The Office of Environmental Sustainability is holding the Amherst All In initiative this week, a T-shirt campaign designed to encourage positive student attitudes towards environmental activism.
Planning for the Amherst All In campaign began last semester. According to the campaign’s student organizer Suhasini Ghosh ’16, the campaign’s name comes from the goal of demonstrating the widespread effect of environmentalism on daily life.
At first, this op-ed was going to be a call to arms, asking our fellow seniors to boycott the senior gift drive. As members of Amherst’s divestment campaign, we planned to refrain from donating to Amherst College until the college has divested, a pledge that many other environmentally-conscious alumn have already taken. Amherst still has many investments tied to the fossil fuel industry, and we felt that it was important that our class does not give our dollars to the companies that are destroying our planet.
Renowned author Chris Abani delivered a speech titled “My Face and Ours: Views of Today’s America” in Stirn Auditorium on Feb. 24. Abani’s talk focused on themes from his new book of essays, “The Face: Cartography of the Void,” and was part of a lecture series taking place to honor Black History Month. Abani commented on the complex undercurrents of race and individual and collective identity in people’s interactions with their own and others’ faces.
The red planet has been a source of inspiration for years, especially for science fiction visionaries such as H.G. Welles and Edgar Rice Burroughs. It has hosted alien civilizations, portals to other dimensions and Bugs Bunny. This time, Matt Damon takes on the second step of the final frontier. It’s his Oscar-nominated performance that anchors this movie, “The Martian,” and allows legendary science fiction director Ridley Scott to produce a quality adaption of the Andy Weir novel of same title.
Fresh off their 15th appearance in the NESCAC championship tournament, the Amherst women’s lacrosse team is primed to succeed in the 2016 season. The squad is comprised of a mix of veterans and new faces, with 18 players returning to the team from last year. These upperclassmen will look to guide and rely upon the 10 new players joining the purple and white on the field for the first time.
The college welcomed Jesse Beal as the new director of the Women’s and Gender Center on Tuesday, March 1. Beal formerly worked as the acting director for the office of diversity services at Suffolk University. The center will hold a meet and greet with them (Beal uses the non-binary pronouns they/them/theirs) from 3 to 5 p.m. this Thursday.
It’s unfortunately clear that a vibrant music scene doesn’t exist in the mainstream social fabric of Amherst College. In my experience, when concerts happen on campus, very few people know about them and attend them. And on Saturday nights, the social dorms tend to radiate the same ten pop songs. Certainly, people have schoolwork to do, jobs to work and higher priorities than participating in the creation of a more sophisticated musical culture.
