Homecoming

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

VOLUME CXLV HOMECOMING EDITION | FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2015

HOMECOMING 2015 THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Photo by Kyra Gardner ’18

Schedule Events of

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 23-SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

8:30 a.m.-7 p.m.

Check-In Alumni House

8 a.m.-1:30 p.m.

Check-In Alumni House

8 p.m.

Homecoming Bonfire Valentine Quadrangle

9:30 a.m.

Conversation with President Biddy Martin Johnson Chapel 12:45 p.m.

Lehrman Stadium Dedication Pre-Game Ceremony Pratt Field

1 p.m.

Amherst Football vs.

Wesleyan Pratt Field 3:30 p.m.

Amherst Homecoming Fest Alumni Gymnasium

SUNDAY 1 p.m.

Alumni vs. Student Ultimate Frisbee Game Hills Field

10 p.m.

Party at the Powerhouse The Powerhouse

STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Sophie Murguia HEAD PUBLISHERS Emily Ratte, Tia Robinson EDITORS Elaine Jeon, Dan Ahn. Jingwen Zhang, Johnathan Appel, Sunna Juhn, Lauren Tuiskula, Drew Kiley, Jason Darell, Paola Garcia-Prieto, Julia Pretsfelder, Alida Mitau DESIGN Gabby Bishop, Adele Loomis, Katherine Chen, Zavi Sheldon, Yrenly Yuan, Megan Do PHOTO EDITOR Kyra Gardner

2 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

The Amherst Student is published weekly except during college vacations. The subscription rate is $75 per year or $40 per semester.

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Table of Contents ALUMNI PROFILES

4 5 6 7 8 9 12 13 14 15 16

Ben Gundersheimer ’89 Reaching a High Note with Musical Education Joshua Kors ’01E A Journalist Uncovering Stories of Injustice Mary Beth Meehan ’89 A Portrait’s Worth: Photographing, Storytelling and Listening John Yarchoan ’13 A Young Entrepreneur for the New Marketplace Mark Vanhoenacker ’96 Life’s Travels: An Adventurous Path to Flight Kirun Kapur ’97 A Poet Grappling with the Limits of Language Mike Gamson ’96 An Unpredictable Road to Success at LinkedIn Madeline Janis ’82 Activist Champions Living Wage for L.A. Poor Cuthbert Simpkins ’69 Defying Definition, Embracing the Liberal Arts Anette Sanderson ’82 Working to Improve Hartford’s Public Housing Chuck Lacy ’80 A Venture Capitalist Follows His Curiosity

MASCOT

10-11

Let’s Talk About the Mascot

SPORTS

17 18 19 20

Football, Men’s Cross Country, Field Hockey Men’s and Women’s Soccer Men’s and Women’s Tennis, Women’s Cross Country, Coach’s Corner Volleyball October 23, 2015 | The Amherst Student | 3

Alumni Profile | Ben Gundersheimer ‘89

Reaching a High Note with Musical Education Ben Gundersheimer ’89 found his path through music. The singer-songwriter has produced critically acclaimed albums for young children and has found immense joy in his work.

— Sunna Juhn ’18 Every aspiring musician dreams of playing in front of a screaming crowd.

But not every musician has to worry about a member of the crowd screaming because he spilled his juice.

For Ben Gundersheimer, playing to sold-out crowds of kids is just part of a day’s work.

Gundersheimer, known to his fans as Mister G, is a critically acclaimed singer-songwriter. His albums for young children have received Latin Grammy nominations along with impressive recognition from parenting magazines and foundations.

Early Life Gundersheimer started playing guitar when he was 9 years old, but his interest in music was evident even earlier. “I was really captivated by music all along,” he said. “Apparently I was pretty musical when I was preverbal, always drumming on things or banging on pots and pans.”

Being a musician wasn’t the only career path that Gundersheimer considered when he was growing up. An avid baseball player, his junior high decision to study Spanish was born from a desire to be able to communicate with his teammates as a future major league baseball player. The sport is also partially what drew him to Amherst. He played in the program for four years, captaining the team for one of them, and says that it was this athletic aspect of his college experience that had the greatest impact on his later career.

“One thing that helped lay the groundwork for where I ended up professionally was having to compete and persevere, which I learned through playing baseball at Amherst,” he said.

Persistence “has served me well in the music business, where there are lots of ups and downs.”

After College After graduating from Amherst with an English degree in 1989, Gun-

dersheimer moved to the Washington, D.C. area with a friend and played gigs around there for a few years. Before long, he found himself back in school, this time at the prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston.

Although “a completely opposite experience” from Amherst, Berklee — where Gundersheimer remembers himself as being just one of thousands of guitar players —was nevertheless a valuable and exciting time that figured prominently in his trajectory to becoming a musician.

“I came face to face with so many talented people, virtuosic musicians … It was intimidating but also inspiring,” he said. “Ever since, I’ve wanted to both surround myself with the best players that I can and push to improve as a writer, player, producer and engineer.”

He left Berklee after several semesters and formed an indie rock group called the “Ben Swift Band” with a few of his classmates. He toured nationally, both as the bandleader and as an independent singer-songwriter, for 15 years.

It was thanks to this band that he had his first foray into the world of children’s music.

“We created an educational performing alter ego called the “Roots Music Collective” where we would just go and do assemblies on the roots of American music,” he said.

The group had “this sort of funny, weird double life,” he said. “Sometimes we’d be performing at a club until two o’clock in the morning, and then a few hours later, we would be under the fluorescent lights of a cafeteria playing for some kids at an elementary school.”

The energy and enthusiasm the young audience demonstrated in response to these shows was nothing short of exhilarating for Gundersheimer, who said he was “getting a little burned out and jaded” on his then-career track. He’d previously entertained the thought of becoming a teacher, a

Photo courtesy of Ben Gundersheimer

Ben Gundersheimer ‘89 describes the joyful experience of performing as Mister G.

4 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

backup plan in case becoming a musician (or a baseball player) didn’t work out, and this watershed moment was enough to convince Gundersheimer to leave the music scene and pursue his interest in education.

“When I had that exposure to those kids, I got so much from their energy, their enthusiasm for music and I thought that perhaps what I would do was transition to becoming an elementary school teacher and doing music on the side,” Gundersheimer said. “I just thought it was a healthy energy to be around day to day.”

This new path took him to Smith College, where he enrolled in the school’s Master of Education program and graduated in 2008 with a degree in elementary education and the rare distinction of being both an Amherst and Smith alum. He taught at the Smith College Campus School as a graduate student, and it was in these classrooms that he witnessed what happened when his two interests, music and children’s education, collided.

In a sense, Gundersheimer discovered his passion for writing music for children somewhat by accident: “When I had a little autonomy in the classroom, I would write songs with the kids,” he said. “Honestly, at that point, it was because I didn’t know how to teach them, but I did know how to write songs.”

However, this initiative elicited a surprisingly warm and enthusiastic response from the children, and Gundersheimer quickly came to see the potential of using music as a learning tool.

“The kids were so responsive to [writing songs and performing]; it was wonderful to see how engaged they became,” he said. “The degree of engagement I would see in the kids between taking more of a conventional worksheet approach to learning versus bringing music and creativity into it, like creating a catchy song to help kids learn something … was astonishing.”

For a while, writing songs for kids remained just a classroom activity. It wasn’t obvious to Gundersheimer at first that there was a path that led to becoming a children’s musician. But as he started to branch out and play at other local schools, gaining both experience and recognition, his classroom initiative naturally developed into something bigger.

Gundersheimer will be the first to tell you that not everyone will be “on board” with anything new an artist tries to do, but his own transition into children’s songwriting was met with support from his close sources. His parents, for one thing, were “very happy” to see him reconcile his interests in both performing and working with children.

Steffen Hartleib, who attended Berklee with Gundersheimer, was not only supportive of his longtime friend’s decision, but also not surprised by it.

“I couldn’t imagine him settling down, becoming a teacher full-time and giving up performing — he’s too restless and adventurous for that,”

Photo courtesy of Ben Gundersheimer

Ben Gundersheimer ‘89 has always loved playing music, and he is best known for his children’s music performances as Mister G. Hartleib wrote in an email. “I think writing songs for and with the kids in the classroom gave him a new perspective on music, so switching from indie rock to performing and recording for kids was a very natural progression.”

Indie rock and children’s music, and all genres of music for that matter, all require a serious work ethic, the willingness to put oneself out there and on the road. But aside from that, the two are quite different.

“If I had to pinpoint one thing about what I’m doing now compared to the scene I was in earlier, it’s the fact that with kids’ music there are no limitations, stylistically speaking,” Gundersheimer said. “From an artistic standpoint, it’s really liberating to think I can go in any direction I want.”

Gundersheimer has been able to experiment freely with different artistic styles without compromising the quality of his music. His colleague Emilio Miler, musician and co-producer of the latest Mister G album “Los Animales,” points to this as one of the great things about Gundersheimer’s work.

“You could pick any of these songs, slightly alter the lyrics, and they would fit nicely in any album by another artist,” he said. “The appreciation of his material doesn’t require being filtered by the fact that it’s ‘for kids,’ in the sense of requiring any less of it for that reason.”

The Mister G Project In some respects, the Mister G project has come a long way from its origins about six years ago. Gundersheimer’s wife Katherine Jamieson, who manages the project, recalled when she had to “cold call schools and libraries” for gigs.

“Now we’re consistently being hired by performing arts centers, major festivals and theaters around the country,” she said. “I think this has a lot to do with the diverse styles and catchiness of the songs, the high level of musicianship on the albums and Ben’s charisma and incredible ability to connect with audiences.”

But in other respects, not much has changed. Six albums and countless concerts later, what originally drew Gundersheimer into first teaching and then writing songs for children has remained the same: the invigorating energy and honesty of their reactions to his music.

“They aren’t responding because

Rolling Stone or Pitchfork told them this is the thing to do — if what’s happening in the moment on stage, the whole experience, is captivating for them, they’ll be euphoric and ecstatic with me,” he said. “It’s so refreshing to have that completely honest and open emotional response, which I think sadly many of us can’t access as adults.”

One of the distinguishing characteristics of Gundersheimer’s music is its bilingual nature. This recent development was inspired by a trip to Colombia in 2010, shortly after Mister G’s first album was released, and was partially derived from a wish to be able to tour in warm Latin America to escape the brutal winters in Gundersheimer’s New England home.

This is not only fun for Gundersheimer, who is able to incorporate his longstanding love of Spanish into his career, but is also appreciated by his Spanish-speaking audience. Miler, who is from Argentina, praises his culturally inclusive approach to bilingual albums.

“Mister G’s songs teach kids who are familiar with either language that they can get together and play the same games, have the same conversations and learn and grow together,” Miler said. “This focus on unity, on developing relationships out of the things we have in common, rather than pointing out whatever may set us apart, is an incredible message to send out to kids everywhere.”

Looking Forward Gundersheimer is filled with plans for the future and not just for his future as Mister G. Although he reports that an environment-themed album is in the works, he also expressed interest in making music for adults again.

“I think it would be a lot of fun to go into a town and do a kids’ show in the morning and a grownups’ show at night,” he said. “From a performing and writing standpoint, it’d be good to have an outlet that goes back to my roots as a … kind of Americana singer-songwriter … as a contrast to these high-energy kids’ shows.”

But no matter what happens next, he’ll always be Mister G. “To do the two together a little bit would be a nice combination,” Gundersheimer said. But “I can’t imagine ditching kids’ music entirely,” he said, “because it’s so rewarding on so many levels to do what I’m doing.”

Alumni Profile | Joshua Kors ‘01E

A Journalist Uncovering Stories of Injustice Joshua Kors ’01E found his passion in journalism, and he has received widespread acclaim for his reporting on a military scandal.

— Lauren Tuiskula ’17 Growing up in Walnut Creek, California, Kors’ passion for journalism began almost as soon as he could write. He recalls writing his first article at the age of four, after he explored an Encyclopedia Britannica that his mother bought for him.

As a middle school student, he continued to foster a passion for journalism, writing movie reviews for his school newspaper. Although he laughs remembering that the paper consisted of just four pieces of paper stapled together, it served as a stepping-stone on his path to a journalism career.

His passion stayed with him in high school, where he went on to write for the newspaper. He worked his way up the ranks and eventually became the editor-in-chief. “It was nice when that happened,” he said.

“That paper was so important to me.”

In what would eventually develop into a trend of Kors’ work garnering widespread attention, an article for his high school paper helped him get his first taste of the myriad positive impacts his journalistic work could have.

A former student at his high school committed suicide 12 years prior to Kors’ time at the school. The student was gay and ended his life largely in response to the pressure from both a devout Christian mother as well as pressure from a homophobic culture.

Kors’ article detailed the aftermath of the student’s suicide and described how the student’s mother reevaluated her views and now serves as a prominent advocate for gay youth. For a community that did little to commemorate this loss of life, Kors’ work broke the silence and showcased the transformations that had occurred since the suicide.

“It was just an explosion,” he said.

“I still get phone calls and emails from all over the world from people who are just reading the article that I had written for the high school newspaper back in 1995. That was just a

really special moment.”

Tales of A Freshman Nothing After building such a strong foundation in high school, Kors knew exactly what he hoped for in a college.

“I knew I wanted to be in a classroom where there were a small amount of people and students sat around arguing about books that they had actually read,” he said. “As soon as I stepped onto the campus of Amherst, I just went ‘Ah, this is the place.’ It just felt like home.”

Kors participated in a variety of extracurricular activities during his time at the college, serving consistently as a movie reviewer for The Amherst Student as well as enjoying airtime as a commentator for WAMH. He wrote an essay series for the station and titled it “Tales of a Freshman Nothing,” in which he was audacious enough to share potentially divisive opinions.

“One time the disc jockey was sure to clarify it was me who said something controversial on air. I said it and then he said, putting on his best radio voice, ‘and that was Joshua Kors, not Kevin Johnson,’” he said with a laugh.

Kors found the idyllic classroom setting he had hoped for. An English major, Kors particularly enjoyed his time with English Professor David Sofield.

“I was so fired up about the literature, and I was yelling at him in class,” Kors remembered. “He started yelling back and I guess all of that yelling just sparked a love for each other. We’ve been very close ever since.”

He also fostered a strong connection with Spanish professor Ilan Stavans.

“He’s more than just a mentor; he’s a friend, and I think he considers me a colleague now too,” Kors said, “I didn’t have a father in my life, so he became a real father figure to me.”

Stavans had similar thoughts when asked about Kors.

“I still see him in class, articulating thoughts in admirable, thought-provoking ways, at times offering views other would be timid to endorse,” Stavans

said. “I love him: We have been close friends since graduation.”

Kors also said that his time spent at Amherst helped to strengthen his passions for journalism.

He obtained his degree in the creative writing department, at first aspiring to become a novelist. After speaking with a professor who had transitioned from journalism to creative writing, he had the opposite revelation.

“I knew I wanted to make the world better with my writing,” he said. “I thought I was going to be a novelist, but then I realized how broad of an impact you could have when what you are writing is actually true.”

Finding Fulfillment in Journalism In pursuit of a place to use his words powerfully, Kors applied to 97 different newspapers across the country after graduating from Amherst.

“I was willing to go anywhere, I just wanted to be a reporter,” he said.

He wound up reporting at a small newspaper called the Spectrum based in St. George, Utah. He reported on local news stories, such as profiling the town ice cream man and writing about the small Jewish community in southern Utah.

“It’s funny, because I still have people from Utah calling me asking for advice about a good place to get ice cream or they ask me when my Jewish services are starting up,” he joked. “But I still do try to help these people. I have a whole list of Jewish contacts in Utah now. I’ve even Googled ice cream in St. George for some people.”

After a year in the Midwest, Kors returned to the East Coast, enrolling in the journalism graduate program at Columbia.

“I really believe in education,” he said. “I thought it would be great to learn from the top, and I wanted to learn more about how to do the craft.”

While at Columbia, Kors spent a year writing about epilepsy, focusing on something called the Andrews-Richter approach — a technique proven to stop

Photo courtesy of Joshua Kors ‘01E

Joshua Kors ‘01E has delivered multiple testimonies about veterans’ rights in front of the House Committee on Veteran Affairs.

Photo courtesy of Joshua Kors ‘01E

Joshua Kors ‘01E always wanted to be a journalist. At Amherst he reviewed movies for The Student and worked for WAMH. seizures and to help make sufferers well.

Kors himself had his first seizure in the eighth grade, making this reporting very personal.

“I love when people who have epilepsy call me up to talk about the article,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of hopelessness associated with it, and it’s great to be able to walk them through the approach … I like to think this is a condition — this is not who you are.”

Telling Soldiers’ Stories Kors returned to his native California for his first job after graduate school. He worked for KCBS-AM, a local radio station as well as at a local newspaper. That same newspaper would eventually run a story about Kors himself after his military reporting won him a prestigious George Polk Award.

The story of Kors’ military reporting begins with a connection to Amherst. After reconnecting with a former classmate, he began writing about the stories of various soldiers for a website this classmate was running. Kors served as a ghostwriter of sorts for the soldiers, empowering them to tell him their stories for a larger audience. What started as simply writing about the experiences of soldiers quickly transitioned into something much larger. The fifth soldier in his series raised an interesting issue, sharing that he had been diagnosed with multiple personalities disorder and was subsequently discharged during his service.

“I thought, that doesn’t make sense at all,” Kors said. “So, I started digging, and next thing you know I spent nine years on the story.”

Kors eventually brought that work to a professor at Columbia who put him in touch with The Nation, the outlet that eventually published his work.

His reporting revealed that doctors had been purposefully misdiagnosing soldiers as having a “personality disorder.” By discharging them in such a way, soldiers would be denied a lifetime of benefits in addition to having their signing bonuses retracted.

Kors’ work landed him in front of the House Committee on Veteran Affairs, where he testified three separate times — once in 2007 and twice in 2010. His testimonies sparked the creation of two new laws helping to regulate military discharge.

“I knew absolutely what I wanted to share and how I wanted to share it,” he said. “I wasn’t there to be an advocate.

I made sure that the unvarnished facts got there on the table. It was certainly one of the defining moments in my life.”

His work was featured on various national news outlets, landing him television opportunities to share his findings with a larger audience. The story was even adapted into a “Law & Order” episode.

“It’s gone all kinds of crazy ways, and I think that’s because it’s such an odd, global injustice and people just respond to it,” Kors said.

After enjoying a wildly successful career in journalism, Kors is now pursuing a new passion: law.

He’s currently in the process of obtaining a law degree from Vanderbilt University, while maintaining his work as a contributing reporter to both The Nation and the Huffington Post. Given the bleak job market for journalists, the decision to study law was partially a practical one. However, Kors also spoke to the benefits that his new degree will grant him. He will now not only be able to write about the soldiers, but also legally defend them.

“It’s exciting for me, I can still find a way to use my writing for good, which is always what is was all about for me,” he said. “Through the law, I can make a concrete difference and determinant difference in people’s real lives.”

Kors was also invited to speak at an upcoming TEDx event, hosted by Vanderbilt. His talk is titled “How to Uncover A Military Conspiracy,” and he’ll speak about his military reporting with the soldiers he had initially written about in attendance.

“What I’ll be talking about in my TED talk is that this is not a political issue, this is a human rights issue,” he said. “These are people, they’re not just statistics, they’re not just photos; they’re real people and real families.

They don’t deserve to come back and be surreptitiously cheated out of medical benefits.”

He hopes to use these new channels as a platform to continue to talk about issues that are important to him.

“It’s a passion,” he said. “It’s wonderful to continue to have opportunities to share these stories with so many people.”

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 5

Profile | Mary Beth Meehan ’89

A Portrait’s Worth: Photographing, Storytelling and Listening Photographer and educator Mary Beth Meehan’s work creates stunningly honest portraits of individuals and their communities.

Mary Beth Meehan’s open-mindedness and awareness shape her visualizations of other people’s lives through photography. Through her interest in the way the world can be “studied and digested into narrative,” Meehan proves that there is always more to be heard from the people we pass on the street. Writing a portrait about someone who takes them so thoughtfully is not an easy undertaking, but this unease speaks to the magnitude of Meehan’s abilities.

Stories are Greater than Frames Meehan’s current project, “Seen/Unseen,” is an attempt to get to know her neighbors in Providence, Rhode Island. The project consists of a series of up-close portraits in which the subject faces the camera head-on. Meehan does not label the portraits with their names, and their literal and figurative backgrounds are often unidentifiable.

But this focus on the subtleties of their expression, making them all the more resonant. Each face tells a story, and it is clear that the photographer has listened.

Eight of the portraits have been hung on buildings in downtown Providence. Meehan describes this public art installation as an effort to “co-opt the scale of celebrity for people who are not usually power brokers.” The decision to place a huge portrait of a fellow pedestrian on the cityscape reflects Meehan’s distinct point of view as a photographer. She’s interested in how a place’s diverse population can define a space, but she also takes a deeply caring look at her subjects as individuals. She said that too often, city residents are viewed as mere statistics in a pie chart of different

— Julia Pretsfelder ’18

immigrant groups; “Those ideas just eclipse the fullness of a person.”

Meehan refuses to put her subjects in a box, so it’s not surprising she avoids labels when describing herself, too. The distinction between photojournalist and fine art photographer is unimportant to her: “I call myself a photographer and educator, and I just keep doing my practice.” In her opinion, the process of creating is what’s important, and she is “more interested in the content than the final object and what box it came from.”

Visions of Brockton In her work, Meehan draws inspiration from her hometown of Brockton, Massachusetts — a place often caricatured by the media as a post-industrial economic wasteland with high crime rates. Yet, according to Meehan’s childhood friend, Lisa Martel, Brockton is a place to be proud of.

“Brockton shaped both of us to be strong willed, hard working, determined individuals who were not afraid of diversity or to fight for what is right,” Martel said.

Meehan credits her interest in telling full, multifaceted stories to her roots. “My work isn’t autobiographical, but I come from a working-class community that was only defined by its limits, which made me feel like I had something to say,” Meehan said.

In 2011, Meehan gave Brockton a voice through portraiture in the installation of “City of Champions: A Portrait of Brockton” after five years of taking photographs of the city’s residents. Meehan intended to offer a counterpoint to the narrative that degraded Brockton in public discourse by portraying it as a city in decline.

Photo courtesy of Mary Beth Meehan

Meehan stands with Wannton St. Louis and his family below a portrait she took of him for her Seen/Unseen project in Providence, RI.

6 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

“Photography was a way for me to reach around these narratives of Brockton and try to meet it on its own terms — on the streets, in markets and kitchens,” she said. She worked with educators, artists and governing bodies in the city to design the project, and she and some colleagues decided on 12 portraits of people from all walks of life to place on buildings across Brockton’s downtown center.

The collaborative nature of Meehan’s work is a testament to her passion for supporting other people.

Sharing a portrait of a place by tying together individual narratives was integral to the structure of “City of Champions.” She even passed it on to 10 Brockton high school students who hung 12 portraits of their own in 2012.

By emphasizing the importance of telling stories about ordinary people, Meehan’s work masterfully and effortlessly opens up the possibility for dialogues about the realities of difference.

Photography’s Openings While Brockton set the stage for how Meehan sees the world, her studies at Amherst put her experiences into perspective intellectually.

“I gained access to different ways of viewing the world that shaped the way I can offer my small view and contribution,” she said.

According to Meehan, the small, student-oriented town of Amherst was so different from the working-class city of Brockton that it was hard to believe that the two cities were located in the same state.

From the outset, Meehan was captivated by Amherst’s natural beauty and the energy she observed in the classroom. She studied English and took many classes in the art history and sociology departments, which helped her discover new ways of thinking.

Though she was not involved in an art scene at Amherst beyond publishing photos in the literary magazine and taking a visual art class with Professor Robert Sweeney, Meehan always felt an instinctive affinity for photography. During the summers while she was in college, Meehan took classes at the New England School of Photography in Boston.

She began to think about shifting her energies towards photography when her editor at a newspaper internship preferred her photos to her writing.

After graduating from Amherst in 1989, she went to University of Missouri’s photojournalism graduate program where she began to notice consistent themes in her work.

Her master’s project, “A Family of Sisters,” documented the lives of a family she had met. Meehan sought to explore how a matriarchal family system worked during a time when

Photo courtesy of Mary Beth Meehan

“When I look at her portraits, I’m not just a voyeur. I’m invited to see because Mary Beth was invited to see,” said Rani Arbo ‘89.

Dan Quail and George H.W. Bush were upholding traditionally patriarchal family values. This work went on to win a second-place prize in the New York Times’ “Pictures of the Year” contest, and she continued to publish more work in the Times.

Her master’s project set a framework for her subsequent work. “It was my first attempt at noticing this idea of seeing a pattern of a way something is defined in public discourse and trying to breathe air into it or see another angle of it,” she said.

The Power of Representation Commenting on her “City of Champions” project, she asked, “Is it possible for art to create social change? I don’t know, but I hope that it can at least create connections.” A striking aspect of Meehan’s work is her ability to connect with and take compelling portraits of people from many different backgrounds.

She has photographed an Italian community transplanted to Boston’s North End in “Paesani: An Italian Community, Transplanted,” a family’s emigration from the Dominican Republic to the U.S. “A Mother’s Journey,” and undocumented immigrants living in a variety of spaces in “Undocumented.” Yet, instead of studying her subjects from a distance, she maintains a warmth and intimacy in her photographs.

Fellow Amherst alum Rani Arbo ’89 became close friends with Meehan when she photographed Arbo’s band years after they graduated.

“Mary Beth is a magician with people,” she said. “When I look at her portraits, I’m not just a voyeur. I’m invited to see because Mary Beth was invited to see. This is an extraordinary privilege.”

Meehan allows her subjects to depict themselves the way they want to be depicted. She allows them to change clothing if they want to, and she will often let them direct the shoot by choosing how they want to pose. She offers biographies and descriptions of varying lengths, depending on the project, which leads to more honest portrayals.

Meehan said when she was in

journalism school, she and her peers thought the world was theirs to photograph, but she began to take note of the subjectivity of power differentials. She appreciates that the world of journalism is beginning to change after being monopolized by white men for so many years. However, she also recognizes the inherent criticism of her work. “I enjoy learning about other people’s stories, but it is problematic to tell these stories as a white woman,” she said.

Meehan does not shy away from asking herself challenging questions, such as, “What are the problems in trying to speak for a person with whom I have a power dynamic in the U.S.?” or “What does it mean to represent?” At times, Meehan has found it hard to continue photographing because she is so troubled by these power differentials, but she said, “You can’t just stop taking photos forever. You have to grapple with these issues and come to a resolution through yourself. I can try and use my access to benefit my community.”

She created a blog to reflect on her “Seen/Unseen” project in order to be entirely transparent, and she is frank about discomfort, mistakes and first impressions. She documents certain imperfections in her process: how she stumbled around phrasing a question to an old friend who had adopted his daughter or how she worried about perpetuating stereotypes about neighborhoods in Providence. But most importantly, she listens and learns. She seems to leave no experience without being somehow touched and impressed upon by her interaction.

“It takes skill and something much more important to take a photograph ‘from’ someone, and to have them experience the interaction as a gift,” Arbo said. “It’s the radical-ness of this relationship-building, and what it demonstrates about the possibility for human connection, mutual respect and trust, that blows me away.”

Meehan uses her stunningly honest, perceptive and modest lens to bring out the storyteller in all of her subjects, and by doing so she tells a fuller story about our world.

Profile | John Yarchoan ’13

A Young Entrepreneur for the New Marketplace John Yarchoan ’13 never gave up on his unconvenional passion, which landed the 24-year-old on the “50 Emerging Global Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2015” list.

— Elaine Jeon ’17 Reading those “20 Successful People in their 20s” lists has always been rather unsettling for me. It’s crazy to think that someone only a couple years older than me could have accomplished so much, so when I read about these young accomplished entrepreneurs, I automatically label them as arrogant hotshots to make myself feel marginally better.

But when I met John Yarchoan ’13, the 24-year-old CEO of Sky Mutual, he seemed like nothing but a charming and friendly Frisbee bro. While answering my questions on a late-night bus to New York and trying to figure out how to use FaceTime, he remained humble and was all smiles — which allowed me to momentarily forget that he was recently placed on Inc. Magazine’s “50 Emerging Global Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2015.”

Eclectic Backgrounds Merging into One Founding a company was not always the career path that Yarchoan, an economics and political science double major, had in mind. But his experiences at Amherst gradually shaped him into the entrepreneur that he is today. Yarchoan’s first foray into entrepreneurship was in 2012, when he co-founded the Amherst Muck-Rake, the satirical publication written by an anonymous group of students on campus.

In 2012, the campus was brewing with tension: Angie Epifano published her personal experience of a sexual assault at the college, and an off-campus fraternity printed misogynistic shirts for its annual event.

“It was a period when it felt like speech was being restricted,” Yarchoan said. “And we were all personally frustrated. We started the Muck-Rake with the idea that comedy and satire had a way of cutting into things that [other] dialogues were unable to do.”

Yarchoan also spent his time playing for Army of Darkness, the men’s ultimate Frisbee team. “John was tireless and had great work ethic as a player,” the team’s coach Bill Stewart said. “As

a captain, he brought quiet focus and a good-natured lightness. And he consistently showed respect to his opponents and was respected by them.”

Over time, Yarchoan has realized how much overlap there is between running a team and managing a company. He loved growing the ultimate Frisbee program at Amherst with his co-captains and teammates, and he reminisced fondly about going to semifinals at the Division III national competition during his senior year.

Yarchoan served as a senator for three years in the Association of Amherst Students, also finding an overlap between the AAS and his current work.

Being a senator during a rocky period at Amherst was difficult for Yarchoan, but, he said, “at the end of the day, the senate is empowered to take a huge fund to do something that would bring value to people on campus.”

When he presented his senior thesis about why Rwanda and Burundi each experienced different political transitions after the Rwandan genocide, Yarchoan was fearless in defending his argument in front of political science experts. “His defense was attended by then Provost Peter Uvin, one of the world’s leading expert on the subject,” said his thesis adviser Javier Corrales.

“Other students would have been a bit intimidated, but John rose to the occasion. Despite the fact that some of John’s claims challenged some of Uvin’s arguments, in the end, John left everyone in the room, including Uvin, absolutely impressed.”

Given his successful Amherst career, it’s no surprise that Yarchoan quickly developed into the confident entrepreneur he is now. But he joked that there were couple mishaps along the way.

“I took Advanced Econometrics knowing it was going to be a nightmare,” Yarchoan recalled. “Successful people don’t like to fail, but I still went for it. But the class was so hard, and I was so tired from studying that I passed out before the exam.”

Associate Professor of Economics Jun Ishii confirmed this story. “John

overslept for not one, but two of my exams,” Ishii recalled. “The first time it had happened, John came to me afterward all nerves. I was shocked when it happened again the following semester — we were both initially speechless. For a few semesters after, John was always a bit nervous around me — he denies it, but the body language was there.”

Nevertheless, Ishii said he was thrilled when Yarchoan decided to run a start-up company based on an idea he had as a student at Amherst. Ishii said he wasn’t surprised that Yarchoan opted to become an entrepreneur. “One of the most important traits of an entrepreneur is the ability to withstand and recover from setbacks, as entrepreneurial success is almost always preceded by a long string of setbacks,” Ishii said.

From an Idea to a Company While at Amherst, Yarchoan considered going into consulting after graduating. But he realized he would not be happy working in very defined roles with predictable work. Instead, he honed in on his core interest: the environment. He believes that climate change is “one of the biggest problems our generation has to grapple with,” and he was consumed with the concept of how humans interact with and are impacted by the natural world.

He got his first taste of what his company, Sky Mutual, and its business plan would come to be during a course he took with Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought Adam Sitze. As Yarchoan explored the relationship between neoliberalism and climate change, he began to wonder what it would be like to create a new marketplace that specifically dealt with climate change.

With scattered ideas about his passion, Yarchoan concluded that he needed some training before delving further into his interest. “One mistake is to assume that one day people wake up and say ‘I want to start a company,’” Yarchoan said. “For me personally, I’ve been the one to always work on projects

Photo courtesy of Megan Hurlburt

Being a young CEO is challenging, but Yarchoan loves his job because he’s putting in the hours for his passion, rather than “putting in the hours for someone else’s work.”

Photo courtesy of Cole Morgan ‘13

Yarchoan said an idea for a start-up develops over time: “One mistake is to assume that people wake up and say ‘I want to start a company.’” and build teams for things I find interesting.”

During the his senior year at Amherst, Yarchoan decided to forego his acceptance to a financial firm and joined Venture for America, a fellowship program that trains recent graduates to become entrepreneurs by connecting them to high growth start-up companies. He described Venture for America as a critical stepping-stone into the start-up world, analogous to completing apprenticeship before becoming a museum curator or a chef.

Through the program, he began working for Resource Environmental Solutions, a company that created an exchange of environmental “credits.”

Instead of paying their ways through legal battles, interested companies could now purchase credits to get their projects approved, while environmental regulators could channel their resources into managing the net impact on wildlife.

During his second year at the company, Yarchoan was already planting seeds for what became Sky Mutual.

He began piecing together different information and data to develop models for structuring policies for the company. When he decided he was ready to switch gears, the transition to Sky Mutual happened smoothly. “My boss knew I was keen on growing my own company, so when I went up to him and said that I wanted do something different, my boss was very supportive,” Yarchoan said.

Today, Sky Mutual is a weather insurance company that protects companies from financial losses caused by weather. “It’s less about the front-page weather events, but more about the back of the page like droughts — variations of the weather that cause major impacts on businesses in different sectors,” he said. For instance, his company analyzed historic snowfalls to determine how a ski resort could secure steady revenue despite adverse weather.

He is also expanding on the idea of creating a new marketplace that focuses on climate change. “What we’re doing right now is a little different than what I imagined we’d be doing a year ago,” Yarchoan said. “The basic idea is that

since the weather affects so many industries and people, we can create a liquid marketplace, so that it wouldn’t be me just saying ‘Hey, you should protect against this risk,’ but it would be obvious for this kind of company to use this marketplace and trade risks in the same way that they use financial marketplaces to protect them against movements like interest rates and exchange rates.”

What he finds especially compelling about his idea is that the marketplace would not only transfer risks, but also would convey information in an unprecedented way. He said this marketplace could reveal raw, economic data about the reality of climate change and refute the ideas of climate change deniers.

An Emerging Entrepreneur Being a CEO is a challenge that not every 20-something-year-old can digest easily — it’s overwhelming and very fast-paced and requires strong discipline. But what gets Yarchoan out of bed every morning is that he is ultimately doing something he’s always been passionate about. “For me, it’s an extension of the types of things I already think about and do,” Yarchoan said. “It doesn’t exhaust me in the way that I would feel if I were putting in the hours for someone else’s work.”

Yarchoan encourages Amherst students to break away from seeing only “safe” options. “Amherst students tend to be very successful people who are used to being successful,” Yarchoan said, “and naturally, we are averse to failure.” He recognizes that there are both micro and macro level failures in the world of entrepreneurship. Yarchoan isn’t necessarily more immune to potential downfalls than other students, but for him, it seems crazy that many Amherst graduates choose an obvious and perhaps “safer” career path to avoid failure.

“To me, the smartest people should be working on the hardest problems, not something that has already been solved,” he said. “They should be empowered to work on really innovative things, as innovation is the only way out of economic stagnation.”

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 7

Profile | Mark Vanhoenacker ‘96

Life’s Travels: An Adventurous Path to Flight An airline pilot and acclaimed writer, Mark Vanhoenacker is living out not one but two of his childhood dreams.

— Jason Darell ’18 From conducting historical research in Kenya to piloting a Boeing 747 at 35,000 feet above sea level, Mark Vanhoenacker ’96 seems to have done it all. In between all of these endeavors, he has also cultivated a lifelong love of writing.

Vanhoenacker has written articles for the New York Times and Slate, among other publications. This year, he published the critically acclaimed memoir “Skyfaring,” a product of his philosophical and poetic vision of flights.

The Dream to Fly Growing up in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Vanhoenacker was absorbed in language and travel starting at a young age. “I was interested in airplanes my whole life — it’s kind of the first thing I can remember being interested in,” he said.

His father was an airplane fanatic, so there were always books related to flying around the house.

Vanhoenacker constantly looked forward to his family vacations, wondering how they would travel to their destinations each time.

Vanhoenacker explored his interest in flight both inside of the classroom and out, creating aviation-themed science projects at school and building model airplanes at home. As a teenager, Vanhoenacker even took a few flying lessons, but he never really thought that he would pursue a career as a pilot. As much as he tried to explore his passion, he found his high school to be limiting: “My school was pretty academic, and nobody ever said to me, ‘Hey, you like traveling and languages, did you ever

think of becoming a pilot?’” Vanhoenacker is confident he would have become a pilot sooner had he been more exposed to the possibility at a younger age.

While in high school, Vanhoenacker delivered newspapers and spent the income he made on homestay programs in Japan and Mexico.

His summer in Japan proved to be especially influential, and he remains immensely interested in the country to this day. In fact, when he was deciding between Amherst and Williams, he ultimately chose to attend Amherst because of the college’s historic connection to Japan through its relationship with Doshisha University.

Switching Careers When he arrived at Amherst as a first-year student, Vanhoenacker planned to major in Asian languages and civilizations and to participate in the Doshisha fall exchange program.

Even though he did not end up following through with either of these aspirations, he maintained his interest in Japan by taking a Japanese course every semester and traveling there the summer after his junior year. While at Amherst, Vanhoenacker took full advantage of the open curriculum.

“I had a lot of diverse interests, and I was glad to be at a school where you could follow up on different tracks,” he said. In addition to taking Japanese every semester, Vanhoenacker also often found himself taking a science or a math class. He found deep appreciation

for the top-notch teaching at Amherst. “I had a lot of professors that I really admired,” he said. And he cherished the personal connections he formed during his four years at Amherst, and still sees many of his classmates as his closest friends today.

While it was exceedingly difficult for him to choose, Vanhoenacker eventually decided to major in history, finding the field very satisfying for his long-running interests in global culture and language.

During his senior year, he was awarded the prestigious Keasbey Foundation Scholarship, and upon graduation, he matriculated to Cambridge University in order to further his history education. After completing his masters program, Vanhoenacker decided to pursue a Ph.D. When a research project sent him to Kenya he realized he was more excited about flying to Kenya than about archiving its history.

The thought of training to be a pilot crossed Vanhoenacker’s mind often, but he still did not consider it a realistic career choice. Instead, he returned to the United States and began looking for a job that would involve as much travel as possible.

Eventually, Vanhoenacker found what seemed to be the perfect compromise between fulfilling his urge to travel and his realistic need for money: management consulting.

He soon found himself flying across the globe and making good use of the language skills he had cultivated before and during his time at Amherst. After three years, however, Vanhoenacker found that even frequent travel could not satisfy his

Photo courtesy of Sebastien Stouffs

Vanhoenacker’s memoir “Skyfaring” introduces the reader to almost every aspect of flying. He published the book this year and received favorable reviews from critics.

8 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

Photo courtesy of Michael Lionstar

“I think that my five-year-old self would approve of what I’m doing now, “ Vanhoenacker said of his career as a pilot. love of flight.

“Luckily, I found out about a scholarship that British Airways offered in which they paid for your flight training in exchange for working at their company for a number of years,” he said.

Vanhoenacker was rejected the first time he applied for the program, but he was not discouraged.

The second time he applied, he was accepted, and off he went to explore the sky above the clouds. He first started flying commercially at the age of 29 after completing two career changes in what seems like record time.

Landing the Dream Job Vanhoenacker is definitely one of the lucky few who can confidently say they’re living their dream job. “I think that my five-year old self would approve of what I’m doing now,” he said.

In addition to enjoying every second of his time that he spends in the air, Vanhoenacker also has a profound appreciation for the airplane. Even though he works in one almost every day, he in no way takes the aircraft for granted.

“The plane is its own kind of wonder,” he said. “In many ways they represent the intersection between safety, commercial viability and technological excellence. And to be working with those machines is pretty remarkable.” He speaks with an almost giddiness present in his voice, making it more than obvious that he is paid to do what he truly loves.

Vanhoenacker’s love of flight extends far beyond the cockpit; it’s an appreciation of the entire airborne experience. Whenever he flies recreationally, he insists on sitting in the window seat. He finds the experience to be almost cathartic and sees it as having the same appeal as “sitting in a coffee shop and watching the world go by.”

As a passenger, Vanhoenacker has more of an opportunity to ob-

serve the landscapes below him as the globe flashes by. The passenger windows of a plane also allow him to see different viewpoints of the journey that he would otherwise miss out on as a pilot. Instead of only being allowed the view of what’s straight ahead in the cockpit, the ordinary traveler Vanhoenacker can see the wings of the plane and the enormous turbines that power its journey through the skies.

Vanhoenacker said one of the main reasons he wrote “Skyfaring” was to remind people that flight is an amazing innovation. “The things that amaze me about being a pilot — that’s what I tried to put into the book,” he said.

In addition to serving as a reminder of the wonders of flight, “Skyfaring” also serves as a sort of introduction to the more technical aspects of aircraft, knowledge that is usually only privy to the pilots themselves.

Vanhoenacker described his novel as his attempt at creating the “textbook for an introductory Amherst course on aviation.” There is no shortage of detail in the book, which describes almost every aspect of flight, from the intricacies of aviation maps to the structural complexities of a plane’s engine.

“This book represents what I would show you if you could come up [to the cockpit] during a flight,” he said.

These days, as traveling by flight has become more and more common, people have begun to lose sight of how whimsical the experience truly is. In the last century, we have accomplished what humanity has been dreaming of for the past few millennia, which is amazing.

But it seems as though flight is a victim of its own success sometimes.

To this, Vanhoenacker responded by quoting comedian Louis C.K. When flying, “You’re sitting in a chair in the sky! You’re like a Greek myth right now!”

Profile | Kirun Kapur ‘97

A Poet Grappling with the Limits of Language In poems that defy conventional categorization, Kirun Kapur ’97 explores the relationship between family, history and myth.

— Sophie Murguia ’17 The first poem in Kirun Kapur ’97’s recently published collection is called “Anthem,” and it’s a fitting beginning to a book that is often striking in its lyrical intensity.

“Love begins in a country / Where oranges weep sweetness / And men piss in the street.”

It’s a stunning opening, moving swiftly from the general to the particular, and evoking a set of images that stay with you long after you turn the page. Try reading it aloud: It’s only when you hear Kapur’s words spoken that you get a sense of the potency of her language, the aching intensity of those long vowel sounds.

When I speak to Kapur, Skyping her at her Boston home one Thursday afternoon, it’s easy to see where those beautiful sounds come from. Kirun Kapur talks like a poet. She speaks very articulately and with a rare kind of self-possession. Her words often seem carefully considered, although she rarely pauses before answering a question. And she’s at her best when she’s talking about big ideas, leaning into the camera and speaking quickly as she discusses history, religion and the limits of language.

Each of these ideas makes up one of the many threads that come together in Kapur’s debut poetry collection, “Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist.” At its core, it’s a book of family stories: Kapur writes about Cain and Abel, about fictionalized versions of her own parents and about the Pandavas, the family from the Hindu epic poem the “Mahabharata.” But it’s also a book that’s conscious of its place in history, weaving together stories of India’s 1947 partition with headlines from more recent news. Kapur’s poetry manages to be both intimate and expansive, destroying any boundary between the personal and the political.

Family Kapur dedicated her book to her parents, Mary Therese Breton and Inder Lal Kapur. It was only fitting for a book that’s “very much about family,” Kapur told me. And it’s clear that Ka-

pur’s parents have impacted her writing far beyond the scope of this book.

She hopes that one of her next projects will be a translation project in collaboration with her father, a native Urdu speaker.

Kapur, who grew up in Hawaii, said that her parents instilled a love for language in her from an early age, although she had no idea where that love would lead her.

“When I was 5 or 6 I was interested in writing poems,” she said. “But it wasn’t something I did all the time or with the idea that it would be what I did when I grew up.”

Beauty and Mystery Even when Kapur came to Amherst, poetry was far from the first thing on her mind. She double majored in art history and religion — two disciplines in which “mystery and beauty are essential,” she said.

She hadn’t planned on studying religion, but after accidentally enrolling in a class, she was hooked. Reading the writings of Augustine and St. Theresa had a profound effect on her.

Both thinkers, she said, were deeply concerned with “questions about what’s true, questions about how you articulate experiences that don’t easily conform to language.” These were questions that would go on to inform her own poetry years later.

“Suffering, death, love, beauty — these are things that are very hard to find language for,” she said. “We often resort to cliches to express them. And the hard work of poetry is finding fresh language for that not only to describe it but to make the reader feel it on the page.”

This struggle to find the right words is evident in Kapur’s book, especially in those poems in which she tries to find language to describe unspeakable violence. She’s reaching for something almost spiritual, trying to communicate the incommunicable. Maybe this is what all poets are doing in the end, but with Kapur you feel it even more acutely.

Art history professor Natasha Stall-

er noticed this theme in Kapur’s essays for her Amherst classes as well.

“She embraced the sacred, the mysterious dimension of art — which is so often overlooked,” Staller said.

Staller remembered her student as being “fiercely ambitious” in her academic undertakings.

“She’s a passionate learner,” Staller said. “She has the rage to know.”

In college, Kapur found herself surrounded by friends with a similar intellectual passion.

“One of the things I loved about my friends at Amherst was that they had a kind of omnivorous intelligence,” Kapur said. “They were interested in everything from obscure facts about the Byzantine Empire to what was going on in ‘The Simpsons.’ And they brought the same nerdy, joyful intellectual spirit to everything.”

Kapur’s literary gifts found an outlet when she and some friends started a literary magazine, which they called A Further Room. One of these friends, Julia Gray ’96, remembered that Kapur’s college writing stood out from the crowd.

“All her stuff was very sophisticated and political,” Gray said. “It’s sort of cheesy to say retrospectively that someone was wise beyond their years. But when you’re kicking around in college, adulthood is in short supply, and Kirun was always very adult and very real — beyond her peers.”

Telling the Truth For a while, Kapur thought she might want to pursue art history in grad school, but near the end of her college years she changed her mind.

“I think I knew the things I cared about,” she said. “I knew that I still cared a lot about the life of the mind, that I might be interested in some sort of graduate program, that words mattered to me. But I didn’t know exactly how those things would come together.”

She spent some time after college traveling and working as a journalist in India, where she wrote for the now-defunct feminist magazine Manushi.

Photo courtesy of James Cash ‘96

This year Kapur published “Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist,” her debut collection of poetry. She dedicated the collection to her parents, Mary Therese Breton and Inder Lal Kapur.

Photo courtesy of James Cash ‘96

Kapur double majored in art history and religion, two subjects in which “mystery and beauty are essential,” she said.

“It was a fascinating crossroads of writing and politics and social work,” she said. But the experience made her realize that she did not want to be a political activist.

“I like shades of gray too much for the kind of clear, definitive stances you have to take in that kind of field,” she said. “But I think I also found a lot of the causes that matter to me still, and that I hope sometimes poems can speak to.”

Many of the poems in “Visiting Indira Gandhi’s Palmist” have political overtones, not only in their content, but also in epigraphs and footnotes that Kapur includes to reference historical events. For Kapur, this is a natural part of her work as a poet.

“I think in American poetics there tends to be a bigger divide between politics and poetry,” she said. “I think in general in America we divide things.

And I think in other parts of the world you don’t see that as much. You can just look around the world and see leaders who are also journalists or who are also playwrights. And you don’t find that so much in America. So I find the distinction between those worlds somewhat artificial.”

Kapur’s poetry defies categorization — but that’s the point. It resists binary distinctions between the past and the present, between the personal and the communal, between the specific and the broad. She melds these categories effortlessly in poems like “Polaroid City,” in which a father tells his daughter a story about fleeing the violence that preceded India’s independence movement.

“I feel that all poems are an attempt to deal with reality, and that’s in some form political all the time, whether or not we’re identifying that as political at the moment,” Kapur told me. In writing her book, “I certainly was aware that there were historical overtones, some of which were political. But I think poems have to tell the truth, and I’m not sure that’s a political endeavor.”

The Public Poet Considering how fluidly Kipur’s

poetry moves between the public and the private, it’s not surprising that in both her day jobs she’s highly concerned with the public role of poetry.

Kapur is the poetry editor for The Drum, a literary magazine that publishes exclusively in audio form.

“I think of poetry as something that is spoken, that has to do with the body of the speaker,” she said. “The sound of it is crucial to its life.” For that reason, The Drum felt like a natural fit.

She also serves as executive director of the Boston-based arts organization The Tannery Series, which she co-founded in 2010 with a friend. The program organizes literary events for a general audience, with themes like “Love, Lust and Loathing” and “Are You Cool?” Kapur said that she and writer Dawne Shand were inspired to start the series after noticing that poetry readings in Boston were often sparsely attended.

“I started thinking: Where are all the people for poetry?” she said. “We live in Boston — it’s a town that cares about the arts, it’s a town that cares about intellectual things. How come we can’t fill a room for literature?”

Soon after that realization, the Tannery Series was born. Since then, events in the series have filled many rooms.

“At the last program, four or five people came up to me after and said, ‘I’ve never been to a reading before, but this was a lot of fun.’ It was a poet they had never heard of in a little bookstore, but there were 100 people on a cold night talking about poems,” she said.

Kapur said that in her own poetry, too, she’s deeply interested in “the connection between speakers and readers and in between poems and readers.”

Her friend Mark Vanhoenacker ’96, a fellow writer, said that ever since Kapur started a literary magazine at Amherst, she’s been interested in the public role of literature.

“I think Kirun is as dedicated to her own writing as she is to the larger idea that literature matters most when it’s read or heard,” he said. “That’s something she learned at Amherst, and that I learned from her.”

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 9

Let’s Talk about the

mascot

Who was Lord Jeffery Amherst?

Why is he controversial?

Jeffery Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Montreal, is best known for his role as commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America during the French and Indian War. According to the Jeffrey Amherst Collection in the Five College Archives, Amherst was born in Kent, England in 1717, and joined the British army in 1735. He fought the French in Europe during the Seven Years’ War in 1956 as a soldier, and again in North America during the French and Indian war from 1756 to 1763 as commander of 11,000 British soldiers. Along with Quebec City and Louisburg, Amherst’s most well-known victory was the conquest of Montreal, for which he was knighted and given the Order of Bath. Many of his military successes in North America owed to his expertise in military logistics in a land completely foreign to him upon his arrival as a British commander, according to American studies and history professor Kevin Sweeney in “The Very Model of a Modern Major General” in the 2008 Fall issue of the Amherst Magazine.

Amherst was the first British Governor General in what would eventually become Canada, and also served as nominal governor of Virginia.

He declined the post of commander of British forces during the American Revolutionary War, though he played a part as an advisor and commander of forces in England. He was recalled to active duty in 1792 at the age of 76, and died in 1797.

The Town of Amherst is named after Lord Jeffery Amherst, and Amherst College is named for the town.

While the British held control over parts of North America, including parts of today’s Canada and northern U.S., Native American attacks threatened their control. According to Sweeney, Lord Jeffery Amherst was already negatively inclined toward Native Americans, seeing them as less-than-valuable allies during the French and Indian War, and his attitude led to a decline in the alliance between his troops and the Native Americans.

According to Michael Kelly, Head of Archives and Special Collections at Amherst College, after the French and Indian War, Amherst saw no more need for an alliance with the Native Americans because the French had been defeated. At the same time, his superiors in England ordered him to cut costs. Amherst decided to stop distributing gifts to the Native Americans and instead adopt more punitive measures for failure to cooperate with the British soldiers, even though other British officers advised him otherwise.

“When Men of What race soever, behave ill they must be punished but not bribed,” Amherst wrote to major-general and superintendent of Indian af-

fairs Sir William Johnson in 1761, who had warned Amherst that without continued gift exchange, good relations with the Native population could not exist.

This cessation of diplomatic bartering, along with the British army going back on its word to vacate its forts near the Great Lakes after the French were defeated, led to a new surge of Native American attacks against colonists on the Western frontier in 1763.

In late June, Amherst brought up the idea of introducing the deadly disease smallpox to Native Americans using blankets infected with the virus to Colonel Henry Bouquet. “You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” Amherst wrote. There is no evidence that Amherst commanded the distribution of such blankets or went beyond advocating such a course of action.

Native American tribes near the Great Lakes continued to resist British rule, leading to Pontiac’s Rebellion. Amherst’s control over areas of the western frontier degraded quickly, and he was recalled to England.

Is the Jeff Amherst’s official mascot?

When did the Jeff become Amherst’s mascot?

What is the history behind the Lord Jeff and Amherst athletics?

There has been no evidence of the Lord Jeff being instated as Amherst College’s official mascot. According to George Rugg Cutting’s 1871 book “Student Life at Amherst College,” students voted to change Amherst’s colors from mauve and white to purple and white in 1868. But there has never been an official procedure for instituting a mascot.

The idea of Lord Jeffery Amherst being a mascot for the college began with a song. In 1905, James Shelley Hamilton, a 1906 graduate and a member of Glee Club, wrote a song titled “Lord Jeffrey Amherst.”

“Oh, Lord Jeffrey Amherst was a soldier of the King, and he came from across the sea,” read part of the lyrics. “To the Frenchman and the Indians, he didn’t do a thing, In the wilds of this wild country.”

The song was included in the Glee Club program, and added to the Amherst College Songbook in 1906.

“The whole thing had been frivolously conceived and carelessly done, without any reference to historical justification or fact and even with Jeffery’s name mis-spelled,” Hamilton wrote, in a letter from 1934 held in the Archives and Special Collections. He explained that he wanted Amherst College’s Glee Club to have something “a bit gay” to sing, similar to songs about John Harvard or Ephraim Williams at those respective schools.

In 1913, Amherst College alumni attempted to erect a statue of Lord Jeffery Amherst on campus.

The U.S. and England enjoyed good relations in the 1920s, resulting in a wave of anglophilia in the States. In Amherst town, a hotel — the Lord Jeffery Inn on Boltwood Ave. — was named for the commander. On campus, more students embraced the song “Lord Jeffery Amherst,” which became the first song in the college songbook in 1926. A student-run publication, the Lord Jeff, was started in June 1920 and ran until 1935. It was a humorous and lighthearted publication which frequently depicted cartoonish caricatures of Lord Amherst on its cover. During World War II, The Amherst Student stopped publication, and its temporary replacement was a four-page paper called The Jeff, which was much shorter due to a paper shortage. The Jeff ran until the end of the war, and The Amherst Student resumed.

The Lord Jeff has often been portrayed on the college’s athletic flyers and bulletins for decades. It is unknown when the Lord Jeff was first linked with sports, but the Jeff was consistently associated with the college’s sports teams in the 1920s, particularly when the magazine Lord Jeff would feature illustrations and caricatures of Lord Jeffery Amherst with a football, with a cow representing Williams College, or on Pratt Field. Sports teams were referred to as the Jeffs beginning in the 1930s and 1940s. Archives of The Amherst Student dating at least as far back as 1931 include references to Amherst teams as the Jeffs. Prior to that, they had simply been known by the college’s name — for example, the baseball team was referred to as “The Amherst Nine” in 1885 by the Harvard Crimson.

Image coutesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

10 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

What arguments have been made in favor of keeping Lord Jeff?

Those who have argued in favor of the Lord Jeff have said that the Lord Jeff is one of the college’s few historical traditions, and therefore serves too important a role in the community to be removed.

“I think Amherst is already a place that lacks tradition and identity, and the traditions that remain here are dying out quickly. Most of the old traditions (the school song, etc.) have already been eradicated, and I think that getting rid of the Lord Jeff as our mascot would be another step towards dissociating from our school’s great history,” Tom Sommers ’16 said in an interview earlier this year.

Others have said that the Lord Jeff has taken on a life of its own as the mascot, and now reflects values of the college community more than it reflects the historical figure Lord Jeffery Amherst.

“When I think of a Lord Jeff, I don’t think of Lord Jeffery Amherst.

I think of excellence, in the humanities, science, music, theater, art and athletics,” Michael Johnson ’16 wrote in a sports column for The Student last year. “I think of all the past alumni and administrators that worked to make Amherst the great place it is today. I think of sporting events and orchestra concerts, late nights in Frost and football practice.”

At the Association of Amherst Students senate meeting on Oct. 5 at which the AAS officially took a stance against the Lord Jeff, some senators expressed concerns that the current student body would fail to accurately represent the opinions of Amherst’s alumni, many of whom have been vocal about their support for the Lord Jeff.

What arguments have been made against keeping the Jeff?

Who has taken a stance on the issue?

Who hasn’t?

Those who propose changing the mascot have argued that Jeffery Amherst advocated genocide against Native Americans, and that the college should not associate itself with this legacy.

“Just because of this accident of history, we don’t have to stick with this. If we want the college to be some place that’s inclusive and open, and something that we can be proud of, I think we need to just sit down and do it right this time,” said Michael Kelly, head of Frost Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

Another argument is that the Jeff alienates students of Native American descent, whether they be current members of the community or prospective applicants.

“Many see our commitment to the development of a learning environment where difference is examined and celebrated being thwarted by our having Lord Jeff be the icon behind whom we rally in pride,” said Katie Fretwell ’81, dean of admission and financial aid.

Kelly noted that some advocates of keeping the Jeff have pointed out that there is currently no serious movement to change the name of the college or the town. But he said this is not a reason to avoid changing the mascot.

“There’s the argument that, well, if we change the mascot, then we have to change the name of the college, then we have to change the name of the town — the slippery slope argument, which is a logical fallacy,” Kelly said.

President Biddy Martin has held small open discussions about the mascot, but has not released an official statement for or against either the Jeff or the Moose. “We may need to design a process for discussion of the proposal. Because the current mascot was never formally adopted by the college, there is no clear mechanism for re-considering it,” she said in an email interview last semester.

The Association of Amherst Students senate voted on Oct. 5 to publish a letter officially announcing its stance against the Jeff. “Asking our peers, some of whom identify as Native American, to rally around a mascot who advocated the genocide of an entire nation of peoples is not something we can do,” the letter says. “In continuing to support the Lord Jeff as the college’s mascot we risk alienating members of the student body who do not feel as though they can, in good conscience, endorse him.”

E.J. Mills, head football coach, said in an interview last semester, “I want to make sure everyone feels welcome, and everyone feels valued. So, if our mascot right now is alienating students, then I would advocate that we really think about making a change … Would I advocate to become the Moose? I would not jump on that bandwagon.”

Image coutesy of Amherst College Archives and Special Collections

Have other colleges changed their mascots?

According to the official website of Dartmouth College’s athletic department, Dartmouth’s sports teams are unofficially nicknamed the Big Green, a name that originated among the student body at the college’s first baseball game, when green was adopted as the college’s color. The Indian became their unofficial mascot in the 1920’s, when it became ubiquitously used by local sportswriters. The college used that mascot until 1972, when a controversy over the mascot among the student body prompted an ad hoc mascot committee on the Dartmouth Alumni Council to issue a statement discouraging the use of the Indian on campus and at sports games. In 1974, Dartmouth’s board of trustees issued an official statement in which they said that they found “use of the (Indian) symbol in any form to be inconsistent with present institutional and academic objectives of the College in advancing Native American education.” After this statement, the Indian was considered discontinued as a mascot, although it was never officially removed. There have been several student referenda to adopt new mascots, including the moose, but none have passed. Dartmouth continues to use the Big Green as the nickname for its sports teams.

Stanford University officially adopted the nickname of Indians in 1930, after a unanimous vote by the Executive Committee for the Associated Students, Stanford’s student government. The Indian had been used commonly on campus before the vote. The mascot was used until 1972, when a group of Native American students lobbied the university’s president, Richard Lyman, to take action against it. That year, the Stanford Student Senate voted 18-4 to remove the mascot. There were student referenda to reinstate the Indian and select other mascots including the griffin, but from 1972 to 1981, Cardinal was the unofficial nickname of athletics at the university. In 1981, president Donald Kennedy released a statement that declared Cardinal the official nickname for all athletic teams at Stanford.

Neither Dartmouth nor Stanford have official mascots. At Dartmouth, Keggy the Keg, an unofficial mascot adopted by the student body in 2003, appears at sports events, while at Stanford, the Tree both represents the marching band and attends major games.

What is the procedure for removing or instituting a mascot?

Amherst College has no established procedure of removing a mascot or instituting a new mascot. Thus far, there has been no suggested means by which the college would officially remove the Jeff or institute a new mascot, mainly due to the unofficial status of the Lord Jeff.

Has other discussion occurred at Amherst?

Archives and Special Collections have found no evidence of student polls or referenda about the mascot in the history of the college. The use of the Lord Jeff began informally in 1905 and expanded over the following decades, without formal college-wide discussions.

Photo by Kyra Gardner ’18

What is happening next with the mascot debate?

The Association of Amherst Students has publicly announced its intention to hold a poll at the end of this semester on whether to officially remove the Lord Jeff as the mascot. The senate has also invited members of the campus community to its meeting on Oct. 26 for a campus-wide discussion of the mascot.

— Dan Ahn ’17 and Jingwen Zhang ’18

October 23, 2015 | The Amherst Student | 11

Profile | Mike Gamson ‘96

An Unpredictable Road to Success at LinkedIn From starting a surf shop in Costa Rica to leading global solutions for LinkedIn, Mike Gamson is a man of many talents.

— Jingwen Zhang ’18 Mike Gamson ’96, senior vice president of global solutions for LinkedIn, is a man of versatility and vision, and he holds an impressive role at one of the world’s leading social networks. But because of his personal intellectual curiosity and penchant for risk-taking, his road to this role has been anything but predictable.

“It Felt Right” Gamson described his path to Amherst as the result of “a little chance, a little luck.”

Gamson grew up in the northern suburbs of Chicago. In high school, he embarked on a tour to visit colleges, and Amherst made a decent impression. However, what really got him fixated on Amherst was the admissions speaker who visited his high school for an information session.

“She just spoke about it so glowingly that something about it felt right,” Gamson said. “I think I liked the idea of only choosing classes that you wanted to attend. I think the idea of surrounding yourself with people, who by their choice are engaging in some subject matter, was a really powerful idea.”

When he arrived at Amherst in 1992 as a first-year student, Gamson soon realized the full power of that idea.

A Deeper Bond Gamson majored in religion and fine arts at Amherst, and he enjoyed the college’s close-knit community.

“I really valued that one-on-one investment,” he said. “That’s the reason I love Amherst’s small classes, and the ability to really have a meaningful relationship with fellow students, with the professors, et cetera.”

One of his defining experiences

at Amherst was playing on the rugby team for several years, which also constituted a large part of his social life.

Gamson said he feels connected to all Amherst students, not just his close friends and classmates. He owes this affinity to the overall sense of community that he had while in school.

“If there’s a random person out in the world and they went to Amherst, I am incredibly positively predisposed to them,” Gamson said, “knowing nothing else about them except that they made a choice like my choice and they shared an experience that was not exactly my experience, but was probably similar enough in its component parts that I know there’s something there that I would enjoy learning more about.”

Off the Beaten Path After graduation, Gamson’s desire to learn more about the world took him to South and Central America for over a year.

“I narrowly avoided life on Wall Street,” Gamson said. He had received and accepted an offer at a bank, but ultimately decided go to Argentina with a friend instead.

The pair headed north from Argentina by bus for several months.

Gamson, who had learned Spanish and loved the Spanish-speaking culture while at Amherst, found it an adventurous and “mind-opening” experience.

Beyond immersing themselves in the language and culture, Gamson and his friend had the goal of learning to surf in Costa Rica. But upon their arrival, they realized that they had a pressing problem: They were running low on money.

Gamson found it difficult to seek legal employment in Costa Rica, but fairly easy to start a business.

He found inspiration in his college experiences, especially those shared with friends over late-night food like burritos from Bueno Y Sano, which opened a year before he left Amherst. “I loved those burritos,” he said.

Gamson and his friend opened a burrito restaurant with plans to operate in the evening until 1 a.m., return to their rented house by 2 a.m. and then wake up and surf all day. They did exactly that until some American tourists asked to rent their surfboards, and they discovered that renting and selling surfboards was a much more lucrative business than selling burritos. The duo converted the late-night restaurant into a daytime restaurant that also rented out surfboards. Eventually, in response to demand, they rented a second apartment, threw in some bunk beds and turned it into a youth hostel.

“We had this really nice little cross-sell, where people would stay at our youth hostel for the week, they would eat mostly our food, rent our boards and we would be kind of those guys you meet on your vacation sometimes when you spend the week in a place and yet you end up as being close friends,” Gamson said.

He and his friend had always been committed to returning home only when they felt that their purpose, whatever it was, had been fulfilled in Costa Rica. The burrito-surfboard-hostel business stayed open for a while, and he said that not having to stick to a timeline was a luxury after years of tight schedules at school.

“About a year later, I was actually in the youth hostel and cleaning up some horrific mess that can only happen when you’re in a Central American youth hostel,” Gamson said. “And as I was mopping up, it occurred to me, ‘I think this is done.

I think it’s time to go home.’”

The Power of Mentorship

Photo courtesy of Techstars

Gamson has always valued leadership and communication, and these skills have been useful in his career at LinkedIn.

12 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

Gamson returned to Chicago, where he landed a job as a financial analyst at a bank. A year and a half later, he moved to California during the dot-com boom in an attempt to discover where he wanted to work among the many job positions that had opened during the time.

“I didn’t really care so much about the company that I worked for, but I really cared a lot about the person for whom I worked,” he said.

Gamson wanted to work for a person who could be his mentor, one with whom he could have a personal relationship like the ones he had had with professors at Amherst. He found a mentor at Advent Software, and he worked there as first a sales representative and later a sales manager until 2002, when a new person joined the company.

Photo courtesy of LinkedIn

Gamson, ambitious and personable, became the president of global solutions for LinkedIn after years of adventure.

“His name was Dan Nye,” Gamson said. “He spoke about leadership in a way that I never heard before.

He talked about making multigenerational impact and leading from a place of your authentic personal values, and really bringing your personal values into work.”

Gamson switched into Nye’s group at Advent Software, where he learned about product management and marketing. More broadly, he learned the critical aspects of being a leader, such as integrating his own values into his leadership platform.

He worked for Nye until 2006, when he took a sabbatical and moved back to Chicago to develop a startup company with his former roommates at Amherst.

Later that year, it was Nye — who had just taken over as CEO of LinkedIn — who called Gamson shortly after he returned to Chicago and persuaded him to consider working for LinkedIn. Gamson traveled back to California and took a position at LinkedIn, but he decided he did not want to leave Chicago.

However, Gamson soon found he could not work as an effective LinkedIn executive from Chicago; the Mountain View, California-based company was not ready for a remote executive. As a result, Gamson joined LinkedIn as an individual contributor, working from home on the company’s monetization strategies and travelling frequently to and from California.

A Liberal Arts Education As LinkedIn continued to grow, surpassing then-giant MySpace in 2011, Gamson went from working on company-based research to working for Talent Solutions before becoming senior vice president of global solutions, the position he holds today.

LinkedIn’s global solutions team aims to solve problems and to improve experiences for customers around the world. As the leader of this team, Gamson does a variety of different things to oversee operations, with no particular daily or weekly schedules. For example, he spent time with executives and cli-

ents at a conference in Anaheim, California during the week of Oct. 12. On Friday, Oct. 16, he caught a plane to Europe to visit LinkedIn’s office in Amsterdam, and he had plans to spend a few days in London as well.

In his current role, Gamson said that skills such as critical thinking, communication and leadership are very useful skills that he developed through his liberal arts education.

“The more senior that one is in the company, the more the relationship between that executive and their employees depends on the ability to communicate,” Gamson said.

He has learned how to communicate effectively in a range of situations, from one-on-one conversations to speaking onstage at conferences.

“The way that Amherst focuses on writing, and on discussion, and on debate­­— I think those are incredibly valuable skills in a modern collaborative workplace,” Gamson said.

Lives of Consequence Nye’s message about prizing personal values was not wasted on Gamson over the years. Throughout the advancements in his career, he has not lost touch with what he considers most important.

“Personally, I think I’m very fortunate, and I’m incredibly grateful to be happy with what’s happening right now in my life,” Gamson said.

“We have a wonderful family that is healthy and happy together.”

Gamson met his wife, Alyse, in Chicago in the year after he returned from Costa Rica. They married in 2003 and have three children today, aged 8, 6 and one-and-a-half years old. Because frequent travel is an integral part of Gamson’s work, he and his wife have decided to travel as a family and set aside time in every place to do family activities.

“I’ve been in my job now between eight and nine years, and I love it every day,” Gamson said. “I re-choose to work here every day … Against the total set of all the things I could be doing right now with my life, I’d choose to be doing what I’m doing.”

Profile | Madeline Janis ‘82

Activist Champions Living Wage for L.A. Poor Madeline Janis ’82 has worked as a lawyer for disenfranchised refugees and has successfully advocated for living wage reform in Los Amgeles. She currently serves as director of Jobs to Move America.

Nestled in the heart of Los Angeles, an inconspicious building disguises a network that is changing the lives of people across Los Angeles and the rest of the United States. Co-founded by Madeline Janis ’82, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE) fights for Los Angeles’ working poor to receive better wages and working conditions, and has been a model for organizations across the country to effectively fight for substantive policy changes for workers. Though it wasn’t a direct path from Amherst to LAANE, Janis has been a passionate advocate for people suffering from injustice around the world and in her backyard throughout her life.

Amherst Roots For much of her life, Janis has been able to call the city of Los Angeles home.

She grew up near L.A. in San Fernando Valley, and she knew from an early age that she wanted to spend her life as an advocate for Los Angeles’ low-wage workers.

As a member of only the third class of women to be at Amherst, Janis was already a pioneer by the time she reached campus.

“I learned about Amherst when I was young, because they didn’t allow women and was one of the hardest schools to get into,” she said. “So I made a decision at that point that I was going to Amherst, and told my mother about it.”

She focused much of her attention on international issues over the course of her Amherst career, organizing a great deal of student activism against the apartheid regime in South Africa and human rights abuses in Latin America. During her junior year, she studied abroad in Spain, an experience that came at the crucial moment when the regime of the long-time dictator Francisco Franco had just fallen. This experience laid the groundwork for her senior thesis, which explored the anarchist movement during the Spanish Civil War. Janis’ thesis work proved to be foundational from the presence and advice

— Raymond Meijer ’17

from her thesis adviser Professor Amrita Basu. Janis said nearly all the Amherst professors during her time were older white men, so at times she struggled to connect with them on a personal level.

However, during her junior year, a young professor arrived on campus who was a pioneer in her own right. Just 29 years old when she arrived, Basu was only a few years older than Janis, and “as a woman of color she was truly groundbreaking for the diversity of Amherst,” Janis said.

The two grew close, and the friendship continued to develop the years.

Reflecting back on her experiences, Janis cited Amherst as having “a hugely formative impact on my thinking and who I am as a person.” Even after her student activism organization against injustices in the world, her pioneering journey of advocacy had only just begun. It would lead her back to something more local — her home city of Los Angeles.

Advocacy After graduating from Amherst, Janis continued her education back on the other coast at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. For a long time, she had wanted to do something at the United Nations or in Washington, D.C. with international work, but when she moved back to L.A., she “fell back in love with the city.”

In 1984, she clerked at the Central American Refugee Center and proceeded to work there after receiving her law degree. While there, she became a member of the first full-time legal clinic for disenfranchised refugees, setting a model for the rest of the country to fight for the legal rights of refugees. After working in private law for a short time while continuing to do pro bono work to advocate for vulnerable constituents of Los Angeles, Janis returned to the refugee center in 1989 as its executive director until 1993. While in this position, she successfully campaigned to legalize and regulate the activities of sidewalk vendors and combatted civil rights abuses of Central American immigrants by the L.A. Police

Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

It was in the aftermath of the 1992 civil unrest in Los Angeles that Janis turned from her legal protection of and advocacy for refugees to a new advocacy role of substantively changing policies to assist the broader community of the working poor in the city. She credits the tremendous poverty in the city as one of the main causes of the civil unrest, and she recognized that “major structural changes were needed. For change, we needed to talk about structure and strategy.”

That strategy turned into LAANE, an organization Janis co-founded with two other activists. As the executive director from 1993 to 2012, Janis oversaw remarkable advocacy that reinforced bills and influenced governments to support the fight for better pay, housing and working conditions for workers in the low-wage service economy of Los Angeles. LAANE led the historic campaign in 1999 to pass L.A.’s “living wage” ordinance, a measure that raised wages and improved health benefits for tens of thousands of workers in the L.A. area and provided a model for the rest of the U.S. Not only have they successfully fought for living wage ordinances around Los Angeles, but they have also gained key victories in improving the general work environment for workers while simultaneously pushing for a healthy environment and stable communities.

Janis sees particular connections between her living wage ordinance work in the late 1990s and the hot button minimum wage discussions today.

“People need to earn enough to live a decent life,” Janis said. “Research has shown that around $15 is necessary, for people to survive and for people to not raise their kids in a terrible condition. $15 may be the minimum we work off of or the aspiration for a minimum, but people need to receive a living wage.”

How has LAANE been so successful in fighting for substantive structural

Photo courtesy of Madeline Janis ‘82

Janis, an advocate for low-wage workers, is the co-founder of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy. changes in the economy of Los Angeles?

Janis will be quick to deflect praise, but much of the success involves her guiding hand. She recognized that long-term change wouldn’t come unless communities were involved, so LAANE dedicates much of its focus to grassroots organization and leadership development and communications. “The people affected most have to be a leading part of every change,” Janis said. “A successful model that works is when grassroots workers — workers as well as community leaders — have a main focus and want to change. There’s always a community or worker voice in coalitions and proposals.”

A hallmark of LAANE’s work is its direct involvement with and reliance on workers’ voices and leadership to fight for their legal rights. The organization’s focus on the service economy and rebuilding the economy on a sustainable base that is “focused on creating things” is in Jani’s eyes a key sector to support workers’ rights. From the founding of LAANE when the organization had nothing to its current position with fifty employees and a wealth of experiences with different tactics, Janis has focused on fighting for systemic change. And now in her current role as the national policy director, she plans to refocus her efforts on specific programs and fundraising that can continue the work LAANE carries out.

Outside of Politics

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

During her time at Amherst, Janis was involved in activist groups on campus for issues such as the apartheid regime in South Africa and the human right abuse in Latin America during the late 70s.

Though LAANE’s advocacy work is directly tied with policy, Janis is very quick to say she has ruled out working as a politician to make structural changes. Rather, she prefers to “build a program and push the envelope on the outside.” More importantly, though she has worked incredibly hard in her career, she has always wanted to maintain a life balance; to her, a crazier life as an elect-

ed official would impede the balance of her valued personal and family commitments and would prevent her from some of the grassroots organizing she so enjoys. Moreover, her work outside of politics still involves crucial policy advocacy and enables both local and national efforts. Local efforts becoming national models lead the way at LAANE, while the broader national coalition, called Jobs to Move America, which Janis now directs, works on a national scale to ensure that public funds are spent in environmentally sustainable ways that create better jobs and more opportunities for lower-income people.

Living a Good Life When she accepted an honorary degree from Amherst in 2013, Janis was asked to give a speech. In a talk that touched upon important moments in her life, successes and challenges in her career and the role of her Amherst experience in her life, she described the five main principles that she knew would help her live a good life.

It’s “not the typical American dream necessarily, but a purposeful life where you feel like you’re making a contribution to the world and you feel happy,” she said. She articulated this creed as: purpose — making the world a better place through the people immediately around you; courage — fighting for social justice when it’s much easier to shut your mouth and not speak out; kindness — being courteous to someone who’s suffering; love — feeling a joy of the world; and integrity — not judging, but believing there’s a right and a wrong.

In following these principles, advocating for people who don’t otherwise have a voice, and living a well-balanced life, Madeline Janis is transforming the world of the people immediately around her and the rest of the nation and the world, one structural change at a time.

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 13

Profile | Cuthbert Simpkins ‘69

Defying Definition, Embracing the Liberal Arts A physician and surgeon by trade, Cuthbert Simpkins ’69 has pursued a rigorous and varied intellectual agenda throughout his life.

— Drew Kiley ’18 Cuthbert Simpkins ’69 is the ultimate Renaissance man. Throughout his distinguished career as a physician, he’s been a bitter opponent of medical malpractice. But he’s also the biographer of the jazz musician John Coltrane and an inventor to boot. With all these remarkable accomplishments, Simpkins’ career defies labels.

Growing Up “There were two circles of influence,” Simpkins said. “One was my family. The other was everything outside of my family.”

Born in 1947, Simpkins grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father, a dentist, and his mother both encouraged the young Simpkins to pursue a rigorous academic pace, but for Simpkins to learn and excel seemed ridiculous to the segregated society in which he lived. At age 8, Simpkins attempted to enter a science fair for young people in Shreveport, but the administrators of the fair informed him that it was closed to black children.

Simpkins remembered being confused and frustrated by obstacles such as these. “I was angry as a young man,” he said. Despite this opposition, Simpkins learned through reading his father’s college science books and speaking with professors that his father invited to the house from Wiley College, the elder Simpkins’ alma mater.

“We were always ready to defend ourselves,” Simpkins said. His entire family knew how to shoot, and Simpkins kept a gun under his bed. In one episode, another boy ran Simpkins home from school one day. The next day, when the boy ran him home again, Simpkins’ mother locked the door and said, “You better fight.”

Simpkins and the family fought.

They fought through the civil rights movement, in which he remembers his parents actively participating.

In the midst of this political turmoil, his parents also maintained a vibrant intellectual environment at home. Simpkins’ mother taught her children about the arts, while his father encouraged scientific pursuits and shared his love of jazz with his young son.

However, the racial violence eventually forced the family out of Shreveport.

“In my first semester of ninth grade, our house was bombed,” Simpkins said. “Actions, terrorist actions, were taken against my father and the black community because we had won some civil rights battles.” Simpkins and his family eventually settled in Queens, New York, where Cuthbert attended Andrew Jackson High School.

Amherst, Medical School and Coltrane Growing up in Shreveport, Simpkins had never heard of Amherst College. But Simpkins’ high school guidance counselor Nelson Black was enamored with the college. After speaking with a black student studying at Amherst, Simpkins was sold and applied to the school early decision.

“I wanted to go to Amherst because of its emphasis on developing the individual,” Simpkins said. Despite choosing a career in medicine at Amherst, Simpkins did not forget the love of jazz that his father had instilled in him. While an undergrad, he began a biography of John Coltrane, the legendary 20th-century jazz musician. Simpkins continued working on the biography despite writing a chemistry thesis his senior year and attending medical school at

Photo courtesy of Kimberly Owen

Simpkins’ current project focuses on Vivacelle Bio Inc., a company created to produce and distribute his new resuscitation fluid.

14 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

Harvard University after graduating from Amherst.

When Simpkins finished the biography, his publisher changed Simpkins’ language in order to “make it more acceptable to white folks.” Simpkins, however, wanted “the book to be Coltrane, as much as a book can be a man.” He left the publisher, restored the manuscript to its original language and, with the help of various friends, created his own publishing company to distribute the book.

Upon finishing the book, Simpkins said, “I was happy to finish it, since the book both represented a great success and also meant I had more free time.” “Coltrane: A Biography” was published in 1975 to enormously positive reception from media critics.

Mel Watkins wrote in The New York Times Saturday book review, “Dr. Simpkins very often accomplishes something that few other jazz biographers have done: He narratively simulates the motional effect of the subject’s music.” The New York Amsterdam News raved, “This book reveals Dr. Simpkins as a literary talent worthy of attention,” while a reviewer Essence Magazine wrote, “Coltrane? What do I say?

One helluva book.”

In the June 3, 2014 edition of the Paris Review, nearly 40 years after the biography’s publication, acclaimed biographer Sam Stephenson wrote a glowing review of Simpkins’ work. “The review was wonderful,” Simpkins said. “And since the book was out of print, one copy sold for $7,000 afterwards.”

Medical Career Simpkins graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1975 and completed his surgical training at St. Luke’s Hospital in New York and Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn. Simpkins’ medical career took him around the country. He did research fellowships at the Boston University School of Medicine and the Naval Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. While in the Navy, Simpkins reached the rank of Commander, but he left in 1987 because, “while he was prepared to do his duty as a member of the military, he disagreed with the policies of the president at the time.”

In 1987, Simpkins joined D.C. General Hospital in Washington, D.C., which generally treated the poorer residents from the area, and Simpkins said, “Over the course of two or three years, I noticed that I was operating on the same [people] over and over again.” He discovered, in researching the problem, that 40 percent of patients who were admitted to the hospital due to violence had been in the hospital at least once before.

While at D.C. General, Simp-

Photo courtesy of Cuthbert Simpkins

Simpkins immediately liked the liberal arts model: “I wanted to go to Amherst because of its emphasis on developing the individual.” kins was also an outspoken critic of doctors who he believed acted in the interest of the hospital or of themselves while treating people, rather than in the interest of the patient.

The administration at D.C. General retaliated to Simpkins’ accusations by sending false information to the National Practitioner Data Bank, a government entity that collects information on medical malpractice.

Simpkins challenged the falsified review, suing the databank and successfully removing his name from the list. To this day, he remains one of the few to have done so.

In 1991, Simpkins left D.C. General to join the trauma center at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, but continued to conduct research on patient recidivism. In 1993, he proposed and eventually implemented a Violence Intervention Program at the University of Maryland. In the program, the hospital worked with social workers to prevent patients at risk of recidivism from returning to the hospital for reasons due to violence. The program continues at the University of Maryland to this day.

Simpkins left Maryland in 1994 to work at the University of Buffalo.

At Buffalo, Simpkins noticed during his assessments and conversations with patients that many had been pepper sprayed by the police in the nose and eyes. His research and criticism of the practice, picked up by the media, led the United States Department of Justice to investigate the Buffalo police department, and complaints about the misuse of pepper spray stopped soon after.

Return Home Simpkins worked at Buffalo until 2000, at which point he spent a few years at Texas Tech University’s trauma center. Despite his travels, Simpkins claimed, he always wished to return home to Louisiana. So, in 2004, Simpkins left Texas Tech to work at Louisiana State University Health Sciences in Shreveport as the chief of trauma and surgical care.

However, Simpkins was appalled at the medical malpractice that occurred at LSU. Certain doctors and nurses, he

claimed, routinely mistreated patients. “It wasn’t a racism thing, either,” Simpkins said. “Black or white, they mistreated everyone.”

He recalled one incident in which a pregnant 17-year-old girl checked into the hospital. The doctors addressed most of her injuries, but since they disapproved of Simpkins, they did not call in the trauma team.

By the time the girl went into shock, it was too late to do anything, and both the girl and her unborn baby died.

All the same, Simpkins found a group of residents, nurses and doctors at LSU with whom he bonded and mentored. As chief of the trauma department, Simpkins restored LSU’s status as a level one adult trauma care center and also led it to attain level one status in pediatric trauma, a distinction LSU had never held.

However, Simpkins’ relationship with some of his colleagues and the hospital’s administration never improved. In 2008, he was once again the victim of malicious peer review, and in 2009, LSU refused to renew Simpkins’ five-year contract without explanation.

Simpkins the Inventor Throughout his career, Simpkins has also made various contributions to research on shock and trauma.

As a trauma surgeon, he “had many patients whose injuries [he] could fix but who died because of shock,” he said. He surmised that the existing resuscitation fluids could be improved, and, in 1998, began research on a new fluid. By 2007, Simpkins had developed a new soybean-based resuscitation fluid, which saw positive results in animal tests.

After leaving LSU, he founded the biotech company Vivacelle Bio, Inc. in order to facilitate the production and distribution of his new resuscitation fluid. Simpkins has been awarded multiple patents for his discovery, both in the United States and abroad.

To Simpkins’ list of achievements, he has added doctor, surgeon, soldier and invetor. In the future, he will try to add entrepreneur to that list.

Profile | Anette Sanderson ‘82

Working to Improve Hartford’s Public Housing Anette Sanderson ’82, the executive director of the Hartford Housing Authority, has dedicated herself to making Hartford a better place to live.

— Paola Garcia-Prieto ’18 After growing up in public housing in Hartford, Anette Sanderson is now dedicating her life to making Hartford a better place to live.

Sanderson, the executive director of the Hartford Housing Authority, also serves as the chair of Amherst’s alumni advisory board.

Transitioning to Amherst Sanderson grew up in the north end of Hartford and attended a predominantly black high school located in the inner city. “Going to Amherst was quite a transition to me,” she said. “To go from an inner city environment to a place like Amherst College, which is quite different, [was difficult] for me from a social perspective.”

Sanderson said she appreciates the college’s efforts to reach out to students from different backgrounds, but admitted that she did

not feel completely comfortable in this new environment at a point when the college had just become accessible to low-income students.

“There was definitely a division I felt coming from an inner city high school,” Sanderson said. “I felt like an outsider for a while because it was a totally different environment than what I was used to. I felt very different on campus being from a poor urban environment among people who are very much not from a poor urban environment.”

Sanderson said she felt like her gender affected her experience on campus as well. A member of only the third incoming class of women in the fall of 1978, she shared a feeling of alienation with many women in the early period of co-education at Amherst.

Sanderson said that at the time she attended the college, Amherst was still a very male-oriented cam-

pus. She said it was amazing to come back to campus and see a student body that is half female — something many students take for granted nowadays.

“I think at this point Amherst is doing a better job of attempting to make students from diverse backgrounds feel comfortable,” Sanderson said. “I think their efforts have improved.”

A couple of students who attended high school in Hartford with Sanderson also attended Amherst.

Being around people of the same background eased the otherwise difficult transition for Sanderson.

And according to her friend Gary Rhule ’84, Sanderson was the type of friend that made every day a little sunnier.

“Annette is the real deal: bright, funny, thoughtful,” Rhule said. “We have been friends for many years.

Whenever the storms of life bring tumultuous waves, she is there to provide advice and to help steer you to shore. Lost your funny bone? Call Annette, she will make you laugh.”

Sanderson says that looking back at her time at Amherst, her friends were her favorite part. “I met some good people,” she said. She also found a great support system in the Black Student Union.

Currently the chair of the Alumni Executive Committee, Amherst’s alumni advisory board, Sanderson has played a role in prioritizing the diversity she commends the college on enhancing today.

As she states in her member bio for the Executive Committee, “Amherst must continue to evolve with societal changes ... Our talented and diverse alumni are a very valuable resource to the college community.”

Adapting to New Circumstances

Photo courtesy of The Amherst Olio 1982

Sanderson said the adaptation skills she gained at Amherst proved useful throughout her life.

When I asked Sanderson to identify the most important lesson she had learned during her time at Amherst, she had a very quick answer: adaptation.

“I learned very quickly how to adapt to different situations,” Sanderson said. “I became a very confident person because I had to. Coming from my background, in order to survive in a place like Amherst College, I had to learn to be confident and believe in myself.”

She said the element of adaptation that she found most challenging was traveling back and forth between Amherst and Hartford because “in Amherst you’re acting one way, and when you’re home, you have to learn to act another way.”

“It’s all about adapting,” she said. “Quite honestly, that’s what my whole experience at Amherst taught me.”

She continuously emphasized that her skill in adapting to differ-

Photo courtesy of Anette Sanderson

Sanderson says “Coming from my background, in order to survive in a place like Amherst I had to learn to be confident [with] myself.” ent situations came about because she had had no other choice but to adapt in order to succeed.

Unlike many of her fellow classmates, she had not come from a background that facilitated an easy transition into Amhers’s challenging academic and social experience.

The challenges she faced at home were completely different from those in college, but her willingness to adapt to this new environment allowed her to be equally successful in college as she had been in high school.

Public and Private Sector Jobs After graduating from Amherst in 1982, Sanderson attended University of Connecticut’s School of Law and graduated in 1985.

Upon graduation, Sanderson first worked in the public sector at the Connecticut state treasurer’s office and then transitioned to the private sector to work in investment management at Cigna. Sanderson also had her own law firm and worked as general counsel for the city housing authority before taking her position there as executive director, a position she has held since 2012.

The Hartford housing authority owns and operates public housing in the city of Hartford.

Sanderson, who has benefited from public housing in the past, is very passionate about providing the basic need of housing to the city’s most needy.

After having a number of jobs in the public and the private sector, Sanderson confirmed that her current job is her favorite.

“This job is the best thing I’ve ever done career-wise because it is the most personally rewarding,” Sanderson said.

“With housing, we’re feeding a basic need of society to the neediest of people.”

On Working in the Public Sector Sanderson has continued to use her skill in adaptation in her various jobs in the private and public sectors.

She is dedicated to giving back to the city of Hartford, where she has lived for the majority of her life. She now lives there with her husband and 16-year-old son. In spite of the city’s successful business sector, 30 percent of the families in Hartford live below the poverty line.

When I asked Sanderson what the biggest challenges of working in the public sector were, implying that some consider it to be an incredibly challenging work environment, she showed her passion for these issues in her response.

“I love my job, I love what I do every day; I mean we’re providing housing for very poor people,” she said. “Some of the challenges are that there is just not enough housing [or] not enough resources to meet all the needs. That is the biggest challenge: not having the resources we need to help everyone that we’d like to help.”

Even so, she has certainly helped a great deal. The Hartford Housing Authority provides housing for 35,000 people in Hartford, which is about a fourth of the city’s population.

The Hartford Housing Authority seeks to provide more than just housing. Sanderson works to improve the quality and expand the supply of affordable housing and better the working environments for employees.

By striving for these goals, the authority seeks to strengthen the fabric of their community and be a “catalyst for change,” as they say in their mission statement.

An adaptive person seeking to bring change to her home, Sanderson said, “I want to make the community I grew up in a better community.”

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 15

Profile | Chuck Lacy ‘80

A Venture Capitalist Follows His Curiosity Chuck Lacy ’80 went from being the president of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to a successful venture capitalist and beef farmer.

— Katarina Cruz ’17 Chuck Lacy ’80, the former president of Ben & Jerry’s, had an active hand in expanding the company’s sales growth from $17 million to $160 million. But despite his impressive success in the business world, he’s incredibly down to earth. When I asked him for a photo of himself to include in this profile, he sent me a picture sitting outside in a sweatshirt and baseball cap. Whether he was describing his family, his time at Amherst or the small businesses he’s worked with, what’s most striking about Lacy is his humility.

The Young Entrepreneur

Lacy was born in a small town called Brookside, just outside of Boston. He then moved to Morristown, New Jersey where he lived with both of his parents, one brother and one sister. His father, a felt salesman, traveled two and a half hours each day to his job in New York City.

Lacy’s interest in business started when he was young. At age 12, Lacy noticed the financial troubles that his father faced after being laid off from his job. Lacy then decided he would try to raise money by selling fishing jigs. He bought lead, melted it and decorated the jigs with feathers himself. He titled the business “Lacy’s Panfish Killers,” and created advertisements to be placed in the Outdoor Life Magazine.

“I was just trying to help out,” he said. “It didn’t really work, but he appreciated it.”

One of his most formative experiences before college came when he traveled to Montana. In the back of a sporting magazine, Lacy found an advertisement for a month-long outdoor expedition in Montana and decided that he had to do it.

“It was wild,” he said. “My mother gave me 40 bucks and told me ‘don’t tell your father.’ In my old man’s pinto, he took me out to route 80 in Whippany Park. He then gave me $20 and told me ‘don’t tell your mother.’”

Lacy then hitchhiked from Whip-

pany Park in Whippany, New Jersey all the way to Montana, where he stayed for a month.

Escaping the Amherst Bubble

When Lacy arrived at Amherst in 1975, the college was an exclusively male institution. Drinking, partying and living in fraternities were the markers of the college’s social scene.

“Yeah, we were jerks,” Lacy laughed. “I was in a fraternity. I think we were one of the better ones, but I think we were pretty self-indulgent. Not particularly thinking about anyone else or the rest of the world — pretty inwardly focused.”

He also arrived at the college during a time of change — there were many conversations being held across campus about whether or not women would start being admitted to the college. Debates raged across campus, with heated arguments being tossed by members from both sides of the issue. Lacy remembers how the admittance of women changed the social scene at Amherst.

“It was a much better place when I left than when I started,” Lacy said. “The women were incredible — I mean, they were so, tough. The whole place was not really welcoming, but the women were just tough.

They stuck it out.”

Besides members of his fraternity, Lacy became good friends with a group of students he attended a protest with. In May of 1977, towards the end of his sophomore year — “during finals week,” he added with a laugh — he and 2,000 other enthusiastic protestors went to the Seabrook Power Plant in New Hampshire to protest the plant’s construction. He was arrested that day and was then relocated to a room in the Manchester Armory with around 700 other activists.

“It was the best [learning] experience I ever got,” he said. “Some professors got that and some didn’t.”

The experience helped shape the rest of his time at Amherst.

“Up until that point, I had been living in a fraternity and was very inwardly focused,” Lacy said. “I tried to keep up with preppy social scene. This helped me break out of that and to take a more activist, purposeful look at the world. I had more of a desire to hang out with people that had larger, more global community goals. [The school’s culture] was a lot of hard drinking and hard partying, but that helped me transition out of it.”

On Business

After graduating from Amherst, Lacy went on to work for the Amherst Water Department. He then started a small business selling water conservation valves in Washington, D.C. When this project failed, he decided to work in a shelter until he went to Cornell to earn his Master’s in Business Administration. After receiving his MBA, he went on to work in United Health Services in Binghamton, New York as a hospital manager, where he had the great responsibility of organizing and maintaining all of the hospital’s workers.

“I was 27 or 28 and I had hundreds of people working for me,” Lacy said.

At the same time, Ben & Jerry’s was beginning to sprout rapidly as a company. It had recently expanded from about 25 employees to 50, which, without a manager, was a difficult task. Lacy’s managerial experience fit perfectly into the Ben & Jerry’s picture.

While working at the hospital, Lacy was also on the board of a credit union in Ithaca. He was introduced to Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s by a fellow board member who was also on the board of Ben & Jerry’s.

“In the hospital I was running psychiatric programs, drug and alcohol programs, a lot of clinics, a gastroenterology lab, different parts of the hospitals,” Lacy said. “It was

Photo courtesy of Chuck Lacy ’80

Lacy resides in Vermont with his family. He said he strongly believes in developing special connections with his environement and valuing the people in his life.

16 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

Photo courtesy of Chuck Lacy ’80

Lacy has always found a passion in advocating for local farmers and locally grown food. fun ... It’s a hive of human activity. It’s highly regulated; it’s a hard place to try something that is unusual. I was hungry for something that was a little more creative and spontaneous, and that’s when I moved into Ben & Jerry’s.”

Lacy worked hand in hand with Cohen and his partner Jerry Greenfield to manage and expand the company. As they built the company up, they tried to develop it organically, without doing any traditional advertising. They held many festivals across the country, which garnered attention from the masses.

They also came out with interesting flavors with distinct names, distinguishing themselves from other ice cream companies.“Haagen Daaz was there ahead of us and they were very straight, kind of corporate, kind of slick,” Lacy said. “We needed to create a point of difference with them. We knew there would be two: Coke needs Pepsi; Ford needs Chevy. We wanted to be that other one, but to do that, we knew we had to be different. We were growing the business when Ronald Reagan was president, so people were looking for something that was counter culture at that moment.”

After Ice Cream

After working at Ben & Jerry’s, Lacy continued to work with Cohen on a venture capital fund called Barred Rock Fund. This fund has about $5 million in total committed capital, and its social mission is “to create jobs and wealth for low-income people by growing businesses that offer a living wage and good benefits,” according to its mission statement.

Through this company, he has become involved with many socially minded companies. He looks for entrepreneurs with an edge — they must be “a little bit crazy” and in need of a strategic business partner to move forward with. He said he also looks for people that have a genuine awareness of their customers.

“People have an idea but people need to produce something, even on small scale, to face moment of truth with the customer,” he said. “I like people that like selling. The thing I hate about MBA schools is that the big thing they teach them is how to write a business plan. They just spend weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks writing a business plan without ever talking to a customer.”

Additionally, since working with Ben & Jerry’s, he has moved from selling ice cream to selling beef. He combined three old dairy farms into one large beef-selling farm called Hardwick beef, the largest grassfed beef company in New England.

With this company, he aims to sell beef to butchers “that aren’t Whole Foods” in order to provide a brand for natural food stores to compete with companies like Whole Foods.

Promoting locally grown food is important to Lacy’s businesses.

He also works on two international projects that stress the importance of local foods. His son works with a company in Costa Rica which aims to sell local coffee to the Costa Rican locals, and Lacy is partnered with this company.

“We’re trying to sell good coffee to Costa Ricans,” he said. “Most of the coffee gets exported.”

He also works with a friend who is developing production and marketing systems in Kumawu, Ghana.

His friend Yaw Nyarko (a native of Ghana and a current New York University professor) offers economic advice, and Lacy offers agricultural advice. Together, they are looking at how to bring small-scale food processing to small communities. Their hope is that Ghanaians can benefit from their commodities rather than just export them. Lacy has a sixweek regimented schedule: he goes to Ghana for two weeks, then comes home for four weeks. While there, he mostly talks with farmers to better understand their current situation and how to best move forward.

“It’s a challenge,” he said.

“There’s no electricity and no clean water, but I think there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s a lot of great people there. A lot of talent.”

On Life

When asked what his greatest accomplishment is, Lacy boasted, “I have been married for 31 years, and I have three fabulous kids who still like their parents.”

He said that due to his continuous work growing businesses around Vermont, he and his family have built a very strong sense of place together.

“You need to make wherever you are a special place as opposed to going to places that are already special,” he said. “I feel like that’s what we have helped do. Vermont is becoming a special place. My wife was a speaker of representatives there, I was at Ben & Jerry’s there.

By staying put, we have helped to build a really good community where we are and my kids feel like they’re from someplace that they care about.”

Through it all, Lacy clearly maintains elements of the Amherst model of learning.

“I’m also proud of maintaining curiosity,” he said. “I told my kids that the only B.A. they had to get was a degree in curiosity from Dad.”

Football Remains Undefeated With Dominant Win Over Colby Devin O’Connor ’16 Staff Writer The Amherst College football team extended its win streak to 15 consecutive games after a 31-13 defeat of Colby on Saturday afternoon.

The Jeffs set a team record for the most consecutive wins in program history, and have won 20 straight games against the Mules. Amherst progressed to 4-0 on the season, while Colby dropped to 0-4.

The first 15 minutes of play were uneventful, and both Amherst and Colby were forced to punt on each drive. Despite a slow start to the game, the Jeffs managed to get things rolling in the second quarter.

Just under a minute into the second stanza, Charlie Wall ’18 put the purple and white on the board with a 26-yard field goal. It was the start to a strong 15 minutes for the Jeffs, who amassed 17 unanswered points before the end of the half.

The Jeffs converted on their next drive. After forcing a Colby punt, Amherst regained the ball at its own 33-yard line. Following two strong rushes by Jack Hickey ’19, Reece Foy ’18 completed a 46-yard pass to Jackson McGonagle ’16 to get Amherst to the opponent’s 8-yard line.

The Mules called a time-out at fourth-and-goal in an attempt to hold off the visiting team, but Amherst converted on the following play. Foy connected with Devin Boehm ’17 in the end zone to give Amherst a 10-0 lead.

With just under four minutes to play in the half, Jaymie Spears ’16 picked off the Colby quarterback to prevent a touchdown. Spears made the interception at the Amherst 1-yard line and returned it for 60 yards. The play led to a touchdown. Foy, in combination with Kenny Adinkra ’16 and Boehm, led the Jeffs to the 2-yard line. On first-and-goal, Adinkra rushed for two yards to extend Amherst’s lead to 17-0.

The Amherst defense held off the Mules for the remainder of the half.

Photo by Peter Connolly ’18

Reece Foy ’18 went 15 for 23, throwing for two touchdown passes in the Jeffs’ 31-13 victory over Colby last weekend.

The home team managed to get on the board at the start of the third quarter. Colby received the ball to begin the half, and found its way to the end zone over the next five minutes.

The Mules drove for 85 yards over 12 plays, and recorded a touchdown with 9:37 to play in the quarter.

Amherst was quick to answer. Boehm received the kickoff and returned for 26 yards to get the Jeffs to the Amherst-40. Seven plays later, the purple and white found the end zone for the third time. Foy completed a 26-yard touchdown pass to McGonagle to extend the Amherst advantage to 24-7.

Play was back and forth for the remainder

of the third and the majority of the fourth quarter. Late in the game, Colby cut the deficit again.

The Mules found the endzone with 3:45 to play, but could not convert the extra point.

After an Amherst fumble, Colby recovered the ball at its own 24-yard line. However, the home team could not capitalize on the opportunity. Jimmy Fairfield-Sonn ’16 intercepted a Colby pass and ran the ball to the end zone with 1:59 left in the game. The score was the last of the game, and the Jeffs locked up the win with a final scoreline of 31-13.

Although the Mules had a greater time of possession and more total yards than the Jeffs did, the purple and white still dominated the

game. Offensively, Foy went 15 for 23 and completed two touchdown passes. Adinkra rushed for 61 yards and a touchdown, while Boehm notched four catches and a touchdown. On the defensive end of the field, senior Tom Kleyn and juniors Evan Boynton and Parker Chapman led the team with seven tackles each, while FairfieldSonn, Spears and Nate Tyrell ’19 each picked off the Colby quarterback.

Amherst will face Little Three opponent Wesleyan this weekend for its homecoming game. Last year, Amherst narrowly defeated the Cardinals in an overtime win, 33-30. Kickoff is scheduled at 1 p.m. on Pratt Field on Saturday, Oct. 24.

Men’s Cross Country Places Second Field Hockey Splits on Weekend at Little Threes, Hussein Takes Title Maine Trip, Now 4-4 in NESCAC Jason Darell ’18 Managing Sports Editor The Amherst College’s men’s cross-country team came in second at Little Three championships last Saturday, Oct. 17. Hosting bitter rivals Williams and Wesleyan in the 8-kilometer race, the Jeffs fell to the Ephs in a tight contest.

Williams entered the event with a 27-race winning streak in Little Threes, but the Jeffs looked set to pose their best challenge for the

Photo by Melissa Martin ’15

Mohamed Hussein ’18 placed first for the third time this season.

title in years. Led by Mohamed Hussein ’18 and senior captain Dan Crowley at the Purple Valley Classic in late September, Amherst had defeated Williams over the 8K distance. With the Jeffs entering ranked second in the USTFCCCA poll and Williams below them in seventh, the purple and white were favored to break the streak.

As expected, Hussein and Williams’ Bijan Mazaheri pulled ahead of the field, challenging each other for the individual crown. At the Purple Valley Invitational, the two battled neckand-neck until Hussein edged Mazaheri by a second. Hussein repeated the act at home, defeating his Williams counterpart with a time of 25:47.4 to claim the individual crown. The win marks his third first-place finish this year.

Throughout the race, Amherst and Williams’ second through fifth runners ran in a tight pack.

The breakthrough for the Ephs came when their second runner, Ben Decker, made a move to pass Crowley and claim third place. The Amherst senior finished in fourth place with a time of 26:21.9.

Williams’ Peter Hale and Griffin Colaizzi followed in fifth and sixth place, respectively, while Wesleyan’s Taylor Titcomb came in seventh.

Three Amherst runners rounded out the top 10. Craig Nelson ’18 crossed the line in eighth place with a time of 26:39.4, while Raymond Meijer ’17 finished milliseconds behind him in ninth-place with a mark of 26:39.4.

Jeff Seelaus ’16 was the last scoring Jeff to finish, running a time of 26:41.6 to come in tenth place.

With the results, the purple and white amassed a total of 32 points, but the Ephs amassed 27 points to claim a close victory. Wesleyan finished third with 77 points.

Kelly Karczewski ’18 Staff Writer The Amherst College field hockey team spent the weekend in Maine, where the team matched up first against Colby on Saturday and then against Bates the next day. Ranked No. 14 entering the weekend, the purple and white fell short to the lower-ranked Mules in a frustrating and heartbreaking loss that dropped them to a 3-4 record in NESCAC play.

The next day, the Jeffs were able to bounce back to defeat the Bobcats in a shutout win.

Their record now stands at 8-4 overall and 4-4 in the NESCAC. After a scoreless first half in Waterville, Maine, the Jeffs saw a change in momentum when Colby’s McKayla Blanch whacked one past Amherst goalie Emily Horwitz ’17 off of a corner opportunity in the 47th minute.

Although the Jeffs ended up leading the Mules in both shots and corners, they were unable to put one on the board and even the score.

Amherst highlights from the match include three saves made by Horwitz and five shots from senior midfielder Annie Turnbull. The loss — though disappointing — served as motivation for their matchup against Bates the next day.

A trio of goals in the first half gave the Jeffs the hefty lead they needed to shutout the Bobcats and bring the field hockey team’s NESCAC record up to an even 4-4.

Seventeen minutes into the game, junior Sarah Culhane punished a mishap in the Bobcats’ defense by picking up a loose ball and sending it into the middle, where it was finished by Elizabeth Turnbull ’18 with a clean shot past Bates goalie Cristina Vega, making

the score 1-0.

Senior captain Katie Paolano doubled the score 15 minutes later, with an assist by fellow senior Annika Nygren.

Amherst’s leading goal-scorer Culhane put her 12th goal of the season away with just 25 seconds to go in the half. A shot by Elizabeth Turnbull off of a penalty corner rebounded right into the stick of Culhane, who notched it away just past Vega’s right side.

The goal proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the Bobcats.

Though the Jeffs were held scoreless in the second half, they dominated the play and kept sufficient enough pressure on the Bobcat defense to keep Horwitz’s net free from scoring.

By the end, the Jeffs had outshot the Camels 15-8 and earned eight corners to Bates’ four.

In addition, junior goalkeeper Emily Horwitz registered two saves in order to preserve the shutout.

The purple and white will travel to play Smith on Thursday, Oct 22 at 7 p.m.., hoping to clinch another win. Smith looks to be a tough matchup, they come into the game with an 8-6 record overall, including a 4-2 mark in conference. Amherst easily defeated the Pioneers by a 4-0 score in last year’s matchup.

With only Wesleyan and Trinity left to play in the NESCAC conference, the Jeffs still have hopes of ending the regular season with a winning record and advancing to the NESCAC tournament.

They’ll face Wesleyan this on Saturday, Oct. 24 for their homecoming game before taking on Trinity on Wednesday, Oct. 28 for a midweek matchup. Last year, the team made it to the NESCAC quarterfinal before falling to Tufts in a heartbreaking 1-0 loss.

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 17

Men’s Soccer Sweeps NESCAC Play Over Weekend, Remains Undefeated Jason Stein ’16 Assistant Sports Editor This past weekend, the men’s soccer team traveled to Maine and continued their winning ways with a pair of NESCAC victories. By beating Colby, 2-0, and Bates, 3-0, the second-ranked Jeffs extended their winning streak to 13 games and now stand at 13-0-0 on the season and 8-0-0 in NESCAC play.

On Saturday afternoon against Colby, the Jeffs held a 6-1 shot advantage over the Mules in first-half action, but were unable to convert on any of these opportunities in the opening period.

More than halfway through the second half, the game was still scoreless, as the Jeffs continued to generate scoring chances.

In the 72nd minute of play, however, the Jeffs finally struck, as senior forward Nico Pascual-Leone scored a picturesque goal on an overhead bicycle kick that found its way into the back of the net. The phenomenal play was certainly one of the highlights of the season for the Jeffs thus far, comparable to Amherst’s dramatic game-winning goals in double-overtime earlier this season.

About 15 minutes later, the Jeffs put the game away with a late goal that doubled their lead. On this play, an Amherst shot blocked by Mules defender Chandler Smith ’18 went high into the air, at which point senior striker Greg Singer won the ball and headed it over the reach of goalie and into the back of the net. While Singer picked up his fifth score of the season on this late goal, forward Aidan Murray ’18 was credited with his second assist of the season (and his second assist in the past three games after picking up one against Hamilton two games prior).

After beating the Mules, Amherst had a quick turnaround, taking on Bates the following afternoon.

Pascual-Leone once again gave the Jeffs a 1-0 lead, this time with a goal midway through the first half. Pascual-Leone’s goal was the only score of the half, but both teams had many scoring chances, as the teams combined for 19 shots in the half — 13 for the Jeffs and six for the Bobcats.

In the second half, Pascual-Leone and the Jeffs took control. Just over five minutes into the second period, Singer and junior forward Jackson Lehnhart set up Pascual-Leone for his second goal of the contest.

Just over 20 minutes later, Pascual-Leone struck again in the 72nd minute off of Lehnhart’s second assist of the match.

Pascual-Leone then added a late third goal, his tenth of the season, and the Jeffs held Bobcats scoreless over the rest of the game for a 3-0 victory and another shutout.

Following Sunday’s win against Bates, Pascual-Leone became the second Amherst player in 2015 to notch a hat trick.

For his efforts this weekend, Pascual-Leone was recognized as the NESCAC Player of the Week. Pascual-Leone is the second Amherst player to receive the recognition during the 2015 season; after Amherst’s victory over Williams,

Singer was recognized as the NESCAC Player of the Week for a performance in which he netted the game-tying goal towards the end of regulation and the game-winning goal with just seconds remaining in double overtime to secure a 2-1 victory for the Jeffs.

At this point, Pascual-Leone leads the NESCAC with 10 goals (three clear of second place) and is second in the conference with 23 points overall, one point shy of Middlebury’s Adam Glaser, who has seven goals and 10 assists on the season.

Regarding Pascual-Leone’s contributions to the soccer program, Serpone praised his efforts on the field, but has been even more pleased with his impact upon the broader school community during his Amherst career. “Nico is a great player, but an even better person,” Serpone said.

“I’m most proud, not of his soccer, but of his impact on the culture of our team, and the campus as a whole, over his four years at Amherst.”

Through 13 games, the Jeffs are outscoring opponents 32-2 and averaging 2.5 goals per contest. While the Amherst offense was impressive in back-to-back contests this weekend, goalkeeper Thomas Bull ’16 and the Amherst defense continued their standout play.

After holding both opponents scoreless this weekend, the team has now recorded 11 shutouts. Bull easily leads the NESCAC with a 0.15 goals against average and a .952 save percentage. The Jeffs are now riding a six-game shutout streak after surrendering goals in back-to-back games earlier on this season.

On Saturday at 2:30 p.m., Amherst will welcome Wesleyan (7-4-1 and 3-3-1 in the NESCAC) to Hitchcock Field on Homecoming for the team’s final home game of the regular season. Heading into this final home match, the Jeffs have already locked up the top seed in the NESCAC tournament and home field advantage for the event. However, this does not mean the Wesleyan game is meaningless. Against the Cardinals, the Jeffs will be focused on enacting revenge on a team that beat them, 2-1, in overtime last year.

“Saturday should be electric from an energy perspective,” Serpone said. “Wesleyan is a very good team who beat us at their Homecoming last year. It will take a total team effort — with the support of all of our great fans — to return the favor.”

A win on Saturday for Amherst will not remove any incentives for the Jeffs to continue their winning ways, as Amherst would stand one win away from a perfect regular season. Their final regular season match is set for Wednesday at 3 p.m. in Hartford, Connecticut against Trinity (5-5-3 overall and 2-5-1 in the NESCAC). The Bantams will be hungry for a positive result as they hope to sneak into the NESCAC Tournament with a strong finish to the regular season.

After taking on the Bantams, the Jeffs will then welcome the eighth-seeded team in the NESCAC Tournament to Hitchcock Field on Saturday, Oct. 31 for the NESCAC Quarterfinals.

Photo by Rob Mattson

Nico Pascual-Leone ’16 earned NESCAC Player of the Week honors this week.

18 | The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015

ATHLETE SPOTLIGHT

Kenny Adinkra ‘16 Favorite Team Memory: After a grueling loss against Middlebury at their field my first year, the team made it their goal to make a statement against them the next time around. After we beat them the following year, I learned that the team can accomplish great things when we all buyin to achieving a common goal.

Favorite Pro Athlete: Marshawn Lynch Dream Job: United Nations diplomat Pet Peeve: Bad listeners Favorite Vacation Spot: Prague, Czech Republic Something on Your Bucket List: Sending my parents on vacation to any place in the world they desire Guilty Pleasure: Singing in the shower Favorite Food: Anything my mom cooks Favorite Thing About Amherst: The ability to establish lasting relationships with your professors How He Earned It: Adinkra played a crucial role in Amherst’s 31-13 win over Colby this past weekend. He rushed for 61 yards on just 14 carries, and also scored a crucial first-half touchdown.

Katie Warshaw ‘16 Favorite Team Memory: Lip-sync contest on the bus Favorite Pro Athlete: Serena Williams Dream Job: What Anthony Bourdain does Pet Peeve: When the stir fry station is closed Favorite Vacation Spot: Manhattan Beach, CA Something on Your Bucket List: Canoe the Mississippi River Guilty Pleasure: Justin Bieber’s “What Do You Mean?”

Favorite Food: Tacos Favorite Thing About Amherst: Fall fest How She Earned It: Warshaw led Amherst to three wins this past week, including a 3-2 victory over NESCAC rival Bowdoin. The win improved the Jeffs’ record to 15-2, including a 6-2 mark in conference. In the victory against Bowdoin, Warshaw totaled a match-best 38 digs, good for 7.60 per set. For the week overall, Warshaw recorded 64 digs in three games.

She was named NESCAC Player of the Week for her excellent performances in each of the three wins.

19th-ranked Women’s Soccer Blanks Colby, Ties Bates on NESCAC Road Trip Virginia Hassell ’16 Staff Writer On the road this weekend, the 19th-ranked women’s soccer team (8-2-2) notched their fifth shutout on the year in a 2-0 victory over lastranked Colby College before playing the 7thranked Bates College to a 0-0 draw.

After 44 scoreless minutes, the Jeffs were the first to break the deadlock. Senior Rachael Abernethy found her way behind the Mules defense and forced the Mules keeper to be charged with an interference call in a desperate attempt to prevent an Amherst goal.

Sophomore Hannah Guzzi, who was summoned to take the penalty shot, converted the kick to give the purple and white a 1-0 lead heading into halftime. The goal served to be a pivotal point in the match, as it gave the Jeffs confidence to continue shooting in the second half.

“Against Colby we had momentum in the second half,” senior captain Jessy Hale said.

“We started the game slow but as it went on we problem solved and started playing together as a team.”

Carrying the momentum into the second half, Amherst controlled the tempo of the game while prevailing in nearly every statistical category. The Jeffs struck again at the 63:44 mark when first-year Eden Charles chipped in an unassisted goal to push Amherst to a comfortable 2-0 lead.

The purple and white held off the Mules for the remaining 26 minutes of action. The Jeffs recorded a 16-4 shot advantage, as well as a 10-1 edge in corner kick opportunities in the dominant effort. Senior netminder Holly Burwick recorded three saves en route to the convincing victory. The Jeffs hoped to carry the momentum from the convincing win into their next match.

To closeout the doubleheader weekend, the Jeffs traveled to Bates. The game was extremely

fast-paced, with each side controlling play for a period, but neither team seemed to be able to convert an opportunity to score in the final third.

With neither team able to find the back of the net at the end of regulation, the game proceeded into overtime. In the second overtime, Amherst dealt the Bobcats a severe scare.

With 5 minutes remaining, senior Megan Kim corralled a throw-in and blew past a defender. Kim created enough space for herself to fire a shot that zoomed just inches above the crossbar. Bates responded with an equally as frightening attack. With 27 seconds left in the contest, Burwick had to race out of goal to make a slide-tackling save. Amherst recorded an advantage in shots, 21-17, and corner kicks, 7-4. Even though the Jeffs created more opportunities, they unfortunately could not break through in the final third to earn the win. Burwick tallied 11 saves in order to preserve the tie.

“In the Bates game we had a lot of opportunities but we didn’t execute” Hale added. “For the next two games we need to keep an attacking mentally for 90 minutes and look to score not only to shoot.”

The Jeffs will faceoff for Senior Day at noon on Saturday, Oct. 24 when they play little three rival Wesleyan.

Last season, Abernethy contributed two goals to lead Amherst to a 2-0 victory over the Cardinals. On Tuesday, Oct. 27, the Jeffs will conclude regular season action as they travel to Trinity.

After playing Trinity to a tie at the end of regulation in the 2014 season, Amherst suffered a heartbreaking overtime loss to the Bantams.

The purple and white will look to capture two wins before heading into the NESCAC tournament. Last year, the Jeffs were unable to make it past the NESCAC quarterfinals, losing 1-0 to a tough Middlebury side. This year’s team appears to have the ability and the motivation to make a deep run in the tournament.

Women’s Tennis Finishes Fall Season on a Strong Note at NEWITT Invite Raymond Meijer ’17 Staff Writer The Amherst women’s tennis team concluded the fall portion of its 2015-16 campaign this week at the NEWITT Invitational, hosted by Smith College. The Jeffs will head into winter training with confidence after successful results from many of their doubles teams this weekend.

Amherst’s series of matches with unique formats continued this weekend, with the NEWITT Invitational only featuring doubles action. This allowed for further experimentation with doubles pairings of team members who usually play doubles, but also provided the opportunity for Jeffs who normally just play singles to try their hand in the very different doubles setup.

The invitational featured lots of competition from key NESCAC and other non-conference rivals, which promised lots of tough matchups. Every doubles team came away with at least one win in the tournament, with some teams advancing extremely far in the bracket.

Three of the nine doubles pairs were seeded in the top eight, including teams of Maddy Sung ’16 and Jackie Calla ’17 (fifth), Vickie Ip ’18 and Kelsey Chen ’19 (sixth) and captains Sarah Monteagudo ’16 and Sue Ghosh ’16 (eighth).

The tournament started off with seven of the nine pairs advancing out of their first matchup, by way of a victory or a first-round bye.

The seven winning teams all moved into the East part of the bracket at this point to accompany the pairs that had also won their first round matchups.

The Ip/Chen pair team highlighted the weekend with a second-place finish in the East draw. After a first-round bye, the pair won their next matchups 8-1 and 8-4 against two Brandeis teams to set up a high-powered matchup with Williams’ Mia Gancayco and Maya Hart. Ip and Chen were able to just edge their Williams rivals in an incredibly tight 9-8 (2) battle, before moving on to another Williams pair and putting that game away 8-3.

However, the third time wasn’t the charm for

Ip/Chen, as their final game in the draw pitted them against a third Williams team — this time the pair of Juli Raventos and Linda Shin, who were ranked No. 1 in the nation in last year’s ITA polls. Ip and Chen came close to beating the duo, 8-5, but they would match their other teammates’ results in their inability to beat the Williams tandem.

The pair of Sung and Calla finished a very solid fourth in the East draw, posting strong victories of 8-2 over a Williams pair, an 8-0 victory against Brandeis, and an 8-6 defeat of MIT. However, they would meet their match, against the Raventos/Shin team, losing 8-4 to set up another matchup with a Williams team in the third-place game. They would ultimately fall 8-2, but it was a success for Amherst to finish with two of the top four teams in the tournament.

The Monteagudo/Ghosh team cruised to 8-0 and 8-4 victories before notching a key victory over a Williams duo 9-8 (4).

They also wouldn’t be able to upset Raventos and Shin, falling 9-4 in the quarterfinals of the draw.

Jane Fraley ’19 and Kelly Yang ’19, after winning their first match 8-0 and then dropping their second, stayed focused and cruised in their next three matchups 8-5, 8-2, and 8-4, before falling to a Trinity duo.

Jenna Peng ’18 and Lola Fadulu ’17, after just getting edged in their first-round matchup, bounced right back to notch a win in their second match.

Perhaps the biggest bounce-back came from the team of Adrienne Irmer ’18 and Sofia Aisiks ’19. After dropping their first game 8-4, they cruised to the finals of the West draw.

They picked up convincing wins of 8-3 and 8-1 in the next two rounds, before advancing past an MIT team by default and beating a Trinity duo 8-6. The pair wasn’t able to edge the Simmons team they faced in the final, but still came away with some impressive victories on the weekend.

After a successful tournament in which the Jeffs experimented with new doubles matchups, the team now takes a break before training throughout the winter to prepare for the bigger spring season.

Coach’s Corner Eddie Effinger ’12 Assistant Men’s Hockey Coach Chris Roll ’17 sat down with former men’s hockey player and current assistant coach Eddie Effinger ’12 to talk about the transition from player to coach and hopes for the upcoming season.

Q: Tell us a little bit about how you got into hockey as a youth and its role in your early life?

A: Hockey was a large part of my childhood. I grew up just outside of St. Louis in a small town in southern Illinois where I played my youth hockey, club hockey and high school hockey growing up. After high school I went to play junior hockey in Wichita, Texas and also in New Jersey, which eventually led me to Amherst College, where I played for four years.

Q: What your experience like as a student-athlete here at Amherst?

A: I was extremely fortunate to end up here, as I had spent the past couple years removed from any significant academic experience while playing junior hockey. I was extremely excited but also somewhat nervous to jump back into the rigors of a challenging academic setting. The balance of having both a rewarding academic and athletic experience defined my time here. I majored in economics and environmental studies while being a part of some great hockey teams and developing some lasting relationships.

Q: What is your favorite athletic memory as a player? As a coach?

A: All the moments when you win championships are moments that stick with you and ones you really value. However, I would say that my favorite moment in hockey was watching one of my younger brothers win a national championship when he was twelve. Being around that age is such a great age to be a part of a team and seeing the sheer joy the kids wear on their faces is something I will always remember. As a coach my favorite memories are the ones that happen all the time. Whether it’s one of my players making me laugh at a 6:30 a.m. practice or it’s 8 p.m. at night and I’m driving some of the players up to Valentine so they can make it before it closes,

it’s those little things that get me out of bed excited to coach.

Q: In your opinion what is the most rewarding part of coaching? The toughest?

A: The most rewarding moments for me as a coach are certainly the small things that accompany the position. The relationships that I build with our players challenge me both as a coach and a person. The development of those relationships is extremely rewarding, but at the same time, the most challenging. It is challenging in that the trust must be gained on both ends. It is a process that cannot be forced, and the players have to see my willingness to help them better themselves as both players and as people, and once they do, we both can benefit and learn from each other. That is where the reward comes in.

Q: Tell us a little bit about the brand of NESCAC hockey and the style that has made our Amherst teams successful?

A: All the schools in the NESCAC are tremendous institutions and if I ever have children I will be jumping for joy if they attend one of them, regardless of athletics. From a hockey perspective, it is a league that values team speed and hard work. I do not necessarily think it is an accumulation of the most skilled players in Division III hockey, but it is by far the deepest league and a collection of young men that know what hard work will do for a team.

Q: What are your plans after Amherst?

A: What I have learned as a coach here is how the process of coaching is only a piece of the education you receive at a place like this. It is a valuable piece of the puzzle, in my opinion, and I see myself staying in education, whatever role that may be. It will most likely be in hockey, but as a coach you are first and foremost an educator and I hope to continue down that track.

Women’s Cross Country Finishes Second at Little Three Championships Jason Darell ’18 Managing Sports Editor At home this past Saturday, the Amherst women’s cross country team hosted the 2015 Little Three Championship.

In this meet, the Jeffs competed against the other two members of the Little Three: Williams and Wesleyan. Amherst’s final score of 59 earned them second place out of the three schools.

Williams earned first place with a score of 15, meaning each runner in the top-five came from Williamstown. Wesleyan finished third with a score of 69.

“We were missing two of our top runners this week in Savanna (Gornisiewicz ’17) and Nicky (Roberts ’18),” Cara Lembo ’17 said.

“The two are irreplaceable, since they are two of the best in the league, but I was confident the rest of the squad would step up, especially since we were facing our most bitter rivals in Williams and Wesleyan.”

The Jeffs placed two runners in the top-11 out of the field of 61: first-year Lizzie Lacy and senior captain Betsy Black.

Lacy finished with a time of 19:56, good for seventh overall at the meet, while Black recorded a time of 20:21 to secure 11th place.

She improved her time from last year by a substantial 35 seconds.

The other three scoring runners for the purple and white all finished in the top-25.

Junior Cat Lowdon recorded a time of 20:41, which earned her 19th place overall. This result was an eight-second improvement over her effort at the 2014 Little Three Championship.

Nicky Roberts ’18 took 20:48 to finish the race, giving her 22nd place. Rounding out the top five for the Jeffs was junior Lembo, who finished with a time of 20:48 in order to place in 23rd overall.

Three other Amherst runners also finished among the top-30 in the field: Veronica Rocco ’19, Tess Frenzel ’17 and senior captain Caroline Rose. They finished with times of 20:51, 20:52 and 21:09 respectively.

“We had a rough couple weeks when our team was plagued by sickness, but we are definitely coming back strong,” Lowdon said.

“Some of the first-years have stepped up as major players and it’s great to run with them.”

For their next meet, the purple and white will travel to Middletown to race in the NESCAC Championship on Saturday, Oct. 31.

They hope to improve upon the third place finish they managed at the meet last year.

Looking even further forward, the Jeffs have two regular season meets in November as they prepare for the NCAA Division III Championships in Winneconne, Wisconsin on Saturday, Nov. 21.

Photo by Rob Mattson

Aaron Revzin ’16 took fifth place this weekend with Michael Solimano ’16.

Men’s Tennis Doubles Pair of Revzin and Solimano Compete in South Carolina Jason Darell ’18 Managing Sports Editor While the men’s tennis team culminated its fall season two weeks ago at Bates’ Wallach Invitational and the Dartmouth Invitational. The Jeffs sent the doubles pair of Aaron Revzin ’16 and Michael Solimano ’16 to the USTA/ITA national small college championships. The best small college doubles teams from across the nation descended on Palmetto Tennis Center in Sumter, South Carolina to stake their claim in division three tennis.

Amherst’s Revzin and Solimano earned the number one seed for the tournament followed

by Buxbaum/Walsh of Johns Hopkins at two, Humphreys/Treis of University of WisconsinWhitewater at three, and Chua/Liu of University of Chicago at four.

The competition was tight, and the Jeffs duo

unfortunately fell in its first match to unseeded Adam Krull and Matt Tyler of Trinity University (Texas) 6-4, 6-3. However, the Amherst seniors bounced back in their second Thursday match, defeating Kyle Richter and Adrian Sirovica of University of California Santa Cruz. Finally, on Friday, Revzin and Solimano took down the second-seeded duo from Johns Hopkins, earning fifth place in the tournament.

“It wasn’t the result we’d hoped for, but it was great experience to face some of the nations best teams.” Revzin said. “We know what’s out there, and we’re ready for the spring.”

The Jeffs will put their rackets away for the winter but return to the courts on Sunday, March 13 to kick off the spring season. The team starts its campaign with a tour of the west coast before commencing NESCAC action home against Colby on Sunday, March 27.

The Amherst Student | October 23, 2015 | 19

Sports

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

The Firedogs are riding a four game win streak as they prepare to host non-conference opponents for the 24th annual Hall of Fame tournament this weekend.

Volleyball Sweeps Home Slate, Takes Down NESCAC Leaders Bowdoin Julia Turner ’19 Staff Writer Amherst women’s volleyball enjoyed another successful week with two non-conference wins and a crucial victory in their match against NESCAC leader Bowdoin, boosting their overall record to 16-2. With these three wins in the books, Amherst is a perfect 8-0 at home in LeFrak Gymnasium and is riding a four game winning streak into this coming week of competition.

The Firedogs took an easy sweep over a 6-22 Colby-Sawyer squad on Wednesday evening.

The purple and white posted three impressive sets, winning 3-0 (25-9, 25-16, 25-20) led by 11 kills from Nicole Gould ’17 and 17 assists apiece from Kate Bres ’17 and Nicole Carter ’16. On the defensive end, senior Katie Warshaw led the effort with 12 digs, while Carter and Asha Walker ‘18 each chipped in five.

On Friday evening, Amherst faced one of their toughest opponents of the year in a Bowdoin team that was previously undefeated in conference play. The Polar Bears came out

strong, taking the first set after several Amherst errors allowed them to pull away from a 7-7 deadlock to win 25-15. The second set again saw Bowdoin jump out to an early lead as the Firedogs struggled to find scoring opportunities early in the set.

The Firedogs managed to take advantage of service errors from Bowdoin that allowed them to stay in the match until a big kill by Samantha Newby ’16 brought them within two points.

With the Firedogs continuing to capitalize on Bowdoin errors and several impressive plays by Carter, the game reached a deadlock at 18-18. A Warshaw service ace and two huge Danner kills allowed the purple and white to pull ahead 2421 before a cross-court kill from Newby sealed the win 25-21.

In the third set, Newby earned the first point of the third set with a tough kill, and Marialexa Natsis ’18 put Amherst up 2-0 with a great defensive read. With the Firedogs clearly fired up, a tight, back-and-forth set ensued, with neither team pulling ahead by more than 3 points.

Two service aces from Walker put the Firedogs

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

GAME SCHE DULE

up 18-15, but the Polar Bears managed to hang in and gain momentum with a service ace of their own to bring them within two. The purple and white, however, rode a pair of Danner kills followed by one from Ahern to clinch the third set 25-21.

Bowdoin came out with a new energy in the fourth set to go up 5-3. Danner helped put pressure on the Polar Bears with some powerful kills, bringing Amherst within one and forcing a Bowdoin timeout. The Polar Bears remained tough at the net, however, putting Amherst down 16-11. Walker and Danner worked hard to bring the spark back for the Firedogs, but a service ace and an Amherst error gave Bowdoin the win, forcing a fifth set.

The Firedogs came out with fantastic energy in the fifth and final set, which was matched by an excited home court crowd. The purple and white started off the set with an Ahern kill followed by a Kelci Keeno ’17 service ace before Bowdoin came back in the game to tie it up.

The two teams stayed gridlocked until Amherst took back the momentum with a Newby kill

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

FRI

SAT

TUE

Volleyball vs. Vassar, 7:30 p.m.

Volleyball vs. Brandeis, 10 a.m.

Volleyball Women’s Soccer vs. Bridgewater St., noon @ Trinity, 3:30 p.m.

Field Hockey vs. Wesleyan, noon

Football vs. Wesleyan, 1 p.m.

Women’s Soccer vs. Wesleyan, noon

Men’s Soccer vs. Wesleyan, 2:30 p.m.

and another Keeno service ace to put them up 11-8. Bowdoin fought to stay in the game but in the end, a Honea serve and a powerful kill from Gould were too much for the Polar Bears to handle as the Firedogs took the set, 15-10, and the match.

Coming off of their thrilling win on Friday night, the Firedogs continued their form on Saturday afternoon against non-conference UMass-Boston. Junior duo Maggie Danner and Nicole Gould controlled the game for Amherst, combining for a total 23 kills in the match, and leading Amherst to a 3-1 (25-17, 25-13, 24-26, 25-18) victory. Walker added an impressive three service aces and Carter impressed with 35 assists. On the defensive end, Warshaw led the team with 14 digs, followed closely by Honea with 13 and Keeno with 11.

Next up for the Firedogs is the 24th annual Hall of Fame tournament, played at home in LeFrak Gymnasium. Amherst will host Vassar on Friday, Oct. 23 and play a doubleheader on Saturday, Oct. 24 against Brandeis at 10 a.m. and Bridgewater State at noon.

Photo courtesy of Mark Box

WED Men’s Soccer @ Trinity, 3 p.m.

FIeld Hockey @ Trinity, 6 p.m.

Volleyball @ Springfield, 7 p.m.