Issue 2

THE AMHERST THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER OF AMHERST COLLEGE SINCE 1868

STUDENT

Like us on Facebook! @AmherstStudent

VOLUME CLI, ISSUE 2 l WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2021

AMHERSTSTUDENT.COM

Unprecedented Enrollment Leads to a Difficult AddDrop Period Tana DeLalio ’24 Staff Writer

Photo courtesy of Scott Brasesco ‘22

The college is struggling to hire staff to work crucial jobs in departments including Dining Services, Custodial Services and Covid Safety.

College Employees, Overworked and Underpaid Caelen McQuilkin ’23 Staff Writer Amid a nationwide hiring slump, the college is struggling to fill positions in a number of departments, including dining, custodial services and Covid safety. As a result, staff members and department directors report worsening workplace conditions, including frequent department transfers and an increase in typical workload intensity. Though staff members are thankful for supportive coworkers, many expressed a deepening frustration with poor workplace communication, inadequate compensation and overwork, and are calling for large-scale changes in the college’s treatment of its employees.

The Student spoke with eight members of college staff working in facilities — which includes dining, custodial, and grounds staff — all of whom asked to remain anony-

mous due to fear of retaliation. Their thoughts on the labor shortage revealed a growing discontent with the college’s employment system as a whole, and a heightened awareness of unfair labor practices.

“If there’s ever a perception of a labor shortage, I’ve always interpreted that as a misnomer,” said one employee, hereinafter referred to as Employee A. “People will work if you pay them enough. That is not the situation here. We are not being paid enough.”

“Nobody is getting compensated for what they are doing extra,” said another, Employee B. “And a lack of communication is huge, because of the inconsistency of what’s going on.

We’ll hear last minute. For example, we were told three days ahead of time that we had to work for [new student] orientation. That was kind of crazy.”

Several staff members agreed that the increased compensation that they

received at the start of the pandemic should have continued into this school year, due to the changing and increasing job expectations that they face every day, not to mention that the pandemic is not yet over. “Last semester, we were making what the college considered a bonus for Covid reasons. Everyone here was making at least $20 an hour at the minimum, which is almost livable for most people. We are now making $15 an hour,” said Employee A. Meanwhile, Director of Custodial and Grounds Services Mick Koldy, Director of Dining Services Joe Flueckiger and Director of Human Resources Chris Casey said in a joint statement that “the college has been very creative and aggressive in providing a wage and benefit program that addresses staff needs and enhances retention,” referencing a retention bonus of $1,500 for full-time workers, a referral bonus of

$1,000 and an increase in base pay for frontline staff working in custodial and dining. They also stated that they are currently working with the Office of Human Resources to “creatively introduce compensation enhancements that make Amherst attractive as an employer.”

Amherst’s current situation, characterized by low job retention and a more limited pool of staff, is not unique to the college, the three said.

“People across the country have been leaving food service work,” they noted. “Restaurant jobs typically have fewer benefits, challenging work hours, are physically demanding and are customer-facing, all of which can make these jobs difficult [and] less desirable. While Amherst College is an excellent employer with a strong benefits package, the available pool of candidates has been severely reduced

Continued on page 5

After returning to in-person classes following a year-and-a-half of learning primarily on Zoom, many students felt let down by the myriad of complications surrounding the fall semester’s course registration process. In addition to being randomly dropped from classes weeks before the semester began, students struggled to register in their preferred courses due to severe over-enrollment and reduced course offerings.

The unprecedented increase in student enrollment this semester, in combination with reduced faculty availability due to Delta variant concerns, led to a stressful add-drop period for many students. The administration has not addressed the student body’s ongoing concerns about registration difficulties, exacerbating students’ concerns since the end of add-drop is Sept. 8.

Phoebe Eccles ’24 is currently enduring such registration difficulties.

“During the first round of registration, I registered for Statistics 13502. The Registrar’s office asked me to switch into the third section, which I did. Then in July, they emailed everyone in the third section and said [that] it no longer existed. [They said] that we would have to register for another class during add-drop but didn’t really give us an opportunity to change it.”

Eccles continued, “At this point, I couldn’t find any other classes that fit into my schedule because all of them had already been filled up

Continued on page 4

News Aug. 29, 2021 – Sept. 6, 2021

>> August 29, 2021 11:51 p.m., The Octagon An officer observed a group in an area that was restricted from use by caution tape and cones. The group left the area before the officer could speak with them. >> August 31, 2021 10:09 a.m., Lipton An officer responded to an alarm and found it was set off accidentally by hair products. >> September 1, 2021 2:38 a.m., Hills Lot Officers responded to a report from the town police regarding an individual missing.

The person was located at their home.

7:32 p.m., Tyler House An officer responded to a report of a student group’s room occupied by unauthorized individuals. The group left prior to the officer’s arrival. >> September 2, 2021 11:42 a.m., Moore An officer responded to a call to the emergency line where no one answered the dispatcher. There were no issues found in the area. >> September 3, 2021 10:02 p.m., Mayo Smith House

Staff Spotlight

Residential Life staff and CSOs responded to large groups gathered and not following COVID guidelines. >> September 4, 2021 12:48 a.m., Jenkins CSOs responded to a report of loud music and dispersed a party.

6:42 p.m., The Octagon A CSO spoke with a group on the roof, which is an area closed off for safety purposes.

10:25 p.m., Hitchcock House Residential Life staff responded to a report of a loud group gathered. >> September 5, 2021 8:32 p.m., Greenway Building C Officers confiscated less than 1 oz of marijuana.

10:11 p.m., Hitchcock House Residential Life staff requested CSOs respond to a report of a large group gathered for a party. The group dispersed upon the CSOs request. >> September 6, 2021 1:01 a.m., Nicholls Biondi Officers responded to an alarm and found it was set off by burnt food.

Kevin Weinman Chief Financial and Administrative Officer

Kevin Weinman started as Amherst’s first Chief Financial Officer in 2013, overseeing the college’s financial planning, investments and, most recently, Covid response. Over the summer, Weinman announced that he will be departing from the college in early September to serve as the president of Marist College.

Q: What kinds of responsibilities did you have as the Chief Financial and Administrative Officer?

A: I oversee the financial function of the college, which includes a number of things — financial planning and budgeting; the investment and use of the endowment; all of our accounting transactions; our financial transactions, like payroll and accounts payable; student accounts and billing.

Those are sort of the direct things that I’ve overseen, but I also worked very closely with [President] Biddy [Martin], on a whole range of strategic and other administrative work here at the college — most recently, [that has been] a lot of the Covid-related planning and execution of our safety protocols.

Q: What kinds of added responsibilities were brought on by the pandemic?

A: We had to figure out how to teach and keep students safe in the middle of a pandemic, so coordinating all of the testing, just securing tests through the Broad [Institute] program, and then organizing a testing center — that was probably the biggest challenge that we had two summers ago, when we didn’t know how it was we were going to administer Covid tests. We spent a lot of time figuring out how best to do that, how many tests per week, how can we get test results back as quickly as possible. That’s really where most of the challenges were last summer, trying to envision how to bring students back and keep them safe.

Q: What has been the most challenging aspect of the job overall?

A: Amherst is a well-resourced institution, but its ambitions and its

ideas outrun its resources. So, trying to meet the demand for resources to make Amherst better, but in a way that preserves our financial strength for the long term. Every year, the budget process starts with many more needs and ideas than we can fund, even with a large endowment. And so, achieving that balance is a particular challenge, because there’s sort of an expectation around the community that we have ample resources to do everything that we want to do, and, unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

Q: What would you say is your proudest accomplishment at Amherst?

A: I would say it’s been modernizing the way that we use our resources.

I’ve helped us build inclusive and transparent budget processes. We’ve slowed the rate of expense growth by using money more efficiently, but we’ve still made major major investments in things such as financial aid.

We built the Science Center, which was a very expensive project that I know is beloved by the entire community. I’m very proud of that. And we’ve grown support staff in a lot of really key functions supporting students, like the Counseling Center, career exploration, academic support areas like the Writing Center and the quantitative center. I know there’s always demand for more resources, even in areas where we’ve made significant investments, but we’ve been able to use our resources to grow these services to students over time — again, all in a way that we’re still in a very strong financial position. We’ve managed to do all this and still preserve our financial health.

Q: Looking forward, then, what are you excited about in serving as the president of Marist College?

A: It’s an amazing place. I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to serve as its president. The goal of any new president is to understand the perspectives of Marist students, its faculty, its alumni and staff, so I’ll be spending a lot of time listening and learning. From there, we’ll do a strategic planning exercise — they have five year cycles for their strategic plan and their current strategic plan will be coming to a close in 2023. So I’ll be taking a lot of what I learned from those early conversations and establishing a collaborative strategic planning process and helping the institution come up with the next iteration of its strategic plan.

Q: What kinds of lessons from your experience at Amherst do you think will apply in your new pursuits?

A: For 1,800 students, Amherst is a very complex place. Shared governance is so important here — the voice of the faculty in key decision-making and serving on committees, students as well, alumni are very passionate and very involved, and the Board of Trustees is really terrific here at Amherst as well. So I’ve really learned how to incorporate the different perspectives and views of everyone in thinking about what the right strategies are financially here at Amherst going forward. And now I’ll have a chance to do that as a president. Understanding the importance of outreach and listening to different perspectives before decisions are made — that’s probably the most important thing that I’ve learned here at Amherst.

— Yee-Lynn Lee ’23

News 3

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

CDSL Renamed Class & Access Resource Center (CARC)

Yee-Lynn Lee ’23 Managing News Editor

The resource center previously known as the Center for Diversity & Student Leadership (CDSL) recently announced that it will now be known as the Class & Access Resource Center (CARC). The change was motivated by student advocacy for a name that would better reflect the work that the center does and the student populations that it serves.

The CARC works to provide support, advocacy and community building for first-generation and/or low-income (FLI), transfer and veteran students. According to the CARC’s social media page, the center’s new name “brings together several things that students have identified as particularly important: (1) building community around shared experiences of classism; (2) navigating elite institutions with less access to valued forms of social and cultural capital, and; (3) providing resources to support access to and through college for folks who have been

historically marginalized and excluded from higher education, especially non-traditionally aged transfer and veteran students.”

Discussions of changing the name began among staff at the center at the beginning of this year, reported Diana Tiburcio ’22, who worked at the CDSL as a program organizer. “We were talking about changing the name of the CDSL to encapsulate more of what we actually do in the center,” they said.

“The CDSL — what does that mean?” added Edmund Kennedy ’23E, also a program organizer for the center. “When I spoke to students — whether they were FLI or transfer students — they often didn’t know what the CDSL was or what it did, and that was kind of common across the entire student body. I wanted us to have a name that made sense for what we did and who we supported.”

These conversations prompted the creation of an open survey asking for name suggestions, which was sent out to the entire campus community, said Lupita

Mendez, director of the CARC. After reviewing the suggestions and narrowing them down to a few options, the center presented the names to students in another survey asking for feedback, which allowed them to make the decision on the final name.

“It felt really important that, as much as we took input from the whole campus community, the final decision-making should be done by students, because that’s who uses the space,” Mendez explained.

Coming up with a representative name was difficult, said Kennedy. “I think one of the big issues with naming any resource center is that you try to encompass everyone, so that everyone feels like they have a space there. With the communities that we support, there’s so many that it’s hard [to do that].”

Mendez explained that the ever-changing terminology for describing different identities only adds to this difficulty. “We could have had an acronym that just incorporated each of those identi-

ties [that we serve], but one of the reasons we decided not to go with that is that some of those words may change over time,” she said.

“I think ‘low-income’ is already on its way out as a preferred word to use and, in a lot of ways, is not the best language to encapsulate that community.”

Ultimately, the impacts of class presented itself as the commonality among the different communities the center serves. “I think we realized that a lot of the work that we were doing in the center centered around the FLI experience, and that [the different student populations we serve] were all coming [to the center] mostly for financial resources or wanting to talk about class or even the way that intersects with their other identities,” said Tiburcio.

Access provides the other link between the different communities, said Mendez. “Social class unites a lot of the groups that we center in our work, but so does access to college and access through college and even beyond.

That’s also a lot of what we’ve

been doing with all the students we serve — so much of our work is around facilitating access to resources.”

The new name provides an opportunity to “re-introduce to the student body and to the campus who we are and what we’re all about,” said Kennedy. Through his work going forward in the center, he hopes to create a space for education around class and what it entails, and expand conversations about class on campus.

Josue Sanchez Hernandez ’22, who also worked for the center and played a role in bringing about its new name, added, “All of us have a class status, and I feel like that’s not something that’s really acknowledged. I think the [new] name brings class to the forefront and kind of forces students on this campus to think about where they lie within the spectrum of class status. It starts conversations about how we can be more inclusive of certain students and build community around these identities that are so important to us.”

IT Loses Six Members in Department Staffing Exodus Sophie Wolmer ’23 Managing News Editor The Information Technology (IT) Department has undergone a mass staffing exodus in the past year. Former Associate Chief Information Officer and Director of Support Services Luis Hernández Muñiz left the department in February, and was followed by five of his employees.

Since leaving the college, Muñiz has transitioned to the role of Director of Productivity and Collaboration Services at the University of California, Berkeley. Director of IT Infrastructure Brian Holley, was another IT employee to transition elsewhere. As of July, Holley has worked for Samford University as the senior security Analyst.

The other five individuals who have left that department elected to retire early. The retirees include Deb McCulloch from PC Infrastructure Operations, Jan Jourdain

of Technology Support Relations, Bob Ryan from Technology Support Operations, Senior Service Desk Technician Jayne Lovett and Multimedia Services Manager John Kunhardt.

Chief Information Officer David Hamilton cited the early retirement program as the cause for the mass exodus. “The college offered an early retirement program, and 5 staff who were eligible for it opted to participate. Each would have their own specific motivations, but generalizing, I suspect they would say it made financial sense for them to participate in the program given their age — most of the retirees were at or past the IRS definition of retirement age,” he said.

When asked about her decision to retire, Jourdain said, “For the past several years, I had hoped to retire in June 2021 when I turned 65. Fortunately, the retirement incentive program (VRO) the college offered this spring made that

possible. I can’t speak to the timing of my IT colleagues’ retirements other than to say several of us are similar in age and the offer was ‘too good to refuse,’ as the saying goes.”

Kunhardt noted similar reasons for leaving the college, “In the spring of this year, the college offered a “voluntary retirement option” which was quite generous.

The caveats were, the staff had to be at least 62 and have 15 years of service to the college. They are paying us close to a full year’s salary 14 days after retirement.”

He continued to say, “My colleagues were all either 65 or older.

I am the only one under 65. They were ready anyway, and the offer made the decision fairly easy.

Amherst has been a great place to work, and I think all my colleagues would agree on that.”

All of the five individuals were pillars of IT and had been with the department for over 20 years.

Lovett was the longest serving em-

ployee of the college. After 40 years in the IT Department, her last day was Aug. 31.Altogether, these employees have given the college 128 years of service.

The IT department addresses numerous technological needs of the college. Namely, they are tasked with keeping the wireless network up and running, providing technical support to students, staff, and faculty, and also with the provision of specialized software such as Adobe products and Final Cut Pro. When the college transitioned to remote teaching, IT also became stradled with addressing video conferencing concerns. Specifically, IT helps the community navigate and solve issues with Zoom, Meet and Slack. Despite the additional workload that the department has been burdened with because of the pandemic, IT has yet to fill a majority of its open positions.

Hamilton stated that filling the

open positions is still a work in progress, “We have filled one of the openings, and have three open searches. We also have another candidate who we hope will start in October. Our candidate pools in these searches have definitely been smaller than we’re used to, but we’re optimistic we can find the right candidates for the positions we have.”

When asked about the hiring process, Interim Director of IT Services Tyrell Wellington noted that IT is, “working through the process of finding the right individuals to provide excellent service to our Staff, Faculty, and Students.”

In addition to those who have permanently left the department, IT has staff that are on leave, including Tamara Lewis, assistant to the Chief Information Officer David Hamilton. David Yang ’18 also left the department after completing a fellowship with the department on June 30.

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

News 4

Students Frustrated by Inability to Get into Desired Classes Continued from page 1 during pre-registration.” Eccles then received an email from the registrar that she was required to enroll in another class.

“How can I do that when almost all the other classes are filled up?

Very few classes fit into my schedule on Tuesday and Thursday,” she said.”

Eccles feels frustrated with the lack of support offered by the administration. “They didn’t even tell me that I was under-enrolled until [Sept.

3] and add-drop ends on Wednesday [Sept. 8].” She has continued to email the Registrar in hopes that the office can help her find a class that works for her schedule.

“It’s too much for me to drop another course and add two new classes to my schedule, and now there’s a week of work that I’ve missed for those classes anyway,” she said.

Jake Rosenbluth ’24 also expressed discontent with the course registration process this semester after changing his major over the summer. “The process was really stressful because I didn’t know if I would be able to get into the classes [that] I needed to meet the requirements for my major, so that was definitely trying. I mean, it all worked out well, but there was such a short time frame to figure it all out.” Among the classes that Rosenbluth had

shopped, had between ten or fifteen people competing for spots in the class. These individuals were competing for seats in courses that were already at capacity, if not completely overenrolled.

Similarly, Lauren Weil ’23 noted how difficult it was to get into her desired classes. Out of her four class choices, Weil got into three — the fourth had too many people. “It’s a little frustrating because as an upperclassman, you feel like you should get into the classes that you want.”

Provost and Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein explained that the large fall enrollment is due mainly to students returning from leaves taken

in last year, as well as fewer students studying abroad due to Covid restrictions and uncertainties. Course offerings are also reduced due to a larger number of faculty than usual being on research sabbatical or other leave.

“Departments have also had to make decisions on offerings that appeal to a large incoming first-year class and the needs of the larger number of [upperclassmen] majors than is usual,” she said. Although the combined size of the classes of 2024 and 2025 is the usual size for the sophomore and first-year classes, “the fact that the first-year class is so large place[s] additional enrollment

pressure on classes that are popular with first-years.”

Going into future semesters, Epstein said she cannot guarantee that course registration will be easier. She is hopeful, however, that students will not face the same difficulties as they did this semester.

“There are currently 76 seniors who are scheduled to graduate after the fall semester as members of the class of 2022E. That should provide some immediate relief this spring. It is more difficult to predict whether study abroad will be more readily available this spring. The Office of Global Education is monitoring the situation carefully,” she said.

Scrutiny Returns to Cargill CEO After Child Slavery Case Tana DeLalio ’24 Staff Writer Over the summer, the Supreme Court sided with global food corporation Cargill in a case related to child slavery in the Ivory Coast.

Cargill is run by CEO and Chairman David W. MacLennan ’81, P’14, an alumnus and trustee of the college.

The Court’s decision was nearly unanimous and has come under fire in the context of growing public scrutiny over the company’s ethical and environmental practices.

Work by environmentalist groups has revealed that the company utilizes supply chains that rely on deforestation and accelerate global climate change. Mighty Earth, a global advocacy organization for protecting nature, has deemed Cargill “the worst company in the world.” While the company claims to adhere to a pro-climate action plan, activists and Amherst community members have expressed frustration that one of the nation’s largest private companies by revenue has faced little to no ramifications for seemingly unethical and environmentally unfriendly practices. Amherst students have previously protested MacLennan on campus for the company’s role in the deforestation of the Brazilian Cerrado.

The case began in 2005 when six Malian individuals alleged that Cargill “aided and abetted” their condition as child slaves. As children, the

six Malians were enslaved on cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast from where the company bought cocoa.

The case rested on an interpretation of the Alien Tort Statute (ATS), a federal law written in the 18th century that allows district courts to “have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.” In other words, nonU.S. citizens may, under specific circumstances, file a lawsuit in U.S. courts for egregious violations of international law, such as war crimes or genocide.

The Supreme Court ruled in an 8-1 decision that the Malians “impermissibly seek extraterritorial application of the ATS. Nearly all the conduct they allege aided and abetted forced labor — providing training, equipment and cash to overseas farmers — occurred in Ivory Coast.

Pleading general corporate activity, like ‘mere corporate presence,’ … does not draw a sufficient connection between the cause of action respondents seek and domestic conduct.” Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the Court’s opinion, and Justice Samuel Alito was the sole dissenter.

Lawrence Douglas, Amherst’s James J. Grosfeld professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought who served as a signatory on an amicus brief on behalf of the plaintiffs,

described how the Court deemed Cargill’s actions constitutional by using the ATS. “The ATS goes back all the way to 1789, and it raises the possibility that a foreigner could use the U.S. court to sue another foreigner for a major violation of international law. There needs to be some kind of sufficient conduct that the company in the United States did that connects it to the bad thing happening abroad.”

In this case, Douglas said, “For the allegations of the plaintiffs that they were forced to work as child slaves in the Ivory Coast in these cocoa fields, there would have to be some kind of showing that Nestle [the co-defendant in the Supreme Court case] or Cargill was aware of that, or basing their decision to buy the cocoa was based off of that information. The holding here, which was 8-1, showed that there was insufficient conduct.”

During the oral argument in Nov. 2020, Justice Alito said that the plaintiffs’ claimed that Cargill “should have known” about the slavery, but not that the company “knew.”

Parker Richardson ’22, who served on the executive board of Amherst’s Food Justice Alliance (FJA) when she was at the college, posited that the fact that the Court found Cargill to be innocent doesn’t necessarily mean the company is morally upstanding. “There are a few different narratives out there, and I

have found it difficult to hold them together and know what the truth is,” she said.

“David MacLennan claims that Cargill does not tolerate child labor. Mighty Earth, who FJA worked with in the past to protest Cargill’s destructive practices, claims Cargill is responsible for countless human rights violations. Because there was insufficient evidence to prove the plaintiff ’s allegations, this case became about the application of the ATS to extraterritorial defendants.”

Richardson noted.

Richardson is more concerned about “the larger questions of when corporations can be held liable” in the same way as individuals. She thinks that it is of the “utmost importance that corporations be held responsible for their actions” because, in many scenarios, their violations are rooted in systemic behaviors that inflict more damage than individual decisions.

“Cargill’s size protects the corporation, which allows human rights violations and environmental degradation,” she said.

Senior Lecturer in Biology and Environmental Studies Rachel Levin also acknowledged the difficulty of holding large companies accountable. She noted that “one can certainly trace connections between Cargill purchasing soy that’s contributing to deforestation,” but, “If you can’t track the supply chain then it

becomes really difficult. It connects in a way to your original court case because you can easily deny it [environmentally damaging practices] because the supply chains are so complex.”

To remedy this problem, Levin suggested that “Companies like Cargill should [make] a corporate commitment to only commit to areas that have good farming practices or don’t use deforestation for production, and then you have to have monitoring to enforce that.”

Additionally, Richardson said that Amherst student groups can be a useful resource. “We have the power of protest and pen, and of community. Groups like FJA and Sunrise empower individuals to collectively hold corporations like Cargill and Amherst accountable.”

In spite of the solutions available, many students believe that there is no sustainable way for Cargill to exist. Given this reality, some students think that it is unconscionable to have MacLennan on the board of trustees.

“Amherst cannot be completely carbon-neutral if it depends on money from destructive industries,” Richardson said. “While I understand the importance of a diversity of opinions and experiences, because of Cargill’s emissions and lack of initiative to offset them fully, there is no place for MacLennan on a pro-climate board.”

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

News 5

Employees Discuss Low Morale and Deteriorating Conditions Continued from page 1 due to this flight.”

Along these lines, some employees brought up the overall sense of low morale in the workplace. Some staff members have found ways to build morale themselves. “It’s okay because we’re all pitching in. We’re a good team and we’re all pitching in,” reported Employee C, another facilities employee.

According to others, the issue of low morale connects to larger socioeconomic issues that require a broader restructuring on the college’s part to address. “Morale has gone down because when Covid came around, we all were working overtime, endlessly, tirelessly,” said Employee B. “It wasn’t evenly balanced either. There were people who had children, families who got to stay home during that whole time, and there were people who were expected to be here because they didn’t fit into that category.

The people who were here the whole time are burnt out,” they said.

“I would say that morale is another thing that management uses to misdirect our attention,” reported Employee A. “‘Staff shortage,’ ‘morale committees,’ ‘morale’ in general, are all used to create a neoliberal climate within this institution. One of the intentions of the neoliberal climate is to allay anxieties that would otherwise lead to action with solutions that are always non-starters.”

Some staff members attributed these struggles to the changes brought about by Covid, and others placed them in the larger context of the college’s lack of “care” or ability to “listen” to its employees, especially those working in facilities such as dining and custodial services. Part of the reason for this, Employee A noted, is that employees in the state of Massachusetts are “at will” employees, meaning that they can be terminated at any time, for any reason, without legal repercussions. This deters staff members from asking for change that would radically alter the current systems in place, due to fear of retaliation.

“I think [the issues] are just magnified now,” said Employee D, referring to the collective feeling that the college consistently falls short in

supporting its facilities staff, labor shortage or not. “As long as you guys [students] get fed, that’s all they care about.”

This collective sense of mistreatment among the college’s employees has been investigated before.

The Amherst Employee Council, designed to help increase communication between staff, colleagues, administration, faculty and students, writes on its platform: “The Employee Council routinely hears concerns from constituents about morale among staff on campus. We get the sense that there is widespread frustration and fear in regard to a number of issues.” One source the council identifies is “class divisions among staff, and between staff and faculty,” meaning that “The Council believes that some morale issues stem from differences in resource allocation across divisions and rank — i.e., that some staff are less likely than others to have their needs and concerns met with the attention or resources they require.”

Last September, a similar issue came to light when The Student reported on staff members feeling expendable and replaceable in the face of Covid safety concerns. In 2017, the Employee Council brought up another issue when it submitted recommendations to the college about its treatment of what it calls “casual employees,” or employees who have been “hired for a specific period of time” or “occupy a temporary/casual position.”

Casual employees do not receive health benefits and are oftentimes paid less than non-casual employees who, according to the employee council, typically have comparable job responsibilities. The council surveyed casual employees on campus and found “most of those surveyed expressed feeling that, as casual employees, they feel like second-class citizens who are not a real part of the Amherst College community and thus feel exploited for their service.”

As of January 2018, the college had 1,108 staff employees, and of those, 385 (34.7 percent) were considered “casual employees.” The report found that at other colleges similar to Amherst, the percentage of “casual employees” ranged from

a low of 13 percent to a high of 23 percent, making Amherst “an outlier with significantly more casual employees than any of the other campuses.”

Employee Council Acting Chair Jonathan Doyle noted that the 2017 survey “may be out of date and may not reflect the current state of affairs on campus.”

In this present moment, the relevant department heads — Koldy, Flueckiger and Casey — are working to address these issues and find “creative solutions” to keep operations afloat and increase job retention.

They have implemented a few central changes to the way that facility jobs run, in order to account for the lower number of staff and increased number of students.

Combined with Covid protocols such as using to-go containers at Val, the unusually large number of students on campus has created a heavier workload for employees taking care of campus facilities. “The conditions changing overall on campus create more work,” said Employee E. “The containers from Val, the trash, those things were never part of our responsibility. It’s a big deal. It really is.”

Other employees similarly reported an increase in the intensity of workload. “I just think the pace of work changed. We’re working a lot harder,” said Employee F. “It’s physically taxing. It really is,” commented Employee G. Due to this change, department

heads are beginning to shift employees between departments. “We’re all doing stuff that we don’t normally do,” Employee F reported.

“We come in every day, and [oftentimes] what you thought you were supposed to do changed, because a new regulation came out, or something like that,” said Employee G. “And then it’s completely different the next day.”

“When I first started here, I was like ‘I’ll probably never serve,’” said Employee F. “Now I serve every day.

I started here in the dishroom, and now I’m behind the line, serving and doing other things.”

Koldy, Flueckiger and Casey expressed their gratitude for staff members making these shifts. “This flexibility and willingness to do what is needed have contributed to much of the success Amherst has had with keeping the community relatively safe throughout the pandemic,” they said.

In addition, staff members reported being encouraged and sometimes expected to work more overtime than is typical. “There’s more overtime than there was before, and now there are more instances of mandatory overtime,” said Employee B, who has been working at the college for ten years now and explained that this year, they were expected to work Labor Day for the first time during their time at Amherst. “We’ve never worked Labor Day before. That was always voluntary,” they said. “But now I believe that just because every-

thing is so heavy, so much more of a workload, they actually need people here. They can’t make it voluntary, so it’s mandatory. We all have to come in on Labor Day.” Employees have contemplated what students and other members of the college community can do to help. For one thing, “Do not leave your food all over the table,” Employee G said. “Clean up after yourself. This is not how you would eat at home. Is this what you do at your mom’s house? No. Then don’t do it here!”

Employee H brought up the idea of implementing a program that would designate a portion of all alumni donations to college staff working in facilities like dining and custodial services: either giving them pay raises or bonuses. Facilities are essential to the college and so the people making them run should be treated as such, they said.

Others envisioned the benefits that could come from closer solidarity between students and workers.

“When it comes to effecting change, I think one of the most important things that I think about, aside from awareness, is actually involvement with students,” said Employee A. “I wish that there was some kind of cross-class solidarity that we could have, between us working-class people and students, who oftentimes are also working-class. The bond of students and workers together would be so helpful. I would love to foster some kind of communication.”

Photo courtesy of Ryan Yu ‘22

Overenrollment and continuing Covid restrictions have burdened staff with new responsibilities, such as collecting the green to-go containers from residence halls.

News 6

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Town Proposal Aims to Address Housing Crisis; Concerns Remain Rebecca Picciotto ’22 Editor-in-Chief The Amherst Town Council recently introduced a new affordable housing policy in response to growing strain on the local housing supply with Amherst College, Hampshire College and UMass Amherst bringing back their full student bodies this fall for the first time since the pandemic started.

The policy report is the product of 18 months of work by the Community Resources Committee (CRC), a group within the Town Council. The CRC introduced the plan to the Town Council on Aug. 23. The plan outlines five goals including diversifying housing options to promote homeownership, “especially among low-income residents, people of color and Indigenous people”; increasing the rental housing supply; allocating more resources to affordable housing projects; and creating and maintaining environmentally sustainable housing options.

The Council will officially vote on the proposal on Monday, Sept. 13.

The CRC used previous housing studies, reports and policies to form the 23-page comprehensive plan. One such study it drew from was the Amherst Master Plan, which notes that “the presence of higher education institutions in Amherst has a significant impact on the character of the Town’s population, as well as its housing needs.”

College students and faculty members often outcompete local residents for the town’s limited supply of housing, pushing prices up to sometimes exorbitant levels. Assistant Professor of Philosophy Rafeeq Hasan, whose research partially deals with the ethics of gentrification, has explored the stakes of when a town becomes unaffordable to its residents.

“Let’s be blunt: When only richer people can live in a community, the kind of interaction and interchange that is essential

to democracy withers a little,” Hasan said. “And it sometimes reflects the outcome of zoning and other decisions that only reflect the interests of the most powerful.”

Amherst College currently has 49 students living off-campus, just one away from reaching its cap of 50 off-campus students, which the college “has never really reached before,” said former Chief of Student Affairs Karu Kozuma to The Student last semester. The off-campus student cap is a result of Amherst’s commitment to staying a residential college. In the same vein, Hampshire College typically requires its students to live on campus, making exceptions only for students who meet certain criteria like medical needs, being above the age of 25 or having parents within a 30-mile radius. Meanwhile, UMass Amherst is housing 13,000 of its students on campus this fall, leaving the rest of its nearly 30,000-student population to find housing elsewhere nearby. The university helps those students find housing on its Off Campus Housing Website, which currently has 38 rentals listed in the town of Amherst.

The pressure that off-campus students put on the town’s housing supply has been exacerbated by the pandemic. Amherst Community Connections (ACC), a local nonprofit that helps individuals find affordable housing and navigate the application process, has had to expand its resources in order to meet increased need among clients. Sophia Harrison ’22 has worked as a case management intern at ACC for two years and noted that pre-pandemic she was working with about 10 regular clients. But with the onset of Covid, Harrison’s client load increased to about 50, though she only meets with some regularly.

Emma Rial ’22 began interning at ACC in January 2021, nearly a year into the pandemic, and also reports a 50-person caseload.

“One of the biggest obstacles during the pandemic was preventing landlords from evicting

Photo courtesy of Google Maps

Amherst Community Connections (ACC) is a local non-profit organization that works with individuals to look for affordable housing. Demand for their work has surged during the pandemic. my participants,” Harrison said.

With widespread job loss created by Covid, many of Harrison’s clients struggled to keep up with their rents. Eviction moratoriums temporarily prevented landlords from kicking out tenants immediately due to nonpayment of rent. But with the national eviction moratorium ending on Aug. 26, “many participants still struggle to catch up on their missed rent even when they were able to find a new job,” Harrison continued.

The burdens placed on housing by the pandemic and now by full student bodies returning to the town this semester compounded the impetus for the CRC’s report. To implement its goals, the report lays out specific recommendations for zoning adjustments, municipal regulations, funding strategies and more. It states that to truly actualize affordability in the town “will require the work and cooperation of Council, Town Staff, Town Boards and Committees, and partnerships with non- profits and the three institutions of higher education located within our Town.”

Amherst College students and local Amherst town repre-

sentatives alike see potential in colleges’ ability to alleviate Amherst’s local housing crisis.

Rial said, “Amherst has immense resources to promote affordability in town and could increase student and employee housing on campus to reduce the demands placed for units in town. Additionally, Amherst College owns considerable property in Amherst that could be developed for affordable housing.” Amherst College’s central campus takes up 150 acres, but the college owns 750 more in other land holdings. Further, the college also buys housing and pays local property taxes for its faculty.

District 2 Councilor Patricia DeAngelis echoed, “I’d like to see Amherst College do more. They give us money towards services, but again, I think not enough.

They’re a very wealthy institution. They could probably build an elementary school for us like Williams College did but they don’t.”

DeAngelis mentioned the support Hampshire provided to the town throughout the pandemic. Since many students were learning remotely during the peak of the pandemic, Hamp-

shire lent its residence spaces to house those who got sick with Covid.

Ultimately, when it comes to how the CRC’s policy goals get executed, some town officials still have reservations. DeAngelis admits that the plan leaves some holes: “I feel like we’re acting like if you increase density, then everything’s going to be affordable.”

At the Aug. 23 meeting when the proposal was officially introduced, District 5 Councilor Darcy DuMont criticized the policy for largely neglecting how UMass should act to alleviate housing pressures. “It is the elephant in the room. UMass needs to use its land to house students. It needs to require freshmen and maybe even sophomores to live on campus in dorms or complexes they would want to live in,” DuMont said at the meeting.

Still, DeAngelis feels that the essential goal of this report is to “call the council to task.”

“So while I think there are flaws, and it’s a wish list, I think it’s important,” DeAngelis said. ​​ This article will be updated on The Student’s website following the Town Council vote on Sept.

13.

Op pinion

w

Pay Staff What They Deserve This Labor Day, as people around the country were supposedly recognizing the hard work of working-class Americans, Amherst College showed its commitment to its workers by gifting them the great honor of more work. This, while pandemic unemployment benefits were cut to over 8 million Americans and the college remained as wary as ever to the risks of the Delta variant: a true sign of Amherst’s inimitable commitment to labor rights.

Unfortunately, in spite of its many kindnesses, the college has suffered a recent labor shortage — a fact it has repeatedly pointed to in order to justify its many new “gifts” to its staff. According to administrators, they’ve even gone above and beyond by offering a generous sign-on bonus of $750 for entry-level positions; in other words, their hands are tied. Something they’ve been reluctant to try, however, is maintaining staff wages at a fair rate.

Earlier in the pandemic the administration implemented a pandemic wage increase, making $20/hour the new base pay for staff at the college.

This made the college’s pay more competitive at a local level, where many workers can currently earn hourly wages higher than those offered by the college (see UMass Amherst Dining’s average wage of $17-27/hour), and helped staff deal with the increased burdens of life during the pandemic.

But in this semester, the college actually chose to cut staff pay from these early pandemic levels.

This has led to an increase in discontent among the staff and could certainly be blamed for at least some of the difficulty the college faces in hiring new employees. If the college wants to make the choice that is both ethical and pragmatic, the answer is clear: put staff wages back where they were.

As a starting point, we call on the college to reinstate the $20/hour base pay of the early pandemic — our workers deserve as much for all the effort they put into making our campus experience great. Beyond the pay increase, the college should enter into more serious deliberation with staff over their needs, both material and economic, without the threat of reprisals that currently prevents staff action.

Staff are essential members of the Amherst College community, but they aren’t treated that way. They take care of all of the minutiae of dayto-day life, from small things like unclogging the shower drains to huge tasks like prepping meals for almost 2,000 students several times a day, that have made life on campus bearable over the course of the pandemic. But due to added administrative

pressures and reduced compensation, Amherst’s staff morale is the lowest it’s been since the start of the pandemic, as The Student has recently reported.

Communication between staff and their supervisors is minimal, with staff reporting lastminute work schedule changes upending their day-to-day lives as well as unexpected shifts in responsibilities — often the addition of new responsibilities with no commensurate increase in pay. One third of staff are treated as ‘casual employees,’ receiving reduced pay and benefits often for the same labor. Overtime, which was once voluntary, has now become more frequently mandatory — even on Labor Day itself. And staff are often afraid of pushing the administration for more benefits out of fears of retribution or job loss.

Representatives of the college acknowledged that the recent ordeals of staff have certainly been unideal, but have argued that the nationwide labor shortage has tied their hands. They touted sign-on bonuses and above-minimum-wage labor as incentives for staff to join, arguing that the college offered competitive benefits as other jobs in the Pioneer Valley but workers simply weren’t interested.

In part, this is another manifestation of the problematic go-it-alone attitude of the administration, ignoring the benefits of consultation with other community members in order to improve policy. However, it also represents a more callous disregard for the needs of workers, especially during the pandemic.

At a bare minimum, the college needs to improve its communication with staff, keeping them in the loop on campus changes and avoiding the last-minute switch ups that have devastated morale over the pandemic. But, equally crucial, the college needs to listen to its staff in order to solve its own understaffing problem and make working at Amherst a desirable experience. After all, staff are members of our community, too; they should want to be here the same as the rest of us do — but they can’t unless we make that a possibility.

We all want this college to be great, the best even — sorry, Williams — but we can’t achieve that without investing in the entirety of our community.

Administration, faculty, students and staff all contribute to making this college what it is, and staff deserve to have their efforts recognized.

Unsigned editorials represent the Editorial Board (assenting: 11; dissenting: 0; abstaining: 2).

THE AMHERST

STUDENT E X E C U T I V E B OA R D Editors-in-Chief Ryan Yu Rebecca Picciotto Managing News Sophie Wolmer Yee-Lynn Lee Managing Opinion Scott Brasesco Skye Wu Managing Arts and Living Theodore Hamilton Brooke Hoffman Alex Brandfonbrener Managing Sports Ethan Samuels Liza Katz Liam Archacki Managing Design Anna Smith S TA F F Publishers Emmy Sohn Digital Director Sawyer Pollard Social Media Manager Emi Eliason

Letters Policy The opinion pages of The Amherst Student are intended as an open forum for the Amherst community.

The Student will print letters if they are submitted to The Student offices in the Campus Center or to the paper’s email account (astudent@amherst.edu) by noon on Sunday, after which they will not be accepted.

The editors reserve the right to edit any letters or to withhold any letter because of considerations of space or content.

Letters must bear the names of all contributors and a phone number or email address where the author or authors may be reached. Letters and columns may be edited for clarity and Student style.

Publication Standards The Amherst Student is published weekly except during college vacations. The offices of The Amherst Student are located in the basement of Morrow Dormitory, Amherst College. All contents copyright © 2021 by The Amherst Student, Inc. All rights reserved. The Amherst Student logo is a trademark of The Amherst Student, Inc. Additionally, The Amherst Student does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation or age. The views expressed in this publication do not reflect the views of The Amherst Student.

Connect With Us

Email: astudent@amherst.edu Twitter: @amherststudent Instagram: @amherststudent Facebook: @amherststudent

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Opinion 8

Seeing Double: Amherst Reorientation 2021

“Freshmen Add/Drop Period” by Emi Eliason ’22.

Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22 Columnist Over the course of the last week, I’ve frequently found myself tired out by all of the reintroductions and reunifications to be expected from our return to a full campus. I had been and still am excited to be back, but I hadn’t realized how exhausting seeing this many people — more people than I’ve seen in one place in 18 months — would be.

And as I, a senior, have gotten to know some of our new firstyears, I’ve realized how much my experience back on a full campus feels like orientation.

Everyone remembers orientation, right? The constant pressure to be cheery to stave off the perception that you’re an awkward, anti-social loser who deserves no friends? The overwhelming rush of classes and

Val and extracurriculars, signing up for seemingly thousands of email lists you would go on to ignore? Making new friends that you quickly dropped after a few weeks only to awkwardly encounter them literally everywhere for the next four years?

Orientation had its highs, of course, but my first couple of weeks at Amherst were rough.

Nobody knew me, so I had to explain myself to everyone that I met. Even my own room wasn’t a place where I could hang out alone and recharge, since I hardly knew my roommate. Every introduction was a first impression: when someone asked for your name, pronouns, major and a fun fact, they were also vetting your friend potential.

And let’s not forget about classes, which were not easy to navigate. I walked into my first college class without doing the

reading for that day because I had no clue how to read a syllabus. For the next 80 minutes, I practiced the time-honored Amherst skill of talking out of my ass.

Incoming students, I want you to know that it gets better.

If you feel lonely, stretched thin or homesick, you aren’t alone.

We’ve all been through it, and I guarantee that your neighbors and peers feel the same way. And don’t write off the weird people that you meet. When I first met my co-columnist, I thought he was awkward and strange. I was right, of course, but now he’s one of my closest friends. (Let’s not consider what that means about me.)

I’m not a first-year anymore, but for some reason this first week and a half has felt more like orientation than any movein since then.

I was on-campus last semester and this summer, but this week has felt different. The flood of people feels overwhelming. For every first-year I meet, I have two acquaintances that I have to somehow catch up with.

If anyone’s figured out how to talk about the last 18 months, let me know. I’m incapable of distilling those experiences into a shot’s worth of light-hearted small talk.

In other words, I’ve gotten used to Zoom University. I’ve acclimated to sitting at my screen and taking notes; to unmuting myself when I want to talk; and to turning off my camera when I’m tired. In some ways, my body and mind have adjusted to living in one room and only seeing a handful of people — Covid college became my new normal.

Confronted with the pace of in-person college life, I can feel

myself starting to shut down.

My guess is that I’m not alone in this. Please don’t get me wrong: I’m ready to be back, and I’m so excited to see everyone again. Campus feels like home to me. But at the same time, I can tell that it’ll take some getting used to again. I’m planning to set up an appointment with the Counseling Center to talk through how I’m feeling, and if that would be helpful for you, you should too.

For other resources, talk to your CA — they know what help is available on campus. And if you want to, come find me and we can go on a silent nature walk to get away from it all.

I don’t like that ordinary life feels too draining for me now, but it does, and that’s okay. I just need some time to get reoriented. And unfortunately, reorientation feels a lot like orientation.

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Opinion 9

Amherst Staff Deserve a Union Scott Brasesco ’22 Managing Opinion Editor Until Hampshire College cynically replaced unionized staff with student workers after their latest dining contract closed in 2019, Amherst College had been the only member of the Five College Consortium without a unionized worker presence.

The public UMass Amherst, of course, has the strongest network of unions, but Smith and Mount Holyoke both have long-standing staff unions of their own.

While it may seem odd that a college that aims to “give light to the world” refuses to provide staff the institutions necessary to claim that same ‘light’ right here, my time on The Student’s Editorial Board has made me privy to the multitude of reports we receive of administrative pressures on the staff each time we examine staffing issues at the college.

Like much of the rest of our college community, staff members have chafed under a dismissive and rigid administration.

But unfortunately, unlike the rest of the community, they face the threat of unemployment for speaking out.

In many of our previous interviews, staff have spoken in hushed tones of quashed unionization attempts of the early 2000s and have very rarely felt comfortable having their name on the record — many have even asked us to anonymize their departments for fear of retribution.

As we interviewed staff on Labor Day about the college’s recent staff work policies, what we saw was much the same; staff feared that complaints or suggestions would be met with reprisal rather than improvement — they feared for their jobs, especially as unemployment benefits phase out across the country.

This should not be the case, but if history is any lesson, it’s not going to change on its own.

If they had a union to protect them, perhaps staff would be able to more openly challenge poor administrative policies and feel prouder to be a part of this community.

Support for unions is the highest it’s been since the 1950s, especially among left-leaning Americans like the majority of us here at the college, and the pandemic has provided momentum in the form of a wave of new unionizations across college campuses in the country. One recent unionization effort in particular, a “wall-to-wall” union formed

by Arizona State University and University of Arizona workers, provides a particularly compelling model to build on by uniting the interests of faculty, students and staff across multiple colleges.

Collective bargaining at the

college has recently focused on the needs of students, but as the removed, authoritarian nature of the administration prompts backlash from faculty, staff and students alike, it may be time to consider broader collaboration.

Recent research suggests that faculty unionization can improve the efficiency of academic institutions. Other evidence suggests a majority of Americans would like to be unionized even if they are not already — some have even gone so far as to suggest student-parent unions against college administrations in order to fight tuition increases. And for the first time in recent history, union membership has correlated with job satisfaction rather than dissatisfaction. A college-wide, or even Five College, union would be of tremendous benefit to all parties.

Ultimately, however, the thing that recent events have made

If a Mammoth Wore a Mask

clear is the necessity of greater coordination between and support for our staff at the college.

No one should need to work in an environment of fear and disarray, and an institution as wealthy and educated as this college should aspire to more than just a $20/ hour wage.

For that to happen, however, staff need the support of faculty, who have greater access to the administration, and the student body, who have greater presence on campus. If faculty were to strike or students to protest as the college sought to quell staff labor rights pushes, the college might be willing to negotiate — if only to avoid the bad press.

One lesson I have learned over my time at Amherst is that only when we work collectively are we successful in challenging those in power.

Amherst staff deserve a union, but they can’t do it on their own.

by Emi Eliason ’22

Arts & Living 10

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

“Twin Peaks” Reboot Finds New Voice for Old Fans Theo Hamilton ’23 Managing Arts & Living Editor From the revival of the “Star Wars” universe to the relaunch of “Arrested Development” and Disney’s attempts to refilm what seems like its entire catalogue, the last decade has seen no shortage of television reboots. It’s becoming something of a truism that TV reboots never really capture or add to the energy of their source materials. More often than not, reboots come across as transparent attempts to turn nostalgia into money while expending as little effort as possible. Some of them are still fun to watch, but they are almost never original.

So, having torn through the first two seasons of cult classic “Twin Peaks,” which were released between 1990 and 1991, I was more than a little wary watching the third, which came out more than 25 years later.

I struggled to imagine how it could maintain the bizarre, dreamlike atmosphere of the show’s first two seasons, and I worried that slogging through a disappointing third would negatively color my summer-long enterprise. To my surprise, season three was enjoyable and provided a blueprint for how reboots can build on a show instead of just leeching off the original.

The basic premise of “Twin Peaks” is simple — a young woman washes up dead on the shores of Twin Peaks, a small Pacific Northwest town. When the FBI is called to investigate, more and more mysteries emerge. The borders between reality and dream then begin to blur and tensions in the town reach a boiling point. Here, attempts to piece things together rationally are doomed to fail. The show urges us to understand the limits of their knowledge and be willing to act on instinct or spirituality instead of cold rational logic when the occasion calls for it.

At the same time, the show offers a powerful critique of some of the myths we have built around our own country. When the show’s lead character, FBI Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), first enters Twin Peaks, he almost immediately falls in love with the town’s 1950’s style “American Dream” aesthetic —

Photo courtesy of Blogspot.com

The third season of “Twin Peaks” embraces the cryptic tone and complex themes of the original, while also adjusting to modern audiences. diners filled with cherry pie, white picket fences and good, honest (and almost entirely white) people.

Cracks are visible from the beginning, though. Sleazy businesspeople are executing complex plots to turn the woods surrounding Twin Peaks into a luxury hotel chain. And, in a spectacularly unsubtle metaphor, there is the Black Lodge, a place full of actual demons hiding in the heart of this whitewashed vision of America.

None of “Twin Peaks’” central pillars have been abandoned or diminished in the show’s third season.

Instead, each of the show’s standout ideas — the surreal touches, the skepticism of unfettered rationality and the rejection of the “American Dream” — are all dialed up to 11 in order to create a gripping, dense and sometimes confusing 18-episode journey.

During the first two seasons of “Twin Peaks,” directors David Lynch and Mark Frost’s natural inclination towards surrealism was held in check, at least partially, by pressure from ABC for more conventional storytelling. The show therefore leaned heavily on traditional plot devices brought in from soap operas and detective shows. These seasons have no shortage of familiar love triangle and whodunnit storylines.

Still, weirdness was always creeping in around the edges, out of sight —

Why is there a fish in that coffee pot?

Why does Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn) start dancing as if she can hear the show’s soundtrack? Why does that one secondary character carry a log with her everywhere she goes? — but it was always framed within a fairly traditional story structure.

The first thing that struck me when I started watching season three was how much weirder it was than the original run. The bizarre dream logic had expanded from the margins and worked its way into the narrative structure of the show.

Instead of a straight chronological journey through one small town, “Twin Peaks: The Return” jumps all over America while simultaneously leaving viewers to puzzle together exactly when each event is taking place. At times, dialogue is reduced to almost nothing for long stretches, giving the impression of a silent film where the mood is set by jarring visuals and a strong soundtrack.

Several plotlines are completely self-contained, sharing thematic ties with the central narrative but never actually allowing their characters to cross over.

The effect of all this is mixed.

At times it feels frustrating that the show seems to have been designed to be unconventional for nothing more than inaccessibility’s sake. But more often than that, it gives the show an irresistible puzzlebox quality, drag-

ging the viewer back for more clues.

While the show’s enigmatic design makes it infuriatingly tempting to solve, “Twin Peaks: The Return” shares earlier seasons’ resistance to the idea that everything can be logically decoded. In the first two seasons, characters determined to know everything are usually portrayed as unlikable and often met terrible ends. In “The Return,” attempts to sort and ‘solve’ the world also tend to end in disaster. The failure of the show’s characters to decipher its mysteries also seems to be a warning to viewers determined to find the correct interpretation of events.

Instead of leading to a single answer, Lynch says his goal is to ensure that “if there are 100 people in the audience, you’re going to get 100 different interpretations.”

At least one thing is clear: a feeling of world-weariness and decay seems to have seeped into the town of Twin Peaks over the past 26 years. A town that had previously been able to hide its problems under a veneer of cherry pies and politeness now feels exposed and disenchanted. Instead of a nostalgic glimpse into the town of the show’s first two seasons, the third season shoes us how that town’s obsession with a nonexistent ideal has left it to rot. Instead of the upward mobility the American Dream promised the residents of Twin Peaks, most of the

show’s recurring characters now seem trapped. Some are stuck in failing marriages; others are managing failing stores; one is now hosting a bizarre conspiracy podcast which several other characters listen to religiously; and another seems to be dreaming in a comatose state.

“Twin Peaks: the Return” isn’t all doom and gloom — many characters manage to improve their circumstances over the course of the season — but it does manage to darken show’s original themes.

I think the brilliance of “The Return” is that its writers knew they couldn’t just dial back the years and write “Twin Peaks” again. Instead of trying to ignore 25 years of change, Lynch and Frost took advantage of it. The classic status “Twin Peaks” has cultivated was used to ensure enough creative control to take the revival in a (more) surreal direction and to design (more) impossible puzzles for audiences to ponder. At the same time, the widespread disillusionment of post-9/11, post-recession America was harnessed to create a new atmosphere for the show’s namesake town and further develop the show’s critique of American ideology. The result is an engaging piece of television that manages to be original while remaining thematically loyal to its predecessors. Television would be much richer if other reboots followed suit.

Arts & Living 11

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

“Donda”: Daring, Disruptive — Disappointing.

Photo courtesy of David Shankbone

Featuring religious subcurrents and a new experimental tone, West’s album, “Donda,” intrigues yet puzzles listeners.

Alex Brandfonbrener ’23 Managing Arts & Living Editor Last week, Kanye West released his highly anticipated new album, “Donda.” Named after his mother, who passed away in 2007, the album opens with a cryptic chant of the title: “Donda, Donda ... Donda ... Donda Donda Donda…” The track, titled “Donda Chant,” reflects the strengths and shortcomings of the album as a whole. It embraces a new experimental tone but often falters, feeling unfinished.

Still, it’s impossible to tell the story of “Donda” by just listening. Instead, West’s multimedia empire cultivates his oeuvre, contributing to his fame and setting the high expectations for his

releases in the hip hop world. I spoke with WAMH Events Director and “The Car Wash” DJ Nii Aryeetey ’23 about the expectations for “Donda” and what they mean for the future of hip hop.

For West, the process of releasing an album is as much of a performance as the music itself. West hinted at “Donda” as long ago as 2019, in a long list of prospective albums that he said he would make but, for the most part, never did. Since then, West has stoked anticipation for “Donda” through a series of teasers, announcements and snippets of music. And weeks before the album was released, West held listening events for the unfinished album, amassing sta-

diums full of fanatic listeners. He promised to release the album at his first event in Atlanta, and again at a third and final event in Chicago, but ultimately ended up delaying the album’s official release until Aug. 29. An appeal of West’s persona is the mysterious dichotomy between his passionate declarations of absolutes and his fickle changing of plans.

The success of hip hop and pop stars is almost never based on their music alone. West and other stars must develop a marketable personality, one that can sell more products than just albums. Just as Rihanna markets her makeup line “Fenty Beauty,” West is known for his expensive streetwear fashion line, “Yeezy.”

These brands aren’t merely suc-

cessful. They sell out of merchandise immediately.

Hip hop is hopping with competition. West’s contemporaries have not slowed releasing music.

Drake dropped “Certified Lover Boy” last week, and younger superstars like Lil Nas X and DaBaby continue to fill the genre with new hit singles. Still, West maintains an influential role in hip hop. Beyond his widely chronicled and outrageous public presence — maybe you know him through his cryptic Twitter posts or his 2020 presidential bid, or his recent divorce from Kim Kardashian — West remains a respected musical talent.

“The albums he has released have influenced hip hop and pop music in general,” said Aryeetey.

“He’ll release something that’s unconventional at the time.

Then years later, that sound will be the convention.”

Listening to the album, Aryeetey pointed to “Off the Grid,” a track he enjoyed via livestream even before the album’s release.

“The beats are strong,” says Aryeetey, before comparing them favorably to their counterparts on West’s last album, “Jesus is King.” He also singled out the long third verse featuring New York-based rapper Fivio Foreign as a highlight of the track.

Fivio Foriegn’s verse is lyrically dense, which brings variation to West’s usual style. Aryeetey is also fond of “Hurricane” featuring The Weeknd and “Jonah” featuring Vory. “All the features on the album are intentional by Kanye. He invited all the artists he respects.”

It’s noteworthy that none of the track titles note West’s collaborators, something he first did in 2016’s “The Life of Pablo.”

Other iconic rappers like Frank Ocean and Kendrick Lamar have followed suit, also leaving their track titles unaffiliated.

Not all of the tracks were strong, Aryeetey regretfully reported. In particular, he noted “Tell the Vision” featuring Pop Smoke. “It sounds unfinished.

It’s clear that it’s not fleshed

out.” Aryeetey also made specific mention of “Ok Ok”: “It had the potential to be my favorite.

But it didn’t use percussion, and I think it would immensely improve the song.”

Still, the album as a whole develops a more cohesive style than the tracks individually.

Aryeetey described that style to me: “A lot of the instrumentation is very sparse. The first two actual songs are called ‘Jail’ and ‘God Breathed.’ ‘Jail’ has no percussion, and ‘God Breathed’ has a lot of percussion, but it’s repetitive. It feels very stripped down. There’s a lot of harmony, but not that many individual instruments playing. It’s a very unconventional thing to do on a mainstream album.” But Aryeetey also pointed out that the experimental tone can come off as a lack of polish, too. “Some of the songs feel empty, and the mixing is a little rough. I don’t think the actual production was finished.”

Another central component of the album is the inclusion of Christian messaging. Since the 2019 release of “Jesus is King,” West has publicly expressed his newfound religious beliefs. Aryeetey elaborated, “[Donda] is a very religious album, clearly. A lot of the songs sound like gospel songs and mention Christianity.”

Peculiarly, West seems to have recorded explicit words in the album, only to censor them out in the final release.

Aryeetey discussed “Donda” with a reverent tone. “[Donda] is kind of a rebirth of Kanye. With all the features, he’s bringing all the people around him into it.”

Kanye West acts as a fixture of the hip hop world, an uncomfortable figure that influences it by pushing boundaries and challenging norms. But while his album features a compelling new sound, it struggles to maintain its quality. It’s a complicated album, even for a long-time fan like Aryeetey: “It still feels like a grand statement, but one that could be grander. I still don’t know how to feel about it.”

Arts & Living 12

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Ricky Jay: Master of the Deck, Maker of Magic

Photo courtesy of th.bing.com

Eclectic, erudite and engaging, Ricky Jay enthralls audiences with simple interpretations of classic tricks.

Ross Kilpatrick ’23 Staff Writer In any field of art, it is valuable to know how to be good, so that when someone is amazing, you can understand the stakes of that success. Magic is no different, and magician Ricky Jay in “Ricky Jay and his Fifty Two Assistants” understands that truth perfectly.

Ricky Jay, who died in 2018, was a magician with a long career, an actor in many shows and movies and an absolute master of cards.

That was apparent, almost immediately, even over the 360p resolution of the likely illegal Youtube upload of “Ricky Jay and his Fifty Two Assistants” I watched this past week.

In this 1996 show, he performs simply, elegantly, with gentle histrionics. He is sometimes comedic, sometimes teacherly, but always erudite and verbose. He fidgets and

jokes and, even on one or two occasions, stumbles over his own words.

The cards — the titular fifty two assistants — dance and amaze. It is a small show in both scope and audience. Jay’s ambition is cards, and in his hands, cards become enough.

The route by which I ended up watching this 25-year-old magic special — on Youtube in multiple delicate slices over a couple days, then again, and then a documentary about Jay, also on Youtube, also in poor quality, also probably illegal — is as mysterious as that algorithm which rules my recommendation bar. Ricky Jay is a name I have heard, often called “the magician’s magician.” But I’m not a magician, nor am I even really able to perform tricks. So I’ve never had a reason to watch him.

This past year, however, I’ve submerged myself in the breadth of magic videos circulating on You-

Tube, mostly from programs like “Penn & Teller: Fool Us,” in which Penn Jillette and Teller try to figure out how other magicians perform their tricks. Most of the time, they do figure it out. For me, it has been a distraction from the otherwise baseline misery of the past year.

But I didn’t find Ricky Jay through Youtube recommendations. Instead, I stumbled upon him by the outdated, un-algorithmic, bespoke word of mouth. It was a passing eulogy on Ricky Jay that turned me onto this special. The previous year of floating through magic videos felt, then, like a year of intense training, all building up to this: to Ricky Jay. Finally, I could watch the magician’s magician. Not quite through a magician’s eyes, but through something approximating and approaching what a magician might see.

To really appreciate “Fifty Two

Assistants,” you need to know a little about how to do magic. Jay first explains the difficulty of the tricks he performs, then performs them flawlessly. A middle deal, where one deals from the middle of the deck but makes it appear like they are dealing from the top, is not impressive to the person that does not understand magic is taking place.

He contextualizes the tricks, as well as hyping up their impossibility, acting as our gondolier through the mysterious, murky waters of magic.

Jay doesn’t explain everything though. He ends the show with a perfect execution of the classic cups and balls, a trick involving three cups and three balls which seem to slip between the cups.

Even a show about cards cannot escape this ancient trick. To know nothing about cups and balls and to see Jay perform this trick leaves one feeling, perhaps, deflated — what

a commonplace trick, to end such a spectacular show. But knowing a little about cups and balls, I left the show elated. I saw proudly, at first, how the balls were being snuck under the cups, where he had placed and taken them. But he tricks further and more flawlessly. The final product is not for the naive audience, but for the magically inclined.

It is a wink and a nod to the fellow enthusiast, amatuer or magically curious.

It is a masterclass performance, an original rendition of the cups and balls, wrapped inside a history lesson about cups and balls, so effectively beautiful as a trick that I have seen his kind of cups and balls routine recreated countless times elsewhere. But it was, in its time, a new rendition of a cliché so original that others could not help but copy it.

Jay is so compelling because he approaches magic with a deadly seriousness, yet comes off jokingly.

For Jay, magic is not party tricks, it is a universalizing world view. Jay is an eclectic personality, which is obvious even in the show. He fluidly slips from storytelling to history to quippy old French verse.

His magic collects these interests into a singular, convergent point. It was the original refuge of the cheat, but cheat as intellectual rogue. Jay traces magic’s historical tracks backwards, finding, among cheats, friends and mentors. In this way, magic becomes a medium of storytelling. Magic is a profession of wisdom and secrets, of passed down knowledge, of oral stories. Jay was once, clearly, its head shaman.

Many contemporary magicians, the most obvious being Derek DelGaudio, were clearly influenced by Jay and have adapted his central motifs — a small crowd, intimately grasped by the sheer mastery of a single individual over a deck of cards — for their own performances and stories. But it isn’t the cards alone that make the performance a spectacle. To those cards, the performer adds storytelling, and in the startling puff that follows, it is perhaps in the mysterious combination of cards and story that we can say the magic happened.

Sp ports

Recent Coaching Chaos Reveals NWSL’s Growing Pains Melanie Schwimmer ’23 Staff Writer

In 2020, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) made headlines as the first American sports league to return to play since the pandemic began. Now, over a year later, the league struggles to maintain consistency at the top with six head coaching changes this season across the 10 teams.

The coaching turmoil reflects the NWSL’s shortcomings, as the league competes with European clubs for talent and leadership. As new teams enter the NWSL, including Racing Louisville FC this season and teams from Los Angeles and San Diego in 2022, there is a renewed push for greater gender and racial equity in leadership positions across the league. All this has shined a long-overdue spotlight on coaching behavior in the league.

Players exposed the subpar conditions at the start of August after the Washington Spirit terminated Coach Richie Burke for harassing his players; tensions redoubled after Racing Louisville Head Coach

Christy Holly was fired “for cause” as recently as last week. For many, these two firings highlight the need for increased player protection and established standards for player treatment in the NWSL. One former Spirit player, Kaiya McCullough, explained that Burke emotionally abused her throughout her time on the Spirit, including using the n-word at a preseason dinner. Two additional players added anonymously that he had called players “a waste of space” and “dog shit.” These allegations join a long list of claims against Burke, whose behavior was so infamous that multiple players advised against the Spirit hiring him in 2018 due to his known homophobia and emotionally abusive practices.

The NWSL did not have a formal anti-harassment policy until this year, and multiple players shared that they did not know who to report instances of emotional abuse to. By coming forward, McCullough hoped to expose larger cultural problems throughout the NWSL, where players feel that they can not speak up for fear of retali-

ation. She also expressed a specific need for the league to change its treatment of Black players at every level from the locker room to the coaches’ offices, the boardroom and the field.

When Racing Louisville fired Coach Holly, fans around the league wondered if his removal reflected a similar cultural problem as the Spirit. Holly had helped build the club in its inaugural season and league representatives touted him and his team as a success story after signing international talent. While Racing administrators did not specify the cause of Holly’s termination, they did allude to the seriousness of the decision, as the club’s vice president opted to “plead the fifth” when asked if Holly had broken the law.

The firing was a sudden shock for players, including team captain and goalkeeper Michelle Betos, who shared that, while surprised, she felt confident in her squad as they are “big-time pros.” While the new club has struggled in the always-competitive league and currently sits in ninth place, they recently won the inaugural Women’s Cup, edging out

Photo courtesy of Max Pixel

NY/NJ Gotham FC’s Gina Lewandowski and OL Reign’s Sofia Huerta battle for possession of the ball during their 2020 NWSL Challenge Cup group stage match.

FC Bayern Munich in penalty kicks.

These players, and others throughout the league, continue to persevere through coaching and administrative turmoil, unstable working conditions and unequal pay compared to their male counterparts.

Furthermore, a third head coach, Farid Benstiti of OL Reign, resigned in July shortly after the story broke that he had bullied star U.S. Women’s National Team midfielder Lindsey Horan about her weight during her time at famed club Paris Saint-Germain. Benstiti regularly made deprecating comments about her weight, saying she needed to be skinnier. After losing weight, Horan shared that she “was very unhealthy, and the funniest thing was the coaching staff absolutely loved it.

They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, look what we did to her, she’s so much better for it. She’s so beautiful now.’”

Even after Horan completed the club’s fitness test with a top score, Benstiti proclaimed, “Lindsey, your weight is not good enough. Your body fat is still too high. You’re not going to play in a game until that’s done.” While the team shared the official reason for Benstiti’s resignation as poor on-field performance, the impact of his past treatment of soccer superstars has not gone unnoticed.

Meghann Burke, the executive director of the NWSL Players Association, explained that the league’s head coaches serve as a “power broker in a system of rules built on disempowering players.”

As players call for better coaches and more stability, there is also a push for more female coaches in the league. One of the three female head coaches currently in the league, Freya Coombe, left her position at New York/New Jersey (NY/ NJ) Gotham FC at the end of August to head up the new team Angel City FC in Los Angeles. Gotham replaced Coombe with Scott Parkinson, a former assistant coach in the league, passing over multiple female candidates to do so.

The new San Diego club hired

the two-time World Cup Champion Coach Jill Ellis as its president.

Ellis promptly displayed her commitment to increasing female leadership in the league, signing Former Manchester United Manager Casey Stoney to manage the fledgling club.

After Portland Thorns coach Mark Parsons announced his departure from the club at the end of this season to lead the Dutch women’s national team, fans and players alike pushed for a female replacement, following the lead of Orlando Pride. The Pride hired Becky Burleigh after Marc Skinner resigned this summer to take Stoney’s former position at Manchester United. Coaches and players alike continue to flow from the NWSL to European leagues as investments in women’s soccer grow globally.

With this ongoing coaching carousel and two additional teams joining the league in 2022, the players’ push for an increase in labor rights and the NWSL’s first collective bargaining agreement proves all the more essential. Right now, the maximum salary an NWSL player can receive is $52,500, and its minimum player salary is $22,000.

As a result, many elite athletes — including World Cup champions and some of the most popular social media influencers in the sporting world — work additional jobs as DoorDashers, personal trainers and Amazon packers to make ends meet. This reality continues to shine a light on gender disparities across sports in this country and beyond.

As women’s soccer grows across the country, especially after the U.S. Women’s National Team’s success at the 2019 World Cup and this year’s Olympics, players continue to make it clear they deserve better, both on and off the field.

After becoming the first professional league to return after Covid, the NWSL is starting to suffer from the same shortcomings that plagued its predecessors. With women’s soccer on the rise, a culture change is needed to prevent it from meeting the same fate.

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Sports 14

Cross Country Teams Eager to Hit the Ground Running

Photo courtesy of Keon Mazdisnian ’23

Keon Mazdisnian ’23 competes in the 2019 NESCAC Championship.

Ethan Samuels ’23 Managing Sports Editor

The women’s and men’s cross country teams will debut entirely new line-ups when they compete at UMass Amherst on Saturday, Sept.

11 in their first meet since 2019.

Of the 13 members on the women’s squad, only five have competed at the collegiate level before.

The team’s two sophomores, Nora Bannon ’24 and Annika Paylor ’24, were unable to run in the fall of 2020 after the season was canceled

due to Covid. Newly added to the team are six first-year recruits who have shown significant promise in practices so far.

“We have a really strong freshman class. They came off of strong high school seasons and then really showed up in our beginning-of-season time trial and it looks like a few of them will be scoring for our team right away … so we are really excited about them,” said Mary Kate McGranahan ’23.

First-years Sidnie Kulik ’25 and Julia Schor ’25 are expected to have

a particularly large influence on the team’s scoring in the first meet — both have recorded exceptional times in the past two weeks of practice. The team’s remarkable firstyear class helped land Amherst a spot at No. 8 in the latest NCAA Women’s Cross Country National Coaches Poll rankings, an honor that came as a pleasant surprise to some of the older members of the team.

The top-10 ranking is also anchored by captains Maggie Drew ’22, Eline Laurent ’22 and Sophie Wolmer ’23 (Managing News Editor). Last spring, Wolmer was able to compete during the track season and qualified for the national championship in the 10,000-meter race. Wolmer posted a time of 36:20.64, earning All-American honors.

“Sophie is coming off of a really successful outdoor track season … and is a favorite to go to nationals so she’s going to be a huge factor in [our] team’s success,” said McGranahan.

Across the board, the team is eager to get back outside and start competing. McGranahan said the majority of the team is “amped and anxious to get back out there.” Gigi

Chappra ’23 echoed a similar sentiment: “I think I speak for everyone that we’re just super excited to have a full season again and to compete again, and we’ve got a very strong team headed into the season. It will be a very different team since the last time [we] raced together but I think it makes things more exciting, competitive and fun.”

On the men’s side, the roster breakdown looks similar. While the team has a combined 10 upperclassmen, they have seven firstyears and four sophomores, none of whom have competed for the cross country team at an NCAA level yet.

Similarly to McGranahan, Keon Mazdisnian ’23 noted the men’s team’s strong pre-season, particularly from the first-year athletes.

“We are looking good. We are a relatively young, inexperienced team but have some seniors with a lot of experience. A lot of people are counting us out this year because we lost so many guys [to graduation] but we are just excited to surprise people and prove them wrong,” Mazdisnian said.

The underclassmen on the team are led by captains Owen Daily ’22, Billy Massey ’22 and Ajay

Sarathy ’22. “Our captains Owen, Billy and Ajay have done a great job leading by example, [showing the first-years] how to carry themselves during or outside of practice and how to deal with the stress of being a student-athlete,” continued Mazdisnian.

Luke Munch ’25 gave the upperclassmen leaders similar praise, citing their ability to immediately make the first-years feel at home on the team. “Cross country has already been a great time. The freshman class is super strong and has been welcomed into the team with open arms. Ajay, Owen, and specifically Keon have been fantastic role models,” Munch said.

Following more than a year of waiting to run competitively, Theo Dassin ’24 has pinpointed an acute sense of enthusiasm across the entire roster. “I can’t wait to compete with ‘Amherst’ across my chest.

We are running for each other, our coaches and our older team members who have been waiting for this cross-country season for a while,” Dassin said.

Both the men’s and women’s teams are slated to run in five meets before the NESCAC championship on Sunday, Oct. 31.

Women’s Soccer Aims to Defend 2019 NESCAC Championship Liam Archacki ’24 Managing Sports Editor Almost two years removed from its last official match, the women’s soccer team, which missed its 2020 season due to Covid restrictions, returns to the playing field on Sept. 9 with an away bout against Mount Holyoke College. The game will be the team’s first since losing to Dickinson College in the second round of the 2019 NCAA Division III Tournament. In the same season, the Mammoths claimed a 1-0 victory over Middlebury to be crowned NESCAC champions.

As reigning NESCAC champion, Amherst holds high expectations heading into the 2021 season. Julia Ralph ’22E, who is

one of the four team captains, remarked, “We have two main goals for this season: defend our [2019] NESCAC title and win a national championship.”

Despite the team’s championship confidence, Head Coach Jennifer Hughes was sure to point out that the nearly two-year hiatus means that Amherst’s past success will not guarantee success in the future.

“So much time has passed and so many things have changed since then, so it’s important for us to keep in mind that we’re not going to just pick up where we left off. Every year is a new year, and it’s really important that we focus on creating habits and building a foundation that will enable success,” she said.

The missed season due

to Covid also means that the makeup of the team’s roster is significantly different from when it last played. “We’ve had two classes graduate since our last competitive season, although some players in the 2021 class took time off, so they are still with us, and we’ve brought in two new classes, so roughly half the team is different from 2019,” Hughes noted.

It remains to be seen whether the influx of players lacking collegiate-level experience will put any damper on the efficient play that benefitted the team in 2019. Ralph, however, framed the team’s diverse range of experience levels as a positive. “I think that the novelty of our team’s composite can be seen as an advantage, too. The

new players bring in high energy, unwavering passion for the game, and unique perspectives,” she said.

Ralph also acknowledged that the team’s inability to practice in person since Fall 2019 posed a challenge. However, she expressed confidence that the team would quickly be able to regain its feel for the game: “We [had] a longer preseason this year, which has allowed us to reconnect with each other and get back into the groove of playing soccer daily.”

In addition to readjusting to the field, Ralph emphasized the importance of constructing the team chemistry that had been hampered by the 22-month break. “The upperclassmen have been working diligently to

re-establish our team’s culture and expectations since we have not been together as a team since Fall 2019,” she said.

Despite the inconveniences imposed by a year of soccer lost to Covid, the team still possesses a positive outlook. “After missing last season, we’re all grateful to be back out on the pitch playing the beautiful game. We have a lot of talent, strong leadership and we’re building chemistry — all important ingredients for success,” Hughes said.

The team’s schedule begins in earnest this week, with three matches. In addition to its game against Mount Holyoke on Thursday, the women’s soccer team plays away versus Bowdoin on Sept. 11, and its home opener is Sept. 12 against Smith.

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Fall Preview: Men’s Soccer Liza Katz ’24, Liam Archacki ’24 Managing Sports Editors The men’s soccer team kicked off its season on Sept. 7 with a 2-1 victory over Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont. This was the team’s first time back on the field in almost two full years, the last time being at the 2019 Division III (DIII) National Championship Game, where they lost 2-0 to Tufts University.

While last year’s National Championship loss was heartbreaking for the team, their prospects for this season look promising. Led by a slew of returning talent, including DIII Player of the Year German Giammattei ’23, the team looks to build on the promise of its 2019 regular season NESCAC championship, and end the 2021 season with the national trophy that eluded it two years ago.

Amherst also finds itself ranked as the number two DIII men’s soccer team in the country

by United Soccer Coaches (the foremost DIII ranking body), behind only 2019 championship opponent Tufts, who also held exactly the same regular season record as Amherst (19-2-2) in 2019. The significance of this NESCAC matchup should figure to be a compelling storyline when the teams face off on Oct. 16.

Despite their championship-level expectations, players and coaches inside the program are taking the season one step at a time. Head Coach Justin Serpone remarked, “We’re really just focused on winning whatever game is next. The first thing we need to do is compile enough points to qualify for the NESCAC tournament and we know how difficult that is to do in this league.”

Felix Wu ’22E echoed his coach’s commitment to a shortterm focus. “All the teams on our schedule this year are top quality, so we are going into each and every practice and game focused on ourselves, bringing energy, getting the details right, working hard and improving every day,” Wu said.

The team features seven fifthyear seniors, who took time off from school in order to be able to play in the team’s return from its Covid hiatus. Among these players are both of Amherst’s 2019 leaders in minutes played, Kyle Kelly ’22E and Bryce Johnson ’22E, respectively. Serpone emphasized the importance of this veteran leadership, suggesting that the team will “lean on [the fifth-year seniors] heavily this season.”

While the team features a number of experienced players, there are 12 new players recruited over the last two years who Serpone says have been “getting up to speed as quickly as possible.” The mix of experience levels makes for an interesting dynamic as the team attempts to establish its on-field identity early in the season.

Regarding the difficulties of a season still mired by the ongoing pandemic, Serpone said, “Every season comes with it’s own set of challenges, but it feels like there is some uniqueness to 2021. Certainly we’ll have to be adaptable with all of the Covid regulations that could interrupt our routines.”

While fall sports teams are allowed to play despite Covid, there remain restrictions imposed by the college, such as a mandated 50 percent locker room capacity and limited access to training rooms.

Despite the extended time off and the persisting presence of Covid, the men’s soccer team is happy to be back on the field.

“We’re just grateful to be back together, surrounded by people we love, playing the sport that we’re all so passionate about.

So many people work so many long hours to give us the chance to compete and we’re thankful to every one of them,” Serpone said.

The team’s schedule kicks into high gear this weekend, when the Mammoths will travel to Brunswick, Maine to take on conference foe Bowdoin College on Saturday, Sept. 11 at 2:30 p.m.

Sports 15

ESPN Hornswoggled into Nationally Televised Catastrophe Alex Noga ’23 Staff Writer

With about seven minutes remaining in the second quarter and a 30-0 showing on the scoreboard, ESPN commentators Anish Shroff and Tom Luginbill had seemingly had enough. In what was supposed to be the compelling finale of ESPN’s 2021 High School Kickoff series, a lopsided annihilation was taking place at Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio.

On one side was perennial high school powerhouse IMG Academy from Florida, widely considered to be the best collection of high school football talent in the country, and on the other was Bishop Sycamore High School from Ohio, a self-described “online-only charter school” that came into the game completely unknown.

The High School Kickoff is usually intended to be a final celebration of elite high school football talent before the beginning of the college football and NFL seasons, as well as an opportunity for players to get recognized on a national stage.

But this year, the obvious mismatch between IMG and Bishop Sycamore created an uncomfortable viewing experience that even the announcers couldn’t ignore.

“This has not been a fair fight,” Shroff said over the broadcast as IMG broke off yet another long run. “There’s gotta be a point now … where you worry about [player] health and safety.” The announcers also noted that, although Bishop Sycamore claimed to have a number of Division I prospects, ESPN could not verify the identities of any of the players in their databases. The game eventually and mercifully ended, with a final score of 58-0 in favor of IMG. So how exactly did arguably the best high school football team in the country schedule a game against a no-name program that was ostensibly lying about the credentials of its roster, and how did the game end up on national television? The answer lies in a number of missteps by

multiple parties at various levels of the game’s production. But all roads lead back to Bishop Sycamore’s Head Coach Roy Johnson.

Bishop Sycamore is not Johnson’s first venture into high school football, and it may not be his biggest failure either. Johnson founded Christians of Faith (COF) Academy in 2018. The school, which lacked an academic building and any athletic facilities, disbanded after just one year and was littered with corrupt practices. Despite this, Johnson founded Bishop Sycamore the following year with business partner Andre Peterson. Based in Columbus, Ohio, the school promotes itself as a top football program on par with other powerhouse schools in the nation, though it is clear that Johnson had greatly underestimated the costs of running such a program. Without the benefits and amenities that established schools are able to provide their students, Bishop Sycamore relies upon recruiting players who are seeking a last chance to get noticed by colleges. The end result is a roster composed of post-graduate players who didn’t academically qualify for college, or players, high school-age or otherwise, who have exhausted all other options (at least one player on Bishop Sycamore’s roster has appeared on a junior college roster in the past). The school lacks any permanent infrastructure — players either live in apartment complexes furnished with air mattresses or are forced to move from hotel to hotel to find a place to sleep at night.

In an interview for The Athletic in the week following the IMG game, Bishop Sycamore Quarterback Trillian Harris walks through an average day as a Bishop Sycamore student: after a workout from 5:00 a.m. to 7:30 a.m. and a practice from 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m., students stop back at their apartments to shower before returning to the athletic facilities to take classes on their computers or phones through Excel Academy, an online school.

Though Harris speaks highly of the school and of Johnson, many

have begun to question the school’s practices and its overall validity.

Bishop Sycamore initially attempted to associate itself with YouthBuild Columbus Community School, a dropout prevention academy based in Ohio, though the YBCCS website currently has a disclaimer that reads “YBCCS is in no way affiliated with Bishop Sycamore” at the top of their homepage. Moreover, the address listed on Bishop Sycamore’s website was the address for a library at Franklin University — the website has since been taken down. Following the ESPN broadcast, far more speculation has arisen regarding Bishop Sycamore’s legitimacy, and the Ohio Department of Education has been directed to investigate by Governor Mike DeWine.

Though his rosters lacked talent compared to their opponents, Johnson has been able to portray his teams as premier programs in order to schedule big games (and massive defeats) against top schools. Christians of Faith Academy was actually scheduled to play IMG in October 2018, but after COF Academy asked IMG to pay for the team’s travel costs, IMG canceled the game, feeling wary of their opponent’s legitimacy. Much of IMG’s staff has turned over since then, largely due to the pandemic, and IMG played Bishop Sycamore in October 2020, where IMG won 56-6. This blowout did not garner nearly the same media coverage that this year’s game received.

In 2020, Bishop Sycamore finished with a record of 0-6, playing five of Ohio’s best football programs in addition to IMG, and was outscored by a margin of 227-42.

This year’s schedule boasted a similarly impressive group of schools, though all of their remaining games have been canceled since the game against IMG aired. What is most peculiar about this year’s game is that Bishop Sycamore had played against Sto-Rox High the Friday before their scheduled game with IMG, meaning they played two games in

Continued on page 16

The Amherst Student • September 8, 2021

Sports 16

New Bishop Sycamore Coach Admits “We Are Not A School” Continued from page 15 the span of just three days. That Friday game against Sto-Rox High ended in a 19-7 defeat for Bishop Sycamore, but it does not appear on the team’s official schedule. When asked about the game, Johnson claimed that they field multiple teams, but the film of Friday’s game shows the same players in the same positions as during the IMG game on Sunday.

Since the conclusion of the IMG game, Johnson has been reportedly fired by Peterson, who serves as the school’s director.

Ben Ferree, a former investigator for the Ohio High School Athletic Association who has looked into Johnson’s ventures in the past, believes that the school’s founders were able to profit off of scheduling big-time games.

To do this, Johnson would claim that his team has the talent to be a competitive program in the future, making it seem worthwhile for established programs to play them. Because they are a new program, however, Bishop Sycamore requests that these other schools pay for their travel expenses, which Ferree believes that Johnson and his partners simply pocket for themselves.

Johnson’s practices certainly seem shady, and he is no stranger to confrontations with the law.

Along with an outstanding warrant in Delaware County, Ohio for failure to pay a fine that resulted from his guilty plea in a March 2020 assault case, Johnson faces a number of lawsuits.

He reportedly owes a Baymont Inn in Delaware, Ohio over $110,000 after his COF Academy team spent three months living there in 2018 — the hotel’s management sued Johnson, but the case was dismissed without prejudice (meaning it can be refiled) in November 2019 after multiple failures to serve Johnson with the suit. Johnson and former Ohio State football player and local television personality Jay Richardson are also defendants in a 2018 civil suit filed by First Merchants Bank, alleging that the pair obtained a $100,000 loan by misrepresenting themselves as officers of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the church was reportedly affiliated with COF Academy. The loan has yet to be repaid, and a hearing is set for Nov. 18 to determine the damages. Johnson and Richardson are also named in a 2018 lawsuit filed in Frank-

THU GAME SCHE DULE

Women’s Soccer @ Mount Holyoke, 7 p.m.

Field Hockey vs. Mount Holyoke @ UMASS, 7 p.m.

Volleyball @ Smith, 7 p.m.

lin County, Ohio by Heartland Bank attempting to recover damages from a defaulted $92,020 loan used to purchase a 2017 Range Rover. Richardson denies any involvement in Bishop Sycamore, but his name appears on the court documents and can be seen on Bishop Sycamore’s original logo. More recently, it was reported that Johnson paid for 25 rooms at a Fairfield Inn in Canton, Ohio for the IMG game with two invalid checks totaling $3,596.

Given the absurdity surrounding Bishop Sycamore, it seems unlikely that a school with IMG’s prestige would even consider scheduling a game. It seems even more unlikely that ESPN would decide to air such a game. Yet that was exactly what happened thanks to the services provided

by Prep Gridiron Logistics and Paragon Marketing Group.

Prep Gridiron Logistics is an online scheduling system for high schools across the country looking for games — it aids in creating big-time matchups. The company’s founder, Joe Maimone, is also the vice president of sales at Billboard Magazine. He is a huge football fan and considers Prep Gridiron Logistics to be

his passion project. The service currently has about 160 clients, who are mainly elite programs like IMG, though Maimone admits he often helps smaller teams gain exposure, and he stated that he believed in Bishop Sycamore’s mission of helping prospects get a second chance. When IMG approached Maimone, Bishop Sycamore was the only program in Ohio willing to play, and so the game was set.

Rashid Ghazi, president of Paragon Marketing Group, takes responsibility for having the game air on ESPN. Paragon aids in the process of matching high school teams together and partners with ESPN to produce broadcasts of games. Ghazi was the individual who pitched the idea of broadcasting the game between Akron’s St. Vincent-St. Mary’s and Virginia’s Oak Hill Academy in December 2002, a game that featured LeBron James as a high school phenom. Ghazi has publicly taken full responsibility for the Bishop Sycamore broadcast, stating that the vetting process and issues with the matchup itself are “100 percent on Paragon.” He went even further, stating, “as the guy who founded the ESPN relationship and the president of the

SAT Men’s Soccer @ Bowdoin, 2:30 p.m.

Women’s Soccer @ Bowdoin, 2:30 p.m.

Field Hockey @ Bowdoin, 2:30 p.m.

company, it’s really 100 percent on me.” ESPN released their own statement and essentially placed all the blame on Paragon, though people likely won’t remember the marketing company that packaged the game — they’ll remember the media giant that had the final say in broadcasting it.

A recent interview with newly appointed Head Coach Tyren Jackson has only made the situation even more puzzling. Though Bishop Sycamore is designated as a “non-charter, non-tax supported school” by the state of Ohio, Jackson stated, “We do not offer curriculum. We are not a school.

That’s not what Bishop Sycamore is, and I think that’s what the biggest misconception about us was, and that was our fault.” Jackson instead describes Bishop Sycamore as a “post-grad football academy.”

The future of Bishop Sycamore and its football team is certainly in question, though the team’s Twitter account has remained active and is looking to fill its scheduling vacancies. Though unclear who is behind the reigns, the team has launched an online store selling Bishop Sycamore merchandise, likely the last remnant of the school’s messy legacy.

SUN Volleyball @ Western New England, 11 a.m.

Volleyball vs. Emerson @ Western New England, 1 p.m.

Women’s Soccer vs. Smith, 2 p.m.