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Otherwise occupied
Student protests divide campus
In
the leonine first days of March, 150 or more students took over the Goodell
building, the former library, which now houses the comptroller's and payroll
departments at UMass. While the occupants were a diverse bunch, the sit-in
was organized chiefly by ALANA students (ALANA stands for Asian, Latino, African,
and Native American). Their four-page "Living Document" contained
sixteen demands related to financial aid, support and academic services, and
daycare for students' children. Mainly, however, it enjoined the university
to increase the numbers of people of color on campus.
The occupation set in motion the by-now familiar ritual of rallies, marches, negotiations, and statements to the press. From our windows, we saw groups of protesters flock back and forth between buildings like northern birds, starlings, in their drab plumage: jeans and corduroys, dark winter jackets. To our middle-aged eyes, they looked like children on a field trip. At various times during the week, many of the doors to buildings and offices were locked. On March 8, the students and the administration agreed on a revised "Living Document," a list of twenty-one commitments.
On Friday, the penultimate day of the occupation, we went to a noontime rally at Goodell. Two weeks before the spring equinox, the sun made no headway against the bitter wind. Several small camping tents, looking bravely festive and vulnerable, huddled on the lawn. Banners proclaiming "Five Days Strong" and "Justicia," somehow secured during the dead of night to the scaffolding around Old Chapel, flailed from the belfry. The Du Bois Library loomed over our shoulders.
A bunch of occupiers inside Goodell peered out a window, their faces obscure behind the dark screen. Above the entranceway, the gold Indian in the state seal gazed northward, seemingly unconcerned. Beside the hedge that edges Goodell's lawn, a bevy of plump, middle-aged women chattered animatedly in Spanish.
The New England Cable News cameraman put the crowd at around 500. A series of speakers addressed the tidal pool of knitted hats, baseball caps, and sweatshirt-hoods. The messages from the microphone were variously impassioned, light-hearted, even light-headed:
Speaker: "We've gone for five days without showers, our own beds, unable to communicate with our families, friends...our pets."
Speaker: "Why is the university wasting money on repairing the Chapel clock I have a watch!"
Speaker: "We are here to protect UMass from becoming a mess!"
Speaker: "I realized how big this is...five hundred years of genocide is not going to end in five days."
Other announcements. As a gesture of solidarity with the UMass students, eighth-graders over at Amherst Junior High had walked out of class. Cheers went up, never mind that thirteen-year-olds will seize any excuse to exit a classroom. Cornel West, of Harvard, had rung up in the early hours of Friday morning to express his support. Messages of solidarity from the political science, sociology, and women's studies departments were read.
Back at the office, we meditated on the meaning of it all. Weeks later, we're still at it. And, so are the protesters and administrators. The "twenty-one commitments" were signed, they're back in business again at Goodell, and the two sides continue to meet. Although the media seemed determined to cast the encounter in adversarial terms, the basic goal of the sit-in, diversity, is one on which the administration and students agree. What seems harder for everyone to agree on, is how to get there. To paraphrase the student speaker at the rally, diversity isn't built in five days.
The Reason Why We Sing
At an evening panel/performance on gospel music last April, the second event of the annual Black Musicians Conference at UMass, Pastor Marvin Winans remarked with amusement that people will pay a lot to see his Grammy-winning group on Saturday night when they could hear them on Sunday morning for free.
The scene in Bowker Auditorium that night proved Winan's point. Only about forty people were gathered together in the name of gospel, and that included speakers and honorees. Other free events, including a Thursday evening session at the Augusta Savage Gallery, were similarly intimate. The biggest crowd was for a Thursday night concert for which admission had to be charged.
Not a soul seemed disheartened by the turnout. The Reverend Milton Biggham, recording impresario and director of the Georgia Mass Choir, reeled off a stunning series of alliterations on the subject of gospel: "We got to major in the ministry and minor in the music," he told an appreciative audience. "We cannot let the dollar determine our destiny." And, "What good is a cross-over without the Cross?"
Pastor Winans, a husky, handsome young man with droll sense of humor, was equally clear about, as the conference title had it, "The Reason Why We Sing." How many people, asked Winans, can say they have a spot reserved in a heavenly choir? "How many artists can say there's a spot reserved for them in the next world, singing the same songs they sang in this world?" By the time Winan's was through, moderator and UMass professor of music Horace Boyer was declaring that he felt "just as happy as a baby boy. That's all there is to it."
But that wasn't all there was to the evening. There were still citations to be presented to two giants of the genre who were in personal attendance. Miss Willa Ward, a member of the first gospel group to sell a million records, gave "honor to God for letting me live this long to receive this award." (A foxy septuagenarian, Sister Ward received a few shouts of "Go, girl!" with her ovation.) Deacon Randy Green spoke with equal humility and joy of his life in gospel. His Silver Leaf Singers had sworn, he said, "to sing 'til the angels in heaven got happy." And that is about how long the audience sang, led by the Saints & Friends Fellowship Choir of Springfield, before it was time to empty out Bowker Auditorium and head for home that night.
The
critically acclaimed book The Battle for Christmas by historian Stephen
Nissenbaum was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize as well as for the National
Book Critics Circle Award. Imagine the Angels of Bread by English professor
Martín Espada was a Critics Circle nominee, and won the PEN/Revson
Award.
The recently published Rise of American Research Universities puts UMass in the top twenty public research institutions in the country. And in a recent U.S. News & World Report ranking of graduate programs, creative writing placed tenth in the nation and the College of Engineering forty-fourth among 219 schools.
UMass is among the charter members of Internet II, the next-generation system that will be 100 times faster than today's version; it may be up and running here by summer. Also speeding things up on campus within the next two years will be a fiber-optic system 300 times faster than the current phone lines.
Alumna
Madeleine Kunin '56 has been named by President Clinton as U.S. Ambassador
to the Principality of Liechten-stein. She is already Ambassador to Switzerland.
UMass students can do chemistry homework on the World Wide Web thanks to a $358,000 NSF grant and the combined efforts of the chemistry department and the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology. Students can log on at any time of day, but must meet deadlines to receive credit.
The "Classroom of the Future" built with an $850,000 grant from General Electric is in its first year of high-tech service to engineering students. With twenty-six computers run on specialized software developed on campus, the facility also encourages interaction. "Students need to know how to participate in the big decisions that arise in the business world," says chemical engineering professor Michael Malone. "You can have a perfectly fine technology that goes nowhere because of a price increase in raw materials or a regulation you didn't know about."
Meanwhile, at Herter Hall, a campus television studio is under construction, and should be functional by fall.The primary output will be academic programming for broadcast on the Housing Services Cable Network.
The "Story of Gospel Music," a BBC production
recently broadcast on PBS, featured professor of music Horace Boyer
among its gospel greats. In February, when Boyer directed a huge gospel-music
concert in Colorado, he spoke of the power of gospel music to "chip
away at the distances between people."
One of ten recipients of the 1997 Commonwealth Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council is long-time FAC director Frederick Tillis, cited for "outstanding leadership, creativity, and vision fostering the study, practice, appreciation, and flourishing of the arts."
A community clinic in Buckland has the services of a nurse-practitioner from the School of Nursing, thanks to a grant from Phoenix Home Life Mutual Insurance. Foryt-eight patients visited the clinic in January.
Researching the Kennedy family in Ireland for his biography-in-progress of RFK will be history professor Kevin Boyle, who has received a Fulbright scholarship to the Mary Ball Washington Chair in U.S. History at University College in Dublin.
"Weeds," an educational video on biological invasions, will be the upshot of a National Science Foundation grant to biology professor Peter Alpert.
Biodiversity in the Danube Delta, Europe's largest wetland system, is the subject of an international project funded by the World Bank and headed by Professor Curtice Griffin of forestry and wildlife management.
A site in southern Clile has yielded evidence of human habitation some 12,500 years ago - a thousand years earlier than previous evidence allowed. One of several noted archaeologists recently invited to visit the Monte Verde site was UMass anthropology professor Dena Dincauze, a specialist on early settlements in the Americas.
Closer
to home, Nature Journal has reported on findings by student Michael
York on those myserious vagabonds, the fisher cats. Between 1992 and 1995
York placed radio tracking-collars on ninety-three fishers. Some journeyed
so far he needed a plane to locate the signals. A few young cats set up territories
more than sixty miles from where they were collared.
A Nature article describes discovery of the earliest known occurrence of mammalian hair by biology professor Jin Meng, who found evidence of a hoofed mammal, two rodent-like creatures, and a long-extinct animal called Lambdopsalis bulla within fossilized excrement in Mongolia.
Drivers' responses to hazards, from barking dogs to weaving motorcycles to fogged-in highways, are being gauged in a sophisticated driving-simulation lab opened on campus this year with NSF and industry funding. Mechanical engineering professor Donald Fisher and fifteen grad students have been running these virtual roadway tests. Check out their web site at http://www-unix.ecs.umass.edu/~asl/midas.html.
UMass students logged an estimated 40,000 hours of volunteer work during the '94-95 academic year, notes the Boston Globe, and the number is expected to be up by at least ten percent this year. And according to News Director Kay Scanlan, there's "evidence that grades improve when students have a chance to practice what they learn." Case in point: senior Keith Zajac is one of many students who volunteer for Five College Habitat for Humanity, which builds or remodels houses for low-income people and disaster victims. Zajac does it because "I think it's great to help out," but as a building materials major he also finds the hands-on work educational.
Other volunteer efforts this year include engineering students helping children at the Springfield Science Museum design a bridge, build and fly a wooden glider, and explore the inner workings of a computer. And some fifteen business students helped low-income tax payers with their tax returns at the Jones Library in Amherst.
Haggertyite, the Mineral whose moniker was recently bestowed in honor of geosciences professor Stephen Haggerty, is not the first to allude to a UMass faculty member. "Jaffeite" was named for professor emeritus of geosciences H.W. Jaffe.
A four-member squad of management students finished among the top ten in the recent International Case Competition in Montreal. The competition required teams to solve complex business problems, make presentations, and field questions about their work.
Spanish lessons for court employees and training for court interpreters are the objectives of a Translation Center project headed by director Edwin Gentzler and funded by the Trial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
The Everywoman's Center has received state grants totalling about $54,000 to improve services for sexual assault victims, fund an education program for adolescent boys, install a toll-free rape hot-line, and enhance services for diverse populations.
Alumnus
Bill Pullman '80, fresh from his success in the hit movie "Independence
Day," plays the lead in David Lynch's film noir,"Lost Highway."
Thousands of virtual visitors are logging onto the UMass web-site, says webmeister Art Clifford. Last year 20,000 listened to UMass basketball games broadcast on the site. Another 14,000 visited the alumni home page. The address is http://www.umass.edu/
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Fry
to fish
"Definitely under
10,000 per pail," estimated Don Pugh, the forestry and wildlife management
staffer in charge of this aspect of the effort to restore Atlantic salmon
to the connecticut River watershed. It was the sixth time in as many minutes
he'd answered the same question as several dozen school kids, UMass students,
and plain helpful citizens took turns looking over his shoulder at the
wriggling fry. He smiled every time.