THE AMHERST
THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVII, ISSUE 22 l WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4, 2018
Men’s Tennis Posts Two Wins on Weekend, Moves to 5-1 See Sports, Page 11 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
College Admits “Most Diverse Pool” Ever to Class of 2022 Emma Swislow ’20 Managing News Editor
Photo courtesy of Natalie De Rosa ’21
Students traveled to Washington D.C. with the Amherst College Democrats to participate in the national March For Our Lives on March 24. The march supported the creation of stronger gun control legislation.
Students March for Gun Control in Washington D.C. Natalie De Rosa ’20 Staff Writer Forty Amherst students travelled to Washington D.C. to participate in the national March For Our Lives on March 24. The trip, which was sponsored by the Amherst College Democrats, called on policymakers to enact stronger gun control legislation. The Washington D.C. march was organized by victims of the Feb. 14 school shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The massacre, one of the deadliest school shootings in the nation’s history, killed 17 people and injured 14 others. The Amherst College Democrats had initially planned to attend the March for Science on April 14 to advocate for the use of science-based evidence in federal policymaking. In the wake of the Parkland massacre, however, the organization decided that the gun control debate held greater urgency.
“The gun violence epidemic in this country got a lot of national attention and focus on it, and [the march] was something we were all very excited about participating in,” said Alexander Deatrick ’20, president of the Amherst College Democrats. The importance of the gun control debate in recent weeks was evident at the march, which gathered over 800,000 people, with hundreds of thousands of others participating in 800 other sister marches throughout the world. March for Our Lives also gained celebrity attention, with musicians like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande performing at the event. Students from Parkland, along with others impacted by gun violence, gave speeches advocating for stronger gun control laws following these performances. The event’s first speaker was Cameron Kasky, a junior at Stoneman Douglas. Kasky, known for challenging Florida Senator Marco Rubio’s accep-
tance of donations from the National Rifle Association (NRA), questioned the intent of Washington’s legislators. “The corrupt are manipulating the facts, but we know the truth,” Kasky said. Sarah Chadwick, also a junior at Stoneman Douglas, echoed Kasky’s sentiments in her speech, asking, “Is that how much we’re worth to these politicians? One dollar and five cents?” That figure is the amount of money Rubio accepted from the NRA, divided by the total number of students in Florida. Last month, Chadwick vocalized her disapproval of Rubio’s ties to the NRA, tweeting, “We should change the names of AR-15s to ‘Marco Rubio’ because they are so easy to buy.” There were also calls for the Trump administration as a whole to take action. “We cannot keep America great if we cannot keep America safe,” said Jaclyn Corin, a junior at
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After poring over a record-breaking 9,722 applications, the Office of Admissions admitted 1,244 applicants, bringing the acceptance rate down to 12.8 percent, according to the Office of Admissions. Around 37 percent of the total number of accepted students were admitted through early decision. Dean of Admissions Katie Fretwell expects a yield rate of 37 to 39 percent, which would make a class of 460 to 485 students. Admissions hopes to admit additional students off of the waitlist in late April and May in order to meet this target class size. This year’s accepted students are “the most diverse pool geographically, socioeconomically and racially” that the college has ever had, according to Fretwell in an email interview. She attributes this diversity to a variety of outreach efforts Amherst has put in place over the past year. “In addition to a number of targeted recruitment efforts to diverse populations, we have made a number of modifications to the application process including reduced standardized testing requirements, expansion of application fee qualifiers and waiver of the additional fee for submission of supplemental arts materials,” Fretwell said. The school flew out prospective students in the fall for Diversity Open Houses (DIVOH), and accepted 101 of the students who participated in that program. Fretwell expects to fly in about 200 more students for the April Open House. The college accepted a record number of African-American and Latino students this year, and 56 percent of the admits are domestic students of color. The admit pool is also geographically diverse, with admitted students from 58 foreign countries, 49 states, Washington D.C., Guam and
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Scholar Helen Zia Speaks on Activism, Identity and Hope Sehee Park ’20 Staff Writer Helen Zia, an award-winning activist, journalist and scholar, gave a talk about activism in the Asian-American community and the importance of “breaking the binary” in Stirn Auditorium on March 21. The event was sponsored by the Office of Student Activities, the Center for Diversity and Student Leadership, the American Studies Department and the Asian Students Association. Zia, author of “Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People,” is known for her activism in and scholarship on Asian-American communities. She was featured in the Academy Award-nominated film “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” for her activism in the 1980s civil rights campaign against anti-Asian-American violence. Professor Franklin Odo from the American Studies department introduced Zia, saying that “her work has been extremely important to all of us — I think in the best sense — [in showing] that Asian American studies can help illuminate the rest of American society and American history.” Zia started her talk by saying that she reminds herself that “this is really not a time for people like me … as an Asian American and the daughter of
immigrants and a queer person of color, or really any of us … to run and hide.” “It is more important than ever to stand tall, and link arms, and to raise our voices and especially point to the needs of our marginalized communities: of color, of women, queer communities, immigrants, of Muslims,” she said. Zia then contextualized contemporary politics, explaining that most students today grew up in a “post-9/11 cloud of xenophobic and Islamophobic paranoia that has enveloped this country and most of the world.” “It is a time of fear and hatred of anything that seems foreign,” she continued, citing countries such as France, Italy, the Philippines and the United States as examples. Although most students have grown up in and only know the post-9/11 era, Zia said that “it hasn’t always been that way.” For her, 9/11 was the tipping point, the start of the “global shift toward fundamentalism.” When most people think about fundamentalism, it is in the religious context, but Zia stressed the fundamentalism that began in Washington D.C., from the White House and Congress. This form of fundamentalism views the world as a binary, as just “A or B, you’re either my friend or my enemy.” But, “it’s not this or that,” Zia argued.
“There is a whole spectrum in between, and a lot of nuances and complexities.” Zia then went on to say that it is important to see the historical context and the long view. “It is important to remember that fighting for social justice is not a sprint,” she said. “It’s not just something you do in college for four years, and then you burn yourself out, and you move on. It’s a marathon, it’s something that you can spend your whole life doing.” “This is only a point in time in a continuum,” she said. “But what really matters is the long arc of history, and what direction it’s going in.” Zia said that the pendulum has swung back and forth multiple times in her life, “from darkness into light,” from the FBI crackdown during the Hoover administration in the name of national security to the civil rights movement, and in more recent times, from the post-9/11 anti-immigrant hysteria to the election of Barack Obama to the election of Donald Trump — the “whitelash.” Zia encouraged students not to be discouraged by the current political moment, and to take the long view of history. “History and movements do not move in straight lines at all. They swing, they go forward and backward and in zigzags,” she said. “The thing about this time is: it’s your time. And
there will be some time in the future … when others will say, what were you doing in 2018 to make a difference of where we are today?” Zia then talked about identity politics and her early years as an activist in Boston, where she was part of both an Asian-American collective and an African-American collective, but also the women’s movement. She recounted what she called her “lesbian trial,” in which she had to denounce the women’s movement and deny being a lesbian in front of both collectives. This experience was part of the reason Zia left Boston and moved to Detroit. She got a job in a Chrysler auto plant, just in time to see the collapse of the automobile industry. Millions of people lost their jobs, “race came into play,” and the finger was pointed at Japan. Shortly after, a young ChineseAmerican named Vincent Chin was killed at his bachelor party because his attackers thought he looked Japanese. His killers, who had pled no contest, were released on probation with a $3,000 fine. At a community meeting, people discussed what they could do in response to this ruling. All of the experts said that nothing could be done, and Zia said she “could feel the energy going out of the
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