News & Events Amherst in the News

For a lighthearted piece on the Dec. 21 doomsday being predicted by some readers of the Mayan calendar, the Chicago Tribune recently gathered ten “bet you didn’t know” facts about the Apocalypse, including observations from Bruce B. Benson ’43 Professor of Physics Kannan “Jagu” Jagannathan on the possibility of this planet being sucked into a black hole.

 “The Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, went into operation in 2008, accelerating atomic particles and agitating people who were worried it could create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. Scientists downplay such concerns but, as Amherst College physicist Kannan Jagannathan explained, they are opposed to saying there's zero chance. Jagannathan did say the odds of the collider ending life on this planet were no better than the odds of his college president opening a kitchen faucet and a dragon popping out,” the Tribune reported.

 You can read the original interview with Jagannathan here.

Playwright-In-Residence Constance Congdon’s play “Take Me to the River” was recently the subject of a staged reading by the Key City Public Theater of Port Townsend, Washington. Congdon went to Port Townsend earlier this year as the guest playwright at festival there in February; Key City presented her play “Lips” in the spring. “Take Me to the River,” which has been workshopped and given staged readings at the Denver Center Theater and at UMass, deals with the fate of family farms, the arrival of developers and drought.

President Biddy Martin recently spoke about the transformative power of education WNYC’s program "Freakanomics Radio."

Martin , appearing with economists David Card, Betsey Stevenson, and Justin Wolfers, as well as former Bush advisor Karl Rove, spoke about her upbringing in rural Virginia, and what an education provides beyond facts and figures.

“The family was skeptical of education…They grew up in a time and a place when the bias against what they would have called eggheads and overly educated people included, among other things, I think a fear that people with a lot of education think they’re better than those who don’t have an education,” she said.

“It’s impossible to learn a completely different way of thinking about things without unlearning what one has already learned,” she said. “And I think it’s important to realize that, because it’s often the case now, people think about education as the acquisition of new things as if it were an unproblematic and promising process, simply of adding to what one already knows or thinks. And the truth is, it is transformative, and that means upending a whole set of assumptions about how to see things, what’s possible, what’s real.”

Listen to the program here or read a complete transcript here.

Amherst athletes recently turned furniture into food for a recent benefit supporting the Amherst Survival Center, and their work was the subject of a news piece on WWLP-TV.

The annual Recycled Furniture Sale, help Sept. 7, benefits the Amherst Survival Center; money raised helps provide meals and health care for the needy. 

Amherst students joined with those from other local college sports teams in helping sell, move and arrange furniture during the drive.

“It's really a bonding experience, because I know we do other things as a team: we run and everything. Just to come here and help out with the Survival Center is just something that brings the team together,” said Wrenford Thaffe ‘13, captain of Amherst’s track and field team.

Amherst College has lately been getting attention from numerous media outlets for its low-tech, old-school and winning method of matching student roommates.

“The experience of being in a small residential college in New England is about negotiating what it means to live with another person,” Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residential Life Torin Moore told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. “For many, it's their first year away from their families, and it's important for us to get it right. This is someone you're living with day by day, someone you can grow and learn with.”

“Students at this age are often going to look for somebody they're going to feel comfortable with because they're just like them...We're going to look to really mix it up,” said Pamela Stawasz, assistant housing director, in an interview with USA Today.

“It’s cool to be introduced to new types of people,” Tom Sommers ‘16 told The Boston Globe, in a piece picked up by United Press International.

National Public Radio’s All Things Considered spoke with Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, about Spanglish being acknowledged in the 2014 edition of the Royal Spanish Academy’s dictionary (under the entry “Espanglish”). He noted that Latinos have held onto their native language --or at least a version of it-- much more effectively than other immigrant groups retained their native tongues, partly because they can easily keep in touch with where they came from.

"Latinos are not losing the Spanish language, but they are not keeping it in a pure form. And this impure form is a language that has been around for over 150 years,” he said. "For someone who is Latino and lives in San Antonio or in New York City for that matter or in Chicago, it's very easy [to keep in touch with the home country]. It's very cheap as well. And so we are a very movable population. We never really cut the umbilical cord."

Joseph Meyer '13 spent this summer at NASA's History Program Office. He and fellow intern Jessica Brodsky, who attends Brown University, created a 12-minute video introducing key moments in the history of the American space program, using historical footage, photographs and audio files. The pair narrated the video while wearing mock-up spacesuits. Over the summer internship they also created an interactive Web page about artifacts on the moon as well as an iTunesU site. Meyer told NASA’s Public Affairs Office he would like to work in space law or policy.

Javier Corrales, professor of political science, was among the experts commenting in a recent Washington Post story about a lesbian couple in Colombia seeking legal recognition of their rights as a couple and parents. The Post wrote that Corrales, “who has closely studied the gay rights movement across several countries, said the region may be on the cusp of a revolution. But he described fierce pockets of resistance across the Americas, places where homophobia and violence are common.”

The Associated Press reported the news that writer and journalist Cullen Murphy has been elected chairman of the Amherst College Board of Trustees. The story was picked up by media outlets from Boston to San Francisco.

Why do we travel? And do we do it well anymore? Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture Ilan Stavans and his co-author Joshua Ellison, editor of the literary journal Habitus, recently took up those questions in an opinion piece for the New York Times. They lamented, “We have turned travel into something ordinary, deprived it of allegorical grandeur. We have made it a business: the business of being on the move. Whatever impels us to travel, it is no longer the oracle, the pilgrimage or the gods. It is the compulsion to be elsewhere, anywhere but here... travel is a search for meaning, not only in our own lives, but also in the lives of others. The humility required for genuine travel is exactly what is missing from its opposite extreme, tourism.”

The Associated Press recently spoke with Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, for a story about the Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick’s record on issuing pardons or commuting sentences of convicted criminals. Sarat noted that Patrick is not alone in being leery of practicing clemency: "If you grant a commutation or pardon, you may please the person who's the recipient or their family, but there is no political gain to run on the idea that you are interested in using the clemency process," he said.

The Daily Hampshire Gazette ran a feature story about this year’s Ko Festival of Performance, which runs through Aug. 5 at the Holden Theater and other locations on campus. The festival's title this year is "An Irreverent and Intergenerational Look at Age and Aging." The Gazette spoke with playwright-in-residence Constance Congdon, whose one woman piece “Is Sex Possible?” opened the festival. The piece, which examines sex and dating after 50 in a frank and humorous fashion, is based on her own experiences, she told the Gazette: "I think that's the best material. ... A lot of playwriting is listening and then writing down, which also includes listening to yourself.”

Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, recently reviewed Traveler of the Century, a new translation of El viajero del siglo (2009), by Argentine writer Andrés Neuman. In the article, published in the Jewish Daily Forward, Stavans praised the book, which tells of a traveller’s wanderings through Europe in the 1820s, “is large and philosophical and deliciously slow — an old-fashioned kind of narrative, less interested in pleasing the tyrannical literary market with fast, easy satisfactions than in bamboozling it through sustained ruminations on politics, God and the nature of things.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently spoke with Shane Zhao ‘14E, one of three Amherst students who participanted in the recent Rio+20 U.N. environmental conference. He spoke about how, as one of the founders of China's largest youth environmental activism group, he ended up at the Rio de Janeiro conference.

Concluding, as other commentators have, that the conference was not a success for environmentalists, he said, “The result doesn't surprise me. I was at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in 2009 and I learned how difficult it was for more than 100 countries to reach a legally binding agreement.”

In a recent piece touting Massachusetts as a leader in attracting Latino college students, Boston Globe higher education writer Mary Carmichael spotlighted Amherst as setting the gold standard. She spoke with Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture, about the college’s doubling its Latino enrollment in the past decade, and with Tom Parker, director of admissions, about Amherst’s generous financial aid package.

“Amherst’s healthy endowment means it can afford to give students plenty of financial aid - the average award is $41,150 and includes no loans,” Carmichael wrote. “During recruitment season, the school flies almost 200 kids from around the country to campus for ‘diversity open houses.’ Once students are enrolled, it buys them two round-trip plane tickets apiece every year. That can make a big difference to Latino students from the Southwest, [said Parker], because ‘these may be kids who have never been to Massachusetts - maybe kids who have never even been in an airport.’”

The piece drew the attention of a blogger at NBC Latino, who followed up with a piece also featuring Tom Parker. “The last three classes at Amherst have been 42 percent American students of color, including Latinos, and 10 percent non-US citizens … We are just trying to reflect what the U.S. looks like,” he said.