THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLV, ISSUE 19 l WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 2016
Baseball Dominates Competition in Florida, Finishes 8-1 See Sports, Page 10 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AM-
Communications Office Redesigns Amherst Website Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor
Photo courtesy of Sydney Tate ‘18
Political commentator and author Charles Krauthammer spoke about the state of conservatism today and the impact of the Obama presidency in Buckley recital hall on March 9.
Krauthammer Speaks on Conservatism
Dan Ahn ’17 Managing News Editor
Members of the college and town community filled Buckley Recital Hall to attend a talk by Charles Krauthammer, political commentator and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, on March 9. Krauthammer is currently known as a nightly panelist on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” a political discussion show on Fox News, and also contributes weekly to the conservative opinion magazine The Weekly Standard. He worked in psychiatric research at Massachusetts General Hospital before re-orienting his career toward politics. Krauthammer based his talk on his latest book “Things that Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes, and Politics,” a collection of essays on a variety of topics including American history, embryonic research and his personal experiences. The book was published in October 2013 and held a spot on the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list for 38 weeks.
This was Krauthammer’s second visit to the area in recent years. The University of Massachusetts Amherst GOP, a student-run organization, invited him to speak on his book last April. Prior to the talk, Krauthammer spoke at an exclusive question-and-answer session with a group of students. “We were there for about an hour and thirty minutes, and asked about four or five questions,” Emmanuel Osunlana ’18, who was present at the question-and-answer session, said. “With each, he spent about fifteen minutes fully answering the question. It wasn’t just rhetoric or buzzwords. With each response, I felt that it was coming from a place where he had really thought about the issue for a long time.” Professor of political science Javier Corrales introduced Krauthammer, who opened his talk with quips about the trajectory of his career and his experiences working with federal politics. “I’m sometimes asked to compare what I do today as a political analyst in Washington with what I used to do as a psychiatrist in Boston, and
I tell them it really isn’t that different,” Krauthammer said. “In both lines of work, I deal everyday with people who suffer from paranoia and delusions of grandeur. The only difference is that in Washington, they have access to nuclear weapons.” Krauthammer said that he was officially supposed to talk about the state of conservatism in America, but he spoke first about the impact of liberalism and the Obama presidency on contemporary political discussions. “I would argue that over the last seven years, just about every major debate we have had as a country — from the stimulus, to Obamacare, to foreign policy, to the deficit and debt — have all been, and can all be, subsumed under one more general question,” he said. “And that is, what is the proper size and reach and scope of government?” According to Krauthammer, the United States is in an era of particularly intense political debate,
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The Office of Communications launched a new version of the Amherst website on Wednesday, March 16. An email sent to members of the college community on March 9 announced the new website’s release. The website has been extensively redesigned, featuring a simplified homepage structure intended for easier use on all devices, including mobile ones. The new format also uses photos and videos in order to be more visually appealing. “Mobile devices, social media, the attention to visual media and the hyper-connected society have all affected the way users interact with websites,” chief communications officer Pete Mackey said in an email interview. “We felt it was past due to offer an Amherst College site that was responsive to today’s web users.” Mackey said that the last time the college’s website underwent an extensive renovation was nine years ago in 2007. Originally slated for January, the launch was delayed until spring break to provide Communications and Information Technology more time to work on the structure and design of the website, as well as to assist academic departments and administrative offices in adapting their own web pages to the new format. “Along the way, we also re-wrote huge amounts of content to present it with a writing style that is more personal and friendly for web readers,” Mackey said. The Office of Communications created the new website in partnership with the Information Technology department, and integrated the new format with content from the previous version of the site. For the website’s new design, the college hired Fastspot, a website design and development firm that has worked with other schools and organizations such as Yale University and Kenyon College. A major change to the user experience on the website is the organization of content into four major fixed tabs at the top of the page, labelled “The Amherst Story,” “The Academic Experience,” “Admission & Financial Aid” and “Life at Amherst.” Content within each tab is arranged vertically, which, according to Mackey, is an effort to make the site easy for users to scroll through. “I like the look,” Thomas Lam ’18 said. “But I
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AAS Creates Task Force on Committee Membership Kiana Herold ’17 Managing News Editor
The Association of Amherst Students created a Task Force on Committee Membership to review student membership on faculty committees. The task force held its first meeting, which was open to all students, and plans to make a recommendation to the Senate by the end of this semester. “The task force was created to explore how seats on committees can best be utilized,” AAS communication director Bonnie Drake ’17 said. “It will address questions such as the appropriate balance of senators and at-large members, the appointment process for students to be on committees and ways to increase the accountability of those on committees to
ensure that the general student body knows what’s happening in meetings and knows who is representing them.” The idea to create a task force on Committee Membership arose last semester after the AAS sent a poll to the student body regarding the split between senator and at-large student membership on College Council. This poll was prompted by the Committee of Six, which had moved to increase the number of at-large student representatives on the College Council and wanted to solicit the opinion of the student body. The charge of each committee, as written in the faculty handbook, dictates among other things the composition and number of student membership on faculty committees. The Committee of Six has authority over the text of the handbook. There are six faculty committees that have
student members, which have varying student representation in the number of seats available and the composition of those seats. These faculty committees consist of the College Council, the Committee on Priorities and Resources, the Committee on Education Policy, the Committee on Discipline, the Faculty Committee on Admission and Financial Aid, the Faculty Computing Committee and the Faculty Orientation Committee. Currently, the only committees with at-large-members of the student body are the Committee on Educational Policy, the Committee on Discipline and the Faculty Committee on Admission and Financial Aid. Heru Craig ’17E, who spearheaded the effort to bring attention to student membership on faculty committees, cited the power that
committees have and said that the student body’s general lack of knowledge about the committees is problematic. Craig promotes greater at-large student involvement. “Everyone who is capable of being on a committee should know what they are,” Craig said. AAS President Tomi Williams ’16, who was instrumental in creating the task force, said that he finds the current selection process for at-large members of faculty committees transparent and effective. “I think that it is important that all students who are interested have a say and are able to craft a substantive recommendation,” Williams
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