Issue 1

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THE AMHERST

THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 1 l FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2016

Men’s Soccer Looks to Defend National Championship See Sports, Page 11 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU

Resource Centers Announce Plans for Collaboration Lauren Tuiskula ’17 Editor-in-Chief

Photo courtesy of Takudzwa Tapfuma ‘17

472 students moved onto campus early to plan and participate in an orientation experience geared toward the class of 2020 to help them familiarize with a campus that they now call home.

The Class of 2020 Arrives on Campus Caleigh Plaut ’19 Staff Writer On Aug. 30, the 472 students in Amherst’s class of 2020 moved into their new homes in the dorms on the first-year quad and commenced a week of orientation activities. Students in the incoming class withstood a competitive application cycle last year, as Amherst admitted 1,161 out of 8,406 applicants, making for an acceptance rate of 13.8 percent. Approximately 41 percent of the accepted students accepted their offer from Amherst. Sixteen transfer students will also join the college. Out of the 403 transfer applicants, only 25 were accepted, making for a six percent transfer acceptance rate. “I am excited to welcome this new cohort of accomplished, interesting and engaged students to the Amherst family,” said Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Katie Fretwell

’81. According to Fretwell, a record 47 percent of the incoming class have self-identified as American students of color. First-generation students comprise 14 percent of the class. Fifty-two percent of first-year students will receive financial aid, down from 56 percent last year, and 22 percent are Pell Grant recipients. Fretwell also said that 26 different countries are represented in the class of 2020 and that eight percent of students are non-U.S. citizens. “They speak more than 35 five different languages [and] have lived in more than 50 different countries,” she said. Within the U.S., the incoming students come from 40 states, with New York, California and Massachusetts boasting the most students. Students in this class hail from 379 different secondary schools, 59 percent of which are public, 35 percent independent and seven percent parochial.

They had exceptional academic backgrounds with a record SAT composite of 2177 and an ACT composite of 32. Eightyfour percent finished in the top decile of their class in schools that calculated rank. After moving, the class of 2020 began their first-year orientation, a week filled with activities designed to introduce them to the college and the community. Amherst’s orientation program has seen major changes over the course of the last two years. According to Dean of New Students Rick López, these changes were made to meet new goals such as allowing for more “intimate conversations,” bridging “potential divides between athletes and non-athletes,” facilitating better “student-to-student” connection and incorporating “robust sexual respect training.” This year’s orientation program resembles

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Chief Diversity Officer Norm Jones announced the hiring of Bulaong Ramiz as the new director of the Multicultural Resource Center in an email to the college community on August 16. Jones also announced the creation of the Resource Center Team, which will include directors and student staff from the Multicultural Resource Center, Queer Resource Center and Women’s and Gender Center. “There really isn’t a change connected to the work of the centers. [It is] more so an additional name given to the team formed by the centers,” Jones said in an email interview. “We will begin to do more work in the collective and it’s important that the community begin to understand both the discrete and collective value of justice work being advanced by all three sites.” One of the main goals for the Resource Center Team will be to use an intersectional lens to look at community issues and plan for event programming. “One of the most unfortunate occurrences in diversity work is to watch people swap or make involuntary trade offs of their multiple identities because various cultures privilege certain identities over others,” Jones said. “Intersectionality asks us to be more sophisticated in our engagement of one another — to seek to understand the ways in which reductionism strips away at the richness of our interchange and does more to perpetuate our divisions than to create inclusive communities.” Angie Tissi-Gassoway, the director of the Queer Resource Center, stressed the importance for the centers to retain individual autonomy while working collaboratively. [We’re] thinking now about starting to reestablish all of the centers, now that we are all in the same place,” she said. The Queer Resource Center changed locations over the summer, moving from the basement of Morrow Dormitory to the second floor of Keefe Campus Center. “[We’re thinking about] what will be different about the way our collaboration will look and what it means to collaborate now … I’m thinking about how I hold saliency in the

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Amherst Welcomes Chief Diversity Officer Norm Jones Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor President Biddy Martin announced the selection of Dr. Norm Jones as the College’s chief diversity officer to the Amherst community in an email on June 16. Jones officially joined the college staff on July 15. Jones was selected after a nearly year-long search following the resignation of the former interim chief diversity officer and director of the Multicultural Resource Center, Mariana Cruz, last October. The search was led by a committee comprised of students, faculty and staff that held open campus-wide discussions and meetings with candidates throughout the year.

In an email interview, Jones said that he was drawn to Amherst College’s leadership in diversity and inclusion in higher education, the opportunity to gauge students’ needs directly through closer personal relationships and the sustained racial diversity within the student body. “The question now becomes how such a diverse student body can become the source of sustainable inclusive practices that all students experience,” Jones said. “I see it as my role to ask the questions, collect the information and frame our conversations in ways that allow us to gauge inclusiveness and act on what we learn.” Prior to joining the college, Jones was the associate chief diversity officer, deputy direc-

tor and creator of the office of diversity and inclusion at Harvard University. Before that, he had been the associate vice president and dean of institutional diversity at Dickinson College. Amherst’s search committee hired consultants from the search firm Isaacson, Miller last year, who identified Jones along with several other candidates for the position. “Dr. Jones is judicious, thoughtful and very insightful about the challenges and opportunities that the college faces with regard to diversity and inclusion,” search committee co-chair and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein said in an email interview. “He is very datadriven in his approach, and this bodes well for the systemic change that we all hope that he’ll bring to the college.”

“I am truly upset that my time at Amherst does not overlap with Norm Jones’,” Miu Suzuki ’16, a member of last year’s search committee, said. “Regardless of the context, he is authentic and personable.” Epstein also said that she and Jones have already begun meeting with faculty search committees to plan diversifying the faculty, which Jones listed as one of his goals in an email he sent to the college community on July 22. Jones has also met with staff from various administrative departments to improve systems for addressing workplace bias and better career and promotion tracks to create “an inclusive work experience” for college employees. “Recruitment and retention of women and minority staff and faculty is a concern [Jones]


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