Many students, including me, desire to put the classroom in the service of politics. I mean that many of us think that, with the forces of thought, knowledge-production, and scholarship on our side, we can enact political change and transformation. And while it is true that we can, it might be worth pausing over this desire to ask the question: Should “the life of the mind,” to borrow Hannah Arendt’s formulation, be employed to enact social change, issue public policy and modify our ethos toward the world?
On Sunday afternoon, playing in The Masters, one of golf’s four Major Tournaments, Jordan Spieth, the No. 2 ranked golfer in the world and my favorite athlete in the world, arrived at the 10th hole of Augusta National Golf Club with a five shot lead. Spieth, the defending champion at Augusta, had just birdied the final four holes of the front nine. He knew he was going to win the tournament. I knew he was going to win the tournament. Everyone knew.
He did not win the tournament.
On a campus fraught with loneliness and stress, the decision of where to live on campus is of the utmost important for Amherst students. The current room draw process, revamped with the new online system, aimed to alleviate some of the anxiety, but students still found themselves battling with unnecessary extra pressure associated with the perils of the process on top of the unavoidable stress involved in the procedure.
By the end of a chaotic week of in-conference matchups, the Amherst men’s lacrosse team had claimed two important victories, one of which was over Colby. The purple and white outlasted the Mules to clinch the 12-9 win at home. The real story of the week, however, came just half a week earlier in a nail-biter against Wesleyan.
Following a thrilling loss to Middlebury that saw a near comeback in the fourth quarter, Amherst looked to regain their momentum against a tough Wesleyan team. However, they soon found themselves in a deficit, and had to claw themselves back into the game.
The women’s golf team established themselves as a dominant force this weekend in the opening tournament of their spring season in Poughkeepsie, New York. Out of the twelve teams at the Vassar College Invitational, the purple and white finished second with a team score of 649, falling only to NESCAC rival Williams College. Distancing themselves from the rest of the pack, Amherst finished 29 strokes ahead of third-place Middlebury and 31 strokes ahead of fourth-place SUNY Cortland.
Last week, the baseball team was scheduled to take on MIT and rival Williams. Due to weather complications, Wednesday’s game against MIT was cancelled. However, by Friday, the snow had melted and the men were ready to revive the oldest baseball rivalry in the history of the sport: Amherst versus Williams.
The purple and white started off strong when Max Steinhorn ’18 and Ariel Kenney ’18 crossed home plate to earn an early 2-0 lead. In the top of the third, Yanni Thanopolous ’17 sent a homer over the right center field fence, knocking in three runs and increasing the lead to 5-0.
Michael Harmon ’16 created his own interdisciplinary major “Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.” His thesis focuses on a trip he took by train in South Africa and Zimbabwe. His advisers are history professor Sean Redding, European Studies professor Ronald Rosbottom and political science professor Amrita Basu.
Q: What is your major and what is your thesis about?
