THE AMHERST
THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868
STUDENT VOLUME CXLVI, ISSUE 6 l WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 19, 2016
Men’s Tennis Makes Impressive Showing at MIT Invite See Sports, Page 10 AMHERSTSTUDENT.AMHERST.EDU
Journalists Discuss 2016 Presidential Campaign Jingwen Zhang ’18 Managing News Editor
Photo courtesy of Takudzwa Tapfuma‘17
Students Adil Chhabra ’19 (left) and Obi Ezeogu ’19 (right) play cornhole at Fall Festival on Sunday, Oct. 16. The popular event, featuring food, music and entertainment, is open to the public and held annually.
Students Hold “Divest Week of Action” Shawna Chen ’20 Managing News Editor Divest Amherst, a student-run advocacy group, organized “Divest Week of Action” from Oct. 11 to Oct. 15 to promote campus-wide support for divestment from fossil fuels. The group, which has repeatedly called for the college’s board of trustees to divest all of its holdings from fossil fuels, organized several events to engage the student body and put public pressure on the board, which invests $110 million of the college’s $2.2 billion endowment in fossil fuel companies. Students in Divest Amherst met with the board’s chief financial officer and the head of its investment committee on Thursday, Oct. 13, according to Divest Amherst member Kelly Missett ’19. The group publicized the week’s events by tabling, writing chalk statements around campus and putting up Post-It notes in the entrance to Valentine Hall. A collaborative art installation
was set up on Thursday in Valentine quad to which students passing by could contribute. A screening of “How to Let Go of the World and Love All the Things Climate Can’t Change,” a climate change documentary, took place in Keefe Campus Center on Thursday night. Divest Amherst ended the week with a rally to promote divestment on Friday evening, during which speakers spoke about the effects of the drought in Massachusetts, the moral necessity to address climate change and the significance of the controversial Dakota Access pipeline in relation to the college’s investments. “The Amherst campus, especially, is kind of sheltered from what’s happening in the rest of the world,” Brian Beaty ’17, another member of Divest Amherst, said. “We have the drought, but obviously our lives didn’t really stop with the drought — and there are also so many students here whose families back home are being affected by climate change.” Divestment is also a human rights issue be-
cause the effects of climate change will not be equally distributed across the world, said Missett. “Patterns of irregular and extreme weather such as drought will impact the global South, especially Africa, and those are the countries that are often the least wealthy and the least able to cope with climate change,” she said, adding that they are also the countries that have contributed the least to climate change. Students in Divest Amherst believe that funding fossil fuel extraction and fossil fuel companies amounts to profiting from activities that “directly impact people in an unjust way,” Missett said. The board of trustees, however, has repeatedly denied the group’s requests to divest. “The Board and the Divest Amherst movement are in agreement on the threat posed by climate change,” said Cullen Murphy ’74, the
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Five political journalists covering this year’s presidential campaigns participated in a panel discussion titled “Tales from the Trail” on Oct. 6. The discussion, which was open to the public and held in Johnson Chapel, featured Julia Ioffe from Politico, Abby Phillip from The Washington Post, Jessica Taylor from NPR and Byron Tau from The Wall Street Journal and was moderated by Tim Murphy from Mother Jones. President Biddy Martin opened the night by introducing Murphy, who introduced each of the four other participants. Electoral politics were the first topic of discussion, as Murphy began the talk by asking the other journalists if this year was the “craziest election in our time” and why this election seems so different from previous years’. Phillip and Taylor addressed the longterm changes in the American electorate following widespread demographic change, the recession and a political shift from President Obama’s eight-year presidency. “Here in this country, there is an inexorable movement toward diversity and change that’s leaving a lot of people in this country in the lurch,” Phillip said, adding that it was “a long time coming.” Tau said that the contentious Republican campaign revealed “rising tides of populism” and deep divisions within the party, and that the party’s elite have “almost no control” over who their nominee will be. Ioffe compared the rise of Donald Trump, the contentious Republican nominee, with worldwide events such as the election of controversial Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte, “Brexit” and the growth of the far right in Germany. Taylor added that Trump differed from most other politicians in that his campaign largely lacked internal structure and that he frequently abandoned script during major appearances or rallies. “It’s essentially a toss-up,” Murphy said, referring to both major candidates’ odds of winning the election. “Why is it so close?
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Fitzgerald ’82 Addresses Myths Surrounding Terrorism Isabel Tessier ’19 Managing News Editor Former U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ’82 gave a talk titled “Ten Myths about Terrorists and How We Fight Them” on Thursday, Oct. 13 in Merrill Science Lecture Hall 2. The event was free and open to the public, and brought in an audience of around 175 students, faculty, alumni and community members. The college’s economics department and the studentrun Amherst Political Union co-sponsored the talk. After earning a degree in economics and mathematics at Amherst, Fitzgerald served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1988 to 2001. During this time, he assisted in the prosecution of notable terror-
ism cases, including U.S. v. Rahman for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. From 2001 to 2012 he served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, becoming the longest-serving U.S. attorney in Chicago ever. During this time, he convicted Illinois governors George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich of corruption and led the investigation of CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name leak. He received an honorary doctorate from the college in 2007 and became a trustee in 2013. Fitzgerald began by telling the audience that this would not be a scholarly analysis of terrorism, but instead based on his experiences working in the field. “My exposure to terrorism was not as an academic,” he said. “It was very anecdotal.” The first half of the event laid out what Fitzger-
ald considers the top 10 myths that exist around terrorists and methods of combating them. He urged the audience to consider their own presumptions about terrorism and the way in which it’s handled in the U.S. One myth, he said, is that terrorism is solely a foreign threat. Fitzgerald said that domestic terrorists “were actually far more scary … The number of people who were domestic terrorists just scared the daylights out of us.” Many public assumptions about terrorism are oversimplified, Fitzgerald said. One of these assumptions is that terrorism is just a border issue which can be easily solved with stricter security. “There’s a nice simplicity to it,” he said. “There’s a problem, it’s over there [and] it’s coming here — just keep it out. I think people don’t quite get how hard it is to keep people out who are terrorists.”
A question and answer session followed the first half of the talk. Members of the audience asked Fitzgerald about topics like the CIA’s treatment of civil liberties, Syrian refugee immigration and the use of drone strikes. Professor of Economics Geoffrey Woglom, who taught Fitzgerald during his time as an undergraduate, said that he enjoyed the speech and found it “captivating.” “He just was involved in all of these fascinating, highly charged cases,” Woglom said. “I think he articulated his points really well,” said Emilía Kaaber ’18, a co-president of the Amherst Political Union. “I like that he made it very clear that he was not approaching this from an academic standpoint. This is his in-the-field experience — ‘This is how I’ve experienced it [and] these are the things I’ve done.’”