“Material Girl” is coming to the Pioneer Valley.
Saucy Santana, the rapper behind the Tiktok-famous 2020 track, will headline the Spring Concert on April 29, the Office of Student Affairs announced in a message to The Student.
The college announced two major changes to its Covid-19 policies — the end of both the vaccine requirement and the college’s onsite PCR testing program — in a community-wide April 12 email, signaling a return to near-normalcy on campus after over three years of Covid-19 restrictions.
The email — signed by the Health Readiness Group (HRG), which advises the president and senior staff on Covid-19 health and safety protocols — explained that community members will no longer be required to have the Covid vaccine, or any boosters. However, it noted that the college still “strongly recommends” that community members remain up to date on future Covid vaccines.
FEATURES 8
The Testing Center will be closing its doors Friday, June 2, marking the end of on campus, on-demand PCR testing, which has been available since fall 2020. The email explained that the college will work to provide at-home antigen testing to community members, but in the meantime, antigen tests will continue to be available in the lobby of Keefe Campus Center.
These announcements come after several semesters of diminishing Covid-19 restrictions on campus, with the mask mandate notably being lifted in November 2022.
Chief Strategy Officer Kate Salop, who is a member of the HRG, further clarified the context around the decision to halt PCR testing.
“These decisions were reached within the context of the federal government’s decision to end the Covid-19 national public health emer-
AI at Amherst: Editors-in-Chief Sam Spratford ’24 and Liam Archacki ’24 talk to faculty and students about recent advances in artificial intelligence.
gency on May 11 and the Broad Institute’s decision to end its testing program (of which we have been a part since the very beginning of our testing program) this June,” Salop wrote in a statement to The Student.
Dr. Emily Jones, medical director of Student Health Services, noted that, despite PCR testing being halted on campus, students will continue to have access to PCR testing through the college’s partnership with UMass Amherst, if necessary.
Jones added that, from a public-health perspective, the college feels the vaccine requirement is no longer necessary.
“Unlike earlier on in the pandemic, receiving a Covid vaccine is mostly protecting the individual and less the community as a whole,” she said. “Those who are continuing to follow CDC recommendations,
and are receiving all the vaccine doses for which they are eligible are still enhancing their protection against severe disease and hospitalization independent of the vaccination choices of others.”
Salop said that if health and safety concerns arise, students and faculty should rely on the strategies they have used throughout the pandemic.
“We encourage students — and all members of the community — to pay attention to their health. Anyone who is symptomatic should wear a mask and immediately test for Covid-19,” Salop said. “Anyone who tests positive for Covid-19 should continue to isolate according to college protocols.”
At the moment, no community members have replied to The Student’s requests for comments on the changes.
Rant: Managing Opinion Editor Yasmin Hamilton ’24 critiques Trader Joe’s sometimes ”culturally inaccurate” products.
Saucy Santana and the openers, the EDM duo Lost Kings, will perform in LeFrak Gymnasium. The doors will open at 8 p.m., and the concert will start at 9 p.m.
Saucy Santana has risen to prominence in recent years behind hits like “Walk Em Like a Dog” and “Material Girl.” He began his career as a makeup artist for the hip hop duo City Girls, and is a frequent guest on the VH1 show “Love & Hip Hop: Miami.”
Lost Kings has produced official remixes for artists like Rihanna, Imagine Dragons, and Halsey. The duo has performed at festivals such as Billboard’s Hot 100 Festival and the Ultra Music Festival. The concert will be free for Amherst students. Five College students may purchase tickets at the door for $20.
This year’s concert will see the tradition fully recover from the pandemic. The concert was canceled in 2020 and 2021. Last year, the concert, which featured Young M.A, was closed to Five College students and masks were required.
John Cho Event: Managing Arts & Living Editors Noor Rahman ’25 and Madeline Lawson ’25 recap the actor’s recent visit to campus.
>>April 19, 2023
11:20 p.m., Boltwood Avenue
ACPD discovered a vehicle that was uninsured, which caused the registration to be revoked.
>>April 20, 2023
6:25 a.m., Pratt Field
ACPD responded to a noise complaint. ACPD spoke to the team and they turned the music down.
>>April 21, 2023
11:08 p.m., Stearns Hall Community Safety was dispatched to check a
candle being burned in a room.
>>April 21, 2023
4:13 p.m., Snell Street ACPD assisted APD with traffic control at a motor vehicle accident on Snell Street.
>>April 21, 2023
6:12 p.m., Garman House Community Safety responded to a noise complaint. CSAs had the music volume turned down.
>>April 21, 2023
6:27 p.m., Mayo Smith Lot
ACPD took a report of stolen license plates.
>>April 21, 2023
7:08 p.m., Valentine Dining Hall
ACPD took a report of comments made on an Instagram page.
>>April 23, 2023
12:52 a.m., Garman House Community Safety responded to a noise com -
plaint and asked people to end an event.
>>April 23, 2023
7:54 p.m., Converse Lot
ACPD conducted a motor vehicle stop after they observed a vehicle traveling the wrong direction on a one-way road.
>>April 24, 2023
4:19 p.m., South Pleasant Street
ACPD responded to a fire alarm. The cause of activation was cooking smoke.
“Society may subsist, though not in the most comfortable state, without beneficence, but the prevalence of injustice must utterly destroy it,” University of Denver Professor of Business and International Studies
Tricia D. Olsen said, quoting Adam Smith. More than two centuries after he wrote those words, the question of reconciling the free market and social justice remains hotly contested.
The political science and economics departments hosted the annual Vogel Lecture on April 19 in the Lipton Lecture Hall. This year’s event, titled “Corporate Wrongdoing — The Possibilities for Accountability and Redress in Latin America,” featured a conversation about the harms caused by transnational corporations in the region, including human rights abuses, and the future of economic regulation.
Speakers at the lecture included Daniel Marín López and Tricia D. Olsen, with political science professors Javier Corrales and Kerry Ratigan moderating the panel. After the speakers presented their research, the audience was invited to participate in a short Q&A.
López, who presented the first half of the lecture, is a fellow at Harvard's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, as well as a lecturer
on human rights and business at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He has also served as an expert advisor on corporate complicity in human rights abuses to Colombia’s truth commission, which was created in 2016 to heal divisions after years of civil conflict.
López began by discussing issues associated with coal mines in Colombia, which are owned by transnational corporations. Because the mining districts are labeled as ‘public utility projects,’ the central government has purview over mining in the region.
“At the end, these are actually negotiations between the central government, the executive branch, and the companies. And why is this important? It’s because you don’t have any kind of participation by communities or municipalities in these issues,” López said.
López highlighted the takeover of chunks of land in coal mining areas and showed how displacement and rates of violence against the peasant population rose significantly with the arrival of companies. Violence against union leaders, teachers, and workers appeared especially stark.
López recalled an interview with a food supplier for Drummond, a coal company, who became an intermediary between the company and paramilitaries.
“I knew that they were going to attack these people, like the union le-
aders, but I did not have the capacity to determine these homicides,” the supplier told López.
“He was explicitly saying, ‘It’s in the capacity of the company to do that,’” Lopez said.
While several cases against Drummond filed in the U.S. were dismissed on procedural grounds, there are several suits in Colombia still pending. However, there are limits to restitution, due to the longterm effects of mining on the land.
“The problem is that [the former peasant land] is a hole. So they cannot restitute the land to the peasant population,” López said.
On the lessons from these events, López noted the importance of state involvement in holding corpora-
tions accountable and taking domestic action against transnational corporations.
Olsen, who spoke next, is an associate professor and associate dean at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business and Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Her research and fieldwork on business ethics and economic development examines under what circumstances victims take measures to seek redress for corporate human rights abuses, including her compiling of over 13,000 corporate human rights abuses across Latin America.
Olsen’s segment of the lecture took a broad view of corporate wrongdoing, examining how institutional strength, the characteristics
of the corporation, and organizations elevating voices contribute to redress in cases of corporate wrongdoing.
Olsen cautioned against emphasizing state weakness in the face of corporate power, commenting on the ability of states today to influence corporate policy.
“Corporate strength is the result of state policy, and this is particularly true in Latin America, where neoliberal policies and the Washington Consensus were specifically designed to create large, powerful companies and relatively weak states,” Olsen said.
The tension between private and
Continued on page 3
The event was moderated by Professors Kerry Ratigan and Javier Corrales. Photo courtesy of Peter Finnerty '25Continued from page 2 public spheres has real effects on the legitimacy of democratic systems, Olsen argued.
“Lots of people in Latin America and around the globe are actually trying to understand how to navigate this tension, feeling very much like economic growth has been fine, but it’s unequally distributed,” she said. “I think it has implications for people’s interest in waiting out the democratic experiment.”
Following Olsen’s presentation, a discussion segment began. López noted how conversations around human rights have an unclear relationship with corporations and emphasized the difficulties inherent in holding corporations to the same standards as states.
“The international human rights regime was based mostly for
state actors. That is one of the main challenges that current affairs in human rights is facing. Usually the way we think about human rights, state responsibilities, is that they are applied by treaties or other sorts of conventions,” López said. “In an international level, [corporations] have personhood, sort of, at least in human rights there’s a conversation about that.”
Olsen also remarked on how the paradigms of human rights advocates and corporations are drastically different.
“The human rights world writes about this as though there’s this story of corporate impunity. From a strategic management perspective, the world is a scary, risky place, and there are competitors, and regulators around every turn, and you are lucky if you survive another day,” Olsen said. “So, it’s just this complete
disconnect on how business leaders really perceive the world and how human rights advocates think of it.”
Du Bai ’26, who heard about the lecture through his political science class, appreciated Olsen incorporating a business perspective he had not been familiar with.
“Her points on business reactions to environmental, or just state regulations in general, and from the perspective of risk management methods, I think it’s very interesting to think about it, from the perspective of the business,” Bai said.
Ariana Rodriguez ’24, who majors in economics with an interest in developing countries, felt the talk was important in showing both the present issues and also ways forward.
“First, the widespread nature of the issue, I think, became clearer than ever,” Rodriguez said. “I also think that the content that was
shown also inspires a little bit of hope for remedy.”
Rodriguez also appreciated the collaboration between the two guest speakers.
“I thought it was so interesting, because we had two very amazing people that had different perspectives on the issue. So, we had [López], on the ground, hands on, directly part of the [Truth] Commission, and then we had Tricia Olsen, who had this big dataset, macro view of the issue,” she said. “I think they complemented each other very well.”
Lucas Romualdo ’24 saw the value in providing an international perspective on campus.
“I think the political sphere at Amherst, in a lot of ways, can be pretty American-centric, and I think it’s always good for students to see not only international politics and events, but also the impacts of that
on people, and how these people are reacting to that, and also the role that Americans and the American government, American companies, and American people play in those international events,” Romualdo said.
In ending the lecture, Olsen highlighted the widespread nature of corporate abuses and the role of protections in helping everyday people.
“One thing that I’ve realized when I was doing this research and I’ve been teaching about this: everyone has a business and human rights story in their families,” she said. “It might not be you, it might not be your parents, it might not be your grandparents, maybe it’s your great-grandparents, but think about what economic and/or human rights protections happened in generations past and how that shaped your ability to be in this room today.”
The Editorial Board
The Association of Amherst Students (AAS) will hold elections for AAS at-large Judiciary Council members and senators in each grade and transfer students on Thursday, April 27, 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. EDT. The students below have announced their candidacies for the election. Students who are interested in hearing from these candidates, or are interested in running but were unable to submit a candidate statement, should attend Speech Night on Wednesday, April 6, at 7 p.m. in Johnson Chapel.
Class of 2026
Claire Beougher
Hello everyone! My name is Claire Beougher, and I am running to be one of your AAS senators! I hail from the great state of Michigan, and I am a proud rower, baker, and sea shanty enthusiast! As a senator, I would work to improve the transparency and accountability of the senate, ensuring that the senate responds to all student concerns and addresses issues affecting our community in a timely manner. I would also seek to
support all student groups in their endeavors so that the Amherst community can continue to grow and thrive!
Simon Burnham
My name is Simon Burnham. I am running for AAS senate. A vote for me is a vote for you. The future is bright.
Phuong Doan
I’m Phuong Doan, a current senator, and I’m running for reelection. Look, we all know this year has been crazy for AAS, so I would help reshape AAS. That is why I will work to change the inner functions of AAS. I introduced an amendment to create a stricter policy for committee participation. As a member of the Transportation Committee, I’ve seen how unorganized certain parts of AAS can be, and I hope to change that. I also have been working alongside Senator Chloe [Yim ’26] with the Health Education Department to bring sustainable menstrual products to campus.
Nathan Lee
My name is Nathan Lee, and I’m a first-year student from Mont-
vale, New Jersey. My main goal is to boost community engagement. It’s rare events such as last Sunday’s City Streets that remind us of what potential the Amherst community has — events that are too few and far between due to budget and logistical issues. Sure, I’m humanities-minded and a high school debate alum like other senators. But at heart, I’m a math major, graphic designer, and ex-robotics team captain. I’ll bring a practical, calculated, yet personal mind that’s lacking in AAS but needed to solve this issue.
Tom Nash
I am running for Amherst senate for the class of 2026. During my first year at Amherst, I have seen all that Amherst has to offer; however, I have also seen the problems in the Amherst experience. As your class senator, I pledge to bring meaningful collaboration between different groups to better our class’s future. Amherst is a historically excellent institution, but we must take the required steps to continue our tradition of excellence. I look forward to working with different members of the Amherst class of 2026 community to better our experience moving
forward.
Thomas O’Connor
I am Thomas O'Connor. I believe that with the right people, AAS can be a force for good. I am the right person. Vote for me. Thank you all.
Martha Odhiambo
My name is Martha Achieng Odhiambo, but let’s stick to Martha for now. I am back as promised and hoping to gain your trust once again. I am running for senate not because I have figured out some magical concoction to make your college experience a utopia one, but because having spent the little time I have with y’all has made me realize the awesomeness we hold as a class and how much I want to help us stay stronger moving forward. I want to be able to create an environment where everyone feels free to explore their individuality.
Griffin Postley
My name is Griffin Postley. I have a vision for the future. I want to change the world. I want to be your senator. Vote for me.
Ayres Warren
Hi everyone, my name is Ayres! Serving on senate this year, I worked with Dr. Jones and Mr. Garner on the accessibility and hours of Keefe Health Center and Frost respectively. Post-pandemic it’s really important that all our spaces adapt to student needs and I’d like to use my time in senate to prioritize this aspect of student life. This past year has strengthened many of my connections with administration and I look forward to continuing this relationship to get things done! I’d be honored as your representative and can’t wait to see what more we can accomplish together!
Chloe Yim
Hi, my name is Chloe Yim, a current class of ’26 senator. Over the course of this year I have gained experience in improving senate to better suit student needs, whether it be through contributing to the new weekly AAS newsletter in the PR committee or working with new funding policies in Budgetary Committee. I will continue to fight for accessibility on campus through my senate project with Phuong Doan
Continued on page 4
Continued from page 3
’26 focusing on increasing menstrual products on campus. If elected I hope to focus on helping students navigate what feel like dramatic changes across the school by improving administration to student communication.
Class of 2025
Zane Khiry
Hi everyone! I’m Zane Khiry & I’m running for AAS. Over the past year, I’ve worked really hard to advocate for equity and justice on campus, and I’ve sat on numerous different committees. If re-elected, I’d like to continue this work and fight to make Amherst live up to its promise. Vote Zane Khiry to get the job done.
Hannah Kim
For the past 2 years, I’ve served our community through AAS as your senator — and I am excited to continue to do so. Last year, I stated 3 goals in my candidate statement: bridge the gap between students and the senate, foster stronger companionship in the senate, and host an annual Major Fair. I worked towards these goals by reviving the AAS Instagram, discussing and hosting four major AAS community events, and hosting the Major Fair this March. I am excited to continue nurturing a collective effort towards these goals and to continue to better AAS to better serve our community.
Isabella Malmqvist
I am an empathetic and experienced leader. Coming from a multicultural and multilingual background, I embody diverse perspectives and lead with empathy. At Amherst, I’m the founder and president of the Amherst College Chapter of the United Nations Association of the USA, secretary of the Reproductive Justice Alliance, and president of the French House. As your senator this past year, my perspective and leadership experience has motivated me to contribute with compassion and create projects with you in mind — like my reproductive & sexual health resource guide. I would be excited to further this mission as your senator next year!
Henry Pallensen
At its best, AAS is an organization that harmonizes student perspectives, creating campus initiatives all students feel invested in. At its worst, AAS is a petty bureaucracy that does little visible good for the student body. If reelected, I’d strive for the former. I’d continue working on the Public Relations Committee, increasing transparency and the visibility of AAS initiatives. Students often bemoan a lack of campus community/ traditions. AAS is a great vehicle to change that. School-wide game of assassin? Lip-Sync Battle? Mammoth Day — the Admin’s downplayed this, but come on. Anything Williams can do, we can do better.
Class of 2024
Taha Ahmad
For two years, I have organized shuttles with the transportation committee, met with the administration to revise the honor code, and adjudicated violations of the Student Code of Conduct as a member of the CSRB. Next year, if elected, I want to kickstart my new committee on Volunteerism and Social Impact by connecting student organizations with each other and with resources to ensure their long-term survival and expansion. As the President of the most active affinity group on campus [MSA], and of a new volunteer club, Habitat-for-Humanity, I have demonstrated skills in leadership, teamwork, and activism.
Eugena Chang
As a senator, I’ve been inspired by the passion of Amherst students for improving campus life. Alongside my fellow senators, we took action by organizing meetings with Val and surveying students on their dietary preferences and thoughts on the current rice options. This resulted in valuable feedback from nearly 400 students, informing Val’s purchasing decisions and leading to better rice options. Next year, I’m committed to continuing my role as a liaison between students and staff, working towards positive changes to campus. I look forward to using senate office hours to directly hear from students about their vision for campus.
Stephanie Choi
My name is Stephanie Choi,
and I am interested in representing the Class of 2024. Continuing my work as a senator would allow me to further fulfill students’ needs and celebrate our last year at Amherst. Advocating for better rice on the lighter side and securing funding for services like Grammarly Premium are just a few small ways to ensure that the Class of 2024 feels represented and supported by AAS. As a FLI Asian American, it would be an honor to be a part of the AAS senate and represent the Class of 2024.
Trevor Gasgarth
I am passionate about increasing communication between the Association of Amherst Students and the student body as well as enhancing social activities on campus. Communication is essential to ensure that the student voice is heard and that our needs are met. Furthermore, by increasing the number of activities on campus, we can create a more vibrant and engaging community. I am committed to creating more social events such as the rave from the fall of 2019. If elected, I promise to work tirelessly to improve our college experience and make our campus a more enjoyable and inclusive place.
Ankit Sayed
Hi, I’m Ankit, the current VP of AAS. When I joined the senate, it was a chaotic time, but I collaborated with other senators and the e-board to increase transparency and accountability in the bylaws. If
elected, I'll work to improve campus safety, promote public service, and beautify campus with study spaces and murals. While I have ambitious goals, I'm aware of external constraints. As others in senate can attest, I'm open to communication and always willing to listen to feedback. With a deep love for Amherst, I hope to earn your vote and continue serving our community through AAS.
Jeffrey Ma
Hello, I’m Jeffrey. You may know me as the previous secretary of the AAS. While I am no longer serving on the e-board of the AAS, I am still eager to serve the student body in other ways. I’m a doer and fixer — if you have issues or concerns, you can count on me.
Judiciary Council
Samuel Etienne ’26
My name is Samuel Etienne. As a prospective LJST and Philosophy double major, I find it fitting that I concern myself with matters of impartiality and justice here at Amherst.
My experience working under a civil rights attorney is one that influences me to this day. It instilled in me the imperative of pursuing fairness, equality, and justice wherever I can. This drive combined with a strong work ethic is what I will bring to the Judiciary Council.
If you give me your vote, I’ll do my part to foster a fair and transparent council. Thank you.
The Editorial Board
College Hosts Arbor Day Celebration
The college will be holding a Noon Hour Arbor Day Celebration in conjunction with the town of Amherst’s Public Shade Tree Committee on April 28. The event will host a speaker from the U.S. Forestry Service who will discuss recent “research on how the biology of trees change.” Following the discussion, a guided tour of “Amherst College Big Trees” in addition to
a tree planting.
Philosophy Hosts Discussion on Restorative Justice Professor of Philosophy Erin Kelly from Tufts University will give the final lecture in the philosophy department’s Forry and Micken Lecture Series on Racial Justice on Thursday, April 27. The lecture will focus specifically on the concept of restorative justice, specifically as it pertains to the redress of historically entrenched injustices.
Photo courtesy of Amherst College The college will celebrate Arbor Day on April 28.dents, I know a few names, but then a lot of them I don’t know so I say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ and they say, ‘Hi Mike.’ I say okay, I need to find out his name. I need to find out her name. Then I forget the next day, cause there are so many kids. It’s fun for me working here, I’m 65 years old, but I love being around the students. They make me feel young and happy. They make me happy. So I make them happy too.
Except where indicated by initials, all of the quotes in the profile are Riley’s. They have been lightly edited and rearranged to flow chronologically.
Working at Amherst
Caelen McQuilkin (CM): The first thing I wanted to ask you is, how long have you been working at the college?
Michael Riley (MR): I’ve been here for five years. I used to work at Amherst High School, across the way there, and I retired from there, and I saw an ad that said ‘part time job.’ I wasn’t ready to quit quite yet, so I decided to come over here and check it out. It’ll be five years in November — the Monday after Thanksgiving, I came here. And I love it here.
CM: What makes you love work-
ing here?
MR: It starts with my colleagues. And the supervisors are so amazing. I’ve never worked for anyone like that before. I was kind of nervous about it when I first came here. I knew how to clean already, but they showed me how they do it. It was totally different. I started out in a dorm, they hired to me to work the night shift. [Today], I work the second shift, 2 [p.m.] to 10:30 [p.m.]. But I needed training, so they started me in the dorms… James, and across the way to Tyler and Marsh. That was my start.
And then I finally came here. I came to the Science Center, and I started seeing people, smiling, waving, saying hi. And they responded back. Professors are awesome here. Our students are the best. Every time they gradu-
ate, I say, ‘When you graduate, I’m leaving with you. I’m gonna go.’ But then I meet first-year people, and I interact with them, and then I say, ‘Okay. I’m gonna wait four years until you leave, and then I’m leaving.’ They’re awesome, the students here are very awesome. They give me respect, they’re always speaking to me. I haven’t seen one that doesn’t speak to me.
In the science center, you see heads down, most of the time, typing on the computer. Doing their work. Sometimes they stop and get a break, and hang out with each other, and talk. But mostly, they are ‘bam.’ Banging it out, working hard… So that’s always awesome, that they take the time out. And, you know, sometimes they’re stressed — ‘aaghgh, I can’t do this, I’ve got a test, I’ve got a test’ — and I tell them, ‘This is what you signed up for. So go in there and do what you gotta do.’ I make them feel better about themselves, about doing their test, doing their theses or whatever they’re doing.
I like talking to them, you know, because I didn’t have the chance to go to college. And I have two daughters, one 20, and one 19. They’re both in college in Springfield, and also they’re working. So that’s awesome. I never got the chance, but I get to see them go. I’m always bragging with the kids here [about] them. How good they’re doing.
I’ve been here for five years, and know everybody. I don’t know names, but everybody knows my name. Everybody knows my name here. There’s so many stu-
[For example,] a girl came to me today. She said she was supposed to have an interview with someone, but they had left, and she couldn’t get in. So I let her in the office… I called the person up, and let her talk to them on my phone. And she appreciated it. That’s what I do for people. I just do things. I’m here for them when they need me. To put it this way: I protect the herd.
Growing up in Onanock, Virginia
MR: This is how I am. This is how I was brought up by my family in Virginia. My grandmother always told me, ‘It don’t cost nothing to speak. And just smile at someone.’ And when you smile at someone, they’re gonna appreciate you more, because they see that you are a very friendly and very caring person. So I took that with me through life. That’s my motto. Be happy, and see others be happy.
When I was younger, I always was the same way. In high school — same way. I made friends with everybody. And that was in the 60s … we had just become desegregated. White and Black people going to school together, so everybody was nervous. Like, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to go to school with no white kids, I don’t want to go to school with no Black kids.’ I got there, and bam, I made friends with everybody.
I guess high school was my greatest time. Because I got to interact with different cultures, different people. I was a class clown. In those things that are like ‘most likely to succeed’ and all that — I was ‘most friendly.’
I played football. I was on the football team, and I loved that. I loved doing that. So instead of college, I went to the military after. But still, when I go home to Virginia, a lot of my friends passed away but a lot of them are still there. And they can’t wait to see me come home. You know I had this nickname. All of the kids there had nicknames, but they don’t call them their nicknames anymore — except for me. Some people don’t even know my real name.
CM: What was the nickname?
MR: Frog Daddy.
(everyone laughing)
CM: Is there a story behind that?
MR: Yeah. I was on the football team. I got hurt, and I used to hop off the field. So that’s why they called me ‘frog.’ And a bunch of the girls said, ‘Okay, frog daddy.’ I said ‘Oh, wow.’ So every time I go home, ‘Frog Daddy! You’re home. How you doing?’ All that.
CM: Did you like the nickname?
MR: Oh yeah, I loved it. My daughters now, when they get mad at me, ‘FROG DADDY!’
(everyone laughing)
CM: That’s awesome.
MR: Then, after high school, I went to the military. Same thing — make them laugh. I made everybody calm. There were people that didn’t want to be there, just wanted to leave and run away.
‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘Just stick it out. This will be over soon,
Continued on page 6
Photo courtesy of Erin Williams '26 Mike Riley is a custodian at the college who most often works in the Science Center. In this staff spotlight interview, Riley shared stories from the course of his life, and reflected on how he has learned and used the kindness that so many know him for. Photo from Riley's high school yearbook. Photo courtesy of Mike Riley Riley has been called the mayor of the Science Center as some. Photo courtesy of Erin Williams '26Continued from page 5
and then you can go back to your regular training.’ That’s what I always felt, this will be over soon. The army made me kind of what I am today, also. Because in the army, you get to meet different people from all over.
I was in Germany for four years. It was the best time of my life there … we’d go out and train for combat. I didn’t like it. But I did it. But then I got the job — I was a warehouse worker delivering furniture to the dependents that married. When the soldiers were married, and they would have their families come over and move into apartments … whoever was working in the office, they would write a schedule out of what people needed. So me and the guys, we had to deliver it. We had to pick it up, put it on the truck, and take it where we had to go.
It was me and three German guys. I couldn’t speak German, they couldn’t speak English. But we all found a way to communicate together … just talk slow. I kind of learned a little bit of German.
MR: I moved up here in 1986. My brother lived here, and his wife and daughter … I wanted to come up on vacation. So I took off from my job in Virginia. I took off, and
came up for two weeks. It was in September. And oh my goodness … [My brother] just drove me around, showing me Pelham, all over. And I think, ‘It’s so pretty here.’ I said, ‘I’m not leaving.’ And so I called my job. ‘I’m going to resign. I’m not coming back.’ That was in ’86, and I’ve been here since.
I’m from Virginia, country, and there’s nothing like this. Nothing like this. [Living in Amherst], I saw people there, met people. [My brother] introduced me to some friends of his. And they became good friends of mine, over time. And before long, they were asking him, ‘Aren’t you Mike’s brother?’ He was here already for like twenty years.
I stayed with [my brother and his wife] for a couple of months, until I got my own place. And I met my wife there, because she was in apartments up the hill. I was downhill. I used to come to catch the bus. I used to have to pass by her house, and she asked me to come in for tea one day. So
I said ‘Okay.’ And we hit it off — I’ve been married for twenty three years.
And then in 2000, we bought a house in Springfield. That’s where we live now. We bought a house in Springfield, had our first daughter. And then we sold the house and moved to another house, had another daughter there … [my wife] had two sons already.
[When I first met them] one was
six, one was nine. One’s a court officer in Springfield, and one is a chef teacher in Franklin Tech in Greenfield.
The teachers [at Amherst High School] — awesome. Every year, [this theater teacher], he had some awesome musicals. Every year, he had it on my birthday, March 8th. So he’d say, ‘Mike, make sure you work on March 8th.’ I’d say ‘okay, I’ll be here. It’s my birthday, you know, but I’ll be here.’
So I went. And he said ‘bring your family with you.’ Every year — ‘Bring your family along with you, so they enjoy the show.’ They didn’t have to pay anything, just go in. So one birthday I went in, and I was outside cleaning. My daughters were like six or seven. And I was outside the auditorium. And she ran [out] ‘Mike, they want you onstage.’ I was like ‘what?’ ‘They want you onstage.’ So I went up there, and they said, ‘We just want to wish Mike a happy birthday.’ They had the curtain closed, and they opened the curtains. All the students that were performing were standing [onstage] and they had this big, long banner: ‘Happy Birthday Mike.’ And each one of them signed it. They gave me a cake, and flowers. I said, ‘Oh my goodness.’ I had tears. I couldn’t hold it. I love being around people. I’m a people person.
Other Passions
MR: When I’m home, I like to garden. Me and my wife will go out — we like to travel short distances, like Connecticut, down to the coast. We go up to Greenfield, we go to Vermont, to the Country Store. And we just do stuff together, when I’m not working. But most of the time I’m working. She says, ‘Where are we going this weekend?’ And I say, ‘I’m going to work.’
CM: What kind of things do you grow?
MR: I have the plants out there, on the windowsill. Those are my plants. But I grow — I have my little flower bed in the backyard. I grow tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, big tomatoes. Cucumbers, some-
times I go to the farm and get stuff. I don’t know what I have, I just put it there. Because when I was a kid, I was mostly living on a farm. And they would grow peanuts. Just having a garden, to see the garden grow, see the pretty things in there, and then you get to eat it before the fall comes.
MR: And I love to cook — this is what I do best — on the grill. I love being on the grill, even in wintertime, I’m out there.
CM: What do you usually grill?
MR: Meat. Chicken, burgers, fish. I have this little basket I put my fish in so it won’t stick to the grill. Ribs. Saturday, I grilled lamb. And that was so good. I’ve never had it on a grill. It’s better than putting it in an oven … it’s more flavorful. The flavors just pop out.
CM: Wow that sounds really good. Have you been cooking for a long time?
MR: Oh yes. Since I was a kid. I used to watch my grandmother and my aunts and my mother. I used to see what they do — just go in the kitchen and see what they were doing. My favorite dish is chicken and dumplings, because they roll out the dough, and cut it in squares. I still make that, now, to perfection. I got it down.
A lot of the other stuff, I wish I had learned more about. I can cook it, but it’s not like my mom’s or my grandmother’s. Except for my chicken and dumplings. That’s perfect. That’s the only thing. I can cook fried chicken or whatever, make mashed potatoes, but it’s not quite the piece that
they have.
[In the future] I wanna go home. I’m gonna go back to Virginia. I kind of miss my family, because I have three brothers there, and three sisters. They’re all in Virginia — my mom, aunts,
I came up for two weeks. It was in September. And oh my goodness... [my brother] just drove me around, showing me Pelham, all over. And I think, 'it's so pretty here.' I said, 'I'm not leaving.' And so I called my job. 'I'm going to resign. I'm not coming back.' That was in '86, and I've been here since.
uncles, cousins, nieces. Everybody’s in Virginia. Because my brother, he passed away two years ago. So, he left me here. He knew what he was doing, he left me in good hands. But we were here together for 20 years.
—Caelen McQuilkin ’24EEach week in Old News, I use a random number generator to select a year in the college’s history and take a look at The Student’s issue from this week in that year.
This week’s column delivers the oldest news yet: that of Amherst College on April 23, 1898. This era’s tight-knit, elite community of Amherst students, alumni, and families, and its position in the upper echelons of white Northeast society, was on full display in this edition of The Student. It features an assortment of college news with highly specific details of people’s lives, and reveals interesting information about the college’s academic and admissions programs at the time. And similarly to past issues, it includes specific writing on the role of The Student in the college community. According to the masthead, the paper then cost $2.50 for a year’s subscription, and 10 cents for one copy.
My research this week reminded me of the importance of one of my original questions: What is and is not represented in The Student? As recently as a couple of weeks ago, scholars presented their ongoing research on Amherst’s racial history and its ties to racist institutions and movements. Anika Lopes spoke last week about her work with Ancestral Bridges, which curated an exhibition currently in Frost Library of artifacts related to the historic lives of Black and Afro-Indigenous Amherst residents and college employees. This 1898 issue of The Student falls within the time period they are researching, drawing attention to how large pieces of Amherst’s story (and the individuals’ stories that make up Amherst) were excluded from the student newspaper. As I examined this edition of The Student, I could find only small traces of this historical context.
The last page of this edition of The Student reads like a brochure for the college and reveals some basic information about Amherst’s environ-
ment at the time. It includes a list of academic departments, among them various humanities, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Pali, rhetoric, biblical literature, logic and oratory, modern languages, a number of science departments, and hygiene & physical education.
This page also includes admissions information, including the requirement that applicants be sixteen years old. The policy noted that “graduates of certain Preparatory Schools are admitted on certificate, without examination.”
Tuition was $110 per year, and included “privileges of the Pratt Gymnasium free to all students,” and “the Pratt Athletic Field, five minutes’ walk from campus … the finest college field in the country.”
Advertisements
I counted: this issue of The Student included 107 advertisements, collaged among many ad-only pages. The ad pages are riddled with encouragement from The Student itself: “Our advertisers are reliable, do your business with them,” reads one sentence at the bottom of a page. “Our advertisers show their interest in The Student. Show your interest in them,” says another; “You will advance your own interests by mentioning The Student,” proclaims the last.
Some of the ads were more local than others. Amherst House, for example, marketed its space for student event rental. “During the season of 1897-98,” it promised, “special attention will be given to College and Fraternity Banquets.” Henry H. Tuttle and Co. advertised “spring style” shoes: “Newest shades. Newest shapes. $4.00 and up.” An Amherst town dentist noted that their services included “Ether and nitrous oxide administered when desired.” One very vague ad simply read, “The boys all patronize ‘John’ for peanuts and all kinds of fruit in season.” I can’t speak to who John was, or why all the boys patronized him for peanuts and all kinds of fruit.
Businesses in Springfield and Northampton also placed ads in The Student, including the Springfield Photo Engraving Company, and the newspaper The Springfield Republi-
can, which still handles the printing of The Amherst Student today.
Perhaps most interestingly, medical and law schools such as Boston University and New York University placed simple-text ads encouraging Amherst undergraduates to apply to their programs. NYU boasted both day and night law school programs, each for a fee of $100 per year.
All this ad space had a cost — a later page noted that “owing to lack of space” in the pages, The Student would delay coverage on a few new resolutions from meetings and reports of sports seasons.
The Student reported on the Easter tours of both the Senior Dramatic Company and the musical clubs, each of which traveled around New England, New York, and New Jersey to different theaters and social clubs to much acclaim. According to The Student, the Dramatic Company’s performance of the comedy “All the Comforts of Home” was “without doubt the most successful ever given by Amherst students.” The glee, banjo, and mandolin clubs also received rave reviews on their tour. Descriptions of the tours emphasized the elite circles that Amherst families belonged to. On the Dramatic Company’s tour, wealthy patronesses were listed in each town that the students visited. In New York City, “a small informal reception was given to the members of the cast at [a] home … on Fifth Avenue, at which many prominent young society ladies were present.” The reception included an informal dance and was hosted by “prominent and wealthy society ladies of New York and vicinity.”
The Student reported the death of Professor of Rhetoric Henry Allyn Frink, who had been absent from classes for some time due to illness. The article included much detail about Professor Frink’s health, citing that he had not been in the best health for a while but he had been fine until “he sustained a severe attack of ‘grip,’” a colloquial term for the influenza epidemic. Frink then sustained a number of other illnesses, each of which was outlined in The
Student, until his heart failed at 11:30 a.m. on March 25. “The many tributes to his scholarliness and Christian character which have been paid by his fellow professors, the students, and by his acquaintances and friends ... testify to the love and esteem in which he was held by all who knew him,” The Student reported.
The paper also reported that a second member of the graduating class of 1897 had passed away. John C. Johnson died of paralysis as he pursued a career as a high school teacher. “He won the love and admiration of all his pupils and his loss was probably felt by none more keenly than them,” his obituary read, “He was a young man of singular purity of character and of remarkable courage and hopefulness.”
The Editorial Board seemed to have fewer opinions and more shout-outs this week in 1898: congratulations to a new professor; well wishes to the traveling artists; encouragement to the baseball and track teams on upcoming competitions. They did, however, mention that this was the first issue under the purview of a new Editorial board.
The new board described its aims for the following year. They would “present in accurate and readable form the different phases of Amherst undergraduate life.” They aimed to publish for an audience of both undergraduates and alumni, and keep column space open for alumni, faculty, and students. “In these columns positive opinions upon all matters which affect the life of the College upon which an undergraduate may properly speak will be expressed,”
they wrote, “When acting as a critic The Student will invariably do so with the best of motives, never criticizing for the sake of criticizing, always seeking to treat debatable questions fairly and without prejudice.”
This edition of The Student also emphasized the strong Christian religion of Amherst at the time. Religious notes included a wide variety of events, including at least five different services, multiple classes, and class-specific prayer meetings.
A miscellaneous news section included detailed updates on alumni and student activities.
One senior was taking up a substitute teacher position at the local high school. All freshmen were expected to take their gym drill next week. President Merrill Edward Gates would soon embark on leave to Europe via an ocean liner, and his house would be occupied by Dr. H.P. Smith and family, who would move in “when Mrs. Smith arrives from Lakewood, N.J., which will probably be the first week in May.”
In academic news, “Jebbs’ ‘Introduction to Homer’ will be the collateral reading in freshman Greek this term,” and an Ornithology class had just been formed
The Student also announced that voting on new trustees was open to alumni. It published the candidates and an address to send votes to, emphasizing the importance of The Student to alumni life at the time.
Read the full article online at www. amherststudent.com
Liam Archacki ’24 and Sam Spratford ’24 Editors-in-Chief
“I’m probably an outlier on this particular question, but I think they’re going to get more and more capable. And what they cannot do may shrink. Maybe to nothing.” Eyes alight, Lee Spector, a professor of computer science and founder of the college’s Artificial Intelligence in the Liberal Arts (AILA) initiative, spoke before a rapt audience in Frost Library’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry.
The panel event at which Spector spoke, held on Feb. 20, centered around the implications of a popular new AI-powered chatbot, called ChatGPT, for the future of learning and teaching. ChatGPT has sparked widespread intrigue over its ability to instantly generate fluent and competent responses, in prose paragraphs, to almost any user-inputted prompt. It has drawn over 100 million users since its release in November 2022, who have used the AI to generate absurd poetry, full coding programs, answers to nearly any question you can ask — and far more.
Many commentators have cast the AI’s implications for academic writing in existential terms, with two different Atlantic articles declaring the software’s arrival “The End of High-School English” and the “death” of the college essay. Strong claims like these have been met with equally strong objections, fueling a wildfire debate over what the emergence of generative AI means for academic institutions, like Amherst.
While the February panel event focused on how AI could alter the future of academics, The Student’s conversations with Amherst faculty and students revealed broader, often philosophical, excitement and concern extending far beyond the walls of the ivory tower. As Spector, with a slight smirk on his face, put it in an interview with The Student, “A lot of the hand-wringing … about how it can be used to cheat seems pretty much completely beside the point.”
Many community members,
like Spector, touched on plagiarism and honor-code policies, but were more eager to consider how generative AI may reshape society at large — by making it easier to spread misinformation, by performing jobs once held by humans, and even by challenging our understanding of what it means to have a mind.
Many professors to whom The Student spoke suggested that the panic over ChatGPT as a cheating tool was unfounded, or at the very least misguided.
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Matteo Riondato said that he had already encountered a case of a student using ChatGPT to write code for an assignment they submitted. As a result, this semester, he decided to add a line about ChatGPT to his syllabus “to just make it explicit that this is not what we would like [students] to do.”
Nevertheless, he maintained that he was not too worried about students using ChatGPT to cheat, noting that comparable methods of cheating had already existed.
“For all I know, my students may be outsourcing their code-writing to someone else,” he said. “And is that really different?”
“It doesn’t introduce any new way of cheating that didn’t exist before,” he added. “Therefore, if you're really concerned about cheating, you should have already been concerned.”
Riondato was able to catch the ChatGPT cheater because the code the AI wrote was “far more complex” than anything discussed in the course. “Even cheating requires brains,” he remarked.
While the AI can offer cogent responses on just about any topic, much of the concern about ChatGPT’s potential as a tool to cheat has been concentrated in the humanities.
English Department Chair Christopher Grobe, whose research probes the nexus of technology and performance, explained that this is because professors “see ChatGPT producing a fluent paragraph of prose, and they [become] so overwhelmed by the fact that this model
can do one thing that they struggle to teach other people to do.”
Grobe, who sat alongside Spector at the panel in February, said that he has fielded many emails from educators who want to figure out what, exactly, the AI’s limitations are.
“There are some really key things that it can’t do,” he explained, noting that the current version of ChatGPT struggles to correctly use quotations and produce an interpretation of text — core skills emphasized in the humanities.
The reason for these deficits, Grobe said, lies in the way that generative AI like ChatGPT actually work, which he said is commonly misunderstood. “[People] think of them as databases or fact engines when really they’re like word prediction,” he said. “So people misunderstand them as having some relation to the truth rather than the arrangement of words.”
Riondato, who researches algorithms for knowledge discovery and machine learning, added that misconceptions about how ChatGPT works result, in part, from “gimmicks” of the user interface, like the fact that it responds to prompts in the first-person and
appears to “type” its answers. These features are intended to “capture user attention,” Riondato said.
When it came to the dangers of people taking what the AI generates at face value, Riondato and Grobe were in agreement. “This idea of sounding like someone who knows what they’re talking about, which, again, captures your attention, it makes you trust, as a user, what you’re reading,” Riondato said. “And therefore is very dangerous.”
Nevertheless, Grobe said he thought there were productive ways for students to use ChatGPT in their academic work. “What the current models are good at is generating a lot of variations on something,” Grobe said. “For some people, that could be a useful place to start when starting from a blank page feels scary for a writing task. I think what’s crucial is that it’s a starting point.”
The students whom The Student spoke to described a range of different interactions with ChatGPT.
Claire Holding ’26 said that she had heard of students using ChatGPT to “lighten the workload” by summarizing dense articles or performing other rote tasks — in other words, to “help burnout,”
rather than as a replacement for original work.
Spencer Michaels ’24 — a law, jurisprudence, and social thought major — has leveraged ChatGPT to automate some of his note-taking workflow. “Let’s say I’m reading Karl Marx, and he’s talking about the French Revolution,” Michaels explained, “I have a plug-in in my note-taking software that will write a summary about the [historical] event automatically.”
Multiple students echoed Grobe’s belief that ChatGPT can generate starting points for many different types of projects.
One of the students who works for Spector’s AILA initiative, Ashley Bao ’26, said she had used ChatGPT on occasion to generate Python code for her personal projects. “It’s pretty useful,” she said. “Sometimes I’ll use it to get ideas … for whatever I’m working on.”
Michaels also said that, when he sits down to write papers, ChatGPT helps him brainstorm and organize his thoughts from the comfort of his room (as opposed to the inconveniences of attending office hours). He’ll probe ChatGPT for
Continued on page 9
Continued from page 8 good questions about a concept, or ask it to remind him of the connections between authors. Though he admitted, with a laugh, that it’s rare to get a smart response, “It’s just nice having something to bounce off of.”
Some students, however, like Hedley Lawrence-Apfelbaum ’26, expressed concern about students using the software to cheat. “I think the danger is now that, obviously, people just use [ChatGPT] for all their work, which I don’t think is effective, but that people will do it anyways,” he said. He suggested that the college’s administration would have to adapt to the reality that students would make use of AI, and regulate accordingly.
The students were in agreement, though, that anyone who offloaded their original thinking to ChatGPT would ultimately be hurting themselves. “I feel like [using it this way] will wind up biting you in the ass at some point,” Holding said.
Beyond fears about plagiarism and the end of academic writing, ChatGPT’s emergence this winter has sparked energetic public discourse surrounding the technology’s possible effects on the job market. The prognosis is largely centered around white-collar workers, whose labor often involves writing and other forms of content-creation. Commentary ranges from the apocalyptic to the dismissive.
Alfeld maintained that the economic changes foreshadowed by ChatGPT are completely unprecedented. “What I find most worrisome is the uncertainty,” Alfeld said. “In the Industrial Revolution we went from, you know, 80 percent of people being farmers to four percent-ish. But in doing so, it’s not like we ever had 70 percent unemployment.”
Alfeld thinks that, with the speed that AI is developing, and the tendency of culture and law to lag behind technology, we could enter a period where certain jobs start instantaneously becoming obsolete. “If that happens, we’ll need severe
societal change,” he said.
To this latter point, Spector expressed what is perhaps the “unreasonably optimistic” hope that if and when ChatGPT wreaks havoc on the white-collar labor market, it will mobilize more equitable economic policies. “Arguably, for over a century, people have tried to confront these questions and to say, ‘What should be the basis for material support for people?’” Spector said. “If the disruption is universalized, perhaps we’ll do a better job figuring out how these things work.”
Like Alfeld, Spector emphasized the “massive” disruptive potential of these technologies for the economy, and he reiterated that the pace of their development will soon make their current shortcomings irrelevant.
ChatGPT threatens the future of our economy, there are also imminent hazards posed by its current vulnerability to bias and misinformation. For Riondato, these concerns are far more pressing than its potential for college-level cheating. For one, he explained, “it’s possible that search engines — companies like Google and Microsoft — will adopt it and incorporate it in their search engine interfaces.”
One problem with this, he said, is that generative AI like ChatGPT are currently susceptible to highlighting inaccurate information, if it’s in the datasets on which the AI is trained. This will be compounded, Riondato added, if different AI-powered search engines begin “feeding off of” each other’s false information.
Riondato was also concerned that AI-powered search engines would reduce the diversity of information available. “My worry for something like ChatGPT is that it will limit you to what you [now] find on the first page,” he said. “And not only that, it will limit you to what the company running the model will decide that you should know or which. We benefit much more from an informed public that is exposed to a variety of points of view.”
In terms of how to move forward, Riondato emphasized the importance of learning how best to
use ChatGPT and other generative AI. “Like any tool can be used well or badly, and for positive or negative things,” he s aid. “But I feel like it’s a kind of tool that we haven't learned yet how to use.”
To this end, he pointed to the importance of developing regulations to mitigate the harmful effects that misuse of AI could have on society, comparing ChatGPT to a car. “There are very strong regulations about what a car is and what it’s supposed to do and how it’s supposed to react in some situations,” he said. For instance, he recommended considering regulations on “how [AI like ChatGPT] are supposed to answer some questions, or refuse to answer some questions, and how diverse the answer should be.”
Alfeld, though, pointed out that these flaws are by no means unique to computers. “It’s wrong sometimes; it makes very silly mistakes,” he said.
“[But] do you want to dig through all the silly things students have ever said?” Alfeld countered. “When you talk to ChatGPT, there’s this bizarre feeling [for] many, many people that there’s an intelligence on the other side.” With his characteristic irony, Alfeld suggests that our dismissive attitude toward the “stupidity” of ChatGPT is perhaps motivated by our anxiety to differentiate our own minds from computers.
Whether or not ChatGPT and AI technologies like it are equivalent to human minds, this “bizarre feeling” means that no conversation about regulation can escape these existential questions. Nina Aagaard ’26 noted that, as the technology becomes more ubiquitous in content-creation, the college, and society at large, should make it a norm to cite when ChatGPT’s words are being used. “It’s creating work that needs to be cited … as a source in the same way that a peer-reviewed article would be,” Aagaard said, even if it’s not “original” in the same way that individuals’ words are.
Some aspects of successful regulation go beyond merely imposing a rule. Alfeld, for instance, thinks it's crucial to disincentivize students from using ChatGPT to by-
pass intellectual labor. “Right now, students can spend 20 hours on a paper and get an A-minus, or they can spend 20 minutes and get a B,” he said, emphasizing that it won’t be long before that gap closes even more.
Alfeld has found an argument that has worked to modify the incentive structure for his intro CS students. Although ChatGPT is “reasonably good” at writing simple code, Alfeld notes that students simply “copy-and-pasting” code will end up having only basic skills that are increasingly undesirable in the job market. “If you do that [copy and paste] why would anyone ever hire you?” he retorted. “The alternative is they give it to an AI [who will do it for free].”
Many others agree that regulations at the campus-level should aim at cultivating thoughtful users of ChatGPT, rather than banning the technology outright. Much of this happens at the level of faculty-student relationships, as Alfeld described. AI and the Liberal Arts (AILA) is hoping to create more venues for these exchanges on campus, according to Spector, who sponsors the club. “I think that it’s particularly important that people … who have deep knowledge in many different ways of viewing the world talk to each other to figure this out,” he said. “People should not feel like this is out of their control, and should stand up and talk to each other about what their concerns are, what their hopes are.”
The question of campus-wide regulations is intimately connected with the broader social implications the technology will have. For Spector, the most powerful thing Amherst can do to spearhead the behemoth process of regulating these technologies is to push back against the monomania of corporations and tech giants by setting a standard of nuanced, interdisciplinary discourse. “I have zero confidence that the narrowly technically educated people at the core of the big AI companies are going to do the right thing,” he stated. “That is not the way to a healthy future.”
Computing Answers
Every discussion about ChatGPT between The Student and campus community members was underlain by certain philosophical anxieties — about what it means for a computer software to write fluently, and perhaps, what it means to be human at all.
This question hung in the air of Red Room on the evening of April 13, where Alfeld spoke at an AILA-sponsored panel event about the future of AI in warfare. As his co-panelists, two big names in the legal political field of AI regulation, decried the brutality of AI’s military applications, Alfeld scanned the crowd full of his students. When the Q&A portion began, his poker face began to fall away.
Andy Arrigoni Perez ’24, a computer science major, approached the microphone with a question directed at Bonnie Docherty, Human Rights Watch expert on autonomous weapons systems, or “killer robots.” He pushed back against her view that systems should be banned, citing the possibility that AI technologies could make warfare more humane by eliminating decisions motivated by anger or fear.
Docherty resolutely shut him down, maintaining that any delegation of life-or-death decisions to AI is a degradation of human dignity. Right on cue, Alfeld interjected. “I’ve seen AI show more empathy than some people I know in real life,” he retorted.
In his office, where the doors are always open to the chatter of the CS lounge, Alfeld reiterated what these conversations are exposing about the “supreme arrogance of humanity.”
“We, as a species, have always talked about what it means to be human … and we don’t have a universally-agreed upon definition,” he said. When people insist that AI lacks compassion, originality, or dignity, Alfeld thinks it’s something like a self-soothing mechanism.
“These computers are deterministic machines,” Alfeld said, “and so there are all sorts of questions at play if we say that they can be intelligent.”
According to Professor of Philos-
Continued on page 11
Valentine Dining Hall is a staple of Amherst students’ lives, but we’re not the only ones enjoying meals there. Often, I’ll look to my left or right expecting to see a college student, and am instead greeted by a much younger face. These Val kids, as I’ve taken to calling them, are almost always the children of professors. This week, Maya (7) and Asher (12) told me about Val from a new angle. Literally. Special thanks to the two of them for their humor and thoughtfulness, and to their equally wonderful parents, Associate Professor of History Vanessa Walker and Associate Professor and Chair of History Adi Gordon, for facilitating this interview. It has been slightly edited for length and clarity.
Eleanor Walsh ’25: Maya and Asher, it’s so nice to meet you guys. Will you remind me how old you are before we get started?
Maya: Seven.
Asher: And I am 12.
Eleanor: OK! I’m 20. So, I think your parents filled you in, but I wanted to ask you both some questions about eating at our dining hall, Val. I want to hear what you both think about it, because I think it might be a little different than how students [at the college] view Val. How often do you guys come to the dining hall?
Asher: Not that often, but —
Maya: It’s a special treat.
Vanessa Walker: Usually once every two weeks, I would say, is that right?
Asher: Ish.
Eleanor: And how do you guys feel when you go to the dining hall?
Maya: I feel, like, super excited.
Asher: Usually I’m happy. Free food, you know.
Eleanor: Totally. And when you go there, do you usually have dinner, or do you have other meals?
Maya: Usually we have dinner.
Asher: I’ve been once for breakfast, and a few times for lunch, but mostly dinner.
Eleanor: When you guys go to Val, do your parents pick out your food for you?
Maya: We get to pick out our own food.
Eleanor: You do? OK, what stations do you guys go to?
Maya: We usually always go to the pizza.
Asher: Yeah. It’s our first stop. We get in, we get plates, we go pizza!
Maya: It’s the number one. But I always, I usually get Lucky Charms, unless my parents say, “If you want dessert you can’t eat Lucky Charms.” That’s what they say.
Eleanor: That sounds like a pretty fair deal. What’s your favorite kind of pizza to get?
Maya: Oh… I just eat normal —like, cheese — pizza. Because the other kinds I don’t really like.
Asher: I like barbecue chicken when they have it.
Eleanor: Oh yeah, that’s a special treat when they have it. And where do you guys like to sit once you have your food?
Maya: Well, I prefer one of those that has cushions on the backs of chairs ’cause they’re better for my back. My back is like “ouchie, ouchie!” when they don’t get one of those.
Asher: Wherever’s open, I guess.
Eleanor: Yeah, it’s usually pretty busy in there, at least for me. Do you guys feel like it’s busy when you go in? Or is it a little less —
Maya: Yes.
Asher: Sometimes it’s not busy, but I remember one time I was waiting in a line for maybe 10 minutes for a
burger.
Eleanor: Yeah, and then you start to ask, is it worth it for this burger?
Asher: And then I decide, yes, it’s worth it.
Eleanor. Exactly. Do you guys have something you’ve eaten at Val that you didn’t like?
Asher: I think their cottage cheese isn’t the best.
Eleanor: I think that’s fair. I don’t think I’ve ever tried it, so I’m going to trust your judgment, Asher. What do you guys usually get to drink when you go?
Maya: I usually used to mix bubbly water and lemonade. Or was it apple juice? Or was it orange juice? I don’t remember. It was one of the fruit juices.
Asher: It depends what my mom lets us have. [Vanessa laughs]
Maya: Yeah, but when I get lucky I usually go for the — [incoherent]
Vanessa: Yeah, I just don’t let you mix, like, lemonade and milk together.
Eleanor: You’re a tyrant!
Vanessa: I am, I am.
Eleanor: When you guys are in Val, is there anything that you find weird or funny or unusual?
Asher: Not really.
Maya: Well, one thing I find funny about Val is the big boat that drapes over. I think it’s very weird.
Eleanor: You know what, Maya, I do too. I sometimes sit under it and I keep looking up at it the whole time.
Maya: That’s happened to me.
Eleanor: Do you guys usually sit in that boat room, or do you sit somewhere else?
Asher: Usually in the boat room I think.
Maya: But when we get unlucky we have to sit in the laundry, or the place next to the TV.
Eleanor: If you’re unlucky you have to sit in the laundry?
Maya: Like the tall chairs.
Eleanor: Oh yes, the high tables. OK, when you’re in Val, what kinds of people do you see?
Maya: Well sometimes Parker, who’s our neighbor.
Asher: Sometimes we bring our friends and have dinner with them, but often it’s just our family.
Eleanor: And what about the people who you’re not eating with but you see around Val, like the students or the people who work at the college — do you ever talk to them?
Maya: Mostly no.
Asher: Mostly no.
Continued on page 11
Continued from page 10
Vanessa: Maya, you talk to them sometimes, right?
Maya: But not usually.
Eleanor: Do you guys like to get dessert when you’re there? What’s your favorite dessert?
Asher: I usually get whatever dessert they have out. Sometimes I get ice cream if I don’t like it.
Maya: [giggling to Asher] Stop tickling my armpit.
Eleanor: Do you guys ever go upstairs or do you always stay downstairs?
Asher: For the most part, downstairs.
Maya: Once I went upstairs.
Eleanor: What did you think of it?
Maya: It was kinda weird because my dad kept on going downstairs and it took forever for him to come up again. So, like, literally whenever I heard footsteps coming up upstairs I’d look over and then be like,“Oh.” I was like, “Come on, come on, come on!”
Eleanor: Do you think of Val like a restaurant or more like eating at
your house?
Maya: Restaurant.
Asher: Kind of a mix.
Vanessa: Maya, can I tell her what you said when we drove by there during the pandemic?
Maya: Yeah.
Vanessa: During the pandemic, obviously we couldn’t take kids into Val, so we drove past Val one day and Maya said, “Oh! I love that restaurant! Why don’t we go there anymore?!”
Eleanor: That’s so great. Do you remember how old you were when you guys first went there?
Maya: I was… three?
Vanessa: I think you were a baby, Maya, since you’ve been going there since you were born.
Maya: But, well, my first memory is…
Vanessa: Oh, first memory is very different. But we took you there when you were really little. We took you in your stroller sometimes.
Maya: My first memory was when I was 3 years old.
Asher: I have no idea.
Vanessa: Asher’s been going there since we moved here, so since he was 3 or 4.
Eleanor: Wow, that’s a long time, guys. Do you think you feel any differently about it as you’ve grown up?
Asher: I think now I kind of take it for granted.
Eleanor: I think sometimes I do that too. Well, that’s all my questions, but do you guys have anything you want to say or ask, about Val or in general?
Maya: I do.
Eleanor: OK, go for it, Maya.
Maya: I really like Val because you eat what you want. [Asher gives a thumbs up]
Eleanor: It’s so true. It’s really great. Well, thank you guys so much. I’ll say hi if I see you in Val sometime.
— Eleanor Walsh ’25Continued from page 9
ophy Joseph Moore, who is currently teaching a course on the philosophy of mind, the emergence of AI like ChatGPT has renewed long-standing debates in the field over what it means to have a mind.
“Speculation about the possibility and implications of artificial minds goes back at least into the 19th century, but reflecting on ChatGPT and other emerging AIs can make these issues relevant, and sharpen them,” he wrote in an email statement to The Student. “Not only do we confront the gold standard question of whether any artificial system can have ‘general intelligence,’ but these AIs press us to reflect on what
we mean by this and other central notions bound up in our concept of mind.”
“And of course, philosophy can weigh in on more existential questions about what AIs—and the dreaded ‘singularity’— might mean for the future of mankind,” Moore added. “People range from being cautiously optimistic to completely apocalyptic about these larger questions.”
For his part, Riondato pushed back on the philosophical excitement surrounding ChatGPT’s emergence.
“I do think that most of the hype is definitely misplaced. I mean, none of these AI models has shown any kind of really revolutionary compo-
nent, in some sense. The development is following the same rate of progress that it has followed for the past 15 years,” Riondato said. “But it’s clear that it’s a better model than what we had before and in terms of producing a sequence of words that sounds like language.”
He also noted that humans, whose “brains have evolutionarily developed to search for patterns and search for meaning,” are sure to “find meaning in those sequences of words [produced by ChatGPT,]” even if the AI itself is just recreating trends in datasets.
Grobe, for his part, cautioned against being “seduced by the analogy between human intelligence and machine intelligence.”
At the college’s panel event on ChatGPT in February, Spector offered a more nuanced vision for how human and artificial intelligence may converge. He acknowledged the areas in which human intelligence is successful but models like ChatGPT are not — like, in “representing the world, and doing logical reasoning, and planning” — but he expressed doubt that these distinctions would exist for long.
“I would expect [these large language models] to be hybridized in the very near future,” Spector said, “so that we’re going to have systems that actually do model the world, that actually do reason and plan, on top of doing this ‘autocomplete’ function.”
In an interview with The Student, Spector expanded on his belief that it’s close-minded to neglect the parallels between human and machine intelligence — even precluding any further advances in AI technology.
“I’ve, for a very long time, understood what happens in humans, in human brains and minds, to be a kind of computation,” he said. “But people often think that sort of denigrates the human mind, that it’s ‘merely’ computation. I would flip that and say it means computation is a lot cooler than we thought. Computation can fall in love. Computation can imagine other worlds. Computation can write mind-blowing poetry. Computation can feel pain.”
No matter what classes you’re taking this semester, chances are high that conversations about AI have infiltrated your classrooms. While our cultural zeitgeist has been preoccupied with the rise of AI for decades, the advent of ChatGPT has made previously hypothetical discussions eerily tangible, particularly in academic circles. One in five college students nationwide has used ChatGPT to complete assignments. As such, it is necessary not only for our community to reflect on the changes ChatGPT will bring to our academic culture, but also for the college to lay the groundwork for regulation and adaptation.
After all, if programs such as ChatGPT can create an equivalent product to the work of actual students with none of the time and hassle, won’t that only further devalue the humanities, a discipline already in a precarious position? Is there even a need for human writers anymore? Perhaps this worry doesn’t seem so realistic in the present — the Editorial Board would argue that using ChatGPT in its current iteration would only be a detriment to one’s academic achievements. But as the writing and synthesizing capabilities of AI become stronger in coming years, it is necessary for us to reflect on what we value in the learning process and ensure that the productive capabilities of AI do not overshadow those values.
Take, for instance, academic writing. It may be tempting to use ChatGPT to complete essays, but in doing so, one completely bypasses the process of writing, much more important to a liberal arts education than the literal completed assignment. The value in human writing is not only the capacity for creativity and originality but the time and effort put in: the hours spent struggling with the material, discussing ideas with others, and synthesizing those ideas to form an argument. To let ChatGPT do that is not only to ruin your capacity for critical thinking and originality but to lose fundamental aspects of the student experience.
To some extent, therefore, in order to prevent our work from becoming indistinguishable from the algorithm’s, it is necessary for Amherst as a whole to undergo a cultural academic shift: Amherst classes should require us to be better than ChatGPT.
Too many writing-based classes at Amherst focus on the product of writing, rather than the process itself — that is to say, these classes involve assignments that require writing without incorporating the necessary analytical reasoning skills that will improve student writing in the long-
term. This has three two consequences: firstly, it reduces the paper-writing process to its few pages of final product instead of a synthesis of ideas in collaboration with existing debates, nullifying the possibility for interesting and original thought. Secondly, it encourages procrastination and lastminute completion of assignments — creating the stressful environment that drives students to use ChatGPT in the first place.
One solution is for classes to de-emphasize writing projects in favor of oral assignments. A shift towards oral exams and presentations could more effectively teach students how to communicate ideas clearly and formulate arguments in real time. This could also be a greater emphasis on discussion in even lecturebased classes, facilitating student engagement with peers. Rather than having classes centered around writing four or five major papers over the course of the semester or 10 mini-response papers, classes with one or two major papers that focus on the process of creating those papers could be much more effective in fighting the influx of ChatGPT product-oriented writing. We acknowledge that this argument works better in some disciplines than others — classes in STEM departments, such as computer science, are often forced to decenter discussion due to the structure of their discipline. Rather than making any finalized arguments ourselves, we call upon each department to rethink the structure of their own classes in response to ChatGPT.
These responses can be positive as well. From generating practice problems for effective studying to helping draft the wording for emails and cover letters, ChatGPT could bring many benefits to students. But in order to maximize these benefits, students must have resources that can guide safe usage of ChatGPT, encouraging us to explore rather than live in fear of the dystopian AI.
Whatever decision the college makes in regards to regulating usage of ChatGPT, its relevance to our lives shows no signs of waning. The Editorial Board believes that the administration must show their dedication to this issue, considering its potential ramifications on education at Amherst and nationwide. Most importantly, academic departments need to take active steps to preserve the learning process and combat the dangers of AI usage.
Unsigned editorials represent the views of the majority of the Editorial Board — (assenting: 13; dissenting: 0; abstaining: 4).
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Like many Amherst students, I often use Trader Joe’s-brand snacks and frozen meals to supplement my poor nutritional intake from Val’s pierogi or tequila lime chicken nights. I must admit: I am a Trader Joe’s lover. Its snacks aren’t too pricey, and its frozen meals are incredibly flavorful in comparison to Val. It also provides me with a breadth of foods that I otherwise would only have access to at a restaurant.
However, the same variety of flavors is also sometimes accompanied by questionable product design and culturally inaccurate recipes. In my semi-monthly special snack trips to the store, I find myself walking around the aisles, apprehensively staring at packages of culturally-coded snacks, and wondering how appropriate the descriptions are. I’ve often stopped to stare at the “Philly Cheesesteak Bao Buns” in half-disgust, half-curiosity. As I
eat my Trader Joe’s snacks, I can’t help but feel like I’m complicit in their lack of cultural respect, understanding that these foods are not truly representative of the meals they’re inspired by.
One of the snacks I’ve suspiciously peered at through the years are the “Giant Peruvian Inca Corn Snacks.” For starters, this name reads like a nonsensical string of words. Are the corn snacks giant, or is the corn itself?
Or is it Peru that is giant? Is it Incan or Peruvian? Why couldn’t they choose one or the other?
Why are the Incas relevant to the name of the snack?
I grew up eating fried white corn at Peruvian restaurants, where it is served as an appetizer and as a side for ceviche.
It’s crunchy, salty, delicious and filling enough to keep you satisfied before a meal while being light enough to not fill you up like bread does. Fried white corn is traditionally served hot, and whenever it gets cold, it’s almost inedible — which is why a cold
version of the snack was alarming. These concerns caused me to avoid picking this snack off the aisle, until a bout of curiosity and generous thinking made me want to try it out last week. Perhaps I was also hoping that this snack might provide me with a little piece of comfort.
When I opened the bag, I was hit with the realization that these snacks were oddly...puffed? Whereas normal fried corn is browned by toasting over a fire, this corn seemed to have a fluffy quality to them. When I tried them, I discovered that they were their own type of delicious, but that they had nothing to do with the hot snack I enjoyed as a child.
After finishing the bag, I looked at the back and saw the most gut-wrenching little blurb, detailing the origin of the bag: the “Sacred Valley of the Incas, Urubamba” — a direct quotation from Wikipedia. Apparently, “you no longer need a llama to hit the high trails to track down” fried white corn, which actually exists
in every single Peruvian restaurant that has ever existed.
This rant is by no means comprehensive to the issues that surround Trader Joe’s borderline-appropriation of foods. Neither is it
the most pressing issue that needs to be written about. However, there is an inescapable, conflicted feeling that comes with eating these snacks as a college student looking for a piece of home.
I’ve attended a predominantly-white institution (PWI) for both my college and high school years. And being a Bangladeshi woman of color at PWIs comes with its fair share (as most BIPOC will know) of microaggressions.
This manifests in a couple of different ways. At Amherst, I’ve been called “Snigdha” twice, referring to my dear friend Snigdha Ranjan ’25, a fellow international student — but from India, not Bangladesh. Both times this occurred and I pointed out the mistake, it was justified with, “Oh I’m so sorry, you two look so alike.” But I don’t know how much I bought those arguments — beyond the numerous differences in our facial and bodily features, Snigdha has blue hair. Another time I was called
“Muntaha” by an otherwise nice Community Safety Officer (CSO) — referring to Muntaha Mamun ’25 — who at the very least is Bangladeshi.
At the very least, members of the Amherst community have pinned down my identity in the Indian subcontinent. In high school, my friends of South Asian, West Asian, and North African descent seemed to be considered essentially interchangeable to a laughable degree — including one extraordinary moment in which the health center gave my daily medication to my friend, mistaking her Iranian features for my own.
It’s as funny as it isn’t. These interactions are mostly harmless — easily laughed off and really only brought up again for interesting party stories — but the above instance of my actual life-saving medication
being given to someone else reveals that there are so many instances where this racialized “face-blindness” is incredibly dangerous. We could note the implications on an even greater scale: There are too many examples of the American justice system misidentifying perpetrators and sending innocent BIPOC people to prisons — too many wrongful convictions based on the inability of white people to distinguish POC faces.When white people can’t tell BIPOC faces apart, it can be life-threatening.
I don’t think that this mis-identification is necessarily racist, at its core. When I first came to the U.S. as a young teenager, having only lived in a homogenous South Asian country all my life, I found it difficult to distinguish white faces from one another at first — for the simple reason that I had never seen
white features before. Part of the inability to distinguish POC faces stems from a similar innocent unfamiliarity — but how long can we allow people to hide behind the excuse of unfamiliarity? And what does it say about you, that you’re so caught up in your bubble that even in a diverse country like the U.S., you’re unable to distinguish BIPOC faces?
Conservative and racist rhetoric loves to accuse BIPOC of being obsessed with the color of their skin, that they can’t see people beyond race. But I can assure you that many of us don’t want to be aware of our race — we are forced to become aware when we enter a society that renders us an other. We develop a “dual consciousness” of sorts. That awareness starts at a different age for everyone — for me, I was lucky enough to not have to actively think about skin color until I
came to the U.S. But that realization, and the resulting constant awareness of the way white society watches you, is exhausting.
Every negative interaction I’ve had with someone, every random glare from a stranger, I’ve had to ask myself, is it because I'm Brown? And most certainly I am overthinking, except I have had enough negative interactions — enough yells on the street and “Why is your name so weird?” and “Oh, wooooow your English is so good I’m so impressed” — that I’ve become distrustful of people. And honestly, I think that my experiences as non-Black POC have been for the most part innocuous; I know there are many people at Amherst who’ve had much worse experiences.
And that’s why I’m a little
Continued on page 14
Continued from page 13
wary of the term “microaggression:” All these interactions are “micro”-aggressions, until they’re not. Until your professor gives you the wrong grade, having mixed you up with your friend. Until you’re constantly interrupted during discussion sections, with your classmates feeling nothing wrong with it. Until you realize that the theoretical academic conversations the people in your classes are having are real life matters to
you. Until you’re forced to assimilate and give up aspects of your identity for sheer survival. Until sitting in an Amherst College dormitory, you are told that you were “most probably an affirmative action” admission, so don’t get too full of yourself.
My parents have always told me that the way to deal with microaggressions is to ignore them, (which is, admittedly, mostly what I end up doing) but I think a lot of people don’t realize how “macro” these “micro”-aggres-
sions can become, how even these small comments and interactions can build up over time to threaten your sense of self and identity. Most people I know, myself included, often dismiss the microaggressions we face in our day to day life, not wanting to blow what are often harmless comments out of proportion. But in doing so, we become complacent in the ways society treats us and — excuse my cliché wording here — part of the problem. To say that microaggressions
are only done by white people is purely false: Internal racism within POC communities is very real, and I’ve witnessed microaggressions from white and non-white people alike. If we don’t call out the microaggressions done to ourselves, how can we be allies and call out the microaggressions done to others?
The popular advice for avoiding making microaggressions is for us to “interrogate our biases,” explicit and implicit. I don’t disagree — but I think hand-in-
hand with that comes the need to develop a culture of care — to value the individual for who they are. On this campus, I want to be seen as just another Amherst student, not just as a Brown person or international student or Bangladeshi or low-income student or any of the -isms and categories we are attached to. We are all here on this campus to learn and grow and hopefully succeed together — no need to make this journey even harder for ourselves and others.
by Quinn Nelson ’25
1 Muscle paired with the bicep
2 Day before Domingo
3 Mortal lover of Aphrodite
4 PC alternative
5 Politician Roosevelt
6 Supermarket sandwich section
7 Cubs and White Sox org.
8 “Jingle Bells” contraction
9 Devil, Sp.
10 Earhart's specialty
11 “Zip-A-Dee-___-Dah”
12 Possess
19 Quarterback Manning
20 What the Mad Hatter served
On Monday, April 24, actor and writer John Cho spoke in Johnson Chapel to a packed audience, many of whom had arrived as early as 30 minutes prior to secure a spot. The event drew students from throughout the Five Colleges. He discussed his path to acting, the evolving role of Asian Americans in cinema, and the place of Asian stereotypes during his hour conversation with Pawan Dhingra, who is assistant provost, assistant dean of the faculty, and a professor of American studies.
The event, titled “Breaking Barriers in Hollywood: A Conversation with John Cho,” was introduced by President Michael Elliott, who credited Tony Chan ’72 and the Asian American Studies Initiative Fund for sponsoring the event.
Cho is best known for his role as Harold Lee in the “Harold & Kumar” film franchise, but he also starred in the rebooted “Star Trek” franchise and the films “American Pie,” “Columbus,” and “Searching.” He has also written a New York Times-bestselling children’s book, “Troublemaker,” published in 2022.
Asked about how other Asian American representation influenced his decision to start acting, Cho noted that he had never considered acting before watching Asian American actors in a production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” while attending the University of California, Berkeley. He had only been hired to tear down the set immediately after the performance, but he found himself inspired to begin his own journey in acting.
“I literally didn’t think that Asian Americans could be on TV and in film,” he said. But, like the four-minute mile or other perceived impossibles, he understood that he could do the same once he saw their work. He quickly moved from stage to screen. Soon after, he landed his first major role in a blockbuster film: “American Pie” (1999).
While working on the first “Harold & Kumar” film, Cho said, he realized that the project was different from other depictions of Asian Americans on screen. Before “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” premiered in 2004, Asian American stories had catered to white audiences. They featured a white protagonist and Asian American characters following the model minority trope, a trend so pervasive that Cho admitted he “thought [‘Harold & Kumar’] was a hoax.” Instead of contributing to the model minority stereotype, “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” shows two Asian men (Cho and Kal Penn’s Kumar, respectively) go on a turbulent, comedic quest to get burgers from the fast-food chain White Castle after smoking marijuana.
Cho noted that he puts a piece of himself in every role, asking himself what he would do in a given scenario faced by his character. What would he do if he was in a spaceship, for example, or if he wanted burgers after getting stoned? “I don’t have to imagine too hard on some of those,” he joked.
Dhingra and Cho then discussed the common narrative of escaping Asian culture as an evolution of the model minority myth. Cho argued that love is seen as separate from Asian culture in cinema, so it is portrayed as a good thing when characters leave their backgrounds. He also argued that the term “Asian American” is a useful political identity for organizing, but it holds little cultural significance, especially in film.
Cho’s talk also traced the changing inclusivity of the movie industry since the 1990s, when he started acting. Cho recalled the days of “breakdown sheets,” which outlined character traits that would be important to look for in an actor who would fill the role — the breakdown sheets would often specify whether the character could be played by an actor of color. More often than not, explained Cho, leading roles were explicitly restricted to white actors.
When asked to reflect on the driving forces behind the increased diversity of actors in the film industry, Cho responded, “The history of film has always been the history of technology.” New technology has allowed Hollywood to penetrate the global market, which has driven today’s cultural ideas in a way that allows Asians and Asian Americans to reach the highest echelons of achievement in the industry.
Cho also reflected on his own contribution to this shift in the film industry: “As far as my participation in [the shift], upon reflection, my contribution is … I helped create a space for Asian American men in particular that wasn’t there before.” He further elaborated, “When I was growing up, all Asian men were ‘other.’ I helped create an idea that Asian men could be ‘us.’ That’s as much credit as I’ll take.”
Cho was forced to reckon with the relationship between his race and his fame in 2020, during the pandemic’s early days when Asians
were increasingly being victimized by violent attacks across the country. “We can feel completely invisible, and fame makes you visible in a way that contradicts what your race does to you on a daily basis,” remarked Cho. “Then there’s some national event that makes us too visible. Then we’re punished or scapegoated,” he added, referring to the racist misconception that Asians were responsible for the Covid pandemic.
Dhingra pointed out that Asians are often applauded for working hard and finding success but then criticized when their success reaches a certain point. Cho responded that the model minority myth places Asians “next-in-line to be white.” He described this as a “dangerous liminal space” that leaves Asian Americans vulnerable to sudden changes in how they are treated by the white ruling class.
The discussion highlighted the importance of film as a medium that can help change stereotypes
and popular perceptions of Asian Americans. Cho remarked that he “[doesn’t] like to approach storytelling as a political tool, but having said that, it is, of course, plainly political,” adding, “The real power of storytelling is encouraging empathy.”
Since Cho majored in English during college, Dhingra asked him about the value that being a student of the humanities has brought to his life as an actor, writer, and musician. Cho credited his humanities education for his ability to empathize with others and navigate the world, but he encouraged students to “study what you want to study and figure it out later.” He emphasized that college is a time for exploration and that many people pursue careers unrelated to their major.
Dhingra’s final question was centered around Cho’s remark that he considers quitting acting every five years...
Read the full article online at www. amherststudent.com. John Cho highlighted how Asian American representation in the performing arts was essential to kickstarting his acting career. Photo courtesy of Evelyn Chi ’25On April 19, “Survivor” released episode seven of season 44. The episode was another great one in what is becoming a fantastic season. It was entertaining throughout and packed to the brim with the strategic dilemmas that “Survivor” fans love.
It also had emotional moments, like Carson struggling physically. He repeatedly threw up and was visibly weak throughout. This likely won’t have a longterm effect on his game, but his tears and trembles were tough to watch. During another emotional moment, Frannie was crying after Matt’s elimination. She had to sit and watch him fear for his “Survivor” life, and then watch him leave. Understandably, that took a toll on her.
Unlike Frannie, the Ratu four felt great about Matt’s elimina-
tion. Brandon, Jaime, Kane, and Lauren thought they’d cruise through the game with the Tika three (Carson, Yam Yam, and Carolyn) in their pockets. In modern “Survivor,” though, that never happens. Players are too individually motivated now and will do everything they can to put themselves in a winning position.
The Tika three are no exception. That group, who Yam Yam affectionately called “The Three Stooges,” is actually in a great spot — underestimated and trusted by both Ratu and Soka.
The contestants paired up to start the immunity challenge.
Carolyn immediately said she’d go with the ailing Carson, which was heartwarming. Carolyn has grown on me throughout the season as a player and person. She cares about her people and treats them well. She’s also not a bad strategist.
In the challenge, there were
five pairs: Carson and Carolyn, Yam Yam and Frannie, Heidi and Jaime, Brandon and Lauren, and Kane and Brandon. In the first section, Carolyn struggled mightily through a twisted, muddy net. This led to her and Carson’s exit from the challenge. The next section used planks to cross a rope bridge. The Yam Yam-Frannie and Heidi-Jaime pairings lost there.
The last part of the challenge was a classic pain tolerance and endurance test. Brandon, Danny, Lauren, and Kane stood between two walls with their feet perched on small footholds. The longer the challenge lasted, the lower the remaining contestants had to climb. The lower they got, the smaller the foothold. All four contestants performed admirably, but Lauren ended up winning the individual immunity necklace.
Back at camp, the Ratus planned to eliminate Frannie,
who they perceived as the biggest threat in Soka. In their minds, they had a stronghold on the game. They told Yam Yam, Carson, and Carolyn the plan and assumed it was a done deal. Ratu even told the other Soka (Heidi and Danny) their plan. Their confidence bordered on cockiness, which is often punished in “Survivor.”
In reality, the scheming was far from over. Now aware of the plan, Danny told Heidi about his idol and said he’d play it on Frannie. This would cancel the votes against her and eliminate the Ratu member of Soka’s choosing. Soon after, Heidi told Yam Yam and Carson about the idol. This was risky. Yam Yam is a walking source of drama — it’d be so easy to envision him running to Ratu and spoiling the plan. If Ratu knew about the idol plan, they could switch the votes to Danny or Heidi and send either one home. Danny recognized
this possibility and faced a dilemma — trusting an untrustworthy player or losing an ally.
In the end, Danny trusted Yam Yam. He played his idol for Frannie, which canceled out the six votes for her and sent Brandon home. All four Soka players had their jaws open and their eyes wide — the road to the end wouldn’t be as easy as they thought. Interestingly, Carson and Yam Yam voted for Frannie. This idea likely came from Soka and was probably to fool Ratu into thinking the Tika three were still loyal to them. Despite this, I think those three will continue to bounce back and forth between the other two alliances.
The Three Stooges made it through another vote intact! Now, the game is even: three Ratu, three Soka, and three Tika. Tune in next week to see which tribes gain an advantage and which falls behind.
In this issue of Val Hacks, Ivy Haight ’25 shares how to make a healthy, delicious fruit salad and savory bagel sandwich for a delicious brunch. Follow the recipes for your new favorite fruit-filled or protein-packed brunch treat!
Sometimes, Val can be overwhelming. The bustle right before class time, the flurry of folks rushing in, and the potential to see every single person you know make for a stressful dining experience. If you’re feeling this, an easy to-go meal might be the perfect solution. I usually eat this as breakfast or brunch on the weekend when I need to take some time in my room during a meal. If you really need a quick in-and-out of Val, you can skip some of the add-ons. For this meal, you’ll need a large and a small to-go box.
Directions
• Grab a green apple, red apple, banana, berries from the yogurt station, and any other fruits of your choosing.
• Mix a spoonful of yogurt and two pumps of honey in a sauce container.
• Take a slice of lemon from the drink station.
• Finish the meal in your room:
• Cut each fruit into small pieces.
• Pour the honey-yogurt sauce onto the fruit.
• Squeeze the lemon slice over the fruit salad.
• Close the lid to the box and shake!
Directions
• Toast a bagel of your choice.
• Grab eggs, sausage (I go with the MorningStar vegan patty), cheese, and any other fillings you would like while the bagel is toasting. If you want this for lunch, use the ingredients from the sandwich station. Bonus: you avoid awkwardly standing by the toasters while you wait for your bagel.
• Place your chosen fillings onto the bagel and voila, a bagel sandwich!
The baseball team played Trinity College last Wednesday, making an incredible comeback to pull out another road win and improving their NESCAC record before the upcoming tournament. During the first four innings, pitcher Caden McClure ’23 allowed three runs, and the offense was barely even able to get on base. While Jack Boyle’s ’25 double brought Jackson Reydel ’23 home to make the score 3-1 at the top of the 5th, neither team was able to score again entering the ninth inning. Boyle, Jackson Reydel, and Michael Perales ’25 loaded the bases with two walks and a single, respectively. Then, Jack Sampedro ’25 cleared the bases with a stunning double to right field and Ryan McIntyre ’25 finished out the inning with an RBI single that brought Sampedro home, putting Amherst in front 4-3. Christian Pedro ’26 was able to close up the game with three statement strikeouts, bringing home the win in stunning fashion.
Over the weekend, the Mammoths played three games against the Wesleyan Cardinals. The team out-hit the Cardinals 15-10 in the first game but narrowly lost 7-8 as they were unable to rally back in the ninth inning. The Mammoths redeemed themselves in their second game, however, making the score 5-1 in the second inning off of some walks that loaded the bases, and two RBI hits from Boyle and Sampedro. Sampedro stamped the victory in the 4th inning with his first home run of the season. Amherst won 8-4. While Jack McDermott ’25 was able to take the lead in the first inning with a home run, it was all downhill from there. The Mammoths only scored again in the seventh inning and lost the game 2-6.
The softball team played three doubleheaders over the past week. In their first one — against Western New England University — they lost both games by only one run. Both teams had amazing pitching performances that kept the scores low at 0-1 and 2-3.
The Mammoths completely redeemed themselves against their rivals with 4-1 and 7-2 wins over Williams. The first game was marked by Jess Butler’s ’23 beautiful triple towards rightfield that brought Dani Torres Werra ’25 and Rachel Lovejoy home after a sacrificial bunt from Sadie Pool ’24 that initially put them on second and third base. In the second game, Amherst continued to dominate by quickly taking a 2-0 lead in the first inning. While the Ephs were able to tie the game up again right after, they were unable to score again, and the Mammoths comfortably marched to victory.
Over the weekend, the team extended their winning streak to four games, with easy 5-2 and 8-4 wins over Hamilton. Again, they immediately took a 2-0 lead in the first inning and never looked back to win the game. The second game was exactly the same only Hamilton showed a little life in the fourth inning, but it ultimately proved to be futile.
The four wins pushed the team to fourth in the NESCAC, putting them in the perfect position for the upcoming tournament.
The men’s track and field team sent athletes to Cambridge, Massachusetts to compete in the Collier Invitational. The highlight of the meet was Alton Machen’s ’24 season-best in the 110m hurdles, which gave him the first college victory of his career. He ran a 15.39. Paolo Canigiula ’25 ran a
10:37.13 to claim third place in the 3000m steeplechase — the time was a personal best. Jack Renda ’23, Braedon Fiume ’24, Max Spelke ’23, George Cahill ’26, Keon Mazdisnian ’23, and Zach Villegas ’26 all placed top ten in their respective events.
The women’s track and field team also competed in the Collier Invitational, featuring some stellar performances. The Mammoths’ best events were the 110m and 400m hurdles. Olivia Steele ’25 and Anaya Thomas ’25 took sixth and eighth place respectively in 110m and Artis Phillips ’25 and Valerie Finke ’25 took fourth and fifth place respectively in 400m. Steele’s 16.05 was a personal best for her in the 100m hurdles. Payton Sorensen ’25 and Annelise Romero ’23 also finished top ten in their events.
Men’s tennis took on two NESCAC opponents in Middlebury and Williams but were un -
able to win either match. They lost 3-6 against Middlebury and 1-8 against Williams ending their regular season with a 10-6 record. The Mammoths face Williams again this weekend in the NESCAC quarterfinal.
Women’s tennis also took on Middlebury and Williams this past weekend. They narrowly fell to Middlebury with a score of 4-5, but were able to pull off a close win against Williams, ending their regular season with a 10-3 record.
Women’s Lacrosse
On Saturday, the Mammoths faced the first-seeded Middlebury Panthers who have a 14-0 record so far this season. So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when Amherst fell behind by ten goals to start off the first quarter. The team tried to rally back off of a stunning solo goal from Emily Petersen ’26 that led to four more goals by the end of the first half, however, the Panthers quickly fought back to make their lead
15-5 by the beginning of the second half. Middlebury won with a score of 9-20. The women’s team has their last game of the regular season on Wednesday before the NESCAC tournament this weekend.
Men’s lacrosse also faced Middlebury on Saturday. In the first five minutes, Tanyr Krummenacher ’23 immediately scored two goals to put the team up 3-1, but the Panthers slowly bounced back to give themselves a 4-3 lead only a minute later. After Krummenacher was able to assist or score three goals the Mammoths rallied to a 9-11 deficit at the half. However, the team was unable to continue their rally as Middlebury scored the only three goals of the third quarter to carry them to a 17-11 win over the Mammoths. The men’s team also has their last game of the regular season on Wednesday before the NESCAC quarterfinal on Saturday.
It is an unfortunate reality that injuries impact all professional sports, but the alarming level of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) tears in women’s soccer is particularly concerning. In fact, over 60 female professional soccer players have suffered ACL tears since the beginning of 2022 in the run up to the 2023 World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, including top stars such as Beth Mead (England), Caterina Macario (USA), Christen Press (USA), Vivianne Miedema (Netherlands), Alexia Puetellas (Spain), Marie-Antoinette Katoto (France), and Ellie Carpenter (Australia). Last week, England’s captain, Leah Williamson, became the latest addition to this
list. To put this in perspective, if a World Cup roster were formed made up entirely of players who have suffered from ACL tears in the past two years, the team would be one of the favorites to win the tournament. These injuries raise serious questions about how we are supporting and caring for women’s bodies in sport.
The ACL is a small but critical ligament that stabilizes the knee and is attached from the femur (thighbone) to the tibia (shinbone). Tearing this small ligament can wreak a lot of havoc, with a traditional recovery time of nine months to a year after a tear. ACL tears are often non-contact injuries caused by a sudden cut or landing after a jump. Complete ACL tears almost always require surgery which involves grafting a tendon
from the athlete and using it to create a new ligament.
Strikingly, female athletes have a 4-6 times increased risk of ACL injuries than males in field sports. While female ACL tears skyrocket, ACL injury rates have decreased among boys and men in the past 20 years. There are many proposed reasons for the differences in these statistics, including elevated estrogen levels during the menstrual cycle that can interfere with collagen in the joints, making them more prone to injury, and differences in biomechanics of men and women, which leads to differing landing positions of the knee after a jump or cut. This is too typical in sports: Rather than examining the effects of factors such as subpar pitches, cleats designed with male feet in mind, and small-
er athletic staffs, people often blame women's bodies for the difference in injury rates. Many people, including Alex Morgan, who tore her ACL in high school, suggested that over-scheduling in women’s soccer might contribute to the rise of ACL injuries.
While there is no one definitive answer to explain the concerning statistics regarding ACL tears in female athletes, it's evident that more targeted research is needed to properly support these athletes. Unfortunately, only six percent of sport and exercise science research studies are centered on female athletes, highlighting the need for more targeted research to properly support female athletes. However, research alone is not enough, as we have known about the increased likelihood for female
ACL tears since the 1990s. It’s time to take action and implement reforms that address the factors that lead to the increased risk of tears, including specific programs to strengthen the joints and muscles of cis women and increased investment into the quality of fields, equipment, and training and medical staff.
It is also important that we focus on supporting the mental health of injured players, as the physical and emotional tolls of injury can be particularly isolating for athletes at all levels. Sports organizations must recognize the need to understand why ACL tears continue to occur and invest in strategies to mitigate the likelihood of such injuries. It is well past time for them to simply wish players well after ACL tears.
Formula 1 (F1) returns from nearly a month off this weekend when the sport travels to the streets of Baku, Azerbaijan. There was originally a race scheduled for the middle of April near Shanghai, China; however, the nation’s Covid restrictions prevented the event from happening and no suitable replacement was found. As a result, teams have had plenty of time to make small changes to their cars, both for long term performance gains and track specific demands for Baku.
Baku is a special circuit because it is what is known as a street circuit, a circuit that literally runs on streets. Other such tracks are in Monaco and Singapore. Albert Park, the scene of the most recent race, is also technically a street circuit, but it mostly runs through a park (as the name implies) and it offers substantial space between the track and walls at many points.
Baku is more of a pure street circuit as the race is run on the
streets of downtown Baku and the walls are right up against the track for 90% of each lap. Monaco and Singapore are much more like Baku. These unique characteristics of street circuits leave little room for error, creating a high risk of damage for the teams and a lot of excitement for the fans as the drivers must get as close to the limit as possible to extract the performance they need.
The Baku City Circuit itself can be separated into two distinct sections; one with long straights and 90° angles, and another with a mix of low and medium speed corners. The run up to the start line is a 1.4 mi (2.2 km) straight that leads into a sharp left turn. The track then goes along a shorter straight that turns onto a 0.62 mi (1 km) straight. Then comes two left-right chicanes (a chicane is one corner in one direction quickly followed by another in the opposite direction) separated by a short straight. After the second chicane, the track flows into the more technical section that circles the old city. The most notable set of corners
runs alongside an old castle and is aptly known as the “castle section.” The corners could theoretically fit two and a half cars, but with the racing line resembling more of a straight line through the two corners, it can only fit one — and barely so. After a cou -
ple of left corners, the track runs along the start/finish straight to start another lap.
This weekend is also special because it is a Sprint Race Weekend. At the time of writing, there is still some uncertainty as to what this weekend in particular
will look like. However, it is likely to follow the usual sprint format. The sprint race is borrowed from the junior categories (F2, F3, etc.) where there’s a shorter race on Saturday to increase the
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amount of racing and gives teams towards the back the chance to improve their starting spot for the race. Sprint weekends in F1 used to have a similar effect, but on Tuesday the sport’s governing body announced changes to the Sprint format. A typical F1 weekend consists of two practices on Friday, a practice and qualifying on Saturday, and the race on Sunday. After the changes, a
sprint weekend will consist of a practice and qualifying determining the starting order of the Sunday race) on Friday, a sprint qualifying (determining the starting order of the Sprint Race) and sprint race on Saturday, and the race on Sunday. The idea behind the changes is that with the sprint race results no longer tied to the race, teams will have more incentives to take risks and make the sprint more exciting for fans.
As for news that came up during the april break, not much
substance came out. A German journalist was fired after using AI to conduct a fake interview with 7-time world champion Michael Schumacher. The German F1 legend is not dead, however, he is in poor physical condition after a skiing accident in 2013. His family maintains strict privacy around the incident so the whole incident generated much controversy. In more lighthearted news, rumors came out of nowhere that Aston Martin driver and 2-time world champion Fernando Alon-
so may be in a relationship with Taylor Swift. This is pure speculation, but the Spanish driver did post a video to social media with a Taylor Swift song in the background, so who knows.
In a departure from tabloid ramblings, Mercedes has been quoted throughout the month about the progress they have been making. George Russell has said the team made greater gains over the past month than over the entire winter offseason. Mercedes has also made some chang-
es at the top of the team, shuffling current personnel around for the purpose of optimizing the organization of the team and development of the car. It is unclear when these changes will show results on track, but there are some planned upgrades for this weekend and the race three weeks later. After that race (race 6, Imola) the development plan becomes less clear. However, the sport desperately needs someone to challenge Red Bull, and Mercedes are hoping to be that team.
