Issue 5

The

Due to Deficits, AAS Faces Depletion of Funds

Theo Hamilton ’23 Senior Managing Editor

The Association of Amherst Students (AAS) has seen a signifi cant depletion of its funds in recent years, due to sustained reductions in the student activities fee relative to its pre-pandemic level.

Since the beginning of the pan demic, the AAS’ rainy day fund, which holds surplus funds accrued over the years, has more than halved, falling from approximately $200,000 to just $79,000, according to AAS Treasurer Dania Hallak ’24.

The rainy day fund is used to cover costs if the AAS overspends its discretionary fund — which funds requests made by students and student organizations over the course of the semester — as well as to fund projects exceeding $10,000. As the amount of money allocated

FEATURES

to the discretionary fund this se mester is expected to be insufficient to cover discretionary spending, the AAS will likely have to rely on the rainy day fund to cover costs, Hallak said.

To avoid extinguishing the re source completely, the AAS Bud getary Committee (BC) is con sidering changing several of its funding policies. Looking forward, students could see reduced caps for the number of events clubs can request funding for each semester, as well as stricter funding guide lines for Senate projects, which are sometimes funded directly from the rainy day fund as they exceed $10,000.

According to Hallak, the pri mary cause of the rainy day fund’s depletion has been the reduction of the student activities fee — a fee charged to each student at the be ginning of every semester which

is the AAS’ only source of income — since the beginning of the pan demic.

During the 2019-20 academic year, the student activities fee was set at $365 per student each semes ter. However, during the 2020-21 academic year, with many students living off campus and unable to participate in traditional college life, the college administration made the decision to cancel the stu dent activities fee for the year.

Yet, throughout the year, AAS continued to fund clubs and stu dent organizations, Hallak said, “and everything was just coming out of AAS’ pockets.”

Last year, as students returned to campus, the college reinstated the student activities fee, but at the rate of just $230 per semester — only about 60 percent of what it had been prior to the pandemic.

“The reason [the student activ

OPINION 13

ities fee] was lowered was because, technically, we were still [under Covid] restrictions,” Hallak ex plained. “We could not fund for mals, parties, etc. So the school was like, ‘You need to abide by our rules, so you’re only getting this amount of money.’”

Midway through last year, how ever, the college began to relax its Covid restrictions, and activities again started opening up.

“We started funding activities like it was normal,” Hallak recalled, “but the student activities fee was still low.” The result was that AAS once again had to dip into the rainy day fund to cover the semester’s costs.

This year, the student activ ities fee has been raised to $300 per semester, in accordance with a motion passed by the AAS last

Community Honors Memory and Legacy of Professor Franklin Odo

Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 Editor-in-Chief

Franklin Odo, John Wood ruff Simpson Lecturer and for mer John J. McCloy ’16 Visiting Professor of American Insti tutions and International Di plomacy in the Department of American Studies, passed away on Sept. 28. He was 83 years old.

Odo came to the college as a visiting professor in 2015. For several years following his arriv al, he was one of only two faculty members teaching Asian Ameri can studies at the college. Among many contributions to the col lege community, Odo served as an advisor to the Asian Students Association, supervised multiple theses in Asian American stud ies, and played a key role in ad vocating for the establishment of an Asian American studies pro gram at the college.

In an email sent to students, faculty, and staff on Sept. 30, Dean of Students and Chief Stu dent Affairs Officer Liz Agosto and Provost and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein spoke to Odo’s legacy as both a pioneer in the field of Asian American studies and a valued member of

ARTS&LIVING 27

"Writing My Body": Poetic Perspectives

with Mikayah Parsons’ ’24 exploration of abortion rights

bodily autonomy.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

News POLICE LOG

>>Sept. 30, 2022

1:11 a.m., College Street

ACPD responded to a report of people throwing rocks from the railroad overpass at people walking on the sidewalk.

>>Sept. 30, 2022

1:11 a.m., Charles Drew House

ACPD responded to pre-

alarm of fire that was caused by a resident using an aerosol spray and a burnt piece of paper.

>>Sept. 30, 2022 11:57 p.m., Mayo-Smith Hall

Community Safety re sponded to a report of people throwing beer cans in a restroom. CSAs

reported no one in the area upon arrival.

>>Oct. 1, 2022 10:16 p.m., Lipton House Community Safety re sponded to a noise complaint in Lipton. The music was lowered at their request.

>>Oct. 1, 2022 10:31 p.m., College Street A Sergeant conducted a motor vehicle stop after observing a car being oper

ated in an unsafe manner.

>>Oct. 1, 2022

11:06 p.m., Seelye Parking

Lot

APD called and requested Amherst College address a noise complaint at Seelye Residence Hall. A Com munity Safety Assistant responded and addressed the noise.

>>Oct. 2, 2022 12:25 p.m., Mill Lane

ACPD asked a person not

affiliated with the College to leave the fields off of Mill Lane.

>>Oct. 2, 2022

1:42 p.m., Moore Hall

ACPD responded to a prealarm of fire. The cause was incense burned in a room.

>>Oct. 2, 2022

1:50 p.m., Tuttle Farm

ACPD asked people not affiliated with the college to leave the area of the Book and Plow Farm.

AAS Budget Issues May Cut Into Club Funding

Continued from page 1

spring. Hallak noted, however, that this sum is still below the $365 per semester charged before the pan demic, and expressed worries that the fee may still not be enough to cover the AAS’ costs.

“We have also been increasing our [spending] caps to account for inflation,” Hallak said. As the student activities fee has not in creased with inflation, these price cap increases — which help avoid situations in which clubs are forced

to pay a portion of things like travel costs out of their own pockets — add a further strain on the overall budget.

This semester, AAS is managing $570,000, split into three pools of money: the master general fund, club budgets, and the discretionary fund.

The master general fund in cludes the AAS Senate fund, audi tor fees, student payrolls, and also covers most of the programs which AAS pays for every year — every thing from providing students with

free PVTA access to supporting the Campus Activity Board and Campus Resource Centers. This se mester, the master general fund has been allocated $225,000 dollars, about 39.5 percent of the total AAS budget.

AAS has allocated another $302,551, just over 53 percent of its budget, to club budgets. Hallak ex plained that the club budgets pro vide the primary source of funding for Registered Student Organiza tions (RSOs) that have been active on campus for three continuous semesters. “This semester, [RSOs] had a five-week period to submit club budgets,” Hallak said. “The total request was $400k.” She add ed that because some requests were not in accordance with AAS poli cies, the total allocated was slightly lower.

The money that is not allocated to club budgets or the master gen eral fund make up the discretion ary fund, which individual students and clubs can request funding from throughout the semester. Even many clubs with funds already as signed through a club budget rely on discretionary funding through out the year to pay for events which they had not already planned at the start of the semester. This semester, the discretionary fund contains only $42,448, or 7.45 percent of the AAS budget.

According to the AAS Fall 2022 budget, more than $94,000

has already been allocated from the discretionary fund over the course of BC’s first five weekly meetings of the semester, although only $24,624 has been spent so far.

Last spring, AAS spent a total of $181,529 through the discretion ary fund. Hallak explained that any discretionary spending in excess of the $42,448 in the discretionary fund will have to be covered by the rainy day fund.

Hallak noted that avoiding a situation in which the AAS emp ties the discretionary fund and the rainy day fund is a crucial priority.

Were both the rainy day fund and AAS’ income from the student ac tivities fee totally emptied, Hallak explained that AAS would need to freeze all spending for the rest of the semester.

As a result, the BC is currently discussing several ways to avoid excessive discretionary spending. These possibilities include reduc ing the cap on the number of events clubs can host per semester, as well as establishing clearer rules about the difference between events and regular club meetings, the latter of which has a much lower spending cap per person. Additionally, Hal lak mentioned that AAS is plan ning to follow stricter guidelines when funding Senate projects this semester than in previous years.

Because the discretionary fund has a $10,000 cap on spending, projects which cost more than that

sum need to be covered directly by the rainy day fund. The AAS Sen ate makes decisions on whether to fund these projects by direct vote, however, AAS’ budget shortage means that it may be more diffi cult for students to receive funding through this method than in the past.

For example, in the minutes from the AAS Senate’s Sept. 26 meeting, Senator Mollie Harten stein ’23 raised the issue of acquir ing more AAS vans for students to rent, as loosening Covid restric tions would increase student’s need for transportation services. Senator Jeffrey Ma ’24 added that at the moment AAS only had one car and one van for students to rent.

Nonetheless, Hallak recom mended that, as this funding would have to come from the depleted rainy day fund, it could only be done “if [we] had extra money, which was very unlikely.” As a re sult, discussion of increasing the number of vans available to stu dents has been postponed until the budgetary situation becomes clearer.

Looking forward, Hallak said that she thinks raising the student activities fee to its pre-pandemic level is the first step. “If BC is in creasing our [spending] to account for inflation, and the college isn’t increasing the student activities fee, of course we’re going to run a defi cit,” she said.

Converse Hall, where AAS and BC meet.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

College Community Speaks to Odo’s Impact and Legacy

Continued from page 1 Asian Pacific American Center.”

the college community.

“A renowned scholar, activ ist for racial justice, steward of Asian American culture, and internationally recognized lead er in the field of Asian Amer ican studies, Franklin focused his life’s work on the history and lived experiences of Asian Americans,” they wrote. “He was educated at Princeton and Harvard and went on to serve in many important roles over the course of a long and dis tinguished career, including as founding director of the Ethnic Studies Program at the Uni versity of Hawai`i at Mānoa; president of the Association for Asian American Studies; senior advisor to the National Park Ser vice’s National Historic Land marks Program; chief of the Asian Division of the Library of Congress; and founding director of the Smithsonian Institution’s

“At Amherst, Franklin taught courses on race and public his tory and memory, among other topics, inspiring our students in side and outside the classroom,” they added. “His loss will be deeply felt.”

In a note to The Student, As sociate Provost and Associate Dean of the Faculty Pawan Dh ingra also remarked on Odo’s mentorship of students and con tribution to his field. “[T]o see him interact with students was so joyful,” Dhingra wrote. “How someone of his age and stature could inspire and be inspired by students was amazing to watch. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. He has accomplished so much, he could have received it twice.”

ShoYoung Shin ’19 recalled her experience taking classes with Odo at Amherst. “Profes

sor Odo had an incredible way of bringing both deep wisdom and great fun to the classroom,” she wrote. “I have many fond memories of the conversations we had and will remember the light chuckle that would follow his jokes. I remember being so fascinated during his courses, feeling enlivened by his vast knowledge and stirring story telling. He showed great care for his students through everyday gestures, and it meant so much to me, and many others, as a stu dent, to be understood and ad vised by him.”

For Jiajia Zhang ’22, who chose to attend Amherst in large part to be able to study with Odo, he was much more than just a teacher or advisor. “In my acknowledgements and dedi cations, I always called him my hero, mentor, and best friend, and that was exactly what he was to me,” she said. “ … He was one of my favorite people in this

whole world.”

In their email, Agosto and Epstein invited community members to share kind thoughts and memories online on the col lege’s In Memoriam page, or on notecards available in the Multi cultural Resource Center, which

will be compiled and shared with the family.

“The family wishes to have a private gathering at this time and we will work with them on any future opportunities to hon or Professor Odo’s memory and legacy,” they wrote.

Schwemm’s Set To Become Merch Store Before Plans Put On Hold

Liam Archacki ’24 Senior Managing Editor

The Schwemm’s Mammoth Market faced the threat of ex tinction this past week.

The cafe, currently beloved for its hot food offerings like mac-and-cheese bites and moz zarella sticks, was set to be con verted into a shop primarily sell ing college merchandise by the end of this week, reported sev eral student workers and staff, who said they were notified of the change last Tuesday. Hot food and non-perishable food items were to be moved out of Schwemm’s and to the Science Center Cafe over Fall Break.

Plans to make the transition, which were met with concerns from staff and student workers, were abruptly canceled, howev er, with a final decision on the matter delayed to later in the term.

day, full-time staff who work at the Mammoth Market were informed by Dining Services leadership that, by Thursday, the interior of the space would be redesigned to accommodate merchandise purchased from A.J. Hastings, a local shop which sold the college’s merchandise for many years but closed its doors in July.

Staff were also told of plans to no longer serve food at the Mammoth Market, with some menu items being transferred to the Science Center Cafe, whose hours would be extended later to meet the increase in demand. These changes were reported ly supposed to go into effect by Oct. 11, the last day of Fall Break, with plans already in motion to remove the kitchen’s ovens.

On Thursday, staff stayed late to put together display cases and rearrange the market’s interior in preparation for added merchan dise. Soon after, an array of new

items — including purple bean ies and scarves, mammoth-em blazoned visors and decals, and ball caps labeled for sports teams — arrived on the shelves, with many open spots remaining for future additions.

Despite close proximity to Fall Break, however, an official announcement of either the changes that had already oc curred or any to come, had yet to be made.

In an email response to The Student on Tuesday from Execu tive Director of Dining Services Joe Flueckiger, he maintained that, contrary to what staff re ported and the alterations al ready underway in the Mam moth Market, “no final decision has been made” regarding the transition.

The changes to the Mammoth Market had been discussed, he said, but they had only been re layed to staff as a possibility. “We have not released this informa

tion outside the staff group as a decision has not been made yet,” he added.

Jeramie Marquez, a full-time staff member who works shifts at both the Mammoth Market and the Science Center Cafe, said he was informed on Tuesday that the additional planned changes were being put on hold for the time being.

In addition to the closing of A.J. Hastings, the considered changes were motivated by de creased demand for food from the Mammoth Market relative to the Science Center Cafe, Flueckiger explained. “Very few students are using Keefe in the evening and, instead, seem to be using the Science Center lobby as a hangout/study space well into the evening,” he wrote. “We need to offer services where they have the greatest impact for stu dents.”

A number of full-time staff and student workers expressed

concern about the changes, how ever, as well as the way in which they were communicated.

Belane Abdurahman ’25, who started at the Mammoth Market last month, had already grown comfortable in her current role at the location. “Now I have to move to the Science Center Cafe, in theory, and learn how to maneuver a new oven, learn new prices, and make new menu items, which is super annoying,” she said. “[It’s unfortunate] to have to relearn or retrain in the middle of midterm season, espe cially after just getting comfort able.”

The loss of established rou tines was also a concern for Mikayah Parsons ’24, another Mammoth Market worker, who emphasized the destabilizing effect that changes, even small ones, can cause. “Change in a re tail or food service place — it’s

Franklin Odo began teaching at Amherst in 2015.

Photo courtesy of The Amherst Student

Staff, Student Workers Frustrated by Communication of Changes

very serious,” she said.

For Marquez, the logistical problems of merging the two were a key concern. “You’re tak

Continued from page 3 ing a whole night crew, enough to fill one space, and a whole day crew, and we all have to meet in the middle here,” he said.

He added that there would be a number of difficulties raised by

moving the Mammoth Market’s equipment into the limited space of the Science Center Cafe.

In addition to these disrup tions, workers feared losing a sense of community — both

with each other and with regu lars of the space.

Parsons noted the market’s “sentimental value,” pointing to the behind-the-scenes effort staff put in to build connec tions with students, which she said would be lost. “It’s not fair to staff, because they care so much about us, right?” she said. “They’re constantly churning out new recipes, and they’re con stantly trying to make the place work for us.”

Abdurahman was also con cerned about the potential loss of an important space. “I love Schwemm’s,” she said. “I love the people that come in. I love mess ing around with menu items and ingredients. I love the actual staff that work there.”

More often than anything else, though, workers — staff and students alike — expressed disappointment at the lack of substantive communication in advance of the changes be ing enacted. They said that the way they were informed of the changes felt sudden.

Parsons added that she wished student workers had been told of the changes further in advance

and asked for their feedback.

“We would have given sugges tions,” she said. “It wouldn’t have just been empty complaints.”

For Marquez, the lack of ad vance communication created a sense of uncertainty. “That’s the worst part about it,” he said, “that we don’t necessarily know all the answers until it’s literally happening.”

Contrary to employee con cerns, Flueckiger held that even if the changes happened, “[s]taff locations may change, but their roles and responsibilities would remain largely the same.”

He explained that no com mittees representing staff or stu dents had been involved in dis cussions, because “[w]e are not reducing services.”

Nevertheless, workers main tained doubts. “[There are] some things that aren’t quantifiable that are being lost in this transi tion,” Parsons said.

The administration hopes to come to a “final decision” about the Mammoth Market changes by the end of the term, Fluec kiger wrote. In the meantime, though, the space appears to have avoided meeting its fate.

Access to Amherst Sucessful After Scramble for Hosts

Julia Gentin ’26 Staff Writer

Access to Amherst (A2A), a free fly-in program which in troduces prospective applicants to the college’s campus, student body, faculty, and classes, was held on campus for the first time since the pandemic began on Oct. 1-3, despite challenges in recruit ing student hosts to accommo date the attendees.

In a change from when the event was last held in person in fall 2019, two weekends with 70 students each were condensed into one weekend of 135 prospec tive students. This was designed to make it easier to coordinate with other colleges’ fly-in pro grams, said Diversity Outreach

Sirus Wheaton ’23.

Early Opportunity for Native Students (EONS) was also held this past weekend, starting one day earlier on Sept. 30. Accord ing to its website, A2A priori tizes prospective students from historically marginalized groups, first-generation college students, and students from families with limited financial resources.

Attendees speak with diversi ty interns, meet with admissions staff, and participate in a mock application workshop and finan cial aid sessions, among other activities. They also have the op portunity to sit in on classes at the college.

All transportation costs for at tending are covered for prospec tive students. The college works with a travel agency and the ad missions office to secure flights.

Attending students are matched with an on-campus host, whose dorm room they stay in.

However, one week before the program’s start, 30-40 prospec tive students, nearly a third of the total set to attend the event, were unmatched, said Diversity Out reach Intern Jeanyna Garcia ’23, who helped plan the event. This was because of a late start to plan ning on the side of admissions and the new requirement of a Massachusetts Criminal Offender Record Information (CORI) for hosts, Garcia said.

CORI includes a background check, forms, and training videos.

“This posed many barriers be cause students were aware that they would do additional steps but didn't realize how time-con suming the steps would be,” Gar

cia said. “It takes huge chunks of time to fill out those forms.”

But thanks to a final push from the Diversity Outreach Interns — which included adding an incen tive for hosts to be entered in a drawing for a $150 VISA gift card and advertising the importance of A2A — all prospective stu dents had a place to stay. In fact, they had so many more sign-ups in the last week that the Diversity Outreach Team had to turn stu dents away from hosting, Garcia said.

“Amherst is known for histor ically recruiting diverse students, and this program plays a big part in that,” said Nicholas Torres ’25, a former A2A attendee and now host. “We want to maintain that community. If it means having a couple of high schoolers sleep on

our floors for a couple of days, that’s what we got to do.”

Torres said that when he at tended A2A, the financial aid meeting was a big deal, as his family was concerned about the financial aspect of attending col lege. “Getting the opportunity to sit down with a dean of financial aid was really, really helpful,” Tor res said. “I even paid less than he said.”

In the past, approximately 75 percent of A2A attendees have subsequently applied for admis sion to the college. Of those who apply, typically 65 percent are ad mitted, according to its website.

“The reason why it is so success ful is because so many students feel a connection to the program,”

Mammoth Market has become a staple among Amherst students in search of late-night snacks.

Photo courtesy of Sawyer Polland ' 24

Students Targeted by Phishing Attacks Impersonating President

that IT manages,” Hamilton said.

On Thursday, Sept. 8, the De partment of Information Tech nology (IT) sent out a schoolwide message via the Daily Mammoth alerting students of an “ongoing phishing attempt,” a cyber scam that was using the name of the college’s newly instated president, Michael Elliott, to solicit personal informa tion from community members.

Up until about two weeks ago, a handful of students and faculty re ceived targeted phishing messages via text from a sender claiming to be Elliott. According to Chief In formation Officer David Hamilton, the messages attempted to solicit recipients’ financial information. To IT’s knowledge, no one fell for this particular scam.

“This is a terrible thing to hear, but the college is always contending with a variety of attacks against fac ulty, staff, students, and the systems

“In the past, when Biddy [Mar tin] was president, folks did fall for these kinds of attacks on occasion,” although outcomes for individuals have never been “especially terrible.”

These kinds of attacks via text or SMS messaging are called smishing. According to Hamilton, smishing attacks can come from an auto mated source, just “knocking on doors and trying to see if some body answers,” but there have also been attacks that “demonstrate that the attacker has been studying [the Amherst community] and trying to leverage what they’ve discerned about us.”

Usually, the latter type of mes sage makes an urgent call to action on the basis of a supposed relation ship with someone in the Amherst community. Hamilton supposes that the only discernible targeting pattern in this most recent case is the deliberate concentration toward senior officers of the college or “em ployees who have access to a partic

ular system or certain information.”

Because of the lack of uniformi ty of software at Amherst and other colleges, college students are fre quent targets of phishing. “Higher education is a lot more vulnerable to these kinds of attacks than if you were working for a motor company, and everybody was using the same device,” Hamilton said.

While much of the awareness around cybersecurity concerns in frastructure, finance, healthcare and government, higher education is becoming an increasingly frequent target for various types of cyberat tacks. According to Inside Higher Ed, almost two-thirds of higher education institutions reported ran somware attacks in 2021, 74 percent of which were successful; In 2020, only half of said institutions report ed ransomware attacks.

Just last year, Howard University suspended classes for four days in September as a result of a ransom ware attack. Campus Wifi was deac tivated to prevent the cybercriminal

from accessing student information until the issue was resolved.

Hamilton said we live in a “par ticularly precarious” time when it comes to global cybersecurity. The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an international corporation that an alyzes and attempts to eliminate phishing, reported each financial quarter by over 1,700 client com panies worldwide, observed a total of 1,097,811 phishing attacks glob ally from April to June — roughly a 7 percent increase from the first quarter of 2022, and quadruple the number observed in early 2020. Smishing, the type of phishing that occurred most recently at Amherst, saw a 70 percent increase in volume since the year’s first quarter.

The most recent cyberattacks at Amherst occurred despite securi ty systems already put in place by the college. As a Google customer, Amherst’s students and faculty are protected by the corporation, which automatically filters out phishing messages via Gmail. Amherst stu

dents can also report messages to Google directly from their Gmail accounts, and the Amherst IT Ser vice Desk in Seeley Mudd can help community members determine the legitimacy of the messages they re ceive on any platform. Additionally, when the college is aware of ongo ing phishing messages, IT can filter them out of individuals’ inboxes be fore they are seen.

As an added protective measure, Amherst IT also works with Boston’s FBI unit, which warns the college of potential phishing threats, specifi cally when other higher education institutions have been targeted.

“At Amherst College, we’ve got 2,000 students coming from all over the world, some of whom are famil iar with this stuff, some of whom are not,” says Hamilton. Hwe urged stu dents to email the IT department if they are unsure of the validity of any message they receive, and download protective software to their personal devices to help filter out phishing messages.

A handful of community

The phising attempts came amid a rise in cyber attacks against colleges and universities across the country.

Graphic courtesy of Nina Aagaard '26

Photo courtesy of David Hamilton

Maggie Sher ’26 Staff Writer

Prospective Students Explore Campus, Attend Classes

know

Wheaton said that the last time A2A was in person, they needed fewer hosts because it was spread across two weekends, one in Sep tember and one in October. “We

actually got more people to sign up [this year] than any year be fore,” Wheaton added.

Diversity outreach interns take students to each scheduled event,

and pair students with hosts. “I loved asking students how they felt about their hosts and hearing glowing reviews,” Garcia said. “It was really nice to see that I made that relationship happen.”

Generally the interns do not host students themselves because they are working at the event, but this year, Sirus Wheaton ’23 did both. “We were [initially] real ly short [on hosts], but we want to have more kids here versus at a hotel in order to have a real Amherst experience in a dorm,” Wheaton said.

Kong ended up hosting two prospective students, and only learned about the second student the day the A2A began. “I would have appreciated a little more of a heads-up to prepare a more com fortable sleeping situation,” Kong said. “I just gave them blankets off my bed because we were told they were going to be given sleep ing bags but neither of them had any.”

Access to Amherst brought 130 prospective students to campus last weekend. The students had a chance to learn about the college and attend classes.

Abby Kong ’26 didn’t know about A2A before this semes ter, but signed up after receiving an email from Felipe Gomez, diversity outreach admission counselor, because she was al ready CORI-certified as a softball athlete. “I felt like since I have a two-room double and it’s such a nice setup, it would be rude not to host,” Kong said. “I really like the values of the program in getting to experience the school and not having to foot the cost.”

Other than sleeping arrange ments, hosts are mainly inde pendent from their paired pro spective student. Torres said it was important for him to show prospective students “a true and authentic Amherst outside of ad missions. Hearing the truth about the school is what made the dif ference.”

Altogether, despite last minute logistical issues, the organizers were able to improvise success fully, Garcia said. “The fact that we were able to get it together after all the struggles of finding hosts … is impressive,” Torres added.

Mammoth Moments in Miniature: Sept. 28 to Oct. 4

The Editorial Board Award-Winning Aizuri Quartet Performs at Amherst

On Sept. 30, the critically ac claimed, Grammy-nominated Aizuri Quartet performed a 90 minute concert at the college's Buckley Recital Hall as part of the Music@Amherst program. The group, made up of Emma Frucht and Miho Saegusa on violin, Ayane Kozasa on viola, and Karen Ou zounian on cello, performed four classical pieces evoking a restless, fearful nightmare, before the even tual release of a beautiful sunrise.

New Podcast “Black Women of Amherst” Released Nichelle S Carr '98, distin guished activist and film, television, and digital media producer, hosts a new podcast entitled “Black Wom en of Amherst.” Inspired by the 1999 book of the same name, the podcast tells the stories of Black women at

the college, from staff and students to professors and administrators. Around 50 women were included in the six-part series, including poet Sonia Sanchez, CNN anchor Laura Jarrett, and former Amherst presi dent Biddy Martin. All episodes are streaming now, wherever you listen to podcasts.

College Releases New Masking Policy for Classrooms

On Sept. 29, the administration sent an email to the campus com munity with updated guidelines for masking policies in instructional spaces on campus. Beginning Oct. 18, masking policies in these spac es will be based on the results of anonymous surveys, conducted by professors, requesting that students indicate whether or not they wish to continue wearing masks. All students in classrooms with at least one participant indicating a prefer ence for ongoing mask-wearing will be required to continue doing so.

Michael Elliott Makes WAMH Debut

President and former DJ Mi chael Elliot made his debut ap pearance as president on the student radio station WAMH on Oct. 2. Speaking with host Holden Orias ’24 on Orias’s show “Southpaw Soundbites,” Elliot discussed 80’s music along with his curated picks for the show, which included, among others, “Like a Prayer” by Madonna and “7” by Prince and The New Power Generation.

SASA Holds Fundraiser for Pa kistan Flood Victims

The Amherst College South Asian Students Association re sponded to recent floods in Pa kistan with a fundraiser between Sept. 28 and Sept. 30. Gift bags were sold in the Keefe Atrium during the afternoon, with the goal to aid some of the 33 million affected Pakistanis.

Buckley Recital Hall, where the Grammy-nominated Aizuri Quartet performed on Sept. 30.

Photo courtesy of Elido Studio

dfPhoto courtesy of Jesse Gwilliam

Features

Thoughts on Theses

Renee Rosenkilde

Rennee Rosenkilde is a biology major. The prospective title of her thesis is “Char acter Displacement in Vegetative Traits of Impatiens capensis and Impatiens pallida.” Her thesis advisor is Thomas B. Walton Jr. Memorial Professor of Bi ology and Environmental Studies Ethan Temeles, and her research partner is Ella Rose ’23.

get pollinated by insects, I’m work ing with both plants and insects, [and through that I’ve figured out]

I’m [not as interested in] insects at this point. It definitely is a learning experience, but I do know that gen erally this ecology and this research is something that I really want to do with my life.

Q: This is such a special thesis be cause you are collaborating with someone else in your research. What is that like?

tennis courts. That’s one site. We’re also looking at the entrance to the bike trail, and we’re looking at a sec tion that’s growing on Amity Street by University Drive, [about] a mile away from here.

Q: Can you describe a day into your life as a senior writing your thesis while having to manage classes and having your own social life?

Q: Can you briefly introduce your self?

A: My name is Renee. I’m a senior biology major. I’m from New York City, and I’m interested in plant ecology and insect ecology. I’m cur rently working on a thesis based off of a two-semester research [project] with another senior student. Now, we have to collect all the data before winter comes and then we’re going to spend winter in the spring writing [the thesis] and everything.

Q: What is your thesis about?

A: My thesis is looking at charac ter displacement in [two] species of flowers that grow in western Mas sachusetts and in this general area. It’s about two species that coincide with each other. They’re both native species and are pollinated by other local organisms like hummingbirds and bumblebees. We’re looking at how the presence of one is going to influence the traits that we see in the other … if they look different when they’re apart versus when they’re to gether.

Q: What is innovative about your research?

A: I would say that invasive species are a problem everywhere in the world now. With globalization, al though I’m just looking at two plant species in western Massachusetts, I think that there are principles that could be taken from that. Under standing how that system works can help understand the ways that character displacement functions and looks in plants, which is the di vergence of traits that we’re seeing, and which is something that occurs when native plants are in the pres

ence of invasive ones. The research is also important locally because there’s been a decline in the number of species of bees. We noticed that, when we go out into the field, there’s usually only one species, like Bom bus vagans — [half-black] bumble bees. There are not really honey bees anymore. The plant is supposed to have a lot of pollinators and it really doesn’t anymore.

Q: How has the process of research ing and writing the thesis been for you? What are the ‘roses’ and what are the ‘thorns?’

A: I’ll start with thorns because I want to end up getting everything. Definitely working in bio — work ing in nature and climate change — is a really big thorn in my side. I came in the middle of the summer to start research, and there was a drought for like a month. It didn’t rain for a few weeks and a bunch of our populations literally burned to a crisp, it was crazy. That, and also the weather — it’s getting cold now so the flowers are starting to fall off. We’ve had to switch gears a little bit and focus less on the flowers because they’re all dying, and focus more on things like the stems and the leaves. But that kind of goes into the rose[s], because that’s the thing about bio research and about field research, is that things will go wrong. You have to learn to accommodate that and to grow from that. I would say that the rule is that it’s a learning experience. It’s not just doing research — like, working for a professor — because you actually have to generate so many of the methods from start to finish. My advisor obviously has such an influential role in mento

ring, but [it’s also about] just being able to do this on my own with my partner, then learning from it, grow ing from it, seeing what I can create, and being proud of what I create.

Q: What advice would you share with students who are interested in writing a thesis?

A: I guess a piece of advice is to have an open mind. Talk to your profes sors. Talk to your advisors. They’re really knowledgeable people who have been in situations where things go wrong, and they’ve had to switch gears. Just be open to other routes and other ideas that they might have, or that you might get from reading the literature. Keep an open mind, and circle back to the very beginning point.

Q: Why did you decide to write a thesis in the first place?

A: I decided to write a thesis because I really like the idea of working in the field and the idea of doing research. I haven’t had a ton of experience with it like other students have — I know students who’ve been working for the same professor doing research for three years now, and I haven’t had that same experience. [That’s why] I wanted to try it: to be able to put my name on something and to be more involved than just doing research under somebody — to actually make something and see if this is some thing I want to do with my life.

Q: How has writing this thesis im pacted your thoughts about your career choice?

A: I think I definitely still want to do field work. I still want to do research. Because I’m working with plants that

A: I think we’re both really lucky that we’re interested in the same kind of research, and the same field of re search and doing similar things with our lives. We’re super lucky in that sense. But I think it is really nice to have somebody that you can shoot ideas off of when things go wrong, to have somebody with you in the de cision making process of everything, like ‘Which sites are we going to use?’ or ‘What are we going to do now that a bunch of these plants have burned up?’ All of that.

Q: What are some of the similari ties and differences between your thesis and Ella’s thesis?

A: Because we were just collecting general data together for a long time, we kind of decided recently on how we’re breaking it up into what we’re doing. [Ella is] looking at charac ter displacement in the floral traits, which is something that has to do more with pollinators and how to attract pollinators, whereas mine is more about resource-based compe tition, since I’m looking at vegetative traits and how the two plants or the two species are affecting each other on a resource level, like fighting for light and for space. Her work looking at the flowers is more like reproduc tive competition — how the two spe cies fight with each other to attract pollinators.

Q: Where are your different sites?

A: We spent the first couple of weeks just walking around all over the bike trail, all over Book & Plow [Farm], in town, looking for sites. We actu ally didn’t find too many of them [at Book & Plow] but we’re working behind the faculty apartments by the

A: A day in the life ... I get up super early at 7-ish. Eat breakfast, probably do some homework that I haven’t done already at breakfast. Go to class — I’m doing well in my class es. And then after class I’ll probably eat something quickly and run back to my room to change clothes, like cargo pants and hiking boots. And then meet my partner at one of our sites, and then take measurements for probably like three hours or something like that. Go get dinner with her. [Go] back to my room, put all the data, do homework. Go to meetings for other things if I have to. The only nice thing about my sched ule this semester is that for bio, they let you take two thesis credits. [So] I have a little bit of extra free time, but [the thesis] is what the free time is for.

Q: What do you do on your free days to recharge your energy?

A: It’s going to sound sad — I’m going to lay in bed all day. If I can hang out with my friends, then I lay in their beds. Something that is nice that I actually do: I like going out into nature, like going out on the bike trail or on any of the loops on the campus. I actually like going and seeing my plants, but at places where we’re not doing research, because when we do research on them, we have to tag them and mark them up a bunch and tread through [them]. So it’s really nice to just go on a walk and see a natural population and there’s a bunch of spiders and undis turbed things living in it. It’s just so beautiful.

Read the full interview online at www.amherststudent.com

Photo courtesy of Mollie Hartenstein

Encontrando La Causa: 50 Years of Latinx Activism

Karina Maciel ’25 Staff Writer

What does it mean to be Latinx at Amherst College? This question has followed generations of Latinx students who’ve come to Amherst since the college’s earliest attempts at diversifying its student body. How ever, class after class of students have found that there’s no single answer to this perpetual question — rather, the answer has changed over the past 50 years, with students constantly rede fining and pushing the boundaries of Latinx identity through activism, community building, cultural ex pression, and student-led organiza tions like La Causa, Amherst’s Latinx affinity group.

Since the early 1970s, Latinx stu dents at Amherst have worked to make the college a place where their identities, academics, and self-ex ploration can thrive. For this year’s Latinx Heritage Month, The Student explored this 50-year history of Lat inx activism and involvement on campus, speaking to students, facul ty, and alumni about what being Lat inx at Amherst means to them, and the gains that several generations of students have made.

1972: The Beginnings of La Causa

In the fall of 1972, Tomás Gonzáles ’76 had just settled into his first-year dorm when he heard a knock on his door. Upon open ing it, he was greeted by Edmundo Orozco ’74, who introduced himself and offered to introduce him to an other Latinx first-year student — Les Purificación ’76, who was living in Charles Pratt Hall.

Gonzáles, Purificación, and Oroz co were part of the earliest group of working-class Latinx students on Amherst’s campus, and despite their differences in ethnic background — Purificación was Puerto Rican, while Gonzáles and Orozco were both Mexican — all three men were able to find common ground in their experiences of being Latinx at a pri marily white institution. The three men became close friends. Later that semester, they founded La Causa, Amherst’s first working-class Latinx student organization, with the goal of “creat[ing] a viable Latino social, cultural and political body” on cam pus and increasing Latinx student enrollment.

By the end of the year, La Causa had received funding from the Stu dent Allocations Committee, known

today as the Budgetary Committee, and was recognized as an official student organization. Its original mission became the founding pillar of Latinx activism and community on campus.

“We just became a support group for one another, and for others,” Orozco said at a Sept. 15 event titled Latinx History at Amherst, which featured three panels with alumni, professors, and current students. “We’re just sharing information and experiences.”

Prior to the enrollment of Purifi cación, Gonzáles, and a handful of other working-class Latinx students, Orozco had worked closely with the admissions office to recruit domestic Hispanic and Latinx students from working-class backgrounds. These students were a stark contrast from the Latinx students who had attend ed Amherst previously, many of whom were international students from wealthier families in Latin America.

“We certainly weren’t the first Hispanics in Amherst,” said Orozco. “There've been a lot of them coming through here from privileged back grounds, well-known backgrounds … there [were] always Hispanics, but … they had a career path, they had a background. We were trying to establish ourselves.”

Following La Causa’s official es tablishment, the next item on the group’s early agenda was to continue increasing the number of Latinx and Hispanic students on the Amherst campus. As students, Purificación and Gonzáles became involved with the Office of Admissions and worked to recruit Hispanic students from more diverse backgrounds.

Through La Causa, Orozco, Gonzáles, and Purificación went to high school campuses and recruit ment fairs around the Northeast, meeting with Hispanic students and other students of color and en couraging them to apply. They also reviewed scored applications, eval uating Hispanic applicants in par ticular and advocating for them in the admissions office. According to Purificación, all of these efforts were encouraged by Dean of Admissions Ed Wall, who made diversifying Amherst’s student body one of his key focuses.

These concerted efforts in the admissions process led to a small increase in the number of Latinx students on campus in the late 1970s, including Ricardo Morales ’78 and Edwin Camacho ’79. Morales and Camacho joined La Causa as firstyear students after meeting Gonzáles and Purificación, and also partici pated in advocating for more Latinx recruitment through the admissions office.

“The only way to win prioritizing for La Causa was admissions,” said Morales at the 50-Year Anniversary of La Causa: The Founding panel.

“So taking a page from Edmundo and taking a page from Les, when I got here, I realized that really quickly and I made that one of my top prior ities in terms of admissions … Being able to be diverse means diversity across the board.”

Alongside advocating for diver sity in admissions, La Causa also worked to bring visibility to Latinx culture on the Amherst campus. Among the organization’s achieve ments was “Pa’lante,” the Five Col leges’ first annual Latinx talent show,

in 1975. “Pa’lante” united Latinx students from all of the Five Colleges — they sang, danced, and performed in a vibrant display of cultural unity — one of the first of its kind on Am herst’s campus.

However, according to alumni, efforts to build a Latinx community on campus were met with resistance. “[We were] challenged by other stu dents saying, ‘Why do you need a group? That’s bad, because you’re separating yourself from us,’” said Purificación at the panel.

The students also struggled with the institutional ignorance ingrained in Amherst’s very campus, physical reminders that made it difficult for students of color to ever feel com pletely comfortable. Purificación recalled an instance where, as part of his work-study, he bused dishes for students eating in Valentine Dining Hall — only to look down and real ize that all the dishes had the racist design of British soldiers on horse back hunting down Indigenous peo ple.

“Every day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, [we were] looking at geno cide, reinforcing it every time,” Pu rificación recalled. “How can this be Amherst College, [which is] sold to be a bastion of progressive liberal thought? There are Black students here, there are some Hispanic and Asian students here … How can no one see it?”

Despite these conflicts, La Causa endured, and continued to pursue its mission. As the Latinx student pop ulation on campus grew, so did stu dent activism and the push to create spaces on campus where Latinx stu dents could feel truly included, with out having to compromise aspects of

themselves and their culture.

“There were very few [Latinx] people,” Gonzáles said at the panel.

“So we had to do what we could with what we got, and that’s why admis sions was so important. To embrace communities where they were at, and attract them, and reinforce the reasons why they should be here and stay here, because it wasn’t only about enrolling and matriculating, it was about graduating and surviving and succeeding.”

“La Causa created that vehicle of social change, of voice,” Morales add ed. “Letting people know that we’re here … to be counted upon, and to provide change in a way that’s mean ingful not only to ourselves and to our families, for our own prosperity, but also for those who come behind us, or are on the side, or are ahead of us.”

1977-1982: The Next Generation

Following the matriculation of Orozco, Purificación, and Gonzáles, students like Morales and Camacho stepped up to lead La Causa, foster ing a new wave of student activism in the late ’70s.

The later 1970s saw an increase in the Latinx presence on campus, partially due to La Causa’s work in admissions. This swell of students prompted the crucial fight for a physical space for the Latinx com munity to gather on campus. To cope with the hostility they faced from the wider college, Latinx students want ed a designated room where they could convene for meetings, build community, and be themselves. Calls

Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel

Original copy of La Causa’s founding constitution.

Banner from the Latinx History at Amherst Confer ence held on Sept. 15, 2022. Signed by alumni, facul ty, and current students, currently on display in the Archives and Special Collections.

Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel ’25

Tracing the History of La Causa and Latinx Student Activism

for a cultural space coincided with the Student Allocation Commitee’s refusal to fund La Causa in 1977, and tensions eventually boiled over during December of 1978, when Camacho and a small group of stu dents decided to hold a sit-in at the snack bar in Fayerweather Hall, dis rupting the snack bar’s usual activity and occupying the space until their concerns were addressed.

“The larger community … viewed us as being Latinos, [as being] some thing else,” Camacho said at one of the panels at the event, explaining the necessity of the sit-in. “We felt that it was important for us to own that, and to present our identity as a group and not have it be imposed upon us.”

The sit-in lasted three days and grew to include approximately 100 students, and was immediately met with backlash, most notably from The Amherst Student. In the issue published on Dec. 7, 1978, The Stu dent’s editorial board published a piece titled “‘The Cause’ Celebre.” In the piece, the editorial board scolded La Causa for their protest, stating that they were “dismayed at the lack of respect which La Causa displayed in effecting the takeover of the snack bar,” and claiming that the organization needed to meet the administration halfway. In the same issue, The Student gave La Causa a superlative in its Sixth Annual Dubi ous Achievement Awards titled “The Hey, I Hear You’ve Got A Special On Tacos Today” award.

Calls for a cultural space coincided with the Student Allocation Commitee’s refusal to fund La Causa in 1977, and tensions eventually boiled over during December of 1978, when Camacho and a small group of students decided to hold a sit-in at the snack bar in Fayerweather Hall, disrupting the snack bar’s usual activity and occupying the space until their concerns were addressed.

“The larger community … viewed us as being Latinos, [as being] something else,” Camacho said at one of the panels at the event, explaining the necessity of the sit-in. “We felt that it was important for

us to own that, and to present our identity as a group and not have it be imposed upon us.”

The sit-in lasted three days and grew to include approximately 100 students, and was immediately met with backlash, most notably from The Amherst Student. In the issue published on Dec. 7, 1978, The Student’s editorial board published a piece titled “‘The Cause’ Celebre.”

In the piece, the editorial board scolded La Causa for their protest, stating that they were “dismayed at the lack of respect which La Causa displayed in effecting the takeover of the snack bar,” and claiming that the organization needed to meet the administration halfway. In the same issue, The Student gave La Causa a superlative in its Sixth Annual Dubious Achievement Awards titled “The Hey, I Hear You’ve Got A Special On Tacos Today” award.

These negative reactions to the protest “highlighted the need for the cultural center,” said Camacho. “Yes, [it was] racism, but it’s really born of ignorance … a lot of racism, most of it is born out of ignorance. And I think that just to refer to tacos, to lump all Latinos together with that symbol, was another example of that ignorance.”

However, the backlash La Causa received was small in comparison to the support from other campus organizations. The college’s president at the time, John William Ward, was also open to dialogue between his administration and the organization, and the sit-in eventually proved to be a success: The administration offered Fayerweather 108 as an office and cultural center.

La Causa accepted the offer on three conditions: priority for a larger room, the college’s refurbishment of Fayerweather 108, and the inclusion of minority students in the interviewing and evaluation process of minority faculty. The space was named after José Martí, a Cuban revolutionary. Today, it still exists on campus as the José Martí Cultural Center in the basement of the Keefe Campus Center. The late 1970s also brought co-education to the college. Janine Craane ’82, one of the first Latinx women to attend Amherst, had to navigate the dual

experience of being Latinx in a white space while also being a woman in a predominantly male space.

“The campus really hated having women and the professors, especially [hated it],” said Craane at the 50-Years of Latinx Student Activism panel. “The economics department was positively hostile, [and so were] a lot of the alumni, and that lasted well into when I graduated.”

Craane ran for chair of La Causa and faced some of this hostility and machismo during elections, but was successful in her campaign and led La Causa through a new era of co-education. She brought multiple Latinx figures to Amherst to speak to students, and engaged with the wider Five College community. She also started initiatives like Big Sisters, Little Sisters, through which Craane connected with other women at Amherst, offering mentorship and guidance for female students that was hard to come by in the early days of co-education.

Racist backlash published by the Editorial Board of the Amherst Student, Dec. 1978. From Amherst Col lege Archives and Special Collections.

1990s: La Lucha Continues

more political.”

A major part of this political collaboration came in the spring of 1992, after the beating of Rodney King, an unarmed black man, by four Los Angeles Police Department officers, and the subsequent trial and verdict which acquitted the officers.

The larger community ... viewed us as being Latinos, [as being] something else. We felt that it was important for us to own that, and to present our identity as a group and not have it be imposed upon us.

Edwin Camacho '79

“[That program] was my way of addressing the machismo,” Craane added. Programs such as Big Sisters and Little Sisters had a strong impact on the college community– so much so that later on, when Craane was working on Wall Street, the Amherst students interning in her office “loved the school. They had a completely different experience. It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t even recognize the school you’re describing; it’s not the school I attended.’ I tried to make it a kinder, better place.”

Internal changes in La Causa, as well as the group’s activism across campus, continued throughout the 1990s, with the 1992 takeover of Converse Hall serving as a particularly memorable moment. During these years, the college further increased its recruitment of Latinx students of working-class backgrounds, as the admissions process began moving away from feeder schools in the Northeast and toward public schools across the country.

One of these students was Rick Lopez ’93, the Anson D. Morse 1871 professor of history, professor of environmental studies, and dean of students, who arrived at the college in fall of 1989.

“I was part of the first group when Amherst College was starting to recruit outside of feeder schools and brought in a lot of workingclass Latinos, who might have been the only ones from their public high school who came here,” Lopez said in an interview with The Student. “It was a very different experience. The college didn’t quite know what to do with all of these students, but there was a critical mass of us.”

Lopez and Gilberto Simpson ’94 were co-chairs of La Causa together, and Simpson also ran for chair of the Black Students Union.

“The idea was we were going to try to bring greater alliances between these two organizations, both to recognize Afro Latinos who felt really unwelcome at La Causa before that … but also [for] greater collaboration across organizations,” Lopez added. “Things got much

At the time of the verdict, Simpson stated, there had also been stalling from the college administration on the recruitment and retention of Black faculty.

The combination of these two issues meant that students felt the need to hold “a kind of protest or consciousness-raising event,” Simpson said at the 50-Years of Latinx Student Activism panel. “There was somebody who had the suggestion, ‘Hey, let’s take over the administration, let’s take over Converse [Hall].’”

This suggestion, at first taken as a joke, quickly became reality, and in May, members of La Causa joined the Black Students Union in their takeover of Converse Hall. The group of protesters issued a list of eight demands to President Peter Pouncey’s administration. Chief among these was a call for the hiring of a trained affirmative-action officer by Feb. of 1993, as well as the hiring of Black or Latinx faculty members in two of three departments — psychology, political science, or theater and dance — by May 1995. However, the college’s response to the Converse takeover made many students feel demoralized, Lopez said. It felt like the administration wasn’t taking their demands

Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel

“You Find Solidarity”: Reflections on Latinx Community

seriously.

“We had a big meeting [with President Pouncey] in the Red Room,” Lopez said. “Basically what he did was proceed to take apart all of our arguments and make it seem like there was absolutely nothing wrong, which wasn’t convincing, but it was demoralizing. And so we persisted in the occupation for a little longer and then we eventually came out.”

It wasn’t until much later, when Lopez became a professor at Amherst himself, that he realized that there were concessions made to student protesters — concessions that the college had not wanted to present to students right away. One of these concessions was the hiring of Brenda Bright, the first professor to teach Latino studies at the college.

Additionally, later in the ’90s came the creation of La Casa, the Latinx theme house. The charter for La Casa was written by Marisol Arriaga ’95, alongside Jorge Blandon ’96 and a few other students. “At the time, people really wanted a space to live together, to share and … to be able to deal with not only the academics of Amherst, but all of the micro- and macro-aggressions that were happening in the institution,” said Arriaga at the event.

The charter of La Casa also required inhabitants to fulfill a community service requirement, in an attempt to engage with the wider Latinx community in the areas outside of Amherst.

But despite these attempts to forge pan-Latinx solidarity on campus, there were also points where different cohorts of Latinx students diverged in order to give specificity to their own issues. The creation of Hispaña, for example, was led by a group of Puerto Rican students in the 80s who wanted to focus more on cultural and social activities, rather than align themselves with the political activism and activity of La Causa. “[They didn’t] want to be associated with that kind of thing,” said Craane. “It broke my heart to see the splitting.”

The Chicano Caucus was started in 1993 to create a space explicitly for Chicano students — students of Mexican American descent — to talk

Article published in the Student, discussing success of the Fayerweather Sit-in, Dec. 1978.

about their own political issues and find their own community, separate from the wider Latinx umbrella. There were worries that this would create tension, Arriaga recalled.

“There was this idea that [the Caucus] was going to splinter off and drain some of the resources from La Causa, but what actually happened was quite the opposite,” she said. “They were very great at going to the Student Affairs Committee … getting the funding. And what it did was give us twice the money.”

Neither Hispaña nor the Chicano Caucus exist on campus today, but both were born out of the wide range of Latinx students on campus fighting to assert their identities in ways they saw fit. This was especially important as the Latinx population on campus increased and the community became less monolithic — something that reflected the increasing diversity in the Latinx population of the wider United States.

“We had numbers, we had interest,” said Arriaga. “[But] obviously you’re always going to have different factions of people who don’t want to be as involved — your race is not a proxy for your politics, per se. And I think looking back, we were sort of trying to think through a lot of these issues, trying to complicate the conversation a little more, trying to think about things in a more intersectional way.”

“There’s not one kind of [Latinx] activism that has existed [on campus], it’s gone through phases,”

added Lopez. “People come from different parts of the world, different sorts of traditions — Puerto Rican, Chicano, Mexican, Peruvian, Dominicano — and different class backgrounds … when you think about activism, part of it is the development of a consciousness about where [students] come from, what it means to them, what it means to be part of this place, Amherst College, and the things that they want to see happen.”

2010s: The Creation of Latinx Studies

While earlier generations of students had called for the implementation of Latinx studies in the Amherst curriculum, it wasn’t until the 2000s and 2010s that such advocacy really took off. Conversations around establishing Latinx studies had been occurring since the 1970s, but according to Carlos Gonzalez ’14, these conversations “didn’t go anywhere, which caused a lot of frustration.”

Gonzalez, along with other Latinx students and faculty, held a dinner with then-President Biddy Martin to discuss their desire for a Latinx studies department. Latinx studies would not only demonstrate that the college valued the experiences of Latinx students, they argued, but it would also remove the burden of Latinx students having to educate the rest of the population — a burden which had fallen on them since the arrival of the first workingclass Latinx students to Amherst in

the ’70s. “We’re happy to be at the table,” Gonzalez noted at the panel titled the 5-Year Anniversary of Latinx and Latin American studies.

“But we cannot be expected to be the ones planning all of this when we also have to deal with Amherst College-level academics.”

Prior to the creation of Amherst’s Latinx and Latin American Studies (LLAS) Department, students had to look to other colleges in the Five College system to study any sort of Latinx or Latin American curriculum. One of those students was Elaine Vilorio ’17, who, alongside Hugo Sanchez ’17, was involved in the early advocacy to create a Latinx studies program.

Sanchez recalled a moment in one of his Spanish classes when he was a sophomore, where a student made an ignorant comment about undocumented students in a class with many Latinx individuals. “Everybody’s faces changed … They were very upset,” he said at the event. “I thought to myself, how was his opinion made? Why is it that someone would think like that?”

However, Sanchez attributed this microaggression to ignorance.“It wasn’t my job to teach anyone [when] I was at a school whose mission was to teach,” he said. “I felt like I wanted an institution like Amherst College to be responsible for that.”

Due to slow movement on the issue, Vilorio ended up creating her own Latin American studies major through Amherst’s interdisciplinary studies major. “I didn’t want the [Five College Latin American Studies] certificate, because I wanted to do a thesis, so I made [the major] through the interdisciplinary studies option,” she said in an interview with The Student. However, in order to create this major, Vilorio had to travel off campus and attend classes at UMass and Mount Holyoke College — something that wasn’t “really a choice as much as it was a requirement,” as Amherst didn’t have the requisite course offerings.

Additionally, the sense of community usually found within a department or major was lacking, mostly because the limited Latinx studies programming that did exist was so widely scattered across the

Five Colleges. “I definitely felt like I was more alone when I was making an interdisciplinary major, and it was hard for me to have peers to talk to about it,” Vilorio said. “It would have just been nice to have that community … and just having recognition on campus would have [also] been nice.”

The Amherst Uprising, a 2015 student-led demonstration for racial justice on campus, played a pivotal role in the advocacy for Latinx studies. Following the Uprising, R. John Cooper ’64 Presidential Teaching Professor of Spanish Paul Schroeder Rodriguez was hired during a push for more diversity in the Spanish department. However, Schroeder Rodriguez also came to the college specifically because of his past experience in Latinx and Latin American studies. Alongside Lopez and Professor of American Studies and Black Studies Solsiree del Moral, Schroeder Rodriguez helped draft the proposal for the LLAS program.

“In the 2010s, it’s unacceptable for a college [the] caliber [of] Amherst College to ask students to justify the academic value of Latinx studies,” said del Moral at panel. “But the students were put into that position. I really resented that they had to do that type of work. What we were doing was convincing the administrators and the faculty that they should catch up to 60 years of academic research, and found the program here.”

Alongside student activists, del Moral, Schroeder Rodriguez, and Lopez were able to come up with the core requirements and curriculum for the LLAS program, ensuring that it allowed students to study not just U.S. Latinxs, but also Latin America and the Caribbean. Exposure to all three content areas was especially important, as it created “a space for students to build the major to suit their needs,” del Moral said.

Because Schroeder Rodriguez was new to campus, he realized that he would be in a “good position” to move the proposal through the administrative process. “I went around and gathered feedback, sometimes by myself, sometimes

Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel ’25

The Only Way Through Is Forward — Pa’lante

with other faculty, to hear from students, departments that might have overlap,” he said in an interview with The Student, “[to] get a sense of who was on board and how.”

The proposal for LLAS was then put up to a faculty vote, where it received unanimous approval. “Everyone voted in favor of it and actually stood up and gave a round of applause for the creation of the major, so that was pretty exciting,” Lopez said. “But I can’t say that was the result of just those two years of working on it. It was the fact that this was the result of this longer history, student activism, collaboration with faculty, and openness by the administration at the college.”

The LLAS program was officially launched in 2017, and has produced a steady number of majors ever since. Soledad Slowing-Romero ’20 was the second person to ever declare LLAS as a major in the fall of her sophomore year, and the first to write a thesis for the department. “I didn’t really do anything to bring the major about, I just kind of benefited from it,” she said in an interview with The Student. “But the LLAS major was definitely my favorite place to be in. I met so much of the faculty that I adore … it just really felt like a community.”

According to Slowing-Romero, the LLAS department was a “space for more progressive scholarship” than other departments and majors, partly because of its interdisciplinary aspects. The department also enables students to critically study their own histories, as well as nurture “radical scholarship,” she said.

These sentiments were echoed by Victoria Foley ’23, who has worked as a research assistant for the LLAS department since the beginning of her sophomore year. Part of Foley’s research has been to interview past Latinx alumni of the college and speak to them about their experience as Latinx students on campus.

Through this research, Foley said she has gained “a more profound appreciation” for the struggles that past Latinx students have gone through. “There’s so much activism that’s not recorded or even seen

here at Amherst,” Foley said in an interview with The Student. “It’s really awesome and should be highlighted that people overcame that. They were like, no, you can try to vandalize our space, but we’re going to prevail here. And it gives you appreciation, like someone fought for what I have today.”

Research like Foley’s also plays an important role in legitimizing the experiences of Latinx students and alumni at Amherst, something that was almost unheard of 50 years ago. According to Lopez, who has done his own historical research about Amherst’s history of Latinx advocacy, “for alumni to share their stories is actually pretty cathartic … because for some of them, their experiences at Amherst — while they valued it — was traumatizing.”

“What they experienced here, the kind of classism and racism that they experienced from peers, left scars,” he added, “so it meant a lot to them to have a current student and reach out [and interview them] … I think that has been very powerful for a number of alumni.”

Additionally, through the LLAS department, Foley was able to curate an exhibit on the history of La Causa for Latinx Heritage Month, which is currently on display in Frost Library until Oct. 15. She also helped to organize the Latinx History at Amherst event, alongside Eva Diaz,

said.

2020s: Siempre Pa’lante, the Future and Beyond

2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of La Causa, and the fifth anniversary of the creation of the LLAS program. The organization and the program continue to flourish on campus today, as students consistently use both to explore their Latinx identities and define what being Latinx at Amherst means to them — the continuation of an effort that has lasted 50 years.

Lexy García ’23, who has been involved with La Causa since her sophomore year, stated that prior to Covid, the club played a large part in her experiences with Latinidad on campus. García was the Conocer y Resolver chair before the pandemic, a position designed to serve as community liaison between the La Causa e-board, the general club membership, and the wider Latinx population on campus. As Conocer y Resolver chair, García made an effort to create programming that would connect club members to Latinx alumni through events such as Latinx Alumni Homecoming. According to García, this event was particularly important for creating a sense of community, connecting the younger students to past alumni, and continuing the traditions of La Causa throughout the generations.

“The more I read about the struggles and activism that the first generations of Latinos on campus had to deal with and fight with, the more I felt connected to this vision,” García said in an interview with The Student.

However, despite attempts by previous La Causa e-boards to continue strengthening the Latinx presence on campus, Covid and the arrival of online learning made that difficult. In recent years, the political and activism aspects of La Causa largely went quiet, and even the organization’s attempts at creating a social space for Latinx students have struggled to make an impact.

Latinx at Amherst from the Amherst Archives, curat ed by Victoria Foley ’23. Currently on display on the first floor of Frost Library.

Duran ’24E, Elias Villanueva Gomez ’25, Mina Enayati-Uzeta ’25, and Valerie Rosario ’26. The new constitution drew from many of the principles and objectives of past constitutions that had been removed in the last decade, most notably in its redefinition of many of the club’s leadership roles — a change that tries to “reference the labor put in by the Latine community who’s come before us, and to honor all the good work they did,” according to Villanueva Gomez in an interview with The Student, “to strengthen the connection between the past and the present, in order to understand the future we want as a community.”

Recent weeks have also seen the election of a new e-board, meant to lead La Causa into the next semester and revitalize its presence on campus. Part of that revitalization is to once again make La Causa a space where Latinx students have the ability to assert themselves culturally, politically, and academically — to make La Causa into a vehicle for wider social change and explorations of Latinidad at Amherst.

“In La Causa you find solidarity,” said Rosario. “It’s an affinity space where you can let go of your frustrations but also celebrate who you are with people who also share the same feeling.”

what can we do? How do we come together? Now that we have more structure and clearer goals, hopefully we can … move forward with a concrete agenda.”

The wide spectrum of Latinx activism and involvement on campus means that countless students have fought to find their places at Amherst. And although these students are only here for four years, each class builds off the work done by those before them, leading to the environment we know today, where organizations like La Causa are allowed to stumble and then rebuild, where programs like Latinx and Latin American studies can continue pushing the bounds of scholarship and exploration. The only way through is forward — pa’lante.

“Though I’ve never felt totally comfortable in a place like Amherst, my Latinidad has manifested into me trying to be as true to myself and the way I am,” García said. “The way I was raised, my customs, my practices, my morals, my ethics, while still being in a space like this, and hopefully thriving. But I couldn’t have done that without finding community first.”

the LLAS department’s academic coordinator. “My hope is that people can look at the exhibition and be like, ‘Wow, I had no idea that my own classmates [who] are like me devoted their time to this,’” Foley

As the 2022-23 school year started, dissatisfaction and calls for restructuring grew. After a period of extensive discussion with the community, a new constitution was developed by Belem Oseguera

“That’s something you won’t find in many other places at Amherst,” she said.

“[La Causa] is the meeting ground,” Villanueva Gomez added. “It’s the place where I tell others, this is happening to me, is it happening to you? We need to change that,

This sentiment was echoed repeatedly by alumni, who credited Amherst for giving them the avenues to discover themselves and their voices. “I thank Amherst for everything,” said Orozco. “And I want to stress to you that we’re here for a purpose. And the purpose is to become the best you can be, and to become a symbol and someone that can give guidance. We don’t do things on our own. We do it in the company of others.”

“[La Causa] is the meeting ground. It’s the place where I tell others, this is happening to me, is it happening to you? We need to change that, what can we do? How do we come together?

— Elias Villanueva Gomez '25

“

Photo courtesy of Karina Maciel

Opinion

Say Yay for Mountain Day

While Amherst students rued the unfortunate cancellation of Farm Fest this past week, students at two of our fellow Five Colleges, Smith and Mount Holyoke, enjoyed a particularly exciting treat in the form of Mountain Day.

For those not in the know, Mountain Day is a tradition held by a couple of different colleges across the U.S. wherein classes, extracurriculars, and other responsibilities are canceled without warning and students climb whatever mountain is convenient and relatively close to their campuses. While Mountain Day is named for and centered around this climb, the colleges that celebrate it treat it as a day to engage in outdoor activities in general: Smith encourages apple picking and picnicking opportunities, Mount Holyoke serves ice cream on the mountain, and Williams has had all-campus picnics and polar bear swims.

Considering that two of the Five Colleges and our dearest rival have Mountain Day, why don’t we? You obviously don’t need a mountain to hold Mountain Day (re: Smith) — and besides, we’re the College on the Hill, in the middle of a Pioneer Valley filled with extremely hikeable mountains.

For a campus so surrounded by beautiful natural landmarks, Amherst’s culture is remarkably inward-looking, and the majority of students spend most of their time within the Amherst bubble. It is too common a phenomenon for students here to look up from their notebooks only to realize that they haven’t left campus proper in four weeks — we often marinate in the pressures and stresses of campus, and the repetitiveness of our travels between class, dorm, and dining hall only exacerbate academic burnout. A physical relocation, with new sights and sounds and smells, is often surprisingly and enormously beneficial for a person’s psyche. Mountain Day would give students a chance not only to purposely break out of that bubble, but to reconnect themselves with the natural landscape in a way that many students, the Editorial Board included, just don’t feel able to justify with our busy schedules.

The unscheduled nature of Mountain Day is particularly important here. If we had a scheduled day off, many people would surely plan out hangouts with their friends or work they’re planning to do or events to go to in advance before they would consider school-sponsored outside

time. But the unexpected nature of Mountain Day encourages widespread participation in the festivities, allowing more people to actually get outside. Moreover, there is a kind of symbolic power to summiting a mountain, and a change in perspective that makes all of our homework seem so much smaller, so much farther away. Up in the clouds, the worldly concerns weighing on us may disappear.

Mountain Day brings students in touch with nature and helps build community among that student body — after all, what’s more of a bonding experience than climbing a mountain with several of your peers? There are so few events that we as a campus participate in collectively, and Mountain Day is an opportunity to bring the student body closer together. Also, the Pioneer Valley is arguably at its best in the fall: Just consider all the fun fall activities to do here.

While the logistics of Mountain Day may seem daunting at first, we can easily follow our fellow colleges’ approaches. Amherst could provide shuttles to the mountain, as Mount Holyoke does, and those who would rather carpool on their way there could choose to do so. From there, students could choose to hike up the mountain or continue with the shuttle to the top, if they had accessibility concerns or simply didn’t enjoy hiking. Depending on the mountain we pick, Amherst could also create activities and events centered around the day: Mount Tom, for instance, has its own ice cream shop near the bottom as a fun reward for triumphant students, but for those who would rather have little to do with the mountain, there could be shuttles to other outdoorsy activities, like apple picking, rafting, a brunch picnic, and many more.

Considering the uproar in the aftermath of the cancellation of Farm Fest, it’s obvious that Amherst students do appreciate nature when it’s accessible for them. Mountain Day would undeniably be a success. And — let’s be real — There are so few campus-wide Amherst traditions that the entire school truly takes part in. Let’s grab some inspiration from our fellow schools and make some of our own.

Unsigned editorials represent the views of the majority of the Editorial Board — (assenting: 22; dissenting: 0; abstaining: 0).

THE AMHERST STUDENT

EXECUTIVE BOARD

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The opinion pages of The Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community. We welcome responses 50-800 words in length to any of our recent articles and aim to publish a diversity of views and voices. If you would like to submit a response for consideration, it must be exclusive to The Student and cannot have been published elsewhere. The Student will print letters if they are submitted to the paper’s email account (astudent@ amherst.edu) or the article response form that can be found on The Student’s website, by 8 p.m. on Saturday, after which they will not be accepted for the week’s issue. Letters must bear the names of all contributors and an email address where the author or authors may be reached. Letters may be edited for clarity and Student style. The editors reserve the right to withhold any letter because of considerations of space or content.

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The Case for Five Class Slots

Tapti Sen ’25 Managing Opinion Editor

Another semester, another add/drop period gone by, with course registrations just around the corner. As we gear up for another round of stressing over class selections, I’d like to con sider the question that constantly strikes my mind as I stare long ingly at my registration screen: Why do Amherst students only have four course slots a semester?

While taking five classes is possible here, Amherst makes it unnecessarily difficult for stu dents to do so through its per mission system. Currently, in order to take five courses, you have to justify your reasoning and receive extra advisor and class dean approval — approval that is sometimes excessively dif ficult or impossible to get. From stories I’ve heard from my peers, some advisors heavily discour age or outright don’t allow their students to take more than four classes, citing a student’s per ceived inability to handle them. This unnecessary and sometimes impassable hurdle makes it diffi cult for students to even consider taking five courses.

The reason why Amherst in stitutes this permission system is obvious: We don’t want already stressed students to feel that they need to take more classes to demonstrate their ambition or in telligence to their peers. The cur rent system simply doesn’t make five classes a feasible schedule for many students, and if we want to make five class slots a reality, we will have to change that system.

First, let me address the rea sons why having five class slots can be better. For one, taking five classes allows students to better take advantage of the school it self. Amherst has an incredible course catalog, filled to the brim with learning opportunities in any (well, almost any) subject you can imagine, and an open curriculum to facilitate taking advantage of that variety. It’s no surprise that students would want to take as many classes as it

is possible for them to handle giv en such a curriculum. But in our current system, people who are double majoring or planning on studying abroad often have little time to explore courses outside of their majors. Allowing people to take five classes would facilitate the mission that Amherst is try ing to achieve with its open cur riculum.

Also, taking five classes simply looks more competitive to out side institutions. Prospective em ployers comparing the transcript of an Amherst student with four classes and a student from anoth er college with five classes may be incentivized to look more kindly upon the latter simply because they’ve taken eight more classes throughout their college career (and thus have eight more classes’ worth of knowledge and skills).

Under the current four class slot system, the majority of our “learning” is centered not in class time, which is typically only three hours a week per class, but in what Amherst calls “academic en

gagement,” consisting of labs, dis cussion sections, studios, or good old homework, for nine hours a week (a figure that may or may not represent reality). For some one taking five courses, that’s an estimated 60 hours of work week ly, taking up more than one-third of your week. But if we lower the amount of additional academic engagement hours to, say, six to seven hours a week, then some one taking five courses would have about 45-50 hours of work a week — 15 hours in class and 30-35 hours of outside work — a similar number to the 48 hours of work someone enrolled in four courses would currently have.

To be clear, I am not advocat ing for a drastic decrease in the 48 hours of work we get overall — that’s an article for a different day perhaps — but rather for a de crease in the workload per class in order to make space for one more slot. One consequence of this is that we would spend more time in class overall, but I don’t see that as a bad trade-off at all:

I think face-to-face interaction with a professor is actually much more beneficial than homework to the learning process. When I reflect back on the new things I’ve learned in college and carry forward with me, the majority of that learning stemmed from class, not from the readings and forum posts I did in preparation for said class.

And I’m not denying that homework does have an import ant role in building upon and shaping our in-class learning — I just think our educational system should maximize rath er than minimize the number of in-class hours we have, and distribute homework according ly. A concern some people have with adding more class slots and reducing the amount of home work assigned per class is that teachers won’t be able to dive as deeply into certain topics as they do currently. But less homework doesn’t mean less learning, it just means that professors have to rethink the way they currently

structure classes so that students can get the most out of class time (a task, I’m sure, they’re already optimized to do).

We don’t have to look far to find other schools implement ing this system; there are already numerous examples among our peer institutions, including Yale, Columbia, and Bowdoin. All of these institutions have five class slots as the “average” number of classes a student takes per se mester. Students are managing to maintain a work-life balance with five classes instead of four, surely because their academic workload is set up by their college in a way to facilitate that.

In registering for my Spring 2023 courses, I’m sure I’ll have to undergo the very same debate with my advisor about wanting to take five classes that I’ve un dergone every semester (if you’re reading this, I know you do it out of care for me; don’t worry Professor). But hopefully, future students won’t have to go through that song-and-dance.

Converse Hall, which houses the Registrar’s Office and the broken dreams of students hoping to take five classes.

Photo courtesy of Amherst College

Mass. Insider: Will Kim Driscoll Remember Western Mass?

Shane Dillon ’26 Columnist

The hard truth for Western Massachusetts public officials is that if you dream of running for state office, you’d better find a new dream. It has been histor ically almost impossible for any one from the western side of the state to succeed in a statewide race. There have been no gov ernors or lieutenant governors from Western Massachusetts since Jane Swift became acting governor in 2001. Since a major ity of the state’s population lives within about 30 miles of Boston, any candidate living solidly in Eastern Massachusetts has an of ten insurmountable “hometown” advantage at the state level.

Maura Healey became the nominee for governor because she is known throughout the state and has been for years. Kim Driscoll, who won the lieutenant governor nomination, was the only statewide candidate this cy cle to lose almost every city/town in the western part of the state. The current mayor of Salem, Driscoll won a three-way race for the lieutenant governor nomina tion, prevailing over Longmead ow State Sen. Eric Lesser and Acton State Rep. Tami Gouveia. Lesser was the only western Mas sachusetts candidate in the race and Gouveia is from Acton, clos er to Boston than Longmeadow but not as well known in that re gion as Driscoll.

As soon as Driscoll entered the race, pollsters deemed her the winner. That was the case up until the state party convention where delegates from local city/ town Democratic party branch es gather as one to choose who the party wants to endorse. At the convention, Driscoll won 41 percent of the vote compared to Lesser’s 23 percent and Gouveia’s 21 percent. All three candidates made it over the 15 percent del egate vote requirement to make it onto the ballot. Since her an nouncement at the beginning of the year, the state Democratic par ty began coalescing around her.

Like Maura Healey, Driscoll ran on a platform advocating for better housing, healthcare, and childcare. As in most states, the lieutenant governor has a very obscure job description. In some states, they just preside over the state Senate chamber, while in others they assume complete control of the governorship if the governor so much as steps out of the state’s borders. In Massachusetts, the lieutenant governor chairs the governor’s council — a body of eight mem bers elected from districts across the Commonwealth who vote on the governor’s judicial nominees and give advice. Aside from that, the rest of one’s tenure is more or less spent traveling the state as a kind of publicist for guberna torial initiatives. All this means that it’s a generally boring posi tion — so why was the field so crowded this year?

Driscoll may want to run for governor or Congress in the fu ture, and proving that she can win statewide is valuable fuel for a campaign. She has been the may

or of Salem — a trendy place to be during the Halloween season. She patiently waited for 16 years to shoot her shot and ultimately made it. Undoubtedly, she will triumph over Leah Cole Allen — the Geoff Diehl-endorsed Republican nominee who shares Diehl’s weaknesses as a far-right candidate. For Western Massa chusetts, though, the question is, will she remember us?

It is no secret that Driscoll was trounced in the western part of the state by Lesser, a na tive of Western Massachusetts. Voters here undoubtedly wanted him to be the lieutenant gover nor. Unfortunately for him and them, that will not be the case. Losing almost all of four coun ties does not look good. So, un less Driscoll works to coalesce this region around her, she will alienate this part of the state. I have met Driscoll and talked with her and she doesn’t strike me as the type of person to leave anyone behind. Although resi dents of Western Massachusetts certainly had a preference for

Lesser, Driscoll’s support of the construction of a West-East rail line shows that she values their votes. Indeed, she and Lesser stood side by side in Springfield in support of the project, and Lesser has given a full endorse ment of the Healey-Driscoll tick et.

I believe that Driscoll’s loss here has only driven her to want to build more relationships in Western Massachusetts. In the months leading up to the pri mary she gained some momen tum in the region, including the endorsement of the Springfield City Council President as well as some of his colleagues on the council and school committee. The support that she gained in the region, however minor, is proof that she cares about West ern Massachusetts residents, and is a foot in the door, so to speak, to gaining allies outside of her Eastern base.

Moreover, Driscoll will have to live up to making relation ships here if she plans on run ning statewide again for a higher

office. In 2018, Sen. Warren only defeated her opponent because the western part of the state showed up and out for her. She dominated in the Boston area and its suburbs, but if Western Massachusetts voted for the Re publican nominee for Senate with the same enthusiasm with which they voted for Gov. Baker in his race the same year, Warren may have lost. So, there are occa sions where Western Massachu setts matters, and our state lead ers are beginning to realize that.

I hope Western Massachusetts won’t continue to be forgotten and I feel that it won’t be. Per haps Sen. Lesser will receive a position in the new adminis tration if the Healey/Driscoll ticket wins the general election. Our governors rarely pick cabi net secretaries from this region, leaving our mayors and city councils to fend for themselves.

It is not the case that everyone in the race gets a position, but the state needs someone from West ern Mass in Boston to continue helping bridge the divide.

Mass. Insider columnist Shane Dillon ’26 with Kim Driscoll at the June 2022 Massachusetts Democratic State Convention.

Photo courtesy of Shane Dillon ’26

UMass Dining: A Comprehensive Review

A Wundt Curve describes the relationship between the novelty of an experience and the pleasure one derives from it, a relationship which Andrew Rosin

Andrew Rosin ’25 Assistant Podcast Editor

Amherst College is not known for its food. UMass Amherst, on the other hand, recently earned the distinction of having the country’s Best Campus Food, according to the Princeton Re view. UMass is no stranger to this award; 2022 marks the sixth consecutive year that they have topped the rankings. So, with the country’s best dining hall food just a five-minute drive from Amherst’s campus, what student wouldn’t be curious as to what

argues holds for dining at UMass Amherst. Nevertheless, it is certain that those brownies never get old.

makes UMass the king of college dining? And, more importantly, is the food as good as everyone says it is? Last Friday, two of my fellow gastronomes and I decid ed to try it for ourselves.

To gain access to the Berk shire Dining Commons — one of UMass’s four dining halls — one either has to pay $17 per person or find a UMass student who is willing to part with one of their “Guest Swipes.” After ruling out the first option, my friends Joe Sweeney ’25, Ziji Zhou ’25, and I loitered outside the entrance before intercepting

three freshmen who generously agreed to swipe us in. (Useful tip: Freshmen are more likely to have remaining “Guest Swipes” than upperclassmen.) And with that, the cornucopia that is the Berkshire Dining Commons was at our fingertips.

We completed two full laps around the expansive dining hall before deciding what to order, noting the elegantly flowing buf fet tables and classy raised-table seating arrangements. Reflecting on his first impression of the din ing hall, Joe recalled, “It smelled great. Ambiance was great. It

was very well-constructed — I would say there was very much a high-class elegance.” In agree ment, Ziji added that “it did not feel like a school cafeteria.”

Eventually, though, our appe tites overwhelmed our curiosity. Berkshire Dining Commons has a seemingly endless (and some times overwhelming) selection of available foods — on Friday night, we could choose from the rotating Chef’s Table, which was serving pork chops and white fish; a sushi bar; a made-to-order stir fry station; wonton bowls; an international cuisine station of

fering chicken tikka masala and naan; and, of course, the classics: salad bar, pizza, mac and cheese, and herb-roasted chicken. (As Ziji noted, the fact that the piz za and mac and cheese — sta ples at Valentine Dining Hall — remained largely untouched in a remote corner of Berkshire told us everything we needed to know about the difference be tween UMass and Amherst din ing.) Lastly, one cannot forget about the dessert options: bread pudding, pear cobbler, cranberry

Aagaard

Unimaginable Selection, Quality Foods

bars, and walnut brownies.

Amherst students familiar with UMass dining often de scribe the stir fry as epitomizing the larger school’s superiority, and it did not disappoint. Fol lowing Ziji’s lead, I ordered a stir fry — choosing my preferred veggies and protein — and watched as one of the two stir fry chefs prepared it in front of me. Together with warm white rice, available in adjacent rice cookers, I ate what was easily the best meal that I have had in the past five weeks. In addition to the fact that the stir fry was hot off the pan, the flavorful sauc es, fresh vegetables, and tender chicken combined to form what I would declare a college culi nary masterpiece.

Ziji, however, was not as im

pressed with his stir fry. While his specific complaint concerned the lack of variety in stir fry sauc es — the only options being soy sauce and hot sauce — he point ed out that he was thinking of the “long-term” experience of eating at UMass: “Eating it once is great. Twice — great. Three times — good. Four times — not as good anymore. Five times — OK. It’s the same flavor with different in gredients in it, which is going to taste the same.”

Joe, who sampled the pork wonton — comprised of broth, lo mein, and vegetables — in addi tion to the stir fry and pork chops said that his only complaint was that the pork tasted a “bit dry” and that the bacon relish “did not sat urate the pork.” Other than that, eating at UMass “was basically the greatest moment of my life in the past trimester,” Joe reported.

The UMass students that I talked to on Friday night echoed Ziji’s opinion of the UMass din ing experience. Ruby, a soph omore at UMass Amherst, told me, “I feel like [Berkshire Din ing Commons] definitely loses its appeal over time. Last year

I feel like it didn’t, but even this year, it’s a really nice rota tion and all of the food is really good, but it still is a rotation. So I feel like I get used to it.”

Ziji and Ruby touched on a universal human experience: When one eats a certain food enough times — even something as delicious as a UMass stir fry — it eventually loses its appeal. This phenomenon is described by the Wundt Curve, named after German philosopher Wil helm Maximilian Wundt, which maps pleasure as a function of novelty. As the Wundt Curve

predicts, experiences that lack novelty will lead to boredom and displeasure.

My takeaway, then, is as fol lows: How good a college dining hall is on an absolute scale does not matter as much as how well a dining hall curates an interest ing and varied selection of meals. Case-in-point: Even the famed UMass dining hall gets old after a time. To create a pleasurable dining experience, the ability to choose from a wide variety of options becomes critical: “I think you have to make sure you’re switching up where you’re going and what you’re getting. Because if you get into a routine, it does kind of feel stale,” UMass sopho more Shane Williams explained.

As we left UMass, feeling so full from our multi-course meal that we did not even sample the dessert options, I asked Ziji and

Joe for their final ratings. Ziji, trying to provide an objective rating, hypothesized that arriving to UMass on an empty stomach might have clouded his judgment of the food — he arrived in a “hot state,” as behavioral scientists would describe it. Ziji ultimately rated his meal a respectable 7 out of 10, while Joe rated his meal an impressive 9 out of 10.

Joe, in responding to Ziji’s rating, questioned, “What is the utility of the judgment?” That is, what purpose does it serve to find reasons for critiquing the meal? Why not focus on enjoying the experience? If you want the most accurate rating of the food, free of any bias, then Ziji’s response is likely more reliable. But, if you want the rating that captures the joy of eating at Berkshire Dining Commons, then Joe’s 9 out of 10 is surely the better rating.

Photos courtesy of Andrew Rosin

Amusements

Trickle Down Dendronomics

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Arts&Living

Broken Hearts Abound in Ghostlight Triple Feature

Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Managing Arts & Living Editor

The Ghostlight Triple Feature hit the stage from Sept. 30 through Oct. 2, the first production from Ghostlight, the college’s new the ater group. The event consisted of three plays, each written by an Amherst student, with each featur ing their own cast.

At the outset, I was uncertain — three plays is a lot! But after attend ing their final dress rehearsal, I was drawn into the captivating worlds created by Luke Herzog ’24, Bianca Sass ’23, and Petra Brusiloff ’24.

Herzog’s “Pulling the Switch” opened the show with a story about two prisoners working in a prison kitchen, cooking the final meals for people on death row. Shawn (Sterling Kee ’23) is a doc tor turned prison cook, struggling with the guilt of (maybe) killing a young patient that resembled the “Morton Salt Girl,” wearing a yel low rain jacket with an umbrella.

On the other hand, Cory (Matt Vitelli ’24) is a former “hustler” who is gleefully unafraid to put his moral compass to the side. The characters are foils for each other, balancing Kee’s earnest but morose acting with Vitelli’s sharp wit and comedic tendencies. Their dynam ic created moments of simultane ous tension and humor, including an explosively entertaining stage fight scene that culminated in tears and Morton salt containers every where.

Likewise, Herzog’s clever script juxtaposes layer upon layer of hu morous detail within the morbid premise. I was drawn to the nu merous gags, all grounded in the unusual setting of the play: the outlandish final meals Shawn has cooked in the past, a well-timed toaster, and a death row kitchen suggestion box. I chuckled and chuckled again as Shawn and Cory cooked for an inmate with an unorthodox final meal request: a PB&J. When they realize that their diner has a peanut allergy,

they scramble to replace it with an AB&J: almond-butter-and-jelly sandwich!

Despite the lighthearted mo ments, the play leans into discus sions about justice and what to do when it fails. But instead of offer ing moral certainty, the play revels in asking these questions again and again. It starts with the mys terious death row inmate: What did he do to receive the death pen alty? Why did he choose a PB&J as his final meal? The play slowly turned the focus of these questions from the mystery man to the two main characters. What did Shawn and Cory do to end up in prison?

What would they request for their final meals? And as the play came to a close, I found myself asking those questions about myself: Why might I end up on death row, and what would I choose as my last supper?

After having adjusted to the co medic peculiarities of prison life in “Pulling the Switch,” I was both comforted and unsettled entering the awkward high school setting of Sass’s “Blackout.” The play follows two high school students grappling with an unspoken romance. Alex (Eva Tsitohay ’24) is the lighting technician for a school play, eagerly waiting for her chronically absent boyfriend to arrive. George (PJ Smith ’24) interrupts her rumina tion by asking if he can join her in the isolated lighting booth so that he can write an article about the show for the student newspaper.

Sass plays with the meta quality of the premise, as Alex and George argue about the turbulent plot of the school play, all while confront ing their own loves. The characters sat facing the audience, referring to the unfolding events of the school play’s romance with only the audi ence in front of them. There is no way to watch theater without being watched, too.

It’s worth noting that I was per sonally drawn to the meta quality of the premise: There I was, me, Alex, writing a review of a play

Amherst’s newest theater group, Ghostlight, premiered their “Triple Feature” this week. Managing Arts and Living Editor Alex Brandfonbrener ‘23 discusses the trio of student productions, which each featured original scripts and casts.

about the character Alex watching someone write a review of a play! It struck very close to home.

Though the stage was bare — one table, two chairs, all bathed in a soft orange light — Tsitohay and Smith’s compelling, well-rehearsed, and flexible acting was more than enough to immerse me in their sto ry. Tsitohay used expressive faces to color Alex’s defensiveness with glimpses of longing and inevitable pain. It was as if only a thin veneer were covering her honest feelings. Likewise, Smith showed George painting over insecurity with non chalance, balancing frustrated and lighthearted emotions. His deliv ery was well-articulated and com pletely believable.

Though Smith was comfortable on stage, his character was not. In an awkward, resentful, and inti mate depiction of romance, Alex and George stand up to each other, not accepting the apparent truths of simple claims. They play off of each other’s rhythms, such that we were not always in on their jokes. And when the finale of the show left their situation unresolved, I felt for their loss. As such, “Blackout” is a painful and relatable reconcil iation: Who hasn’t had their heart

broken?

Brusiloff’s “Processing…” be gan with four chairs on stage. Four girls come in, and they decide to play Monopoly — the online ver sion, not the board game. Each sits in a chair, holding a controller. This single image then unfolds, un winds, and breaks apart. The four girls each take a name from the Monopoly tokens — Top Hat, Bat tleship, Dog, and Thimble — and work through the tragic death of their favorite (or maybe not?) se nior year teacher.

Just like Herzog’s “Pulling the Switch,” the play juxtaposes humor with loss. The four cannot decide what to feel about “the elephant in the room.” Battleship (played by Brusiloff herself) was closest to him, and perhaps more in denial than the other three. At times she is checked out, and in other mo ments, she bristles with anger at the other girls; she only wants to play Monopoly. Top Hat (Sarah Quiros ’24) has been Battleship’s best friend since kindergarten. She serves as a formal and honest me diator for the four. But when her wounds are exposed, she lets her stubborn side bubble to the sur face. Thimble (Rachel Zhu ’24) is

distant from their concerns with her humor and strong will. But she resents the “elephant,” and is quick to close herself off. Dog (Snigdha Ranjan ’25) holds them together, despite her sensitive and naive na ture. She is the only one who wants to talk about their dead teacher, and kicks off the story.

The girls are not a four-way foil. Instead, they share traits, interact ing messily, barely keeping civil at times, and threatening to quit the game without provocation. The four actors presented such differ ent personalities that the play had a seamless, lived-in quality. “Pro cessing…” boasts sections of unin terrupted dialogue, in which lines are rapid-fired in quick succession.

A marathon of sorts, the Ghost light Triple Feature was three hours of terrific student theater, written, produced, and acted by a host of talented students. While the event was indeed a celebration of their passion for art and perfor mance, I was struck by the sense of loss in the plays. All three stories were haunted by broken hearts; they are timely reminders to take care of ourselves and our loved ones, even in unexpected and un usual circumstances.

Photo courtesy of Alex Brandfonbrener ‘23

ASO Welcomes Class of 2026 and President Elliott

Madeline Lawson ’25 Managing Arts & Living Editor

The Amherst Symphony Or chestra (ASO) performed their first concert of the year on Sat urday, Oct. 1, honoring both the Class of 2026 and the college’s new president, Michael Elliott. It was the first orchestra perfor mance open to the general public since 2020, and the concert hall was packed with excited students and community members. The public had waited two years to see another ASO performance, and the orchestra certainly de livered, impressing the audience with its skill and musicality.

Before the performance start ed, the orchestra welcomed their newest members from the Class of 2026 onstage with a round of applause. The group then ex tended a special welcome to El liott, presenting him with a ba

ton with which to conduct the affairs of the college. Following this, Conductor Mark Swanson entered, and the concert began.

The performance featured a number of mid-century Black composers and showcased the full range of the orchestra. The concert began with Wil liam Grant Still’s Symphony #3 (“Sunday”), showcasing the high ranges of the wind and string sections. The performance, a symphony in four movements, oscillated between light, bouncy moments and powerful fanfare, but evoked images of Sunday, guiding the listener through a restful day featuring sunny skies and warm walks.

The ensemble then transi tioned to a serene, reflective piece with Florence Price’s string composition, “Andante Modera to.” The orchestra shifted effort lessly to a mysterious section, full

of pizzicato plucking and playful tempo changes as the mood re turned to serenity.

The violas were emphasized in the piece, and the entire concert, in fact, highlighted instruments that are so often overlooked in orchestral compositions. Still’s Symphony #3 featured the oboe section, and the final piece, an orchestral arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Black Brown Beige” in three movements, featured the saxophone, clarinet, and trumpet sections, instruments typically found in big band jazz.

Yet, the strings fit in seamless ly, with a rare swing violin part and robust accompaniment to the winds. For me, a highlight of the final piece was the funky trombone wailing, which excited the audience and established the piece as a true jazz composition. The listener couldn’t help but be reminded of the march at the end

of Symphony #3, “Day’s End & A New Beginning,” which created a cohesive narrative throughout the concert. The pieces comple mented each other and created a natural conclusion to the perfor mance.

The orchestra has three more performances this semester; the next is a tribute to John Williams on Oct. 29, featuring a piece named “Getting Out the Vote.”

Swanson noted that, because of the midterm elections this year, he wanted to perform a reper toire of political music. “We’re trying to integrate [a theme of democracy] this semester as well as a broader classical theme, which is third symphonies,” he said.

Swanson also acknowledged the cohesiveness of the orches tral community, especially since Covid policies have been lift ed. “[They] didn’t miss a beat

in terms of the bonding and the community, which is equally im portant to the music making that we do,” he said.

Indeed, it’s clear that many of the orchestra’s new first-year members have already fallen in love with the ASO. Charlie Od ulio ’26, a trumpet player, em phasized the caliber of music at Amherst and the joys of partic ipating in an all-student ensem ble. “It’s nice to be in the orches tra and then to go to Val and see people I know who are in the orchestra,” he said. Winton Gar relts ’26, a violinist, added, “The orchestra is a tight-knit commu nity where it’s about the music, you know?”

Swanson was visibly proud of the orchestra members, ending our interview by saying, “It’s a tremendous honor and pleasure to work with these brilliant stu dents.”

On

Amherst Symphony Orchestra held its first performance of the semester. Managing Arts and Living Editor Madeline Lawson ‘25 recaps the concert, which welcomed the Class of 2026 and President Michael Elliott to Amherst.

Photo courtesy of Madeline Lawson

WAMH THEX STUDENT

Brought to you by the WAMH blog, where it can also be found, and The Student’s Arts & Living Section. Written by WAMH e-board member Sylvie Wolff ’25.

In June, I road-tripped with my two best friends from our home town of Baltimore to our friend’s new house in Pittsburgh. The fourhour drive is gorgeous; it’s the kind of expansive trip where you lis ten to audiobooks or full albums rather than playlists. The long, empty roads surrounded by moun tains and periodic tiny roadside amusement parks make one feel very Americana à la Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” diners with cracked leather seats, and West Virginian hikes. We drove along feeling very special and very much a part of mountainous Amer ican lore that only musician Neko Case, a single lane road, and our rosy imaginations could give us.

During that drive, I introduced my friends to “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.” Released in 2006, “Fox Confessor” is Neko Case’s third album recorded under her own name and fifth total, counting her first two albums recorded with the band Neko Case & Her Boyfriends. It contains “Star Witness,” the first song of hers I ever heard (also while driving, that time from Amherst to North Adams to see a concert at Mass MoCA in March). I never stopped listening after that; “Fox Confessor” was the soundtrack of the rest of my spring semester, the music to which I biked and walked through gloomy March mornings,

rainy April afternoons, and glori ously green May evenings.

Case left home at age 15, and by 18, she was performing as a drum mer for two different bands. Her career spans over two decades and a range of genres including country, folk, art rock, indie rock, and pop.

To me, everything about Case is a mix of defiance and acceptance, power and softness, her discogra phy a dizzying, beautiful mix that fills you up and rustles your hair and makes you feel like part of something really grand.

I spent lots of time with Neko Case’s music over the summer, but didn’t listen to my now very favorite album of hers, “Furnace Room Lul laby,” until my friend Eva sent the seventh track, “Thrice All Amer ican,” to me in late August, saying “this is like bmore!” The song is about Tacoma, Washington, where Case spent her teenage years and got her start in a venue called the World Musical Theater. When Case was living there, Tacoma was full of poverty, ruined infrastructure, and gang violence. The title of “Thrice All American” comes from the fact that Tacoma has been given the title of “All-American City” three times.

In the song, Case swells with pride for the “dusty old jewel”: “People, they laugh when they hear you’re from my town / They say it’s a sour and used up ol’ place,” she

sings. “I’ve defended its honor, I shrugged off the put-downs.” A Ta coman reviewer on songmeanings. com wrote, “Our town’s a shithole, everyone knows it, but goddamn, we love it anyway.” My friends and I called this summer our “summer of Baltimore,” and the way that Case sings about Tacoma is exactly how we feel about our city. All working jobs in Baltimore and free to go where we pleased, we finally had the chance to really get to know our hometown. Baltimore was nick named “Charm City” by a panel of advertisers seeking to improve the city’s reputation. It has an enchant ing weirdness enhanced by the fact that it’s rough around the edges, charming and strange and kind of ugly to those who don’t know it — or those who do but don’t look deeper than its surface. Baltimore is bursting with character, music, art, food, and good people.

Stretching beyond the barri ers of folk, country, or Americana,

Case’s voice is yearning, strong, nostalgic, and completely gorgeous (although she describes it as “not a very pretty voice but a very loud voice”). She packs so much fragile power in small punches — most of the songs on "Furnace Room Lullaby" are under three minutes. “Twist the Knife,” the sixth track on the album and my absolute favorite, is the kind of song that makes you stop everything, squeeze your eyes shut, and just listen with your en tire body. The song is about giving a wounded self away to someone who, very gently, twists the knife and deepens the wound, but still begging them to take more. The chorus is completely heart-wrench ing; Case sings “You’ll be my guest / And I’ll let you stay / Leave me the check / I’ll pay with the rest of my life / Twist the knife.” Anoth er superb song about the perils of love, “Bought and Sold,” features another favorite lyric of mine: “No body said that love was gonna be

kind / But they did say that it was as pleasurable as it was divine.” A sense of nostalgia and loss haunts the album’s twelfth and final track, “Furnace Room Lullaby.”

While Case transcends genre, I love “Furnace Room Lullaby” for all the reasons I love American folk music. A living art form, it con nects past and present and envel ops you into the story. Folk music is distinctly communal, tied to the earth on which it is played just as much as to those who play it and those who listen. “Furnace Room Lullaby” is murky and haunting, its desolate sound also incredibly whole. It’s large enough to fill the space as large as the roads hugged by mountains between Baltimore and Pittsburgh and small enough to make me squeeze my eyes shut and fold into the feeling of my headphones in my ears. Above all, the album’s deep sense of nostalgia is what keeps me looping back to the beginning.

Photos courtesy of Flickr

Neko Case’s music transcends genre and generation. WAMH e-board member Sylvie Wolff ‘25 reflects on two of the artist's albums, tracking their presence in her life.

“Survivor” Season 43: Episode 2, Reviewed

Vaughn Armour ’25 Staff Writer

On Wednesday, Sept. 28, the second episode of “Survivor 43” was released. A longer episode, it was 90 minutes instead of the typical 60. This allowed for a nice balance — more strategy than in the premiere, while still fleshing out the backstories of the players.

We learned the most about Cody, Geo, and Elie this week, seeing a different side of Cody than we had previously seen. He initially presented himself as a carefree guy, but in this epi sode, we learn that one of Cody’s best friends passed away in high school from skin cancer. This has inspired him to take more risks in

life while he still can.

In a conversation with Ryan, Geo revealed that he was kicked out of his parents’ house at 18 af ter coming out as gay, which led to Geo being both temporarily homeless and suicidal. This story was powerful, and it was moving that he first revealed it to Ryan. Their friendship is quickly be coming one of my favorite parts of this season, and their strategic partnership also seems potent.

Finally, Elie revealed after the immunity challenge that she is dyslexic and has ADHD. Elie was diagnosed late, so she grew up be ing called lazy and unintelligent by classmates and teachers. Even now, with a doctoral degree as a clinical psychologist, she struggles with the

feeling that she isn’t good enough.

At the immunity challenge, Elie dominated the puzzle en route to a Baka victory. This victory brought her to tears. I’m a certi fied Elie fan after this episode and am definitely rooting for her to continue tackling her insecurities. The Coco tribe also secured im munity, forcing Vesi to go to Trib al Council. The ensuing chaos was emblematic of “Survivor” at its peak, with strategic decisions and social manipulation that left fans (like me) grinning from ear to ear.

Although Baka was safe, an important strategic conversation took place at their beach. Elie and Jeanine are a tight pair, and they debated bringing in either Sami or Owen as their third. They decid

ed on Sami, because they thought he’d be easier to control. The women believed that Sami wasn't strategizing, and would go along with whatever plan they tell him. However, Sami is more strategic than they think. He knows how close Elie and Jeanine are, and he knows how they see him. Because of this, he pitched a guys’ alliance to Gabler and Owen, which seems to be the dominant grouping on Baka right now. Sami continues to impress me, and the way he down played his intelligence last week has already paid dividends.

The Vesi chaos started at the immunity challenge. The tribe had to move a massive wooden snake through water and across a beach for most of the challenge. Nneka was a liability, to put it kindly. She was physically over matched, unable to help for the majority of it. The challenge was not an easy feat, but she struggled significantly more than anyone else, and was the main reason they lost. Justine and Noelle want ed her gone because of this, so she was in trouble. Thankfully for her, she had two things going for her. Her trustworthy allies were the first — Jesse and Cody were in her corner, giving her at least three votes to count on in a six-person tribe. The second was Justine’s di sastrous gameplay.

Earlier in the day, Justine claimed to be a good liar to Jes se, for no good reason. It was a puzzling decision — there really wasn’t anything to gain, and it just makes her seem untrustworthy. Later, she asked Jesse and Dwight how she could know that they weren’t lying to her. This is basi cally telling them that she doesn’t trust them, which is a cardinal sin in “Survivor.” After all, why would you trust someone that doesn’t trust you? Jesse began pitch ing Justine as a vote-out and got Nneka and Cody on board easi ly. However, Dwight felt uneasy about that plan. He wanted to vote with the girls to take Nneka out. This was because Dwight didn’t trust Cody, despite Cody actually feeling pretty good about Dwight.

The whole vote descended

into madness when Cody found a “Beware Advantage.” As seen in the previous two iterations of “Survivor,” this advantage reads “Beware” on the outside, and gives players the option to either take it or leave it there. Cody had seen these in the last two seasons, and he knew that taking a Beware Ad vantage could easily lead to you losing your vote at the next tribal. However, Cody decided to take a risk and snagged the advantage. It was an idol, with a twist. Produc tion put beads on every castaway’s bag at the start of the season, and Cody had to get the beads from every person in his tribe without stealing them. If he succeeded, he’d activate the idol, but until he did, he’d be unable to vote.

It was a fantastic twist. It forced Cody to use social connections to better his position in the game. He actually did a fantastic job and played it in a way that only he could. First, he told Nneka and Jesse about the advantage so that they could help him. Then, once the whole tribe was togeth er, he had Jesse offer up his beads to decorate a palm-frond hat that Cody had made. Nneka followed suit and soon after, Justine gave up hers. It took a little time and some light pressure from Jesse and Nne ka, but Dwight and Noelle even tually gave up their beads, giving Cody an idol, and more impor tantly, a vote. He used his social bonds to complete this task, along with his reputation as a quirky guy. Anyone else randomly hav ing a palm frond hat that need ed beads likely would have been met with suspicion. With Cody, it tracked.

Justine ended up being vot ed out. Because of his hesitation, Dwight was left out of the loop, and he voted for Nneka to go. This puts him squarely at the bottom of the Baka tribe alongside Noelle.

This was a fantastic episode of “Survivor.” It had meaningful sto ries, and both questionable and imaginative decisions. It was ev erything a “Survivor” fan would want on a Wednesday night. Tune in next week at 8 p.m. to see if this season continues its hot start!

Season 43 of “Survivor” is in full swing! Vaughn Armour ’25 recaps the second epi sode, which revealed heartfelt backstories and surprising twists.

Graphic courtesy of Nina Aagaard

The Indicator THE STUDENT ×

This piece was initally published in The Indicator’s 2022 issue “Break” and is presented here in colloboration with The Indicator.

Sam Spratford ’24 The Indicator Staff Writer

““the breakfast date”

before i earned my driver’s license before i learned to swerve down narrow city streets— i fell i fell in love with the existentialists’ sooty prose peering into an opium abyss and seeing my reflection in obsidian and when i returned home, it smelled like cinnamon and soap before i earned my too-small hips before i learned to sever kisses from promises— i fell i fell in love with my friend’s soft touch swaddling the valley of my waist and pressing lips in primordial warmth and when she and i slept, nightlights looked like newborn stars

dancing through L’Étranger to the rhythm of prickly smirks i wash down heartburn with chamomile tea with college-issued-carpeting under my feet i don’t know much except camus was a dick and at some point i took a one-way ticket to someplace my dad would have called “the real world” quietly weeping into his steak dinner

up across the table

there is the love of my life framed by noontime and neon waffles and lattes

there is nothing left to yearn for when i go back to chicago where lakeshore drive is bleary and damp i will hide between skyscrapers like velveteen shadows waiting for my friend’s parents to leave the room but for now our chests rise and fall as we match the pulse of railroads and teslas marking time the oscillation between half-life and almost-death

what was it like to hold my breath for so long that i felt dizzy for that boundless, choking moment when i believed i would live forever?

The Indicator ×

THE STUDENT

“Till Some Blind Hand Shall Brush My Wing”

This piece was initally published in The Indicator’s 2022 issue “Break” and is presented here in colloboration with The Indicator.

Joe Sweeney ’25 The Indicator Staff Writer

I wasn’t thirsty anymore, so when I heard him calling from over the belts it was OK. Part of it, too, was his voice, which sounded like it had finally decided being exhausted wasn’t worthwhile. TSA workers (agents?) don’t seem to have time for anything. But really that’s only true about the ones behind the belts — at the gates they’re always wav ing me through. Go on ahead. For some people it’s easier to imagine behind their mask than it is to see, their smile.

As I came closer my bottle began to rotate gently in his hand (“See the fluid?” Yes, yes I do).

“Where can I dump it out?”

Points, “There’s a trash can.”

Rarely am I able to find things, especially if they’re in front of me, to the right or left of me, or behind me. Before I had even turned to look I saw myself coming back, eyes wid er: Where? And he keeps telling me, and still nothing has happened.

But I turned and there it was. The liquid ran down the draping plastic folds. Or I’m pretty sure it did; I had turned away. Everything about it felt wrong. The bag was a bright green. It used the dull can rim for its shade.

I wasn’t that tired. I’d slept on the bus ride over, and it was very relax ing actually. The seats were inclined

so you could lay your head back without craning, and I fell asleep while the world was very gray be side me. And that’s not the impres sion I get when I’m just walking — the world beside me. The best I can come up with then is a turgid ever green or a wind-shaken bough. And the gray too, pressed jolting against the window. I wasn’t that tired.

“You see the strings hanging from your pants?”

My hands were to my head, my feet filled the yellow footprints. Not withstanding their color those foot prints were very fashionable, at least it seemed to me. They had a tight curvature and detached heels — very businesslike. I could see myself going anywhere in shoes like those. Maybe that was the point.

“Put them in the sides of your pants before we run the scanner.”

I couldn’t get them in, they kept falling out. I almost asked if they would just give me a break. I figured it out, though.

The detectors don’t really whir, but they do move, and quickly.

From one side to another. The one in front of me always seems to go left-right. I don’t know if they can scan both ways, or if they have to return to their original position.

In any case, they don’t have to wait long to find out.

Now I’m just waiting on the belts.

But it’s not their fault. The belts fal

ter only because the beams are not enough; they can’t pick apart the insides alone. Helping them along is yet another man behind. Nothing has ever been there — how does he know what to look for?

Maybe it’s no one’s fault.

And all the while my bag hangs heavy on the belts; in its gray dull bin.

***

There’s an image that comes back to me. Two brothers grow up under a roof cold as the light of stars — it’s not anyone’s fault. There is some thing inside dad and mom that love is too lonely to name. Under the same silence many things come to pass, one too-many too many. Against this brothers come to know the name of the other.

But I do not know them.

When the growing’s all done one brother becomes sick. The other flies in from where he’s been, three thousand miles away. He comes to his bedside. He knows it is a miracle he is anywhere at all. He hates him self for ever being pained by a sol itary voice. He looks into his eyes. He looks away when understanding comes to kill everything. He looks down at his hands. I loved you be fore I even ever knew what love was like. He holds them.

Flying, it is no longer right to feel anything. But after it racked his body for so many hours (His teeth had shivered!) it lives inside him after all. He sees the faces of his cold lights through the voice on the phone — his parents, who did not come for his brother. They are not faces that will ever be made right.

What he can he lets drip from fingers, from legs chests and eyes — but because the world has no place for it he must decide which part he will hold beneath his heart. This im age and my eyes upon it.

Their eyes upon me — but bar

reling through transparent air I am too quick for them yet. Still, there cannot be much time before I re turn.

Which part? Which part?

***

Only now that I am made to pick them all up does it seem absurd how many things I have. My phone, my wallet, my keys — where does it end? And it ends right there, except for the crumpled receipt I got from the convenience store. I almost just leave it for the bin. Almost. In the end I can’t.

My bag rolls along the linoleum, faster than the belts could take it. Already the gate is there. I have plenty of time. I bought some pea nut M&Ms at the Hudson news stand and already, they are nearly done for. I think about going back for more. I think about walking up, pocketing the limp yellow bag, walking down and away. I think about the type of person who could care about a thing like that. The per son I see is not any person I have ever known. I do not go back; their image unnerves me.

And yet still there is something wrong. Twenty-five minutes to de parture and the voice fails to come over the speakers. I eye the boarding screen, which says “To Cleveland”, to me alone. This is not where I’m going.

I run, with my shoulders tense and my knees bending and my heart beating quick as the wheels are turning. I pass everything by. The terminal sprawls beneath my feet, and I am not amazed by how quickly I forget such cramped end less gray space.

And when I arrive at my right place they haven’t even boarded the first group. I could return to my original position and no one — no one — would suspect a thing.

I take a seat, far from anyone

else. The windows are wider than anything, floor to ceiling amid their steel lattices. I don’t look out, though. That’s for later.

I am more tired than I supposed I was.

The bag is no longer heavy on the belts. But it is heavy still.

It's moments like these I feel I don’t particularly care for anyone.

How, then, does it happen? The bag falls over — behind it there is a little girl. I snatch the handle. I do. She is untouched.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

And I keep looking at her.

She walks away. All this time hand in hand with her mom. The beams that shock through the wide windows are the shadows of the sun.

I sit there for a while, but not much longer because my flight is very soon. Before takeoff I hear this guy a couple aisles down going on and on about how God made him attend his exorbitantly priced Christian university. I don’t know why this speech has begun. The girl he addresses meets these revelations with kind affirmations, too kind re ally. It is incredible how kind people are.

I don’t know how this will end for me.

Does he ever wonder why God chose him, and not someone else?

I don’t think so. I doubt he knows anybody so well to wonder. And yet if I were in his position, knowing I should — would I myself wonder?

Again, I don’t think so. I guess that’s why God made me live my life, and made this guy live his. Then again, maybe things would’ve turned out better if it were the other way around.

When we roll off the runway I look out my window, but not for long. There isn’t much to see after all.

Celebrating Amherst’s Latinx Community and Voices

Piero Campos ’25 Staff Writer

September marks the annual celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month that recognizes the con tributions of Hispanic Ameri cans to the history of the U.S. The month includes the celebra tion of independence for several Latin American nations, such as Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Chile.

This past month also marked the five-year anniversary of the college’s Latinx and Latin Amer ican Studies (LLAS) department and the 50th anniversary of La Causa, the Latinx affinity group on campus. In honor of this particularly special Hispanic

Heritage Month, I would like to highlight some of the Latinx stu dent voices that contribute to the Amherst community through their connection with different Latinx arts and cultures.

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Jos ue Martin ’24 recalls childhood memories that have shaped his Mexican American identity. “I was born in Jalisco, but I grew up in Los Angeles,” he said. “As a child I was involved in a Mexican folklore dance group called Gru po folklórico mexcaltitán de los ángeles. I learned how to dance Zapateo (tap dance), which is a Mexican dance marked by rhythmic stamping of the feet.”

Dancing became an outlet that allowed Martin to connect

with his Mexican heritage. “Al though I was able to connect with my culture, I had to learn how to navigate being both Mexican and American at the same time,” he said. “I had to be ‘Mexican enough’ and ‘American enough,’ but I always kept the values that the Mexican com munity taught me close to me because it sparked a bigger con nection to my identity.”

Martin described how his connection to his Mexican her itage has been strengthened by taking classes in the LLAS de partment. “I am currently tak ing a LLAS course called ‘Diego and Frida,’” he said. “The course is giving me the opportunity to learn about the history of my na tion, as well as the art that comes out of it. It makes me proud that figures such as Frida Kahlo bring pride to Mexico through her art that represents the diverse Mexi can culture.”

Ellerman Mateo ’25 talked about his connection to his home nation of Guatemala, in addition to his often-overlooked Mayan roots. “I identify as Mayan, both of my parents speak Q’anjob’al,” he said. “Q’anjob’al is an ancient Mayan dialect. Although I don’t speak it, it is an important part of my identity.”

Similar to Martin, Mateo mentioned how the sexuality, women’s, and gender studies (SWAGS) course he is taking, “Indigenous Women in World Politics,” has allowed him to strengthen his connection to his indigenous identity. Mateo passionately spoke about the challenges faced by Mayan art ists. “Most Mayan art is done by indigenous underrepresented women who face a lot of chal lenges getting their work pub lished,” he said. “My SWAGS course challenged me to find art done by Mayan women, but it became difficult due to the little representation. It is important to acknowledge Latinx art, but as well as indigenous art that makes up a huge part of Latin America.”

’25, an international student from Chile, described how her love for Chilean poetry has helped her understand her dual identity. “A poet who I am cur rently following at the moment is Cristalina Parra,” she said.

“She is a young poet and artist who went to study abroad in Dubai and writes about her life within two cultures: Chile and Dubai. This resonates with me deeply because I too navigate within two cultures here at Am herst. Although it was difficult at first, I feel more comfortable with the way I navigate two dis tinct cultures.”

Contreras Catalan also men tioned her connection to the Latinx community at Amherst. “When I first arrived at Am herst, I noticed that the Latinx community was small,” she said. “However, I noticed that it was not much of a struggle to com municate with other Latinx stu dents. Although I may not know them all, I feel welcomed to know that I could have a conver sation in both English and Span ish and feel comfortable.”

Diego Carias ’23 reflected on his immigrant journey from Honduras to the U.S. “When I arrived from Honduras, all I felt was like a kid who needed to make it,” he said. “Growing up in New Orleans was tough, but I al ways knew that I had to make it, and education was the way.”

Carias reminisced about his past in Honduras. “Although I left, I still remember some of the celebrations that remind me of my childhood,” he said. “Similar to New Orleans, Honduras has its own Mardi Gras where peo ple dance and celebrate tradi tional Honduran culture. One of the practices done is dressing up in traditional Mayan dresses that represent Honduras history and connection to the land.”

Adriana Almendares ’25, also an immigrant from Hon duras, arrived in the U.S. when she was 16 years old. Describing her identity, Almendares said, “I feel and I am Honduran. I do not feel American. All my fami

ly and friends live in Honduras. Since most of my life was spent in Honduras, I am very much still connected and close to my culture.”

Almendares is the grand daughter of Sergio Almendares, a known Honduran painter who paints “Paisajes Hondureños” or “Honduran Scenery.” Al mendares described her grand father as, “the inspiration for my love of art and painting.”

“When my grandfather was 15 he moved to the capital of Hon duras to study art,” she said. “He earned his degree and dedicated his work to painting the beauti ful landscapes and sceneries of Honduras. Today I love painting landscapes and sceneries. I just love the creativity that comes with it, that’s why I am studying architecture because I can be as creative as I want.”

Many of the Latinx students at Amherst celebrate their cul tures through the art of their home nations. As a Peruvian immigrant myself, art for me has come through the form of music and street art. One of my fondest memories growing up was seeing street performers act out come dic skits called “Comicos Ambu lantes” or “Street Vendor Com ics.” Many of the skits consist of parodies of the daily lives of the Peruvian population that poke fun at the hardships of poverty, political corruption, and crime of Lima through dark humor. Most, if not all, are performed in parks and plazas, where crowds of people gather.

As the Latinx community continues to grow within both Amherst and the U.S., our cul tures and traditions continue to flourish and expand. Many of us continue to honor the memories of our parents, grandparents, and friends; these memories fos ter our love for our cultural heri tage. The Latinx community still faces many challenges today, but the contributions of our commu nity continue to create safe spac es and opportunities for younger generations, immigrants, and marginalized groups. Adelante!

Michelle

For Hispanic Heritage Month, Piero Campos ‘25 high lights five members of Amherst’s Latinx community,

Diego

Adriana Almendares

Photo courtesy of Piero Campos

“The Bear”: Reflections on Food Service and Identity Tension

Mase Peterson ’23E Staff Writer

This past summer, dejected by an uneventful and unpaid internship, I got another job as a food runner at the local 30Boltwood Restaurant in hopes of saving my bank account from near-total hemorrhage. For us first-gen, low-income (FLI) stu dents, this type of employment is an all-too-familiar consequence of trying to live in a society that’s engineered by worker exploitation but also a reliable failsafe in times of financial distress (unless, of course, it’s a pandemic shutdown). You’re stuck between gas money for your trip to therapy or your last non-Val meal for the whole month? Time to put that apron back on, babes.

During my initial few weeks of training at 30B (an in-house moni ker), I just so happened to also catch FX’s “The Bear” on Hulu. A summer blockbuster, both for critics and au diences, the eight-episode series has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, and for pretty good reason. The Chicago-based dramedy boasts a well-written, expertly-performed, and poignantly detailed exploration of life in a struggling kitchen. If you know the show, you might think this was exactly the type of content I would want to avoid when already tasked with bringing persnickety WASP moms their $12 salads but I haven’t stopped thinking about it since then.

The story follows a young, with

drawn chef named Carmy (played by Jeremy Allen White) who leaves his prestigious title in fine dining to salvage his dead brother’s run down beef shop, all while confront ing the painful history behind the transition. And like other ensem ble-based shows (“Orange is the New Black”, “Shameless”), “The Bear” leverages the main character’s arc like a springboard, boosting the visibility and interior volume of other characters.

In fact, I’d argue Carmy’s narra tive presence has more to do with how he interacts with and isolates himself from those around him.

Playing the new but persistent sous chef Sydney Adamu, Ayo Edeberi is Carmy’s most compelling ac complice within the narrative. She represents Sydney’s own journey through a protean performance that often juxtaposes and even su persedes White’s (taking note of Edeberi’s chops as a comedian, there seems to be no end to her ver satility).

And the fact that she’s another brilliant Black woman forced to clean up the white men’s mess is also salient to the story. Case-inpoint: her fights with Carmy and his cousin, Richie “Messy, Pseudo-Ital ian Daddy” Jerimovich (played by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, an Amherst native). Moss-Bachrach showcases his tremendous conviction to play the ultra-sensitive jackass but one who you just can’t help but care for despite all his antics. Other charac

ters like the funny and defiant Tina, the only other woman in our dys functional brigade de cuisine, and the earnest and heartwarming Mar cus (Lionel Boyce) do not nearly get as much exploration as they should despite their singular and accumu lative impact on viewers like myself.

Beyond the characters, perhaps the show’s storytelling excels most in its heavy but not overcooked blend of atmosphere, mood, and setting. If you’ve ever been in the bizarre predicament, by choice or otherwise, to work in this type of environment, you'll immediate ly notice some eerie parallels. If your sweat has flavored the burger juice, your tired feet have throbbed against the sticky floor, and you’ve seen the politics that ranged from Absolute Managerial Autocracy to Don’t-Even-Have-Time-to-Cry-inthe-Walk-In-Freezer Mayhem, you might intimately know the horror that “The Bear” is serving. It’s all there in the endless whirring of the receipt printer, the ritualistic and often agitated cues (“Behind!, Cor ner!”), and how Carmy’s crew fight for their lives during brunch — a notoriously undertipped shift — as non-diegetic electric guitars scratch against the walls of Beefland.

Many of these intense depictions in Carmy's kitchen resonate with my own history in food service. Yet when I think back to my view ing experience, what I found to be even more upsetting — and frankly, demoralizing — within the clus terfuck parade of “The Bear” is the traumatically vulnerable positions of its working-class characters. They reminded me of myself and many others here at Amherst, who simultaneously occupy two worlds: that of the privileged student study ing at a highly selective, extremely wealthy private school and that of a poor person working two jobs just to make ends meet before gradua tion.

Carmy’s position is the case study that mirrors this condition. His world-class abilities as a Miche lin-trained chef do not overpower a system against him. His passion and commitment cannot save him from a life burdened with debt and family tragedy. So much so, the very thing

he loves becomes the object of his pathology. It’s a crisis that is classed, raced, and gendered (Sophie Gil bert’s article in the Atlantic hints at a crisis of masculinity in the show. But it’s, in fact, a crisis of cis white masculinity). But it’s also due to his incapacity to accept those tensions inside of himself and integrate them into a stable identity. He can only dissociate in the surrounding tur bulence and keep chopping at his mixed vegetables before the caged beast slowly rattles the knife again.

I too find myself neglecting to accept that my own tensions — a queer Southerner in New En gland, an Amherst FLI student, a perfectionist with ADHD and OCD — can survive and thrive here. Among many other trinkets, what Amherst often tries to sell us is the illusion of safety. A sliver of this facade shattered with our re cent false active shooter alert. The fact is: vulnerable and marginalized people (though not a monolith), have always known that this mes sage just isn’t true. I know this not just because of my own lived ex periences but those of my friends, loved ones, and community mem bers. The friend receiving disability checks for crippling mental illness; the friend escaping a domestic vio lence situation with a baby and no assets; the friend who’s giving blow jobs to rich assholes on the week ends so that he can buy a car and pay for course books; the peer who discusses Tolstoy with you by day and serves cat-fish to you by night, wondering if knowing how to talk about Tolstoy could ever fix their distorted sense of worth.

The illusion of safety, as many writers and scholars have stated before me, is lethal and only func tions for those who have never been vulnerable. And the irony is that it is the most vulnerable who have no choice but to feed the most privi leged that same lie by virtue of their time, energy, and labor in the kitch en — here at school and beyond. When I think about this reality and my outrage as a student at Am herst, I experience the institution as a depersonalizing simulation of sorts. Nothing feels real and yet the precarious urgency to play the role

of “student” persists. And there’s a moment, before the reality of my situation sinks in again, where I be come suspended. I wonder: What if I stay here, paused in the fever of everything? And then the thought evolves: What if I just completely stopped? It’s a moment that re minds me of a scene in episode 5, where Carmy comforts a disheart ened Marcus after he blows a fuse in the restaurant. Carmy, in a moment of empathy, admits that he once started a fryer fire the night after he won Food & Wine’s Best New Chef.

He reflects out loud: “You have this minute where you’re watching the fire and you’re thinking, ‘If I don’t do anything, this place will burn down and all my anxiety will go away with it.’” Marcus replies, “And then you put the fire out”, and Car my reaffirms: “And then you put the fire out.”

For the 40 percent of Amherst students paying full tuition who don’t know, the service industry for FLI students is like your rich grandfather, the semi-functioning alcoholic and Howard Schultz apol ogist, the one who you FaceTime every so often so that you don’t feel so bad for your primarily trans actional relationship: You wanna avoid it but there’s really no choice. This isn’t a polemical generalization about what wealthier people do with their time here in the Grano la Valley — it’s a meaningfully un derstated tension, regularly filtered out through the college’s capitalist recital of respectability. Let’s talk about our generous financial aid policies but not the fact that an institution worth nearly $4 billion still pays a barely livable wage to its overworked dining hall staff, many of them people of color. In Hamp shire County, that would be about $18/hr minimum for an adult with zero children. Remember to thank Pro-Life Shadowlord Andrew Nussbaum for your Giant Purple Mammoth Balloon but maybe don’t mention the Valley’s housing short age or the rampant mental health crises among students. Just do a land acknowledgment here, form another task force there. #Protect theHerd. You know the drill. Now dig in.

Mase Peterson ‘23E connects "The Bear" to their ex periences in food service at 30Boltwood this summer.

Photo courtesy of Tripadvisor

“Thirteen Lives” Tells Story of Hope and Determination

Davis Rennella ’24 Staff Writer

Two British divers emerge from a six-hour dive through a submerged cave beneath a mountain in Thai land. Along with Thai Navy SEALS, they’ve been searching for a youth soccer team and their coach, who disappeared in the cave 10 days pri or during an early monsoon rain. “We’ve found the boys. They’re alive,” the first diver, John, announc es to a chamber full of SEALS, hand ing them a waterproof camera. The SEALS clamber over the rocks to take a look. “Be careful who sees that,” the second diver, Rick, warns the men.

News later arrives at base camp that the boys have been found alive. A veritable wave of celebration spreads through the masses, until everyone is smiling and cheering in ecstatic relief. But on their way back to camp, the divers refuse to accept their hero’s welcome, shrugging off reporters with vacant consternation.

An American officer’s attempt at encouraging the divers to learn how to deal with the press proper ly causes something inside Rick to snap. “What do you want me to tell them? We found the boys; now let’s all watch them die?” The room falls silent. He explains that they had

tried to dive out a rescue worker, but he got trapped in an outer cham ber, panicked, and almost drowned. Trying to do the same with the chil dren in the inner chamber would be a death sentence. No one in the room had any other plan to offer, so the divers left the camp, keeping the gravity of the situation to themselves.

“Thirteen Lives” is a dramatized account of the events which oc curred in Thailand’s Tham Luang cave during the summer of 2018. The relationship between hope and cold realism flows throughout the film, represented, respectively, by Englishmen John Volanthen (Col in Farrell) and Rick Staton (Viggo Mortensen), a pair of divers called in by the Thai government to help with the seemingly impossible rescue mission. John approaches his inter actions with the people involved in the rescue with empathy and under standing, demonstrating his good will and optimism even in bleak situations. Rick, on the other hand, has a streak of sarcasm, and refuses to communicate with anything less than brutal honesty. In the end, both John’s optimism and Rick’s realism become indispensable as the rescue unfolds.

When John and Rick initially find the boys, the scene unfolds like an encounter on an alien world. In

a pitch black cavern, lights start to flick on in the distance as the boys hear the divers approaching. We ini tially see a shot of only the boys’ legs as they tentatively creep down from the rocks towards the water. This is when the audience understands the desperation of their situation, and their shock at seeing other people after what must have felt like an eternity of isolation in the darkness.

John tells them that they will return the next day with food, doctors — “everything”— although he has no knowledge of whether this can be done. He ignores Rick’s objection that “you don’t know that,” because leaving the boys with some degree of hope is better than leaving them in further uncertainty.

The rescue operation continues to take form as a stirring confluence of volunteers comes in from all over the world. A local British spelunker arrives who has mapped the cave and lends his charts to the team, a Vietnamese American hydrologist puts together a team to help divert rainfall away from the caves below, and the “man of the mountain” helps guide him.

Everyone has a part to play, and everyone takes up their part out of altruism, and the spirit of generosity permeates the events of the film. It is no wonder that, in moments when

the rescue seems in jeopardy, like when the SEALS accidentally trap themselves in the cave along with the boys, the truth of the situation must be carefully managed. Because hope for the boys’ survival is the very en gine that powers the people to help in the way that they do.

Despite his pessimism, Rick is the one to hatch the plan that will eventually save the boys. He suggests that they call in another British diver, Harry (Joel Edgerton), who is also an anesthetist, so that the boys can be taken out of the cave unconscious. As this method is totally unprece dented, they only inform Harry of their plan after he arrives in Thailand on the pretense of “helping out.” It takes Rick’s hard truth-telling — that the boys will “die anyway” if they don’t attempt this — to get Harry to eventually come around.

Most of the film takes a hands-off approach to storytelling, letting the individuals and their actions do the talking. However, some extra cine matic flair was helpful in bringing the otherwise inexpressive diving scenes to life, and in conveying the sensory confusion of swimming through a dark and confined space. The agitated bubbling of each exhale overwhelms the auditory space and blurs the viewer’s vision, restricting our experience of the cave to the

next few seconds, and the next cou ple feet. There are a number of nar row squeezes, in which we hear the bumping of tubing and the clanging of oxygen tanks on stalactites. With every errant noise, you can’t help but fear that something important might break, leaving the diver to run out of air hours away from the exit.

It is with these risks in mind, as well as the near insanity of the plan to bring the boys out unconscious, that we see the British divers, now numbering five, enter the cave for their final dives. With a troubling re turn of the rains, Rick is left to make the call on whether to reenter the cave one last time to get the last of the boys. He gives the all clear. With the water levels rising again and the currents intensifying, the divers and the boys barely make it out in one piece.

As the divers walk out of the cave for the last time, we see a shot in which water drips from the ceiling in the foreground, just out of focus, as if we are looking through a blurry win dow into a dream. With its delicate blurring of the raindrops in front of the triumphant procession of divers, it has an element of fantasy, and re minds us of just how extraordinary these real life events were, and how powerful human determination can be.

Davis Rennella ‘24 reviews Academy Award-winning filmmaker Ron Howard's new movie, "Thirteen Lives," a dramatized account of the mis sion to rescue a boys soccer team trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand (pictured above).

Photo courtesy of guavanthropology.tw

Poetic Perspectives

What’s the big deal?

The big deal is the fetus she carries in her body. How could she kill?

Something that is not yet living. More Worried about the Morality of the woman with child

Than the life of hate you’d subject that child to.

Where were your cries of judgment, Your God-like takes on morality, When the same child whose life you supposedly fought for Had to sear scars in her own skin

For her voice to be heard

Above the pressing weight of a world that privileges The voices of white men

As the authority on all things?

This is not the glorification of death

You’d make it out to be.

This is an acknowledgment that women’s health need not be Discussed in the public eye and talked about As though we cannot make decisions for ourselves.

Keep me under the thumb of the patriarchy, But don’t expect me to walk around with belly out

Explaining that life is sacred in the face of the man who Violated my life the second he came inside me, That he defiled me, That he denied me

My own humanity—

All you can be bothered to care about is my sagacity?

Well, here’s a lesson:

Too much of my life as a brown-skinned woman Has been gatekept by people who won’t mind

Their own damn business.

So worried about children yet

Want your child to grow up holding BB guns

Like that shit is fun,

Guns that will one day be rifles

Pointing at God only knows who,

Praying that it’s not another school.

I think you’re scared.

It’s okay. I scare me, too—

So talented, so capable, Everything about me scares you.

You hate that when I open my legs, that’s not an invitation in, That I could decide whether or not I have a baby

Because that’s the one decision in the world your manhood does not permit you to make,

The one thing about me which you cannot take.

My baby? My body.

My body, my choice.

Is this seriously an issue on which I still must raise my voice?

Step behind the curtain and take a peek in, I am a woman, and my femininity is no sin.

Let’s get down to what this is really about.

You want to sanction my sexuality to be heard over my shouts.

I’ll give it to you,

You’ve made a good distraction.

People so confused by your lies

That we’re not all jumping to action.

Let’s simplify the fraction.

Abortion.

Let’s say it,

It’s not a bad word.

I know you have a history of silencing certain terms.

Guess what?

If I want an abortion,

You don’t get a say.

I know you’re pissed you can’t have your way.

Why don’t you find something else to care about?

This isn’t your conversation to be in so please see your way out.

And if you’re a woman?

You should understand

That this is all a guise for us to always answer to a man.

If this was all about a child’s life, Don’t you think we’d care more about the children who are alive?

Passion, misplaced, Power, unsafe,

The world that we live in is a dangerous place. You can repeal and deal for the rest of my life, But I won’t give up my personhood.

I will continue to fight, And I will continue to write.

Poetic Perspectives returns with Mikayah Parsons’ ’24 “Writing My Body,” an exploration of abortion rights and bodily autonomy.

Photo courtesy of Flickr

Sports

Football Remains Winless After Third Straight Loss

Drew Stephens ’26 Staff Writer

Despite a strong defensive ef fort, the men’s football team lost to the Trinity College Bantams 20-3 at Pratt Field this Saturday, dropping to 0-3 on the season. After falling into an early deficit, the Mammoths couldn’t find any offensive momen tum and ended the day without scoring a single touchdown, only managing to put a field goal on the scoreboard.

The Amherst defense started strong, coming up with a big stop on a fourth-and-one attempt on the first Trinity possession, then forc ing a punt on the next. However, the Bantams were able to pick off Amherst quarterback Mike Piazza ’24 twice in the first quarter, stymy

ing any chance for the Mammoths to build a lead. The first intercep tion was returned 48 yards for a touchdown to put the Bantams up 7-0 with 2:57 left in the first quarter.

On the very next possession, Piaz za was picked off once again. That interception was converted by the Bantams into a 27-yard touchdown pass on their very next offensive play to extend the lead to 14-0 with 1:10 left in the quarter.

But despite Amherst’s offensive struggles — every Mammoth of fensive drive in the first half ended in either a punt or an interception — the Mammoths’ defense didn’t let up the pressure, keeping Trinity off the scoreboard completely in the second quarter. First-year defensive back Luke Harmon ’26 came up with his first career interception in

the endzone to put an end to one particularly threatening Trinity drive, and another interception by Ben Taylor ’25 on the final play of the quarter wrapped up the first half, with the Bantams unable to extend their 14-0 lead.

The Amherst defense stayed strong in the second half, forcing punts on the first two Trinity drives. The Mammoths’ offense, having re placed Piazza with Chad Peterson ’23, continued to stall, however. The Mammoths were outgained by the Bantams 395-175 in total offensive yards, and ended the day one-for-15 on third-down. Trinity, on the other hand, added to its lead with a sev en-play, 31-yard drive capped off by a 39-yard field goal to go up 17-0 with 3:56 left in the third quarter.

On the first drive of the fourth

quarter, the Amherst offense was finally able to drive into Trini ty territory. Thanks to a 37-yard completion from Peterson to Car ter Jung ’26, they went from their own 27-yard line to the Trinity-21. The move culminated in a 35-yard field goal by Conor Kennelly ’23, the longest field goal he’s made this season. This cut the deficit to 17-3, but the offense was unable to put together another scoring drive for the rest of the game. Trinity added a final field goal with 8:35 left to go up 20-3, and the score held until time expired.

The Bantams left Amherst un defeated, having emerged victo rious in their first three contests, while the Mammoths left Pratt Field still searching for their first win of the season. This 0-3 start is

the worst start for Amherst football in the 21st century.

The Mammoths’ defense has played strong this season, and Sat urday was no different. Linebacker Andy J. Skirzenski ’24 led the team with a career-high 12 tackles, and lineman Phil Slaughter ’25 notched his first career sack. Offensively, the Mammoths’ run game struggled, rushing for only 24 yards on 20 at tempts for an average of 1.2 yards per carry, the lowest this season. Both quarterbacks combined to throw for 151 yards, completing 13of-31 attempts in total.

Amherst will look to get their first win of the season next Satur day, Oct. 8, on Pratt Field at Lehr man Stadium versus Bates (0-3), a team they defeated 28-20 last sea son. Kickoff is scheduled for 1 p.m.

With three straight losses to start the season, the men's football team is struggling through their worst start to a season in the 21st century.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Around the Herd: Your Weekly Mammoth Sports Update

Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor

Cross Country

Both the men’s and women’s cross country teams found success at this weekend’s Purple Valley Invita tional. The No. 8 women’s team won the 11-team event hosted by Wil liams College, while the No. 33 men’s team finished second.

The awards keep coming for Mary Kate McGranahan ’23, who paced the Mammoths to their team win, winning her third consecutive race. She finished the 6 km course in 22:19.4, 25 seconds ahead of the sec ond place finisher from Mount Holy oke, and earned her second NES CAC Performer of the Week award of the season. Two other Mammoths finished in the top 10: Sophia Wol mer ’23 was the next Mammoth to cross the line, finishing in third place with a time of 22:59.1, and first year Daphne Theiler ’26 posted a time of 23:45.0 to place ninth, her third top-10 finish in three total collegiate races. The Mammoths’ scorecard was rounded out by Sylvan Wold ’25, who finished 12th, and Allison Lounsbury ’26 just behind her, who took 13th place.

On the men’s side, junior Theo Dassin ’24 and first-year Henry Dennen ’26 led the Mammoths to their third top-two finish of the young season. Dassin was the first Amherst runner to finish the 8 km race, placing 11th with a time of 25:52.4. He was also the first person from a school other than Williams to cross the finish line — Eph runners took all 10 of the top spots in the race. Dennen crossed the line less than 10 seconds later, taking 12th. All five of the Mammoth scorers finished the 143-runner race in the top 30: George Cahill ’26, Aidan Gemme ’26, and Thomas Stephens ’26 crossed the finish line in 26:10.4 (14th place), 26:40.4 (26th place), and 27:06.5 (27th place), respec tively. Both Cahill and Stephens set collegiate bests for themselves with their times this weekend.

The Mammoths will return to action after fall break, traveling to Waterford, Connecticut, for the Connecticut College Invitational on Saturday, Oct. 15, at Harkness Me

morial State Park. Men’s Golf

The men’s golf team was out standing this past weekend at the Blazer Invitational, shooting the best score of the day on both Saturday, Oct. 1, and Sunday, Oct. 2, to take home their first tournament title in four years among a field of 10 other teams. The Mammoths’ two-day to tal of 603 was 12 strokes ahead of the second-place team.

John Beskid ’26 led the Mam moths, finishing second in the in dividual standings with a team-best score of 148 over the two days. His classmates Paari Kaviyarasu ’26 and Mark Vitels ’26 were not far behind, posting identical two-day scores of 150 that placed them in a tie for third on the individual leaderboard. Ste ven Chen ’25 placed eighth overall with a two-day total of 155, and An thony Zhang ’25 was the final Mam moth scorer, placing 13th overall with a score of 158 over the two days.

The Mammoths will take next weekend off before competing in the New England Intercollegiate Golf Association Championship in Brew ster, Massachusetts, on Saturday, Oct. 15, and Sunday, Oct. 16.

Women’s Golf

The No. 9 women’s golf team finished in third place at the George Phinney Classic in Middlebury this past weekend. Their two-day total of 662 was 12 strokes behind second place and 14 strokes behind the tour nament winners.

Jessica Huang ’25 was the Mam moths’ top finisher. She tied for second in the individual standings with a two-day score of 160, just two strokes behind the top finisher. Huang has finished in the top three overall in all three tournaments the Mammoths have played in this fall. Lindsey Huang ’26 finished with a score of 165, tied for 13th individu ally — her best finish yet of her debut collegiate season. Priya Bakshi ’24 carded a 167 over the two days, tying her for 17th. Jenny Hua ’24 and Ivy Haight ’25 were the final Mammoth scorers, who finished with two-day totals of 170 and 174, respectively.

The Mammoths return to the course next weekend to begin their NESCAC championship defense

at the NESCAC Fall Qualifier on Saturday, Oct. 8, and Sunday, Oct. 9. This year’s tournament is hosted by Amherst and will take place at the Cold Spring Country Club in Belchertown. The top four teams from the tournament will advance to the NESCAC Championship in the spring, with the winner earning the right to host the tournament.

Men’s Tennis

The Mammoths traveled to Brunswick, Maine, this weekend for the ITA Division III New England Regional Championships, their first of three fall tournaments. The event, held at Bowdoin College, was a suc cessful start to the team’s season with three players reaching at least the semifinal of their respective brackets.

Sujit Chepuri ’25 and first-year Jakob Esterowitz ’26 reached the semifinal round of the doubles tournament, winning three matches across two days to get there. After receiving a first-round bye as one of the top 16 teams in the bracket, the pair took their first match 8-5 in the round of 32. They then bested two NESCAC opponents, the No. 3 seed from Bowdoin and an unseed ed team from rival Middlebury, by identical 8-4 scorelines in the next two rounds on the way to a semifinal appearance. While their run ended with an 8-4 loss on Sunday, the first three wins showed the Mammoths’ potential early in the new season.

In the singles tournament, Am herst players also found success. In the B Bracket, junior Marshall Leung ’24 dominated his first collegiate singles tournament. He took an easy 8-4 win in the round of 32 before claiming a 6-2, 7-6 victory in the round of 16 and a 6-1, 4-6, 10-3 win in the quarterfinals. In the semifi nals, Leung found another gear, grit ting out a 7-6, 7-6 win before cruis ing in the final, taking the title with a 6-3, 6-0 victory. Kobe Ellenbogen ’25 was the Mammoth to get the farthest in the A Bracket, reaching the quarterfinals before falling to the No. 2 seeded player from Bowdoin.

The team will return to the courts next weekend at the MIT Fall Invitational, held in Cambridge from Friday, Oct. 7, until Sunday, Oct. 9.

Photo courtesy of Amherst Athletics

Women's cross country is currently ranked eighth nationally.

Men's golf won their first tournament in four years.

Men's tennis players found success at ITA regionals.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Photo courtesy of Amherst Athletics

Women’s Soccer Falls to Williams, Beats Lynx in 7-0 Blowout

Violet Glickman ’25 Staff Writer

On Saturday, Oct. 1, women’s soccer faced off against rival Wil liams Ephs in a dramatic show down. Isabel Stern ’23 got the ball rolling, so to speak, with a shot that forced the Williams keeper to step off the line to save it. While clearly the stronger team, Am herst struggled to recover from an early goal by Williams’ attack in the 15th minute. However, the Mammoths refused to let the defi cit faze them and remained a con stant threat to the Ephs, sending shot after shot into the box. Sierra Rosado ’25, Brooke Ingemi ’26, (Managing Sports Editor) Liza Katz ’24, and Isabelle Geneve ’23 all had excellent shots on target in the first half. And while the Mammoths displayed their strong skill set, the Williams keeper kept them off the scoreboard in the tightly-contested match. Despite the glaring disparity in statistics — the Mammoths took eleven shots with six on goal to Williams’ eight with two on goal — the Ephs took home the win, ending Amherst’s three-game winning streak.

Speaking to their persever ance and drive, the Mammoths

held their tusks high, returning to Hitchcock Field on Sunday, Oct. 2 for their second game of the weekend against Lesley Uni versity.

The Mammoths were evi dently unhappy with their lack of goals the day before — just three minutes into the game, Amherst’s attack found their way past the Lynx for the first time. Rosado capitalized on a beautiful build up play, with assists going to both Abby Schwartz ’24 and Katz on a team move.

Five minutes later, Ingemi found Schwartz inside the 18yard box, who snuck one to the back post and past the Lesley keeper for a 2-0 lead. Still firing despite their lead, Katz put her first goal of the day in the back of the net after only five additional minutes had passed, following an assist from Stern.

From there on out, it was the Mammoths’ sophomores who stood out on the field: alongside Rosado, Patience Kum ’25, Carter Hollingsworth ’25, Alyssa Huynh ’25, Charlotte Huang ’25, and goalkeeper Katya Besch ’25 also had exceptional games. Kum was responsible for a penalty kick that bumped the Mammoths up to 4-0, and just a few minutes later,

Hollingsworth sent a well-timed pass to Huynh, who sent the ball soaring into Lesley’s goal from al most 35 yards out. In the second half, Huang, typically a center back, challenged the Lynx defense and earned a penalty kick which was ultimately saved, while Besch made a play on the opponent’s only shot on goal. Senior Sarah Sullivan ’23 (say that name five

times fast) sent a miraculous ball flying over the keeper on a free kick from the right sideline, and a few minutes later, Katz scored once again off an assist from Ally Deegan ’24 to end the game with a 7-0 scoreline in the Mammoths’ favor.

Despite the disappointing re sults of Saturday’s match, No. 22 Amherst women’s soccer found

success at the end of the week end, and will be sure to succeed again as they face off against Wes leyan and Bowdoin this weekend at home. Saturday’s game will be Faculty Appreciation Day, and Sunday will be the team’s Senior Day. Roll Hitchcock Field at 12 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 8, and 2 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 9, to support your Mammoths.

An Inside Look Into the “Schrett’s Takes” Podcast

Mike Schretter ’23 Staff Writer

Sports are an avenue that have changed so many people’s lives and can be a medium for bringing community, lessons, and entertainment. Additional ly, sports are an essential part of my life and have shaped me into who I am. Because of my passion for and love of sports, I decided to start my personal podcast, called Schrett’s Takes. Schrett’s Takes is a small sports podcast that I began about two and a half years ago in April of 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pan demic. For now, it has 50 You Tube subscribers and 12 Apple Podcast subscribers, so calling it

“small” seems appropriate.

How did I get started? Well, it all began when we got the call to go home because of Covid-19. Covid shifted my future, just like it did for everyone. After having the time to really think about what I wanted to do, I de cided that I wanted to change career paths from finance to sports broadcasting. I knew it would not be easy, and I wanted to get ahead in the sports me dia world by doing something unique. Getting a job or an in ternship in the sports media in dustry is extremely competitive, even though, on the surface, it seems to be an easy industry to get into. Between the large pool of applicants and broadcasting

programs at schools like North western and Syracuse that carve out an easy path for people to immerse themselves in profes sional sports, breaking into the industry can be challenging.

I wanted to get ahead, and someone had mentioned that getting content early on would go a long way towards aiding my sports media career. Thus, I be lieved that it was essential to get my content out, and use my pod cast to teach me skills in audio and video production, as well as social media marketing. With those goals in mind, Schrett’s Takes was born.

After two-plus years of epi sodes, I am nearing eight seasons of the podcast, with episodes

airing on YouTube, Apple Pod casts, IHeartRadio, and Spotify.

Content-wise, Schrett’s Takes is not only about one thing or one sport. Even though I mostly talk about basketball, the pod cast is about building a sports community and giving people a place to share their stories and opinions, and to have a fun conversation. I will talk about anything, from the NBA to the Premier League or Amherst sports. At its core, the topic of discussion doesn’t really mat ter; the podcast is about having fun conversations about sports with interesting people, and the enjoyment people get from play ing, being fans of, and debating their opinions about sports on a

forum with me.

All of this has set me up to partner with The Student for the last year, and I now produce epi sodes with the help of Managing Podcast Editor Sam Spratford ’24. In these episodes, I bring Amherst student-athletes on to discuss their goals and their current seasons and to give the Amherst community an inside look into these athletes and their teams. It has been an amazing experience so far, and I will con tinue to post more content with them on a weekly basis.

Stay tuned for more informa tion, but in the meantime, check out Schrett’s Takes on The Stu dent’s website, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios Women’s soccer bounced back from a 1-0 loss to Williams with a win over the Lynx.

Amherst Ties Williams in Thriller, Defeats WPI

Carter Hollingsworth ’25 Staff Writer

Amherst men’s soccer began their two-game week on Saturday, Oct. 1, when they traveled to bit ter rival No. 23 Williams College for an away NESCAC contest. The Mammoths started the first half off strong, dominating the flow of the game and notching 10 shots to Williams’ one. Sophomore Niall Murphy ’25 began the barrage with the first shot of the game. Two minutes after Murphy tested the Williams keeper, senior Ber nie White ’23E made a save on the Ephs’ only shot of the half to keep the score at zero apiece. Respond ing to the Williams attack was sophomore Fynn Hayton-Ruffner ’25, whose strike missed just wide, and junior Declan Sung ’24E, whose header flew just over the bar.

The rest of the half continued in similar fashion, with Amherst clearly outplaying the Ephs of fensively and locking them down defensively, but just missing the goal with each shot. The score re mained 0-0 at halftime.

Coming into the second half, the Mammoths looked to con tinue their first-half dominance.

However, 10 minutes in, sopho more Laurens ten Cate ’25 record ed a second yellow card, with the resulting red sending him off the field. This left Amherst down a man with much of the second half left to be played.

Despite the advantage, Wil liams was unable to capitalize, as Amherst played with the same tenacity that they had in the first half, without changing their at tacking style; if you turned on the live stream, you would never have known they were playing with 10 men. But the Williams defense remained strong until the final whistle, keeping both teams scoreless. With the draw, the Mammoths now have a 5-1-3 re cord in the NESCAC this season, sitting in seventh place overall.

“Obviously, it was unfortunate that we had to play a majority of the second half versus Williams a man down, but I thought we were still dangerous,” said Aidan Curtis ’25. “As a team we know we can do better, and we need to focus on how to get as many points [as pos sible] from the remaining games.”

And with that in mind, the team’s focus shifted to their next game, when the Mammoths took on Worcester Polytechnic Insti

tute on the road at Alumni Stadi um on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

As in their game three days pri or, Amherst couldn’t seem to find their offensive rhythm early in the contest — Sung took the first five shots of the game for the Mam moths, and the team only recorded one shot on frame in the entire first half — but managed to keep the game tied with good defensive play and solid goalkeeping from White.

After 55 minutes of back and forth play, Amherst found their breakthrough. After a long throw from Alex Shahmirzadi ’23E was cleared by the Goats’ defense, Mi cah Valdez-Bush ’25 roped a cross to Hayton-Ruffner for a wide open header that found the top right cor ner. The goal was Hayton-Ruffner’s team-leading fifth of the season. But that was the game’s only goal, and while Amherst didn’t get on

the scoreboard again, their defense handled the rest, and the team left Worcester with a 1-0 win and a 6-1-3 overall record.

With that momentum in hand, the Mammoths will look to move up the NESCAC standings with two im portant home contests this weekend. They will take on Wesleyan on Sat urday, Oct. 8 at 2:30 p.m. before fac ing Bowdoin on Sunday, Oct. 9, the team’s Senior Day, at the same time.

Field Hockey Earns Wins Against Rivals Williams, Conn

Hena Ershadi ’26 Staff Writer

On Saturday, Oct. 1, Amherst field hockey confidently took on their biggest rival, the Williams Ephs, in a contentious game on Williamson Field in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The Mammoths started off strong: Their persistent attacks resulted in an offensive penalty corner in the first four minutes of the game, and a second one half way through the first quarter. But while the Mammoths consistently held the ball in the Ephs’ half of the field, they were continuously shut out by Williams’ defense as they struggled to convert their advan tage in shots into goals.

By the start of the second quar

ter, both teams were fighting to gain control of the pace of the game. This changed halfway through the quarter, however, when Muffie Ma zambani ’24 took advantage of a breakaway against the lone Williams goalie, whose defense was nowhere to be found. The chance yielded a penalty stroke to the Mammoths, which Beth Williamson ’23E con verted into the team’s first goal. The Mammoths concluded their phe nomenal first half with a beautiful play: A defensive clearance by Kate Smith ’25 found its way to Mazam bani in the offensive third, whose powerful shot put Amherst up 2-0 at the end of the half.

The halftime talk seemed to have lit some fire under Williams, who relentlessly attacked to start the third quarter and managed to

notch a goal halfway through. But the Mammoths were undeterred. “When they scored the goal, we had to remind ourselves to stay alert, especially now that they had come back with some extra momentum in the second half,” said Mazamba ni. “The team is good at communi cating, so we managed to figure out who to mark.”

And it seems that is exactly what the Mammoths did, as they gained control of the game once again in the fourth quarter, halting the Ephs’ comeback with a sneaky reverse shot scored by Paige DiBiase ’25 to put away their 3-1 win.

“I can’t even put into words how amazing this win felt,” said Wil liamson. “We haven’t beat Williams since my freshman year, and finally beating them has probably been the

most exciting part of the season so far. Our team brought insane ener gy to the game, and I think it really raises the bar for what this team can do this season.”

On Tuesday, Oct. 4, the Mam moths returned home to Hill Field to take on NESCAC foe Connecti cut College in their second contest of the week. It didn’t take long for the Mammoths to open the scor ing, with Kat Mason ’25 scoring her ninth goal of the season off of a stellar individual effort after only five minutes had elapsed. Mazam bani doubled the Mammoth lead 10 minutes later. Abbey Kays ’25 fed Mazambani the ball at the top of the circle and the Mammoths’ leading scorer did the rest, cutting the ball back to beat two Camel defenders before rifling a shot into the top left

corner of the goal for a 2-0 lead.

The margin would remain the same into the fourth quarter, as nei ther team could find the back of the net with very few shots being fired at all. Kays finally broke the dry spell with five and a half minutes to go, winning the ball from a Camels de fender and taking it to the goal her self, putting a low roller past Con necticut’s keeper for the final goal of the game. The 3-0 win cemented a 2-0 week for the Mammoths going into an important week of NESCAC competition.

The Mammoths, now No. 7 in the nation, will look to continue their win streak as they take on Wesley an University in a home conference match on Saturday, Oct. 8, at 11 a.m., before facing Bowdoin on Sunday, Oct. 9, at 12 p.m. on Hill Field.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios

Men's soccer will look to start a win streak against Wesleyan and Bowdoin this weekend.

Volleyball Brings Out Brooms Against NESCAC Competition

Liza Katz ’24 Managing Sports Editor

After a weekend in which they lost to perennial rival Williams, the volleyball team responded in em phatic fashion, coming to life offen sively and locking down defensively on the way to a pair of 3-0 sweeps in NESCAC play.

The first unlucky team up on the Firedogs’ revenge tour was the Bow doin Polar Bears on Friday, Sept. 30. The game began in back-and-forth fashion, with the score standing at 14-11 in favor of the Firedogs midway through the first set. But kills from Caroline Tilton ’23, Ava O’Connor ’24, Charlotte Rasmussen ’26, and Anaya Thomas ’25, as well as four straight serves from Lani Uyeno ’23 shortly after, resulted in a 11-3 run which ended the set and put the Firedogs up 1-0.

The next set proved to be the most competitive of the match, but Amherst still pulled out the win with setter Jacqueline Kortekaas ’23 setting up four kills during the set-deciding run. The Firedogs’ dominance didn’t stop in what

proved to be the final set — they built a 12-6 lead and never looked back on the way to a 25-18 victo ry. Libero Katelyn Hamasaki ’24 notched four straight serves during the set, including back-to-back aces, to ice the Polar Bears. In the end, they were frozen off the scoreboard, and the Firedogs left LeFrak with their first 3-0 win of the weekend.

Amherst returned to the court for the final game of their home stand the following day, Saturday, Oct. 1, against Connecticut College. The Camels were conquered in sim ilar fashion to the Polar Bears a day prior, falling 3-0 to the Firedogs. On Saturday, it was Tilton who led the way offensively, notching a gamehigh 18 kills in three sets. The Fire dogs started the game strong, with a 25-11 win sealing the first set with relatively little fanfare.

It got much closer from there on out, with the Camels taking a onepoint lead late in the second set. The Firedogs rallied, however, with a kill from Kortekaas winning back serve.

Alexandra Trofort ’26 then took matters into her own hands, win ning seven straight serves, including

The volleyball team finished their seven-game home stand this weekend with wins against Bowdoin and Connecticut College. Up next are Trinity and Wesleyan.

three straight aces to seal a come back 25-17 win in set number two.

The third set was much of the same, with the Camels starting strong and holding a five-point lead in clutch time. A timeout from Fire dogs coach Val Jones swung the mo mentum, though, and five straight service points from Hamasaki took

back the lead. With the score at 1918, the game got tight once again — the score would be tied at 20-20, 2121, and 22-22 before the Firedogs took the lead for good off a kill from Tilton. Carly Cooper ’24 sealed the hard-fought set, and therefore the match, with a final kill, and the Fire dogs took another 3-0 win.

GAME SCHEDULE

VOLLEYBALL

Oct. 7: @ Trinity, 7 p.m. Oct. 8: @ Wesleyan, 2 p.m.

WOMEN'S SOCCER

Oct. 8: vs. Wesleyan, 12 p.m. Oct. 9: vs. Bowdoin, 2 p.m.

MEN'S SOCCER

Oct. 8: vs. Wesleyan, 2:30 p.m. Oct. 9: vs. Bowdoin, 2:30 p.m.

FOOTBALL

Oct. 8: vs. Bates, 1 p.m.

FIELD HOCKEY

Oct. 8: vs. Wesleyan, 11 a.m. Oct. 9: vs. Bowdoin, 12 p.m.

Next up for the Firedogs is an other two-game weekend, this time on the road. On Friday, Oct. 7, the Firedogs will travel to Hartford, Connecticut to face Trinity College, before taking on Wesleyan the next day, on Saturday, Oct. 8. The Fire dogs’ game against the Bantams will begin at 7 p.m.

WOMEN'S GOLF

Oct. 8-9: NESCAC Fall Qualifier (Home)

MEN'S TENNIS

Oct. 7-9: MIT Fall Invitational @ Cambridge, Mass.

Photo courtesy of Clarus Studios