Issue 11, Homecoming

AMHERST, MASSACHUSETTS

VOLUME CXLXI HOMECOMING EDITION | NOVEMBER 12, 2021

HOMECOMING 2021 Photo courtesy of Matai Curzon ’22

THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

Schedule Events of

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 - SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 13

FRIDAY

SATURDAY

8 p.m.

Jazz Ensemble Concert Livestream and Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Building

10 a.m. - Noon “Peek into the Past” Beneski Museum 11 a.m.

Amherst Women’s Soccer vs. Lesley University NCAA Tournament Hitchcock Field Noon Amherst Football vs.

Williams Lehrman Stadium, Pratt Field

4 p.m. - 6 p.m.

The Charles Drew House Presents: A Black Homecoming Experience Drew House Lawn 6 p.m.

Choral Society Concert Livestream and Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Building 8:30 p.m.

Symphony Orchestra Concert Livestream and Buckley Recital Hall, Arms Music Building

STAFF EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Ryan Yu Rebecca Picciotto EDITORS Sophie Wolmer, Yee-Lynn Lee, Scott Brasesco, Skye Wu, Theodore Hamilton, Brooke Hoffman, Alex Brandfonbrener, Ethan Samuels, Liza Katz, Liam Archacki, Sam Spratford, Maggie McNamara ASSISTANT EDITORS Caelen McQuilkin, Tana Delalio, Kei Lim, Dustin Copeland, Tapti Sen CONTRIBUTORS Eleanor Walsh, Sofia Rodrigo DESIGN Anna Smith Brianne LaBare PUBLISHERS Emmy Sohn Robert Bischof The Amherst Student is published weekly except during college vacations. The offices of The Amherst Student are located in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, Amherst College. All contents copyright © 2021 by The Amherst Student, Inc. All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age. The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student.

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Photo by Matai Curzon ’22

Table of Contents

4 5 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 22 24 26 28 30 32 34 36 37

Jared Banner ’07 From the NESCAC to MLB Championships Megan Carroll ’02 Fighting for Human Rights on the World Stage Elena Boley ’92 Embracing Questions, Pursuing Truth Andrew Barkan ’02 Composing for the Children’s Corner Sean Ellis ’07 A Hockey Journey From Amherst to the NHL David Friend ’77E Life-Long Devotion to Chronicling the Truth Jean S. Fugett, Jr. ’72 Football and Far More Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12 Reconciling Queer Christianity Through Activism Lisa Chang ’82 Meeting Challenges in the Name of the Law Tony Jack ’07 “Living His Truth”: Fighting for FLI Students Leah Longoria ’12 It Takes a Character to Make a Character Siobhan McKissic ’12 The Art of The Archive: Feeling Histories Emily Ann Rosenburg ’07 When Costume Design Goes Global Amy Stevens Hammond ’92 Storyteller Behind the Scenes and Screen Annette Sanderson ’82 More Than Just Four Walls and a Roof Shayla Yellowhair ’07 Shaping Education in the Navajo Nation Niko Pfund ’87 From the Field to the Publishing Room Tomoaki Ishigaki ’97 Finding Connection Through Translation

20 News

38 Sports

40 A&L

November 12, 2021 | The Amherst Student | 3

Alumni Profile | Jared Banner ’07

From the NESCAC to MLB Championships Jared Banner ’07 spends life grounded in the present, learning as much as he can every day.

— Ethan Samuels ’23 Throughout his childhood, Jared Banner ’07 dreamed of being a professional baseball player. As senior year rolled around, however, he realized it was time to redirect his focus.

Fortunately, there may not be a better college in America for a baseball-lover to be forced to redirect.

Ten years ago, three of the 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) general managers were Amherst alumni who had played for Coach Bill Thurston: Dan Duquette ’80, Neal Huntington ’91, and Ben Cherington ’96.

Following in the footsteps of those before him, Banner is living out the childhood dreams of baseball fans across the country. But he’s also charting his own path — and at just 35 years old, he’s already served in top front office roles with the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and Chicago Cubs, winning three World Series titles along the way.

Growth in the Pioneer Valley Banner, a Brooklyn native, arrived in the Pioneer Valley as a student-athlete in 2003. A cornerstone of the baseball team, he entered Amherst with a determination to grow as an athlete — and grow he did. On the diamond, he played exceptionally as an outfielder and eventually led his team as captain during his senior season. His tenacity and talent produced concrete results, too, as he helped the Mammoths rack up backto-back NESCAC championships in 2004 and 2005.

Like the hundreds of other baseball players who come through Amherst, Banner had the privilege of playing under the highly esteemed skipper Bill Thurston, who coached at Amherst from 1966 to 2007 and racked up a staggering 811 victories, and whom he credits with helping

him improve so much.

“I played for the legendary Bill Thurston. He’s the best coach I’ve ever had,” Banner recounted. “He was tough, but in a good way. I think that everyone that goes through his program comes out better on the other side of it.”

Reminiscing on cold, tough winter practices inside Coolidge Cage to warm spring break trips to Florida, Banner looks back fondly on his experience playing baseball at Amherst.

But it wasn’t just baseball that made Amherst College so memorable.

“Those two [NESCAC] championships were pretty cool, but when I think about my best memories, I remember cramming for a bio-psych test and staying up all night with one of my teammates studying and going straight to the test at 8:00 a.m.,” Banner said.

The archetypal student-athlete, Banner’s determination to grow flowed as much to his academics as his athletics. Still, he was unsure of his major when he arrived. Over time, however, Banner took — and thoroughly enjoyed — a number of psychology courses early in his Amherst tenure with Professor Matthew Schulkind and settled on psychology as a major. Banner notes that his experience with psychology sticks with him every day, helping him understand not only those around him, but also himself.

Even though he was a good student, Professor Schulkind remembers Banner for the impact he made outside of the classroom. “What I remember most about Jared was the conversations we had outside of class, and in particular a long conversation we had about the O.J. Simpson case.

Fifteen years later and I still think about what he said that afternoon. I can’t say what kind of an impact I’ve

had on his life, but I can say that Jared had a big impact on how I think about race in this country.”

For Banner, Amherst College was a microcosm of adult life; it challenged him to balance academics, sports, and extracurriculars such as Black Student Union, all while managing a social life and life back home.

“When I think back to those years, those were some of the best years of my life. I made some of my closest friends, I learned a lot from my professors and advisors, and I had a great experience playing baseball.”

Living the Dream At the time of Banner’s graduation, Cherington served as the Senior Vice President for the Boston Red Sox and helped Banner land a job as a fellow in baseball operations.

A week after graduating, Banner packed up his bags and drove to Boston to begin his fellowship with the Red Sox in Boston, where he’d stay for more than eleven years. In his role as a fellow, Banner worked on projects relating to player development, coaching research, and data aggregation. “It was less about [the work] and more about being around the smartest people in baseball who were there at the time and learning through osmosis.”

Former Red Sox General Manager Theo Epstein and former Padres General Manager Jed Hoyer, two of the most successful MLB front office figures, worked directly with Banner.

“I was very lucky to be 21 years old and be in that kind of environment,” Banner said. With the Sox, Banner seemed to take on a new role every year. After the fellowship, he worked as an assistant in player development before a promotion landed him the title of Scouting Coordinator. In

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Photo courtesy of Newsday

Banner has worked for three of the most popular baseball teams in the country.

2012, he was named the Assistant Director of Player Personnel, and within four years, “Assistant” had dropped out of his title, which soon became Vice President of Player Personnel. In Boston, Banner won three World Series, including one in his first year with the organization. “As a 21 year old, it felt like we were going to win it every year,” Banner said.

The next two titles came in 2013 and 2018.

After the third World Series, Banner left Boston and assumed the role of Executive Director of Player Development with the New York Mets.

In this role, Banner was in charge of “getting the most” out of every player within the Mets minor league system, focusing on “big things” like making sure a player’s strength and mechanics were developing, as well as supporting often overlooked areas like sleep, nutrition, and mental skills.

In 2020, Banner joined the Chicago Cubs as their Vice President of Special Projects, one of the top executive roles in the front office of one of the most storied franchises in baseball history. While Banner says that the Cubs job is the best he’s had yet, he also admits that every role he’s held felt like his favorite at the time.

When asked about his least favorite part of working in professional

baseball, Banner paused, thought, and took a deep breath. “I pretty much enjoy it all,” he revealed. But then Banner interrupted himself.

“Although I don’t like losing.” Even so, it’s the losses that make working in baseball challenging, and it’s the challenge that Banner loves most.

“When you overcome a challenge, that’s fun — and [I love] the competitive environment.”

Throughout his career, Banner is most proud of his World Series championships with the Red Sox. “It’s a team sport and winning championships is the goal,” he said.

Through all the accomplishments, Banner’s kindness hasn’t wavered. Schulkind still keeps in touch with Banner, and texted him recently when his son needed to interview someone working in professional sports for a class. “Even though he is a pretty big deal these days, Jared agreed without hesitation. And when he didn’t hear from my son immediately, Jared checked back to make sure he hadn’t missed a text. That’s the kind of generosity I have come to expect from him,” Schulkind said.

Banner doesn’t know what the future holds, but he knows he wants to make the most out of every day. “I just try to get better every day, learn something every day, and go one day at a time.”

Alumni Profile | Megan Carroll ’02

Fighting for Human Rights on the World Stage The seed for Megan Carroll’s ’02 passion for international service was planted in early childhood and has followed her through Amherst to her job today.

— Sofia Rodrigo ’24 Photo courtesy of Megan Carroll ‘02

Megan Carroll ’02 was nine years old when the Berlin Wall fell, and the seeds of her career path were planted. As the daughter of two parents who were mindful of world-exposure, Carroll became accustomed to hosting exchange students in her home. She vividly recalls watching the fall of the Berlin Wall through the eyes of one student from Tbilisi, Georgia: “He was glued to the TV set, absolutely transfixed [by] the images on CNN of the Berlin Wall falling over and over again.” Nineyear-old Carroll was unable to fully grasp the significance of the Berlin Wall falling at the time. But the event embedded an image of democratic movements that would follow her into her adult life.

Carroll has dedicated her career to issues of democracy and human rights. She has represented The Carter Center as an international observer and later Director in Sudan and South Sudan, served as a Democracy and Governance Advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), led the United Nations (UN) Development Programme’s portfolio that was focused on the elections and constitutional process in South Sudan, served as a White House Fellow in the Obama administration, and managed Harvard University’s Scholars at Risk program. In her current position at the UN Office of Counter Terrorism, Carroll focuses on helping UN member states adhere to human rights mandates when they are implementing their counterterrorism policies.

A Love for Travel Raised in San Diego, CA., as the

granddaughter of an Irish political prisoner, much of Carroll’s personal and professional self was shaped by living and witnessing the social and political inequalities occuring at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as hearing stories of her grandfather in prison. In her words, both of these factors “shaped [her] worldview in terms of why people cross borders and what compels someone to move to a different country.”

Driven by a desire to travel, Carroll was an exchange student to Japan at 13, to Ireland at 16, and South Africa at 18. She also spent time with her godfather in Uganda who worked with Sudanese refugees.

Listening to their compelling stories greatly raised her awareness of their plight. These cross-cultural experiences further confirmed her interest in pursuing international affairs; particularly her time spent in South Africa as a Rotary International Exchange Student, which was a pivotal moment in her life that foreshadowed her future career.

Carroll lived in South Africa the summer before her first year at Amherst, only four years after the end of apartheid. A defining memory Carroll carries with her from that summer was meeting President Nelson Mandela in Pretoria —“Don’t forget about Africa,” he said to her as he squeezed her hand. As an 18-yearold soon to be entering college, Carroll says she “really took that to heart and went into Amherst with that mission in [her] mind.”

Expanding Horizons Interested in human rights and international affairs, it is no surprise that Carroll stayed busy at Amherst

developing these interests. Carroll was a co-founder of the Outreach Council and Foreign Policy Forum, a class representative on the MLK Jr. Committee during her first and second year, a volunteer reading tutor to Cambodian immigrants in the community, and active volunteer with Amnesty International.

Some of Carroll’s fondest recollections about Amherst were the opportunities it provided her to explore her full range of interests, not only her academic passion for political science but also her personal appreciation of the arts. In her senior year, Carroll dove into her love of theater and dance, performing in several student productions. However, her pioneering into the arts didn’t stop with theater and dance — Carroll was also a co-host of a WAMH radio show during her last year at Amherst. Of all her experiences on campus, Carroll says that performing through those various outlets were some of her favorite memories because they stretched her and challenged her to grow.

Looking back, Carroll remembers Amherst as a “special time to learn, experiment and expand [her] horizons” where “you could take a course that would challenge you, perhaps even scare you, and change your worldview.” She advises students to take advantage of Amherst’s unique environment to dive in and challenge themselves.

Full Circle Graduating in ’02 after the events of 9/11 was a “painfully eye-opening entrance into the real world” for Carroll. Experiencing the economic and political impacts of 9/11 simul-

taneously challenged Carroll in her career and confirmed her path to work in international affairs. She got to work quickly.

After graduating from Amherst, she had less than a day before she was on a plane for the Humanity in Action Fellowship in Berlin, the very place that sparked her interest in democratic movements at nine years old. In Berlin, she would begin the work that continued to push her career interests forward.

Carroll never forgot Mandela’s words. Her career path led her to return to Africa in 2010, where she was an international observer for the voter registration process with The Carter Center in Sudan. She was in Sudan at a crucial inflection point: the country was deciding whether to stay as a unified Sudan or to split into two countries. Rather than return to the U.S. after the vote, Carroll decided to stay in the newly independent South Sudan and serve as a Democracy and Governance Advisor to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

If you ask her why she chose to stay for a total of four years in South Sudan, Carroll will tell you it’s because she “fell in love with the challenges in the country and the scale of the complexity.” When the country split, there was a lot of international goodwill to get South Sudan on a pathway towards better governance, and for Carroll, “to be part of that process was humbling, enlightening and exciting.”

Throughout Carroll’s career, her philosophy has been to serve as a conduit to opportunities and resources for other people to claim their own power. This philosophy is

During her time living in South Africa, Carroll was able to meet President Nelson Mandela in Pretoria. She remembers what he said to her that day: “Don’t forget about Africa.” Years later, she would return to Africa to work as an international observer. apparent in her work with Scholars at Risk, a program that brings persecuted scholars from overseas to safe haven schools. After leading Harvard’s program for several years, Carroll brought the network to Canada and established chapters at two Canadian universities in Montreal. Attempting to “lead from behind,” her intention was to start the program at the universities and then step back, allowing the campuses to continue to run with the initiatives. Although Carroll is no longer directly involved with the Canadian networks, she is happy to report that it is still thriving and she remains proud of the legacy that has bloomed from her efforts.

The Million Dollar Question Carroll describes the success of her career with one word: serendipitous. She finds that setting goals and benchmarks are important, but so is being open to a sense of serendipity. Going off script and being open-minded to new opportunities has allowed Carroll to accomplish the work that inspires her. In her own words, her career “hasn’t been a linear line, but it has been circuitous and meaningful.”

What’s next in Carroll’s career?

That’s the million-dollar question.

Although she doesn’t know exactly, Carroll’s sure that it will be something meaningful. As always, her philosophy is to follow the line of work that will allow her to have the most impact on issues that are important to her. We may find Carroll working at the UN, moving to a foundation and serving as a conduit for resources for marginalized populations, or even serving in an administrative position in D.C.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 5

Alumni Profile | Elena Boley ‘92

Embracing Questions, Pursuing Truth A medical officer in the Division of Urology, Obstetrics, and Gynecology at the FDA, Dr. Elena Boley ’92 has learned to embrace the grey.

— Sophie Wolmer ’23 Future doctor Elena Boley ’92 looked out over the waters of the Italian Riviera. From the balcony of a budget hotel, she would make a life-altering decision.

Boley pulled out a piece of paper and split it into two columns: the pros and cons of attending Duke Medical School.

On that solo European backpacking trip, Boley would decide to begin a career guided by curiosity. She would go on to become an acclaimed physician, join the faculty at The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, earn an MBA while raising two young children and eventually become a medical officer for the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Boley has never accepted complacency. Instead, her life has been governed by a spirit of inquiry. Boley’s ambition, intelligence, and ability to learn quickly made her stand out as an honors neuroscience student at Amherst. Indeed, during her time at the college, Boley never backed down in situations of the unknown — whether they occurred in the lab or on the rugby field.

The inquisitive approach that Boley cultivated at the college now tracks her in her professional life. When treating patients, teaching medical students, and reviewing novel drugs, Boley never accepts assumptions at face value. Boley has defined her own career and forged her own path as a physician-scientist.

Forging Her Own Path Boley was born and raised in Washington D.C., and completed all of her childhood schooling in the capital. During that time, she and her three siblings would constantly hear about the wonders of Amherst College, as her father had graduated from the institution in 1956. When Boley arrived on campus for her first year, Amherst already felt like home. She had a full profile of what the Amherst experience looked like.

Early on, Boley did not know where her academic path would lead. Because she had been comfortable with numbers and mathematical logic throughout high school, she assumed that her major would be math. Yet, she soon came to see that her passion for mathematics was satisfied within her science classes.

She was especially intrigued by neuroscience and went on to declare it as her major. In physics, chemistry, and introductory neuroscience classes, Boley discovered “another world” of inquiry.

During her time at the college, Boley took classes in many fields that piqued her interests.

One of these courses was on the psychology of aging, with Professor Lisa Raskin. For the class, Boley was paired with an old couple in Amherst who lived in low-income housing and visited them once every week or two. This was her first exposure to older people, their troubles, medical issues, and competing stresses. The class opened her

eyes to the real-world struggles of those seeking out healthcare assistance.

Boley also recalls an impactful class taught by Professor Hadley Arkes in the field of political science. Arkes’ conservative perspective was eye-opening for Boley. In particular, it was his skill in presenting logical argumentation that impressed her.

Even if she disagreed with his premises and conclusions, she admired his method of justification: students could always follow his line of reasoning and understand how he reached the endpoints of his defense. The insights she gleaned from Arkes have served Boley well when she encounters people with fundamentally different positions than hers.

Boley’s dauntless attitude in the classroom also translated to her extracurricular activities.

David Leviss ’92, a former classmate and now Boley’s husband, noted that Boley stood out from the crowd even at a first glance.

“Elena and I met during our freshman year in the spring semester because we had a history class together. I remember being struck by how inquisitive, bold, and direct she was,” Leviss said.

“She was less guarded than many of my classmates and asked questions when she wanted to understand something, without seeming concerned about letting on that she didn’t know everything.”

One activity that Boley took up was rugby. Because she was one of the smaller and faster

6 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Elena Boley ‘92

Dr. Boley has always been interested in asking the “Why” question, something she has been able to do working at the FDA. members on the team, she be- sistant and a mass-photospeccame a back, but a few hard tack- trometer, Boley discovered her les ultimately led her to conclude passion for research. Professor that her time was best suited Zimmerman recalled Boley’s elsewhere. In the midst of a frig- auspicious, scientific nature: id game at Dartmouth, Boley ul- ”She was quick to learn the labtimately decided that she wanted oratory techniques required for to turn her focus to academics the research we were doing on and lab work. antioxidant mechanisms in the visual cells of mammalian retSparking her Passion inas,” he said. “[Boley] finished from the Depths of the her senior year working more at Lab the level of a graduate student In her last year at the college, than an undergraduate at a good Boley wrote a thesis with Profes- research university.” sor William Zimmerman, an esRemembering their converteemed biology researcher. The sations from a recent sympotwo worked with rod outer seg- sium that they both attended, ments of cows in the McGuire Zimmerman stated that it was Life Sciences Building, investi- “obvious that Elena had develgating Oxidation and Protection oped into a first-class, respected, against Oxidation in Membrane and responsible scientist, able to Phospholipids and Photorecep- draw on a wide-ranging knowltor Cells, a Liposomal Model. edge of medical research and of Some years after it was complet- statistical analysis in evaluating ed, some of the results of her re- and approving new drugs and search were incorporated into a therapies in medical practice.” published paper of which she is After graduation, Boley built the co-author. on her enthusiasm for research In the depths of the lab, during a gap year in Europe. working closely with a lab as- Between graduating and going

to med school, she returned to Washington D.C. and did research at the National Rehabilitation Hospital. She worked hand in hand with a neurologist, testing nerve-stimulating machines that have since been applied to help those with chronic arm or leg pain.

Denying the Strength of Inertia The next step on Boley’s journey was the Duke University School of Medicine. But after working arduously for three years to earn her M.D., Boley left unsure what she wanted to do.

Initially, between 2000 and 2002, Boley worked in private practice in Alexandria, Virginia. But she felt dissatisfied, as if her purpose was muddled. In particular, Boley became acutely aware of the financial pressures of practicing medicine, a phenomenon she grew increasingly curious about. Instead of turning away from her questions, Boley went back to school. With a newborn

in tow, Boley earned her MBA at Johns Hopkins in 2005 by taking night classes, and her son, born in 2002, received a certificate for being the youngest individual to ever come to class.

By 2002, Boley was on faculty at the George Washington University (GW). She continued to practice but also flirted with becoming an academic freelancer.

By 2004, Boley had her second child and was trying to satisfy her curiosity within the job that she had at GW. The timing for a career transition at that point was not right.

But the winds of fate brought Boley next to a new position as senior policy advisor in the Department of Health Policy for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Aligning Forces for Quality Program at GW. It was a different type of role for Boley as she wasn’t seeing patients, but she enjoyed the change of pace. According to her, it allowed her to ponder the question of “why” much more

frequently, which she loved.

“I was just saying ‘why’ all the time. When you’re an attending physician, you’re busy and are seeing patients every 15 minutes,” she said.

“There is not always time to ask why, because it’s very time consuming. When you are practicing, you have to see the patients in front of you.”

Indeed, Boley described feeling like a cog in the wheel of medicine. “I got positive feedback from seeing patients, but sometimes I didn’t feel like I was still growing. My brain felt like it needed to know,” she added.

Eventually, Boley had enough of asking why she was doing things, and decided to take action. In 2016, after 14 years at GW, Boley left and took on the role as a medical officer at the FDA. Boley has been at the FDA as a medical officer in the Division of Urology, Obstetrics, and Gynecology for five years now. “[The job at the FDA] was an opportunity for me to look into

the data and figure out why we do things the way that we do: why certain drugs are considered to be effective, why some might be dangerous, why some are considered unsafe. It was a whole new world.” Boley recounted.

Leviss is proud that his wife has retained the curiosity, inquisitiveness, and direct manner that he first admired thirty-three years ago.

“And as she manages the inevitable curveballs of an overstuffed family and professional life,” Leviss expressed, “she continues to hold herself to the highest possible standards of integrity and loyalty, modeling behavior for her students, our children and her colleagues.”

Embracing the Grey Throughout her career, Boley has learned that the key to success is being fascinated and curious.

Asking questions and fighting assumptions has led her to

be rewarded in each new adventure.

“We spend a lot of time believing guidelines and what authority tells us to do. When you are deep in data and details, you don’t really understand what it took to get there. How can we know if a decision is right or wrong if we don’t even know where it came from?” Boley posited.

“What we take as the rule is sometimes fraught with all sorts of uncertainties. It’s representative of the best that we can do.

But we should realize that our judgments are influenced by our perspectives and assumptions.

We do the best with the information we have and recognize the limits of our conclusions.” Boley asserted.

Boley’s advice: follow your questions. She tells her children and has told her students that they don’t have to follow a clear path. For Boley, the key is fighting what appears to be black and white and embracing the grey.

Photo courtesy of Elena Boley ‘92

In her free time Dr. Boley enjoys hiking in scenic locations like Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and Arizona. When she is not working, Boley is commonly found watching her son play soccer, speed baking and binge watching with her daughter, or traveling and trying foods from different cultures.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 7

Alumni Profile | Andrew Barkan ‘02

Composing for the Children’s Corner To truly embrace your passion can be daunting. Yet, Andrew Barkan ’02 has always stayed true to his passion for music, building a rich career around it.

— Kei Lim ’25 Andrew Barkan ’02 has successfully created a career for himself within the music industry, despite its dauntingly competitive reputation. From a young age, Barkan has been drawn to music, and having a visual impairment has pushed him to further pursue this passion.

Due to the nature of his disability, certain tasks prove difficult for him to do, but music is something which Barkan not only holds a deep passion for, but also excels in.

Working with musicians all over the globe, from orchestras in Eastern Europe to violinists in Argentina, he has scored a number of films for audiences as far away as China. He has also done a slew of freelance work, creating tracks for commercials and advertising, and making music for television shows and shorts, including producers like Nickelodeon and Disney.

Most notably, however, he has built a career creating content for kids. He and his wife, Polly Hall ’04, are now recognized nationally as a kids’ music group — Andrew and Polly — and have produced five records thus far. They receive radio play, have number one singles on Sirius XM, and make a living by producing music for children.

Barkan and Hall also created one of the first kids podcasts.

Titled Ear Snacks, the podcast has since been recognized in the New York Times as well as many other publications, and holds fans all around the globe.

It accumulates interviews with

kids into a nonfiction journalistic montage of what children are thinking about, focused on tangible items in their world.

Focusing much of his career on children’s music allows him to make media that is whimsical and fun, in contrast with the adult-directed content he has made. Barkan’s multifaceted career proves that despite the challenges of going into a creative industry, genuine interest in something is not something to be ignored — if something excites you above anything else, it’s worth going for.

Life Before Amherst Growing up, Barkan always had a special love for music. In the car with his family, his parents would sing tunes, and his dad would make up songs. Barkan attended a boarding school in South Carolina, and grew up singing classical music and also performing as a choirboy at a cathedral.

In high school, he expanded upon this passion by teaching himself how to play piano, doing musical theater, and joining acapella groups. Apart from music, he played team sports and had an enthusiasm for physics, among other things. With these many passions, Barkan knew he wanted to attend a liberal arts college, so he would have the freedom to explore this array of interests.

Upon touring Amherst, he immediately knew he wanted to come here, drawn by the students within the community and the way they immersed

themselves in their passions. “I remember it just striking me,” he said. “These were my kind of people. These were people who were just making goofy jokes and really got into stuff. These were the kind of people I wanted to be around.”

Time at Amherst One of Barkan’s best friends from high school also decided to attend Amherst, making the transition to college easier. They did Concert Choir together, but were in very different social groups. Barkan found his community of friends through the acapella scene: “I got into The Zumbyes within the first month of school, and that really helped me connect with a big community of people.”

Barkan was a member of the Zumbyes throughout his entire four years at Amherst, and directed the group his sophomore year. Through a cappella, Barkan was able to meet and acquire advice from upperclassmen, gaining insight into the many different activities which Amherst students immersed in.

He quickly grew excited about the experiences waiting for him throughout the next four years, captivated by the intellectual and emotional conversations that he was engaging in. “I was meeting people from all over the world. I had a friend from Peru, and my roommate was from India. It was awesome to meet lots of different people with lots of different perspectives.”

At Amherst, Barkan was able

8 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Andrew Barkan ’02

Andrew Barkan ’02 is a renowned composer whose passion and talent for music has invigorated thousands of kids across the U.S. to participate in many of the activities he did throughout high school. He joined club basketball, and furthered his passion for music through coffeehouse-type performances and playing music with other people in bands.

He was also able to explore his many academic interests, debating a vast contrast of prospective career options. He thought about becoming a physics major or getting into education, and spent time exploring the abundance of different English courses, from creative writing to Russian literature.

However, he eventually landed on music as his major. “I’m blind,” he said, explaining a motivation for this choice. “I suppose I used to say legally blind, but the kind of language around that has changed recently. I’m able to get around and play sports and things like that. But there are lots of things I can’t do — recognizing people across a room, driving a car, reading a book, reading signs — so I call

myself blind now.”

Creative projects drew Barkan in, and music was something that he felt, given his disability, he was able to excel in. For his thesis, Barkan wrote a mini symphony, Invitation, which was composed of six acts. “I got to combine like jazz and orchestral and electronic elements all together to weave through this story, like in and out of a dream.”

He was able to work with Lou Spratlan, a Pulitzer Prize winning opera composer, who was the chair of the music department at the time. Barkan expressed about Spratlan, “He helped me get out of my head and just create.” With Spratlan, Barkan grew his skill in writing original music, which contributed to a large sum of his career later on.

In his thesis, Barkan realized that “the only way for audiences to appreciate the thing that you are composing or performing is to understand the theoretical underpinnings of it.” He discussed the importance of understand-

ing the ideas behind music and not just focusing on the sounds being created. He formulated his thesis around this realization, inspiring his composition with a story that held thematic and emotional links between the music and what people were actually experiencing.

After Amherst After graduating, Barkan was unsure what he was going to do.

Like many with artistic majors, he had little guidance and few connections. But he knew he wanted to live in New York. Not only would New York’s public transportation system allow him to get around as a blind person, but he also would be able to access the city’s vibrant music scene.

Though he didn’t have a job upon first moving to New York, he found one within the first few months of living there. He taught music, building after school music programs at a public school before going on to work at pri-

vate schools. This time he spent teaching post-graduation gave him the opportunity to figure out what he wanted to do with his career, and he went on to attend grad school at New York University for film scoring.

As Barkan learned the process of film scoring and how to break into the industry, he wrote a lot of music for advertising.

His then-girlfriend and nowwife, Polly Hall ’04, had started a business writing music for commercials, and Barkan joined her in this. Within the first year of the company’s founding, the pair ended up doing a national advertising campaign for Sprint, where Barkan was able to use skills for orchestration and writing classical music which he learned at Amherst. Barkan and Hall lived in New York for a few more years before moving to Los Angeles.

They have continued to do freelance advertising music since, but now do a wide array of professional music. “We have so many different genres we work

in. We work in folk, we work in indie rock, we work in electronica, we work in orchestral and jazz, and we’ve done some acapella, among other stuff.” Upon moving to L.A., Barkan was able to secure a job at Hans Zimmer’s Remote Control Studios, managed under film composer Heitor Pereira who scored Despicable Me and the Scooby Doo movies. With him, Barkan worked on The Smurfs and Madagascar movies, and has since gone on to score seven independent feature films and around 70 short films.

At the same time, right before leaving New York, Barkan and Hall decided to record an album for children. The duo had made a short EP for some of Hall’s nieces, and loved singing together and performing. And unlike the majority of the music they had written which was directed at adults, in creating music for kids, they could be more playful and lighthearted. Also, with spending the bulk of their time producing studio music, they were

never able to see their audience or get to know those listening to it.

So, they created a children’s record, and began playing this music in bookstores and coffee shops. They were soon awarded song of the year from the ASCAP Foundation, for their track “When You’re a Dog,” and were able to perform their song live at the Lincoln Center. This recognition led to a plethora of opportunities, and they were able to write music for kids’ television, including for Nickelodeon and Disney.

In 2015, they created a kids’ podcast, Ear Snacks, in addition to founding a nonprofit to promote the production of more podcasts for children. “We think podcasts are an amazing resource for parents and for schools and educators,” Barkan declared.

“They are essentially free and provide all kinds of different educational and emotional support for kids that’s not screen time based.” There are now over 200

Photo courtesy of Andrew Barkan ’02

Barkan sits aside his wife, Polly Hall ’04, amid a large cache of instruments. Barkan and Hall together form a nationally recognized kids’ music group known as “Andrew and Polly,”

kids’ podcasts, most of which are members of Barkan and Hall’s organization.

Influenced by his and Hall’s own three kids, Barkan describes Ear Snacks as “like ‘Radiolab’ for kids.” It features fans of their music and podcast, amassing interviews parents conduct with their kids on various topics. The podcast has episodes ranging on subjects from rain to shadows to vaccines, and it not only engages kids, but also helps parents better understand what their kids know and how to grow that knowledge.

“Seeing kids’ ideas start to spark, we get to play a small part in that. And that’s really cool.”

“With kids’ media, you just have to think of authentic curiosity, authentic joy, and authentic laughter — those are what you’re going after,” Barkan expressed. “Performing for children, whether in a massive concert festival with 6000 people or a bookstore with 10 kids, getting to see kids light up is amazing.”

Final Thoughts Barkan describes music as a forever expanding field. “You can keep learning about music your entire life. You realize that there’s this massive massive toolbox that you need to build up. Not just physically — not just having all the right synthesizers and guitars and samples and technology — but figuring out how to relate to people and figuring out what makes a project better.” He described working in the music industry, stating, “There are so many different possibilities for work and chances to learn and challenges to figure out. It’s exciting.”

While many people would rather stop working at the end of the day and go home, Barkan truly treasures his work. “Polly and I don’t have enough hours for the things we want to do,” Barkan expressed. He left me with this piece of advice: “When something holds your interest, and you’re able to work on it for 10 hours straight, realize that that’s something important — that’s something you should focus on.”

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 9

Alumni Profile | Sean Ellis ’07

A Hockey Journey: From Amherst to the NHL A true embodiment of the Amherst student-athlete expeience, Sean Ellis ’07 took advantage of the opportunities he was given to earn his place both as a captain of the Amherst Hockey team, and as one of the NHL’s top officials.

— Liza Katz ’24 Sean Ellis ’07 has loved hockey all his life. Once he started playing, he knew he would never want to let go. But for that desire to come to fruition (as it has), he knew would have to work for it: he would have to make his own luck.

It takes a certain kind of person to dedicate themselves to a sport in the way that Ellis has.

His time in the game has taken many forms, ranging from the ice at Amherst’s Orr Rink to Toronto, Canada, where he is an integral part of the team that watches every National Hock-

ey League (NHL) game and reviews every goal to make sure that they’re contested fairly. But ask him about his impact on the game, and he will be the first to downplay the work he has done, saying, “In 13 years working in the NHL, I’m still in my infancy in having some lasting impact.”

But that’s is just one way that his humble attitude has impacted his life, in addition to driving his work ethic and determination.

A Non-Traditional Path A local kid who was born and raised in the nearby town of

Photo courtesy of Amherst College Digital Collections

Ellis was a vital member of Amherst’s Men’s Hockey team, being voted the sole team captain during his senior season in 2006-07.

Springfield, Mass., Ellis played multiple sports growing up, but it was his passion for hockey that stood out. In high school, Ellis was well liked, and had a large circle of friends, but was known as someone who was committed to his sport: once he knew that hockey was what he wanted to dedicate himself to, he put all his energy into it. He is the first to admit this — he didn’t go to parties or hang out with people much after school. But it was this hard work and dedication to his craft that allowed him to eventually make his way to Amherst.

Ellis knew about Amherst, and was very well aware of the academic reputation that it held.

And, while he knew he was an intelligent kid and did very well in school, he felt it would be a reach for him to get in because of the high standards for admission.

That fact, coupled with his desire to play Division I hockey meant that initially, the school he would eventually call his alma mater was not on his radar. So, he committed to playing junior hockey two years before college in the hopes of making his dreams a reality. While many of his peers were taking the SAT or ACT, writing college essays, and going on college tours, Ellis was honing his craft. Once he knew that he would be playing at the next level, he was determined to make the most of his chance.

10 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Sean Ellis ’07

Ellis joined the NHL’s Broadcasting Department in 2009, doing an an entry-level job working with the league’s different television compaines. Over the last 10-plus years, he has worked his way up to become one of the league’s most senior members officals.

“I put all my eggs in that basket” Ellis’ two years playing junior hockey proved fruitful, providing him the ability to grow up in a way he hadn’t been able to do in high school. In an effort to stay academically engaged, he took classes at Holyoke Community College while also balancing his hockey schedule, studying for the SAT, and his responsibilities at home, since he was still living with his family in Springfield at the time. I think Ellis said it best: “What junior hockey afforded me was a couple of years, to grow, to mature, as a hockey player, as a student, as a person.

And it really helped me, maybe more than anything, kind of understand where my shortcomings were. It gave me that time to address them.” Once he real-

ized this and found his footing, everything changed.

By the second of his two years playing juniors, Ellis was beginning to have conversations with coaches about playing hockey at the college level, and consequently reconnected with the Mammoths’ assistant coach, who he had known since his days of playing youth hockey in Springfield. Once the two started catching up, and Ellis gave the coach his grades, they began to talk about how they could bring Ellis to Amherst. And, as soon as Ellis knew that becoming a Mammoth was a possibility, he got to work.

“I did whatever I could do to make myself the best candidate possible to get in. Because I think I realized that at the time, I wanted to use hockey to get me

into the best school I could possibly get into,” he said. “And then I got really fortunate, you know, the right things happened and it kind of just fell in place. And as soon as I got accepted it was a no brainer, I accepted it on the spot.”

“I wanted to know how I tick” Even after having matured so much during his time playing junior hockey, Ellis admits he walked onto campus woefully ill-prepared for his freshman year of college. While he felt very ready for college athletics, his confidence didn’t yet extend to his academics. Like many students arriving at a college like Amherst, he was immediately overwhelmed by other students’ level of intelligence, and what was ahead for him, despite feeling he did everything he possibly could to be prepared for that moment. In the end, it was his work ethic, the thing that had gotten him to campus in the first place, that helped him navigate his new environment.

This work ethic extended to his studies: while he came to Amherst with no idea what he wanted to major in, Ellis’s connection with visiting UMass Professor Richard Halgin and Professor of Psychology Catherine Sanderson — the hockey team’s faculty liaison and Ellis’ primary mentor and academic advisor during his time at Amherst — were huge influences on his decision to major in psychology. He wanted to learn how he ticked, and from where the determination he had in spades originated — when he found the answers to those questions in the psychology classes he was taking, he decided it was the path for him. But, just like his path to Amherst, Ellis didn’t take the road well traveled. Instead, he worked extremely hard to forge his own path.

From Player to Official Initially, Ellis’ plans after college included going to graduate school for sports psychology, but he decided to wait a year to do so and focus his energy on try-

ing to go as far with hockey as he possibly could, believing that, “if it’s in your head and your heart, you have a duty to try.” After a short stint in the Central Hockey League, he returned to Amherst as a volunteer assistant coach for the hockey team, and continued his path in the game he loved.

It was here that he reconnected with the father of one of his Amherst teammates that worked in the broadcasting department of the NHL. Through the conversations that they had, he was able to get the opportunity to apply for an entry-level job in the NHL’s broadcasting department, and after eight months of extensive interviews and persistently following up, Ellis got the job. After spending two years in New York, he would move to the league’s headquarters in Toronto. There, in addition to his job working with Canadian television networks on broadcasting rights, he was offered the chance to help out the hockey operations department on a part-time basis because of his hockey experience.

Because the department’s job is to watch every single game and review every goal to ensure that the integrity of the game is maintained, his days were busy, and his nights were busier. But just like in college, despite the extra time it would require, he loved what he was doing, and was willing to put in the work to do the job right. Because of this, when members of the departement left and a position opened up, he was able to get the job.

Now a full-time member of the hockey operations department working in the NHL’s Situation Room, Ellis’ job description has expanded from just ensuring the legality of goals to also include verifying goalscorers and recommending rule changes. But even with his increased workload of late, his love for the game has never waned. He is essentially getting paid to watch the game he loves so much. It is a dream come true.

Doing What He Can Even though he is now one of the most integral and senior

members of a vital part of the NHL Administration, he still feels that it is his duty to give back to the community that has given him so much. In addition to his job, the teammates he played with and the people he met are still some of his best friends, and he fondly looks back on his time at Amherst as some of the best of his life. So, when students reach out, he does everything he can to help, even offering this tidbit of advice about making the big decisions in life: “In a perfect world, if you could decide right now, what would you do?” He told me, “If whatever you choose doesn’t work out, you now have an answer, so it’s always worth trying.”

Ellis’ hard work and dedication has defined his journey to this point, and even when he has failed, his determination has allowed him to change course with a huge amount of success. Without a doubt, the advice he gave students has rung true for him, and I, for one, am excited to see what his passion will bring to his life for years to come.

Photo courtesy of Sean Ellis ’07

Ellis, pictured here, stands in the NHL’s Situation Room, where he works full-time. Over the course of his time in the Operations Department, Ellis has had a variety of responsibilities, including checking the legaility of goals, reccommending rule changes, and communicating with team representatives and players about his decisions.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 11

Alumni Profile | David Friend ’77

Life-Long Devotion to Chronicling the Truth As editor of creative development for Vanity Fair, David Friend ’77 uses eloquent writing and striking photography to inform his readers about the most news-worthy topics of our time.

— Tana DeLalio ’24 David Friend ’77 has been on a mission to uncover the truth since his days at Amherst.

Friend began his journalistic endeavors at The Amherst Student, but since then, he has worked as Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development for over 20 years and was previously Life Magazine’s director of photography. As he has developed his extensive writing, editing, and photography repertoire, he has covered some of the most newsworthy events of his lifetime.

Growing up in the Chicago area, Friend hadn’t even heard of Amherst until a family friend recommended it. He decided to apply and got in from a public high school. Friend feels he made the right decision. “I had a wonderful four years there, made lifelong friends and stayed in touch with a number of professors,” Friend says.

Friend’s Days at Amherst As an English major, Friend found lasting connections with his professors. He was mentored

by Armour Craig, an esteemed English professor who would go on to become the interim president of the college. Friend particularly enjoyed Craig’s class on the influential Irish novelist James Joyce. He also studied under the novelist Robert Stone.

“I took two or three writing courses from him and we remained friends for years.

And I published a couple of his pieces years later when I was at Vanity Fair.” He is also still in

touch with Stanley Rabinowitz, whose Russian literature course he loved, and Bill Pritchard, an English professor still affiliated with the college. Of course, his strongest connection to an Amherst community member is to his son Sam Friend ’10, a jazz musician in New Orleans.

In addition to taking classes, Friend further explored his passion for writing by becoming the editor for A Review — a literary magazine at Amherst which featured poetry, short stories, and photography.

He also drew cartoons and wrote cultural pieces and satire for The Amherst Student. One time, he even went to Washington and covered the trial of Jimmy Carter’s budget director for The Student. While drawing cartoons may seem far removed from his later work doing journalism at Life magazine and Vanity Fair, drawing was only one facet of Friend’s exploration of journalism.

Friend created his own course with then-President Bill Ward and Classics Professor John Lee Moore, to learn about pitching and writing stories for national magazines. Within this independent study, he wrote jokes for the National Lampoon as well as poems and serious journalistic pieces for his local newspaper and other places.

During his junior and senior years, Friend also interned at Newsweek through the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) program.

Friend’s Successful and Extensive Career After Amherst, Friend moved to New York, “to try to be a starving novelist,” but became, “more starving than a novelist.”

He came to realize that, even living with friends, he couldn’t make rent. While this is not an uncommon plight for writers, Friend was able to use the connections he made at Amherst to change his situation.

“I sort of created a job for myself,” Friend says. Using a clip portfolio full of work he had written at Amherst, he applied and got a job as one of the nine reporters Life magazine hired in 1978. He was the second youngest person on the staff.

After working as a news editor at Life, Friend became the director of photography, which enabled him to spend 10 years traveling the world with photographers doing picture stories.

In 1982, he visited Beirut three times to cover the Israeli invasion, and went to Poland, which had been put under martial law in response to union protests.

He interviewed Russian prisoners of war held by the Mujahideen in 1983 during the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Over the years, he has covered, “basically everything,” ranging from the Middle East to national and international politics, Americana, and even Hollywood news events. Friend thrived on the incredible variety of subjects he was able to cover, saying it was “really wonderful to work in a

12 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Celeste Sloman

Friend’s passion for journalism started at the Amherst Student and developed into a life-long career, starting at Life Magazine until he moved to his current position at Vanity Fair. general-interest magazine.”

Friend worked at Life for 20 years, then switched to Vanity Fair after he was hired by his Life colleague Graydon Carter.

He has spent the last 23 years doing stories for Vanity Fair as both an editor and a writer. He no longer works on photography, but he continues editing alongside the magazine’s new editor-in-chief Radhika Jones.

Friend recently worked together with Jones on Vanity Fair’s “Women on Women,” a book he describes as, “women writers writing about women.”

In addition to his work at Vanity Fair, Friend has delved into movies and television in recent years. His work on the CBS Documentary 9/11 earned him an Emmy. The documentary centered on the footage of the attacks captured by two of Friend’s childhood friends.

“They were the only people to videotape the first plane going into the first tower, and the sec-

ond plane going to the second tower, and had both buildings fall on top of them and survived while filming. They also focused on the life of a firehouse that was very near the World Trade Towers,” Friend described. CBS still airs the documentary every five years.

Looking at 9/11 through Film and Photography Friend’s work on 9/11 is not limited to the documentary. He also wrote a book about it called “​ Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11.” His writing illuminates different facets of the global response to the attacks than the earlier documentary.

“The book I wrote was my own idea,” Friend explains. “It was the story of the brothers taking that footage, but it really was a history of photography through the lens of a week in time. It looks at September 11 [through]16 of 2001, and talks

about the transition from traditional film and videotape to digital photography and digital news gathering for television. So it’s a whole look at how basically the attacks were also a significant event in the history of photography as it was changing.”

Since there are now 20 years of individuals born after the 2001 attacks, Friend posits that photography can help them gauge the tremendous impact of 9/11 that they couldn’t experience first-hand. He describes that, “People are deniers of many things in life, but through pictures, we can see the reality of what happened that day. And no matter what conspiracy theorists or purveyors of fake news would have you believe, this really happened.”

The premise of Friend’s book is that the way in which individuals can view photography

and images has fundamentally changed since the attacks. The first change Friend observed is the introduction of cell phone cameras, which didn’t exist in 2001. He described how, instead, people captured 9/11 from many different angles through the use of surveillance cameras, civilian photographs, and network footage. He believes that “had there been cell phone cameras, I think, despite all the horror of that horrific day, it would have been even worse in terms of what was conveyed. The images of people up in the burning towers would have gotten out, making it even harder to take in. So, we didn’t see what went on inside the buildings, but we all sort of came together nationally.”

Friend sees the internet’s growth as the second major technological change since 9/11.

He said that, “Even though it

[the internet] existed, 95 percent of people got their information that day from television, newspapers or radio. Only 5 percent went on the internet to get their information.”

He notes that as a result of its rise over the past 20 years, the internet now gives people the capacity to tell lies about 9/11.

He says, “They will begin to insist on crazy things and try to undercut the baseline truth…So while the Internet provided instantaneous information, which was helpful, it also warped people because it also gave a platform to crazy people to serve their own purposes. So, there was a boom in conspiracy theories such as the one that 9/11 didn’t exist.”

Friend explained that the third technological change after 9/11 was the rise of social media.

He noted that it barely existed at

the time of the attacks; MySpace and Facebook became popular a while later. Friend posits that, “In addition to all the good things that social media facilitates, it allows different groups to communicate falsely to one another. It gave rise to people who could easily use networks to promote false narratives.” He notes that the platform of social media can be detrimental to journalism itself. Friend offers Trump’s use of Facebook in the 2016 election as an example of how social media can alter history.

Takeaways from a Lifetime of Journalism As a result of these technological changes, Friend observes that both true and false information spread more readily online and in the media. He urges students to use their own reason-

ing to separate the truth from the fictions that are constantly spreading in today’s society.

“Part of what Amherst teaches students is to have deduction, creativity, inclusion, but you have to search not only for beauty, but for truth. It’s hard to determine what is truthful when you have these all competing narratives, because it all seems subjective, but there are certain underlying truths of history and science. It’s incumbent upon your generation to try to get to the truth.”

While this may seem like a daunting task, Friend posits that, “The evidence is there to chronicle.” Using almost every facet of journalism: writing, editing, photography, and film, Friend has successfully enlightened his readers for decades and will continue doing so for years to come.

Photo courtesy of David Friend ‘77

Friend ’77 aims to separate facts from fiction and share the truth through writing, photography, and film.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 13

Alumni Profile | Jean S. Fugett, Jr. ’72

Football and Far More: Jean S. Fugett, Jr. From the football field to the legal domain, the through line of Fugett’s multifaceted career has been an unwavering work ethic and passion for each pursuit.

— Brooke Hoffman ’23E From the Dallas Cowboys to the Washington Football Team to the business world and more, there is little Jean Fugett ’72 hasn’t done. His impressive career stretches through a multitude of fields where he has ended up on some of the largest stages in the public sphere. Behind it all: drive, passion, and gratitude for every opportunity that comes his way.

Journey to Amherst A Baltimore native, Fugett attended Cardinal Gibbons High School. Having skipped

the seventh grade, Fugett started high school at the age of 12, ultimately setting him up to start Amherst at the age of 16 in 1968. He began playing football seriously as a senior in high school, going on to become the first Black athlete to win the award of Baltimore Catholic Athlete of the Year. Though he gained the attention of notable football coaches at Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, and notably the College of William & Mary — where Fugett would have been the first Black athlete at the college — the beautiful

Photo courtesy of Jean S. Fugett, Jr. ‘72

A two-sport athlete, Fugett was an indispensable member of the basketball and football teams during his time at Amherst.

Western Massachusetts setting and warmth of the Amherst community ultimately drew Fugett to the Pioneer Valley.

Recalling his first visit to campus, Fugett explained, “When I walked to Memorial Hill, and saw all of those fields and those mountains, there was no doubt in my mind. I knew Amherst was ranked well and that the coaches cared about me and that it was just a great place.”

Fugett was recruited by coach Tracy Mehr — assistant coach of Amherst football for 36 seasons — and famous head coach of Amherst football for 33 years, James Ostendarp. Mehr and Ostendarp had a significant impact on Fugett, one that extended past his time at Amherst: “they were very important to my entire life,” Fugett expressed.

Life at Amherst Among his many activities at Amherst, Fugett was an integral member of the basketball and football teams, editor for the Amherst Student, and even host of a campus radio show during his first year — an experience Fugett said kick-started his interest in broadcasting.

Reminiscing on his Amherst years, Fugett shared one particularly exciting story about an Amherst vs. UMass basketball game in which he would play against someone who would later become a household name.

Prior to the game, Fugett was told he was going to “get [his] comeuppance” at the game because he would be going up

14 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Jean S. Fugett, Jr. ‘72

From NFL player to businessman, attorney, reporter and more, Fugett has done it all over the course of his career. against one particular, highly skilled UMass player. People jokingly said the UMass player would “eat [Fugett’s] lunch,” — meaning his opponent would outcompete him with ease.

Commenting on the experience further, Fugett said “to make a long story short, I [asked], ‘What’s his name?’ They said ‘Julius Erving’ … and needless to say, I played against Dr. J. We became fast friends and have been friends ever since. That was a pretty remarkable experience.” Dr. J wasn’t the only notable person Fugett met during his time at Amherst: “Ken Burns used to eat with us. He went to Hampshire. So I met Dr. J, Ken Burns, and David Eisenhower, and this was all just in four years,” Fugett excitedly said as he shared some of his favorite Amherst memories.

On top of his extracurricular involvement, Fugett completed an independent study in which he spent a year researching his family’s history. Inspiring and supporting his independent study was History and Black Studies Professor Asa J. Davis.

Davis had a deep impact on Fugett: “Professor Asa J. Davis was the first Black Studies professor and it really wasn’t Black Studies because we didn’t have a department. And he really influenced me. He had taught at San Francisco State University, he spoke Portuguese, he was interpreting African stuff from Brazil. When he came into class and said that there were royal kingdoms in Africa with gold and jewels while people were still living in caves in England, no one had ever said that to me before. I had never

read that before. And that told me that I wanted to find out about myself.” Over the course of his collegiate independent study, and ongoing research to this day, Fugett has uncovered an extraordinary family history, discovering — among many things — that his grandfather was a notable educator and his grandmother had contact with Booker T. Washington.

In conversation with Fugett, his love and pride for Amherst is palpable. He expressed how much he valued his time on campus and cherished the experiences he had here, especially on his athletic teams.

“You never forget your teammates. To have that relationship and be in the locker room, that’s special. And that’s what I miss the most.” Fugett says.

For Fugett, being on a team is like being a part of a family.

“My family’s gone now and I’m not on a team anymore. I just really miss it.” Experiences like playing against Julius Erving, being coached by top figures like James Ostendarp, and having access to all the resources Amherst has to offer made for a special college experience, one Fugett is very grateful for: “I’ve been so fortunate to be educated,” Fugett expressed.

NFL, News and More Small Division 3 conference games in Western Massachusetts are not the typical training grounds for going pro. Not so for Fugett, who ended up in the NFL after Amherst. “I didn’t expect to make the team,” Fugett says about his transition to the NFL. “I was the 358th player pick — the last in the thirteenth round — drafted by a championship team that had a Hall of Fame player at the position. So I figured this would help my writing career because I was going to be able to tell stories for the rest of my life that I was with Roger Staubach and Calvin Hill at the world champion Dallas Cowboys training camp and I would get cut.”

Impressing the Dallas Cowboys coaching staff with his

ability to memorize and effectively implement the playbook, Fugett made the team as a backup tight end and had the opportunity to be coached by the famous Tom Landry. In the years that followed, Fugett would go on to play in Super Bowl X for the Cowboys against the Pittsburgh Steelers, as well as become a union leader, fighting for free agency in the league.

When asked about his favorite memory in the NFL, Fugett recalls, “I had so many but clearly going to the Super Bowl and having the chance to be the best.” While the Cowboys didn’t win that year, Fugett looks back fondly on the experience, even joking that “though we didn’t win, we had Willie Nelson at our party. I don’t know who the Steelers had.”

The NFL wasn’t Fugett’s only venture after college. Upon graduating Amherst, Fugett had set his sights on pursuing a J.D. and by the time he started in the NFL, he had been admitted to Columbia Law School and was waitlisted at Harvard Law. After signing with the Washington Football Team in 1976, Fugett began attending school at night in pursuit of his law degree from the George Washington University Law School. While balancing his law school curriculum, Fugett had a successful season with the Washington Football Team and was ultimately selected to the Pro Bowl in 1977.

Looking back on his time with Washington, Fugett expressed how much he valued the experience of being challenged everyday. He elaborated: “As a union leader for seven of my eight years [in the NFL], I was tested even more so and the greatest honor — not the Pro Bowl selection — the greatest honor of my football career was signing with the Washington Football Team. Upon signing, the Washington Football Team had more former player [political] representatives on their team than any team in the league. They were [union members] and George Allen liked them because they were leaders.”

Fugett’s presence both on and off the field earned him opportunities in journalism— a lifelong area of interest for Fugett after his early experiences as an editor for the Amherst Student and intern for the Baltimore Sun. During his career in the NFL, Fugett worked as a reporter for The Washing-

ton Post and anchor for CBS broadcasts. After his football career ended, Fugett entered the business world. His notable career endeavors include helping his brother found TLC Group, serving as the Director and Vice-Chair of the McCall Pattern Company Management Committee, running TLC Be-

atrice International Foods, and starting a law practice.

After sitting down with Jean Fugett, one thing is abundantly clear: whether it’s on the field, in the newsroom, or in the business world, Fugett is someone who welcomes a challenge and not only rises to the occasion but sets the bar even higher.

Photo Courtesy of Jean S. Fugett, Jr. ‘72

Calling it the “greatest honor of [his] football career,” Fugett signed with the Washington Football Team in 1976 and would go on to earn a Pro Bowl selection the next year.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 15

Alumni Profile | Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12

Reconciling Queer Christianity Through Activism Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12 embodies Terras Irradient — what it means to spread light.

— Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12 has devoted her life to understanding others, through understanding herself. She is multitalented, and her work is diverse. She works for Reconciling Ministries Network, an United Methodist organization rooted in LGBTQ justice and inclusion, and HopeGateWay, a nondenominational church in Portland, Maine focused on inclusivity. She also serves on the board of the Quality Community Center, a queer and trans centered community hub in Portland, and writes on her blog and in a forthcoming novel. But through all of these professional and personal outlets, one thing is consistent — Hu Kinney works to reconcile Christian faith and queer identity, a cultural divide many percieve to be unbridgable.

She has devoted her life to understanding others’ experiences with these identities, beginning by understanding her own.

Navigating Childhood “Some of the things that when I was younger I thought were my greatest sources of weakness are some of the most unexamined and complex, and life-giving pieces of wisdom of who I am today,” Hu Kinney remarked. Her early life was marked by being a child of two Chinese immigrants who moved around the United States frequently. Born in Chicago and raised in the city’s west suburbs, she and her family later moved to Arizona, then to Oklahoma, until returning to the suburbs of Chicago for high school.

Hu Kinney is very close with her younger brother — a rela-

tionship her parents worked hard to build — but has struggled to connect with her parents themselves, especially because of a difference in language. Hu Kinney and her brother spoke English to their parents, while they responded only in Chinese.

And their miscommunications were based on more than just language: it was also their difference in expectations of what it means to lead a worthwhile life.

This tension appeared strongly when Hu Kinney came out as queer to them at 14. “I think I had this kind of Hollywood sense of what a coming out story should look like. And I tried to play that out with parents that had really different ideas about family and really different values from what I saw on the screen, or stories that I’d read,” she said.

Later in her life, she was able to reconcile these differences, largely by coming to terms with her parents’ expectations and showing them that queer people lead safe and fulfilling lives.

Despite this, Hu Kinney says that her parents taught her the importance of moral obligations to others. “I think I was inculcated with this idea that I have a lot of rights given from the situation in which [my family and I] found ourselves, but also that I have a lot of responsibilities to my family and community and nation,” she said.

The way she believed she could work to fulfill these obligations was through storytelling.

Even during her early childhood, she was drawn to telling stories, especially because her fami-

ly moved around a lot. She said that it helped her “to feel like there was some meaning to this otherwise sometimes random sequence of events” inherent to a childhood spent changing homes.

Finding Community at Amherst After those years of frequent changes, she was able to set down roots at Amherst. It was a reason why she was drawn to apply: “I started to get this idea that I really wanted to be a part of a meaningful small community where I could know people and feel known.” Of course, she also appreciated the financial aid package offered to her, which allowed her parents to send her to college knowing that they could better support her brother, who would also be pursuing a college education.

“But also to be totally honest,” she admitted, “it was visiting campus and looking out over Memorial Hill. That incredible view made me feel like, ‘Wow, this could really be a beautiful home for me for the next four years.’”

Hu Kinney loved her time at Amherst. She got along well with her first-year roommate — they shared a birthday — and quickly became involved with the Amherst Christian Fellowship (ACF). It was a group that facilitated novel and challenging discussions. “I felt I had a lot of freedom to ask questions that I didn’t feel like I had the space to ask in the community where I had grown up,” she said.

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Photo courtesy of Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12

At Amherst, Hu Kinney found community in the Amherst Christian Fellowship, where she also met her future wife.

She also spoke glowingly about her academics at Amherst: “I was enamored with all my classmates and how much they knew. And my professors were brilliant.” The most impactful class she took was “Haiti in Fact and Fiction,” taught by Roberto Marquez, a visiting professor from Mount Holyoke College.

“It was transformative to me because it told me that there were so many modes of storytelling that both had deep cultural roots and had so much to say to people who didn’t necessarily belong to the culture that the stories come from,” she said.

In addition, she noted ethnomusicology courses with Professor of Music Jeffers Engelhardt and environmental studies courses with Professor of History and Environmental Studies Edward Melillo as particularly formative.

“They were challenging courses where I didn’t feel academic pressure as much as I felt academic freedom to roam and to pull in so many other disciplines into what

seems on the surface could just be two-dimensional disciplines.”

Though her academics were invigorating, Hu Kinney’s most important moments at Amherst ended up centering around the ACF. At an ACF mixer between under- and upper-classmen, she met her future wife (though she does not in fact remember the occasion). And, she told me that coming out to the group was bittersweet.

“When I came out, I didn’t have to bear the brunt of losing lots of friends … But when my wife came out, she really did lose most of our community,” she recalled. “I think it was just not a group that was able to hold space for either of us. But it was also a really meaningful place where I really learned how to invest in friendship.”

Despite the lack of acceptance, her experiences with the group informed her post-collegiate work centered at the intersection of queer identity and Christian faith. “I got to under-

stand better how a lot of different kinds of Christians from different perspectives and upbringings thought about their faith, and various theological hang-ups that prevent them from being celebratory about LGBTQ people.”

The Inherent Value of a Voice Hu Kinney describes her work as “translating the experiences of being queer and the cases of queer and trans affirmation for those people who miss out on that intersection.” These people who “miss out” have “cultural misconceptions or lack of interaction with queer and trans people,” she says. To address these misconceptions, Hu Kinney works through storytelling,

preaching and community engagement.

“There is not only a lot of inherent value in the voices of people who live marginalized experiences, but there is a lot that needs to take center stage from those experiences, so that people can draw from the inherent wisdom that we have, that we embody,” she noted. By bringing her own intersectional identity into her faith, as a Chinese, immigrant-born, queer woman, she works to explain what it means to be queer in the context of all the things that make someone who they are, for people who might not understand.

It’s not just about the intersection of identities, but also what she calls “the intersection of my longing and my anger.” She

motivates herself by imagining a world based in her longing, “one that decenters institutions of power, especially the ways in which Christian belief systems abuse power. The world that I imagined begins where the world that I feel anger about ends. The shores butt against each other.”

This metaphor of two shores and the space between came up again when we discussed how her work relates to people of different identities and backgrounds than herself. “I can only occupy the boat that I’m sitting in, and ultimately we are all kind of riding the crest of the world to come.” So, she acknowledges that “it would be foolish of me to speak on other people’s behalf.

But it would also be foolish of me to pretend that [my own story]

is the only experience that matters.”

As such, Hu Kinney rejects simple, succinct answers when nuanced, layered explanations are available. “That includes being really critical about ways in which both our movement and the church at large uphold and systems of oppression that aren’t just about queer and trans people,” she says.

Returning to her Roots Her ambitions for the future are to get through a draft of her forthcoming novel and to see the MAPITA, the Maine Asian American Pacific Islander and Desi American Magazine, published, which she helped organise. She looks forward to seeing the magazine come to life for

Asian American people in Maine.

And at their root, her goals are grounded in the fulfillment of obligation — to others, and also to herself. “I guess I just want to do work that is meaningful and that I can feel proud of, and that I feel I honored my experience at Amherst and the people who poured their energy into me.”

Finally, when asked about the advice she’d give to current students, Hu Kinney gave a response characteristic of her passion for community. “Be as open-hearted as you can bear to be. The times when I felt most like I could be a full part of my Amherst experience, those are the moments when I was most open-hearted: when I was willing to be corrected, or to make friends with people who proved me wrong.

Photo courtesy of Ophelia Hu Kinney ’12

Hu Kinney’s work sits at the intersection of queer identity and Christian faith, working to reconcile these opposing cultural forces. She is affiliated with Reconciling Ministries Network, an United Methodist organization rooted in LGBTQ justice and inclusion, and HopeGateWay, a nondenominational church in Portland, Maine.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 17

Alumni Profile | Lisa Chang ‘82

Meeting Challenges in the Name of the Law Lisa Chang ’82 has led a life with a willingness to adapt, something that has brought her from political science to the Office of Civil Rights.

— Dustin Copeland ’25 Growing up with three brothers and a sister on New York’s Upper West Side, Lisa Chang ’82 had never heard of Amherst College. But during one long weekend spent visiting her friend at Hampshire College, Chang visited Amherst and was instantly enamored. The fall splendor of campus, with leaves carpeting the quad that opens out to goldsoaked mountains, was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen.

“Immediately,” she said, she knew she belonged here.

And it wasn’t just the vistas that made Amherst the best place for Chang to thrive.

There is an experience Chang remembers happening many times over the course of her college career: once in a while, class discussions across departments would start to resonate with one another. The themes and ideas being discussed in apparently-disparate class environments would “vibrate or feed into each other,” and Chang had the opportunity to “see synthesis occur, to see ideas echoing” across classes from political science to women’s studies or Chinese history.

This sort of interdisciplinary synthesis of new and varied information would form the backbone of Chang’s academic career, and inform how she would approach life at large, from law school to practice to her current overseeing position with the Office of Civil Rights.

A sweater is a sweater is an art piece At Amherst, Chang’s prima-

ry extracurricular was her work at the college theater’s costume department. Her sewing skills served her well, and she gained experience there that she posits as a metaphor for the college experience as a whole.

Assigned to make costumes from character boards made by a visiting designer from New York, the crew had not much more than sweaters, normal garments. The task of constructing costumes purely from old sweaters seemed impossible, because a sweater is a sweater — it unravels when it is cut and therefore cannot be made into a new shape.

Not so, Chang found! “In truth, you can cut it, shape it, sew it, do whatever you want to the sweater and make something completely different.” So by deconstruction and reformation of those seemingly-immutable garments, the crew realized an artistic vision.

There was a magic to that creation of something completely new out of the apparently inapplicable old — a process Chang found reflected in her classes as old information and lived experience became fodder for the creation of new ideas, of new forms of learning.

It was a synthesis of sorts, inspiring a commitment to new information that expressed itself from college life to the present.

Exploring the unfamiliar Chang pursued a political science major at Amherst, with an undeclared major in Chinese language — that is, she fulfilled

the course requirements of a Chinese language major without making it official. The combination of political science and Chinese turned out to be complements, as her senior thesis explored U.S. Foreign Policy in East Asia, compelling her to study closely the nature of especially Chinese-American and Japanese-American relations. It was a chance to synthesize her two closest areas of study, and so turned out to be a really fun project.

That sense of exploration and discovery that characterized Chang’s time at Amherst stayed with her after graduation — Chang thought she “should explore some other areas that I was not familiar with” before settling on law school or a career path.

So explore other areas she did.

After a few short stints with companies inspired by econ-major friends, Chang decided she was uninterested in the world of business. Except for a time spent at a consulting firm, business was entirely devoid of what she loved best about college: intense research and writing papers based on that information.

After her business foray, Chang found herself drawn again to law, and so spent time as a paralegal at a position with a fellow Amherst alum, allowing her to get a feel for the practice of law before she committed to school. Paralegal work turned out to be fascinating, leading Chang to law school and more of the academic rigor that she loved in her undergraduate years.

Finals season especially in

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Photo courtesy of Lisa Chang ‘82

Chang has brought Amherst to Washington D.C. as she applies her philosophy of education to her career. law school was “very intense but very good fun,” she said, a chance to bring all that she had been learning through her semesters together into one puzzle, fitting bits of information together to create a new and cohesive whole: a synthesis of previous knowledge, the reformation of a sweater.

The real world, then, became the pure application of what Chang loved most about school.

She wanted to explore, to learn and apply, and so she did.

Abnormally for a recent graduate, Chang tried transactional corporate law first because she liked the idea of getting things done through the law. Very quickly, though, she found that corporate law didn’t fit her at all — her personality could not stand the practice of that kind of environment. It was time to pivot.

“Generally,” Chang said about litigation, “people move out because they don’t like to fight.”

That explained what she called the “typical law school path

from litigation to corporate.” But Chang went in the inverse direction. Her personality and interests fit litigation perfectly.

As she moved around large corporate law firms, she found that it was difficult to get practical experience, so again she changed her situation and she found a litigation boutique full of amazing people and hands-on experience.

Her life was thenceforth set: successful lawyer at a small-scale firm in New York City, married and fulfilled by work that allowed her to utilize methods directly from the best parts of collegiate academia. But, as always, circumstances changed.

A new set of changes A set of fortuitous occurrences: the advent of a first child, and then her husband’s move to teaching law. The first event set Chang looking for a path with a little more work-life balance, perhaps in city government, while the second brought the family to Atlanta, Ga.

Chang described the Atlanta law market as “much more contained” than New York’s, allowing her to much more easily make her mark. It was in Atlanta that Chang became active in a new Asian bar association after having founded one herself in New York, leading her to become president of the national Asian Pacific American Bar Association.

Chang’s life became an amalgam of experiences, from law firm to leadership management alongside her experiences in bar associations. That set her up perfectly for selection for Fulton County Attorney, a position she held from 2009 to 2013. There yet again she was exposed to new ideas and a new chance to find learning in her work.

Her positions in Atlanta from litigation to local government were rooted deeply in her Amherst experience.

She talks about her visits to

China, something that seemed impossible in her childhood when her family in China was completely cut off from her American relatives. The speed of development in China, from utter darkness in 1980 to massive two-level highway systems developed in under a decade as car use exploded from almost nothing to the largest car market in the world. That level of organized public-works project was simply impossible in Atlanta, as bureaucratic disagreement made relatively simple projects complicated — worthwhile for the say Atlanta’s people were given, but a much slower process. It is that contrast that made local government in the U.S. so fascinating — it drew on Chang’s college experience even as it required an entirely new set of skills.But even that could not last forever — Chang’s husband got a position as faculty at Georgetown, so she began to search for

a position in the new city. Currently, Chang works with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in a position very different from anything she’s held before. She oversees the regional offices of the Office, each of which investigate complaints of alleged civil rights violations.

“Litigation,” Chang said, “is always one side or the other.” But the OCR is a neutral position, and so requires her to take on a new kind of third-person view, and a new kind of challenge.

The excitement of challenge Challenge more than anything else has formed a throughline for Chang’s life. Rather than an individual passion or a job Chang has lived for the very uprooting of those things. Rather than stick with something she was good at, she would move to find something new, something different and therefore difficult.

She doesn’t “want to ever keep doing something just because it is easy,” because keeping on with something for the sake of it is stagnation. It breeds a complacency that is antithetical to the driving force behind Chang’s life: the absorption and synthesis of new information with the old. “I like the challenge of change,” Chang said — ideally, every work experience should be like those law school finals, with all of their intensity and their puzzle-piece satisfaction.

Talking with Chang is inspiring in this way. It feels like the pursuit of education, of new information, is of the highest order, and that fulfillment will certainly be ours if only we approach our lives like Amherst approaches learning: in search of resonances in ideas, in the creation of something entirely new from the old and seemingly immutable.

Just as one creates a costume

out of an old sweater, or finds resonances across classes from seemingly-oppositional departments, so Chang says Amherst students should approach their education. The lessons learned here, the work and writing and people, formed the basis for the rest of Chang’s life. Her husband went here, after all, and here is where she learned the true iterative nature of the writing process, a skill that, more than any other, has allowed her to succeed outside of college.

And that success is from a basically very simple philosophy: “Don’t be afraid of change!

Changing things up is always a good thing.” While it’s more work in the short term, Chang said, “Anything that gives you great reward takes a lot of work.

If you just carry through that work, through the end of finals periods and postgraduate life, you have a truly deeper understanding.”

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Prior to moving to her current job at the Office of Civil Rights in Washington D.C., Chang was selected as the Fulton County Attorney in Atlanta, Ga. Pictured above, the Fulton County courthouse.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 19

Black Studies, 50 Years On: Education and Self-Definition

In honor of the college’s bicentennial and the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Black Studies department, The Student looks back on the student activism that led to the department’s establishment to examine the link between deconstructing white-centered academics and institutional change, as one of the many examples of the progress that student movements and Black students have effected at Amherst.

Q&A With Professor of Black Studies Stefan Bradley Significance of the Black Studies Department at Amherst “[It took] innovation to achieve Black studies as a discipline at the college... To protest for Black studies was something entirely different because this was a field of study that was being created, and it was audacious in its attempt to decolonize and decenter Europe and whiteness as the default departures for study.”

“What they protested for 50 years ago … exists today. It’s the reason why I’m here.”

Department’s Role in Student Activism “The student activism of the past informs greatly the student activism of the present. When you have an uprising and students are asking for access to mental health resources, that was an issue that people protested in the 1960s.”

“When [Black students] are decrying acts of racism that students may commit, or professors may commit, they are taking a page out of the book of Black resistance and rebellion that has been constructed over centuries now in this country.”

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Thousands of students partake in a national student strike on May 5, 1970, in protest of the Vietnam War, surveillance of the Black Panthers, and violence against student activists.

Below is an abbreviated timeline of the activism and action that allowed for the founding of Amherst College’s Black Studies department, a microcosm of the long history of student activists — and Black student activists especially — pushing the college to reckon with its troubled past and adopt more just, equitable policies and practices.

February 24, 1969

Black Students walk out of a meeting with the Instruction Committee of the Board of Trustees, testifying that the college is falling short on its promises delivered after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

November 2, 1969 April 17, 1969 Faculty votes in favor of implementing a Black Studies program to be included in the 1969-1970 curriculum.

April 30 – May 1, 1969

The Afro-American Society, with the Ad Hoc Committee, organizes the Amherst Moratorium — a two-day suspension of classes to discuss campus and national issues — and continues to call for previous demands.

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A symposium on “the problems of Black studies at Amherst” is held after program receives criticism from Black community.

Coordinator of UMass Black Studies calls for an autonomous Five College Black Studies department.

May 14, 1969

Day-long discussion seminars about the college’s historical failure to incorporate Black perspectives in the classroom were held.

Views from the Past

Voices from the Present

The following images depict historical moments preceding and following the establishment of the Black Studies department, including reports on the protests that precipitated these changes, documents that were circulated at the time, and views from the newly-established department.

Professor Olufemi Vaughan, Chair of Black Studies “[Black Studies] came out of a specific struggle: the struggle of Black people in this country, within the context of the Civil Rights and Black Power movement of the late 1960s, early 1970s.

Our program … evolved out of that particular experience, particular moment in American national history, but also global history.”

Julissa Fernandez ’22, Black Studies major “I think having a Black Studies department forces Amherst to hold itself accountable. You have to practice what you preach.

Many of the major movements at Amherst wouldn’t have occurred without the work of Black Studies scholars.”

Black Studies Professor Elizabeth Herbin-Trent That students have this opportunity to connect the past and the present, that’s important to me.

Jalen Woodard ’23, Black Studies major To this day, I remember my first time meeting with [my advisor] and feeling seen, heard, and valued … [the department] made me feel like I belong here in a way that no other department has.

Ernest Collins ’23, Black Studies major This department takes the work that is outside of campus and brings it not just into campus, but allows for us to interact with it.

Photos courtesy of Amherst College

February 5, 1970

Dissatisfaction and discourse about the inadequacy of the Black Studies program Students occupy Converse Hall, the main administrative building. Frost grows after its first semester. Horace Library, the Science Center at the Porter ’72, a member of the executive time, and College Hall. committee of the Afro-American society, publishes an article in The Student titled 1:00 a.m.

“Black Studies: Why It Failed.”

February 18, 1970 In light of a year of “idle promises,” around 250 students from the Five-College Afro-American Committee occupy four Amherst buildings. “The college is not and has never been seriously committed to satisying our needs.”

Five College Afro-American Committee presents its demands, including “the acceptence of [Black students’] right to determine their own programs, policies, and directions.”

5:30 a.m.

1:15 p.m.

Horace Porter reads the first statement delivered by the Five College Afro-American Committee over 89.3FM WAMH radio.

They call for the right to “self-determination and self-defintion,” in a Black Studies program in the Pioneer Valley.

Academic Year 1971 Following the pressure of continual student activism, the administration establishes the Black Studies department.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 21

Alumni Profile | Tony Jack ‘07

“Living His Truth”: Fighting for FLI Students A scholar and an advocate, Tony Jack ’07 has defined the conversation when it comes to college equity.

— Scott Brasesco ’22 Tony Jack ’07 is not a man who gives up. That was one fact that became readily apparently as he cheerfully recalled his time at the college and overcome challenges over the course of our interview. My later discussions with his former classmates, colleagues, and professors only underscored his driven nature.

He is a man who has constantly sought to improve and met each challenge with a smile on his face. It was ultimately this persistent determination to ‘expand his toolkit’ that seems to have made Jack the man he is today and brought him so much success as an academic.

An assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, he is best known for his 2019 book, “The Privileged Poor.” The book affirmed that a large portion of students of color at prestigious universities graduated from elite preparatory schools, calling into question how diversity statistics actually reflect socioeconomic diversification. His research has helped illuminate the complications of campus life for first-generation and low-income students — consequently shedding light on his own college experience at Amherst. He is currently researching how the pandemic has exposed further inequities for students of color in their lives off campus.

Despite still being in the adolescence of his professional career, Jack and his work have already been featured in a wide array of prestigious publications including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe. Whether it was his considerable experience giving interviews for magazine features or his hands-on teaching method

that had prepared him to speak so eloquently, our conversation flowed naturally from topic to topic, with almost no need for the questions I had prepared beforehand.

Over the course of our interview, we discussed the fundamental elements of his life and work — his experiences as a low-income student at a wealthy preparatory school, the subsequent cultural shock of entering a new and privileged world, and his groundbreaking work in “The Privileged Poor” — while also exploring how his days at Amherst have shaped his career and the way he thinks today.

Growing Up in West Grove Jack grew up in Coconut Grove, Miami. More specifically, “West Grove,” where he said life had always been harder than on the eastern side of McDonald Street: “One half [the esastern side] has better funded schools and lots of amenities, grocery stores not corner stores.”

Jack lived in a two-bedroom house with his mother, grandmother, two siblings, and an older cousin. His mother and brother were “the two people who supported me in everything that I did,” he said. “They never asked me to work — that was one luxury I had — even when times were rough.” His family’s support meant that he was able to focus on his studies and football, which he believed kept him off the streets and eventually helped him get into Amherst.

After Jack was kicked off his public high school’s football team due to a shoulder injury and his choice to prioritize his GPA over the sport, Jack transferred to Gulli-

ver Prep, a wealthy, predominantly white private school, in his senior year of high school. While he feels incredibly fortunate he was able to do so, it was an eye-opening culture shock. “I got a sense of how the top 10 percent were educated,” he said, and “a sense of what it was like to be at a school where the largest class was 16 students.” He noted the experience added to his “cultural toolkit” by introducing him to a world of privilege and money he had never known before; ultimately, it informed the research interests that would become his highly lauded 2019 book “The Privileged Poor.”

When I asked Jack how he ended up attending Amherst, he gave me one name and two words: “Don Faulstick, financial aid.” He described how then-assistant football coach Faulstick had called Gulliver Prep and asked the coach whether there was anyone on the team who would be a good fit for Amherst.

Jack was flown out to the college shortly thereafter, where he had a great time — he says he is still friends with some of the people that welcomed him to this day — and received a financial aid package.

Enjoying the Amherst Experience “I did not take a sociology class, or even a class cross-listed with sociology, until my senior spring,” said Jack, who is now an award winning sociologist. “Amherst doesn’t allow you to be pigeonholed. It doesn’t even let you pigeonhole yourself.”

In his time at Amherst, Jack took courses in over 10 departments, flirted with the pre-med track, and ultimately majored in religion and women’s and gender

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Photo courtesy of Tony Jack ’07

Jack speaks at Williams College during Claiming Williams Day, an annual event at Williams dedicated to confronting the college’s history of inequality. studies. Professor of Mathematics Robert Benedetto, one of the first professors to play a major role in Jack’s time at Amherst, recalled one telling quote from Jack: “When he was still seriously looking at being both pre-med and a religion major, he noted that, ‘That way, if I can’t help someone with the one thing, I can help them with the other.’”

Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies Rose Olver, the first tenure-track woman at the college and Jack’s advisor, similarly served as a major inspiration to him, helping him find his way to the women’s and gender studies major. He was also influenced by his religion classes, in which he “studied narratives, how people tell their stories, and how people shape their lives.”

Ultimately, these pursuits steered him to study sociology. Jack said the professor with the greatest influence on him was ultimately Political Science Professor Kristin Bumiller: “Her classes really taught me how to think about inequality.” He

shares a close friendship with Bumiller to this day; she attended his Harvard graduations and first big talks, and even brought him brownies on his birthday. “She went from being an advisor, to a mentor, to a lifelong friend,” he said. Bumiller, in an email to The Student, described Jack as “a scholar with a sense of purpose” and said she saw him as family. Jack feels their friendship exemplifies one of Amherst’s strongest assets: “One of the best things about Amherst is the connection that you have with faculty and staff.”

Among the many other faculty and staff who inspired him, he called attention to Professor of Chemistry David Hansen. “Every time I went to Hansen’s evening office hours, I’d be the only one there.

After the first few weeks, he started bringing two clementines, one for me and one for him, and a piece of chalk. He’d say ‘If you’re coming here, you’re going to the board’ and help me work through as many questions as I wanted,” Jack recalled.

The mentorship of Hansen and oth-

er Amherst professors carries tremendous influence on his teaching style today: “I try to bring Amherst to Harvard when I teach and when I mentor, because I know just how lucky and privileged we were at Amherst to have faculty dedicated both to the craft of teaching and the craft of research.”

He was also present in student life on campus. One of his close friends, Natashia Hines ’07, recalled some of these experiences, including Summer Science together, their meetings and parties with the BSU, working student security together, and studying together in the Octagon. Among the more funny skills of Jack’s she brought up were “his uncanny ability to come up with the most hilarious and fitting nicknames” and “taking advantage of his ‘man wall’ stature to shield us from blowing snow as we walked around campus.”

Jack was a friend to staff as well.

“Tony knew a huge swath of people on campus, from Tony Marx to staff in all kinds of campus offices,” said Director Jennifer Innes of the Moss Quantitative Center, who led the Summer Science program that

Jack tutored at during his time at the college and has even dropped in on as recently as 2020. She told me “you can see that much of his current work at Harvard has roots in his Amherst College years” and his advocacy work on behalf of fellow students.

Admission Without Inclusion Despite the many great experiences he had at Amherst — he positively glowed as he remembered his experiences with fellow students, especially his work with students of color as a diversity intern, and with faculty and staff — Jack was also forced to work through the difficulties of attending a predominantly white and wealthy institution as a first-generation, low-income, Black man.

Jack recalled feeling taken aback by the Indicator’s publication of a satire article that joked, “I guess he has cold feet, literally” after police killed a man on his way home from his bachelor party. He said this came after a series of other articles using satire to poke fun at others for their identities, including Harvard’s

first female president. The article sparked rampant discussions at the college — which Jack had a leading role in, due to his job managing the Octagon — about the role of satire and comedy in masking racism, homophobia, and sexism. In an interview with the New York Times, he recalled one instance in which a police car followed him home to his dorm, only leaving after he showed them his student ID as proof of his belonging.

Jack also experienced difficulty at the college due to his financial status. He ended up working five jobs over his time at the college.

“Work was a very big part of my time at Amherst,” Jack said. “It meant I was able to support my family at home, but it also demanded so much time that I wasn’t able to engage with my peers in the same way, go to as many events, or be part of as many things [as other students].” In class, he could always tell when the other students had no real experience with the hardships they were discussing and debating.

His experiences dealing with hardship at Amherst stuck with

Photo courtesy of Natashia Hines ’07

Jack is still close friends with Natashia Hines ’07 and Jordan McKay ’07 (pictured here, left to right).

him in graduate school as he started researching the experiences of first-generation and low-income students at prestigious colleges like Amherst.

Changing the Conversation After Amherst, Jack attended graduate school at Harvard University, where he earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology and conducted the research he would eventually use in “The Privileged Poor.”

“I was still broke,” Jack said, which was “part of the reason I applied for so many fellowships.” He received three fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation as he pursued his doctorate. Jack’s takeaway from the success of his endeavors was to apply for as many opportunities as he could.

When a New York Times Magazine article on low-income students featured his research, his career really started taking off. “I wasn’t even supposed to be part of that issue,” Jack said, “But everybody kept saying ‘You need to talk to Tony.’”

Eventually, he sat down with the article’s reporter, and their conversation “changed the narrative of that piece and became a lightning rod that got so many people’s attention about what it means to be first-gen.”

His work continues to capture national attention, particularly following Operation Varsity Blues — the college admissions scandal that consumed national news — which led many people to more deeply question equity in college admissions. Jack describes feeling proud that his work inspired some people to continue interrogating equity after college admissions. “Everybody was talking ‘The parents, the parents, the parents,’ but I was like ‘What about the students?’” he said.

“It was kind of surreal to see a whole narrative change once I started being part of interviews and talking about the experiences that students of color have.”

Jack is not the only one to recognize the significance of his work. He has twice been awarded membership as a junior fellow in Harvard’s prestigious Society of Fellows. He

also received the Shutzer Assistant Professorship at the Institute for Advanced Study. So far ”The Privileged Poor” has won nine awards and he has given over 150 talks on it at colleges across the country.

“My book has done better than I ever could have dreamed,” Jack said appreciatively. He even received an honorary degree in 2020. “When I went to one school and gave a talk, they engaged with the book and it changed the way they operated.

That was such an amazing experience that I don’t really have the words to describe it.”

Diana Tiburcio ’22, who has worked as Jack’s research assistant for two summers, described him as incredibly driven when it comes to first-generation, low-income communities: ”Tony is someone who really lives his truth. He inspires me to live up to the challenge every day.”

Life Lessons “Never be afraid to ask for help, that’s my piece of advice every time,” Jack said after I asked what he wanted to tell current students, “I don’t just mean asking for extensions; how do you get a network of people that keep you in mind when things come up?”

The advice brought to mind the story of his coach at Gulliver Prep, without whom he said he likely would never have even heard of Amherst. “There’s no better time [than at Amherst] to hone your skill of being comfortable to ask for help.”

Throughout my interview with Jack, it struck me just how often his career or his research had followed so directly from his own life experiences. He is a man who has taken every moment and stopped to question “Why?” It was clear that Jack saw life as a constant process of expanding one’s “toolkit,” something evident even in the advice with which he closed our discussion, and it is perhaps that mindset which I believe is Jack’s greatest gift to us via this profile.

Jack has never been one to confront new experiences with fear nor surrender. Rather, he has looked to each new experience as an opportunity to grow, and that consistent drive to learn more and do better has evidently paid off.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 23

Alumni Profile | Leah Longoria ’12

It Takes a Character to Make a Character Guided by her passion for writing, Leah Longoria ‘12 has demonstrated grit working her way into the Hollywood writer’s room as Amherst’s first FAMS graduate.

— Skye Wu ’23 “How could this moment be a TV show?” Leah Longoria ’12 often asks herself this question before quickly jotting down story ideas for the current episode she’s working on as a TV writer. As the first Film and Media Studies (FAMS) major to ever graduate from Amherst, Longoria is a natural storyteller. I was not surprised to hear about her success in the extremely cutthroat TV industry after learning about her relentless drive and work ethic. Her pluralistic pen has created characters in shows ranging from “Jane the Virgin” to “Monster High.”

But she is not just a writer. She is also a loving twin, a loyal friend, and a dedicated student. Her close relationships and great appreciation for the people in her life not only deeply moved me but also allowed me to glimpse the vibrant wholeness of her character.

In contrast to her ultra-demanding career and work schedule, there was a sense of ease in the way Longoria spoke. Her authenticity and sheer humbleness shone through her humorous remarks and lighthearted anecdotes. “What makes her really unusual, both as a student but also as a writer in Hollywood, is that she is both grounded and creative,” said Chair of FAMS Amelie Hastie, Longoria’s thesis advisor at Amherst.

“I think that’s what also makes her flexible.”

I couldn’t agree more with Professor Hastie’s observation. From my hour-long conversation with Longoria, I got to appreciate the tremendous depth and extensiveness of a writer’s inner world. The multitude of her experiences from coast to coast, from job to job and from page to page, allowed her to craft vivid

scenes and iconic characters that not only reflect her love of stories but also her love of life.

From Austin to Amherst Longoria grew up with her identical twin sister Caris Longoria ’12 in Austin, Texas. Besides remarkably similar appearances — there are relatives who can’t tell them apart — the twin sisters share a deep spiritual connection. “If we had suddenly read each other’s minds, nothing [about] our relationship would change,” said Longoria. “Anytime I try to explain our relationship, words feel inadequate.” The same sentiment reverberates in Caris’ words. “[Leah] understands me on a level that no one else ever will.”

The Longoria twins stuck together all through elementary school and high school. With the hope of continuing to stay together in college, they were both drawn by the open curriculum and decided on a change of scenery from Texas to Western Massachusetts.

She joined Club Crew during her freshman year and stayed on the team for all four years. Head Crew Coach Bill Stekl remembers Longoria as a “diligent, focused, and a model technician of the sport.”

“Leah was always a focused athlete whether she was sitting in a shell learning how to leverage it forward, when she was in the company of her teammates as they prepared for practice, or when decompressing following a practice,” he added. “It did not surprise me when she won a gold medal with her teammates at the New England Championships in 2010.”

Longoria’s academic experience at Amherst shaped both the per-

son she is and the path she leads in significant ways. When she first got to Amherst, she thought that she wanted to be an engineer. Being a daughter to a mechanical engineer and professor, she found herself “a kind of right-brained person.” That vision quickly changed after her first film class with Professor of German Christian Rogowski.

“I just loved [the class], and I ended up taking a lot more film classes because I could [due to] the open curriculum and soon realized [that] this is something I’m really passionate about,” Longoria recalled this switch in her academic interest.

She realized that her interest in films and TV shows transcended the thrill of consuming them as an audience or a fan. She wanted to take part in their creation.

Halloween and “Jaws” Besides Rogowski’s German film class, multiple other courses allowed Longoria to deepen her love for film studies. The most memorable and life-changing ones include a class on ’70s film and a class on the filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, both taught by Hastie. For the former class, Longoria wrote her final paper on Halloween and “Jaws,” a topic that she thoroughly enjoyed. In the latter class, Hastie gifted Longoria a poster of an Almodóvar film which still hangs on the wall of her apartment today.

“All [those courses] made me feel like this isn’t just a hobby or an interest,” said Longoria. “It’s a possible career.”

Following that line of thought, Longoria went on to become the first-ever FAMS major graduating from Amherst. That process was not easy. In fact, the major was still being

24 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Leah Longoria ‘12

As a student at Amherst, Longoria was a dedicated rower, a gifted storyteller and an assiduous student. created during her time at Amherst, and the college envisioned that the first official class of FAMS majors wouldn’t graduate until 2014, two years after Longoria was set to receive her degree.

Still, Longoria found a way. Hastie recalls the moment vividly: she was standing in Stirn Auditorium, where she just finished teaching a class on television and announced this opportunity, when “this young lady walked up to [her] and said: ‘I want to [become a major].’” And that young lady was Longoria.

Multiple people — including Longoria’s close friends — advised her against the idea of declaring a second major besides math as late as junior year. There were requirements that she hadn’t even thought she would need to take, not to mention that doubling up with Math would make her course load extra heavy.

To complete the major successfully would require tremendous tenacity and determination. “[Hastie] was probably the first [person] to tell that I was going to [complete the FAMS major],” said

Longoria. “I was very determined, and I got all the requirements done, took screenwriting and video production, and then I did a thesis with her as my thesis advisor.”

Specifically, in the screenwriting course taught by Professor Chris Mason Johnson in her senior year, Longoria got to complete the script for a quarter of a movie. The writing experience led her to further solidify her vision for a post-graduation plan. “I knew I needed to continue to write, and so I decided after I graduate[d] to do a grad school program [in TV writing],” she said.

The Longoria Method Writing her thesis with Hastie was one of the first times when Longoria seamlessly integrated her passion for writing with an intensive academic project. As Amherst’s very first FAMS thesis student, Hastie suggested that Longoria set the bar very high.

She wrote her thesis on her four favorite TV shows at the time — “Dexter,” “Battlestar Galactica,” “Nip/Tuck,” and “Damages.” One

could sense Longoria’s fascination with sci-fi thrillers simply from this lineup. Named after Princess Leia (sort of), Longoria grew up on sci-fi and managed to formulate her thesis around some of the things she loved the most. She explored death on television, examined how it was portrayed and what it reflected about television as a medium.

“It was a lot of fun … just because I got to watch my favorite shows again and again,” said Longoria.

Beyond her creativity and hard work, Longoria’s ability to take suggestions and turn around on such a tight schedule reflected her extremely disciplined time management. In fact, Professor Hastie started using the phrase “Longoria Method” to describe Longoria’s quick working process of “submissions by Monday mornings, meetings on Monday afternoons, revisions within two to three days and drafting new work by the following Monday.” Professor Hastie still cites Longoria today as a “wonderful model for both an Amherst student and a FAMS major” to her students.

“She was made for the writers’ room,” said Professor Hastie.

Longoria went on to pursue a master’s in television production at Boston University after Amherst.

The last semester of the program took place in Los Angeles, where she took classes at night and did internships during the day. Longoria’s early career thus took off in the country’s heart of film and television production.

Finding Her Way Back to the Pen After she completed her first internship at FX, Longoria reached out to an Amherst alumnus, Dan Ehlij, who works at United Talent Agency (UTA) as a partner in the TV Lit department. During her time at UTA, she learned basically everything she knows about the business side of TV production. She also learned that working for a talent agency was not something she enjoyed.

Longoria rejects the idea that one has to “pay their dues” to succeed in the TV industry. “It was very much like kind of a boys club [at UTA].

And so that was a difficult thing to get through,” said Longoria. “I’ve met a lot of great people there and I

made a lot of really good friends, but it wasn’t a work environment that appealed to me or that I enjoyed.”

Luckily, her connections through UTA helped her land a life-changing job. One of Ehlij’s clients, Jennie Snyder Urman, was the showrunner of “Jane the Virgin.” Longoria managed to get an interview with Urman and successfully got hired as a showrunner assistant.

Working for an incredibly handson showrunner like Urman meant that Longoria was expected to step into her role frequently. “I was in all the production meetings for [Urman], taking notes, coming up with ideas, working with [various] departments to come up with stuff, and then running it by her and getting her feedback, and then reporting back to [the departments] and making sure that all of what she wanted was carried out,” described Longoria.

Working 80-hour weeks for Urman, Longoria learned an incredible

amount about TV production, inside and out. But during this time, Longoria was only writing on the side. The assistant position did not entail working on scripts with writers. She eventually found her way back to the pen as her talent was recognized by Urman while they were doing punch ups on the script — all writers coming up with suggestions for a draft together. Urman decided to give her an episode to freelance in season four of “Jane.”

“This is my dream,” said Longoria. “All the writers on that show are just incredible people and they were great in terms of guiding me and helping me write that first episode of television ever, supporting me in that process.” Her freelance episode was praised, and landed her a seat in the writer’s room for season five.

“It’s still surreal sometimes” Today, Longoria is working on

episodes for “Roswell, New Mexico.” It is a sci-fi drama series — it’s incredible how Longoria wrote a thesis about her favorite sci-fi series and not many years after, she is writing one in Hollywood.

“It’s still surreal sometimes,” said Longoria. “I still have days when…. we release a script and I see the title page with my name on it — ‘written by Leah Longoria’ — that is still so surreal to me because it’s like a dream and not reality, even though at this point, I’ve written a good amount of episodes through television.”

From a production intern at FX to a staff writer for Jane the Virgin to a story editor at Roswell, New Mexico, Longoria took countless steps towards her goal, steady and determined. “She really worked her way up and showed off her talent,” said Longoria’s close friend Chelsea Whipp ’12. “It’s really incredible how hard she’s worked and how

she has been able to achieve exactly what she set out for when she left Amherst.”

Despite her amazing achievements and relentless drive, Longoria remains incredibly humble. “I’m the one bragging about her at family gatherings and to my friends,” said Caris.

When asked what her proudest work is, Longoria suggested that it is the episode that she’s currently producing. Truly, her future is limitless as she continues to produce her best work yet. She sees herself potentially becoming a showrunner and hopes to produce her own feature one day.

Amid all the uncertainty that the TV industry entails, one thing is certain: Longoria will be writing, no matter if it’s supporting other writers’ vision or creating her own show.

As we’ve already seen, no obstacles could discourage her from keeping sight of the light at the end of the tunnel.

Photo courtesy of Leah Longoria ‘12

During her time working for Jane the Virgin, Longoria freelanced her first professional TV script that was signed by the main actors of the show.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 25

Alumni Profile | Siobhan McKissic ‘12

The Art of The Archive: Feeling Histories Siobhan McKissic ‘12 is guided by endless curiosity for the past and the present, and brings others in touch with the intimate histories surrounding them.

When I called Siobhan McKissic ’12 and asked them if I could record our conversation, and they laughed boisterously.

“Okay,” she chuckled, “I’ll try not to say anything wild.”

As our Sunday night call drew on for 90 minutes, I was very hands-off. I asked McKissic straightforward questions, and I got informative answers: their journey to library and archival work was preceded by a period of forced commitment to economics and suppression of their love for art. But, like objects in an archive, the steps in McKissic’s narrative are just islands in the endlessly exciting sea of their passions and life experiences: at one point, they moved from talk of House music to Sir Isaac Newton in the span of five minutes.

I’m grateful that McKissic allowed me to record our call, because so much of her personality was contained in the rambles and laughs that you can’t capture in handwritten notes.

From Chicago, To Amherst, and Back Again Since I’m also from Illinois, I was naturally curious as to how McKissic made her way to the Pioneer Valley. Starting in middle school, before McKissic even had ideas about college, their mother had sent them to summer camps at Amherst. “When I started considering college, Amherst seemed like a perfect fit.

I was already familiar with the area, my mom was comfortable sending me there, and I wanted a small school since I was coming from Whitney Young High

— Sam Spratford, ‘24

School, which is huge,” they said.

Attending the college’s pre-admission diversity program sealed the deal. “I had visited Williams the week before … and I really didn’t like it,” McKissic joked, “Then I came to Amherst, and I absolutely loved everyone in the program.”

McKissic arrived as a prospective economics major.

Their mom is an accountant, and McKissic always excelled at math. “But after a couple of semesters, I had only taken one economics class, and the rest was theater, music, and women and gender studies,” she said.

“Eventually, I realized that no matter how much I tried to fight against it, I was going to end up making art. I just had to.”

They ended up doing an art and music double major, specializing in sculpture/printmaking and jazz, respectively. “My art advisor was [Senior Resident Artist in the Department of Art and the History of Art] Betsey Garand, and I will forever adore her. And my music advisor was [Professor of Music] Klara Moricz, she was also fantastic,” McKissic gushed. “Her and Ann Maggs, who’s the music librarian. They’re truly some of the most supportive people ever.”

After completing her studies, and devoting many hours to the various performance groups on campus, McKissic went home to Chicago. She confessed to me that she only visited the college’s Archives once during these four years. Little did they know that their brief stint in the Amherst Music Library foreshadowed a

fascinating career to come.

“Doing Right by This Material” “When I went home, I was really committed to making art and performing, so that meant I needed to find a real job,” McKissic quipped. Expecting a classic story of a young artist falling to the demands of capitalism, I was pleasantly surprised to find that their story had a happy ending, in large part due to their own joie de vivre.

“To anyone who’s graduating soon, especially artists, I’d advise you to take the weirdest but most exciting jobs you can find,” McKissic said. “When I was working in Chicago, I was a cheesemonger and then had a job painting four-foot tall bobbleheads for a grocery store display. Really weird stuff.”

“But what I really was passionate about was art, and connecting with Black people on the South Side — people like me,” McKissic elaborated. In 2014, she grounded herself in this world and began interning for the renowned Theaster Gates, a University of Chicago professor of visual arts and a social practice installation artist. McKissic got “thrown into” processing Gates’ collection of memorabilia and letters that related to Black history in the United States. It was here that they discovered a passion they couldn’t shake.

“There was some really, really difficult materials — like wills where men were passing down enslaved people to their family members and some really racist

26 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of UIUC

McKissic discovered their passion for archival work while working as a Studio Assisstant for Chicago artist Theaster Gates in 2014. figurines,” McKissic said, “But there was also sheet music from some of the first Black woman composers and Black literature from the late 1700s. And I felt empowered to learn as much as I could so that I could teach my community how to handle these materials.”

By “how to handle these materials”, McKissic meant something physical, due to the artifacts’ fragility, but also intellectually and personally. They brought up some other collections they’d worked with: the Frankie Knuckles Collection and the Gwendolyn Brooks Papers. Knuckles was a pioneer of the House music genre, the precursor of EDM, and Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize. “She [Brooks] was a mother figure to so many artists of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. And, quite frankly, there’s another Black Arts Movement happening now.”

“I needed to make sure that I

was doing right by this material.”

Detective Work and the Politics of Things To ensure that, McKissic left Chicago in 2016 to attend library school at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign (UIUC). It was here that they learned how to be “professionally nosy.”

“Imagine something happens to you today and someone goes and tries to piece together how you felt and how you lived based on what you left behind,” McKissic said, “That’s basically what I do every day.”

In her academics and in her graduate assistantship at the UIUC Rare Book and Manuscript Library, McKissic dove into the nitty gritty of what it means to be an archivist, a keeper of history. “I find the ethical code of librarianship really fascinating,” she remarked, “because people should have free access to knowledge, and you want to preserve their research privacy.

I love helping people find stuff, but I also want to make sure you’re coming away with the skills to do it on your own.”

One thing that complicates the archivist’s ideal of free knowledge is that politics, past and present, inform our decisions about what to keep and what to exile to the forgotten corners of history. “I’ve been told that I’m spoiled because I’ve almost exclusively worked with Black materials,” McKissic laughed, “and that is a really unusual experience.”

They went on. “We need to make sure we’re devoting our energies to saving other histories, because most of the history we have saved deals with white men. No shade to them, but if we want to truly have an understanding of history … they’re not even the majority of people.”

Later, McKissic officially became the archivist for the UIUC

Rare Books Library. There, they worked with all types of histories, like a Sir Isaac Newton manuscript with notes on the fabled Philosopher’s Stone. But those materials that dealt with non-white-men were still some of the most moving. McKissic told me that the Rare Books Library has one of the original copies of the Emancipation Proclamation. “Not the one Lincoln wrote,” they clarified, “but pocket-sized copies of the Proclamation that Union Soldier’s disseminated throughout the South after Lincoln’s announcement. They’re these tiny pieces of, like, newspaper print, and we have one of only several known copies.”

When McKissic pulled out the Proclamation for a group of high school students, one girl started crying. “She was so moved by it because it’s literally a document that told our

ancestors, ‘You can leave. These people cannot keep you hostage anymore.’ Whether or not that history ended up being true, it’s still such a powerful experience to hold that paper and think about how many people read it and learned they were free.”

“There aren’t many jobs you can do where you can connect people to history in that way.”

Creating New Histories As of September 2021, McKissic transitioned out of managing archives to creating her own.

They’re currently working as a Visiting Faculty Design & Materials Research Librarian for UIUC’s Ricker Library of Art & Architecture and beginning construction on a “materials library.”

“Right now, it’s really only companies that have materials libraries — like the people who make your tupperware have an

archive of all the different plastics that researchers can touch and learn about. But I’m trying to build something that’s public,” they said. McKissic is trying to build a library where people can learn about the building blocks of our environment and how our choices of materials impact us, not limited to the materials common to the United States.

Besides just the types of materials, McKissic is also considering the forms she wants them to take. Libraries can be very intimidating and cold-feeling, “so instead of a square sample of glass or satin, I could archive a Topo Chico bottle or a durag.”

McKissic is bringing together questions of sustainability, accessibility, and politics, all through a public university’s materials library; she’s working to create an archive of our material past and present, working to inspire change in a completely

unexpected way.

When I asked them how they view Amherst as an institution, they hesitated for the first time during our entire conversation.

“After working in higher education, I’ve come to see that my criticisms of Amherst are really criticisms of higher education in general: balancing the money interests with the interests of students and professors. And because Amherst is small, they’ve actually had more freedom to make choices that improve inclusivity.”

McKissic isn’t satisfied with the way things are, and views change as an “endless struggle.”

Like Amherst, but in a more radical way, McKissic harnesses the power of smallness as they trek into the future — the infinite collectivities of bamboo mats, diaries, and newspaper scraps that humanize histories past and present.

Photo courtesy of Northwestern University

For McKissic, one of the most appealing aspects of archival work was that it presents a unique opportunity to engage communities with history. Their next project is a materials library for UIUC’s Ricker Library of Art & Architecture, focused on sustainabiliy, diversity, and accessibility.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 27

Alumni Profile | Emily Rosenberg ’07

When Costume Design Goes Global From the Metropolitan Opera House to Düsseldorf, Germany, Amherst native Emily Rosenberg ’07 designs and constructs clothing worldwide.

— Eleanor Walsh ’25 Emily Rosenberg ’07 firmly believes that it’s okay to be interested in everything. Under that philosophy, she has worked as both an accomplished costume designer and a costume technician, which, she tells me, is highly unusual. When I ask her why she does both, she laughs.

“Because I need to eat.”

Then she relents, “I’ve wanted to have a richness of opportunity. So I’ve taken a lot of things that were offered to me. I’ve taken a lot of chances on different things, and I enjoyed them all.”

Growing Up in Amherst Rosenberg’s college experience didn’t take her very far from home.

In fact, she grew up homeschooled in the town of Amherst, and was part of a resource center called North Star. The center was made up of about 60 non-traditionally educated students “finding their way.”

At North Star, Rosenberg learned not only from visiting teachers but from her fellow students.

“I can’t imagine my life any other way,” she said. “This was a great experience for being self-motivated, of course. [I learned] to trust myself about what I was interested in, and what I could accomplish. And getting to know many, many different types of people and work with many, many different types of people.”

The town of Amherst was a huge part of Rosenberg’s education.

“That Amherst was so small

and so rich in arts and culture was a big benefit for me,” she said.

Among the town resources Rosenberg explored were The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, an organic farm and The Amherst History Museum, where Rosenberg worked as a textiles intern for four years as a teenager.

She reflects fondly on her childhood in Amherst.

“All these things that I didn’t have any preconceived notions about so I just thought, ‘Okay, well, I have time and that seems interesting to me, so I’m just gonna do it.’ And it was a great education and a great environment for doing that.”

That environment also allowed Rosenberg’s growing love for clothing to flourish.

Early on, she would fashion clothing for her dolls out of fabric scraps found around the house. Later, Rosenberg graduated to making and dressing corn husk dolls, and eventually began to make her own clothing.

“I bought a lot of things secondhand and modified them.

When I was about 12 or 13, I met a girl who was a little older than me who loves to do this. And she opened my eyes to what was possible with vintage clothes and changing them and putting them together and stuff. So I did that.

And then I discovered historical clothes, historical dress, and just thought: ‘This is the most beautiful thing ever, and could I please just wear gowns every day?’”

Rosenberg continued to do

fashion in various capacities in Amherst, working everywhere from The Valley Light Opera to Cassandra’s, a Northampton dressmaker.

“I was so interested in every aspect of it, and was good at it.

And that was a winning combination.”

College Years Despite growing up next door to Amherst, Rosenberg never expected to go to college at all. But after auditing a couple of classes taught by Theatre & Dance Professor Suzanne Dougan, Dougan encouraged Rosenberg to apply. “‘What? I’m not going to apply here. I’m working, I’m doing all these things,’” said Rosenberg. “And then I thought, you know what, this is a chance for me to experience something different and meet a lot of different kinds of people and be in this liberal arts atmosphere.”

At Amherst, Rosenberg’s affinity for doing it all meant that each semester, she would try to take four classes in four different departments, in addition to majoring in both Theatre & Dance and English.

Although her majors certainly served her well, the classes that Rosenberg remembers most are often the ones that she took outside of her majors. Among them: Geology 11, History of Western Medicine, and a special edition physics course celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s most important discoveries.

Her full embrace of the open curriculum makes perfect sense considering the advice Rosen-

28 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Emily Rosenberg ‘07

Although Rosenberg didn’t expect to go to college at all, she ended up majoring in both English and Theatre & Dance at Amherst. berg would give current AmRosenberg also was an acherst students: “Don’t worry tive member of the arts scene about narrowing things down. on campus — she participated Just go in the direction you’re in Choral Society, Jazz@Amdrawn to, and try to do a lot of herst, Five College Dance and different things and find out a even co-founded the Student lot of different things and try to Arts Forum, which “cultivated make friends while you’re there. conversation between students, Take advantage of the opportu- faculty and administrators about nities because it’s so rich, and the importance of arts resources there’s such an abundance of re- through articles and events.” sources there that it’s rare to find Unlike most Amherst stuin any other stage of life.” dents, Rosenberg went into colRosenberg certainly took lege with a strong sense of what advantage of the resources Am- she wanted to study — Theatre & herst has to offer.

Dance and English.

Before even applying, she had The English component was already designed costumes for inspired by Rosenberg’s grandtwo plays. At Amherst, she con- mother, who had studied Entinued designing costumes, most glish at Cornell in the 1930s. The significantly for the Interterm two were especially close: their musicals. shared love of literature is what “I really learned a lot,” she propelled Rosenberg towards a said. “Because [there were] so double major. many moving parts, and so Although it may seem as if many people to collaborate with, Theatre & Dance is a much more and so many resources to find. applicable major to her career, And it was also five-college — so Rosenberg makes the case for all I got to meet people that had had costume designers to study Enother experiences.” glish.

“Plays are literature. And they’re trying to reveal something about the way that humans interact,” she says.

Rosenberg studies the literature — i.e. the plays — closely when designing a costume for a character.

At Amherst, she learned that you can discover a character through three aspects: what they do, what they say, and what others say about them. She uses this knowledge to construct an idea of the character and what they should wear, which is then discussed with the director and thoroughly researched.

Life After Amherst — All Over the World In the summer of 2007, just after graduating from Amherst, Rosenberg found herself in Poughkeepsie, NY. There, she worked for the New York Stage & Film Company as an Assistant Costume Supervisor, and helped

the costume supervisor ensure productions ran smoothly.

It was good preparation for Rosenberg’s next adventure, this time in London.

She had been given the Janet Arnold Award, a research grant that goes to individuals conducting in-depth studies on the history of fashion and its materials.

Rosenberg used the grant to research structured clothing, particularly corsets, via the Victoria & Albert Museum, Fashion Museum Bath and Museum of London.

After London, she returned to New York, where she worked for the Metropolitan Opera House, maintaining costumes for six performers over more than 150 performances.

The summers of 2009 and 2010 were spent in Santa Fe, NM, where Rosenberg moved from an Apprentice Costume and Wardrobe Technician to Assistant Wardrobe Supervisor at

the Santa Fe Opera.

Opera would continue to be a large part of Rosenberg’s career — she went on to work in Central City, CO for Central City Opera before returning to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House.

In the fall seasons, including this one, Rosenberg has worked for American Ballet Theatre.

As we spoke on the phone, Rosenberg had finished up her work on the ballet and was preparing to fly back from New York to Düsseldorf, Germany, where she currently lives.

“I always had the dream that I wanted to live in Europe,” said Rosenberg. “And I’ve lived in England before and bopped around a couple of other places.

But it was really just this company that I wanted to go to.”

“This company” was Das Gewand, where Rosenberg worked from November 2017 to February 2020. There, she was able to

construct “elaborate and artistically sophisticated costumes for the top opera and ballet companies throughout Europe and North America” as a costume technician.

But when she stopped working for Das Gewand, Rosenberg’s love affair with Europe was not done.

“Once I was there — and I learned the language after I got there — and I started to settle into the community and city, I thought, there’s still something more for me here to learn and to do and experience.”

In Düsseldorf, Rosenberg works for a high-end department store.

She admits that the work is not challenging — she wanted to find a job to stay in Germany and stumbled upon a department store with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a swanadorned pond. What’s not to love?

Her coworkers are “fabulous” — it was slow-going making friends when Rosenberg first moved to Germany, because she spoke very little of the language upon arrival.

“I just started [learning German] when I got there. Night classes two nights a week, plus a full-time job. It was worth it, though. Fascinating.”

Some might be intimidated to learn a language on their feet, but not Rosenberg. To her, “It was so validating. Every new thing that I learned I could use right away.”

Rosenberg used to be “really nervous to be interested in things that [she] didn’t know a lot about.” However, now she’s conquering that fear. During the Covid lockdown, she bought a ukelele.

“My goal is to play a few songs that no one really knows, badly.” She’s promised to send me some.

Photo courtesy of Emily Rosenberg ‘07

Rosenberg’s work in costume design has taken her all over the world. Her time at Das Gerwand in Germany gave her the opportunity to construct “elaborate and artistically sophisticated costumes for the top opera and ballet companies throughout Europe and North America.”

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 29

Alumni Profile | Amy Stevens Hammond ‘92

Storyteller Behind the Scenes and Screen From the stage to the screen, Amy Stevens Hammond ’92 has found a home behind the scenes, working tirelessly to bring stories to life.

— Rebecca Picciotto ’22 In the distant background of Amy Stevens Hammond ’92’s Zoom window, there’s a cat hobbling around stacks of books and piles of binders.

“Excuse my three-legged cat,” Stevens Hammond acknowledges sheepishly.

Stevens Hammond is Zooming from her basement, which has also served as her work office for the past 20 years. Sitting in her office chair, she is engulfed by systematized chaos. Several carefully balanced towers of books and notepads are grounded on a coffee table that has been repurposed as a shelf. She alerts me that what I can’t see in the Zoom frame is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that houses even more books and binders. From my vantage point, the three-legged cat is navigating this obstacle course with impressive dexterity.

The copious amount of reading material in Stevens Hammond’s basement office might lead to the assumption that she is some sort of archival historian, or maybe an author, or possibly an LJST professor. These guesses are all partially correct but ultimately incomplete. Stevens Hammond describes her job as something she “made up.”

“I’ve kind of done that a lot along the way, like figured out what I have decided is a hole [where she works] and put myself in it.”

Her official title is a film and television story researcher. The theater equivalent is a dramaturg — a role that Stevens Hammond knows well because she started in the theater world. Her job boils

down to two central services. For directors and producers, she provides extraordinarily in-depth and comprehensive research to help develop the ideas and structure of a production’s plot — she calls this “world building.” Meanwhile, for actors, her encyclopedic research serves to help them more deeply understand and embody their characters — she calls this “character building.” Her months-long investigations take her to archives, court cases, and more — ultimately culminating in an organized, aesthetically pleasing production binder that looks like a textbook, specifically made for the production she’s working on. Stevens Hammond’s production credit list is full of household names: “Les Miserables,” “Call Me by Your Name,” and “The Music Man” on Broadway, to name a few. She has been publicly referenced by Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, and Armie Hammer for her character development support.

In true Amherst fashion, Stevens Hammond’s career is the essence of interdisciplinarity — every day looks different, every project requires new skills, and because of that, she does not have a singular job description. But fundamentally, Stevens Hammond is a storyteller, an identity that has followed her through every turn of her path so far.

13 Houses, One Home Before Stevens Hammond had even entered high school, she had already lived in 13 different houses.

“We chased education, hon-

estly,” Stevens Hammond recounts. “There’s some military families that move—no, we moved for schools.” When Amy was growing up, her parents were working toward college degrees.

Their family relocations were thus largely determined by the colleges her parents were enrolled at. By the time she got to ninth grade, her family had settled in Milton, Mass. where she attended Milton Academy.

When Stevens Hammond recalls her time at Milton, the first memory she reflects on is theater.

“I’m a theater girl. I’ve been a theater girl forever,” she says. At Milton, the big student theater production was the ninth grade play, which Stevens Hammond stage managed. Though she has experience acting, Stevens Hammond has always preferred working behind the scenes and “making it happen.”

In fact, despite living in a multitude of places throughout her childhood, she has always found a home backstage. “It’s such a magical space, I have relationships with a number of theaters,” she says. “The space just takes on a kind of magic of its own.”

Falling in love with the scene behind the curtain meant that Stevens Hammond knew what she wanted to study when she went to college.

Telling Stories from Backstage Upon arriving at Amherst, Stevens Hammond recalls, “I came in knowing I wanted to do

30 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Amy Stevens Hammond ‘92

As aTheater & Dance major, Stevens Hammond participated both in Kirby Theater productions and also those outside of campus. theater, having done theater all my life.” And so she did, in full force.

As a Theater & Dance major at Amherst College, Stevens Hammond not only found ways to participate in Kirby Theater productions, but also those outside of campus. She spent summer and winter breaks working at theater festivals in Baltimore, Williamstown, and plenty of other regional centers. Throughout her college career, Stevens Hammond was thus “singularly focused” on telling stories through the stage.

It is uncommon to hear about an Amherst student who knew exactly what path she wanted to take as soon as she stepped foot on campus. Amherst’s Open Curriculum is known to self-select students to explore more before deciding on their path. But despite her atypical decisiveness, Stevens Hammond was just as eager to “take everything, and I did.” In addition to her major requirements, she loaded as many non-theater courses as she could.

She took “Physics for Poets,” classes in philosophy, English, Spanish, and more. In fact, one of Stevens Hammond’s biggest college regrets — and the advice she has for current Amherst students — is to take more classes in more departments: “I honestly wish I’d had more time…I would have taken more classes…Because just the chance to sit and read and engage with people reading and thinking is a gift.”

As she moved through her four years in the Pioneer Valley, Stevens Hammond realized that the degree of certainty that she entered campus with was not as durable as she had initially thought.

“I came in thinking at 18 that I knew what the path was…

But I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew at 18. I’m sure I didn’t know as much as I thought I knew at 22 when I left, but I really knew a lot more.”

From Coast to Coast Right out of college, Stevens Hammond ended up at Hartford

Stage, a regional theater in Hartford, Conn., as a directing intern.

“I feel like Hartford Stage was my graduate school,” she says.

Stevens Hammond started as an intern but did not stay that way for long. In her first role, she managed to start a directing intern program to bring new people in, became a dramaturg (which she would later translate to her job in Hollywood), brainstormed future seasons of production for the theater, wrote the program notes, and led educational tours in Hartford’s public schools. Her work filled an evident need at Hartford Stage, so much so that she stayed for four years despite only being originally hired for an internship. “I created for myself at Hartford a job that hadn’t really previously existed, and [it] worked and brought them something.”

After leaving Hartford, Stevens Hammond entered what she recalls were “much more uncer-

tain days.” She switched coasts, leaving Connecticut’s continental climate for Los Angeles’s yearround sun. Her first couple of stints at production companies in LA led her to work on projects like “Dante’s Peak” and at CW Productions, “Mission Impossible.”

But the grind of the production workday started to weigh on Stevens Hammond when she realized that the overload of work — being saddled with reading 30 scripts in one weekend, for example — meant that “there wasn’t any depth to the work. It was just too much too fast.” But when she expressed her desire to leave the company, “They were like, ‘No you’re not. Let’s figure out a different plan.’” And that’s exactly what she did.

“A Different Way Forward” Stevens Hammond credits her boss and mentor at CW Produc-

tions, Paula Wagner, for helping her find “a different way forward for a female executive than what she [Wagner] had been allowed coming up.” Her new job structure allowed her to take on fewer projects for a more extended period of time, and get the work done to the depth she wanted — it also allowed her to start a family.

“Each of my projects takes months. I do a super deep dive into exactly what happened,” she explains. As she puts it, each of her projects is like writing a dissertation. In practice, that means that Stevens Hammond fills her days sifting through primary sources: court documents, psychology experiments, and anything else that seems relevant to the world or character that a film or TV show is trying to build.

After her research phase, the storytelling begins. She lays out her production binders in software that a book or newspaper might

use. It is during the design construction that she begins to put the narrative together. The final product is a “really big, beautiful bound presentation book.”

“It makes people happy — having it look good and being accessible and understandable…

My books have table[s] of contents and dividers, they’re very structured and organized.”

Stevens Hammond stayed with CW Productions (which later became United Artists) for years until she realized, “You know what, I can do this.” “This” meant going out on her own to start a company as a story researcher. After knocking on enough doors, Stevens Hammond’s company, Heavy Water Productions, finally got off the ground.

What Comes Next?

Now that she has raised two kids, started her own company, and essentially carved out her

own spot in Hollywood, Stevens Hammond is now looking to her next steps. She loves the world she lives in through her work and in many ways, does not want that to change. But she does note a desire to get even deeper into hands-on production, possibly shifting to more involved producer roles in the future.

Stevens Hammond has had her fair share of geographic relocations and career pivots throughout her life so far.

Through every change, Stevens Hammond has found her way and adapted: “As a freelance worker, you are reactive. Those growth points have been when I’ve had to make a change.”

The twists and turns that define the life of a storyteller like Stevens Hammond could be likened to the three-legged cat’s basement obstacle course. And just like that cat, Stevens Hammond has been navigating it with impressive dexterity.

Photo courtesy of Amy Stevens Hammond ‘92

Stevens Hammond in front of her floor-to-ceiling bookcase of her home office, which houses 20 years worth of her work as a story researcher. Her production binders are the product of months-long investigations that take Stevens Hammond from historical archives to court filings and beyond.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 31

Alumni Profile | Annette Sanderson ‘82

More Than Just Four Walls and a Roof As the executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Hartford, Connecticut, Annette Sanderson ’82 combines a deliberate problem-solving approach with a genuine desire to be of service to others.

— Liam Archacki ’24 Annette Sanderson ’82 is not one to mince words. “I’ll be quick and concise,” she told me, before diving into a precisely phrased yet encompassing recapitulation of her path to her current position as executive director for the Housing Authority of the City of Hartford, Connecticut (HACH). Her calm, matter-of-fact approach is a key element of her remarkable adaptability in response to challenges. It is what enabled her to succeed as a Black woman in the white- and male-dominated space of Amherst College in the 1970s and 80s. It also helped her enter law school immediately after Amherst, which led her to a series of positions in the legal field. And it certainly came in handy when she stepped into a role that she never intended to hold: her now nearly ten-year span atop HACH. But don’t let Sanderson’s levelheaded disposition mislead you.

Even more essential to her success is her genuine interest in understanding other people — and, perhaps most importantly, her unyielding efforts to be of service to them. Of her job, Sanderson remarked, “To do good in the community, it means the world to me.”

And by pairing an unflappable problem-solving ability with a passion for helping others, Sanderson is able to do just what she aims.

She is benefitting the city of Hartford by providing affordable and accessible housing options for its 123,000 citizens. But it has been a long and at times arduous journey for Sanderson to reach this point of success.

An Early Education While Sanderson couldn’t foresee her future career with HACH, Hartford public housing has been a part of her life from as early as she can remember. When she was just three weeks old, her family moved into public housing in the city’s north end. She gained firsthand knowledge of the difficulties that frequently arise for those who live in public housing — namely, the initial application process and the required yearly recertification.

Sanderson’s mother, the head of the household and a single parent to two daughters, frequently became frustrated with these bureaucratic barriers to obtaining public housing. Sanderson noted with a chuckle that she now runs the agency that manages the property she and her family used to live on. Much time would elapse, however, before Sanderson’s childhood experiences would become directly applicable to her work.

A strong student in high school, Sanderson found herself with many quality options when it came time to select a college.

On a guidance counselor’s recommendation, she took a closer look at a small, but prestigious, liberal arts college in Massachusetts. Amherst’s close-knit community and strong educational reputation won over Sanderson — and it didn’t hurt that it was just a one-hour drive from her home in Hartford.

A Tough Transition The transition from high school to college was a jarring experience for Sanderson. “When

you grow up in an inner-city environment, and you go to a high school that’s predominantly Black or Puerto Rican, and then you go to a place like Amherst College that, when I went there, was still predominantly white, male, and rich, that’s a bit of a culture shock,” she said. Sanderson was a member of just the third class in Amherst’s history to admit women.

Fortunately, Sanderson found support systems to deal with the sometimes exclusionary atmosphere she encountered at the college. She recalled attending a weekend orientation for Black students soon after her arrival at the college. Sanderson was also glad to have as a roommate another student who had entered from the same high school as she had, and who could share in her experience.

Above all, she cited the Black Students Union (BSU) as being her most crucial on-campus support system.

“Quite honestly, I don’t know if I would have survived on campus.

It helped me tremendously, and it helped being able to go to students that are like you, and being able to share some of the experiences that you had to deal with on campus was a significant help,” Sanderson said of BSU. While the academic transition didn’t present as much of a challenge as the cultural shift, the uptick in rigor from her still required an adjustment. However, with the help of faculty like Charles Hamilton Houston Professor in American Culture Jan Dizard, Sanderson’s eventual thesis advisor, she

32 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Annette Sanderson ‘82

A resident of public housing in her youth, Sanderson now heads the organization that manages the property she used to live on. was able to find her academic So, upon graduation from Amsweet spot in the sociology depart- herst, Sanderson enrolled in the ment. As a discipline, sociology University of Connecticut School appealed to Sanderson’s interest of Law, eager to begin the next step in learning about how different in her academic journey. groups of people lived, both withThe transition from college to in and outside the United States. law school, although still someHer studies culminated in a senior what difficult, was not as fraught thesis that investigated households as Sanderson’s entrance into colheaded by Black women, a topic lege. Her educational experience which emerged from Sanderson’s at Amherst provided a strong acaown experience being raised in demic foundation off of which she such a household. could build. “Law school was very challenging at times. However, I Learning Law think that study habits that I develAt some point during her time oped at Amherst prepared me for at Amherst — Sanderson doesn’t my law school career,” Sanderson remember exactly when — she remarked. decided that she wanted to attend Sanderson’s time in law school, law school immediately after grad- although not directly applicable to uating. An interest in understand- her current career as the head of ing how different communities are HACH, prepared her well for her affected by laws served as Sander- earlier work in the legal field, and, son’s primary motivation for this generally, by building her abilities pursuit. She also wanted to gain of critical thinking and analysis. the ability to analyze a situation from a variety2of perspectives — a Assorted Employment certain benefit of a legal education.

After graduating law school in

1985, Sanderson held a number of different positions in both public and private sectors. These included working as counsel for the Connecticut State Treasurer’s Office, a stint in asset management, and serving as the executive director of the Capital City Economic Development Authority — an organization which aims to stimulate the local economy of Hartford. Sanderson credits her varied working experiences with developing her capacity to understand and interface effectively with many different types of people.

In 2007, armed with education and experience, Sanderson decided to branch out and start her own legal practice. Soon after, she earned the responsibility of acting as the Housing Authority of Hartford’s outside counsel, a contract-based position that she held for four years. As is the randomness of life, it was only when the previous executive director was struck by illness that Sanderson was asked, to her surprise, if she would be interested in taking the position in an “acting” capacity.

She agreed and, “long story short,” has now been in the role for nearly

10 years.

Putting Roofs Over Heads While it may have begun under uncertain circumstances, Sanderson’s time as executive director of HACH has proved fruitful — both for the city of Hartford and for Sanderson herself. Coming into the role, Sanderson already held a sincere appreciation for the necessity of public housing. She also understood, from her own experience on the other side of things, the difficulties involved in the process of obtaining and maintaining residence in public housing, and she brings this perspective to her leadership.

“I try to instill in every employee here that we are serving the poorest of the poor, and they may not be truly understanding of what the requirements are, and it’s our job to help them work through these processes,” Sanderson told me.

Sanderson’s thoughtful approach has yielded concrete results. During her tenure, HACH has taken down and is in the process of rebuilding nearly 1000 units of “dilapidated” housing built

in the 1940’s. It’s Sanderson’s mission to make sure that the housing provided by HACH is not only cost-effective, but also “decent and safe” for the residents.

Even during the especially trying time of the Covid pandemic, Sanderson’s cool-headed leadership has guided HACH through.

The organization was forced to shut its doors to the public, while still attempting to serve those in need of housing in Hartford. Repairs during the pandemic had to be limited to only the most essential emergency situations. And to deal with the matter of processing paperwork without an open office, the agency shifted to the implementation of drop boxes. Sanderson and her team were ready for whatever adaptation was necessary.

“It was a significant adjustment. But I believe that, through this all, we’ve learned that we can be more efficient in our operations — but it has been a learning experience,” Sanderson said of the organization’s time during Covid.

But of all the Covid-necessitated changes, the disruption to the sense of community in public

housing seemed to bother Sanderson most. Out of health concerns, the agency has been forced to shut down community rooms in the buildings where residents live.

This means that the residents are no longer able to “get together, to watch television together, to play bingo and other board games” and build the connections that can be fostered by living in close proximity to each other. Sanderson also lamented that her organization’s direct interaction with the people it serves has been disrupted. Nevertheless, as a result of Sanderson’s calm and considerate leadership, the Hartford Housing Authority has been able to overcome these numerous challenges.

Reflection and Moving Forward Having paired her ability to deftly deal with difficult situations and her interest in helping others, Sanderson seems poised for a long run in her current role with HACH. She shows no signs of slowing down, especially as normalcy gradually returns and the pandemic cools off. With this continued success, Sanderson can

Photo courtesy of William J. Clinton Presidential Library

truly be looked at as someone who has taken full advantage of her Amherst education.

And while Sanderson’s time at Amherst wasn’t always the idyllic experience you might find enshrined in an admissions brochure, she maintains that it prepared her, in many ways, for the path that lay ahead. “While I was at Amherst, at times, it was very challenging, in many respects.

And those four years really shaped me as a person. And I know that after going through Amherst College and the challenges that I dealt with there, I can deal with most challenges in life.”

Sanderson was optimistic about recent advancements in diversity and inclusivity at the college. “It appears that the administration has recognized some of the challenges that students from diverse backgrounds face. I do read the information that’s coming out of the administration about their attempts to make Amherst a more diverse and welcoming environment. And I’m glad to see that there’s a recognition that change needs to be made.”

Photo courtesy of Annette Sanderson ‘82

After graduating from Amherst as a sociology major, Sanderson immediately entered the University of Connecticut School of Law, which led her to a series of jobs, in both the public and private sectors. Now, Sanderson has been the executive director for the Housing Authority of Hartford, Connecticut for nearly 10 years.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 33

Alumni Profile | Shayla Yellowhair ’07

Shaping Education in the Navajo Nation Shayla Yellowhair ’07 is changing the lives of future generations by rethinking education on the Navajo Nation, recentering it around Diné culture.

— Ryan Yu ’22 If you ask Shayla Yellowhair ’07 what the purpose of her job is, she’ll tell you, “I work to disrupt systems.” At Amherst or at home, in Window Rock, Arizona, capital of the Navajo Nation — of which she is a citizen — Yellowhair has done just that, disrupting systems in a way that merges “resume” and “real stuff.”

Today, in her work as director of Cognia, Navajo Nation, Yellowhair is changing her community by recentering educational systems around traditional Diné culture, and enacting tribal sovereignty to make this change into real policy. This work shows how loving a place radically can shape it, in this case by recentering values and educating those who come in from the outside.

Contradiction at the Heart of the Amherst Experience Yellowhair’s time at Amherst played a significant role in shaping her into the person she is today. This shaping force, however, came with equal parts pain and growth. While Yellowhair valued her time at Amherst for the relationships she formed and for the depth of her learning, it was also “really hard for me. It was really hard as a Native student, as an Indigenous person going to a school that is named after a person that actively started biological warfare.

That is something that is really heavy,” she said.

Nevertheless, Yellowhair pursued her own intellectual cu-

riosity during her years at Amherst, and describes college as “a place for me to learn what I wanted to learn … do the things that I wanted to do, and get a degree in doing it.” She majored in French simply because she loved it. “As a Navajo girl, everybody was like, ‘What are you doing?’

I was like, ‘I don’t know, I just wanted to learn,’” she said. She was also very involved in fine arts at Amherst, attending plays, musical events, and learning new languages.

But as Yellowhair looks back on her years at Amherst with details like the fact that Facebook opened up to schools beyond Harvard during her sophomore year, and how “crazy” the novelty of social media was at that time, she also remembers the distinctive and sometimes painful signifiers of the fact that “it was just a different time,” a time without movements like #MeToo or Black Lives Matter. The educational culture at Amherst could also be stifling, Yellowhair said, and it was difficult attending an institution that fostered students who viewed education as a process far more extractive than cultivating. For this reason, she now feels that “certain people take more from [Amherst] when it comes to what’s offered,” and what truly “sustained” her through her time at Amherst were the relationships she formed.

Yellowhair recounted one memory from her time at Amherst that she says epitomizes

her experience at the school and why “there are certain things that make [her] uncomfortable at Amherst, because it’s painful.” During her senior year, a peer asked to interview Yellowhair for a sociology essay about how people view their ancestors, and she agreed on the terms that she could read a copy of the essay after it was finished. The interview consisted of the student asking Yellowhair what she thought and felt in response to some of Edward S. Curtis’ photography of “a bunch of pictures of really stereotypical Native Americans,” not all of whom were Navajo. Yellowhair responded with the idea that “these clothes didn’t belong to these people, they were props.

[A lot of the pictures were] set up.” But once “he turned it in, he ghosted,” avoiding her in the dining hall and at parties for the rest of their time at Amherst.

This memory would become a point of pain for Yellowhair, as it “was one of the first times that I truly believed that … white people profit off of Native imagery, off of Native words. They put you into a box for research, they take over your data to make our words what they want us to be. That was the first time that I really felt that,” she said.

“That experience should never happen to any Native girl, ever. Ever. Ever.”

Coming Home With memories and realizations like this still fresh, Yellowhair nevertheless excelled until

34 | The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021

Photo courtesy of Shayla Yellowhair

Yellowhair at her home in Window Rock, Arizona where she plays with her dogs. graduation. She was well-read and well-rounded from the Amherst education, she said, which meant that “I was getting really well developed in the Western world, [but] I was losing and missing a lot of my cultural teaching.”

At this point, Yellowhair knew that she needed to return home.

Back in Arizona, she began to develop her teaching and education career. “It’s up to us, as young Native people who come home,” she reflected. “We’ve done what we’ve been asked. We went out and got our education to help our people. So now, I’m going to do what I need to do to help my people.” Yellowhair made this belief of hers tangible as she worked with Teach for America, the State of New Mexico, and then the Navajo Nation Department of Diné Education.

Working at Teach for America, Yellowhair collaborated with educators from outside of the community to prepare them

to teach in the Navajo Nation, with the ultimate goal of making them aware of what they do not know. This work came in the form of implementing community visioning sessions that would set the path of TFA-New Mexico to become more culturally responsive in many areas.

Her work with teachers focuses on the ways in which they often come from a Western-dominant system, which do not translate to communities with different values.

The experiences she had over these years ultimately led to the realization that allows her to do the work she does today. “I finally understood for myself that as a sovereign being, I decide.

I decide what I want. [And] in that, it’s not about me, it’s about my community.”

“Thinking about Thinking” Over her years of work in public education, Yellowhair has grown both “professionally and personally,” and knows very clearly why she is dedicated to

the work she does. To explain this, she says, “You actually have to go back to the 1800s [when Federal Indian Policy] was designed as a genocidal and assimilationist policy that Native kids had to be assimilated completely,” she said. “Languages were lost, boarding schools were established … [In the modern day], we are still seeing those same policies from that era.”

This is why the American educational system was “created for white people … created for the systematic erasure and assimilation of Native children,” she added.

“It’s not failing. It’s doing what it was supposed to do,” she said.

For these reasons, Yellowhair is constantly “thinking about thinking” and how to move thinking outside the systems currently established in education. Her work ultimately aims to “enact tribal sovereignty in education on a daily basis.” That means supporting the utiliza-

tion of tribal political status in order to make changes in the educational system that are modelled off of the Diné philosophy of learning.

Yellowhair described the philosophy of learning as “the idea that we learn in cycles. You think, you plan, you do, and you reflect. You think, you plan, you do, and you reflect. When we send our kids to school, they are learning, testing, learning, testing. There’s no planning, there’s no reflection,” she explained.

According to her, the tribal nation’s sovereignty over its own educational system could lead to changes that “create a way to measure success and learning that is aligned to who we are” better than, say, high stakes testing. “We want to move towards a school system where Diné children are proud of being Diné, where they don’t have to conform and can learn in ways that value their culture, language and traditions,” she said. The question, then, is “What does it

look like for us to own our own education system?”

Today, working as the director of Cognia Navajo Nation, Yellowhair works with teachers and educators in the Department of Diné Education. All schools under the Bureau of Indian Education have to maintain accreditation, and so Yellowhair works with them and all public high schools to ensure that they meet the ongoing accreditation standards. She also works to support public schools and tribally-controlled grant schools under the Department of Diné Education in other ways. Recently, she worked alongside other educators to help develop Covid-safe reopening plans based on their unique community contexts.

“Everything that we do, is we try to build an ecosystem of learning that values the children and their holistic development,” she said. “In order to do that, we have to go against the systems that want to break that down

… how do you make change?

Do you make change on the inside? Or do you make change by busting things up and starting a revolution? I think we do a good job of balancing that and creating lasting change.”

Fostering Community for Future Generations “I was born in a space where my zip code did not equal success. A lot of people could have looked at me as just another Native kid. A lot of things didn’t stack up to my favor, being born where I was born,” Yellowhair reflected. “But, through the decisions of my family and my decisions in how I wanted to manifest my education, it’s super clear to me the charge that I have.”

For Yellowhair, this charge is in the name of generational strength and knowledge: “For my kids, and their kids and their kids and their kids,” she said. “If we are the seventh generation now, in seven generations from now, is the work that I’m doing

going to disrupt the systems?

What is my legacy? What is our legacy as a culture?”

Building this world for her children and their children and grandchildren means, ultimately, abolishing the contradictions that Yellowhair had to navigate throughout her time at Amherst, rewriting the narrative that knowledge comes from elite and predominantly white institutions like Amherst. “It’s my responsibility to ensure that my children receive the best education that they can, here,” she said. “We should not have to leave the reservation to receive a quality education.”

Looking back at Amherst, Yellowhair has similar advice to offer. Instead of thinking about what you can use your position at Amherst to do, she said, “I would push you to think about what you add to Amherst. Because Amherst isn’t everything.

It’s a place, and we make it who it is … you make it what it is to you.”

Photo courtesy of Teacher for America

Yellowhair working alongside one of her colleagues at the Teacher for America initiative.

The Amherst Student | November 12, 2021 | 35

Alumni Profile | Niko Pfund ’87

From the Field to the Publishing Room Niko Pfund ’87’s life-long focuses on literature and community have inspired his passion for publishing.

— Theo Hamilton ’23 Niko Pfund ’87 embodies two of the central values of a liberal arts education: the curiosity needed to discover a wide array of topics, and the critical thinking necessary to make sense of them.

These traits shine through in an anecdote Pfund told me about a talk he heard while working at New York University (NYU) Press. “When you go to college you want to be in the mix of it,” Pfund recalled the lecturer saying. “You don’t want to be sitting in some field reading for four years.”

Pfund disagreed. “I remember thinking I loved sitting in a field for four years,” he said. “That was how I figured out who I was and who I wanted to be … I’m not down with the idea that a contemplative life is somehow dilettantish.”

Instead, Pfund is always finding ways to see things from different perspectives, to learn and think about new issues with an open mind.

Pfund also values community, and he said that looking for ways to be independent without being isolated has been a central struggle of his life.

Pfund has brought all of these skills and values into his professional life. As the President of Oxford University Press USA, Pfund relishes the opportunity to forge community while interacting with a huge variety of ideas and arguments and finding the most effective ways to make these ideas publicly accessible.

A Breath of Fresh Air When Pfund started applying to colleges, Amherst was a natural choice. Both his father and older sister had attended Amherst. He applied through early admission, got in, and “that was that.”

For Pfund, coming to Amherst was a breath of fresh air. Entering the American high school system

from Germany at 13 years old, he remembers being frustrated by the almost comical “Breakfast Club” style stratifications among “athletes, jocks, stoners, and social outcasts” at his high school. At Amherst, he was relieved to find that instead of grouping themselves into those “comedy boxes,” almost every Amherst student he met was following “all sorts of eclectic interests and pursuits.”

Less refreshing than the social atmosphere were his struggles with the chemistry classes he took as part of his plan to be a marine biologist.

He laughs that “I’d be stuck in the lab until 6:45, worrying that there wouldn’t be any chicken left in Valentine, because I couldn’t figure out how to make the liquid green, or whatever color it was supposed to be.” He managed to get through that class, and ended up with a B- which he still calls one of “the two grades I was proudest to have achieved at Amherst” (the other being a C+ he earned in Economics).

“Sitting in a Field Reading” While taking chemistry, Pfund began comparing himself to one of his friends in the class, a basketball teammate named Paul. Pfund noticed that, although Paul would breeze through the labs he was stuck on, Pfund had a much easier time with essays that Paul had to labor through. Realizing that he had a talent for essay writing, Pfund began shifting his academic interests.

He spent some time reading voraciously while dabbling in political science, English, and law, before a pair of events got him to commit to an English major. The first was the hiring of Professor of Black Studies and English Rhonda Cobham-Sander, who Pfund describes as indispensable in broadening the English

department’s scope from “a very particular New England centric kind of literature” to world literature. At the same time, Pfund had fallen in love with “Tar Baby,” Toni Morrison’s then newly-released third book.

“At that point it all came together,” he said. “I read that book and then took a great literature course with [Cobham-Sander] … and I realized that I wanted to write a thesis on Toni Morrison.”

In his personal reading, Pfund often gravitates towards genre fiction. One of his favorite writers is Scottish sci-fi author Iain Banks, and Pfund singles out the opening of his “Culture” novels as “five of the most imaginative pages [he’s] ever read.”

In all, Pfund’s “four years of sitting in a field reading” at Amherst provided him with a strong set of intellectual tools, and broadened his diverse set of interests.

Into the Publishing Room After Amherst, Pfund was initially drawn towards journalism, a career that would keep him involved with literature. Inspired by Cold War-era Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, he explored journalism as an option, applying for an internship at the New York Times.

However, the Times ultimately canceled the internship, “a real disappointment of the first order.”

Pfund went back into the career counseling office, leafing through three-ring binders to find interesting job openings, something that “would take you 30 seconds now on LinkedIn,” he jokes. After sending out a flurry of letters, Pfund got a response from Valerie Aubrey — an Amherst alum working as editor of politics, sociology, and law at Oxford University Press. The two met and, by the end of the summer Pfund was work-

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Photo courtesy of Niko Pfund ’87

Niko Pfund ’87 anticipates many changes in the publishing industry. ing as an assistant editor at Oxford. opportunities and challenges for the Looking back, Pfund sees this publishing industry. New technoloas one of the most difficult periods gies are often seen as the bogeyman of his life. “I was working probably of publishing, but Pfund disagrees.

50, 60 hours a week,” he said, adding “Digital is a revelation” for connectthat “[after rent] I was trying to live ing with people, he said. on $380 a month in New York. … I He suspects that it will be more had no money.” difficult to manage the transition During this time, Pfund found from an in-person to a hybrid workit nearly impossible to find an good place. “I think the defining challenge balance between work, relationships, of the twilight of my professional life and personal time. Fortunately, after will be trying to replicate a traditionthree years, Pfund was promoted to ally strong and adhesive culture at an editorial role at NYU Press, where Oxford when people are communihe spent the next decade before re- cating like this,” he said, pointing to turning to Oxford in 2000. his computer screen.

Pfund talks about publishing For now though, Pfund is hapwith enthusiasm and a wealth of pily doing the things he’s always valknowledge. Considering his curiosi- ued. His isolation during much of ty and long-standing interest in criti- the pandemic has encouraged him cal thinking, it is probably unsurpris- to double down on finding a wide ing that, for Pfund, “the fundamental set of communities — “I’ve become a work we do [as publishers], which is member of my dog park community, assessing a wide variety of people’s to my own surprise,” he commented. ideas and arguments … and then At the same time, Pfund is still looking at whether we can spread reading as much as ever. He said one that message and sustain ourselves at of his greatest joys right now is findthe same time … is a dynamic I love. ing time to sit down to read The AtAnd it’s something I probably love lantic from cover to cover. In many more now than ever before.” ways, his career in publishing, the field where people and ideas meet, Turning to the Next Page is the natural outcome of his lifelong Looking ahead, Pfund sees both interest in literature and community.

Alumni Profile | Tomoaki Ishigaki ’97

Finding Connection Through Translation

Photo courtesy of Tomoaki Ishigaki ‘97

“I liked that Amherst’s name began with A and not W,” Japanese diplomat Tomoaki Ishigaki jokes when asked why he chose Amherst instead of another liberal arts college.

He chuckles as he says it, echoing the sentiment that many Amherst students have expressed both before and after him.

Life in Japan Ishigaki first decided to pursue diplomacy and foreign affairs while studying at the University of Tokyo.

While he had also considered becoming a journalist or scholar specializing in international relations, he thought it would be interesting to truly see where the action takes place first-hand, and deal with problems on the ground.

After university, Ishigaki started working with the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He decided to partake in the Foreign Services program to send junior diplomats abroad.

Since his language of specialization was English, Ishigaki had the choice to study at a school in the States.

“I liked Amherst for a couple of reasons,’’ said Ishigaki. “I knew of the very strong language and interdisciplinary studies at Amherst, and the wide range of programs in the Five College Consortium sounded very interesting.”

Life at Amherst At Amherst, Ishigaki was a member of the Debate Team, Glee Club, International Students Association (ISA), and Asian Students Association (ASA).

“In fact,” Ishigaki says, “ASA had a big brother system, and my big brother — who was younger than me

Having grown up in Japan, Ishigaki was drawn to Amherst for its robust language programs and interdisciplinary focus. He ultimately carries both of those interests into his work everyday as a diplomat in the Embassy of Japan.

— was my best man at my wedding.”

Ishigaki discussed his adjustment period coming to Amherst as not only an international student, but also as a transfer student.

“Even though we studied English, even though we knew American politics and economy, all the daily vocabulary was hard. It was a learning experience every day,” Ishigaki said. “I remember the ISA took us shopping to buy daily necessities and the orientation told us to bring our ‘plastic’ in case of additional purchases. I didn’t know what that meant and thought that I should bring extra plastic bags. Later, someone explained that it meant credit card.”

Despite these difficulties, Ishigaki described the strong bond he was able to build with many of his classmates on account of his international and transfer status.

“I think because I was a little older than some of the classmates, I was able to help them too since I could give them advice about struggling with deciding their major or career,” he said.

Ishigaki tried to take a wide variety of classes at Amherst, including art classes, music, photography, and French — the last of which he was “not so good at,” but really enjoyed.

He especially loved his experiences taking classes at other Five College schools, particularly Mount Holyoke and Smith. His thesis advisor — now a family friend he still remains in touch with — was actually a professor from Smith.

Life after Amherst & Now After Amherst, Ishigaki returned to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign

Even in a field as serious as diplomacy, Tomoaki Ishigaki ’97 has maintained a buoyant spirit and lessons from Amherst throughout his career.

— Tapti Sen ’25 Affairs, where he remained until 2010. Then, he was posted in New York as a Permanent Representative to the United Nations. During that time period, he visited Amherst for homecoming, and gave a talk at Smith along with his wife, who went to a women’s college in Japan.

Currently, Ishigaki is working as a minister in the Embassy of Japan.

He started his job this summer and describes his role as “a sort of interlocutor for the Japanese government and the members of Congress.” He engages with people on Capitol Hill, such as House members and senior staff of the Senate, and gathers information and intelligence to report back to Tokyo. Nowadays, “it’s things like the infrastructure bill or debates on climate and energy,” Ishigaki elaborated on the primary content of his work. Before this job, he was working at the G7 and G20, as well as in the Japanese prime minister’s office.

When asked about hobbies, Ishigaki laughed.

“Eighty percent of my time is now devoted to my daughter”, He chuckles. “I don’t know if that’s a hobby, but it’s certainly a full-time commitment.” He describes his love of running marathons, as well as reading books and watching movies — science fiction particularly. “But most of the time now, we end up watching kids’ films,” he added.

Reflections on Amherst When asked how he feels about the changes at Amherst since he attended, Ishigaki gave positive responses. While he does feel like students now “are pampered,” he thinks it’s a good thing that facilities have improved dramatically.

He supports the steps Amherst has taken to have a more diverse student population, like increasing its emphasis on admitting international students, as well as advances in financial aid. He also supported the decision to replace Lord Jeff as a mascot with the Mammoth, although he chuckled about some confusion it caused.

“In the Amherst Tokyo alumni association, it was almost customary for us to sing [the] Lord Jeff [song] at the end of every meeting,” Ishigaki said. “So after he was taken down, we were like, ‘Oh, what should we sing now?’”

While he doesn’t necessarily miss Amherst — it was a time of youthful emotional turbulence — Ishigaki does grow nostalgic for certain memories he still associates with the college.

“I loved spending hours into the night discussing really random topics without knowing what would come out of it. And of course, knowing that you had homework and numerous other assignments due and still talking,” he reminisced, “Those were very precious moments.”

Ishigaki’s advice for current Amherst students is to “be open-minded and explore things beyond your comfort zone.”

“It’s good to be passionate about particular issues, but we should not consider any one field better than another. Amherst is great because it gives you a more holistic education, which is really the strength of liberal arts education. At Amherst, you might not want to take other courses and just stick to your major classes, but I think that 10 or 20 years after graduating, you’ll have much more meaningful insight if you have a well-rounded education.”

Tomoaki, whose 25th anniversary of graduating is next year, hopes to visit campus then to show his daughter.

I asked him if he wants his daughter to go to Amherst and he laughed.

“Yes, but I saw that legacy admissions were abolished, so what’s the point?” he joked.

“On a serious note though, I would like to show Amherst to her as an option for sure. It’s a beautiful campus and the people and resources there are amazing.”

Photo courtesy of Tomoaki Ishigaki ‘97

Ishigaki describes his job as “a sort of interlocutor for the Japanese government and the members of Congress.”

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2021 Sports: A Year In Review

2021 has not been a quiet year for the Amherst athletics department. All teams have grappled with a global pandemic, baseball claimed a NESCAC title, and former lacrosse coach Rashad Devoe filed a discrimination lawsuit against the school.

March 9, 2021 The NESCAC announces that member institutions have voted in favor of a limited schedule of conference-only competition for spring sports teams.

Amherst’s men’s and women’s golf, women’s tennis, baseball, softball, and track teams all begin preparing for their first season in two years; both men’s and women’s lacrosse and the men’s tennis teams are unable to compete because not enough members of their teams live on campus and participate in the college’s Covid testing program.

Softball While softball came up short of the NESCAC title, strong players from the Class of 2024 helped propel the squad to a successful 11-5 season. The Mammoths dominated Wesleyan, beating them five times over the course of the spring, and also picked up series sweeps against Bowdoin and Middlebury, highlighted by a 10-2 five-inning win over the Polar Bears and a dramatic 11-10 victory over the Panthers.

May 8, 2021 Baseball claims the 2021 NESCAC championship.

With eight returners — only four of whom were starters — and six seniors who didn’t return to campus, the team entered the season as clear NESCAC underdogs. However, the Mammoths were anchored by dominant seasons both on the mound by Sachin Nambiar ’22 and NESCAC Rookie of the Year Nick Giattino ’24, and at the plate by Joe Palmo ’21 and NESCAC Player of the Year Daniel Qin ’22. After winning their way to the NESCAC Championship game, the team swept Tufts, 6-2, 4-1, to win the title.

Track and Field Both the women’s and men’s track and field teams competed without a full roster in the spring, as many students opted not to return to campus. Even so, Sophie Wolmer ’23 and Troy Colleran ’22 led the way, each earning All-American honors in the NCAA Championships. Wolmer placed seventh nationally in the 10,000-meter race, posting a time of 36:20.64 while Colleran’s 6691-point decathlon performance earned him an eighth place national finish.

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June 2021 The head coach of the men’s lacrosse team, Rashad Devoe, is fired after an investigation into allegations that he verbally abused team members who had allegedly violated the college’s Covid protocols by informally gathering to practice.

June 25, 2021 The NESCAC Presidents confirm Fall 2021 competition, with plans to return to a full slate of conference and non-conference games, including a fall championship tournament for all sports.

August 11, 2021 Sean Woods is named the new men’s lacrosse team head coach.

Men’s Tennis Coming off of their spring 2021 hiatus, the men’s tennis team returned to action in September, playing in three tournaments over the course of their shorter fall season. Their most successful event was the ITA New England Regional Tournament, with doubles pairs of Harris Foulkes ’22 and Edred Opie ’25, along with Sujit Chepuri ’25 and Damien Ruparel ’22 making it to the quarterfinals and semifinals of the event, respectively. The team will look to build on this success during their longer season of NESCAC competition in the spring of 2022.

September 7, 2021 Fall competition officially begins for the first time in two years, with the men’s soccer team kicking off the 2021 season with a 2-1 win over Norwich University.

August 13, 2021 Former Men’s Lacrosse Coach Rashad Devoe files a discrimination lawsuit against the college alleging that the ultimate reason behind his firing was not what the college publicly stated it to be but rather was “on the basis of his race.”

Women’s Soccer After a successful 2019 season where the team won their fifth NESCAC Championship, Women’s Soccer continued their momentum in 2021, winning the “Little Three” on the way to the league’s regular season title and earning the number 1 seed in the NESCAC tournament for the first time since 2011. Standout performances include a 1-0 overtime win over archrival Williams, a 1-0 win over Wesleyan to clinch the Little Three title, and a 4-0 win over Emerson College in which Head Coach Jen Hughes notched her 200th career win. With an offense ranked number 16 nationally led by leading scorers Patience Kum ’25 and Ruby Hastie ’22, the team looks to continue their run of form in the NCAA Tournament. The Mammoths will host the first two rounds for the third time in as many tournaments, with their quest for a National Championship beginning on Saturday, Nov. 13 against Lesley University at 11 a.m. on Hitchcock Field.

Women’s Tennis After a successful spring 2021 season where Julia Lendel ’24 and NESCAC Player of the Year Jackie Bukzin ’22 earned first-team all NESCAC status and qualified for the NCAA tournament in doubles, the team returned to the courts in the fall looking to build on their impressive performances. They would deliver, with members of the team racking up wins in tournament play and closing out their season with an 8-1 team win over rival Williams College on Oct. 16.

Field Hockey Field Hockey came back from the Covid hiatus with a vengeance, finishing with 2021 with a 11-5 record, their best record since 2016. Lead by forwards Muffie Mazambani ’24, and Sam Maynard ’25, who led the team in points with 31 and 27 respectively, the

Women’s Golf The women’s golf team dominated throughout the semester, eventually winning the NESCAC qualifying tournament by 15 strokes. Of the five tournaments they competed in, the Mammoths captured five individual championships. First-year Jessica Huang ’25 earned a first-place finish in a tournament hosted by Middlebury, while Gihoe Seo ’25 took home the gold in all four of the other competitions.

Men’s Golf The men’s golf team’s shortened season, which consisted of only tournament play, was capped off with a second-place finish at the Jumbo Invite to close out the season. Anthony Zhang ’25 led the way with a three-over round of 75, earning himself a fourth-place individual finish. The Mammoths, shooting a combined 301, beat out both Wesleyan (315) and Bowdoin (325) at the tournament.

team notched many impressive wins, including a 2-1 win over top-10 ranked Bowdoin and an 8-0 win over Clark University in their first ever game on the newly-renovated Hill Field. Notably, Head Coach Carol Knerr also earned her 200th career win in the Sept. 29 victory over Clark.

While their impressive season ended with a 1-0 NESCAC quarterfinal loss to Bowdoin, there is much to look forward to in 2022, as the team looks to build on their standout season.

November 13, 2021 Amherst holds its first Homecoming weekend in two years, with the Football team hosting Williams in the first game between the two teams since the Ephs beat the Mammoths 31-9 in 2019.

Volleyball After completing their 2019 season with a NESCAC quarterfinal appearance, the Volleyball team looked to replicate their success during their fall 2021 season. The team did not disappoint, racking up an impressive 16-win fiveloss season, including a 6-4 NESCAC record, good for the fifth seed in the conference tournament.

Led by senior Jamie Dailey

Men’s Soccer Coming off a 2019 season where they made a National Championship appearance, losing 1-0 to NESCAC foe Tufts, the team has not missed a beat, battling to a 12-2-2 record with a 7-2-1 record in NESCAC play. This season’s highlights include a 2-0 win over eventual regular season NESCAC champion Connecticut College and a 2-1 home win over archrival Williams.

Led by reigning Division III National Player of the Year and leading goal scorer German Giammattei ’22, the team is looking to return to the National Championship game for the second consecutive season. Their road to Greensboro starts with a game against Rosemont College at Babson College on Saturday Nov. 13, with kickoff set for 10:30 a.m. ’22, who notched a 300-kill season to lead the team, and assists-leader Carly Cooper ’24, the Mammoths notched a number of big wins. Highlights include a 3-1 win over Williams and a 3-2 comeback win against Middlebury in the NESCAC Quarterfinals. While they just missed out on a NCAA Tournament appearance, the team will look to build on this momentum next season.

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Amherst Through Art

After a year of fully remote performances, this Fall marks the return of live performance to Amherst campus! During the semester so far, the Arts and Living Section has covered a wide variety of performances: plays, concerts and more. Managing Editors Theo Hamilton ’23 and Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 highlight their favorite performances and what they liked about them.

Bad Jews I can’t say enough good things about “Bad Jews,” which was performed as Emma Ratshin 22E’s senior thesis earlier this semester. The play is set entirely in one room and its adjoining hallway over the course of a single night. Within this claustrophobic setting, its four characters alternate between arguing, reflecting and fighting for 90 minutes, with every exchange adding depth to each characterization. By the time the curtains close, it’s almost impossible to like either of the play’s central characters — the devout and argumentative Daphna or her entitled and secular cousin Liam — but it’s even harder not to empathize with both of them.

Photo courtesy of Emma Ratshin ’22E

Amherst Symphony Orchestra In a performance dedicated to welcoming the class of 2025, the Amherst Symphony Orchestra (ASO) played 4 distinct pieces, varying in style, tempo and fame. Led by conductor Mark Swanson, the concert was an acknowledgement of what had been lost during the year without live performance. Buckley Recital Hall with more than eighty students on stage was a powerful sight. The orchestra played fluently and compellingly, and it was clear that they had spent the year of Covid-19 maintaining community and practicing together as much as they could. ASO had a second concert on Oct. 23 for Parents weekend, and continue with a third concert on Nov. 13, featuring Sir Edward Elgar’s Variations on an Original Theme (“Enigma”).

Photo courtesy of Eleanor Walsh ‘25

Deathtrap Green Room’s second production of the semester was Ira Levin’s murder mystery thriller “Deathtrap,” directed

by Caspian Rabaia ’24. The production converted the Octagon — an entirely unique space on campus — into the home of past-his-prime playwright Sydney and his wife. Lit by lamps with yellow paper shades and the glow of a fireplace, “Deathtrap” made the most of the Octagon, which was originally a back-up location.

Strong acting by all five cast members and the meta framework of Levin’s script made for an unforgettable ambiance: funny, tense and slow-burning. It was the kind of show that could only be put on by college students, for college students.

Photo courtesy of Alex Brandfonbrener ’23

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