THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 12 l WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 2016
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NYT Columnist Speaks on Modern Conservatism Audrey Cheng ’20 Staff Writer
Photo by Takudzwa Tapfuma ’17
Around 300 students and members of the community walked out to Converse Hall on Nov. 16 at noon to protest President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed policies regarding undocumented immigrants.
Students Hold Sanctuary Campus Protest Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor
On Nov. 16 at noon, hundreds of students walked out of class to the steps of Converse Hall in a demonstration against President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to “deport all criminal aliens.” Intending to declare the college a sanctuary campus — where students “commit to putting our bodies between Trump and undocumented students” — students raised signs with words such as “No human being is illegal” and chanted, “No borders, no nations, stop deportation.” Joined by some faculty and staff and surrounded by reporters, the crowd listened as Irma Zamora ’17 read Trump’s 100-day plan and Bryan Torres ’18 relayed his experience as an undocumented immigrant in America. After Torres spoke, Dean of New Students Rick Lopez, who was unaffiliated with the student organizers, talked briefly about acknowledging antagonism and bigotry in America.
“Do not give in,” Lopez said. “Support those among us who have the most to lose.” For students with loved ones and family who have undocumented status, he said, every day is a constant state of worry. “If they don’t answer the phone, what does that mean?” he said. “Are they deported?” He urged students to press administration, to enforce more rules and ensure that “we’re working behind the scenes to provide a kind of support and protection.” The focus of the letter of demands, which was read to the crowd, requested that the college refuse all “voluntary sharing of records, documents, and similar materials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) / U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP)” and restrict ICE’s physical access to college-owned land. It demanded that the college continue to support the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program and enact its need-blind admission policy for undocumented and DACA students. The letter also asked for the college to prohibit campus police from
inquiring about or documenting an individual’s immigration status, enforcing immigration laws or working with ICE, CBP or any other policing agency. The last request was for the college to divest from private prisons and detention centers that incarcerate immigrants. “We, as a student body, will no longer permit our college to immorally profit from the imprisonment and detention of human bodies,” the letter said. The letter ended with writers stating that they expected a public, written response to all demands by Monday, Nov. 28. The full letter was signed by over 300 members of the college community. At the protest, student organizers presented the letter to President Biddy Martin, who was standing in the crowd. “Our main goal was to have administration acknowledge and declare itself a sanctuary campus,” said Esperanza Chairez ’19, one of the organizers
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The college welcomed conservative author, blogger and op-ed columnist Ross Douthat on Nov. 16 to give a talk titled “American Conservatism and Donald Trump.” The talk, which was open to the public and livestreamed, was held in Stirn Auditorium, where Douthat spoke for 45 minutes about the history and ideology of modern conservatism and how it relates to President-elect Trump’s success. After the talk, Douthat answered questions from the audience and signed copies of his book, “Bad Religion: How America Became a Nation of Heretics.” Currently the youngest regular op-ed columnist in the history of The New York Times, Douthat is a former senior editor and blogger at The Atlantic and has authored three books. The auditorium was filled to capacity, with many students standing in the aisles. Douthat began his talk by admitting that while writing the speech, he had not believed Trump would actually win the presidency. “When I was invited to speak, I thought, like most people who cover politics for a living and allege to know something about it, that I would be speaking to you all tonight in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s crushing defeat,” Douthat said. Modern American conservatism, he said, is based on the ideology of conserving all the distinctive qualities of American culture, politics and society worth conserving, defending them against what are considered ill-advised efforts of reform. The movement began as an alliance of different ideological groups in the 1950s and 1960s. Douthat describes the coalition as a “marriage of convenience” which, when considering the individual parties involved, seems self-contradictory. “They unite in their opposition to forces defined as liberal, progressive or left wing that, in the name of some higher justice, would undo what makes America exceptional,” Douthat said. The movement gained momentum during the 1960s and 1970s with the sexual revolution,
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President Martin Condemns Racist Posters in McGuire Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor
President Biddy Martin sent an email to the college community on Wednesday, Nov. 16 condemning two unauthorized posters discovered in McGuire Life Sciences Building on the preceding Tuesday. The posters depicted ideas related to phrenology, a study that uses differences in skull shapes and sizes to justify racial disparities. Phrenology has been widely discredited as an obsolete and unscientific defense of racism. “I condemn the racism and cynical mean-spiritedness of those who hung the posters in the strongest possible terms,” Martin wrote in her statement. Images of the posters, hung in McGuire next to other flyers advertising on-campus events or research opportunities, were circulated on social media and generated outrage among students. Both posters contained graphics that showed differences in skull and sizes, and one suggested their link to lower IQ among people of African descent. Both
contained a link to a website that promotes white supremacy, anti-semitism and other “alt-right” beliefs. One of the posters had been discovered by Kristi Ohr, the college’s chemical hygiene officer and laboratory coordinator, on the bulletin board on the third floor of McGuire near the building’s central entrance. Ohr had taken the poster down and sent scanned images to Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Norm Jones and campus police, though she said she did not know what happened to the original. According to Martin’s statement, efforts to identify the person or people responsible for putting up the posters are still ongoing. Martin also wrote that the responsible party either did not understand that phrenology is outdated and discredited or that they had put them up as a deliberate provocation. “They are playing a propaganda game — a dangerous and hurtful game, but a game nonetheless,” Martin said, adding that the incident aimed to distract students from their education and well-being
and, in doing so, confirm the idea that colleges are “bastions of hyper-sensitivity and repressive political correctness.” She ended the statement by exhorting students to continue learning and creating change, and not to “take the bait.” Kaitlyn Tsuyuki ’18, who had been among the early students to circulate images of the posters on social media, said she was pleased with Martin’s statement, which “was passionate — to the point that she could be passionate about something like this happening on her campus.” Tsuyuki added that while some students thought Martin’s statement was not strong enough in its condemnation, she understood that Martin had to represent a student body with a range of different viewpoints. “I think a lot of people assume that because we’re a liberal arts campus … bad ideas can’t spread here — and not only bad ideas, but specifically outdated, racist ideas,” Tsuyuki said, noting that many buildings on campus are accessible to the public and that the posters could have been put up by someone from outside the college community.
Bulaong Ramiz, director of the Multicultural Resource Center, agrees with Martin’s assertion about the motivations of the people behind the original posters. “This is propaganda intended to bait a reaction during a highly sensitive time in our country,” she said. Since the Nov. 8 presidential election, in which Republican nominee Donald Trump became the U.S. president-elect, reported incidents of racially motivated attacks and other acts have increased across the country, including on college campuses. In the aftermath of the posters’ discovery, dozens of faculty and staff in the college’s science departments in McGuire and Merrill Science Building signed a poster of their own, pledging their support for students. “I think that divisive and hateful propaganda should be countered with declarations of unity and love, which is what I believe the posters signed by the faculty and staff [of Merrill and McGuire] are intended to be,” said Ohr.