty scenes. Though he tries to soothe himself, the character soon slips into madness, running around the stage and pulling the bed off-set before disappearing.

Three dream apparitions then appear as interpretive dancers on the empty stage: Ayo Eniola ‘24, Eva Tsitohay ‘24E, and Neviah Waldron ‘24. They fluidly switch roles as they dance, imitating each other. Once they disappear, Youn’s character arrives, dressed in a white dress that she soon replaces with a gray outfit. Her face is painted gray like the other dream apparitions, and she dances alone with bells clutched in her palm.

The performance concludes with Brown’s character succumbing to his fears. He throws the sheets off his bed and screams into bowls of water, which he then dumps all over the set. The last, haunting image shows him weeping on the floor, wrapped in paper towels and surrounded by bed linens, while the dream apparitions stare down at him.

“In Worlds, As If,” truly felt like a dream sequence, so much

so that, after the performance, the entire audience sat for two minutes in silence, as one lies in bed after the end of a particularly intense dream. The clear, expressive performances of the dancers were bolstered by the set, which gave a lucid, ever-wavering feeling. It was impossible to touch and even more difficult to rationalize; the lighting and sound contributed even more to the effect. The loud bass interspersed with delicate sound effects were crucial to the mood, as did the lighting and projections.

The three producers are all Theater and Dance majors, but Youn is also a Chemistry major, while Govus is a joint Computer Science major. When approaching this project, they wanted to explore the intersection of artificial intelligence, chemistry, and theater, according to Brown, and kept arriving at dreams, which have “just enough malleability for a narrative to appear there with those themes.”

It’s rare that any thesis, even in the Theater and Dance department, is completely collaborative.

Others may help produce it or star in it, but it is unusual for three

“In Worlds, As If" is a joint thesis project from Hee Won Youn ‘23, Nick Govus ‘23E, and Julian Brown ‘23. people to work together in a thesis setting to create a show. Brown noted that it was stressful at times but incredibly rewarding. “What I found in this process is that collaboration during a joint thesis project is asking this question again and again: how can we add all our pieces together in a way that is interesting and expresses what we want it to feel like?” Brown said.

“We’re all working toward a goal, and as long as you allow everyone to have the freedom to go towards

that goal in their own way, and the collaboration process is a combinatorial technique, then you have a successful project.”

The students’ styles mixed well, so that the final result was a firm representation of a dream with fantastic production quality and impressive performances from all of the dancers. It was an experimental, innovative senior project that inspired every audience member to watch their dreams closely that night.

“Survivor” Season 43: Episode 11, Reviewed Vaughn Armour ’25 Staff Writer Despite my predictions in the last “Survivor” review, this week’s episode did not feature the downfall of Jesse. Instead, Sami’s game ended.

He played with fire throughout the season, and in this episode, he was burned.

The episode began with Sami attempting to convince everyone that he didn’t vote against Karla. He blamed Gabler, but was unsuccessful. Gabler is trustworthy, so Sami’s lie was transparent. Realizing this, Sami came clean. He had flipped back and forth the entire game, and was largely successful in doing so.

However, his cards were now spilled all over the table.

Following this, “Survivor” sent the castaways on an advantage hunt.

The note was simple, revealing only that the advantage resided somewhere in the jungle. Madness ensued. Every player ran to the jungle, but no one found it for a couple of hours. Sami and Cassidy both unknowingly walked past the advantage, but Cody ended up finding it. It gave him the power to bet on any one person to win the upcoming immunity challenge. If he chose correctly, he’d win immunity as well.

Cody’s pick was Owen.

This episode’s challenge was a “Survivor” classic: “Last Gasp.” The players held onto separate metal grates, with the Fijian tide swelling below them. This challenge is famous because of how psychologically taxing it is. The players have their eyes closed for hours, and are unable to see how close everyone else is to giving up. Amid water

flowing over them and into their nose and ears, they have to convince themselves that they can outlast the others. This is only the fourth time “Survivor” has done this challenge, and it may have been the best version. Karla and Owen dueled it out to the end, making it over two and a half hours before the tide began to subside. In a historical “Survivor” first, Jeff called the challenge a draw — they outlasted it. Owen and Karla both won immunity, with Cody winning too.

With only four players still available to be voted out, Sami had work to do to avoid the elimination. He first rebuilt his relationship with Karla by lying. He claimed that Cassidy wanted Karla out, and blamed her for Sami voting against Karla last week. This was all false, but it worked. Karla believed her, and now

wanted Cassidy out. She had already told Cassidy about her idol, which only solidified her new plan: switching the vote from Sami to Cassidy.

However, Jesse outplayed Karla.

He already wanted to vote Cassidy out to weaken Karla, but he smartly realized that if Karla wanted Cassidy out, she must not value her highly as an ally. He and Cody led the charge to swing the vote back to Sami.​ As a huge Sami fan myself, this plan saddened me, but it was the correct strategic decision. Sami is Karla’s closest ally, so this weakened her more than taking out Cassidy would have. He’s also great at starting fires. This is dangerous in newage “Survivor”, as the final four vote is partly decided by a fire-making competition.

Sami was eliminated, but he’ll likely be invited back for a future

“Survivor” season, like promising first time players before him. He realized his faults in the game and pivoted accordingly. This was more self-awareness than most players show. In this episode, Sami explained his failures in his own life when trying to go after what he wanted. . It’s safe to say that Sami did not fail in that regard this season. He’s only 19 years old, so he has plenty of room for improvement next time.

One more episode remains before the finale. The Jesse-Cody duo is running the game, and hold two idols. The last time you can play an idol is when five people remain. If they make it through the next vote, they’re both guaranteed to make the final four. Tune in next week to see if someone wakes up, and takes a shot at this pair of “Survivor” kings.

Sp ports Women’s Hockey Upsets No. 3 Middlebury — Twice Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor After a scorching start to the season in which they went 3-1 and opened their NESCAC season with a win, the women’s hockey team traveled to Middlebury, Vermont this weekend for a two-game road series against the Panthers. Ranked No. 11 in the country heading into a bout with the reigning national champion, the Mammoths were undeterred, handing the Panthers their first loss of the season and snapping their 21-game home winning streak on Friday, Dec. 2 before taking the second game by the same scoreline on Saturday, Dec. 3.

Amherst didn’t seem daunted by their opponent’s reputation, as they came out of the locker room firing in the first game of the weekend.

But, after a flurry of opportunities in front of the Middlebury net, a penalty looked like it might swing the momentum in the Panthers’ favor. However, the Mammoth penalty kill, which had already notched two shorthanded goals this season, put in a repeat performance. After a clearance out of Amherst’s defensive zone made its way to the Midd netminder, she misplayed the puck directly into the path of a forechecking Maeve Reynolds ’26, who one-timed the puck into the goal to give the away side a 1-0 lead after one period of play.

While the Panthers tied the game early in the second, the Mammoths seemed to have the better of the opportunities throughout the contest, with the Panther’s backstop making save after save to keep her team in it — Mammoth goalie Natalie Stott ’26 only made 10 saves in the contest, compared to 27 from her counterpart. However, the Panthers would eventually capitalize on that stellar backstopping, taking a 2-1 lead four minutes into the final period. Yet, it was then that the Mammoths’ many scoring chances finally turned into goals. Less than two minutes after the Panthers’ second goal, a two-on-one oppor-

tunity saw Reynolds lay the puck off to Carley Daly ’23, who drew a defender and then returned the favor back to her first-year teammate to set Reynolds up for her second goal of the game, knotting the score at 2-2.

Amherst took the lead soon after. A shot by Alyssa Xu ’25 was not handled cleanly by the Panthers’ goalie, and the rebound slid out to Alejandra Ubarri ’26, who sent a one-timer on net. Junior Ellie DeCarlo ’24 redirected the shot into the net to score her first goal of the season, one that eventually stood as the game-winner. Daly scored an empty-net goal with just over a minute to go to ice the game, and the Mammoths took the 4-2 win.

A repeat performance looked unlikely early in game two on Saturday, as Midd scored twice to open up a 2-0 lead after only five minutes of play. With so much hockey left to go, and the shock to their system received, the Mammoths rebounded beautifully, however, scoring twice in the final five minutes of the same period to tie the game.

The first goal came courtesy of Jayna Park ’24, who scored a rebound off a shot from classmate Mary Thompson ’24 at the 16:04 mark to cut the lead in half. Just over 90 seconds later, Xu collected the puck off the boards and passed to Rylee Glennon ’24 behind the net.

Calmly looking up and considering her options, Glennon found Anna Baxter ’25 crashing the net to tap in goal number two and tie the game.

With the scoring flurry out of the way, the Mammoths seemed to settle into the game: They again outshot the Panthers by a significant margin on Saturday, peppering their goaltender with efforts from all over the ice. The game-winner looked inevitable.

The Mammoths grabbed that momentum and eventually converted. This time, it was Daly who netted the game winner off a Mammoth rush. After picking up the puck in her own defensive zone, Daly deftly wove between two Pan-

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Carley Daly ’23 was named NESCAC Player of the Week for her performance last week. ther defenders before leaving the puck for Kate Pohl ’23. Pohl sent the puck back to Daly in the slot, and she netted with five minutes to go in the second period to take the lead, 3-2, with five minutes to play. Daly scored two goals and recorded one assist in two games, and was named NESCAC Player of the Week for her performance in this weekend’s series.

And just like in their last game, the Mammoths got the insurance goal they desired only a few minutes later. After just three minutes of the final period had elapsed, game-one-hero DeCarlo got her second of the weekend on another close-range effort to extend the lead to two. Amherst defended that lead for 14 minutes before the Panthers were awarded a penalty shot after

a delay of game call with a minute and a half to go. But their first-year netminder stood tall, making the save on the play to keep the lead at two and shut the door on Midd for good. The Mammoths had downed the Panthers 4-2 for the second time in two days.

Their two wins this weekend boost an already impressive early-season resumé. The win on Friday was their first against the Panthers since the 2019-20 NESCAC Championship Game, and snapped their opponents’ 21-game home winning streak. And, Saturday’s victory marked the first time since the 2008-09 season that the Mammoths had beaten the Panthers twice in the same season.

Of their weekend, DeCarlo said, “I think we proved just how strong

our program is, and how hard we as a team have been working these last couple weeks [sic]. It’s easy to be intimidated by the record Midd held, but we came out ready to go, and I think we took them by surprise. This weekend showed the potential our team has both skilland culture-wise, especially during the second game when we came back from being down 2-0 after the first 10 minutes. We have an awesome group of girls, and it’s such an amazing feeling being a part of it.”

The Mammoths will return to action on Friday, Dec. 9, on the road against Johnson and Wales University. They will then return to Orr Rink to play Curry College on Saturday, Dec. 10. Puck drop for the first game is scheduled for 7 p.m.

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Back-to-back Wins Keep Women’s Basketball Undefeated Carter Hollingsworth ’25 Staff Writer The No. 7-ranked women’s basketball team left Saturday night for Jersey City, New Jersey to take on reigning NJAC Champion New Jersey City University in their first of two games this week. The Mammoths proved their dominance against the Gothic Knights, never trailing in the contest as they fought to a 76-68 win. Their lead gradually grew throughout the game: The Mammoths began the first quarter up by six, led by 11 at the half, and ballooned the margin to 21 midway through the third quarter.

Junior captain Reeya Patel ’24 opened the scoring for the Mammoths with two made free throws, and sophomore Maya Cwalina ’25 followed with a layup. Cwalina scored four of her eight points in that first quarter, helping Amherst to their six-point lead at the end of the first.

Over the next two quarters, the Mammoths would build off of that lead with key points from Kori

Barach ’25 and Patel. However, midway through the second quarter, New Jersey would close their gap down to one point, 19-18.

This time, Barach answered with a three of her own with three minutes remaining in the first half to make it 33-28 Amherst. A Barach defensive rebound then led to an Anna Tranum ’26 jumper that made it a seven-point Amherst lead. A pair of defensive rebounds led to two free throws from Barach and a jumper from Sylvia Liddle ‘26 came with one minute left to give the Mammoths their halftime lead of 39-28.

Coming into the third, the Mammoths dominated with a 13-point lead to build their lead to a 20-point advantage. This lead propelled Amherst into the fourth quarter where they were able to maintain their lead, ending the game 76-68 over New Jersey University.

Two performances carried Amherst to victory on Sunday: Barach scored a career-high 32 points, and Patel put in 21 points of her own. Barach also recorded

her first career double-double in the game, adding 11 rebounds to go along with five assists.

After a long late-night bus ride back to Amherst, the Mammoths woke up the next day prepared to face their first NESCAC opponent of the season, Little Three rival Wesleyan University on Monday night.

In the first quarter, the Mammoths built an early 15-5 lead over the Cardinals, with eight total points from Patel and six from Barach to maintain the lead, at 2111, after 10 minutes.

However, in the second, Wesleyan fought back, holding the Mammoths scoreless while they scored six points of their own to bring the score to 21-17. Patel, who added eight more points in the second quarter to go into halftime with 16, broke up the run with a pair of free throws. Amherst's defensive effort ramped up later in the quarter, as they held the visitors to just one point over a 5:39 minute span to finish the half, putting the score at 37-20 going into the break.

In the third quarter, though, the Cardinals came out of the locker room determined to close the gap, hitting eight of their next 12 shots from the floor, while Amherst went two for 10 over the same seven-minute stretch. The Cardinals also utilized an extremely effective zone defense to prevent the Mammoths from getting into the paint, where they’ve been most effective this season. All this being said, the Mammoths clung to a slim 49-44 lead after three quarters.

AnLing Vera ’25 opened the final quarter with a key three-pointer, but Wesleyan crept within two points at 52-50 with six minutes remaining. However, Tranum answered back immediately with a short jumper of her own to stretch the lead to four. Cwalina battled for an offensive rebound that led to another Tranum jumper on the next possession, and the momentum seemed to shift for good; in the final two minutes, Vera came up with two key steals, taking one coast-to-coast for a lay-up and another that led to two Patel free throws. With the game now mostly

out of reach, the Mammoths iced the game at the line, and downed their Little Three rival 65-55.

Patel’s 26 points on Monday were the second-most in her career — that distinction goes to a 27-point effort in a win over the Cardinals almost exactly a year ago. Barach finished the game with her second straight double-double, with 11 points and 10 rebounds.

Junior captain Abbey Skinner ’24 said “Playing back-to-back games isn’t always the easiest thing to do, especially after a long travel day, but we showed a lot of resilience in these last two games.

Our offense has really started to flow, especially Kori [Barach] and Reeya [Patel] both putting up big numbers in the last few games.

These were two great wins for us, being able to handle when our opponents went on runs. [We’re] looking forward to our last game of the semester this Saturday!”

The Mammoths will face their final opponent of the semester, Lehman College, on Saturday, Dec. 10 at 1 p.m. at LeFrak Gymnasium.

Men’s Hockey Wins Both Games, Giving Coach His 500th Win Drew Stephens ’26 Staff Writer Amherst men’s hockey earned two close wins this weekend at Orr Rink, rallying to complete a late comeback to take down Wesleyan 3-2 in overtime, then defeating No. 11 Trinity in a close game by the same score. The team’s second win of the weekend gave head coach Jack Arena ’83 his historic 500th career win.

After failing to come away with a win in their two game road trip last week, going 0-1-1, the Mammoths turned things around this weekend with two big home wins against NESCAC foes. They first faced the Wesleyan Cardinals on Friday Dec. 2, and then battled the Trinity Bantams the next day, Saturday Dec. 3.

After a scoreless first period to open the Little Three matchup

versus Wesleyan, the Cardinals scored twice less than a minute apart midway through the second to take a 2-0 lead. The score remained there until late in the third period. With just under four minutes remaining in regulation, the Mammoths scored to keep hope alive: center Matt Toporoswki ’25 found winger Ben Kuzma ’25, who beat a Wesleyan defender and the netminder to score. The goal was Kuzma’s sixth in four contests this season. But, the Mammoths were not done yet.

With under two minutes remaining and the Mammoths still trailing, they pulled their goalie for an extra attacker. Winger Quinton Fox ’24 capitalized, deflecting a shot from Toporowski into the Cardinals’ net to tie the game at 2-2.

In the five minute, threeon-three overtime period, the Mammoths got the game winner.

Toporowski expertly maneuvered his way through the Wesleyan defense and fired a shot that flew past the goalie to win the game for the Mammoths. The comeback victory put head coach Jack Arena one win away from a historic 500th of his legendary career.

Riding their momentum from the previous night, the Mammoths suited up again on Saturday afternoon to face No. 11-ranked Trinity. And like the previous night, the game remained scoreless through the first period. But, even though Trinity pulled ahead after a goal in the second, Amherst picked up steam late in the game. With 4:07 left in the same period, a Mammoth breakout pass found its way to a group of three Mammoths entering the offensive zone. Bobby Luca ’25 came up with the puck, and delivered it to Kuzma, who cut in front of the goal and neatly slid the

puck five-hole to score once again and tie the game at one.

The Mammoths’ next goal was a thing of beauty. Connor Merrill ’23 sent a cross-ice pass to Zach Murray ’26, who dropped the puck behind his back to Ryan Corcoran ’26. Corcoran skated down the right side towards the goal before sliding a beautiful pass along the crease to Fox, who received it at the far post and easily put it into the empty goal. 2-1 Mammoths.

They added one more goal in the final period from first year Josh Burke ’26, who wove his way through the defense to make it 3-1. Trinity attempted to rally, scoring with 13:22 remaining to make it 3-2, but Amherst goalkeeper Alex Wisco ’24 made eight saves in the final period, including one with eight seconds remaining, to keep the Mammoths on top.

The two-win series got Arena to his 499th and 500th career wins, becoming the 10th men’s hockey coach at the Division III level to reach that milestone. In his 39 seasons at Amherst, Arena has an overall record of 500-37481, good for a .566 win percentage. That makes him the fourth winningest active coach in Division III men's hockey, as well as putting him 10th all-time.

With two goals and an assist in the Mammoths’ two victories, Fox was awarded NESCAC Player of the Week. Through six games, Kuzma leads the team with 10 points, while Fox and Toporowski are close behind with seven points each.

The team will return next weekend at Orr Rink, where they will face rival Williams and Middlebury. The puck will drop against Williams at 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 9.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Men’s Basketball Wins One, Loses Two, Falling to 3-5 Alex Noga ’23 and Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editors Though they picked up a dominant victory in their home opener against Northern Vermont University-Johnson to conclude last week, the men’s basketball team lost to Colby-Sawyer College in a mid-week away game on Thursday, Dec. 1. The team continued their slide at home, losing a heartbreaking game to Springfield College 73-70 on Tuesday, Dec. 6.

The Mammoths’ first game against the Colby-Sawyer Chargers opened about as back-andforth as it gets and stayed that way for the majority of the first half.

Each team matched the other basket for basket for well over ten minutes, as neither team could extend its lead past two points.

That is, until a layup from Chris Hammond ’26 gave the Mammoths a 28-25 lead with 8:42 remaining in the first half. Up until that point, the Mammoths had shot 12-of-19 from the floor, and Hammond led the way offensively with 10 points.

Though the Chargers quickly reclaimed the lead by scoring on consecutive possessions — hitting a quick two and then a three-pointer — Hammond responded once more with a jumper to tie the score at 30-apiece.

However, the Chargers took control of the half from there. They went on a 16-4 run to end the frame, shooting a perfect 6-of-6 from the floor and 3-of-3 from beyond the arc. As the buzzer sounded to conclude the half, the Mammoths saw a 10-point deficit on the scoreboard, 48-38.

The Mammoths looked determined to cut into the deficit at the beginning of the second half, as they quickly scored on their first two possessions to decrease the Chargers’ lead to just six. Yet the Chargers responded right away, scoring on their next three trips down the floor to push their lead to 13, which proved to be too much for the Mammoths to overcome. The Chargers kept the game out of reach for the remain-

der of the contest, and the Mammoths picked up their fourth loss of the season in a 81-69 defeat.

Will Scherer ’25 scored a career-high 18 points on 9-of-11 from the floor. Scherer put up another career-high accolade in the rebounding department, corralling 14 boards, including eight offensive rebounds, for his first collegiate double-double.

Hammond also finished with a career-high 13 points and added six rebounds and two blocks to the statsheet.

The Mammoths held a significant edge on the glass, out-rebounding the Chargers 54-22, including 25 total offensive rebounds to the Chargers’ 19 defensive rebounds. However, that wasn’t enough, as the Chargers shot a solid 48 percent from the floor and shot above their season average from three-point range, at 43 percent (12-of-28), while the Mammoths shot 40 percent from the floor but struggled from beyond the arc, shooting a frigid 13 percent (4-of-30) from three, well below their usual standard.

After the tough loss to the Chargers, the Mammoths looked to bounce back on Tuesday night against local rival Springfield College. Amherst opened the game strong, scoring five straight points by way of a Charlie Randall ’26 three-pointer and a Hammond layup to begin the first quarter with the lead. While that was the largest lead they had until about halfway through the first half, the Mammoths eventually went on a 17-6 scoring run to gain some breathing room on the scoreboard, at 28-13. They only improved from there, maintaining that comfortable margin through the end of the first half with strong defensive play — the Pride only scored one field goal in the last four minutes after getting within 10 points for the first time since the 11-minute mark. A Scherer layup with two seconds to go put the Mammoths up 15 heading into the half; they led 4227, behind 11 points from Bobby Sommers ’25, and nine each from Scherer and Noah Helmke ’25.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

After a nail-biting loss at home to Springfield College, Amherst's record is 3-5.

However, the Pride wouldn’t go away, coming out of halftime with renewed energy, and looked to have the Mammoths on the ropes with their high-pressure defense. They narrowed the Amherst lead to eight with 13:40 to go in the half, while the Mammoths couldn’t seem to find their rhythm offensively. Though a Drew Martin ’26 layup ended the Springfield run, the Pride continued scoring right where they left off, with a free throw narrowing the gap to 56-51 with just under 10 minutes to play. The lead eventually shrunk to two with seven and a half minutes left — up to that point, the Mammoths had been outscored 29-11 by the Pride in the second half.

At that point, the game took on all the hallmarks of a close affair, with both teams trading buckets and fighting hard for every loose

ball. The game entered crunch time with the Mammoths clinging to a five point lead and the scoreboard reading 64-59. And with the game on the line, both teams came to play. Hammond hit a three, and then Springfield came back down the floor and hit three three-pointers of their own to take a one point lead with 40 seconds to go. It was the Pride’s first lead of the entire contest.

With the game on the line, C.J. Mitchell ’25 hit what could have been the biggest shot of the night, draining a fadeaway mid-range jumper with 30 seconds to go to take the lead back. With the shot clock turned off and a chance to win the game on the final possession, the Pride hit right back with their own dagger three-pointer to take a two point lead. Scherer missed a layup on the ensuing possession, and the Mammoths

had to foul to keep their hopes alive. The Pride player hit both of the free throws, taking a fourpoint lead, but Amherst still had hope. Canin Reynolds ’25 was fouled on his three-point attempt and had three attempts at the line. He hit one of his first two attempts and purposely missed the third to give the team a chance.

They could not convert the putback, however, and Amherst lost a heartbreaker by a 73-70 score.

With their record now at 3-5, the Mammoths will look to get back on track with a home matchup against Eastern Nazarene College on Thursday, Dec. 8.

They will then have to wait nearly three weeks until their next game against the University of California, Santa Cruz on Wednesday, Dec. 28 in Santa Cruz, California.

Tip off for that game is scheduled for 4 p.m. EST.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Front and Center: Women, Let’s Play Ball Melanie Schwimmer ’23 Staff Writer While Brown University baseball will not take the field until February 2023, one player, Olivia Pichardo, made history this month as the first woman to join a NCAA Division I baseball roster.

Pichardo started playing baseball at the age of five for Forest Hills Little League in Queens, New York.

She made her high school’s varsity baseball team in the seventh grade, a rare feat for any athlete, regardless of gender. This summer, she played on the USA Baseball Women's National Team, competing in a friendly series with Team Canada. Then, Pichardo tried out for the Brown team this fall as a freshman, and after what head coach Grant Achilles called “the most complete walk-on tryout I have seen from a player,” she made the 31-athlete roster announced at the end of November.

Next year, Pichardo will join

eight other women playing collegiate baseball across the three divisions; she is the only one competing at the Division I level. After making the team, Pichardo shared, "I'm just really glad that we're having more and more female baseball players at the collegiate level, and no matter what division, it's just really good to see this progression. It's really paving the way for other girls in the next generation to also have these goals that they want to achieve and dream big and know that they can do it."

Pichardo's quote about increasing the number of women in baseball leaves a resounding question: Why is America’s pastime all male?

For most sports, while they continue to be segregated by gender, the game is the same (or at least very similar). Men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s basketball, and other similar sports are the same across gender. However, softball is quite different from baseball, even though people consider it

the female equivalent of the sport.

Softball was actually not designed as the female version of baseball we know it to be today, but rather as an indoor version of baseball.

Women, it turns out, have been playing baseball for almost as long as men. While the first intercollegiate baseball game was played in 1859 (with Amherst beating Williams), Vassar College formed an all-women’s baseball team just seven years later in 1866. In 1875, men in Springfield, Ill. organized two all-women baseball teams — the Blondes and the Brunettes — who became the first female baseball players to be paid to play. (Though clearly this league was seen more as a novelty act.)

During World War II, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League formed, and over 600 white women played professional baseball during its 12-season run. The league, popularized through the movie “A League of Their Own,” did not allow for

Black players. It folded due to pressure and competition from Major League Baseball. Toni Stone became the first Black woman to play at the highest level in the Negro Leagues on the Indianapolis Clowns in 1953, and the Kansas City Monarchs in 1954. The Negro League eventually folded after Major Leauge Baseball allowed Black players on their rosters and took the league’s best players.

But, as women’s baseball waned, softball rose. Initially, softball saw its popularity increase as an alternative for men who were injured. As people panicked about men spending too much time inside with job markets shifting away from fieldwork, people encouraged men to stick to baseball, simultaneously taking baseball opportunities away from women.

This divide — women should play softball and men should play baseball — was cemented by Title IX. Since the law does not define which sports schools should of-

fer, just that they must be funded equally, athletic directors argued that if schools had a softball program for women and a baseball program for men, they complied with Title IX. This allowed them to save money and not have to start additional programs for women.

Women who want to play baseball are turned aside and offered softball instead. Because softball has never had the same level of public support as baseball, women are segregated from receiving the riches of the game. But, despite the forces working against them, Olivia Pichardo and female baseball players like her are proving that America’s pastime truly is one for all of us.

Front and Center would like to conclude by calling attention to the fact that Britney Griner has been wrongfully detained in Russia for 293 days. She currently faces homophobia, racism, and 16-hour work days in a penal colony. Bring her home.

Both Men’s, Women’s Swim and Dive Open Season 3-0 Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor After a successful 2021-22 season where they went 6-1 in dual-meets and finished third at the NESCAC Championships, Amherst men’s swim and dive opened their 2022-23 season with three straight wins in conference competition. They first won 166-117 over Colby, before topping Wesleyan 175.5-103.5 to open their Little Three season, and defeating Middlebury 192-99 this past weekend.

In their season opener at Colby, junior Tyler Knightly ’24, sophomore transfer Jaden Olson ’25, and first-year Michael Jang ’26 each won two individual events for the Mammoths. Olson was a member of the Mammoths’ first place ​​200yard medley relay team and won both the 100-yard backstroke in 51.37 and the 100-yard butterfly in 50.13 as an individual. Knightly won both the 100-yard and 200yard freestyle races, and Jang won

both the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke races. Four other Amherst first-years won an event in their collegiate debut; the others were Jack D'Alessandro ’26 (1,000-yard freestyle), Henry LeCates ’26 (200yard freestyle), and Jonah Luetke ’26 (200-yard backstroke).

Against the Cardinals, the same 200-yard medley relay team won, with Olson, Liam Loveless ’24, Christian Moy ’23, and Andrew Bernstein ’25 claiming the event for the second straight meet. Olson bettered his individual record to 4-0 with two more wins, this time in the 50-yard backstroke and 50-yard butterfly, and every other member of that medley relay team also won an individual race. Two other Mammoths won their first individual event of the season: Tor Metelmann ’25 (100-yard breaststroke) and Andrew Yuen ’25 (100yard backstroke).

In their home-opener against the Panthers this past weekend, Olson continued his dominance, moving to 6-0 as an individual. The

200-yard medley relay won their third straight race, meaning Olson has yet to lose a race at Amherst.

Jang again swept the 100- and 200yard breaststroke races, and LeCates, Bernstein, Yuen, Metelman, Luetke, Knightly, Bernstein, and Gabriele Lunardi ’25 all won individual races as well, with Lunardi getting his first win of the season in the 1,000-yard freestyle.

The team will return to action against Union College on Saturday, Dec. 31.

Just like the men, the No. 14 Amherst women’s swim and dive team opened their season 3-0, backing up a 2021-22 season in which they went 6-1 in dual-meets and finished third at the NESCAC Championships. They opened their season with a 182-101 win over Colby, before defeating Wesleyan 181.5-113.5 to open their Little Three campaign, and beating Middlebury 184.5-115.5 last weekend.

Against the Mules, senior Jess Gordon ’23, sophomore Ali Lacroix ’25, and first-year Diane Koo ’26

each won two events. Gordon won the 200- and 500-yard freestyle, Lacroix won the 100- and 200-yard breaststroke, and Koo got her first two collegiate wins in the 100- and 200-yard butterfly. Four other firstyears won their collegiate debuts: Emory Tudor ’26, Alex Zorn ’26, Ally Bradley ’26, and Donna Zhang ’26. Sydney Bluestein ’25 and Zhang sealed an Amherst one-two in both diving events: Bluestein on the one-meter board, and Zhang on the three-meter board in her first collegiate meet.

A few days later against Wesleyan, four Mammoths won two individual races each: Grace Tarantola ’23 (50-yard and 100-yard backstroke), Lacroix (50-yard and 100-yard breaststroke), Zorn (50yard and 100-yard freestyle), and Bluestein (one- and three-meter board). Tarantola and Lacroix notched a relay win on the weekend, teaming up with Lauren Eng ’24 and Kate Aubrecht ’26 to win the 200-yard medley relay. Eng also came out victorious in the 50-

yard butterfly, and Koo won for the second straight meet, topping the podium in the 400-yard individual medley.

In their home opener against Middlebury, the team won their third straight meet, with Zorn sweeping the freestyle sprints (50- and 100-yards) and swimming on two winning relay teams (200-yard medley relay and the 400-yard freestyle relay). The winning 200-yard medley relay team was the same as in the first meet against the Cardinals, while Zorn was joined in the freestyle relay by Eng, Gordon, and Jennifer Adams ’25. Adams swept the mid-distance freestyle races, the 200- and 400-yards, while Bluestein again swept the one- and three-meter diving events. Lacroix notched two individual wins for the second straight meet, while Koo and Bradley also won events for Amherst.

The team will return to action on New Year’s Eve, traveling to take on Union College.

The Amherst Student • December 8, 2022

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Squash Teams Best Hamilton, Fall to Trinity Alex Noga ’23 Managing Sports Editor The Amherst squash teams took on NESCAC competition for the first time this past week.

Both the men’s and women’s team handily defeated Hamilton on Saturday, Dec. 3, but were beaten by national powerhouse Trinity on Tuesday, Dec. 6.

Men Coming off a narrow win in their home opener last weekend, the No. 18 men’s squash team rode that momentum into their first conference match of 202223 against No. 26 Hamilton in a dominant 9-0 sweep. Not only did the Mammoths win every match, they won six of the nine matches 3-0.

Kedar Nagaraj ’24, Adam Lictmacher ’24, and Matthew Granovsky ’25 each picked up their first win of the season at the second, fourth, and sixth spots, respectively. The Mam-

moths dominance didn’t just show on the scorecard, though: In total, six of the nine matches lasted less than 30 minutes, and two of the other three barely made it to that point, at 31 and 32 minutes of match time. The longest match of the competition was played by Charlie Sutherby ’23 at the top spot on the ladder.

It was the only match that made it to a decisive fifth set, in which Sutherby was able to secure a 3-2 victory in 48 minutes of match time.

After their commanding victory, the Mammoths traveled to Hartford, Conn., to take on No. 6 Trinity. The Mammoths did not find the same success that they did against the Continentals, as they were defeated.

The team will take a long pause before their next match, which is scheduled for Tuesday, Jan. 3, against Hobart College in Boynton Beach, Florida.

Women

The No. 14 women’s team avenged their tight loss last week with a resounding 7-2 victory against No. 24 Hamilton. The team’s victory was driven by match victories at the top of the order, as all five players at the one through five spots won their match. Rounding out the win were victories at the seventh and eighth spots on the ladder.

Alex Brown ’26, Callie DeLalio ’24, and Isabelle Tilney-Sandberg ’25 each earned their second win in as many matches at the second, fourth, and fifth spot, respectively.

Daksha Pathak ’23 (first), Lauren Weil ’24 (third), Morgan Chauddhary ’26 (seventh), and Supriya Chang ’25 (eighth) all won their first match of the season. And like their counterparts, the team’s members won their matches in thoroughly commanding fashion, with every mammoth winning their match in around 20 minutes.

The Mammoths then took on

Photos courtesy of Clarus Studios

Women's squash lost 9-0 to Trinity College. the No. 1 Trinity in Hartford, Ct. The Bantams proved worthy of their national ranking, defeating the Mammoths 9-0 without dropping a single set. The longest match of the competition came at the fifth spot, in which Tilney-Sandberg lost 16-14, 11-

6, 11-6 in 23 minutes.

Like the men’s team, the women’s team does not play until the 2023 calendar year, when they will also travel to Boynton Beach, Florida, to take on William Smith College on Tuesday, Jan. 3.

GAME SCHEDULE

SWIM & DIVE

WOMEN'S HOCKEY

MEN'S HOCKEY

WOMEN'S BASKETBALL

MEN'S BASKETBALL

Dec 10: vs. Lehman College, 1 p.m.

Dec 28: vs. Montclair State University @ Las Vegas, NV, 3 p.m. EST Dec 29: vs. Kenyon College @ Las Vegas, NV, 5 p.m. EST Dec 31: @ Whittier College, 4:30 p.m. EST

Dec. 8: vs. Eastern Nazarene College, 7 p.m.

Dec 28: @ UC Santa Cruz, 4 p.m. EST

Schedule runs through Dec. 31

Dec. 9: @ Johnson and Wales, 6:30 p.m.

Dec. 10: vs. Curry College, 7:30 p.m.

Dec. 31: vs. UMass Boston, 3 p.m.

Dec. 31: vs. Union College, 12 p.m.

Dec. 9: vs. Williams, 7 p.m.

Dec. 10: vs. Middlebury, 3 p.m.