THE AMHERST
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 15 l WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Women’s Swim and Dive Picks Up Two Wins See Sports, Page 9 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
Best-Selling Author Gives Talk on Nonfiction Book Sehee Park ’20 Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Sarah Wishloff ’19
Administrators released the updated Party Policy on Jan. 26, citing occupancy hazards and risk to student safety — including increased alcohol-related hospital transports — as the reasoning behind changes.
ACEMS Data Challenges Reasons for New Party Policy Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor Data provided to The Student by a member of the Amherst College Emergency Medical Services (ACEMS) calls into question administrators’ assertion that the college needed to overhaul the Party Policy at the beginning of the semester due to a significant increase in risks to student wellbeing. Student Affairs released an updated version of the Party Policy on Jan. 26 to student backlash. Changes include requiring one party sponsor per 20 people as opposed to the previous 50 and expecting party sponsors to work with staff to manage attendance levels. The college designates the authority to revise policies in certain sections of the Student Code of Conduct to specific entities such as the Committee of Six, College Council and Association of Amherst Students (AAS). Most but not all policy revisions undergo “some [community-based] vetting mechanism” such as a student body vote, according to Senior Associate Dean of Students Dean Gendron. The party policy did not. Though the college usually makes edits to the document during the summer months, Gendron said there are times when administrators need to “be quicker than that and don’t have the opportunity or maybe it’s not appropriate even to have a long-term consensus building process.” “We might forego that process in very limited cases,” he added. “Where local state or federal law has changed and where the college is now responsible for new expectations that need to be immediately translated into our code, or where ... the college recognizes that there is some policy or some procedure or practice that is not appropriately protecting health or safety, we would put measures in place to protect health and safety without delay.” The revisions to the party policy, Gendron said, was such a case — focused on health and safety, not “social life scenes or some of the more student preference or student party culture aspects of this.” Those decisions, he said, should be community-based and occur over longer periods of time where “student voice is large and where all students have the opportunity to weigh in.”
Gathering information received through Amherst Town Police, Amherst College Police, residential and other professional staff, Keefe Health Center and ACEMS, the college ascertained that policies needed to change to protect against risks to fire and life safety. The college is seeing clear trends, Gendron said, in increased alcohol-involved incidents and hospital transports. ACEMS declined to comment for the story, but according to an ACEMS member who provided data on conditions of anonymity in order to protect against possible consequences from administrators, an internal review found no statistically significant differences in proportions of alcohol-related hospital transports between the semesters of Spring 2015 through Fall 2017. ACEMS responded to 17 alcohol-related hospital transports in Spring 2015, 24 in Fall 2015, 16 in Spring 2016, 14 in Fall 2016 and nine in Spring 2017. In Fall 2017, ACEMS responded to 26. The Student examined the number of alcoholrelated transports compared to total number of transports and found that in previous semesters starting from Spring 2015 and including Fall 2017, alcohol-related transports were approximately 30 to 50 percent of total transports. Last semester, they comprised 53.1 percent of transports, which is on the higher side of ACEMS statistics. The internal review backs up the statement that “[l]ast fall, hospital transports related to intoxication exceeded transports for the entire previous academic year,” as Chief Student Affairs Officer Suzanne Coffey and Gendron wrote in an email to the student body on Jan. 30. The proportion of alcohol-related transports in Fall 2017, however, only surpassed that in Spring 2017 by approximately 3.1 percent. The number of total hospital transports in Fall 2017 was in the 40s, a number in line with the total hospital transports in Fall 2015, Spring 2016 and Fall 2016. That number dipped unusually low to 18 in Spring 2017. “There was no statistical evidence of any change between Fall 2017 and previous semesters in proportions of alcohol-related calls or alcoholrelated transports out of total calls and transports, respectively,” the ACEMS review concluded. “No ACEMS members, including those who have
been responding to alcohol-related calls for multiple semesters, have reported subjective increases in alcohol levels in transported students.” ACPD Chief John Carter wrote in an email interview that 28 police calls involving overconsumption of alcohol required transportation to the hospital in Fall 2017, whereas 25 calls involving overconsumption of alcohol required transportation to the hospital in the 2016-2017 academic year. Additional numbers of calls not reflected in ACEMS’ statistics occurred in locations outside its service area or while ACEMS was out of service. Carter did not provide numbers for semesters prior to the last academic year or records from the Amherst Town Police. “On average approximately 20 persons a fall semester are transported for alcohol medical reasons, but our heightened concern this year stems from the serious condition of many of last fall’s transports,” Carter added. “This is not purely an issue of numbers.” Director of Health Services Emily Jones said that Keefe Health Center has been implementing a tracking system to follow alcohol-related incidents since her arrival at the college at the beginning of the last academic year. According to Jones, Keefe receives emergency room reports, including laboratory data, on students transported to the hospital for alcohol or drug intoxication. “These reports have indicated some extremely high blood alcohol levels this past semester,” Jones said in an email interview. “This data is concerning as many of these blood alcohol levels have been high enough to cause loss of consciousness, and could even have been in the range of causing respiratory depression or death.” Jones could not provide data on alcohol-related incidents prior to her arrival. According to Director of Residential Life Andrea S. Cadyma, students voiced particular concerns to Residential Life regarding occupancy at parties, which led to the addition of language including staff in assisting with attendance levels. “That was a measure that was intended to make students safer,” she said. “We acted as deliberately as we could to put
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The New York Times best-selling author Jeff Hobbs spoke at Amherst on Jan. 31 in Stirn Auditorium about his book “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League.” The talk was hosted by the Conferences and Special Events Office. Hobbs received a bachelor of arts in English language and literature from Yale in 2002 and published his first fiction novel, “The Tourists,” in 2007. He published his first work of nonfiction, “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace,” in 2014. In his introduction of Hobbs, Adam Hutchinson ’93, assistant coach of the men’s basketball team, said that though the book discusses Peace’s upbringing, his time at Yale and his return to Newark, it is also “about much, much more.” The title, Hutchinson said, echoed the theme of “two Americas,” which is in itself a shorthand acknowledgement that there are a myriad of experiences to be found in the United States. He discussed how higher education is “almost universally recognized as an important key to upward mobility,” but pointed out that there are deep costs, not only in the financial sense, that come with the opportunity. Following his introduction, Hobbs began by talking about his relationship to Peace. Peace was Hobbs’ “college roommate and friend for four years” at Yale. Peace was later a groomsman at Hobbs’ wedding, but after graduation, they lived on opposite coasts of the country and only talked “four or five times a year.” “It seemed like there would always be time for a reunion,” Hobbs said. “There wasn’t.” Nine years after graduation, Peace was shot twice and killed by men in ski masks in a basement where he had been selling marijuana. After laying out the facts of Peace’s death, Hobbs circled back and fleshed out who Peace was as a person. Peace was from a town outside of Newark nicknamed Illtown, a place that “wasn’t Disneyland, but it was home.” He lived with his mother, while his father, convicted of a double murder when Peace was young, was incarcerated. When Hobbs met Peace, he quickly realized that “Rob was not typical, not just because of where he grew up but because he was a straight-A student in molecular biophysics and biochemistry, which is about as easy as it sounds.” Peace was also captain of the water polo team for two years, and was “very bright and very popular.” Peace also “smoked a lot of weed and sold a lot of weed” from their dorm room. Hobbs said that Peace never seemed to spend the money on himself, however, and posited that he had been saving it for the future. “But what I didn’t know, was not aware of, was the huge and complicated set of discomforts Rob experienced, coming from his home to Yale,” Hobbs said. “How to reconcile the gratitude he had for this education that was a gift … with a very real resentment of lively, affluent peers like myself. How to manage the guilt knowing that his mother was home crying every night” as well as “guilt for high school friends — also bright guys who had aspirations but they couldn’t go to college because of financial or other reasons.” Peace didn’t know “how to ask for help without
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