News & Events Campus Buzz Archive

By Daniel Diner '14

Community. It’s the sense of togetherness that defines us as a college. It’s the connection between students and alumni several generations and thousands of miles away. It’s the understanding that all which is achieved here, no matter how unique and innovative, is done in one place, under a common roof. It’s the one thing about Amherst that we can all get behind, communally.

So when Jessica Mestre ’10 determined that the sense of collective Amherst belonging could be yet stronger, she set out to extend its scope. Mestre—who since her graduation has taken on the role of student life fellow for the dean of students office—has been developing and championing a new Community Hour initiative for more than a year.

The inaugural event took place on Feb. 23 in Stirn Auditorium with an hour-long show by the student comedy group Mr.Gad’s House of Improv. To encourage mingling among groups, the seating was arranged so that students were beside professors or staff members, not other students.

The Community Hour originated with Mestre’s efforts to extend more support to students from lower-income backgrounds, which is a central objective of her job in the dean's office. When, during a focus group that Mestre held, one such student expressed her concern that the campus lacked an overall sense of community, Mestre was surprised. “I never thought of that,” she says. “I felt connected both as a student and as a staff member. It was interesting that something I felt quite strongly was lacking in someone else’s experience.” Mestre, after researching initiatives at other institutions, concluded that a regular community hour would help emphasize the college's inclusiveness.

Then, this past November, the college held a day-long community meeting in response to a rising concern about sexual disrespect on campus. That meeting led many to ask for more campus-wide events, and so Mestre, together with Association of Amherst Students President Tania Dias ’13 (whose candidate platform last year largely pivoted on the creation of a campus common hour) and Brendan Burke ’13, who holds the AAS position of all-campus tradition coordinator, drafted a formal proposal for the community hour. They won support from faculty, staff and President Biddy Martin.

At the inaugural event, Martin made a surprise appearance in one of the skits. Two more Community Hours are planned for this semester. Like the Mr. Gad’s performance, they will aim to foster a common community experience, to encourage dialogue and to highlight internal talent.

Mestre, whose term at Amherst ends this year, is delighted to see so much interest in Amherst community cohesion. “I hope that this becomes a more central, celebrated and beloved event,” she says. “I’m excited to see how this facilitates a larger sense of community on campus.”

To submit an idea into the Community Hour Suggestion Box, click here.

By Daniel Diner '14

It’s not often that a professor devotes an entire course to a single, hands-on project. It’s even less often that a class revolves around an intercollegiate competition.  But last semester, eight students and an economics professor came together in this unusual way.

In the Special Topics course “Federal Reserve Challenge,” taught by Geoffrey Woglom, the Richard S. Volpert ’56 Professor of Economics, students spent the semester preparing for the annual Federal Reserve Challenge in Boston.

The Fed Challenge requires teams of undergraduates from various schools to research the state of the current macroeconomy and produce a comprehensive proposal regarding federal monetary policy.  This policy proposal must be based on the team’s macroeconomic forecast and must take into account every possible factor and consequence, including biased statistics and unintended inflation. Teams have 15 minutes to present their recommendation to a panel of experts and another 15 minutes to answer questions. 

For the course, Woglom recruited top students from his “Money and Economic Activity” and “Advanced Macroeconomics” courses. “I was drawn to the class,” says George Tepe ’14, “because I loved Professor Woglom and central banking.”

The semester began with crash courses on central banking and monetary policy, with a focus on Fed operations. The students soon began to think about which economic statistics they needed to single out. They began meeting, with some guidance from Woglom, two or three times each week to discuss the current conditions of the macroeconomy. They used their research to come up with policy recommendations and, eventually, to construct a presentation.

Each student brought a different talent and perspective. March Fan ’15 says the intimate setting of the meetings accentuated their individual abilities. Alex Jiron ’15 was the “macro genius,” Fan says. Tepe became known as the resident “inflation hawk.” Duncan Morrissey ’14 had the kind of polished speaking voice that made him a natural for the smaller team that would present in front of the judges.

Ultimately deciding that the economy required additional stimulus, the team settled on the following policy proposal: “If the unemployment rate remains above 7 percent and core inflation remains below 3 percent, the Committee will continue its purchases of agency mortgage-backed securities, undertake additional asset purchases and employ its other policy tools as it sees fit.”

Then the students’ focus turned from economics to performance. The smaller crew that would present in Boston rehearsed in front of and sought critiques from Amherst (and at one point, Smith) faculty. 

Special help came from Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance Ronald Bashford, who teaches a two-semester course called “The Craft of Speaking.” When Bashford heard the team’s presentation, he gave them advice that would rework their entire oral approach. “These guys were very good students of economics,” Woglom says, “but making a presentation involves a wholly separate set of skills. It was a little bit scary because basically he said, ‘Start over again. Here’s what you need to do.’ But the way the students improved their presentation was absolutely awe-inspiring. The way they learned how to make an effective oral presentation was a side effect I had not anticipated.”

In November the team headed to Boston for the presentation. They received near-perfect marks on their talk, but they were defeated in the first round by the defending national champions from Harvard, and so they never made it to the finals. Still, the professor and students have no regrets. The group “worked harder than students have in most of the other classes that I’ve taught,” Woglom says. “I brought in this diverse group—from student government, athletics and international backgrounds—and thought to myself, ‘How am I going to make a team out of [them]? But it was never an issue. They worked together and came together as a team.”

Chris Friend ’14, another student in the course, hopes  that Woglom will teach “Federal Reserve Challenge” in future years. “It was one of the best crash courses you could take in learning about the Federal Reserve and its inner workings,” he says.

By Peter Rooney

Opening day was fast approaching and General Manager Robert Reeves was a whirling dervish of energy as he led an impromptu tour through the Lord Jeffery Inn, just days before its official opening on Thursday, Jan. 5 and more than three years after it closed for extensive renovations. On today’s to-do list for Reeves and his crew: unload boxes, hang paintings, clean construction dust, arrange restaurant furniture, begin staff training and compile invitation lists for various opening events.

View the gallery of images from the final days of construction and leading up to the ribbon-cutting ceremony. (Photos by Rob Mattson/Amherst College)

Inside one of the Lord Jeff’s two sparkling kitchens, fresh produce and meats from area farms were already being delivered, along with pots, pans and other equipment. Wearing a starched white chef jacket with his name embroidered in cursive letters on it, Executive Chef Dino Giordano presented, for Reeves' approval, an exquisitely arranged roasted beet salad, one of many menu possibilities under consideration.

Reeves predicts that diners from throughout New England will savor the ambience at 30Boltwood, the new restaurant that will anchor the renovated inn and feature “farm to table” contemporary American fare at reasonable prices.

“Everyone is expecting the Elijah Boltwood Tavern with a facelift,” said Reeves, referring to the New England-themed eatery that formerly occupied the Lord Jeff. “This is not that at all. The dining here will be unique, cutting edge, with an unbelievable décor. We’re trying to elevate the dining experience in Amherst. This will not be another pub or tavern with sandwiches, wraps and French dips.”

As employees carefully removed stacks of gleaming dishware from boxes, Reeves listed some of the distinctive features of the $18 million renovation project that has been eagerly anticipated throughout the Pioneer Valley: 49 guestrooms and suites that have been extensively remodeled, outfitted with new furnishings and high definition televisions; complimentary high speed Internet, with plenty of bandwidth for all guests; a well-equipped exercise room; a garden area, complete with a wedding pavilion that can accommodate a tent as large as 40 by 80 feet; energy-efficient features throughout, including a heating and cooling system powered in part by 50 geothermal wells; a ballroom; and expanded conference facilities.

As initially planned and conceived by a Lord Jeffery Inn Committee, headed by former Amherst College Board of Trustees Chairman Charles Longsworth ’51, the renovation would have added 20 rooms to the Lord Jeff, as well as the features described above. Then, against the backdrop of economic uncertainty, trustees halted the project in Fall 2008, keeping the inn closed while they directed the committee to examine less costly renovation options.

The scaled back project trustees approved about a year later didn’t increase the number of rooms, but it was nevertheless extensive. Although the handsome brick-clad exterior remains, with a fresh coat of whitewash, every interior section of the 46,000-square-foot building was gutted “down to the studs” Reeves said. The building was then refurbished with a careful attention to historical detail that has earned it inclusion in the Amherst Central Historic Business District. Reeves expects that it will also garner recognition as a Historic Hotels of America, an exclusive group of about 200 members.

Longsworth estimates he’s stayed at the Lord Jeff more than 100 times over the decades and counts his engagement to his wife Polly as one of his fondest memories there. Although his inn committee work is finished, he’s volunteering his time to ensure that the interior of the inn will feature photos and other reminders of its historical connection to Amherst College. (The Amherst Inn Co., a subsidiary of Amherst College, owns the inn. College treasurer Peter Shea is the company's president.)

“I’ve taken on that assignment because I think it’s very important that the inn be recognized as part of the college, and that the college’s history and the inn’s history be glorified by evidence on the walls,” Longsworth said. That history, he added, will only serve to burnish the inn’s appeal.

“It’s going to be quickly recognized as the finest inn and hotel in the area,” he predicted. “It’s going to be very popular.”

Other alumni who were anxiously awaiting the Lord Jeff’s reopening included college trustee Cullen Murphy ’74, who chairs the trustees'  Building and Grounds Committee.

“As a gateway to the college the inn performs all kinds of useful college functions,” he said. “It’s a place to meet and socialize and when it went offline it became enormously clear what an asset it is to the college and community.”

The Lord Jeff will be managed by the Connecticut-based Waterford Hotel Group, an arrangement that Murphy said will benefit the college as well.

“We expect this to be a viable business,” Murphy said. “It may not generate the profits that a chain innkeeper might want, but we expect that it will be a good investment for the college.”

To Betsy Cannon Smith ’84, P ’15, the Lord Jeff’s absence has made her appreciate its importance to the college even more than before. For all of its admittedly threadbare appeal in recent years, the inn always remained popular with visitors to campus and was an important stop during alumni events, she said.

 “The Jeff’s reopening is like the return of a living room for Amherst College,” she said. “It’s a comfortable place and you know that you’ll be welcome there. Even if you don’t know anybody when you stop by, you know there will be people there who you’ll want to get to know.”

By Adam Gerchick '13

Rohan Mazumdar ’12 had not expected to spend his Friday night with a typewriter. But on Friday, Sept. 16, he arrived at Amherst’s first “letter-writing social,” where, from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., hundreds of students pressed envelopes with sealing wax and tapped away at classic typewriters. To Mazumdar’s surprise, he is now inspired to continue the practice.

See a gallery of photos from the AC After Dark Letter-Writing Social.

Sponsored by the college’s Student Activities Office, the letter-writing social—first in the Amherst After Dark series of late-night events—gave students the opportunity to mingle and relax while reviving the nearly lost art of pen-and-paper or typewritten-letter writing.

"Everyone was really into it," says Mazumdar. “I think both the ‘letter-writing’ and the ‘social’ parts of the event were really well appreciated.”

The brainchild of Crista Reed, assistant director of student activities, the social “was the kind of thing I always wanted to do as an undergrad,” she says. After discussing the proposal with Student Activities Dean Hannah Fatemi, Reed purchased—online—several traditional typewriters. Then, Reed admits (slightly sheepishly), she “figured out how to use them.”

Reed organized two stations, one in which students could operate typewriters and the other for those wishing to delve even deeper into history by using ink and quills. She also purchased envelopes and sealing wax.

Reed expected attendance to reach 150 to 200. Instead, by her estimate, more than 300 people arrived. “I was very pleasantly surprised,” she said. When students asked her to do it again, she decided to incorporate typewriting and letter writing into a Dec. 8 “craft night.”

The experience led several attendees to independently continue the practice of old-fashioned writing. “I actually wrote a letter to a friend in the week following the event,” Mazumdar says. So did Chris Lim ’12: “I was inspired to maintain correspondence with someone who moved out of Amherst through traditional letter writing. In fact, I took extra supplies from the event and wrote letters the next day.”

And thanks to Reed, the Amherst student body might now include a manual typist: Mazumdar heard a rumor that one student went to the typewriter store on North Pleasant Street (yes, there is such a place) asking to rent one.

Simonson’s illustration for the Annual Fund

For almost 40 years, Walter “Walt” Simonson ’68 has been one of the artists and writers behind some of the most recognizable comic book heroes, from the Avengers and the Fantastic Four to Wonder Woman and Thor. This spring, Simonson generously donated his time and talent to his alma mater by creating an Amherst-themed superhero for the June Annual Fund appeal. At Amherst, Simonson studied geology, and his interest in the sciences is still evident in his signature, which resembles a distorted brontosaurus.

Simonson’s work on Thor is legendary in the comic world, and with the May release of the film version, the accomplished artist is finally receiving a wider audience. During the mid-1980s, Simonson took nearly complete control of the storyline as both writer and artist. Although he did not create the title character, his time on the story saw a revival of Thor’s popularity as he introduced major new characters and plot twists. Earlier this year, Marvel published a complete hardcover collection of Simonson’s editions of Thor with newly colored artwork by Steve Oliff, an award-winning colorist in the comic book world who also generously donated his time and talent to Amherst in partnership with Simonson.

“Working on Thor was one of the highlights of my career and I am happy the character found a new audience in the recent film,” said Simonson. “In comics, there’s a creative freedom and an independence rarely found in other media. And I love the complexities of the job. You get to draw pictures in which you mold compositions, design characters, create landscapes, build cities, solve perspectives, forge weaponry, meld lettering and type with art, and fuse it all together into a story by playing with time and space. I haven’t found that sort of challenge anywhere else.”

Simonson has received multiple Shazam Awards, including recognitions for Best New Talent and Best Individual Short Story, and in 2010 he received the Hero Initiative Lifetime Achievement Award. 

Simonson isn’t the only famous artist to contribute artwork to Amherst’s Annual Fund. FoxTrot artist Bill Amend ’84 lent Quincy, the strip’s iconic iguana, and Peter Fox’s Amherst cap to the 2009 fund drive. 

By Ioanida Costache ’12

For the past three weeks a group of string players have been working with Professor of Music David Schneider on a chamber music project designed to get classical music out of its traditional settings of classrooms and concert halls.  With Schneider on clarinet, a string quartet composed of UMass alumnus Ben Van Vliet, me on violin, Hana Kommel ’10 on viola and local cellist Wayne Smith prepared a range of pieces to bring to a different kind of audience.

Schneider, who teaches courses on music theory, music history and analysis, has for some time wanted to organize a group of students who were interested in community engagement. He approached prospective group members in early April with this opportunity to exercise our performing muscles in atypical venues – in our case, the Amherst Survival Center (a community center that provides meals and other services to the needy) and the Hampshire County Jail. It sounded intriguing to me, and I signed on for “Chamber Music Outreach.”

Audience members listen to the musicians at the Amherst Survival Center.

Now, several weeks and almost 50 hours of rehearsal time later, I found myself cramped between a whirling fan and a humming refrigerator at the Amherst Survival Center. We would be playing during dinner. I hardly expected to be heard, let alone listened to. Having never been to the center, I had already been worried that we would feel out of place, unaccepted by the people and the space. But the moment we stepped in, we were received with such anticipation and warmth that all of those inhibitions fell away. The people sat down, listened intently and seemed to be immersed in our playing.

On our second visit, this time during lunch, crowded into a corner by the pantry, we should have felt more in the way than appreciated. We had to creatively find stopping points in our pieces to allow one woman to climb over us to get to the supplies.

Despite this, as the 75 people—including our own Tony Marx, who was volunteering at the center—stopped by to listen, I felt that our presence there was a definite positive. As Professor Schneider discussed each movement, one quiet-mannered man interrupted to ask a question about the “shaky thing” the violinists were doing with their left hands while playing. Ben stood up and explained that this is called vibrato and demonstrated the difference in timbre when the instrument is played with or without vibrato.

Watching this man curiously engage in something that was clearly foreign to him was the highlight of the entire experience for me. This man asking about vibrato made these concerts far more rewarding than the stuffy atmosphere of a “standard” concert in a music hall.

After we played, we were offered a great meal and great conversation with many of the listeners. An elderly woman who sat entranced through our entire set expressed many thanks as we were packing up even though she missed lunch to watch us.

The reception made us feel just what Tracy Levy, program director, described to sum up the concerts: “The Buckley Ensemble brought a sense of calm and wonder to the Amherst Survival Center both times they performed here.  The community was transformed by the beautiful music, and everyone—all 75 people for lunch and 20 people during dinner—expressed their appreciation and joy.”

We took our show farther down the road, to the Hampshire County Jail, where we played for the inmates in an acoustically booming visitors’ room. The setup in this venue was similar to that of a traditional concert; we were not integrated into general flow of the place, as we were  at the Survival Center. But the difference in audience made a huge difference in our playing. The group remarked to each other later that we felt we played our best at these performances because we felt like we had to really sell Brahms to these guys. The most wonderful part about it is that they picked up on it! When prompted for questions at the end, the inmates commented on how moving it was to see us play with such conviction and passion.

What exactly the listeners may have gotten out of our Mozart and Brahms, I’m not sure. It’s possible that the young girl listening to us with a smirk on her face might now find a way to bring an instrument into her life, or that we rekindled a forgotten interest for some of the older folks. It’s also possible that the impact we made wasn’t as direct as we would have hoped.

After performing twice at the Survival Center and playing another two sets at the Hampshire Jail, I don’t think any of the performers pieced together these fragments and feelings into a concluding statement about the experience. I do know that our group was greatly affected by the experience. I think the impact we made was in fact made onto us as well. The conversations we had among ourselves in reflection, as well as with the sheriff and other directors, highlighted our desire to do more of this outreach.

At the very least, these performances were exhilarating for us, since we felt responsible for bringing something we love and cherish into the lives of people who wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to classical music.

After our performance at the Survival Center, we handed out save-the-date cards for two additional performances by the Buckley Chamber Players. These concerts, Summer Songs on July 10 and Amber Hues on July 21, will be in Buckley Recital Hall are free and open to the public. We all hope to see some of our audience from the Survival Center there.

Photos by Samuel Masinter ’04.

By Katherine Duke '05

The students in the Interterm course “An Introduction to the Principles, Practices, and Procedures of Turbine Flight” sat in a darkened room in Merrill, taking turns on a joystick and mouse, being pilot and co-pilot on Microsoft Flight Simulator X (FSX). Projected onto a screen at the front of the room were the switches, dials and lights of a Boeing 737 flight deck and a simulated view of the trees, buildings and waters around the Beef Island Airport in Tortola, British Virgin Islands. Rain was lashing the plane’s windshield, lightning crackled in the distance, and the students were about to undertake a perilous mission.

The course, sponsored for the past three years by the Department of Astronomy, began on Jan. 13 with a trip to Connecticut’s (real) Bradley International Airport, where a pilot showed the class the instruments and control surfaces of a Falcon jet. Over the next week and a half in Merrill, instructor Captain Henry Parker Hirschel—who also teaches the Interterm course on “Celestial Navigation” —used a small, colorful model of a 737 for visual demonstrations and also taught brief lessons on Newtonian physics and the evolution of flight simulation technology.  

But the bulk of class time was devoted to practicing on FSX, and the trickiest skill to learn was landing—that’s when most accidents happen. The students’ final challenge was to fly “a despondent Williams College varsity football team” from Tortola to St. Thomas in the midst of a thunderstorm. As Hirschel gave helpful reminders (“It’s not a video game.” “Up is this way.” “You don’t mumble in a cockpit.”) and sometimes hummed Wagner’s The Valkyrie, each co-pilot read through a checklist from the course flight manual to make sure that the plane and pilot were “good to go,” and the pilots did their best to guide the jet up off one runway, through the air and down onto the other—sometimes successfully, sometimes not. “Oh, the humanity!” Hirschel cried each time the computer showed the plane plowing into the asphalt or a tree. He kept a tally of these “hull losses” on the blackboard.

In the end, the count was 23 hull losses—an improvement over last year’s 27—and several safe journeys. While this course didn’t exactly provide the 2,000-plus hours of jet time required for real licensure to be a co-pilot, every student did step up, salute and receive a certificate of membership into the “Merrill Flyers of Amherst College.”

See more photos from the class here.

“You see these little rolls of fat?” Jessica Ball ’09 points to the plump figures in an oil painting on the wall. “That’s Rubens!”

Ball is lecturing to a group of visitors to the Mead Art Museum. Her topic is Charity Enlightening the World, by 17th-century Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens, who is indeed known for showing the beauty of excess flesh (ask any of us who have ever been described as “Rubinesque”). The painting, Ball explains, was commissioned by Isabella, Archduchess of Brussels, in 1627; owned for a time by Rococo painter François Boucher; and finally purchased by the Mead in 1961. It depicts a personification of the idea of charity: a round, nurturing mother figure of “magnetic appeal,” with three well-fed babies clamoring for her attention. She holds high a lit torch, shedding light on a globe. (Terras irradient, Charity!)

Ball is one of the student docents at the Mead—each of whom, during lunch hours throughout spring semester, delivered a 10-minute gallery talk on a painting of his or her choice. Though an English major, Ball takes a lot of art classes, and Charity Enlightening the World caught her attention because of its diminutive size. “I actually found that this image was just as striking as the two huge paintings around it,” she says. Also intriguing was the fact that the painting was never meant to be displayed in a gallery—it was merely a preliminary sketch; the image was woven into part of a tapestry of numerous Christian virtues, and the tapestry hung in a convent in Madrid. Rough and unfinished, Charity gives insights into Rubens’ process that are not visible in a finalized work. Notice the lack of detail in the background, Ball says, and how the paint is so much thinner in the dark areas, almost revealing the wood underneath.         

After Ball’s talk, I speak with Lizzie Barker, who’s in her first year as director of the Mead. The “Ten Minutes with a Masterpiece” lecture series is just one of several new projects she’s instituted with the docents this year. She wanted them to have as much experience as possible “doing their own thinking about original works of art.” Other initiatives have included a collaboration with The Amherst Student, in which the newspaper featured an article about a different Mead artwork every week, and a “Spring Into Art” party to celebrate the launch of the museum’s new downloadable podcast audio and video tours. Barker is most excited, though, about plans to hire a full-time educator to work with docents and visitors.

The 10-minute docent talks will resume next year, should you wish to spend your lunch break being enlightened.

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by Bill Sweet

Hugh Price '63, a nonresident Senior Fellow for the Brookings Institution and former president of the National Urban League (1994-2003), recently donated numerous records from his multiple careers to the College's Archives and Special Collections at Frost Library.

After more than a half-century of working for the causes of racial justice and education, Price is saddened to see how much more work remains with these issues, but he is impressed with the new generation of activists and future policy makers.

Price said he decided to donate the papers to Amherst because of family ties to the College, and because of the opportunity to provide student and faculty researchers with unpublished material concerning the civil rights movement and other significant causes.

"I was dealing with police brutality, excessive use of deadly police force 50 years ago," he said. "It's important to understand for people who are researching this today, who are advocates today, to understand how the issues have evolved."

The donation includes papers dating back to the 1960s, covering numerous careers up through his stints with the National Urban League and the Brookings Institution.

In particular, there are documents that deal with Price's work with the civil rights and antipoverty movements.

• Correspondence (though only photocopies of the letters from Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush)
• Keynote speeches
• Strategic memos
• Newspaper and magazine articles
• Book manuscripts
• Position papers
• Recordings of television appearances

The summer after graduating from Amherst, he served as a marshal for the March On Washington. After earning a law degree from Yale in 1966, Price began his legal career representing poor clients in New Haven, Conn., later becoming the first executive director of the Black Coalition of New Haven.

Upon moving his family to New York City in 1978, he spent four years as an editorial writer for The New York Times, and then six years as senior vice president of WNET/Thirteen in New York, the nation’s largest public television station.

Appointed to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988, he oversaw its domestic investments improving educational opportunities for minorities and at-risk youth.

Under his urging and consultation, the National Guard launched its Youth ChalleNGe Corps, a 22-week residential program conducted at selected U.S. military bases that teaches academic and life skills to high school dropouts. This program is the subject of Price's latest book, Strugglers Into Strivers, which argues that the social-emotional elements of the military model could help U.S. public schools.

Many of the papers are related to his days as president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League (1994 − 2003), the nation's oldest and largest community-based movement empowering African Americans to enter the economic and social mainstream.

Most recently he was a visiting professor in public and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School.

"I've had about 13 careers," he said. "One of the blessings of having had a lot of careers is you move offices a lot, and stuff gets boxed up. If you don't unbox it, it stays put."

"It's like offering a child for adoption," he said. "But I feel that's public space and public property."

At the Brookings Institution, the nation’s oldest think tank, he specializes in education, equal opportunity, civil rights and urban affairs.

Price received an honorary doctorate from Amherst in 1995.

Price credits his continually-evolving professional life to his Amherst education.

"Amherst made me curious about everything, and I tried to sate it," he said. "It gave me the confidence to try lots of different things, in a lot of very different fields."

Price has four generations of Amherst connections. His sister-in-law is the eldest daughter of Dr. Charles R. Drew '26 and his wife is niece of Dr. William Montague Cobb ’25. A nephew is Dr. Kendall Drew Price ’92 and a grandniece is Rachel Abernethy ’16.

"I guess I'd say Amherst owns a big piece of us, and we own a little piece of Amherst," he said.

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by Bill Sweet

Right outside of Amherst College’s dining hall, a new student club is exploring what just might be the future of food.

This spring, the Hooked on Aquaponics club has been constructing a greenhouse outside of Valentine Dining Hall. Their ultimate goal is to have a self-sustaining, soil-free aquaponics operation raising fish and plants.

Aquaponics combines aquaculture (farming of aquatic animals) with hydroponics (growing plants without soil). The greenhouse setup collects waste from the fish and converts it into plant food.

The project began as a collaborative effort, with individual aspects drawn from the interests of founding members Peter Suechting ’15, Jim Hall ’15, Thais Correia ’16 and Eli Mansbach ’18. Hooked on Aquaponics now boasts about 10 core members and attracts twice that at meetings.

“We have a very strong base of underclassmen,” said Hall. “When it comes to building projects, everyone wants to get involved, even people who aren’t official members.”

Correia is a computer science major who’s taken several environmental studies classes. She’s interested in how technology can be used for the betterment of the Earth’s health. “I thought this was a cool way to do something on campus and work on both of these interests,” she said. She and Henry Laney ’17 have assembled an electronic system that keeps the moving parts of the greenhouse running and collects data on pH, temperature and more. Suechting's involvement comes from his original plan to build a greenhouse as part of his environmental studies senior thesis.

The greenhouse, funded by the Office of the President, contains two 300-gallon fish tanks, which drain into a filtered tank. The water will then be pumped into six tubs containing plants and bacteria which assist in converting the fish waste into usable fertilizer.

“Once the water reaches a certain level, it gets dumped back into the [fish] tank,” said Correia. “By this point it’s been mostly filtered out by the plants themselves … so the only water that we lose is through evaporation.”

In theory, hydroponic systems conserve 90 percent more water than traditional agricultural methods, and aquaponic systems, in turn, conserve 90 percent more than hydroponics. Depending on the plant, aquaponics can make it possible to grow twice as many plants per square foot as in traditional agriculture.

“You can grow it year-round. You can produce more in less space using fewer resources,” Hall said.

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The club is starting with 200 baby koi, being fed fish food as the operation gets going. Future plans include raising edible fish such as tilapia, carp or bass, Suechting said.

The group hopes to sell the produce and fish to Valentine Dining Hall, especially during the winter, when the campus’s Book & Plow Farm doesn’t operate. “We wouldn't be able to provide the whole school with enough fish, but it could supplement,” Suechting said. “Things grow a lot faster in these types of systems, and it’s easier for us to switch between different types of plants.”

The implications for a hungry planet are significant if this technology can be implemented on a large scale, students said. Abandoned buildings could be converted into greenhouses, bringing fresh, organic produce and jobs back to urban dead zones. As produce could be made year-round potentially anywhere, there would be no transportation costs.

Hooked on Aquaponics intends to pass the campus greenhouse down from class to class. As it involves a potentially wide array of technologies and species, the club’s founders are optimistic that the greenhouse can thrive and evolve.

“I hope that every year people just keep adding more and more complexity to the system, and eventually we can get a bigger greenhouse,” said Correia. “This is just the beginning.”

May 4, 2015
By Rachel Rogol

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Darrow and Brathwaite in the art studio they share with Blackmore and Rothkopf in Fayerweather Hall

After a year spent sharing an art studio on the bottom floor of Fayerweather Hall, Natasha Blackmore, Shannon Brathwaite, María Darrow and Emma Rothkopf are slowly beginning to pack and clear the space for next year’s studio art seniors.

It’s here that they’ve collectively created more than 45 works of art—including collage-style paintings with sculptural elements (Blackmore); large and small abstract paintings (Brathwaite); sculptures made from welded steel and scraps of fabric (Darrow); and intimately rendered large-scale photographs (Rothkopf)—that are on display in this year’s Studio Honors Exhibition at the Eli Marsh Gallery through May 24.

Read on to learn more about their inspirations for the works on view and a bit about the artistic processes they’ve developed while at Amherst.

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Shannon Brathwaite, Records of Entropy

Brathwaite says her senior thesis, a collection of 16 abstract paintings, was inspired by an exhibit she saw in her hometown of Brooklyn, N.Y.: Kara Walker’s sphinx-shaped sugar sculpture exhibited in an old sugar factory.

“I was actually inspired by the building itself, which was super-rusty, super-grungy and painfully smelled like sugar,” Brathwaite says. “It was terrible, but it looked really cool, so I took a bunch of pictures of the walls and decided to do paintings of them.”

Constructed with canvas, ink, acrylic paint, wood and scraps of paper, her paintings are a mix of “squares like [Piet] Mondrian’s,” “Jackson Pollock-y drips,” and “the feeling of gravity, decay, rust, aging and things falling apart but still being beautiful,” she says.

Though she dabbled in art in high school, Brathwaite says she didn’t actually come to Amherst to be an artist. In her first year, she says she was on the med-school track and didn’t take a single art class: “I was miserable!” So she signed up for an art class, decided to take on an art major in addition to her pre-med classes, and never looked back.

 

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Emma Rothkopf, Bathrooms and Bedrooms

Inspired by her friends at Amherst and at home in Harvard, Mass., Rothkopf’s senior thesis is a series of 14 photographs depicting intimate scenes of young women ages 14–26. “They’re psychological in a way,” she explains. “You enter into the psyche of a young woman.”

Her thesis title, Bathrooms and Bedrooms, refers to where she took the photos, in spaces most people consider private. This allowed her to capture what she calls “moments that you don’t normally see photographed.”

Before coming to Amherst, Rothkopf considered herself a painter. It wasn’t until her sophomore year, in Professor Justin Kimball’s intro photography course, that she tried her hand at photography. “I love painting, but when I took photography, I felt like for the first time I was forced to really think about what I was making, not just how I was making.” And that new line of thinking is what inspired her to choose photography over painting for her senior thesis.

Rothkopf says photography has given her a new way to make work that she finds more flexible than painting: “It’s a way for me to make the things I’m interested in, and if it doesn’t work out, I can try it again, and tweak it slightly, and it’s a faster process in that way than any other medium that I’ve ever done.”

 

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Natasha Blackmore, Transcendence and Affliction

Working in large-scale collage with paper pieces and watered-down acrylic, Blackmore created five paintings for her thesis that she says are like “imprints” of her body. “I work on the floor,” she explains, and instead of using paintbrushes, “I use my hands,” she says while moving her hand to mimic the circular shape that appears in most of her paintings. 

Inspired by Zen Buddhist philosophy, many of Blackmore’s paintings incorporate the ensō, a hand-drawn circle used to express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create. In addition to being inspired by the universal elements the ensō embodies, Blackmore says her work is about dualities: “It’s about the private and the public, lightness and heaviness, earth and sky.”

Her paintings are also simultaneously personal and collaborative. For instance, Circle of Thoughts is an interactive painting installed on the floor of Eli Marsh Gallery and accompanied by paper, pens and an invitation to the viewer to add “any thought or burden, wish, hope, secret, etc.” The idea in adding a small piece of paper to the larger work, says Blackmore, is that “the sum is literally greater than its parts.”

 

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María Darrow, Winds of Change/Freak Flags/Onward

Darrow’s thesis features six sculptures on view in Amherst’s newly renovated Powerhouse, dozens of email printouts haphazardly stapled to a wall in the Eli Marsh Gallery and five paintings that hang in the stairwells of the social dorms.

Inspired by the college’s ongoing conversations about sexual assault and the representation of women on campus, Darrow says her senior thesis subtly encourages viewers to talk about issues of gender in a public setting. 

Her sculptures, designed to hang in front of the Powerhouse windows, incorporate translucent fabric that includes bits of her own clothing and some donated from friends. “I wanted them to be personal and have belonged to someone,” she says. Darrow worked with gender-specific clothing, such as bras and men’s underwear, and purposefully deconstructed them so that at first glance their gender specificities are hardly noticeable.

In thinking about the representation of women on campus and wanting to make work that sparks conversation, Darrow says, “I think a big part of it is just taking women more seriously.”

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See their collective works in the Studio Honors Exhibition, on view in the Eli Marsh Gallery in Fayerweather Hall through Sunday, May 24.

Eli Marsh Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 10 a.m.–4 p.m.
Special Hours for Commencement: Saturday, May 23, & Sunday, May 24, 10 a.m.–2 p.m.

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See more photos from the Arts at Amherst Spring Festival.

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The second annual Arts at Amherst Spring Festival, April 10–19, celebrated the multitude of arts on campus. Organized by The Arts at Amherst Initiative—a collaboration among faculty from Amherst’s Departments of Art and the History of Art, Music and Theater and Dance, as well as the Mead Art Museum—the festival featured:

• live performances by student and faculty musicians
• a hands-on "century camera" workshop with experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats '94
• short film screenings with award-winning filmmaker Akosua Adoma Owusu
• a faculty performance uniting jazz, dance, new opera and video 
• and more! 

Ron Bashford, assistant professor of theater and dance and one of the festival's faculty organizers, says this year's festival was a success particularly among students: "One representative sophomore said to me how excited he was to attend a week of events involving so many people in the arts community here, and how much he looked forward to it happening again next year." 

Though planning for next year's arts festival hasn't yet begun, there are many arts events happening on campus in the weeks, months and year ahead. Bookmark amherst.edu/arts/calendar and sign up for Arts & Museums: Happenings Ahead, a biweekly email, to stay in the know.

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Even as students enter the time of year where they are practically living in Frost Library, they recently gathered there to share and discuss their theses and other projects at the third annual Amherst Explorations.

The daylong event offers a rare opportunity for students from a broad range of majors to share in one setting what they have been working on in the lab, classroom and community.

“There’s nothing more important than going and putting your ideas to work in the world, with an opportunity to think about the implications of what you’re doing,” said Amherst President Biddy Martin, introducing the event.

Some students and teams shared their projects via poster displays. These included findings from biology students who participated in the 2014 Interterm field trip to Monteverde, Costa Rica, where they studied tropical organisms such as bats, ants and butterflies.

• John Kim ’15, Kelvin Chen ’16 and Sean Rodriguez ’15 prepared a poster about the life lurking under rotting logs.
• Elizabeth Black ’16, Margaret Bogardus ’15 and Madeleine Lobrano ’15 presented findings about flower pollination.

Other projects explored

• geologic records of prehistoric climate change in Mexico
• protein folding
• the circadian clock
• plant defense mechanisms

In a TED-style series of lightning talks, students gave brief overviews of their thesis projects.

Coralie Pardo ’15, a Five College Digital Humanities Fellow, gave a presentation on a virtual-reality game that she is creating, geared at simulating what it is like to experience racism as a black person. Virtual interactions within the game “could be things like being followed in your neighborhood because somebody thinks you don’t belong, or being detained for buying something that’s too expensive,” she said. “Ideally the person who is playing the game will experience these things and take a step back and think … ‘When have I thought these things or done any of these things?’”

Student panels featured reports from fellowship programs such as the Lane Fellowships, which support arts projects informed by materials in the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections, and the Folger Fellowships, which involve intensive research at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Sophie Chung ’17, a managing news editor for The Student, did a project looking at printed news in 17th-century England. “It was really humbling to see this paper [in the Folger collection] that had survived,” the Folger fellow said.

Other panels shared tips and travails of the thesis process. Several speakers noted that one’s thesis research can be the start of something bigger. “The thesis doesn’t have to end when the due date ends,” said Gabriel Gonzalez ’15.

Gonzalez also spoke on a panel of students who assisted with “Life Is a Dream,” a course taught at the Hampshire County Jail and House of Correction as part of the Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program.

Missy Roser ’94, head of research and instruction at Frost Library, said she and her colleagues always enjoy learning about students’ work at Amherst Explorations. “This is one of our favorite days of the year on campus,” she said, “because we get to see what they’ve actually been doing writ large, and it’s amazing.”

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Browse a Flickr gallery of photos from the City Streets festival.

The evening of Sunday, April 19, provided beautiful weather for the City Streets festival on the Valentine Quad. Amherst College students, faculty, staff and families gathered to play games and watch fire dancers. Snacks from around the world, music in various languages, and the dozens of national flags displayed on Fayerweather Hall gave this annual street fair some international flair.