Work to begin on new dorms

Architects are making plans for new campus dormitories and the construction phase is expected to begin with work on the conversion of Williston Hall this August. Estimated cost of the initial projects is $11.8 million.

williston

These projects include $3.5 million in changes to Williston, which now houses classrooms and faculty offices, to make it a freshman dormitory for 36 students. The architect chosen for Williston's conversion—a remodeling that will be faithful to the historic exterior of the 144-year-old landmark—is James McKinney of Sacco-McKinney Architects of Albany, N.Y.

Following the start of that project, new housing for 65 students will also be constructed near Milliken, an existing dormitory that used to be the college infirmary. The cost estimate of the new dormitory complex there is $6.2 million, and the architect will be William Rawn & Associates of Boston.

A third project, also to be undertaken this summer, is a $2.1-million installation of temporary, modular housing for 100 students just south of the Life Sciences Building, on the former site of the college's old clay tennis courts. The plan is for these housing units to be removed after five years.

The three projects are scheduled to be completed on or before June 2003. They will give the college new rooms for 201 students, which will then allow it to vacate two freshman dormitories—James and Stearns—which now house nearly 200 students. The obsolescent, 56-year-old James and Stearns will then be torn down and replaced on site with two similar but less crowded, better-quality dormitories for first-year students. The architectural firm selected for the James and Stearns project is Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott of Boston. Estimated total cost of this two-dorm project is an additional $15 million.

President Gerety explains that Amherst's current student housing "is inadequate in comparison to our peers, and we have for too long deferred action of 'de-tripling' first-year rooms, providing common space for residential programming, and addressing safety and infrastructure needs in some of our dormitories."

The closely connected sequence of moves, culminating in 2007 with the conversion of the Pratt Geology Building into a seventh freshman dorm, will correct those housing deficiencies and also achieve its goal of housing all freshmen around the historic Main Quadrangle (see Summer 2001 Amherst). Appleton Hall and North and South dormitories are already freshman residences.

In the meantime, the philosophy and black studies departments will be moved from their present offices in Williston to new quarters in Cooper House, the former faculty apartment building on College Street.

Before the dorm-building sequence is over, new facilities will be built for geology and for the Pratt Museum of Natural History.

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Love those disgusting places!

It was recently revealed that James and Stearns Halls—the 55-year-old brick boxes in which a large percentage of the first-year class is said to live in notorious squalor—will be torn down and rebuilt, replaced with brand-new, state-of-the-art dormitories. Potential improvements on the buildings include a de-tripling of overcrowded student rooms, the addition of study areas in corridors, and construction of specialized areas like music practice rooms and theater performance spaces meant to bring all students—not just first-year students—to the freshman quad. Yes, it's certain: life in James and Stearns is about to undergo a much-needed replacement.

Just don't tell the students.

Said Phil Maciak '05 on living in Stearns: "It's the most magnificent experience of your life."

"The dorm's got a lot of personality," echoed Ajanta Patel '05. "Old and grungy."

"It was dirty, it was loud," said former James resident Jesse Crew '04. "It was a good place to live."

Such comments do not come from some aberrant group of students with a penchant for masochism; the number of people attempting to escape the two buildings when other first-year living arrangements become available is, according to Dean of Students Ben Lieber, surprisingly slim. Year after year they may grumble, but they do not try to leave. "What always amazes me is how tolerant students are," Lieber said. "By and large, it's been surprising how few complaints we've gotten. It just goes to show that you can subject human beings to almost anything and they'll thank you for it."

It is next to impossible to find someone who has lived in the old buildings who wishes they never had. Even the upperclassmen who now relish the peace, quiet and personal space of their singles in theme houses or the social dorms still insist on being glad about where the Housing Gods placed them as incoming students. Chalk it up to pride, or resignation, or maybe cases of clinical insanity, but the James-and-Stearns-ians really do love their disgusting freshman dorms. And trying to figure out exactly why is half the fun.

Part of the mystery has something to do with making the best of an uncomfortable setup, one that students see as a force compelling them to socialize. "I think they should keep the rooms small—it forces a connection between people," said Maciak. "This place has a lot of benefits people don't give it credit for. It's cramped, but in a good way."

Sophomore Andrew Gillette concurred. "You're forced to get to know each other," he said. "I hope they keep the long hallways with lots of rooms, instead of those creepy hallways in Pratt, or suites like in the social dorms."

The idea is odd, but it makes a twisted kind of sense: being grateful for the solidarity built among people who have all been submitted to the same kind of torture. "You learn how to live in very small spaces with very different people," said Alexandra Linden '04 of the James experience. "My roommates were people I wouldn't have met any other way. The fact that the people on my floor were so different and yet we all came together was pretty amazing. I hope they don't lose the social atmosphere. That was the thing about James: it had a different dynamic than other places. In North and South, if you didn't want to be social, you didn't have to, whereas in James you're forced to be social, just because of the setup. You can't isolate yourself."

This solidarity is closely related to another possible explanation for the love affair between James and Stearns and their residents: the affiliation it brings to first-year students trying to find their place on campus. "The thing I miss most is the sense of belonging to one of [the dorms]," Linden said, remembering James-versus-Stearns snowball fights. "You had a sense of identity. Everyone remembers where you lived your freshman year—it stays with you. The theme houses and the upperclass dorms are really nice, a lot nicer than James, but you'll never get the kind of intimacy again that you had there."

"James had a social atmosphere," agreed Crew, who has since moved to a single in Pond Annex but seems almost wistful for his home of a year ago. "Here, people keep their doors closed, and it's much less conducive to socializing."

This is not to say that life in the dorms is all bliss. All of these students, even the ones who seem most fond of James and Stearns, are quick to point out that the buildings are anything but four-star hotels. They are crammed to the gills with people on different schedules, and lack of space undoubtedly presents uncomfortable situations. One needn't think very hard to figure out the kind of problems that arise in buildings so packed that dorm rooms become the only common areas for socialization.

"I've just gotten into the habit of not going to bed before two in the morning," said Patel. "The one time I tried to go to bed earlier was the second night of school. I got into bed at midnight and I couldn't sleep for hours. Stearns has its own nightlife." She pauses and chuckles. "It really is a nightlife. It doesn't end until three, but even then it's not really over. People are up at all hours."

The paper-thin walls, overcrowding and lack of common space cause more than sleep deprivation; they also make Frost Library the only place where one could even consider doing classwork. Living in James and Stearns sometimes means having trouble remembering that being a college student means studying, too.

"People leave their rooms and go to the basement because there are so many people in their rooms—but then there are so many people in the basement that it becomes a social scene of its own," said Maciak. "It's a never-ending cycle of not getting work done."

Such problems have something to do, at least in part, with the fact that neither James nor Stearns has a specific place, entirely separate from a study area, where masses of first-year students can gather to do nothing in particular. "There's no decent social space," Dean Lieber said of the dorms as they currently stand. "The basements are very institutionalized—there's all that linoleum, and it's kind of cold. And there's no social space at all on the floors. It's almost a paradox: the former frat houses where upperclassmen live have more social space, and the freshman [dorms] have less, even though the freshmen are the ones who socialize in larger groups. In a funny kind of way, our living arrangements are backwards in terms of social space."

This leads to any number of compensatory strategies, which become more and more tragically amusing as students leave their own rooms and try to leave their roommates to study or sleep in peace. "Right now we use our bathroom as a common room," said Patel. "It's this really random thing. We all stand around and talk in the bathroom."

So what would these students have the architects of the new buildings plan? Suggestions vary from the reasonable to the ridiculous.

"The hallways were narrow, creepy and dimly lit," said Crew. "Add better lighting and carpeting, and widen the hallways a little."

"Everything feels kind of old," Patel, a fourth-floor resident, grumbled. "There's no ventilation in the bathrooms; there aren't even any elevators."

Junior Amanda Gabai's proposals sound a little bitter. "Perhaps more singles, like North with the connecting door," she said. "Perhaps get rid of all the football players."

Current plans do not include pacifying lazy people who hate stairs or talk about eliminating athletes, but they do take the rest of the suggestions into account. Tentative figures depict new buildings that will each have 85 beds, in a combination of one- and two-room doubles. Lieber says there will be test-fittings of different schemes over the next few months, and that the number of beds that actually end up in James and Stearns will determine the number placed in the new dorm in a renovated Pratt Geology Building. Plans include social spaces on every floor, better social spaces on the ground floor and in the basement, and separate spaces for socializing and studying. Reconstruction will begin at the close of the school year in 2003, continuing through the summer and the 2003-04 school year; the new buildings are set to house members of the Class of 2008.

But, for now, the claustrophobic and backward James and Stearns will continue to inspire implausible adoration in the Amherst students who live there. When asked to describe his feelings toward his smelly, beat-up home, Maciak waxed poetic.

"It's a speechless awe of this filthy rathole of a dorm," he said, "an inexplicable feeling about what we like about this place."

—Rebecca Louick '04

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College commissions Frost sculpture

The college has commissioned sculptor Penelope Jencks to create a granite statue of Robert Frost that will be placed under trees on the east side of the War Memorial. It is planned as a 50th Reunion gift from the Class of 1957.

Jencks, a resident of Newton, Mass., is best known for her critically acclaimed statue of Eleanor Roosevelt that was installed five years ago in a park on Riverside Drive in Manhattan's Upper West Side. Sculpture Review magazine has described the hallmarks of Jencks's work as "informality, intimacy and unusual emotional rightness of pose."

For the Frost piece, due to be completed before '57's reunion, the sculptor envisions "a casual pose, half seated half standing against a pile of rocks. . . . In his hand he would be holding a book. This would all be carved," she says, "from one piece of granite: rocks, figure and book." The eight-foot figure will be placed on the ground without a pedestal and will face across the Main Quadrangle toward
the Robert Frost Library. A low stone wall will be placed in back of the memorial to set it apart from the brick Seeley Mudd Mathematics and Computer Science Building rising behind it.

The famous poet was on the Amherst faculty for more than 30 years, beginning in 1917 and continuing on and off until his death in 1963.

The production process for the sculpture will begin with Jencks's creation of a three-foot-high "maquette" in clay. After this is approved by college representatives, it will be cast into plaster and sent to Pietrasanta in Italy, where it will be enlarged in clay to a height of six feet. Jencks will refine it again at that stage, and it will be cast again into a work in plaster, which in turn will be enlarged when it's carved in granite by artisans.

When the work is finished it will be shipped by boat to Boston and by truck to Amherst. Overall cost of the project is expected to be around $250,000.

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Folger head to retire

Werner L. Gundersheimer '59, the Renaissance historian who has been director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., for the past 18 years, announced last year that he will retire from that post at the end of June.

Many things can happen in 18 years, and under Gundersheimer's leadership a lot has happened at the Folger, an independent research facility governed by the Amherst Trustees. The institution's primary endowment fund, which was $27 million in 1984, grew to $175 million. During Gundersheimer's tenure new educational and public programs have been established, and there have been improvements to the 70-year-old library's facilities.

The Folger was established in 1932 by the will of Henry Clay Folger of Amherst's Class of 1879 and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, to house their collection of Shakespeare materials—a collection that was and still is the most complete of its kind in the world. The library now also boasts the largest accumulation of English language publications from 1475 to 1640 outside of England, and it has collections of Continental Renaissance materials as well.

When the Trustees looked in 1983 for someone to succeed the library's third director, O. B. Hardison, Jr., they chose Gundersheimer, who was then a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His scholarly work focuses on early modern France and the Italian Renaissance. Books he has written include The Life and Works of Louis Le Roy (Doroz, 1966), Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Despotism (Princeton, 1973), and Berle, generi e potere: I Discorsi de Annibale Romei (Panini, 1987).

In a Washington Post interview, Gundersheimer looked back at his Folger experience and said it's been a "privilege and pleasure to work with our talented and devoted staff to build a stronger library, a livelier house of intellect, and a more vibrant urban community."

More than 200,000 people visit the library every year. During the Gundersheimer years, services and programs provided by the library have been strengthened by extensive computerization, including the creation of an online catalog; by renovation of the main building's exhibition hall; by establishment of staff offices in a new Wyatt R. ('61) and Susan Haskell Center across the street; and by sponsorship of poetry readings, theatrical and musical productions, and innovative new Shakespeare programs for school teachers and local grade-school students.

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From the Folger

Readers with long memories may recall the atomic bomb scares from the early days of the Cold War. As soon as it became clear that the Soviets had the bomb, fears abounded that America's destruction was imminent. Underground shelters seemed to be everywhere, while experts engaged in grim speculation of what the world might look like when the lucky few survivors emerged into the light. Then, too, the nation's capital seemed a prime target.

During World War II, the Folger's treasures had been evacuated to a secure site outside Washington. As a matter of fact, the place in question was the basement of Converse Memorial Library, adjacent to the all-night study room known to generations of alumni as the Pit. The Folger's staff and readers, on the other hand, remained on Capitol Hill to confront whatever dangers might ensue.

On the morning of September 11, however, all human and literary treasures were here and in place. In the intervening weeks, the dedication and resilience of the Folger's staff, fellows, readers, and public have been heartening. The Reading Rooms are full of life; the readings and concerts well attended; Joe Banno's Macbeth was pretty much sold out; a conference on reading practices in Early Modern Europe attracted nearly 200 scholars from North America and Europe. All this has happened while the Folger was the only major institution on Capitol Hill to be functioning continuously, while the Capitol, the Supreme Court, and even the Library of Congress closed their doors.

During this entire awful time, not a single member of the Folger's staff has given in to panic, or wavered in devotion to the place and its work. Instead, while attending to the broad array of scary new problems we face, we have chosen to heed the words of the Library's second director, Louis B. Wright, who confronted that earlier reign of terror with these words: "If the Big Crash comes, it will find us here going about our business, which is to make the best possible institute for the study of the history of the 16th and 17th centuries—the period which saw the origins of the modern world. Nor do we see much virtue in fleeing to some God-forsaken Patagonian refuge. The really safe spots are going to be crowded with people we won't like. We'll just stay here and keep our air conditioning going as long as it will run, and read solid Renaissance sermons on innate depravity—a theme which somehow cheers us." Amen.

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Verbatim

A compilation of recent remarks expressed at Amherst.

"Yes, I work hard as a writer. But I don't work anywhere near as hard as I worked as a cleaning person or a nurse's aide—and I earn 10 times as much."

Barbara Ehrenreich
author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America
In a talk, "The College-Educated Elite and the Working Class Majority: Figuring Out Where You Fit In," Johnson Chapel, November 7, 2001

"I sometimes wonder, for instance, when exactly it became common law that everyone own a peacoat. And a gray one from J. Crew, for that matter."

Kelly Theim '04
Writing about Amherst student fashion
In The Amherst Student, December 5, 2001

"By the time a book of poems comes out, you're no longer that poet. It's like looking at a star. By the time you see it, it's no longer what it was."

Poet Martin Espada
At a poetry reading, Cole Assembly Room, November 14, 2001

"September 11 changed many things; all of us accept that. Among the things that should not change are America's ideals. And among the ideals that we count as distinctively, even essentially American is . . . the ideal of a haven for the oppressed, the persecuted, those seeking refuge in America from tyranny at home."

President Gerety
Urging President Bush to reopen U.S. borders to refugees already cleared by the Immigration and Naturalization Service
In an op-ed piece, The Washington Post, November 18, 2001

"Whether you go fast or slow you'll make mistakes. The point is that you have to learn from your mistakes; that's how we make progress. It's impossible to organize so that you don't make mistakes. You can't make the world 100 percent safe unless you just kill everybody off."

Physicist and writer Freeman Dyson
Responding to a question about the appropriate rate of change
In a Forry Fund Lecture on "Technology and Social Justice"
Cole Assembly Room, October 25, 2001

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