Coming off a season that saw the 2016-2017 Amherst women’s basketball team finish with an incredible 33-0, the Mammoths will look to recapture some of the success that saw the tean captured both a NESCAC title and Division III National Championship. This was the program’s second ever national championship and first ever undefeated season.
The Amherst women’s soccer team extended its win streak to four and its unbeaten streak to six with a victory over the Wesleyan Cardinals in the Mammoths’ sole match-up of the week on Saturday.
The win came at a crucial time in the season, as the Mammoths needed to top the Cardinals in order to secure a spot in the upcoming NESCAC tournament. Saturday also marked Amherst’s homecoming and the team’s Senior Day.
Renowned poet and former John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer Richard Wilbur ’42 died on Oct. 14 after a lifetime of writing, reading and teaching. In a community-wide email, President Biddy Martin and Dean of Faculty Catherine Epstein wrote that Wilbur, a two-time Pulitzer Prize recipient and U.S. Poet Laureate, was “a remarkable man whose decency and humanity are as memorable as his verse.”
Direct Action Coordinating Committee (DACC), a student-run group that aims to promote student rights and social justice on campus, hosted a three-day event called Climate Camp on Oct. 11-13. The event, intended to raise campus-wide awareness and support for divestment of the college’s endowment from fossil fuels and indirect investments in private prisons, took place as a camp-out on the First-Year Quad.
After 35 years in higher education, 12 of which she spent at Amherst College, Chief Student Affairs Officer Suzanne Coffey will retire at the end of this year. President Biddy Martin announced her retirement and the start of the search for a replacement in an email to the college community on Oct. 17. The college aims to secure a new chief student affairs officer by July 1, 2018, according to Dean of the Faculty Catherine Epstein.
The Multicultural Resource Center hosted a panel and discussion on undocumented student activism and the right to education in conjunction with Freedom University on Oct. 13. According to its website, Freedom University is a Georgia-based school that “provides tuition-free education, college application and scholarship assistance and social movement leadership training to undocumented students banned from public higher education in Georgia.”
Mammoth Munch, a student-run late-night food delivery service from Schwemm’s Cafe to students, had its trial run from Oct. 1 to Oct. 14. This trial period allowed students to test out the service, which is still in its early stages.
The idea for this enterprise came from Mateen Mills ’20. This past summer, Mills attended a business program at Middlebury called MiddCORE and was inspired by a similar student-run service called GrilleME.
