Letters

“The Pain of War” appreciated

The article in the winter issue of Amherst on the photographs and commentary in the Mead Art Museum was excellent. It was easily one of the best articles I’ve ever seen in the magazine. I was particularly moved by the last paragraph of Professor Alexander George’s description of the execution wall. What beautiful writing! Thank you.

—Annie T. Kao ’98
Denver, Colo.

The pain of “The Pain of War”

I was disappointed that the magazine’s coverage of the Mead Art Museum’s Pain of War contained the actual images from the exhibition. Although I support Mead’s having the exhibit and might have decided to visit it if I had been in the area, I do not support the decision to include the horrifying images themselves in a general interest magazine sent to people affiliated with Amherst College. Because many of the images are quite famous, I believe that I had seen them in other contexts. When one reads a history book, a general news magazine or other such source, one expects that there might be graphic drawings and photographs of war. Those of us who have read Amherst for years, however, expect to be able to flip through it without encountering such disturbing images. Some of us also used to like to leave Amherst on our coffee table without needing to think about whether the magazine’s visual content would be appropriate for all residents of and visitors to our home.

I wondered why the magazine could not have put a description of the exhibit in the College Row section and then published a link to the college Website, where readers could view the images if they chose. Remarkably, the Internet version of Amherst did something close to that. Placing a summary of the text in College Row and providing a link would have been an entirely appropriate way to handle the subject matter.

—Andrew Winchell ’90
Los Angeles, Calif.

“The Pain of War” and the clubby wink

Saima, from the cover of the winter issue of Amherst, has been looking out at me, and she’s prompted some thoughts. The first is the tragedy of her loss, which can be extrapolated to that of countless others like her across the whole history of human civilization. The second is: What does this photo have to do with Amherst College and her alumni to the extent that it belongs on the cover of the magazine?

The most obvious response is that as intelligent alumni of our great college, it is our duty to be aware of the world in which we live, and to be at least familiar with all the good and bad that occurs in it. Further, this photo is part of an exhibit at the Mead Art Museum, the mission of which, one presumes, is to inform and provoke to that end. The art of these photos is worth discussing, as is their context, their effect on us and their effort to capture the horrors and suffering of war. But this is exactly my point. There is something sensationalistic about this photograph being on the cover of our alumni magazine; it is a little knowing elbow to the side, a clubby wink, to all of us supposedly liberal, antiwar Amherst alumni. We do not compete with Newsweek, Time, or U.S. News & World Report on the newsstand, and thus need not make the cover a screed in one direction or another. Why not a clever photo of a plant in the venture capitalist’s garden to suggest thoughtful economic growth; why not something related to the alumni psychology panel?

More directly, why not any photos of Amherst graduates who gave of their lives in World War I or World War II (the latter being all the more appropriate in this, the 60th anniversary year of Iwo Jima), or of the victims of genocides in World War II (a picture of a wall?), Cambodia, Somalia, Iraq, Darfur or Rwanda (a nondescript shrouded body?); where are any of the enemy atrocities from Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan or Iraq, and why nothing depicting the current spate of gruesome terrorist activities around the world—other than an American plunging to his death from one of the World Trade Center towers (which is not to discount it)? I could go on, but I think you understand. I might add the irony in Saima’s picture coming from a (foreign civil) war for which, at my Commencement, then-President Tom Gerety called upon the youth of our nation to pick up arms and die.
It is rich indeed to put a cover photo like that on the magazine for this college, whose alumni for the most part care little enough but to send one letter in response to an article about one of their own who has served his country in combat. This brings me to one final question, as rhetorical as it may be: How sanctimonious and disrespectful should our liberalness be?

—Robert Longsworth ’99
New York, N.Y.

“The Pain of War” and truth denied

In the last essay in “The Pain of War,” Professor Francis Couvares concludes that suppression of photos documenting American deaths on Sept. 11 “reminds us that the deniers of death remain well-armored and proud of their service to us all.” Photos of Sept. 11 are the least of what a complacent and largely uninquisitive American public has been denied. Benjamin DeMott, my first-year English professor at Amherst, wrote in the October 2004 issue of Harper’s magazine: “The 9/11 Commission Report, despite a vast quantity of labor behind it, is a cheat and a fraud. It stands as a series of evasive maneuvers that infantilize the audience, transform candor into iniquity, and conceal realities that demand immediate inspection and confrontation.” David Ray Griffin’s recent book, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions, raises very troubling questions about U.S. government complicity in the attacks and makes a convincing case that the 9/11 Commission was a whitewash conducted by a panel with insider ties to the Bush administration and to international oil interests. I hope that the intellectual community at Amherst remains alert enough (and sufficiently unintimidated) to examine this issue with students.

—Matthew Orr ’87
Bend, Ore.

“The Pain of War” and pride of peace

Thank you for that powerful set of essays and photographs in the “Pain of War” article. Once in a while I read something that produces a lot of material for my own work, and this article did that (I am the District I representative for the Department of Peace Campaign in New Hampshire and president of the Poetry Society of New Hampshire). If people put one-tenth of the energy and resources into peace that they put into war, we might make some progress.

—Patricia Frisella P’06
Farmington, N.H.

An honor code with teeth

Regarding the new honor code mentioned in the winter issue of Amherst, the student handbook for 1963-64 states similar, but tougher, principles: “Every man who enrolls and remains at Amherst…understands that to submit work which is not his own violates the purpose of the college and of his presence there. No intellectual community can maintain its integrity or be faithful to its members if violations of its central purpose are for any reason tolerated.”

Students had to sign an agreement with the code for each course, not once in four years. I recall no clear cases of cheating and only a few rumors during my years. It was generally assumed and accepted that actual cheating would result in dismissal from the college, not just failure of the course.

This is the second time since graduation that I have been startled by regression toward cheating. In an excellent column in the fall 1975 issue of Amherst, Carl Oxholm ’75 cited an alarming recent report of the Judicial Board on cheating: “A substantial number of Amherst students reject the view that they have a collective or individual responsibility to discourage cheating, and they reject the view that cheating should never be tolerated. [In fact] on a wide variety of grounds, many students believe that cheating at the college is relatively easy to justify.” The root problem was a view that some cheating was OK in order to climb the greasy pole from high school to Amherst to graduate school to a good job. A corollary assumption was that cheating could be switched off once the job was secure. Again Oxholm and the board: “What one does at college seems to have no connection with what may be done beyond its walls. While cheating may be condemned in a person already settled in a job, ‘there is substantial support for the view that a student may cheat to protect career aspirations.’” A tragic notion; any graduate a few years post-Amherst knows that worthwhile careers have no plateau of secure coasting on which to revert to honesty. Continued achievement is what counts.

The national economy and competition pressures have fluctuated since 1975 and will do so again. The honor code should not be contingent on such variations. Apparently the college has had to articulate a code once again. Now the faculty, administration and students must give it life, primarily by addressing violations seriously. This will determine whether the new code becomes trivial or revitalizes some core values of Amherst. I daresay that many graduates recalling core values of earlier times earnestly hope for the latter result.

—Robert A. Knox ’64
Del Mar, Calif.

Defending English 1-2

I was intrigued to read the letter from Dorrin Rosenfeld ’85 in the fall 2004 issue of Amherst. According to this letter, the old English-composition requirement at the college was “universally hated.” It is amusing, not to say ludicrous, to think that someone who graduated in the mid-’80s would know that a course that ended in 1970 was universally hated. Plenty—maybe even a majority—of my classmates recall some rather more positive feelings about English 1-2, and many other alumni have written reminiscences about that course that suggest similarly good experiences with it. For me, it remains the single best course I have ever taken in my life, at any age, and it seemed so at the time, too, not just in retrospect. I do know other Amherst graduates who arrived at the college too late to take English 1-2. Some of them have also assured me the course was a bad idea, or had outlived its usefulness, or some such thing. They have been deprived and misinformed.

—John Stifler ’68
Florence, Mass.

Walker Hall recycled

Though now gone, Walker Hall had a lasting architectural impression on the Amherst campus that is still very visible today. The description of Walker Hall in the winter issue of Amherst accounted for its construction in 1868, the 1882 fire, the rebuilding after the fire and its razing prior to the construction of the Robert Frost Library. Missing from this sequence is the last “use” of that building: The granite from razed Walker was used on the exterior of the Frost Library. And if memory serves me correctly, near the cornerstone of the library is another stone that says “Walker.”

—John Mudge ’71
Etna, N.H.

Living with mental illness

Thanks for including the pieces on mental illness and the family. I graduated Amherst in ’79. I then married an artist who is diagnosed as bipolar. It has been very challenging. I now have a 5-year-old son and am concerned about his future, since this condition tends to run in families. I am going to keep these articles so that I have resources to look into if my son ever exhibits any worrisome behavior.

—Mindy Pickard ’79
New York, N.Y.

Mental illness and suicide

As the director of survivor initiatives for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and a survivor of my own brother’s suicide in 1993, I read with great interest “Surviving a Family Suicide” in the winter issue of Amherst. Like the author’s brother and mine, 90 percent of all people who die by suicide have a diagnosable (although not necessarily diagnosed) psychiatric disorder at the time of their death, most often depression or bipolar disorder. Coming to understand that suicide is almost always complicated, resulting from a combination of painful suffering, desperate hopelessness and underlying illness, can greatly help survivors as they struggle to somehow answer—or simply learn to live with—all of those questions that begin “Why…?”

—Joanne Lelewer Harpel ’85
New York, N.Y.

Mental illness and the ultimate loss

I was enormously moved by your articles in the excellent winter issue of Amherst, particularly “Surviving a Family Suicide” in the article “Grappling With Demons.” For me, it is so sensitive and full of pathos. I react to it not because I have a member of my family who committed suicide, but because my oldest daughter was murdered by her husband in Northampton five years ago. Judging from the ravings that the man documented in a diary before he killed Jean and himself, he must have been mentally ill at the time.

I can relate to the guilt and to the fundamental life changes that Jeffrey Sternlieb ’69 describes. The loss of a loved one is such a devastating occurrence, a bolt from the blue, that one must change simply to deal with the awfulness. One must somehow make his or her life stand for something. I still cannot bear the pain without professional help, but I have moved forward to honor Jean’s memory in any way I can, as have her sisters. I have written a book, Conversations with Jean, which has been ordered by abuse shelters across the country. I have been told that it has saved lives, and I think that is true.

I recognize in Sternlieb’s heart-rending account the sort of self-analysis that one goes through after a tragedy like this. I’m sure it will never end, but maybe one can achieve something in spite of it. Jeffrey Sternlieb has, and I will certainly try.

—Catherine Hosmer W’46
Bradenton, Fla.

Living with mental illness, learning from lectures

I’ve been savoring the winter 2005 issue of Amherst—like a good bottle of wine, each issue just gets better and better. Two pieces in this quarter’s issue that particularly resonated with me: the “Grappling with Demons” triad and “Speaking on the record” in College Row.

For more than four decades now I’ve been intimately involved with two of those mental health demons. They include my late bipolar mother and my schizophrenic younger daughter, now in her mid-30s, who has suffered her mental illness since her college days. James Maier ’69 summed up all too well the results of schizophrenia: “The human cost in suffering...is [italics mine] incalculable.”

“Speaking on the record” in the College Row section stirred many fond memories for me of the innumerable “outside” lectures I always attended on as many diverse topics as possible during my undergraduate years. I heard echoes of our late, great Dean of Admissions Eugene Wilson ’29 when Nicholas Doty ’06 described his rationale for co-founding that wonderful extension of liberal arts learning, the Amherst Recording Council: “Because academics are not just in the classroom.”

—Lee Perlman ’62
Ashland, Ore.

Succor from lucre

I enjoyed your story on Woody Tasch ’73 in the winter issue of Amherst. I work the same problem from a totally different angle: teaching economics to environmentalists. I work mostly in developing countries with people whose mission is to protect tropical forests. Through the lens of economics they can understand where business is a potential ally and where the numbers are stacked against nature. My group, the Conservation Strategy Fund, has been successful in helping local environmentalists protect some big areas, particularly by stopping economically wasteful construction projects.

—John Reid ’88
Philo, Calif.

Professor Benítez-Rojo rediscovered

My jaw kept dropping as I read about the late Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s life in your spring 2005 issue. In the early 1990s, I was lucky enough to take several classes taught by Professor Benítez-Rojo, as well as by his wife, Hilda Otano-Benítez. Although I was aware of their Cuban heritage, I did not truly appreciate all they had undergone in their quest to be together in the United States. Nor, ’til now, did I comprehend what an accomplished writer Professor Benítez-Rojo was. I have just purchased his book Sea of Lentils (translated by the wonderful Professor James Maraniss) and look forward to once again learning from the voice of this great man. Thank you for sharing his story.

—Victoria Raikes ’95
New York, N.Y.

Football forgotten

The winter issue of Amherst left out the fall football classic. I know soccer and lacrosse are important, but that football game ranks up there with the ’42 game.

—Richard Banfield Jr. ’46
New Canaan, Conn.

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