Amherst winter 2016

WINTER 2016

My T

HAI LEE ’80 was a shy, insecure Amherst student when she went down a list of possible careers and rejected each one.

She did not see herself succeeding at any of

Hundred-Year them. Her best option, she concluded, was to run her own company. So she got to work, planning out her entire life, setting goals, and then assessing her progress each

Plan

quarter. Today she is CEO, co-founder and primary owner of the largest woman-owned company in the United States. Yet she insists she’s no smarter than anyone else.

IN THIS ISSUE

18 Winter 2016 Volume 68 No. 2

Monumentally Wrong

For the reporters covering Trump, Clinton and all the others, the endless spring training is over and the time for contrition is here. | By James Warren ’74

22 Harvest Days

At first, the blankness of the page matched the blankness of the snow.

But as lettuce grew and cucumbers ripened, the year took shape in a poet’s computer. / By Tess Taylor ’00

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Taylor’s forthcoming book of poems is titled Work & Days.

She is the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.

The Hundred-Year Plan

Thai Lee ’80 heads the largest woman-owned company in the United States. It boasts a 99 percent customer retention rate. Yet she insists she’s no smarter than anyone else. / By Rand Richards Cooper ’80 Photograph by JEN SISKA

ONLINE amherst.edu/magazine

3 College Row Emily Dickinson’s bedroom now looks as it did when she lived there; students and alumni performed Les Mis; Amherst received a $1.5 million Mellon grant; and more 12 Sports Men’s soccer captured its firstever NCAA crown 14 The Big Picture A blanket of snow 16 Point of View Letting in uncertainty 35 Beyond Campus RESEARCH / David Berón Echavarría ’15 is studying trash DRINK / Americans and cider have had a rocky relationship POLICY / Kim Leary ’82 talks about the White House Council on Women and Girls CRIME/ What happens to kids who serve time in adult prisons?

HISTORY / The East Side Freedom Library 41 Amherst Creates FILM / White supremacists tried to take over a North Dakota town FICTION / Lauren Groff ’01’s much-lauded Fates and Furies.

MUSIC / Children’s music duo Andrew Barkan ’02 and Polly Hall ’04 NONFICTION / Paul Statt ’78 reviews The New York Times Book of Science APPRECIATION / Bill Keith ’61 rewrote the book on banjo 48 Classes 112 In Memory 120 Amherst Made An alumna coined a catchphrase about climate change

Video l Assistant Professor of Computer Science CRYSTAL VALENTINE ’04 gave a Family Weekend talk titled “From Galileo to Google: The Art and Science of Answering Life’s Big Questions.” Valentine studies computational problems involving big data.

l The Career Center hosted a panel on WOMEN IN BUSINESS AND

FINANCE. The moderator was Amherst parent Sarah Bloom Raskin ’83, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.

More News l An exhibition at the AMHERST CENTER FOR RUSSIAN CULTURE offers a journey to places in Russia, Western Europe and the United States that were cherished by the artists who depicted them. It is on view throughout the spring semester.

l The Amherst course “Equality and Violence” brought 10 Amherst and Hampshire College undergraduates and eight incarcertated men together as peers. The 12-week course was part of the INSIDEOUT PRISON EXCHANGE PROGRAM. Photos

l The Department of Theater and Dance presented Chekhov’s

THE CHERRY ORCHARD in an intimte production featuring acting and design work of students and faculty. Professor Ron Bashford ’88 directed, and Professor Suzanne Dougan designed the costumes.

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hifting borders, political battles and changes in property laws intersected with racism and growing economic exploitation to forever alter the destinies of the people of the U.S.-Mexican borderland.”

† RICK LÓPEZ ’93, professor and dean of new students, page 7

MAGAZINE ADVISORY COMMITTEE

WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU

Betsy Cannon Smith ’84 (413) 542-2031

Lawrence Douglas Mark Edington Ann Hallock ’89 Darcy Jacobs ’87 Ron Lieber ’93 Megan Morey Meredith Rollins ’93

DESIGN DIRECTOR

COVER

Amherst welcomes letters from its readers.

Please send them to magazine@amherst. edu or Amherst Magazine, PO Box 5000, Amherst, MA 01002.

Letters must be 300 words or fewer and should address the content in the magazine.

EDITOR

Emily Gold Boutilier (413) 542-8275 magazine@amherst. edu ALUMNI EDITOR

Ronn Campisi ASSISTANT EDITOR

Katherine Duke ’05

Photograph by Beth Perkins

Amherst (USPS 024-280) is published quarterly by Amherst College at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000, and is sent free to all alumni.

Periodicals postage paid at Amherst, Massachusetts 01002-5000 and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Please send Form 3579 to Amherst, AC # 2220, PO Box 5000, Amherst College, Amherst, MA 01002-5000.

VOICES

“Someone climbed up the side of Johnson Chapel and placed Mickey Mouse figures with moving hands, so the Chapel became a giant Mickey Mouse watch.”

A FIX FOR HOMELESS PETS The cover of the fall Amherst magazine is a winner. No one will dare recycle that sweet dog’s picture for a long time.

However, I am disappointed that Peter Zheutlin ’75 was unable to see beyond the underlying pessimism of his story. As a resident of central North Carolina, surrounded by nine of the poorest counties in the state and deeply involved in animal rescue, I resent being referred to as “on a Rescue hamster wheel.”

I have fostered countless dogs and driven a few north in my truck, but the real brakes to the hamster wheel are in providing affordable, high-quality spay/neuter options. The solution to the unwanted pet population in the South is money and education.

Visit www.companionanimalclinic. org to read our story of the 50,000 and counting animals who will not be breeding more homeless animals. The animal control agencies in our surrounding counties have seen a decrease in the numbers of dogs released into shelters.

I’m grateful to Mr. Zheutlin for shedding light on animal overpopulation in the South, and I share his praise and admiration for the people who give so much to help all the existing animals.

BOBBIE JONES MUDGE (MOUNT HOLYOKE ’67, WIFE OF PUNKY MUDGE ’66) Vass, N.C. Why do so many dogs like Albie come north to find new homes? And who are the people behind the effort?

c1_Amherst_Fa15.indd c1

LUCKY DOGS Save ’em all. I fly for Pilots N Paws, taking dogs out of high-kill shelters in Southern California to rescues in Washington and Idaho. There’s nothing better than handing off a shelter dog to its forever family. Thanks for the article on the lucky 80 dogs and for raising awareness of the issue!

REGNA MEENK ’89E Las Vegas 2 Amherst Winter 2016

BEER PARTY IN FROST A photo in the Fall 2015 class notes (p. 75) included the caption, “This photo purports to show a ‘beer party at the library in the 1970s.’” This party took place in spring 1974.

Several of my fellow Theta Delta brothers and I decided to put Frost Library “on tap.” We walked through the library one evening and collected money for a half keg.

We needed $25, and we got it quickly.

We then drove to Russell’s (I believe) on Main Street, bought a half keg, which is quite large and heavy, and put in in the trunk of my Me Audi. We drove over to the circle between Morrow and Pratt dorms and broke the emergency exit in the library that leads to the circle. (It is basically a back door for Frost.) I carried the keg up at least three flights of stairs and said that was enough. Too heavy to go up any higher. So we went around the library and told everyone who was studying to come get a beer. The campus police were great. We sat out on the ledge above the main entrance to the library looking out over the quad.

This stunt was not even the coolest thing done that year. Someone climbed up the side of Johnson Chapel and placed Mickey Mouse figures with moving hands, so the Chapel became a giant Mickey Mouse watch.

My daughter Lila is now a sophomore at Amherst. I have told her about the night we put Frost on tap. Your photo just verified it.

RICK MANSTEIN ’74 Rydal, Pa. FALL 2015

Also inside Inda Schaenen ’82 teaches English in the St. Louis County school district that graduated Mike Brown

10/19/15 4:21 PM

FANS ON THE FIELD In fall 1955 the game was at Williams (class notes photo, Fall 2015, p. 55). Tradition dictated that the freshman class was designated as the hit squad to take down the Williams goalposts after the game. It was clear to some of the Great

Class of ’59 that the Williams goalpost defenders were not yet familiar with all of their classmates. It was relatively easy, therefore, to yell and scream and wiggle your way through the Williams mob and up close and personal to the goalposts.

A group of us impersonated our way to the posts, and upon communal nod, proceeded to rock the posts loose from their earthly grip.

It didn’t take long for the Ephs to identify us Amherst outliers and dismiss the group from their midst with dispatch and a few swings. It was good fun! We thought the earlier Amherst freshman defeat of the Williams frosh 52-0 held sway to their frustration.

HENRY POLER ’59 Grafton, Mass.

FRISBEE FLASHBACK I was interested in the caption for the picture of Frisbee-playing on p. 61 of the spring 2015 edition of Amherst.

One important step in the evolution of Frisbee needs to be added. When I arrived in 1956 and throughout nearly all of my time at Amherst, we used metal beer trays. A steady supply seemed to be available from local establishments.

They were larger, deeper and heavier than today’s plastic variety; one used the entire upper body to create a good throw, and the metal discs could travel farther than the lighter plastic ones. One major disadvantage: after hitting a tree or brick wall, the edge became serrated and not the best thing to catch.

(Plastic Frisbees had become prevalent by graduation in 1960. Fritz Snyder ’60 and I took them to Europe and gave them to youngsters who showed promise and interest in the activity.)

MAC LANGFORD ’60 Lopez Island, Wash.

TELL US WHAT YOU THINK Please go to amherst.edu/magazine to take a brief survey about the stories in this issue. Your answers will help ensure that Amherst magazine gives you the types of stories you want to read.

8 Andreas Georgiou ’83 recalculated the Greek deficit. That’s when the trouble began.

10 An alumnus remembers Professor Nasser Hussain.

NEWS AND VIEWS FROM CAMPUS

College Row

It’s no easy task to restore a famous bedroom without a single historical photo of the home’s interior.

The Clue IN THE OLD FLOOR

Emily Dickinson’s bedroom now looks as it did when she lived there.

RESTORATION U How do you restore a bedroom without a single historical photo of the home’s interior?

That was the challenge facing the College’s Emily Dickinson Museum when it set out to recreate the poet’s bedroom—where she did nearly all of her writing.

“Most of our research has been forensic,” says museum director Jane Wald. She and other experts looked for clues in:

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Amherst Winter 2016

Worn-out spots in the floor showed Dickinson’s route from her writing stand to her bureau, providing valuable information on where to place those items.

WALLPAPER: A structural issue required that the house’s ceilings (which weren’t original) be replaced in 2010. Ceiling workers found four wallpaper fragments in Dickinson’s bedroom. Wald worked with an art conservator to find a similar trellis-and-vine style to serve as a template for the wallpaper’s recreation.

FLOORBOARDS: Removing a 20th-century floor revealed orig-

With a square surface that’s barely 18 inches across, Dickinson’s writing desk looks more like a nightstand.

4 Amherst Winter 2016

based on the real pieces that reside at Harvard.

The writing stand is “remarkable to people because of its diminutive size,” Wald says. With a square writing surface that’s barely 18 inches across, it looks more like a nightstand than a writing desk.

And the bureau is important because it’s “one of the places hundreds and hundreds of poems were found after her death,” Wald says.

Dickinson lived in the house from the 1850s until her death in 1886. The museum’s long-term goal is to restore every room in the house as it was or would have looked during her time there.

RACHEL ROGOL

VOLUNTEER SUMMIT Brings Alumni to Campus

Alumni attended and took part in sessions on everything from leadership skills, to the Pathways mentoring program, to class notes, to the forthcoming redesign of the College’s website.

ALUMNI U This fall 90 alumni came to campus to take part in a weekend-long Volunteer Summit—the first of what the College expects will be a recurring event. Open to all alumni who serve as volunteers for the College, the summit featured talks, student performances and more.

Alain Hunkins ’90, who trains and coaches CEOs, managers and front-line employees, gave the keynote address, on leadership and communications skills. The Mead Art Museum hosted a networking reception for alumni and students involved in the Pathways mentoring program. President Biddy Martin and a group of students spoke at dinner.

Nicola Courtright, the William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor of the History of Art, gave a lecture on how divisions among students melt away when they gaze together upon a work of art. Ethan Clotfelter, professor of biology and environmental studies, spoke about tough parenting decisions in tree swallows and student participation in his research.

Talks from various administrators brought alumni up to date on campus news. Speakers included Chief of Campus Operations Jim Brassord, Chief Student Affairs Officer Suzanne Coffey, Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein, Chief Communications Officer Pete Mackey and Chief Financial Officer Kevin Weinman.

In breakout sessions, alumni learned about class notes, the Annual Fund, reunion, regional programs and the Pathways mentoring program. E.G.B.

l VIDEO from six of the talks at www.amherst.edu/magazine

DICKINSON: RACHEL ROGOL; VOLUNTEERS: NOAH LOVING

inal 19th-century floorboards.

“When the floorboards were exposed,” Wald says, “we found traffic patterns around the room.” Worn-out spots showed Dickinson’s route from her writing stand to her bureau, providing valuable information on where to place those items in the room.

Also, the experts noticed small oval spots near the bed where the wood looked worn.

“Seeing this gave me goose bumps,” Wald says: “That’s where she pulled her feet up at night and put them down in the morning.”

After two years, the bedroom restoration is complete.

The bed is Dickinson’s original, and the writing stand and bureau are reproductions

Les Mis,Carmen AND MORE

The Amherst Symphony Orchestra is playing French music all year long.

SHANA SURECK (2)

Alumni singers joined orchestra students for a December concert performance of Les Misérables.

MUSIC U Since 2001, conductor Mark Swanson has transformed the Amherst Symphony Orchestra from a small group half composed of hired local professionals to a large, all-student ensemble. This year, 80 Amherst students—nearly 5 percent of the student body—play in the ASO. “Outside of a conservatory setting, this is probably the largest all-student orchestra among liberal arts colleges that plays at such a high level,” Swanson says.

Almost all members of the orchestra are non-music majors. Leonard Yoon ’18, a chemistry major who plays principal clarinet, says having opportunities to play music, but not necessarily major in it, factored into his decision to attend Amherst.

In October Yoon and the other musicians took part in a milestone perfor-

mance in New York City, where the orchestra presented a French program at the performing arts center Symphony Space.

In fact, Swanson is devoting the entire

2015–16 season to French music of the 19th and 20th centuries. On Dec. 12, Five College alumni singers joined orchestra students for a concert performance of Les Misérables, the musical created by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg and based on Victor Hugo’s French historical novel.

Amherst alumni in the Les Mis concert included Marshall Nannes ’09 as Jean Valjean and David Ressler ’14 as Javert. Max Rosen ’07 sang the role of Marius and Julia Fox ’07 of Cosette. Ross Wolfarth ’08 was Thénardier; Leslie Erin Roth ’13 was Madame Thénardier; and David Wolff ’06 sang the roles of the bishop, Bamatabois and Grantaire.

This spring the orchestra will perform works by French composers Francis Poulenc and César Franck, as well as selections from the opera Carmen. R.R. Winter 2016 Amherst 5

COLLEGE ROW

MURAL WITH A

MESSAGE ART U The small corners of a viewfinder frame her left eye.

Her right hand reaches out, as if to invite you in. Around her, images of Haitian protesters, a sunny neighborhood and a darkened city street tell her story.

It’s the story of Yenifer Mezquita ’16E, painted by María Darrow ’15 on a wall in the office of Dean of New Students Rick López ’93.

The narrative is personal to Mezquita: it represents memories of her childhood, first in the Dominican Republic and later in the Bronx. To Darrow, it also symbolizes the diversity of the Amherst community.

6 Amherst Winter 2016

The mural is a continuastorytelling.” One section tion of Darrow’s senior thesis includes silhouettes of hands. project in studio art, for which “I see them as both struggling she painted five murals—all and shaping,” she says, “creportraits of students—in the ating pressure and tension.” stairwells of the social dorms.

Another section portrays López, an Georgian colAmherst hisumns and red ↑ Darrow in front of her mural tory professor brick—a nod in Converse Hall. A continuation and one of to some stuof her senior thesis, it tells the Darrow’s thedents’ critique story of Yenifer Mezquita ’16E. sis advisors, that there are says he was so too few gathmoved by Darrow’s socialering spaces on campus. dorm murals that he offered For López, the mural illushis office as a space for antrates a desire to create meanother one. ingful institutional change at Darrow painted the mural the College. “My goal during over the course of two months my entire time at Amherst, last semester. She describes first as a student, then as a its pieces as “windows of professor and now as dean

of new students, has been to create possibilities for the diverse students that make up our community to see themselves reflected in the institution,” he says.

More than half of new students come to his office each year. “The mural normalizes, for everyone who passes through, the reality of the faces and experiences of the people who comprise the Amherst community,” López says, “and invites deeper understanding in ways that tokening and clichéd photos of diverse students that are supposed to represent the rainbow of diversity never can.” R.R.

RACHEL ROGOL

A dean asked his student to turn a wall in his office into a work of art.

Altered DESTINIES

Studying Mexican culture through objects in the Mead

CLASS U Professor and Dean of New Students Rick López ’93 taught the fall history research seminar “Mexican Material and Visual Culture” in the Mead Art Museum, where his students examined Mexican art in the museum’s collection.

FROM TOP: ROB MATTSON, COURTESY RICK LOPEZ, MILA WALDMAN, PAUL GORDON / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

How does a class like this work?

When we look at objects, students begin by drawing them from multiple angles, zeroing in on particular details. Museum staff turn the objects over to allow the students to view them from every angle. This connects them to the people and experiences of Mexico’s past in a way that images, alone, never can.

If you could take your class on a one-day trip to Mexico, where would you go?

I would take them through the streets of downtown Mexico City, where they could see the intermingling of six centuries of art and urban design.

Students could touch the walls and floors of ostentatious colonial palaces built from the stone of the Aztec temples that the Spaniards dismantled, and which, later, were subdivided into claustrophobic apartments for the urban poor.

They would see parts of the city where 19th-century urban planners demolished the colonial past, replacing it with wide avenues and buildings in the style of the Parisian Belle Époque, and which later gave way to high-modernist skyscrapers.

They could visit the Metropolitan Cathedral and a preconquest archaeological excavation site, side by side on the main plaza.

After a short subway ride, students would retrace the route of Juan Diego up Tepeyac Hill, where he is said to have met the Virgen de Guadalupe in 1531. Then they’d examine the Virgin’s shroud for themselves within the Basilica.

With enough time, we might even rent a van to see the great pyramids of Teotihuacán.

What’s one material object from your own life that would be worth studying in a U.S. history class 300 years from now?

I have the Keuffel & Esser survey transit that my grandfather Felipe Alderete López bought when he worked as a surveyor on government projects in southern New Mexico during the early 20th century. Anti-Mexican attitudes of the era made it unusual for a MexicanAmerican to be hired as a land surveyor, and caused him to be passed over for promotion time and again in favor of Anglo newcomers whom my grandfather trained.

Frustrated, Felipe quit and found work using his transit to survey land for the large landowners who were supplying the booming demand for cotton. This was bittersweet, because the land my grandfather was surveying had been dispossessed from Mexicanos such as him, whose families had lived on and farmed it for two centuries.

Felipe taught himself bricklaying and then modern home construction, and started a business building custom homes for the cotton farmers who were enjoying newfound wealth.

When I put my eye to the lens of my grandfather’s survey transit, I think of him looking through the same telescope at a landscape where shifting borders, political battles and changes in property laws intersected with racism and growing economic exploitation to forever alter the destinies of the people of the U.S.-Mexican borderland.

INTERVIEW BY SHEILA FLAHERTY-JONES Winter 2016 Amherst 7

COLLEGE ROW

STATISTICS

on Trial

NEW COLLEGE WEBSITE TO LAUNCH IN MARCH

8 Amherst Winter 2016

After recalculating the Greek deficit, Andreas Georgiou ’83 faced life in prison.

He came to campus to tell his story. ment,” he said in an interview in Converse before his talk, “it was clear to me that the EU’s reservations about the

deficit data had to be fully addressed.” Under his leadership, ELSTAT revised the deficit figure, increasing it from

The new Amherst.edu website will launch in midMarch. This redesign uses the latest in Web-development techniques to feature the intellectual life, creativity and collaborations of the people of Amherst through word, image, video and social media. It also simplifies navigation, improves the search engine and

13.6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product to 15.4 percent. “Greece had not been forthcoming,” he says of the numbers, “and we put it straight.” The EU approved the new numbers.

The trouble began when some politicians accused Georgiou of inflating the deficit in order to justify the terms of the Greek bailout, thus worsening the economic crisis. He soon faced criminal charges, the most serious of which carried a penalty of life in prison, and all of which he has denied. He was sued for slander. His workers went on strike. His email was hacked.

Charges against him have been dropped, renewed and dropped again multiple times.

Georgiou’s campus visit included lunch with economics students at Amherst Chinese and, after that, a meeting with more students. One asked Georgiou—who left ELSTAT in 2015, at the end of his fiveyear term—why he took the job. “You see a country out of control,” Georgiou replied.

“It’s your country. It’s a place that you love. And it looks in a way to be a self-evident fix.”

Does he regret taking the position?

“Absolutely not,” he says.

“I did the right thing, and my country needed me.” E.G.B.

focuses on making pages uncluttered.

Pages on the new site feature multiple panels that will make it easy to scroll vertically, and the pages will automatically adjust to fit any display, whether on a desktop, laptop, smartphone or tablet. See examples of pages at amherst.edu/go/websitepreview.

HENRY AMISTADI (2)

STATISTICS U When Andreas Georgiou ’83 set out to crunch the numbers on the Greek deficit, he entered a political firestorm that eventually led to personal felony charges and a possible sentence of life in prison. People called him a traitor. Some called for his hanging.

“The only way to describe it is ‘Kafkaesque,’” said Geoffrey Woglom, his former economics professor, as he introduced Georgiou in Cole Assembly Room on Nov. 11.

In a talk titled “Statistics and Policy Making: The Case of Greece,” Georgiou shared his story with Amherst students.

In 2010, after 21 years at the International Monetary Fund, Georgiou returned to his home country to head the national statistics office—the Hellenic Statistical Authority, also known as ELSTAT. By that time, the European Union had for years almost continuously questioned the accuracy of Greece’s reported government deficit and debt statistics.

As part of an established biannual EU process, Georgiou began his job by re-examining the deficit and debt data that his country had reported six months earlier—data that Eurostat (the EU’s statistics office) had deemed unreliable.

“From the very first mo-

In November, students at college campuses around the country, including at Amherst, rallied to speak out against racism.

CAMPUS PROTESTS AGAINST

RACISM

SIT-IN U On Nov. 12, students at campuses around the country rallied to speak out against racism. That included students at Amherst, who had planned a gathering in support of students at the University of Missouri that grew into a sit-in at Frost Library.

Amherst students referred to the event as “Amherst Uprising” and used the opportunity in Frost to share their experiences and perspectives over the course of two and a half days.

Following criticism that they and other student protesters nationwide sought to restrict speech on college campuses, students who were part of Amherst Uprising issued a statement underscoring their commitment to free speech and inquiry.

They also replaced their original demands with a set of longer-term goals.

“Amherst Uprising strives to make Amherst a safe and supportive space for students from all backgrounds,” the statement said, “maintaining an academic culture that enables students to think critically, learn from their mistakes and further develop as leaders who will proudly represent Amherst well beyond graduation.”

President Biddy Martin has established a task force on diversity and inclusion to help set priorities among the initiatives that emerged from the strategic planning process, subsequent meetings with students and faculty, and the protest.

“What students are asking us to do is consistent with our overall goal of combining educational access with the academic quality for which Amherst has long been known,” Martin wrote in a Dec. 28 letter to Amherst families and alumni. “Creating educational opportunity does not stop with the recruitment and admissions process. It requires more of us once students arrive on our campus.”

Martin’s letters to the community on the uprising and related matters can be found at the president’s website on Amherst.edu. E.G.B. See p. 11 for a related story on a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.

Winter 2016 Amherst 9

COLLEGE ROW

A Teacher’s EXAMPLE

APPRECIATION U I’ve been lucky to have had wonderful teachers—the kind who know which buttons to push to get the most out of you, all the while seeing things in you that were, at least at first, completely obscured from your own view; the kind who make you a better person, and not just a better student; the kind whom you always wanted to, but never felt you could, both satisfy and adequately thank. The kind to whose example, as a teacher, you always aspire. But for as many wonderful teachers as I’ve had, none holds a candle to Nasser Hussain, professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought.

I first met Nasser in 1998 when I enrolled in “Law and Historical Trauma.” Although it was only Nasser’s second year at 10 Amherst Winter 2016

Amherst, the course was a wonderfully complex and yet deeply accessible study of the role law plays and has played in the formation of historical memory—how societies react to violent crises, how they remember them, and what work, if any, there is for the law in such situations. That was my introduction to, among other things, war crimes trials, truth commissions, Holocaust deniers and a universe of other critical topics all going to “the politics of memory.”

As someone whose only real life “plan” at that point was to maybe pursue a Ph.D. in history (if my sportswriting career didn’t work out), it was a life-changing His course was an introduction experience. Nasser not only to, among opened my eyes to the role law other things, could (and often did) play in war crimes shaping these historical narratrials, truth tives; he opened my eyes to the commisions transformative potential (and and Holocaust deniers. deep potential for violence) of law, in general.

I took three more classes with Nasser and wrote my senior thesis under his supervision. I have profound memories of sitting in his office, desperate to figure out what I was missing, or what more I could be getting, from the material. Studying under Nasser convinced me both that I wanted to go to law school and that I wanted to teach others.

The shape of my life would have been profoundly different had it not been for Nasser—and, even though it would have made him terribly uncomfortable to hear me say it, almost certainly not for the better.

As Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein perfectly summed it up, “Nasser was known for his irreverent wit, tremendous kindness and unfailing generosity.” He was also a first-rate scholar, whose work on law and emergency is as sophisticated as it is widely respected. His masterful book The Jurisprudence of Emergency, which uses case studies from the British colonial experience to explore deeper lessons about the relationship between emergencies and the rule of law, is a tour de force, and one I routinely find myself returning to in efforts to derive deeper lessons from the United States’ reaction to the 9/11 attacks.

Nasser hated praise and obsequiousness. I’m sure that wherever he is, he’s “tsk”-ing me for this very piece. But I learned from him that the politics of memory can be fickle. And so although he may be gone too soon, consider this my first attempt to preserve his story. STEVE VLADECK ’01

COURTESY AMHERST LJST

An alumnus remembers Professor Nasser Hussain, who died this fall at age 50, after a long illness.

COLLEGE WINS $1.5 MILLION MELLON GRANT

MELLON: RYAN DONNELL; BAYIMLI: COURTESY SCHWARZMAN SCHOLARS

The funding will strengthen teaching and community.

LIBERAL ARTS U The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Amherst $1.5 million to adapt residential liberal arts education to a new population of students and changing circumstances.

The grant will allow the College to enhance its commitment to rigorous education in the liberal arts and expand its efforts to create a vibrant, inclusive community in which diversity benefits all students, faculty and staff.

The grant follows a decade-long approach to recruitment and financial aid that has made Amherst’s student body one of the most diverse among its peers. The grant also comes as a generational shift in the faculty has brought a new wave of professors to campus.

The grant—to be spread out over nine semesters, beginning in spring 2016—will support three areas of the College’s work: (1) Developing the capacity of an increasingly diverse faculty to meet the needs of today’s students, drawing on research into high-impact practices and the science of learning and on a long-established culture of great teaching.

(2) Expanding curricular and co-curricular opportunities for students to learn by doing, including more opportunities to identify and solve problems collaboratively and to connect academic growth with possible careers.

TO LEARN A student and two alumni will go to Beijing on a fellowship for future leaders.

The grant will help ensure that students have what they need to be successful at Amherst.

(3) Reimagining living and learning on a residential campus, with a focus on enabling faculty, staff and students to collaborate, build community, participate in difficult conversations and address questions of consequence from a range of perspectives.

Today, 43 percent of Amherst students identify themselves as students of color, and another 10 percent are international students. The grant will “help us ensure that all students have what they need to be successful at Amherst, that every student reaps the benefits of our diversity and that the College is changed for the better as a result of it,” says President Biddy Martin.

Among other initiatives, the funding will enable Amherst to: Engage more than half

TO CHINA,

Servet Bayimli ’16 plans to spend his career strengthening child welfare practices around the world. The ideal place to launch that career? China.

“The United States finalizes more adoptions with China than with any other country,” he says, “so any aspiring child advocate must pursue a deep understanding of the cultural values and regulatory structures that underlie family dynamics in that society.”

of tenure-line faculty in seminars that explore the best methods of teaching across learning styles.

Hire a second instructional designer to help faculty incorporate new pedagogies into their courses.

Support at least 12 academic departments or programs in bringing fresh pedagogical approaches to the curriculum.

Create a program in which students work in teams with faculty, staff and alumni, using principles of design thinking to develop solutions to campus and community challenges.

Bring in local and national experts to help faculty, students and staff learn to lead difficult conversations and contribute to local and national debates on issues important to them. E.G.B.

Any aspiring child advocate must understand China, says Bayimli.

Bayimli, along with Richard Altieri ’15 and Carlos Gonzales Sierra ’14, will head to Beijing as part of the inaugural class of Schwarzman Scholars. These 111 fellows, selected from more than 3,000 applicants, will start classes at the new Stephen A. Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. The program, inspired by the Rhodes Scholarship, is designed to build links between future leaders of China and those from the rest of the world.

Gonzales Sierra’s long-term goal is to work for Centro Bonó, an organization devoted to strengthening civil society and promoting government accountability in the Dominican Republic. Altieri hopes to eventually work for groups such as the U.S.-China Policy Foundation or the U.S. China Education Trust, designing cross-cultural education policy. WILLIAM SWEET Winter 2016 Amherst 11

SPORTS

National Champs!

Men’s soccer captured its first-ever NCAA crown.

VICTORY U Men’s soccer defeated Loras College, 2-1, to seal the program’s first-ever national championship on Dec. 5.

Bryce Ciambella ’17 scored the game-winner in the 55th minute of play. “I’m just so happy for our team, especially the seniors,” said head coach Justin Serpone, named Division III coach of the year by the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. “What a season. The only regrettable part is that it had to end. I wish we were practicing on Monday.”

Chris Martin ’17 (here and below) and Greg Singer ’16 (right) were scoring threats all season.

Luke Nguyen ’19 tied the championship game at 1–1 with his pinpoint pass off a corner kick.

12 Amherst Winter 2016

Photographs by Matthew Hicks/MSH Photography

Ciambella holds the trophy. The goal that won the game was his first goal of the season.

The team celebrates the hard-fought win. Above, from left, Aidan Murray ’18, Will Cohen ’19, Forest Sisk ’17 and Sean Fitzgerald ’19.

Winter 2016 Amherst 13

COLLEGE ROW

THE BIG PICTURE A BLANKET OF SNOW covers almost everything in this photo from February 2015. How can we even tell it’s Amherst? The umbrella, of course. With an average campus temperature of 11.2 degrees Fahrenheit, that month was the coldest in 180 years of record-keeping.

e Rob Mattson

e If you would like a reprint of this photo, email magazine@amherst.edu with your name and address, and we will send you a complimentary copy.

POINT OF VIEW

LETTING IN

Uncertainty

By Helen Wan ’95 I WAS WORKING AS IN-HOUSE COUNSEL FOR A LARGE COM- sue my writing, I walked into my boss’s office to say I wanted to pany in New York when my agent sold my first novel, on which take a hiatus from lawyering. Since then, what has surprised me I’d labored for 13 years, on weekends and late at night, garner- most is not how scary it is to no longer draw a steady paycheck. ing an impressive collection of rejections. That phone call was The big surprise has been how much my identity and even selfthe happiest of my life. Dizzy with joy and disbelief, I threw worth were tied up in what I did for a living. on my coat and left the office. It was snowing. I threaded my “What do you do?” sounds like an innocuous question. But for way through the holiday throngs and stopped to gaze up at the the first few months after leaving lawyering, it flummoxed me.

Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, tears in my eyes. A stranger I would spin a labyrinthian response that made the questioner’s walked up to me. “Lady, I don’t know what just happened to eyes glaze over: Well, I used to be a lawyer until I got my book you, but congratulations.” published, and now I’m a novelist but my second book isn’t finTwo years later, my novel was published. I gave a reading at ished, and, well… At the end of my convoluted speech, a fellow our local Brooklyn bookstore. Friends took me out for beers preschool parent smiled and said, “Oh, so you’re a writer.” after. I thought, One day, I’ll have a great story Once, I was a last-minute addition to a readto tell our baby son: Your lawyer mom once ing in New York. I sat onstage, wearing the wrote a novel. You can do anything you set requisite black, fists sweaty. When the emcee In trading a your mind to. mentioned my corporate law background, corporate life for Then something unexpected happened. My the other novelists and poets onstage turned a creative one, an book—about a young woman of color competto stare at me. I imagined them judging the ing for partnership at a powerful law firm— impostor, picturing me dumping contribualumna discovers started getting handed around from reader to tions into my 401(k) while they boiled instant that the risky and reader. Law firms, law schools, and then uniramen. I had not suffered for my art. the practical are versities, companies and leadership groups What was I afraid of? Being judged? Not not always at odds. started calling to ask if I would come speak. being taken seriously?

People wanted to know about my next book.

These days, students often ask me, “Should The Washington Post followed me to a bunch of I do what I love, or something practical?” I my talks and ran a Sunday magazine story with me on the cover. wonder what could be more practical than doing something that I was still working my lawyer day job, and learning to be a mom makes you happy and fulfilled. When I was in school, I wish I’d to a 1-year-old. The speaking invitations snowballed. I panicked. spent less time worrying about what other people thought, and I am risk-averse by nature. Ironically, I’m descended from a more time figuring out what I was good at and enjoyed doing. line of risk-takers. Both sets of my grandparents left everything All those years I spent following the well-trod path, I wish I’d they had and knew to flee China weeks before the Communist stopped to consider where the bread crumbs were leading me.

Revolution in 1949, starting over in Taiwan. Then my parents Just because there are more gold stars out there, do we have to left everything behind to immigrate to California. When so keep collecting them? much upheaval is part of your family’s origin story, sometimes My corporate career led me to—at least supplied raw mateyou wind up resistant to uprooting yourself. I’m not big on dras- rial for—my creative one. But it was by serendipity, not design. tic change.

Knowing what I know now, I would have been a more active arYet after my novel’s publication, I couldn’t stop thinking about chitect of my career. I would have taken more risks, and sooner. how I’d chosen law over writing in the first place. It was instilled I want our son to grow up believing, as I now do, that identity in me that I must choose a “practical” career. My decision went and self-worth have little to do with one’s job title and everylike this: What do I love? Working with words. Reviewing the thing to do with how meaningful your work feels to you. I once troika of Immigrant-Parent-Approved Careers—law, medicine heard a CEO say, “If you’re not having fun most of the time, or finance—I thought, Well, lawyers work with words. So I took you’re in the wrong line of work.” That’s a bit reductionist, but the LSAT. for me the lesson was this: It is an incredible privilege to do what Nineteen years later, presented with an opportunity to pur- one loves for a living, and I am grateful for it every day.

HELEN WAN ’95 was associate general counsel at Time Inc. before publication of her novel The Partner Track (St. Martin’s Press).

She is at work on her second book. Her website is helenwan.com.

16 WINTER 2016 / AMHERST

Illustration by Shonagh Rae

FOR THE REPORTERS COVERING TRUMP,

CLINTON AND ALL THE OTHERS, THE MONUMENTALLY ENDLESS SPRING TRAINING IS OVER AND WRONG THE TIME FOR CONTRITION IS HERE.

BY JAMES WARREN ’74

18 AMHERST WINTER 2016

Photographs by MARK OSTOW

Winter 2016 Amherst 19

If

YOU’RE A JOURNALIST covering the presidential campaign, modesty and contrition are in order. Whether in the print, TV or digital realm, most of us have been so monumentally wrong so far.

The errors remind me of a semester back at Amherst when we read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas S. Kuhn. I was taken with how long people could be mistaken about such big and obvious changes around them. This time, the errors are less impactful on life around us but do include how Jeb Bush’s financial edge would make him pretty close to invincible. And how Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker was a formidable rival—remember that? Or how Sen. Bernie Sanders was an easy-to-ridicule leftie who could not possibly mount a vaguely credible campaign against Hillary Clinton.

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Finally, of course, there was Donald Trump: Even if his early polling success was a surprise, he’d obviously be toast early; for example, he’d be history one news cycle after he made those nasty comments about Sen. John McCain’s Vietnam War record.

Or claimed he saw thousands of Arabs in New Jersey celebrating the World Trade Center attacks.

No, no, no, no and no.

But there have been many more analytical miscues.

And they’re aggravated by polling that is increasingly untrustworthy because of poor response rates; decreasing levels of civic engagement among Americans; and overheated competition among media outlets, which can fabricate news in a Twitter-driven hothouse where speed is more a priority than precision. And feel free to throw in the occasionally negligible impact on some voters of actual facts. Trump’s standing in the polls did not budge after multiple reporters shredded his claims about those supposedly joyous Arabs on 9/11. It was part of a confounding pattern that underscored seeming media impotence: an outlandish statement, a torrent of press fact-checking to out an erroneous declaration and his subsequent jump in national polls.

James Warren ’74 is chief media correspondent for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies and a national columnist for U.S. News & World Report.

He’s the former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune.

20 Amherst Winter 2016

“I share the shock of the punditocracy over the rise of Donald Trump,” says lawyerauthor Scott Turow ’70. “To me, it emphasizes how profound the cultural divide is in the U.S. Black people keep telling me, with warrant, that I don’t understand their life experience, but it’s clear from Trump that there are plenty of white people who don’t perceive things in any way that remotely resembles mine. To me, he’s a flatulent, ego-mad blowhard, an ineffective public speaker who tends to freeassociate disconnected drivel.”

Many who’ve observed what played out during the political realm’s endless spring training, in advance of February’s key tests in Iowa and New Hampshire, share Turow’s unease. But for at least one Amherst alumnus and political insider, it’s deflating but far short of a revelation, especially on the Republican side.

“I had a unique view,” says former U.S. Congressman Tom Davis ’71, a moderate Republican from Virginia whose wife ran for lieutenant governor in 2013. That year, he attended his party’s state nominating convention (where she lost). Even a pro like Davis was taken aback at how far the Republican base had moved.

“It’s a blue-collar party,” he says. “So when Bush announced, I said, ‘There is a Bush fatigue,’

and I didn’t think he could do it, even as the donor class flocked to him, thinking he was a winner.

The right wing of the party, the antiestablishment, rural, noncollege wing, had become the predominant force.”

Davis’ own former constituents in Fairfax County, Va., one of the wealthier areas in the nation, have drifted away from the Republican Party and become more independent. They certainly have little interest in Trump. The early surprise of the 2016 campaign, Trump has an allure that is especially strong among non-college-educated whites, according to various surveys and observers.

Davis, who heads the presidential campaign of Ohio Gov. John Kasich in Virginia, says his party might need a far-right candidate to win the primary and then lose the general election: “It’s the only way to get realignment. You could nominate somebody like a Kasich or [New Jersey Gov. Chris] Christie, and they could re-center the party. Or you could get somebody who gets defeated and gets you what the Republicans got with Barry Goldwater and the Democrats with George McGovern,” he says, alluding to overwhelming defeats—in 1964 and 1972, respectively—that led to a realignment in each party.

The impact of February’s big

tests in Iowa and New Hampshire will bring some clarity. But much will remain unclear.

“To me, one of the most fascinating questions about the 2016 presidential campaign is whether the outcome of the race will hew more to demographic trends or historical trends,” says Steve Edwards ’93, a longtime journalist who is now executive director of the Institute of Politics at The University of Chicago.

“It’s exceedingly rare for a twoterm president to be succeeded by a member of his own party,” Edwards says. “It’s happened only once since World War II, when George H.W. Bush followed Ronald Reagan to the Oval Office.

Voters tend to select presidents who offset the prevailing tendencies of the incumbent, not just in policy positions but in style and temperament. Think Nixon/Carter, Carter/Reagan, Bush/Obama. So one of the big questions facing Democrats is whether their party can put forth a nominee who can effectively navigate the remedy-versusreplica tension. It’s a tall order— and one that gives Republicans high hopes for 2016.”

On the flip side is the demographic challenge facing the Republicans. “The GOP enters 2016 having lost the popular vote in five out of the last six presidential elections,” Edwards says, “and most of the long-term demographic trends are running against them. As the U.S. becomes ever more multiracial, Republicans are a party increasingly dominated by old, white males. Democrats are cleaning up among the most rapidly growing demographic groups in the nation.”

Why does that matter? “There simply aren’t enough white voters around to drive Republican

majorities in presidential election years, given turnout patterns.”

Edwards notes these data points: In 1988, George H.W. Bush won 60 percent of the white vote and trounced Michael Dukakis in an electoral landslide. In 2012, Mitt Romney won 59 percent of the white vote and lost handily to Barack Obama. “In order to win back the White House, the Republican Party needs to do a much better job of appealing to people of color, especially among the rapidly growing Latino and Asian-American communities, and to connect with more single women and young voters.”

Will the electorate vote for an outsider? If you look at the big trends touching American politics—campaign finance, ideological polarization, apathy,

winter. Even as they did, there remained traditional realities of all presidential elections, namely the “fundamental question of economic performance and the public’s perception of the incumbent administration,” as Bowdoin political scientist Andrew Rudalevige reminds.

And yet, some wonder if we are in for real surprises. “I think this may be a year which is truly different, given the ways in which economic insecurity— especially for the white working class—is expressing itself through embracing the fear-driven politics of the GOP, especially Donald Trump,” says Thomas Dumm, the William H. Hastie ’25 Professor of Political Science at Amherst. “Anti-immigrant nativism and racism are getting

“VOTERS TEND TO SELECT PRESIDENTS WHO OFFSET THE PREVAILING TENDENCIES OF THE INCUMBENT, NOT JUST IN POLICY POSITIONS BUT IN STYLE AND TEMPERAMENT.” partisan media and social media, among others—Trump doesn’t embody any of those changes in a meaningful fashion.

There is ample popular discontent. But there is no assurance that even with the rise of primary elections, the influence of political parties has become nonessential. There are establishments on both sides, and they will make themselves known with money, credibility and clout.

On the Democratic side, they long ago cast their lot with Hillary Clinton. On the Republican side, they fumbled in the fall and early

injected into mainstream politics like no other time I can remember on the right. The New Left excesses of the Vietnam era were similar in extremism, but less deeply impactful on the overall politics of the country.”

Discussing the matter in advance of the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Dumm felt the Big Question was clear: What would be the staying power of Donald Trump?

After all, nobody imagined we’d be mulling this in winter— certainly not my friends in the elite media. k Winter 2016 Amherst 21

At first, the blankness of the page matched the blankness of the snow. But as baby lettuce grew under electric blankets, as cucumbers suddenly ripened, the year took shape in a poet’s computer.

harvest

days

BY TESS TAYLOR ’00 Photographs by Jen Siska

22 Amherst Winter 2016

Taylor is the author of a forthcoming book of poems, Work & Days, that traces the year she spent working on a farm.

was a strange moment. I’d been married six months and was living in Brooklyn with my husband when I got the news: I’d been awarded a yearlong writing fellowship, which asked only that I move to the Berkshires and take up residence in a cottage, rent-free. The cottage was the last home of Amy Clampitt, a poet who’d achieved great fame in her late 60s and had briefly taught at Amherst. Clampitt had purchased the cottage in Lenox, Mass., with her MacArthur genius award, just before she died.

Clampitt, or Amy, as her fans call her, is a poet-hero of mine. I’d encountered her work as an undergraduate, at a critical juncture, when I was at Amherst reading poetry seriously for the first time. I liked that she was a woman.

I liked that she had taught at Amherst. And I liked her sonically rich poems. I had taken a course, taught by Professors Michele Barale and Chick Chickering, on the syntax of English. Clampitt’s work is all about syntax: Her twisted, aleatory sentences might, if they were diagrammed, rival those of Henry James. Some people find her writing baroque, but to me, sinking into Clampitt’s poetry is like watching a bird. It requires that one hold a string of sharply present-tense observations aloft while also watching the whole marvelous creation fly away.

Clampitt’s flights of syntax dazzle, like a coloratura soprano showering her audience with sheer vowel.

Now, Amy Clampitt’s three-bedroom cottage in Lenox was going to be mine for a year. I’d live near Tanglewood.

I’d read her books, which were still there. Little by little, plans fell into place. My husband would rent the smallest possible New York studio for the year and come up to the Berkshires on weekends. I’d live in the woods, and write.

For years I had longed for this kind of time. Since graduating, I’d worked in a funeral-parlor-turned-Italian restaurant, temped in an ad agency, adjuncted in a freshman writing program on Long Island. I’d read slush-pile submissions for a literary agent and served as the personal assistant of a wealthy Upper East Side theater maven. I had tutored the SAT to college-bound New Yorkers. I had done these jobs to sandwich in a bit more time for writing.

But I had never had wild days free, just to write.

However, this was precisely what was terrifying about my fellowship—the solitude of it, the freedom, day after day. The blankness of the page matched the blankness of the snow. There was so much of each: We arrived in a snowstorm in January. Our boxes were covered in snow, and we spent the evening mopping up mud. We had been so used to cramped apartments that we had to remember that it is rude to yell across the house.

It

husband stayed a few days and then left.

Outside, the cold was elaborate. The frost on the window was like the syntax in Amy’s poems—endlessly filigreed. This was J-term with no beer-making classes. Even venturing out for a walk felt treacherous. I was alone with cookbooks, my own books, Amy’s books. I was only one hour west of Amherst, but the air was sharper blue, the back roads icier. Crossing a

My

24 Amherst Winter 2016

mountain in a snowstorm that first week, I was infinitely glad we had bought the Subaru, and not the other used car that was cheaper.

But what was I going to do with the time? The book I was working on was mostly finished, though it needed a discerning edit. I tried to be disciplined, as I could tell Amy had been: As I opened a book of James Merrill’s poetry, Helen Vendler’s reviews fell out, complete with Amy’s marginalia. Amy had taught herself Greek. Amy had read all of Keats, all of Virgil, all of John Clare. I would do well to study as hard. But this was just January.

The whole year was ahead of me. The gift was enormous.

It felt, perhaps, too big.

I knew I needed to be outdoors, to connect with the place, to get outside myself. I had no ready-made community. Hiking alone in the snow up the town’s mountain wasn’t going to cut it. I called the local community foundation and asked for a way to volunteer.

Maeve O’Dea, at the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, seemed bemused when I asked, in the dead of winter, to find a community garden. But I am from Berkeley by way of Brooklyn and have always—except in college—gardened. Working together with others to grow things seemed to speak to many needs. I hoped that perhaps Lenox or Stockbridge had such a place. No, no, Maeve O’Dea told me. This was not community garden country. Perhaps, instead, I would like to work on a farm?

Yes, I thought. A farm. That would do the trick.

And this is how I found myself, every week for one and usually two days, tending to the mud, compost and greenhouses of Farm Girl Farm, a three-acre patch at the edge of Stockbridge. Three acres sounds small, but it’s actually not: We grew food for 80 families and two restaurants.

Laura Meister, the head farmer, had been there five years, cultivating land she borrows from a generous weekender.

Not owning her land has meant she’s been able to clear much of the immense overhead that small-scale farmers face.

Her farm was bare bones—the field, a shed, a metal tent-frame covered in white plastic that served as a greenhouse. I learned that she stocked the greenhouse with electric blankets to keep plants warm on cool spring nights, and that she’d set up an irrigation pump to get water out of the river and into the fields. I worked with a rotating cast of interns, all of whom put in long hours and lived on low or no pay to learn the art of farming. Laura took me on, for whatever needed doing, for as many hours as I could give her. But when I first called her, the world was frozen. She herself was reading seed catalogs and resting up. She said she’d call me when the weather was right.

In early March there was a thaw. I got the call. My task was simply this: Come move stones and put down mulch.

I showed up at 10 and began tracing last year’s rows in the field, laying down burlap sacks to serve as paths. The sky was a querulous gray. In the cold field, it seemed improbable that these muddy acres could become a summer farm. We unearthed stones and hauled them off the

“Some imagined literary critic over my left shoulder (someone who seemed always to have a martini, a cigarette and a smirk) kept asking skeptically if it was even possible to write a farm poem now.�

Winter 2016 Amherst 25

field. We shoveled up the thawing mulch and put it over the garlic seed that had been planted in the fall. The work was rhythmic. My head got clear. I ate a sandwich at 2. By 3 it felt already close to dark. I went back to Amy’s house calmer in my body. I turned on a lamp and began to read.

The next week it froze again, so I read books that lay around the house, including one about the odd species of plants that thrive in vacant lots. I found a running route, a couple of trails. But the year was tilting on: the days got longer. We cleared out some dead tomato vines in the field. Soon we were in the greenhouse, shoving seeds in.

Soon those seeds were sprouting. In the trees above us, the leaves were doing the same. It was time to turn off the electric blankets that kept the baby lettuce warm at night. ground was changing, and I was changing too. I read and wrote with more focus—essays, poems, a draft of a play. A life assembled itself: A long-lost Amherst friend materialized one day in the local café and delighted me by being a neighbor. I made friends with professors, farm people, people from the local press. While New York people are often busy or scattered, Berkshires people hung together, community against the cold.

The weeks went by. I worked. The farm was a stay against loneliness. I read through sections of Shakespeare, through Wordsworth. Because I was farming, I read Hesiod, the Greek farm poet, whom scholars believe had written earth-based, farm-based, season-based poems at just about the same time Homer was composing The Odyssey. I read other farm poems—Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues, Virgil’s own anti-epic answer to his Iliad. I read John Clare, the 19th-century poet who wrote beautiful calendrics—poems tracing the shape of the year.

I was aware, of course, that I was not living the way most poets live, and certainly not the way most farmers live. But I was enchanted by the shape of the day, the tilt of the light, my temporary perch as a watcher. I was intrigued by learning to plant so much kale, so many leeks, and by the vast and sudden ripening of the cucumbers and tomatoes. Little by little the year was taking shape in my computer.

I wasn’t yet sure if I was actually writing a book. What I was doing felt more fumbling. I was working my way through time, through a field. It felt remarkable to record the physicality of that field, its birds, its bugs, the work of haying it. So often now we live in a time when our work is representational: Emails float down and we play inbox Jenga. People trade bon mots on Facebook. A chattering party goes on, full of news cycles and outrage. But—for that year, at least—I was away from this. I pushed kale in, plant after plant, on my knees. My cell phone didn’t work in the field. Little songs would form in my head. And at lunch, at the edge of the field, I would write them down.

I was indeed in a lyric idyll. Sometimes, in front of my computer, I began to quarrel with myself. Did the world really need a poem about weeding kale or watching a toad? Some imagined literary critic over my left shoulder

The

26 Amherst Winter 2016

(someone who seemed always to have a martini, a cigarette and a smirk) kept asking skeptically if it was even possible to write a farm poem now—if Robert Frost had already done it; if, because Frost had once been a swinger of birches, the book was closed on the subject. Other days I felt belated in a different way, as if connecting to the beautiful world rhythm unfolding before me was suspect, not problematic enough, not true enough to the complicated world we live in now.

I had to insist to myself that the time of poems is otherworldly. Half of 19th-century poetry takes place in a bower, a temporary resting place. Yeats’ “Innisfree” is a place he wants to go but never gets to, not a place in which he can live forever. And then I also had to think: What a privilege it is to watch the year pass over this field. I am a woman, farming, at the strange beginning of the 21st century. Observing beauty has a moral force. I thought: I will simply breathe in and record what it feels like to be in a field of tomatoes. I thought: I am not pretending to be Robert Frost, or John Clare. Instead I am working through this field, this landscape, this latter-day pastoral.

And I remembered that the pastoral—the seemingly idyllic space—has always been defined by its own conflicted edges. Hesiod wrote poems of domestic life precisely because he was not writing about the Trojan War. Virgil always put returning soldiers in his Eclogues, with empire at their margins. John Clare wrote fiercely against enclosure.

I watched the field, its fragile blend of growth and fluttering weathers. I also knew that I was writing against other apocalypses: the fragility of the climate, the uncertainty of knowing when the ground would thaw, the increasingly strange swings of cold and warmth that make planting season difficult. Indeed, what is more vulnerable to climate change than the hardscrabble work of smallscale farming? Trying to make a living from the earth, trusting that what grows from the ground can feed you: this is what we are all, at base, made of. It is the “cultus” in culture. Making enough to keep hunger at bay, war at bay, the art of civilization alive: these ancient problems are also present-tense, made even more urgent today.

Ourselves, planting food on earth, now. Our lives, dependent on weather. What could be more timeless?

In Amy’s house I sank into the arc of those extraordinary days. On the best weeks, I kept my doubts at bay. I read and worked and wrote. Suddenly it was October. I’d be going home in a few short months, back to the city.

But I felt different, full of clear, bright inner life. I was pregnant. The pumpkins we had planted in May were ripening. I had the shape of something in my computer, something I thought felt like most of a book, my second.

And that first book, the one that had been lingering in my computer, was finished too. k Tess Taylor ’00’s first book of poems was The Forage House.

Her second, the forthcoming Work & Days (Red Hen Press, 2016), traces the year she spent working on Farm Girl Farm in the Berkshires.

Farm

Poems

What does it mean to forge a relationship with the earth now? The 28 poems in Taylor’s new book describe the work of her year on the land.

STOCKBRIDGE From Wisconsin before it was Wisconsin a glacier hauled these stones you stand on.

They traveled on its rubble.

They are the glacier’s spit, its fissured teeth, the path it garbled on its travel.

In 1880, the Stockbridge, last of the Mohicans, were removed to Wisconsin: White edict impassive as a glacier.

This town and farm and gabled houses all are built upon that absence.

Now you bend into this field to clear it.

You think of a frozen fist, of ice-sheets melting. Glaciers lost in too-warm early weather.

The west wind blows in from Wisconsin.

Each stone you touch is cold as bone.

As if it holds some trace of spirit.

DISQUISITIVE

MID-MARCH

Alone in the village, in the heart of winter, you read John Clare in an old lady’s cottage.

There are filigreed notes in your book’s margins,

Watching a floe slide from a precipice over the waterfall out of the ice-pond

doilies in odd drawers.

In the town’s main café, students huddle by woodstoves.

is like watching obsidian.

Glass at a million degrees— But we touch it, it dents, fluid cold.

Farmers read catalogs, order seed packages.

You drive icy roads between chapped farmhouses.

Valentines glitter in village windows.

Now in the gorges the last ice-skulls. Cold trolls the hills even as

You shovel snow, hike to get groceries: Run by the horse-barn, climb the town mountain.

Your husband comes up on the weekends.

frozen lakes grow cloudy & open— but to look at what? This thorny

You try to dislodge faulty friendship, miscarriage: In the distance, war drones.

Our country murders somebody’s children.

landscape’s bony as November. All melt reveals is half-rotten souls:

You read field guides, welcome few visitors.

Prepare to work one farm for a season.

Your economy is your life as a watcher.

husks, garbage the snow hid.

Wrappers choke marshes.

Water, you move,

You think: You have been given time.

You hear it tick.

but you feel black as stillness.

O says the clock: You have. Given time.

Illustration by Maria Hergueta

Winter 2016 Amherst 27

THAI LEE ’80 FOUNDED A BUSINESS B E C AU S E S H E D I D N ’ T T H I N K S H E ’ D S U C C E E D AT A N Y T H I N G E L S E .

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28 AMHERST WINTER 2016

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Winter 2016 Amherst 29

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Q

UICK QUIZ QUESTION: WHO IS AMHERST’S MOST successful entrepreneur ever, and what does he do?

The answer may surprise you. First, it is not a he, but a she: Thai Lee ’80, co-founder, primary owner and CEO of Software House International, an IT software-and-services provider that is currently the largest woman-owned company in the United States. Under Lee’s guidance, SHI, which provides tech support for large corporations, has stayed ahead of the curve in a notoriously innovative industry, boasting steady expansion and annual sales that last year approached $7 billion. The company’s success has won Lee 14th place on Forbes magazine’s list of the nation's 50 Richest Self-Made Women, with a personal net worth notching in at $1.1 billion.

A lot is surprising, even paradoxical, about the woman whom a May 2015 Forbes profile called “The Modest Tycoon.” Who is Thai Lee? A brilliant entrepreneur who picked up a Harvard MBA “as my backup plan,” yet insists she’s no smarter than anyone else. An immigrant who became a corporate CEO because, by her own account, she was too shy and insecure to do anything else.

A paragon of serious determination whose conversation bursts with self-deprecating laughter. A driven überachiever who embraces the “Tiger Mom” parenting philosophy, yet is loathe to discipline her children. And a tech-industry titan who possesses more wealth than 15,000 median American households combined, yet couldn’t care less about spending it, because she dislikes “buying stuff.”

Whatever else she may be, Lee is surely one of the most unusual admissions ever at Amherst. Her father, Daniel Kie-Hong Lee ’50, was the College’s first Korean graduate, and his life story—he died in 2012—is a fascinating tale of survival and serendipity. That story is of paramount significance to his daughter. “Actually, the reason I agreed to do this article,” Thai Lee said, two minutes into our interview this past fall, “is to talk about my father.”

Lee believes her father’s story can provide guidance to students today. “I think that’s very much needed,” she said. “And it’s really an amazing story.”

Though he would become a prominent architect of South Korea’s economic boom, Kie-Hong Lee came from nothing. Born in 1922 in a village in the remote Korean countryside, he was part of a large family whose father died young. Korea at that time was part of imperial Japan, and Lee, a bright pupil, won a scholarship to a high school in Hiroshima, and from there went on to Hiroshima Imperial Normal College (now University), a school for Japanese nobility and elites. His education was interrupted by World War II, when he was pressed into labor at an ammunition factory; he was sent back to Korea shortly before Hiroshima was destroyed by the American atom bomb. “He was very lucky not to have been there,” his daughter told me.

In Korea, Lee, who by then spoke five languages, was picked up by the U.S. Army as a translator. “He did such an exceptional job for the Americans,” Thai Lee told me,

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“that two years later he was summoned into the office of a general, who asked him, ‘What can we do for you?’” Lee’s answer was immediate: he wanted to study in the U.S. Eventually an Army letter of recommendation landed on the desk of Amherst President Charles Cole. Cole was duly impressed. “And so my father went to Amherst on a full scholarship,” his daughter recounted. “He had never been to the United States before.”

At Amherst, Kie-Hong Lee made two connections that proved fateful. One was with Professor Willard Thorp, the renowned liberal economist and a drafter of the Marshall Plan, whose course in the postwar economic development of Japan helped shape Lee’s professional future: a master’s degree in economics at Columbia, and a rise to directorship of South Korea’s Economic Planning Board.

The other connection was personal. As an undergraduate Lee became fast friends with Willard Weeks ’51, a native New Yorker who eventually settled in the Amherst area as a physician. Weeks and Lee stayed in touch, and decades later, Lee—eager for his two teenaged daughters to receive an American education—sent them to live with the Weeks family. Thus, in the fall of 1974, Thai Lee found herself thrust into the role of a small-town American high school student.

The experience was daunting. “I wasn’t an American teenager,” she recalls. “I wasn’t athletic; I didn’t participate in student government or extracurricular activities.

And as a student I knew I had to catch up.” Ignorant of pop culture, shaky in her English, she bore down hard in school. Graduating from Amherst Regional High in 1976, she enrolled at the College, following in the footsteps of both her father and her sister, Margaret Lee ’78.

At Amherst, Thai Lee’s insecurity only deepened. “I felt very insufficiently prepared for college life. I was scared.”

Above all, her imperfect English made her feel exposed.

In high school she had compensated by focusing on math and science courses, and at Amherst she doubled down on the bet, choosing courses by an unusual criterion: she would not take anything that required writing papers or speaking in class. And so no English classes. No history.

No political science.

Today Lee looks back at these choices with rueful humor. “I’m not exactly a Renaissance person,” she says with a laugh. “I don’t know of any other student that avoided all humanities courses as totally as I did. I was such a coward!” But at the time, her predicament was anything but amusing. Half a world away from home, uncertain and underprepared, she felt lost. She was so far behind. She had to catch up. She needed a plan.

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N MAY 2014, THE DAY BEFORE SHE WAS awarded an honorary doctorate at Amherst’s commencement, Thai Lee gave a remarkable talk to an audience of graduating seniors and parents.

In it she recalled how, as a painfully insecure Amherst student—and recent immigrant—she had sought to anchor herself in a vision of future accomplishment. Taking stock of her own strengths and weaknesses, she reached what might seem an unlikely realization for

l VIDEO from a 2011 oral history interview with Kie-Hong Lee ’50 and audio from Thai Lee’s 2014 campus talk. www.amherst.edu/magazine

BETH PERKINS

an undergraduate: “I concluded I could only be successful running my own company.” To that end, she planned out her career. The first step was to “assume I’ll live to be a hundred”—the audience chuckled—and then to fashion “a goal template” for each decade of her life.

The goals included personal ones— marry, have a child—but the big goal was to run her own company, and she described spending her 20s preparing for it, reading business journals, devouring self-improvement books. “I also went to Harvard Business School, so in case I failed in entrepreneurship, I’d have something to fall back on.” After stints at Procter & Gamble and American Express, she was ready. By Under her leadership, SHI is big enough to then she had married, and she and her service some of the husband, Leo Koguan, scraped together world’s largest firms, the funds to buy a tiny New Jersey software yet small enough to be nimble and personal. reseller, Software House, that purchased discounted Lotus software and purveyed it to clients. “We had one employee,” Lee recalled, “and one customer: IBM.” She nevertheless renamed the company Software House Inin someone so young? ternational, then began seeking new clients and new ways “I think sometimes it’s good to not have a choice,” to expand. A quarter-century later, SHI—by now truly an she said, selecting her words carefully. I asked what she international company—has 3,200 employees and 20,000 meant. Had her parents pushed her to become a businessclient companies. woman?

Lee’s Amherst audience chortled at the idea of a HarNot at all, she said. “Actually, my father’s advice was to vard MBA as a fallback plan. They clucked when she become a medical technician. Not even a doctor.” While counseled students to marry early, as she had, since “if liberal for a Korean man of his generation, Kie-Hong Lee you’re single it’s very distracting, having to worry about hadn’t encouraged his daughters to be ambitious. Choosdating.” And they all but gasped when she described ing a career path had been a process of elimination, Lee how she breaks down each decade’s template into yearly told me. “I knew I wanted to be successful. But when I goals—“and at the end of each quarter, I grade myself.” looked around, I couldn’t imagine myself being successThe reaction betrayed a touch of awe at the prospect of a ful in most of the areas that I could think about.” college student formulating such a detailed life plan—and She meant that literally, she insisted; one by one, we then executing it, point by point. Here was a woman who went down a list of career options a math-and-science viewed early marriage as a way Amherst grad might consider, to focus more effectively on one’s and Lee explained why she had “ W E H A D O N E E M P L OY E E , A N D business. crossed each one off. I asked: O N E C U S TO M E R : I B M ,” S H E S AYS .

I found myself mulling over How about becoming a scienSHE NEVERTHELESS RENAMED this single-mindedness as I drove tist? Nope. (“I loved the theoretiT H E C O M PA N Y S O F T WA R E H O U S E to meet Lee at SHI’s headquarcal part, but I could never find I N T E R N AT I O N A L , T H E N B E GA N ters, a brick and glass building in anything in the microscope.”)

S E E K I N G N E W WAYS TO E X PA N D. a corporate park in northern New A research economist? (“That Jersey. It was two days before requires the ability to read and Thanksgiving, and employees in write.”) A professor? (“You have blue jeans were trickling in at to be engaging.”) A doctor?

9:10 a.m. Lee’s office is modest in size and anything but (“The smells, the blood, the physical body—I find it all showy, fitted out with generic office furniture, some famvery troubling.”) A therapist? (“It would be too depressily photos and her computer, to which she intermittently ing.”) A top executive in a Fortune 500 company? (“You swiveled during our conversation, helpfully fact-checking have to be political and you need social skills.”) this or that point.

Eventually there was nothing left. Basically, Lee was In conversation Lee comes off as both warmly ingratiat- saying, she became the founder of a multi-billion-dollar ing and precise. I brought up her talk at Amherst and her company because she couldn’t imagine doing anything remark about knowing that she wanted to run her own else. company. Where had such clarity of purpose come from “I couldn’t imagine being successful at anything else,” Winter 2016 Amherst 31

she corrected me. “That is the truth.”

It struck me as an unusual mixture of pessimism and hopefulness. I asked Lee what she made of the exhortation to young people, offered in so many college commencement addresses, to find the thing that you’re passionate about, and do that.

“I think it’s wrong,” she said. “I think you should find things that you can be successful in and do well at. Passion is fleeting. That’s true in romance, right? It’s true in life, too. When you find success, you’re going to love it.”

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EE IS EXTRAORDINARILY SUCCESSFUL AT WHAT she does. Under her direction, SHI has become one of the most respected and profitable IT vendors in the world. The company routinely boasts 15 to 20 percent annual growth; has employees in New Jersey, Texas, Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Hong Kong; and continues to expand.

This February it opened a giant new configuration center—the facility where products are assembled and shipped—with more than 300,000 square feet of space.

Its client list ranges from small companies to behemoths such as Verizon and Boeing—in fact, most of the top 50 companies on the Fortune 500 list.

Those who have watched Lee over the years, industry observers and SHI employees alike, call her an exceptionally nimble CEO, skilled at anticipating changes in the industry and adapting quickly. “Thai never takes anything for granted,” one longtime employee told me. “If she doesn’t like a certain direction we’re going in, she can decide in a day to shift directions. ‘We’re not going to do that,’ she’ll say. ‘We’re changing course.’”

These course changes have helped SHI expand and diversify. “We help customers procure, buy, deploy and manage technology,” Lee said, giving me an overview. It’s a long way from hawking Lotus 1-2-3, and necessarily so.

Where companies once relied on IT vendors like SHI for all their software needs, today they can simply download directly from a publisher, or run cloud-based applications, notes David M. Ewalt, the writer who profiled Lee for Forbes. Such changes, Ewalt told me, have forced IT companies to develop new lines of business. “Basically, companies like SHI are moving from simply equipping their client’s IT department to running their IT operations.”

Ask Lee what’s looming on the IT horizon, and she rattles off a state-of-the-industry report, detailing the rising and falling fortunes of a dozen companies. “We’re in a tumultuous state of change right now,” she told me.

“The traditional IT companies are all struggling to grow.

Traditional IT is shrinking, and new ITs are emerging, like Amazon and Google, that are cloud-based.” SHI’s role is shifting accordingly. The company has pushed into infrastructure asset management; data migration and storage; network security; and a host of other services.

You get the sense that Lee succeeds by a kind of hypervigilance, keeping an alert eye on all developments—and all competitors—in an industry continuously transformed by technological innovation. I asked her: If her company

32 Amherst Winter 2016

failed to adapt, could she imagine that in 10 years it might not exist?

She answered instantly. “Absolutely. You could make that five years.”

A second pillar of SHI’s success has been its insistent focus on keeping customers happy. The Forbes profile lauded SHI’s “over-the-top customer service.” Though Lee was reluctant to put me in touch with clients (“I really dislike asking our customers anything”), her company boasts a 99 percent retention rate—an almost incredible figure in an industry in which customers typically change vendors whenever they find a better deal elsewhere.

Lee points out that with more than 100,000 companies providing IT products and services in the United States alone, it’s a highly competitive industry. “The kind of support structure we have built is heavily personal. We bring a lot of value to our customers.”

To get a more concrete sense of that value, I made the short drive to SHI’s configuration center, a vast hangar where orders were being filled for Verizon, Bank of America and others. Mike Scott, senior configuration manager, took me through huge halls of outgoing shipments stacked on pallets, and work areas where teams of employees huddled around projects. Some of the jobs SHI takes on are small chores: assembling stands for monitors for GrubHub, putting 70,000 scannable labels on desktop computers for State Farm. Others are complex, like the towering data storage-array racks that were being put together for JPMorgan Chase—each one, Scott explained, containing 16 servers with a total of 900 terabytes of storage, enough to hold 300 million photographs.

We were joined by senior warehouse manager Felipa Cousens. Both she and Scott have been with SHI from the start, as have 20 of the 85 warehouse employees. Such longevity is a hallmark of SHI and reflects strong loyalty to Lee. “She is the greatest to work for,” Cousens said.

“She knows our warehouse people by name. She really cares.” Scott and Cousens see Lee as anything but remote or imposing. “For years when we were getting a shipment out, she’d come over and grab a tape gun and join in,” Cousens said. Scott added, “If you want to talk to her about something, you just walk right in. And she knows everything that’s going on.”

The last comment is something you hear again and again. “Thai always knows what’s happening,” another employee told me. “She steers the ship.” However large it becomes, SHI retains the intimate, impromptu spirit of a startup, and Lee’s hands-on, accessible way of running it seems to answer a basic business dilemma: How do you grow big enough to service some of the world’s largest companies, yet stay small enough to be nimble and personal? SHI’s answer is to have a boss who knows the company inside-out, who is involved at all levels, who perceives when to risk a major change of direction—and who never rests. When I interviewed her, Lee was contemplating a move to Texas, in order to commute between SHI’s New Jersey headquarters and its rapidly expanding small and medium business division in Austin.

MARGARET LEE ’78

Thai Lee (third from left) in 2008 with mother Young-Ja Kim; father Kie-Hong Lee ’50, Amherst’s first Korean graduate; and sister Celeste Lee P’14. They are in the garden of her sister Margaret Lee ’78.

Vigilance has its price. Lee, who divorced in 2002, “Oh, maybe three or four times a year.” It seemed like has two teenaged children—her son, Victor, has been she might be exaggerating—upward. accepted into Amherst’s class of 2020—and told me she Lee’s is a notably Spartan life and routine: living in strives to “establish a barrier” between work and family the same suburban home for 20 years, showing up at her life. But a barrier can work two ways. “Because I’m trying office every day by 7 or 7:30, and taking few vacations. not to work at home, I come into Where was the splurge? Plenty the office seven days a week.” of Americans, I reminded her, I N S T E A D O F P U R S U I N G A PA S S I O N , Seven days a week? spend significant time imaginL E E S AYS , “ F I N D T H I N G S T H AT “It’s not a good thing,” she ing what they would do if they YO U C A N B E S U C C E S S F U L I N A N D laughed. “I’m trying to break that won one of those billion-dollar habit—that’s one of my 2016 New D O W E L L AT. PA S S I O N I S F L E E T I N G . Powerball lotteries. Quit their W H E N YO U F I N D S U C C E S S , Year’s resolutions.” job. Buy five houses. Embark on YO U ’ R E G O I N G TO L OV E I T.” I didn’t have much luck uncovworld travel. I asked her: What is ering Lee’s life away from SHI. it like, being a billionaire?

She told me she likes to read; “I think it is sort of meaningthen, when I asked what, she less,” she said. “Shopping, acmentioned the books of Clayton Christensen, the busiquiring things—to me, that’s a burden.” ness guru. Does she exercise? “I’m going to become more But didn’t she ever indulge in something lavish just for disciplined about that. I have no excuse for not working the heck of it? A diamond necklace, maybe, or a Lamborout. I have all the right equipment at home.” ghini?

Vacations?

She frowned. “I would think that’s wasteful. One, I Not as much as she should, she said, wincing. “I’m takthink it’s not a good value. Two, it would seem wrong.” ing vacation this Friday, after Thanksgiving.” Her sisters Wrong how? I asked. and their families were coming to visit and watch the “Well, it would seem wrong to our employees. And Macy’s parade. Lee planned to take Saturday and Sunday why would I want to waste money like that? It just doesn’t off as well. “That’s very unusual for me.” seem like a good use of that resource.”

How often did she take a weekend off ?

The Forbes profile—“The Modest Tycoon”—had Winter 2016 Amherst 33

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elicited the same reticence. “Thai has none of the ego prepared I was, and how dedicated to working, would not I’d expect to see in someone who built a $6 billion succeed.” She paused. “I had so little confidence in mycompany,” David Ewalt told me. In fact, it would be hard self, I wouldn’t have been very surprised if I did fail.” to overestimate the scope and, in a strange way, the force I asked her: Does she still lack confidence? of Lee’s modesty. This is a CEO who books her own travel “I’m not really extraordinary,” she answered. “I’ve arrangements and parks her car in the regular employee been very lucky, and I’ve been well-prepared. I think low lot. No sooner had I mentioned the Forbes profile than self-esteem was the source of motivation for me to work she told me she regretted doing it. Partly she’s wary about harder. It’s an accumulation of directed energy, focus and sounding triumphant in such a changeable industry; effort. And over decades that can be very powerful.” today’s emperor, she noted, might have no clothes Lee was eager to draw her own story and her father’s tomorrow. But mostly she considers it inappropriate that together into a message that might reassure students of “one person in a business takes credit for hundreds and today who feel disenfranchised or marginalized. “Here thousands of other people’s work.” Informed she was he was,” she said of Kie-Hong Lee, “never having been being included on the Forbes list of women billionaires, exposed to Western culture, not speaking proper English, Lee tried to get herself off of having no financial means and it, on the grounds that “a dollar no family. But he had a goal to L E E WA S E AG E R TO D R AW H E R amount could never accurately use education to better himself.”

S TO R Y A N D H E R FAT H E R ’ S convey the respect and admiraShe wanted students to feel TO G E T H E R I N TO A M E S S AG E F O R tion I have for the employees of empowered, she said. “You can S T U D E N T S : I F YO U F O C U S , I F YO U SHI.” catch up; that’s my message.

This self-effacing persona suits P L A N , “ YO U C A N C ATC H U P I N L I F E , If you focus, if you know what N O M AT T E R W H E R E YO U A R E .” the profile of a company known you want and you put together for valuing both its customers a long-term plan, you can catch and its employees highly. And it up in life, no matter where you certainly suits Lee’s vision are.” of corporate culture and how a CEO should behave.

When and how does seeing a pattern in your life turn She rejects the model of a chief executive informed by into creating that pattern? As a young person, feeling such bellicose personalities as Donald Trump or former herself perilously behind, Lee laid out a roadmap for her Lehman Brothers boss Dick Fuld. “Maybe in investlife—her hundred-year plan—and stuck to it. In her career ment banking, it’s advantageous to be seen as imperial,” an immigrant’s will to succeed meets the ideology of she said. “But in a service industry, where you are relyAmerican self-improvement. In certain ways Thai Lee’s ing on thousands of your co-workers with a common accomplishments resemble those of Kie-Hong Lee. But goal, I think that would be the wrong personality. And it the father’s life was one of forced relocations, uncertainty wouldn’t be me, either.” and chance. The daughter has faced the vagaries of fate I asked whether it had ever been disadvantageous to be from within a Mission Control of her own devising. a woman running a tech company. Quite the opposite, she Single-mindedness brings both benefits and costs. At said. “It’s actually good if your competitors do not fear one point Lee and I were discussing the controversial you. It’s good to be under the radar.”

“Tiger Mother” parenting philosophy—she approved of In the end, like everything about Lee, even her it, she said—and I asked what kind of mom she is with her modesty serves her company and its goals. It is tactically two kids. disarming. And it is a kind of grindstone on which she “Not the best one, for sure,” she quickly replied. “I sharpens her abilities: believing herself no smarter than haven’t really had a chance to spend as much time with the next person, she knows she has to be better—and ends them as I should have.” She couldn’t call herself a Tiger up being better.

Mom; she was a disciplinarian in theory but not practice.

“When you’re feeling guilty that you haven’t spent HO REALLY KNOWS THE SECRET TO SUCCESS? enough time with them, the last thing you want is to try to And who can confidently predict it in a young be tough on them.” She hadn’t been around very much, person with her whole adulthood in front of her? especially when her son was young.

“Thai was a strong student, very serious and But of late she had been trying to make up for that, conscientious,” recalls Amherst Professor of she told me. “This year I started to drive my daughter to Economics Frank Westhoff. “But I’d be dishonest school. I never did that for my son. And I find it just really if I said she was one of my best.” great. You have all kinds of conversations.”

Even Lee’s father had not foreseen glory in his daughLee offered a look both puzzled and gratified. “I did not ter’s future. “He didn’t think I could be successful in busi- know that,” she said. “It’s sort of like one of the secrets of ness,” she recalled. “And he was probably right.” I made life that nobody told me was there.” k the obvious point that he had actually been wrong. But Lee demurred. The odds had been very long, she said.

Rand Richards Cooper ’80 writes a twice-weekly column at “In fact it was probable that a startup, no matter how Commonwealmagazine.org /blog.

W

34 Amherst Winter 2016

36 One alumnus is traveling the world, studying trash.

38 A member of a White House Council is helping girls and women.

Photograph by Geoffrey Giller ’10

ALUMNI IN THE WORLD

Beyond Campus

In New York State, Bill Barton’74 makes hard cider that bears little resemblance to the sugary national brands.

Winter 2016 Amherst 35

BEYOND CAMPUS

their working conditions. Off hours, Berón Echavarría got a new passport, applied for visas and replaced his shattered camera screen.

Trash is universal. A young alumnus is traveling the world to study how different societies handle it.

GHANA Electronic waste

BY EMILY GOLD BOUTILIER RESEARCH U Wherever humans exist, so does trash. What varies from place to place is how individuals, companies and governments manage that garbage. David Berón Echavarría ’15 is spending a year traveling the world on a Watson Fellowship, studying international methods of waste management.

Berón Echavarría’s aim is to “explore what waste and waste management (or its non-management) reveal about a community’s politics, economics and social arrangements.”

He’s already changed his consumption habits. “I don’t buy new clothes,” he said in December. “I went to the tailor yesterday because I ripped my pants. There’s a hole in my shoe; I’m fixing it.

The idea of being content with a few things is not a new idea, but it 36 Amherst Winter 2016

In Accra, Ghana, he is studying the effects of electronic waste.

David Berón Echavarría ’15 MAJORS: ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

“Being content with a few things is not a new idea, but it seems more reasonable to me now than ever.”

seems more reasonable to me now than ever.”

Here’s where Berón Echavarría has been and where he’s going.

ARGENTINA Buenos Aires is home to 40,000 workers who collect recyclables door-to-door and streetto-street. Berón Echavarría spent a month and a half accompanying these workers, most of whom are in unionized cooperatives, on their daily rounds to neighborhoods and recycling centers. “You see mundane objects—baby shoes, maps, bicycles—in discarded form.

It’s a shocking recognition that everything is going to end up somewhere else,” he says.

BRAZIL In São Paulo, he spent time

at a cooperative’s supermarket drop-off station for recyclables.

He also spoke with graffiti artists who paint pushcarts of workers who travel the streets collecting recyclables. The art raises awareness about collectors’ service and the need to improve

ANDREW MCCONNELL / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Anything Dirty or Dingy or Dusty

from Europe ends up in the Agbogbloshie area in Accra. “The environmental impact is huge,” Berón Echavarría says.

“Heavy metals from TV screens and laptops leak into soil and water.” Scavengers “burn everything to extract copper and other valuable metals,” while neighbors “are living in fumes” from this work.

Here, he is working with a consultant who is involved in a project to build a waste management facility. Besides dealing with electronic waste, that project involves better collection, sorting and recycling, as well as generating energy from organic waste. “I arrived here expecting to learn specifically about electronic waste,” he says.

“What I found has been much broader and more complex than I ever imagined.”

SINGAPORE The island is renowned

for its waste-to-energy and watertreatment facilities, and it has high recycling rates. “Singapore will be a case study of technical innovation,” Berón Echavarría says.

SWEDEN Sweden is a pioneer in technical advancements in waste management. But most impressive, Berón Echavarría says, is the role of public policy in shaping these advancements. In Sweden, a mere 1 percent of garbage ends up in landfills, according to a 2012 government report. Berón Echavarría plans to end his Watson year examining Sweden’s policies and strategies.

Cider for Adults

BY GEOFFREY GILLER ’10 DRINK U Americans and cider have had a

rocky relationship.

We’re not talking about the sweet, murky beverage that most of us call apple cider, which is really just unfiltered apple juice. Real (or “hard”) cider is generally carbonated and certainly alcoholic. And Americans used to guzzle the stuff down: back in the early 1800s it was possibly the most popular alcoholic beverage in the States. But the relationship soured in the 19th century, and it wasn’t a pretty breakup. After Prohibition, America moved on to beer and didn’t look back.

The wounds have finally healed, and Americans are getting sweet on cider again.

Bill Barton ’74 is one of the people helping mend the relationship. Founded in 1999, his was among the first of a new wave of cideries in New York State.

(There are now more than 50.) But Barton’s ciders bear little resemblance to most national brands of hard cider, such as Angry Orchard and Woodchuck.

His ciders don’t come close to soda-like sweetness, instead ranging from dry to semisweet, with subtleties of flavor reminiscent of wine.

Barton runs his cidery, Bellwether, with his wife, Cheryl. In the tasting room, he pours a sample of one of his favorites: King Baldwin. “I would describe this as an off-dry,” he says. It has just a hint of sweetness.

He blends different types of apples to balance the three key aspects of cider: acidity, tannins and sugars.

In 2011 Bon Appétit selected King Baldwin as one of its favorite American ciders.

Rather than disparaging the sweet national cider

Barton blends different types of apples to balance the three key aspects of hard cider.

Bill Barton ’74 MAJOR: GEOLOGY

Hard cider was a favorite of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, but it vanished completely after Prohibition.

GEOFFREY GILLER

This is no sugary, entry-level alcoholic beverage. Instead, it ranges from dry to semisweet, with subtleties of flavor reminiscent of wine.

brands, Barton is grateful for them. “They’re carrying a lot of the load in terms of building the market,” he says. “They’re the entry point for people drinking ciders.” He’s pinning his hopes for the future on a younger generation of drinkers willing to try new things. Older folks are less likely to branch out in their beverage choices, he says.

Barton was inspired by cider he drank in France in the 1980s. He wondered why there wasn’t a similar industry in the States, unaware then of cider’s convoluted history in America. Cider was a favorite drink of some of America’s founders, including John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. While many historians finger Prohibition as the cause of cider’s demise, David Williams, a retired professor of history at George Mason University, says it’s not quite so simple. “Wine came back, rum came back, beer came back,” he says.

So why not cider? Even before Prohibition, cider was in decline: it was harder to produce in cities than beer, and the Temperance movement was especially intense in rural WASP communities, where cider was most popular. The rise of sweet soda also helped to displace cider. After Prohibition, “there was neither the desire nor the means to resuscitate the cider industry,” according to a history of cider that Williams posted on his website.

Today, Barton is producing about 14,000 gallons of cider a year, and he plans to put in new apple trees in the spring. Maybe this time around, America and cider will live happily ever after.

Geoffrey Giller ’10 is a writer and photographer based in Ithaca, N.Y. Winter 2016 Amherst 37

BEYOND CAMPUS

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 POLICY U Growing up female in this country can mean facing obstacles and disadvantages ranging from domestic violence to unplanned pregnancies to limited employment opportunities.

Many of these problems are compounded for girls and women of color. Kim Leary’82 has spent two years working with the Obama administration to find solutions.

In 2014 Leary—who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and a master’s in public administration—temporarily left her faculty position at Harvard and her work as chief psychologist at the Cambridge Health Alliance to begin a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellowship. After “policy boot camp” at the National Academy of Medicine, she started working with the White House Council on Women and Girls.

Founded by executive order, the Council works to ensure that government agencies and lawmakers address “the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, [and] the legislation they support.”

Leary’s focus is on equity for women and girls of color. “We wanted to look, in a data-driven way, at the intersectional challenges that girls and young women of color face,” she says (speaking in a personal capacity and not for the White House). She and colleagues settled on five areas in which “data told us there was a problem” and in which the government and private sector could make a measurable difference: “Girls of color are suspended and expelled from school at rates that far exceed their white peers,” Leary says. So the Departments of Justice and Education have been encouraging schools to use disciplinary alternatives that keep students in the classroom.

Misbehavior in school, truancy and criminal activity are often 38 Amherst Winter 2016

Going to Washington to Help Girls Succeed signs that girls have experienced physical or sexual violence. “Our goal has been to try to promote more trauma-informed care in our schools, our child welfare institutions and also in juvenile justice,” says Leary.

Women of color are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math. “We’ve been working with our Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as external collaborators like Arizona State University,” Leary says, to identify and encourage STEM teaching practices that engage female and minority students.

Pregnancy is much more common among teens of color than among white teens. Adolescent mothers “are much less likely to complete their high school educations, and they and their children are more likely to have much reduced economic earning power,” Leary says. The Council and several federal agencies are working to expand preventative care and sex education.

As part of the White House Council on Women and Girls, an alumna is helping young people of color.

Kim Leary ’82 MAJOR: PSYCHOLOGY

“Girls of color are suspended and expelled from school at rates that far exceed their white peers.”

“Significant wage disparities exist for women in the workforce as compared to men, and very significant wage disparities exist for women of color,” says Leary.

“Women of color tend to be concentrated in low-wage sectors.”

New sick-leave and parentalleave policies and tax credits will help working families, Leary says.

And the Council has secured $100 million from women’s foundations for job training and $18 million from educational institutions to expand research both by and about women of color.

When Leary returns to the classroom this winter, she intends to impress upon her students what the fellowship has taught her about the importance of data in formulating and evaluating public policy: “It’s not just big ideas and good ideas; it’s also ideas that we can demonstrate have impact.”

Katherine Duke ’05 is Amherst magazine’s assistant editor.

Illustration by Yvetta Fedorova

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 CRIME U A 12-year-old was sentenced to 30 years in adult prison for killing his grandparents, possibly as a result of an adverse reaction to antidepressants.

A 14-year-old, awaiting trial, spent the next two years without seeing natural light.

More than half of all U.S. states allow children ages 12 and older to be prosecuted as adults. “And there are 22 states in which a child as young as 7 can be prosecuted as an adult,” says Michele Deitch ’82.

Deitch has been researching issues of youth incarceration since 2007. Children sentenced to adult prisons are at much greater risk of suicide and of physical and sexual assault than those in the juvenile system, she says. Once released, they’re more likely to reoffend and end up back in prison. “So we’re actually promoting criminality by pushing them up to the adult side,” she argues.

Deitch is a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin, with a joint appointment at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs

and the School of Law. In 2009 she and her students produced a report, based on a national study and titled “From Time Out to Hard Time: Young Children in the Adult Criminal Justice System,” that debunked numerous myths, such as the assumption that preteens are tried as adults only when they’ve committed murder, or only as a last resort.

In reality, many children go directly into the adult system for their first offenses or for nonviolent crimes. The report prompted a New York Times editorial calling for “laws that discourage harsh sentencing for preadolescent children and that enable them to be transferred back into the juvenile system.”

Through subsequent reports, Deitch and her students helped spur the 2011 passage of Texas Senate Bill 1209, which gives judges the option to send children to juvenile detention centers instead of adult jails while awaiting trial, so that “these youths could be housed with age-appropriate peers, participate in educational classes and receive necessary services,” according to a news ac-

Michele Deitch ’82 MAJORS: ENGLISH AND PSYCHOLOGY

“There are 22 states in which a child as young as 7 can be prosecuted as an adult.”

Children sentenced to adult prisons, she says, are at much greater risk of suicide and assault.

count from the university. Deitch and students also produced a chapter on youth behavior management for a National Institute of Corrections guide.

Deitch described the problems with trying and imprisoning youth as adults in a November 2014 TEDx Talk at Amherst. It became an Editor’s Pick on the TEDx website and has been viewed more than 20,000 times on YouTube.

Deitch—a former Amherst trustee, with graduate degrees from Oxford and Harvard Law— spent the early 1990s as a courtappointed monitor of conditions in Texas prisons and went on to become general counsel to the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee and policy director of the Texas Punishment Standards Commission.

Her current work concerns the importance of independent oversight for juvenile and adult correctional facilities, and the goal of raising Texas’ minimum age at which a person must be tried as an adult from 17 to 18. This way, she believes, many 17-year-olds could learn and grow from the juvenile system.

STEVE LISS

When Kids Go to Prison

Some children serve time in adult prisons even for their first offenses and for nonviolent crimes.

Winter 2016 Amherst 39

BEYOND CAMPUS

COURTESY PETER RACHLEFF

After 15 years in the neighborhood, a couple leased a historic building in St. Paul, Minn., and created the East Side Freedom Library.

Immigrant Stories

BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 HISTORY U When historian Peter Rachleff ’73 and his wife, Beth Cleary, bought a house on the East Side of St. Paul, Minn., the neighborhood “had been buffeted by plant closings and deindustrialization,” Rachleff says, and “had become the site of new immigration from Southeast Asia, Central America and East Africa.” The history of the East Side seemed like a “microcosm of the American experience.”

The couple, both on the faculty at Macalaster College, began dreaming of a project that could serve, he says, “to build not only knowledge about immigrants’ and workers’ experiences, but also to build bridges which might link disparate communities.”

In 2014, after living in the neighborhood for 15 years, they leased the historic Arlington Hills library building and established the East Side Freedom Library, a nonprofit with a mission to “preserve and promote knowledge about the East Side—its history, residents and institutions.”

In its first year and a half, the library has amassed well over 7,000 books, about half of which come 40 Amherst Winter 2016

from Rachleff ’s personal collection. It also features photographs, visual art, musical instruments and recordings.

In addition, the library is the new home of the Hmong Archives, a vast collection of paj ndau (textile artworks known as “story cloths”) and other materials. This archive was established in the late 1990s to document the history and culture of the Hmong, who began arriving in Minnesota as refugees from Southeast Asia in 1975. Rachleff calls St. Paul “the capital of Hmong America”; it and Minneapolis combined have the world’s largest urban Hmong population.

The East Side Freedom Library has attracted some 3,000 people to more than 80 events, including a Juneteenth celebration, readings by historians and novelists, walking tours, film screenings, performances and discussions.

For Labor Day, artists “painted a labor history mural 48 feet long,” Rachleff says. And “Karen immigrant women from Burma have been weaving on backstrap looms every Wednesday, and they are now selling their cloth and forming an economic cooperative.”

“Volunteers,” Rachleff adds, “have taken over our gardens, built us new bookshelves and, of course, donated books.” Volun-

For Labor Day, artists painted a mural about labor history.

The library is also home to the Hmong Archives.

Peter Rachleff ’73 MAJOR: INDEPENDENT SCHOLAR

The history of the East Side is a “microcosm of the American experience.”

teers are also processing and cataloguing those books. Jazz musician and political activist Fred Ho contributed 100 boxes of books before his death in 2014, and the widow of labor historian David Montgomery gave 15 boxes from his personal collection. The library has also received support from labor unions.

Rachleff ’s interest in community engagement dates back to his undergraduate years, when he participated in local antiwar and antiracism movements. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pittsburgh.

After joining the history faculty at Macalester in 1982, he became “the department’s bridge to the local community,” he says, working with the Minnesota Historical Society, the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center and local labor activists. Labor, immigration and African American history have been his main focuses as a scholar and teacher.

Rachleff believes the new library can serve as an example for similar projects that work to preserve the histories of immigrants and working-class populations around the country. “These projects,” he says, “can become sites of empowerment for people who have been marginalized for generations.” k

43 Lauren Groff ’01’s third novel shifts every fictional frame imaginable.

47 Bill Keith ’61 invented a picking style that rewrote the book on banjo.

Photograph by Josh Piha

ARTS NEWS AND REVIEWS

Amherst Creates

Polly Hall ’04 and Andrew Barkan ’02 compose, record and perform children’s music in and around Los Angeles.

Winter 2016 Amherst 41

AMHERST CREATES

THE NEO-NAZI NEXT DOOR Two filmmakers documented a North Dakota community as white supremacists moved to town and set out to create a racist enclave. | BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05

WELCOME TO LEITH Michael Beach Nichols ’02 and Christopher K. Walker Airing on PBS’s Independent Lens April 4, 2016

documentary that shows all sides of the escalating conflict, with activists protesting the racist encroachment, neighbors attempting to oust the white supremacists on building-code-related technicalities, and Cobb and Dutton patrolling the town with guns—an intimidation tactic for which they are arrested and jailed. In addition, the documentary includes contextualizing commentary from workers at the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that monitors and exposes hate groups nationwide.

Welcome to Leith has been shown at Sundance, South by Southwest and dozens of other film festivals. Reviews in major media outlets echo each other with words such as “haunting,” “unnerving” and “scary,” but also “sober,” “remarkably objective” and “surprisingly even-keeled.”

The documentary has also attracted controversy.

When Cobb did a Skype Q&A after the Sundance screening, audience members criticized not only the outspoken racist but the filmmakers and festival organizers for giving him a platform.

“We felt like it would be most powerful for the audience to hear directly from him what he was going after and what his belief system is,” Nichols says of Cobb’s inclusion in the film and Q&A. Leaving out Cobb’s voice or giving him less screen time, the filmmakers believed, might make him seem less hateful, calculating and dangerous than he actually was, thereby doing “an injustice to the fears the people in the town were experiencing, because they were really terrified.”

“I had fear, every time I walked outside my house, that that guy was going to shoot me,” says townsperson Lee Cook toward the end of the documentary. “I did not let my kids walk that town.”

At one point, the film shows a reporter asking Bobby Harper, Leith’s only black resident, whether he’ll move away for his own safety. He will not, he asserts: “It’s my home, and I have a right to be there.”

Speaking for themselves, the white supremacists say the same thing.

COURTESY MICHAEL BEACH NICHOLS

Leith’s 24 longtime residents grew ever more alarmed and outraged as white supremacists patrolled their town with guns.

FILM U The New York Times reported in 2013 that notorious white supremacist Craig Cobb was buying land in Leith, N.D., and using the Web to call like-minded extremists to join him in the tiny rural town, with the goal of transforming it into a white nationalist enclave. Leith’s 24 longtime residents were growing alarmed and outraged.

The Times article caught the attention of filmmakers Michael Beach Nichols ’02 and Christopher K. Walker. “It just seemed like a real-life Western playing out, where you have this stranger coming into town, and he has nefarious motives, and he’s wanting to take over the government,” says Nichols, who did his American studies thesis at Amherst on violence in small Southern towns and went on to earn an M.A. in documentary filmmaking from the University of Florida.

When Nichols and Walker learned that Cobb’s plan was gaining traction—that Neo-Nazi Kynan Dutton had moved to Leith with his family, and that other white supremacists had bought land from Cobb in town—they decided to travel to North Dakota with their cameras.

The result is Welcome to Leith, a feature-length

42 Amherst Winter 2016

Katherine Duke ’05 is the assistant editor of Amherst magazine.

AMHERST CREATES

THE ECSTASY AND THE AGONY A new novel is a wrecking ball to stagnated notions of storytelling.

FATES AND FURIES Lauren Groff ’01 Riverhead Books

The first half of the book is told from the husband’s point of view. In the second half, we see the other side.

“

FICTION U In the early pages of Fates and Furies, the masterful and much-lauded third novel from Lauren Groff ’01 (The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia), a theater instructor at a boarding school for boys asks his students the difference between tragedy and comedy, and a student suggests that the difference is an issue of solemnity versus humor.

“False,” the instructor says. “A trick. There’s no difference. It’s a question of perspective. Storytelling is a landscape, and tragedy is comedy is drama. It simply depends on how you frame what you’re seeing.” In this book, Groff shifts every fictional frame imaginable, with stunning virtuosity, to illuminate one of the most memorable relationships in recent American writing.

The narrative is structured around the marriage of Lancelot “Lotto” Satterwhite, a failed actor turned legendary playwright, and Mathilde, who gave up her own aspirations in order to tend to her husband’s massive yet good-natured and delicate ego, cultivating and ensuring his greatness in ways that are not immediately apparent.

The first half of the book, the section titled “Fates,” is told largely from Lotto’s point of view.

Groff takes us from Lotto’s background as the scion of a bottled-water empire in Florida through his tumultuous artistic ascendancy. In the second half, titled “Furies,” the clock resets, and we see the relationship from the other side, as Groff goes back to show the secrets that constitute Mathilde’s life, Groff plays including her unspoken-of with the gauze childhood in France and the sexual arrangement that of fiction, her way through coldrawing it over paid lege. After Lotto is betrayed our eyes. by an old friend, we see just how far outside the realm of morality Mathilde will go in order to honor and defend her commitment to her husband.

Oh, and throughout both sections, there are bracketed Greek-chorus-like interjections from a playful plurality of entities—let’s call them Fates— whose omniscience and position outside of time is such that they actually know how the world ends, although they usually prefer to comment with bemusement on the folly of their subjects.

This is the story of a marriage, sure. There is palpable love on the page (something we’re so often told we’re supposed to see and feel in fiction

MEGAN BROWN

| BY NICHOLAS MANCUSI ’10

but so rarely do), built here mostly out of pains: the ache of separation, or love as the absence of absence. But intrinsic to the power of the book is the way Groff plays with the gauze of fiction itself, drawing it over our eyes, occluding a truth to reveal it later, in the same place, somewhere right in the foreground that we had never thought to look. This gauze is evident in the sentence that opens one chapter: “After the incomprehension and the raw fish came the long flight, then the short.” Only further down the page do we realize this is a character returning from Japan.

It’s a small example, but illustrative of Groff ’s brilliance and the game she plays so well here. We think a story is composed of facts, but so often facts turn out to be illusory constructions, shadows cast upon a wall that look entirely different when viewed from another angle. Groff takes us on a tour of every possible viewing angle of the truth of marriage, while still managing to propel the story forward.

At one point in the book, Mathilde bemoans her boredom with reading: “She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.” This could be a description of Groff ’s own book—a wrecking ball to stagnated notions of storytelling.

Nicholas Mancusi ’10 has written for The New York Times Book Review and many other publications.

Winter 2016 Amherst 43

AMHERST CREATES

PRETTY MUCH PAYING ATTENTION When your audience is in diapers, what’s the formula for success? | BY JENN SALCIDO ’05

ODDS & ENDS Andrew Barkan ’02 and Polly Hall ’04 Palindrome Records

The married duo won a Parents’ Choice Award for their latest album’s “generous helping of sunny warmth, gentle humor and truly expert musicianship.”

MUSIC U The The first time Polly Hall ’04 and Andrew Barkan ’02 worked together, they were in a cramped studio space at Amherst, Barkan playing piano on a folk album that Hall was recording.

Today, their workspace has expanded, as has the nature of their collaboration. From their home and 44 Amherst Winter 2016

studio in Santa Monica, Calif., the husband-andwife duo have composed catchy, quirky tunes for movies, advertising campaigns and children’s television, including Nickelodeon’s Wallykazam!.

But they spend most of their time recording and performing as the children’s music duo Andrew Photograph by Josh Piha

“

& Polly. They do live shows of their own material around Los Angeles, and they produce the monthly podcast Ear Snacks. Their new album, Odds & Ends, won a Parents’ Choice Award for its “generous helping of sunny warmth, gentle humor and truly expert musicianship.”

“We’re so lucky there’s a huge children’s music scene here in L.A.,” says Hall. “But there’s really one everywhere, because parents everywhere are looking for quality activities to do with their kids.”

Hall and Barkan came to children’s entertainment while living in an echoey Victorian mansion in Providence, R.I. Hall had been waylaid by an illness after completing a graduate program in music and multimedia at Brown.

“Once I was able to sing again, we wanted to sing a lot,” she says. “And we had sung for my nieces before.”

“We felt like we had found this secret trick to chill them out,” finishes Barkan.

They filled their living room with recording equipment and put together their first record.

Barkan and Hall pride themselves on making honest, intelligent music for kids and parents. Their closest genre, Hall says, is Once I was best known as “kindie,” a able to sing portmanteau that hints at again, we kids and indie rock. wanted to sing “It’s not based on speca lot,” says tacle,” Barkan says. Their songs feature playful banHall. ter and give the feeling of Santa Monica sunshine and, sometimes, polished pop (on a cover of the Ghostbusters theme song, the hook is whistled, backed occasionally by xylophones and kazoos).

Music has not been their only joint project. Their son, Izzy, made his debut in 2014. Now that she’s a mother, Hall has come to see their shows as “5 percent music and 95 percent developmental psychology.”

“You can’t play a song start to finish—let alone 10 songs start to finish—and expect a child to sit there and listen. You have to get the music in while you’re taking them from moment to moment,” Hall says. “Now, as parents, we look out in the audience, and we see these kids pretty much mostly paying attention, and parents pretty much not having to work to keep their children from exploding the rest of the universe.”

And as the pair now knows from experience, the show can be a gift to parents, too: “If somebody were to entertain Izzy completely for 45 minutes,” Hall says, “we’d be eternally grateful.”

Jenn Salcido ’05 is a writer and editor based in Providence, R.I.

REBECCA CLARKE

SHORT TAKES

Feeling cooped up this winter? Go on a quest, or to New York, or to the zoo, with Amherst authors. BY KATHERINE DUKE ’05 Michael A. Kahn ’74 sends you on The Sirena Quest (Poisoned Pen Press).

Venom Is the Healer, says Rice Baker-Yeboah ’08E (Amazon Digital Services), while Frederick S. Lane ’85 warns of Cybertraps for Educators (CreateSpace).

Terry ’60 and Deborah Borton show you what happened Before the Movies: American Magic Lantern Entertainment and the Nation’s First Great Screen Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale (John Libbey Publishing).

Richard N. Gordon ’88, M.D., reveals Everything You Need to Know About LASIK: A Patient’s Guide to Refractive Surgery (Amazon Digital Services).

David W. Kearn Jr. ’95 takes you inside the Great Power Security Cooperation: Arms Control and the Challenge of Technological Change (Lexington Books).

Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow ’90 portray A Man Apart: Bill Coperthwaite’s Radical Experiment in Living (Chelsea Green Publishing).

Caitlin Leffel ’02 and Jacob Lehman help you fall In Love in New York: A Guide to the Most Romantic Destinations in the Greatest City in the World (Rizzoli).

Translator Peter Manuelian ’64 serves up Seven Bites from a Raisin: Proverbs from the Armenian (Aratsani Press), and Kristin Dykstra ’92 has translated Other Letters to Milena / Otras cartas a Milena, by Cuban poet Reina María Rodríguez (University Alabama Press).

And children can come along as Silly Sally Goes to the Zoo (Lulu.com), by the late Sally Laux Murphy ’84 and the illustrator Chelsea Nebelung.

Winter 2016 Amherst 45

AMHERST CREATES

WONDER AND SKEPTICISM This epic sweep starts in Tutankhamen’s tomb and culminates in the passenger seat of a self-driving Google car. | BY PAUL STATT ’78

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF SCIENCE: MORE THAN 150 YEARS OF GROUNDBREAKING SCIENTIFIC COVERAGE Edited by David Corcoran ’69 Sterling

Corcoran edited Science Times from 2001 to 2014. The section began in 1978 and remains one of the newspaper’s most popular features.

46 Amherst Winter 2016

NONFICTION U In 1978 The New York Times introduced the weekly Science Times. Now one of few “freestanding science sections left on the diminished landscape of American newspapers,” writes David Corcoran ’69 in The New York Times Book of Science, “it remains one of the paper’s most popular features.”

I’m grateful for Science Times—and for this book, an oddly enlightening historical account of current events. Alumni of a certain age—dedicated liberal artists like me—will nod when I say that my Amherst education truly began after commencement. Especially in science. In The New York Times I first read of fractal math, the selfish gene, endorphin highs, the right/left brain, AIDS, global warming, string theory, cloning, dark matter. Science Times not only improved my stock of metaphors but bettered my health and buttressed my political thinking.

The Times’ science reporting did not begin in 1978. In his modest introduction to this immodest attempt to capture “More than 150 Years of Groundbreaking Scientific Coverage,” Corcoran—who edited Science Times from 2001 to 2014—notes that “the first mention of science in the Times came in its very first issue—Sept. 18, 1851” (in an obituary for Sylvester Graham).

Corcoran’s book marshals 125 news items, features, editorials— even a poem!—in 13 chapters.

The arrangement is prosaic: alphabetical. But the editor’s skill reveals an epic sweep that starts in Tutankhamen’s tomb and culminates in the passenger seat of a self-driving Google car. The tension between progress and

process keeps it interesting: In 1919, experimenter Arthur Eddington tests Einstein’s theories and confirms “the inference that light has weight.” The scientists and the reporter agree that something important has been proven—but what? Reporting on a new telescope in 1929, James H. Jeans writes, “Man is no longer content to stare through a telescope as at a rare show; the dumb attitude of astonished wonder has passed and he is beginning to ask insistently what it all means.”

Astonished Wonder and Deep Meaning are two legs science

writing stands on. Both are in this volume, sometimes in the same Times story, as on July 21, 1969, when the front page contained not only the “MEN WALK ON MOON” headline but also a poem by Archibald MacLeish: moon, a wonder to us, unattainable, a longing past the reach of longing, a light beyond our lights, our lives—perhaps a meaning to us...

O, a meaning!

Great writing can make the familiar seem strange and wonderful, and bring miraculous discoveries down to earth. AlIllustration by Michael Waraksa

APPRECIATION

Paul Statt ’78 is a Philadelphiabased writer.

Rewriting the Book on Banjo As a student at Amherst, the late Bill Keith ’61 invented a melodic picking technique that forever changed the musical landscape. | BY SIMONE SOLONDZ This fall, banjo pioneer Bill Keith ’61 traveled to Raleigh, N.C., to be inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Hall of Fame. Three weeks later, on Oct. 23, Keith died of cancer at home in Woodstock, N.Y. “It took a great effort for Bill to go down there for the event,” says longtime pal and musical partner Jim Rooney ’60, “and he thoroughly enjoyed himself. When he came home, he felt that he’d done what he set out to do.”

What Keith did was invent a unique picking style that transformed the five-string banjo from a largely percussive instrument used for accompaniment into one that could carry the melody. His innovative technique linked the rolling, three-finger style of seminal bluegrass banjoist Earl Scruggs to the modern-day approach of “newgrass” stars like Béla Fleck and Tony Trischka. “Bill took the banjo from a novelty instrument to a really musical instrument,” Rooney says.

And it all started at Amherst, when Keith arrived as a freshman to study French literature. He spent most of that first year holed up with his banjo and an instructional book by folk legend Pete Seeger. When he’d finished devouring the book, he figured out how to play the standard fiddle tune “Devil’s Dream” note for note on the banjo.

From there, Keith moved on to Bach, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, using his newly minted style to turn standard melodies into banjo masterpieces. He joined forces with Rooney, and the duo was soon playing gigs around campus and in small Boston venues like the YMCA. Their big break came a couple of years later when folk stalwart Manny Greenhill—the agent who represented Bob Dylan and Joan Baez—encouraged Keith and Rooney to hook up with Rick Lee ’63 and Jesse Auerbach ’62, as well as budding UMass folkies Taj Mahal and Buffy Sainte-Marie—to form the Pioneer Valley Folksong Society. “Manny wanted to put [celebrated singer] Odetta on stage at UMass,” Rooney says, “and he needed a campus organization to make that happen.

When he heard Bill and me play, he offered us our first professional gig at the Ballad Room in Boston.”

Keith and Rooney went on to play regularly

CLAIRE KEITH

“

most every page in The New York Times Book of Science qualifies as great. Listen to Dennis Overbye, wondering what happened before the Big Bang: “Like baseball, the universe makes its own time.”

Journalists say, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Scientists might amend that to, “Reproduce the results.” The two professions share a healthy skepticism. Science journalism has faced a crisis at least since 1964, when the surgeon general linked smoking to cancer and the tobacco industry sought to discredit the report with its own scientists.

“Doubt is our product,” declared a 1969 Brown & Williamson memo spelling out Big Tobacco’s strategy. This cynical gaslighting, standard practice today, makes the work of science reporting When Big hard—and Tobacco vital. A savvy made doubt public may its strategy, not be best inby “a science jour- formed study I saw on nalism faced the Internet.” a crisis.

I prefer a book. The science is scholarly and the writing learned. I wouldn’t call this a work of popular history or popular science, although it calls for reading skills common to both genres. This report from the “radio editor” in 1933 that “Television is Brought Nearer to the Home” benefits from a reading that melds historical and scientific skepticism: “What will this mean in the wars of the future when a staff officer can see the enemy through the television eyes of his scouting planes or when they can send a bombing plane without a man on board which can see the target and be steered by radio up to the moment when it hits?”

What will this mean? Indeed: what does it mean now? O, a meaning!

Keith made the banjo more than just a novelty instrument.

at Cambridge’s Club 47 (now Club Passim), performed with Baez at Dartmouth’s winter carnival and recorded the album Livin’ on the Mountain (with Joe Val, Herb Applin and Fritz Richmond) for Prestige Records in 1962.

And just two years after graduating, Keith became the banjo player for the father of bluegrass himself, Bill Monroe.

In the 50 years that followed, Keith continued to break new ground, co-founding the Beacon Banjo Co., recording albums in a wide range of genres, touring with top-flight performers and quietly infiltrating the New York studio scene, appearing on recordings

by Judy Collins, Jonathan Edwards and many others.

“Bill influenced a whole generation of pickers,” says Rooney, “here in the U.S., in Europe and in Japan. He put out a number of instructional tapes and books, but more than anything else it was his commitment to the music and his ability to connect with people that set him apart.” k Simone Solondz is an arts writer and bluegrass devotee based in Providence, R.I. Winter 2016 Amherst 47

LOOKING BACK

From the pages of Amherst magazine and its predecessor titles, here’s a look at what Amherst people were talking, thinking and writing about in decades past.

100 YEARS AGO

50 YEARS AGO

New Library

Newer Library

U The August 1916 Amherst Graduates’ Quarterly reported on the hotly anticipated new library, to be built at the corner of Route 9 and Boltwood Avenue on the site of Hitchcock Hall (which had been known to earlier generations as the Boltwood Mansion).

“It is to be built of Indiana limestone and brick, and the main façade will face west,” the editors wrote of Converse Library. “The main entrance at the middle of the portico leads to a vestibule to be decorated on either side by remarkably well-preserved Assyrian basreliefs, which have been in the possession of the college for many years.”

With the demolition of Hitchcock Hall, “there will be alumni returning next June who will feel a pang of regret when they fail to glimpse the massive Ionic columns,” the article noted. “Returning alumni are by nature and training sentimentalists, and it is to be hoped that they will at least find a tablet to mark the ancient site.”

The new library design is at once classic and modern, wrote editor John F. Genung in November 1916, and it emphasizes “the art that we would have prevail in the coming century of Amherst. It stands at the one point where— apart from the venerable original buildings—Amherst is able, or cares, to make a show. And she will not miss her purpose, strong from old days and old experiences, of showing for what she is.”

U The Winter 1966 Amherst Alumni News reported on the October 1965 dedication of Robert Frost Library, which students had taken to calling “The Frost.”

The event came two years after President Kennedy spoke at the

library’s groundbreaking ceremony.

Frederick H. Wagman ’33, University of Michigan librarian, said at the dedication that while some look to a future when “we are assured that the traditional

library of books and journals and manuscripts is doomed,” Amherst named its library after “a poet who believed that ‘the difference between a college man and a man lacking in college is that he has the resource of books, that he knows there’s a book side to everything.’”

Converse found a second life as a classroom and office building, saving it from the sad fate of Hitchcock Hall.

20 YEARS AGO

Newest Library U Thirty years after the Frost dedication, the Winter 1996 Amherst magazine reported on the library’s $6 million renovation and rededication. In the rededication keynote address, Professor William H. Pritchard ’53 talked about the old borrowing cards.

“A word may be said here about one of the pleasant parts of browsing that has surely vanished, whatever the fate of browsing itself in our online world,” he said. “This involves the borrowing card that used to be found in a slot in the back of each volume—those cards which, as the card catalog became phased out, were destroyed by otherwise decent people at the circulation desk of Frost.”

Pritchard had kept at least one such card—that for a book of essays by former Amherst president Arthur Stanley Pease. The names on the card, Pritchard said, included a one-time professor of classics, two current

professors of English (himself among them), students in classics and English and a former employee at Converse.

Pritchard speculated that at least some of these people had checked out the book on the recommendation of Professor Theodore Baird. “Right there was a little bit of community,” Pritchard said, “indicative of the way a book can bring people together, people sometimes you haven’t thought about in years.”

Pritchard continued: “Randall Jarrell once wrote that a good library has to have its stacks full of readers: the nice thing about knowing, by means of the borrowing card, who has read the book—or at least taken it out before you—was that it made the stacks a little more full of readers.”

For decades, Frost Library had answered Pritchard’s “every question” and indulged his “every whim”—and it had raised no eyebrows when he checked out a biography of Elizabeth Taylor, he said.

“Head for the stacks!” he concluded.

Winter 2016 Amherst 119

AMHERST MADE

A THREAT,

MULTIPLIED

An alumna coined the term that made the U.S. military care about climate change.

HOW MANY words does it take to get an organization as large as the U.S. military to understand and care about an issue as complex as climate change? For Sherri Wasserman Goodman ’81, it took only two: “threat multiplier.”

That’s the term Goodman coined as founding executive director of the Military Advisory Board of the Center for Naval Analyses, a think tank that “provides analysis of military and nationalsecurity-related matters for the Department of Defense and other U.S. government clients,” she says.

At the behest of other concerned nonprofits, Goodman formed the advisory board in 2006, drawing from contacts she’d made as deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security during the Clinton administration.

The board included retired military leaders who had been responsible for operations around the world. “We asked them,” she says, “to assess the implications on their regions of a changing climate: increased

120 Amherst Winter 2016

drought, increased precipitation, more extreme weather, sea-level rise.”

After a year of meeting with climate scientists, military analysts, business leaders and the intelligence community, the board was preparing to release its first in-depth report. Goodman knew they needed to “make it accessible to people who are only going to read the summary.” The military was already fond of using “force multiplier” to describe any technological advance that made its efforts more effective. What if, she

suggested, they called climate change a “threat multiplier” for the way it would likely further destabilize volatile regions?

The phrase caught on, and the 2007 report prompted a mandate from the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that the Department of Defense and the intelligence community further assess and take into account the strategic implications of climate change. “That really got the ball rolling,” Goodman says, “because then the government owned the issue.”

Goodman, who has

Illustration by OLIVER MUNDAY

served most recently as president and CEO of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership, says her work aims to connect “environmental security to our global security.”

A November 2015 BuzzFeed News article, “Meet the Woman Whose Two-Word Catchphrase Made the Military Care About Climate,” has brought Goodman’s work to the attention of a younger generation.

And this generation will, in turn, continue grappling with the threats that climate change will multiply. KATHERINE DUKE ’05

Alumni and Parent Programs SPRING 2016 SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

AMHERST READS

FEBRUARY 8–12

APRIL 30

Love My Alumni Week on Campus

Logros Latinos

SELECTION OF THE MONTH:

Students show their appreciation for alumni donors and volunteers

JANUARY

FEBRUARY 23–24

Girl in Glass

#AmherstPride Giving Day

BY DEANNA FEI ’99

FEBRUARY The New York Times Book of Science: More than 150 Years of Groundbreaking Scientific Coverage

BY DAVID CORCORAN ’69

MARCH Quixote: The Novel and the World

APRIL Andy Warhol Was a Hoarder: Inside the Minds of History’s Great Personalities

BY CLAUDIA KALB ’85

BY PROFESSOR ILAN STAVANS

M AY Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood’s Messy Years

BY CATHERINE NEWMAN ’90

Show your Amherst pride by making a gift to support students and faculty during our second annual giving day challenge. If 750 donors give in 36 hours, Amherst will receive an additional $75,000! amherst.edu/give

Programs will offer opportunities for alumni and students to share their scholarship and experiences, network, and celebrate Logros Latinos! La Causa, the College’s Latino/a cultural group, invites alumni, students, faculty and staff to participate. amherst.edu/go/logroslatinos M AY 2 2

Amherst College’s 195th Commencement M AY 2 5 – 2 9

APRIL 8–9

Reunion

Amherst Today Energy: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Reunion 2016 will offer over 100 inspiring talks, tours and events, lively entertainment and the camaraderie of classmates. A complete schedule is available online.

What effect does energy consumption have on the world economically, ecologically, geologically and socially?

Panels of experts will discuss fracking, energy economics, sustainability and nuclear energy and proliferation. Tours of Amherst College sustainability projects will bring the theoretical energy discussion to the physical campus. amherst.edu/go/today A P R I L 1 5 – M AY 1 6

Alumni Trustee Election Cast your vote starting April 15! amherst.edu/alumni/election

amherst.edu/go/reunion

amherstwellmixed.wordpress.com

Well Mixed – A biweekly blog featuring guest posts from Amherst writers, artists, scholars, professionals, teachers, parents, students and everyone in between.

Interested in contributing?

Contact Carly Nartowicz at cnartowicz@amherst.edu.

There are 170+ Amherst regional events each year! Visit amherst.edu/alumni/events for the current listing.

AMHERST PO Box 5000 Amherst, MA 01002

“The pastoral—the seemingly idyllic space—has always been defined by its own

CONFLICTED EDGES.”

“She was SO TIRED OF THE OLD WAY OF TELLING STORIES...”

Tess Taylor ’00

Lauren Groff ’01

“GIRLS OF COLOR

THIS TIME, AMERICA AND CIDER MIGHT LIVE

are suspended and expelled at rates that far exceed their white peers.”

HAPPILY EVER AFTER.

Kim Leary ’82

Bill Barton ’74