Interim President Tatum gives state of the College presentation at senate

BY PAIGE COMEAU ’26 STAFF WRITER

Before announcing its special guest on Feb. 21, senate began with the usual land acknowledgment.

Skipping over E-Board updates, the senate quickly launched into a presentation given by Interim President Beverly Daniel Tatum. This presentation, announced earlier that week in the Dean’s Corner, gave information on the state of the College. More specifically, Tatum discussed the College’s recent focus on strategic planning.

it matters how much the students pay. In totality, Mount Holyoke students pay less for tuition than Amherst students and the Seven Sister Schools. Tatum stated that this meant that the College had less money than its neighbors. Mount Holyoke is meeting its goal of enrollment and acceptances. Tatum noted that Mount Holyoke admits more students than Amherst College and the Seven Sister Schools.

– Beverly Daniel Tatum

Tatum’s presentation began by describing the College’s current funding situation. 62 percent of Mount Holyoke’s revenue comes from student fees and tuition. Tatum underscored that, because of this,

Furthermore, the acceptance rate is dropping with the number of applications on the rise. Tatum explained that this is a good thing because it allows the College to be more selective with the type of student it would like to enroll.

11 percent of the money that Mount Holyoke receives is from donors, with most of the donated mon- ey going to scholarships. According to Tatum, 2022 was one of Mount Holyoke’s best fundraising years, making as much as $50,621,125. Around 41 million dollars of this money went to student financial aid.

26 percent of Mount Holyoke’s funds come from the endowment. This year the endowment is just over one billion dollars, but not all of that money is available for immediate use. An endowment is like an investment account, with the money being invested in stock portfolios and bank accounts. The College is only allowed to use the money that is earned from those investments. The general rule is that only a spending rate of 4.95 percent can be used. If more is used, the school could begin to eat into the endowment funds.

Tatum ended her discussion on the college’s finances by saying that though Mount Holyoke is doing well financially, it is not doing as well as our neighbors.

The President announced that she is considering changing the college’s mission statement. Later this spring, Tatum said, the students, staff and faculty will be allowed to submit suggestions. Submissions must be less than 25 words long.

Tatum then discussed the College’s strategic planning. She ex-

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Mark Auslander discusses family history, antisemitism and racism

/ If you see my older boy, / Cain, the son of man, / tell him that I” — Auslander explained that it can provide different messages for readers.

“The text I’d like to suggest can be read in part as a powerful testimony of what it means to be Jewish in a post-Holocaust world. … Even in places of relative sanctuary, the possibilities of mass violence never seen entirely removed or off the table. … spective family narratives to a writing project that [they] hope to be a book.” alogue on campus. They then asked Auslander to discuss a bit more about the “importance of these ongoing efforts to bring groups together.”

But at the same time, the poem … emphasizes the universality of the story of brothers,” Auslander said.

While there is a lot of tragedy in the history of the Jewish people, there is good that can be pulled out of it in the ability to empathize with and support others who are fighting for their own liberation, especially those who have experienced a similar nature of historical oppression.

He replied that interpersonal work is vital, but it is only the start.

Photo courtesy of Mark Auslander Dan Pagis’ poem entitled “Written in pencil in the sealed freight car,” which he wrote when he was 11 years old, is displayed in English, Hebrew and Polish at the Belzec Victims Memorial. has been “engaged in deep dialogues and interrogation of our own everyday work to disrupt and resist antisemitism,” for several years.

Auslander explained that neither Pagis nor his grandparents “[ever] discussed with anyone what transpired on board those terrible unheated trains … the poem is the only trace we have whatsoever.”

BY EMMA QUIRK ’26 STAFF WRITER

Content warning: This article discusses the Holocaust.

Dr. Mark Auslander gave a lecture entitled “Here in this Train Car: Holocaust Family Memory, Art-Making and Struggles for Justice” on Feb. 15, 2023. During the event — held virtually — he discussed his family’s history and the connectivity between marginalized communities. He also explored the impact and importance of the arts when it comes to culture and tragedy. Auslander is a sociocultural and historical anthropologist, award-winning author of “The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family” and visiting lecturer in anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. This event is one of MHC’s antisemitism teach-ins that were launched in January of 2021. In her introduction to Dr. Auslander’s event, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion Kijua Sanders-McMurtry said that the College community

Auslander’s talk, held during Black History Month, touched on the similarities and linkages between antisemitism and anti-Black racism. Auslander also discussed the way white supremacist ideology harms both of these communities as well as the intersections between them.

The lecture began with Auslander speaking about his own family, particularly their experiences in the Holocaust. “Here in this Train Car” is a reference to “a terrifying moment in my family’s history,” where thousands of Romanian Jewish people, including his relatives, were forced onto cattle cars during a mass deportation to Transnistria concentration camps in the 1940s, Auslander explained. His father’s first cousin, Dan Pagis, was 11 years old at the time. Pagis wrote a now famous poem about the car, called “Written in Pencil in the Sealed Freightcar.” The poem goes as follows: “Here in this carload / I, Eve / with my son Abel.

Glascock contestant Jordan

Trice discusses his writing career and inspirations

BY JESSE HAUSKNECHT-BROWN ’25 MANAGING EDITOR OF LAYOUT & FEATURES EDITOR

Jordan Trice, a junior at Amherst College, can’t remember a time when he “didn’t do lots of bad writing.” Since starting the practice in childhood, he has worked on his craft more and more, recently gaining a spot as a contestant in the 100th Glascock poetry contest.

As described on the website, the “Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Contest is the oldest continuously-running poetry contest for undergraduate students in the United States.” Mount Holyoke College hosts the contest every year, and since the second year of the competition, the Glascock committee has invited other colleges to join.

This year, Amherst College is one of the invited schools with Trice chosen as their representative. A creative writing professor that Trice had taken a class with during his first semester at college emailed him and asked if he would like to do it. “I was like, ‘Yes, of course.’ And then they put me in contact with y’alls people,” Trice said. “And here we are.” Trice described later researching the contest and seeing that Robert Frost had been a judge and Slyvia Plath had won; this was when he started to become both excited and nervous about the competition.

One moment in particular stood out to Trice in regard to his interest in writing. When he was in sixth grade, a class required everyone to create a presentation about what job they wanted to have when they were older. “I put, kind of as a cop-out because I didn’t really prepare, [that] I wanted to be a writer,” Trice said. “They want[ed] you to have how much money you’d make, so I said ‘it varies’ and then had a picture of books.”

Trice, a double major in English and sexuality, women’s and gender studies, tends to write shorter poems and submitted a number of poems within the time limit. The first two are inspired by his first summer at Amherst when he had a research fellowship looking at “reimaginings of the stories of the women of the Odyssey in contemporary literature.”

He was “obsessed” with Penelope, Odysseus’ wife who remains faithful to her husband while he is away on his 20-year-long journey, and was

He is inspired by the way his cousin has fought for peace and justice and wishes to do the same. Art is a way to share, connect people and remember historical moments, both benevolent and malevolent. Auslander explained that it is vital in both “helping us reflect on unspeakable acts and struggles for tolerance and justice even or especially with the darkest walls of the sealed railway car,” but it can also remind us of “this world before the Holocaust.” The people, places and things that existed before are still important memories and aspects of culture.

Another notion that Auslander emphasized was the close tie between the fight against antisemitism and anti-Black racism, and that one of the ways to combat this struggle is through partnership. He shared an anecdote of his connection to Black poet, storyteller and essayist André Le Mont Wilson who gave his own book talk to MHC on Feb. 20, 2023. Auslander explained that the two found connections between their own family histories, and have since been “working together collaboratively, documenting [their] re-

“The very essence of our beings is not entirely grim or hopeless, which may seem paradoxical, but it’s the paradox that is life-sustaining. Because this experience can yield the most remarkable gifts, as is the case, for example, with my new friendship with André Wilson,” Auslander said. Throughout his talk, Auslander spoke with candor about his privilege as a white man, and how he is working to better understand communities of color, particularly Black communities.

“I’m not joking when I’m speaking [of] myself as a recovering white guy, because I mean, I grew up in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in white Washington, D.C., and I knew very little of the Black majority city, even though my parents [and] grandparents and so forth, had been actively involved in the civil rights movement,” Auslander said. “I didn’t think of the centrality of race or anything like structural racism in other words, and so that was a process.”

In living in Central Africa for some years, connecting with his Black family members and with people like Wilson, he is working to combat his personal biases. He stressed that he believes this type of work is “a continuous process of learning.”

Toward the end of the talk, Sanders-McMurtry highlighted the work that the Jewish Student Union, the Association of Pan-African Unity and the Office of Community and Belonging have been doing to foster di-

“It has to be sustainable, there really has to be groups working together, and everybody knowing that there’s gonna be a space when these groups come together for frank disagreements and discovery,” Auslander continued. “It’s very hard work to do this type of collaborative work because we are all exposing our most fundamental vulnerabilities. And it doesn’t seem fair to each party that we’re being asked to account for things that we don’t feel personally held [responsible] for. But we can’t make progress if all we do is go into a defensive crouch.”

One student who attended the talk appreciated this appeal for intergroup collaboration and the candor about inevitable obstacles. “I am a prospective history major so I think it is so important to, as Dr. Auslander discussed, push through the friction that arises when two very different groups work together and have conversations that deepen compassion and spark change,” Caroline Lamb ’26 said. “It is vital to future generations, and current ones, to work together and learn from our past mistakes so that we can all better understand that we share one world and can make it a better place.”

Auslander believes that students, faculty and staff must all put in consistent effort to do their parts to make change. “We’re extremely lucky that at a place like Mount Holyoke, there are so many people committed to making this happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy here, it just means that we have the freedom and the space to do some of the really hard work,” Auslander said.