THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 1 l FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 2017
Women’s Golf Primed For More Success See Sports, Page 10 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
Raises in Family Contributions Surpise Students Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor
Photo courtesy of Sarah Wishloff ’19
A group of first-year students meet with their squad during Orientation Week. Much of the programming remains similar to past years, though more events focused on the families of new students and building community by dorm.
Class of 2021 Arrives for Orientation Week Jingwen Zhang ’18 Editor-in Chief Amherst College welcomed 473 new students from around the country and the world on Tuesday, Aug. 29, kicking off the college’s orientation week, which included familiar programs from years past as well as new changes and improvements. According to the Office of Admission, members of the class of 2021 were selected from a record-setting pool of 9,285 students, up 10 percent from last year. Of those applicants, 1,198, or 12.9 percent, were offered admission. One hundred and seventy-two students were admitted through early decision. Students traveled to their new homes on the First-Year Quad from 388 secondary schools in 38 U.S. states and Puerto Rico as well as 26 countries. Of these students, 43 percent identify as domestic students of color. Men and women comprise nearly half the class each, with one student identifying as non-binary transgender. The incoming class boasts record-high
scores and academic achievements, with an average SAT composite score of 2232 and ACT composite of 33. This year’s class was also the first to take the SAT in its new format. Eighty-two percent of students ranked in the top decile of their high schools’ graduating classes. Fifty-five percent of new students are receiving financial aid, and 11 percent are firstgeneration college students. In addition, 16 are transfer students, including two U.S. veterans. Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Katie Fretwell ’81 said in an email interview that the new class brings “a tremendous array of talents and interests across the academic disciplines.” “As a group, they have the distinction of having particularly strong aspirations for careers in diplomacy and foreign service and have had an unusually high participation rate in Model United Nations programs through their secondary schools,” Fretwell added. This year’s orientation week includes familiar elements such as squad meetings, Sex-
ual Health Educator (SHE) skits, the DeMott Lecture and the “Voices of the Class” performance. Meetings on subjects like sexual respect and addressing bias will build on themes from previous years, but Dean of New Students Rick López said in an email interview that the format of some orientation events continues to “[move] away from having students listen to speeches” and toward “redesigning orientation events into small group dialogues.” López said that some other changes geared toward students include longer academic advising and registration periods, a reception geared toward first-generation and low-income students, and at the request of student government members, the return of the classwide Honor Code signing event. Also new to orientation are residence-hall specific dinners. “[Their] purpose is to help students create their own dorm identity, while also bonding with students in nearby dormitories,” López said. “Like all other events in orientation, our focus is on fomenting dia-
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When Claire Cho ’20 received her financial aid package in early July, she was shocked — her expected family contribution had doubled “without any indication that it would,” she said. After conversing with friends and peers, she realized that a number of students’ expected family contributions had changed dramatically since their first year. “People who were really close with me, especially my girlfriend, we were really unhappy with the way Financial Aid was handling it,” she said. “It didn’t seem like just one or two people,” Cho added. “It seemed much more of a trend.” The change in expected family contribution, as well as a seeming lack of transparency from the Office of Financial Aid, prompted Cho to gather data to assess the prevalence of this trend. In early August, she created an online survey about satisfaction with interactions with the Office of Financial Aid, asking if a student’s expected family contribution changed after their first year and whether a student had taken out loans to meet the expected family contribution. Other questions examined the financial aid appeals process and accessibility. After creating the survey, she posted it on her personal Facebook page as well as the Class of 2020 Facebook page. Within three days, she was accepted into other class pages and began sharing her survey there. At press time, 115 students have responded to the survey, and she plans to reach out to other groups in the first few weeks of school. She hopes to receive responses from at least a quarter of the student body before conducting any analysis. “It’s obviously going to be skewed toward people who do get financial aid or interact with the financial aid office, but hopefully we’ll have a good reach over all the students,” she said. In addition to the changes in expected family contribution, which for some students tripled, Cho said survey responses revealed the unresponsiveness of staff in the Office of Financial Aid. “For a lot of people, it took two or more emails,” she said. “Some people said they had to resort to walking in and asking someone about it because there wasn’t a response in two weeks’
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Folger Shakespeare Library Given 1.5 Million Dollar Grant Emma Swislow ’20 Managing News Editor The Folger Shakespeare Library, administered by the college, was awarded a grant in August by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for $1.5 million to fund a four-year collaborative research project called “Before Farm to Table: Early Modern Foodways and Cultures.” The Folger Library, located in Washington D.C., houses the world’s largest collection of materials on Shakespeare and was founded posthumously in 1932 by Henry Folger and his wife Emily Folger. According to the library’s Executive Director, Kathleen Lynch, Folger, who graduated from the college in 1879, first developed an interest in the Bard
after attending a lecture on Shakespeare by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In Folger’s will, he left the college with administrative control over the Folger library. The project covered by the grant will focus on using interdisciplinary research techniques and Folger’s materials to study food pathways and the strong connection between food and culture in the early modern period. The “untapped or neglected opportunity” in the Folger collections, according to Lynch, led to a focus on food. “Food is pervasive,” Lynch said. “It’s a basic necessity for survival. But it’s also an indicator of culture and community and trade and economics. We’re demonstrating that our collections can support big questions that are not so obviously tipped off in our middle name — Shakespeare.”
While Lynch will head the initiative, three scholars — David Goldstein, Amanda Herbert and Heather Wolfe ’92 — will each lead a team of other academics. “In a way, the three post-doctoral scholars will be the heart of the work, as they determine some of the emphases and products,” Lynch said. “They will have opportunities to advance their own individual research projects in the usual ways, but also to define new team products like an online edition of a play or a receipt book, a ‘mapping’ of the markets of London on a period map or a visualization of the use of certain terms — perhaps ingredients — over time.” One project goal is to experiment with a more collaborative method of research. Rather than work as individuals each in their own
discipline, the scholars will work together, creating an interdisciplinary, collaborative project. “Our idea in the new Mellon initiative in collaborative research is to set out a big set of issues and assemble teams of scholars, each with his or her own subject expertise, to have them talk across those areas of expertise,” Lynch said. “We need to broaden the scope of scholarly conversations to bring scholars and these experts into the same conversations. We need to find new ways to bring some of the fruits of those discussions immediately out for our public audiences.” Amherst students will also get a chance to participate in the project. The college faculty
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