Construction on the UMass Campus

Sophie Yingling

To get from her bus stop at the Fine Arts Center to her class in Machmer, it used to take UMass senior Kellie Mirtle a mere five minutes, she said. But due to the construction of the New Academic Classroom Building (NACB,) between the Campus Pond and North Pleasant Street, she often finds herself late for class.

photo credit

            “At the beginning of the semester it took me longer to decide a successful route to Machmer than it did to commute to campus from way down Main Street,” Mirtle said.

The NACB is currently expected to open in 2014, and will be situated between the Fine Arts Center and the Hasbrouck Hall. The space is planned to become the new home for academic departments including Communications, Journalism, Linguistics, and Film Studies.

            “The new building will transform the undergraduate learning experience at UMass,” the UMass construction website says, adding that it is planned to create room for over 2,000 additional seats within its four stories of classrooms.

            Some UMass students are excited about the expansion of the university’s academic space, and would argue that even if they don’t get the opportunity to enjoy the building during their time at UMass, they look forward to the completion of the new building and hope to visit the UMass campus with pride following their graduation.

           

            Samara Abramson is one of these students.

“I look around at all of the construction and think, ‘this is going to be so cool in ten years,’” she said, “I think we should embrace it.” Abramson’s father is an alumnus of UMass, and always tells her how proud she’ll be to see all of the changes in the future, she recalled.

            But not all students are looking at the construction on campus so excitedly.

            UMass junior Olivia Holmes has been at the university since her freshman year and has proudly showed the campus to visitors throughout her stay, she said. With the construction “covering the university,” Holmes feels less comfortable with the way her campus looks. “I think that it’s really unattractive,” Holmes said. “The construction on campus affects my attitude more than anything else. I’m almost embarrassed to show my campus off,” she added.

“I pretty much stay away from the campus center now,” Holmes said as she considered how the detours due to construction have affected her routes on campus, “I used to go there all the time.”

            “It’s also really distracting,” said senior Chelsea Goldrick, “my teachers are always complaining about how loud it is. It’s right outside the window when I have class in Machmer.” Mirtle laughed and agreed with Goldrick. “It is so loud,” she said, “I always wonder what they’re doing out there.”

            Besides the NACB, UMass is in the midst of several other construction projects. These include the building of the Commonwealth Honors College’s new residential area, the Life Science Laboratory, and the Southwest Concourse replacement.

On the UMass construction site, it says that the intention behind all of these renovations and new creations is to remain competitive in terms of seeking out the top students and faculty. “Classroom types are planned that will encourage interactive and team learning, critical thinking, and trans-disciplinary learning and research,” it says.

But some students think that there should be a greater focus on keeping our current teachers and learners, and a less constant focus on enlarging and developing. “I think we should be focusing on the students we already have, rather than constantly trying to expand,” UMass junior Alex Schaffer said, “we should be renovating the buildings that make UMass special, not just building more.” Referring to the Fine Arts Center Schaffer said, “that’s the ugliest ‘art center’ I’ve ever seen, I’m sure art students wouldn’t mind renovating that.”

The beauty of the UMass campus isn’t just on Schaffer and Holmes’ minds, either. It seems to be a hot topic. “We pay a lot of money to come to this school,” Mirtle said, “especially being out of state. And with all of the construction it’s just not nice to look at.”

Abramson spoke briefly about the visual affect too, but unlike some of her peers, didn’t seem quite so phased by the way UMass looked. “I think I like flaws,” she began, “when I’m on campus and I look around, I don’t think about whether or not the buildings match perfectly. I think about how I am in love with UMass and how much more important that is to me than it’s appearance.”

           

            Although the appearance hasn’t reportedly bothered Goldrick either, it is the route changes that have had the greatest effect on her day-to-day life. “I was running to class recently and realized that I was basically caged in by construction and had to completely turn around and go a different way. I was so late and so mad,” she recalled.

            Each of the construction locations do offer detour suggestions on their borders, as well as on the UMass construction website. But only some students are taking advantage of those suggestions while others are creating their own new ways around campus. “I find myself traveling all the way through the campus center into the student union…way too often,” Goldrick said.

            “It just shouldn’t take that long to get to class when the buildings are so close,” Mirtle said, “but maybe it was my fault. I guess I should just take an earlier bus from now on.”

Profile of UMass Professor John Gerber

Sophie Yingling

Recently, John Gerber walked to the front of his 300-student lecture on sustainable living, within moments the room went silent. He proceeded to walk up to the podium and lead the class in a silent breathing exercise. “If you feel comfortable doing so,” he said, “Sit. Put your hands in your lap and your feet flat on the ground. Close your eyes. Really think about the chair beneath you. Remember that you are here, nowhere else,” he said, “Don’t worry about anything negative that has happened today, don’t think about that. For just a moment, only worry about your breathing.”

Gerber has a simple, friendly, kind of look to him, white hair and a thick white beard. He’s usually caught wearing a worn in t-shirt and blue jeans. His shoe choice is almost always something practical. To class and on daily adventures, Gerber opts for sneakers.

In a profile Gerber wrote on himself in 2008 for volume 12 Journal of Higher Education, Outreach and Engagement, he said “I feel like I have an opportunity, particularly today with undergraduates, to provide them with a safe environment in the university, an oasis of sorts. They are bombarded by a destructive ‘power-over’ kind of thinking in most of their classrooms. I try to provide a safe place where they can learn and explore what they truly want to know.” He does this by basing his lectures and classroom activities on real suggestions from students, and his graduate student teaching assistants, he mentioned in a lecture.

Gerber has a true passion for the earth, he said in the profile and is known to be exuded through him in lectures and everywhere else. He teaches what he knows and what he is passionate about. Also, he brings in people from the community who share a similar love for the earth, and use their stories to inspire students and help them to understand how easy, or difficult, it is to get involved in sustainable movements.

One woman who presented in Gerber’s Sustainable Living course in the spring of 2012 was half the duo who founded Wheatberry in North Amherst. Adrie Lester, and her husband, Ben, opened the bakery in 2007 namely because of their mutual “burning desire to help create a culture of sustainable resource usage and ecosystem stabilization,” it says on the Wheatberry website.

Their slogan, which now reads “Farm Fresh Foods,” and their mission statement, which illustrates their desire to live sustainably, show a clear link to Gerber’s accomplishments and goals.

But getting to where Gerber is today seems to have taken quite the complicated path.

Gerber grew up Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, NY. At an early age, he realized his love for the earth, spending most of his childhood on the water, absolutely captivated by it, he said. His second interest was in feeding the starving people of the world. He thought somehow, the ocean could help with that. It wasn’t until college that Gerber realized if he was going to put a dent in starvation, he was going to have to shift his interest only slightly- to agriculture.

After graduating from Cornell in 1978 with a Ph.D. in Agricultural Ecology, Gerber attempted to pursue his passion for feeding the world by voyaging to the US Virgin Islands where he would conduct research on vegetable and fruit production for the next two years. “The political system was such that nobody really had to work very hard in the Virgin Islands. Almost everybody had a government job or worked at a hotel. Nobody really wanted to grow vegetables, because it was hard work,” Gerber said on his experience over seas, “I decided to leave out of frustration.”

Because of his discouraging experience in the Virgin Islands, Gerber wanted to go someplace where people would notice him and his hard work, he said in the profile, “and care about agriculture,” he added.

This led him to the Midwest where he worked for 13 years as an Extension Program Leader for vegetable crops in Illinois. This was his first position of leadership, he said, “and I did fairly well at it.”

In an e-mail conversation, Gerber explained in his own words what exactly Extension is, “The Cooperative Extension System is a federal, state and local partnership established in 1914 to help bring scientific education into communities that need help with economic development, community health, and natural resource management.  It is often thought of as a program for farms and people in rural communities because in the early part of the 20th century those were the areas of need.  Today it serves people throughout the nation in both rural and urban settings.”

Gerber was applauded on several occasions for his hard work and many successes within the industry, he said, and advanced quickly from a specialist to an administrator. “I had enormous success, and in the process I lost my soul. I forgot the reason I got into science,” he said in the profile. He found that his interest in the environment and hunger had faded away because they were “not fundable,” but that was where his heart was, “his reason for being,” he called it.

On a year long sabbatical leave in Australia in 1987, Gerber came across the small book that would have a big impact on his future. It was a book called Education for Critical Consciousness by Paulo Freiere, and it was a critique of Extension. It suggested that Extension was a loophole that kept people dependant on big government instead of encouraging citizens to be active and engage themselves, Gerber recalled via e-mail. “That was like a door that opened up during a time in my life then I was low. I hated my job. I was blaming everybody else, and I couldn’t see what was wrong,” he said.

Gerber’s brother Dan was studying public health at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) at the time. He was a strong support system for John, and would send him books and articles that he could read during his time in Australia, he said.

In Australia, Gerber also spent time doing research on the land-grant system, and fell in love with the concept, “it woke me up to something I truly cared about,” he said.

For personal reasons, Gerber wanted to move back to the East Coast. In 1992 he gathered his wife Phyl, and three young sons and applied for the position of Director of the Massachusetts Cooperative Extension System at UMass (now called “UMass Extension”). After a few years in this position, Gerber realized the strongest impact he could make was by teaching.

Gerber is now a UMass professor in the Department of Plant, Soil, and Insect Sciences, and a major player in the UMass permaculture and agriculture organizations. In many ways, teaching takes Gerber back to his early days of graduate school, “where teaching was my primary love,” he said.

Gerber now lives in Amherst with Phyl, as his sons Jacob, Brian, and Jeremy have moved on in their own lives. The youngest, at 21, is Jeremy. Gerber is also a chairman of the Amherst Conservation Committee.

He now uses his story and experiences to educate and to advise students that don’t necessarily fit into the system, he said.

An anonymous post about Gerber on ratemyprofessor.com says “Amazing man; he has a passionate soul for the good of the Earth and the life on it,” a notion he would presumably be proud of.

A former advisee of Gerber’s spoke on what it was like to work with him. Drew Locke of Truro, Mass. said that he met Gerber for the first time at the farmer’s market in Amherst. “We talked for two hours about how to make my farm more sustainable,” he said, “and I thought to myself, ‘This guy is the man’.”

Locke went on to say that some of his friends were skeptical on Gerber. They found him to have unrealistic visions of how the world should be. “He does say some outlandish things,” Locke added.

“You are stardust brought to life,” Gerber tells his students after the breathing exercise and usually several other times over the course of a lecture, “I am stardust,” he says, “I am the universe. You are the universe.” 

Maria Sacchetti Visits UMass

October 4. 2012

Reporters should be relentless yet polite, Boston Globe immigration reporter Maria Sacchetti counseled students on a recent visit to her alma mater, the University of Massachusetts.

"Do it graciously, it'll get you to where you want to be," Sacchetti, who graduated from UMass 20 years ago,  told Journalism 300 students during a visit to class. Sacchetti returned to campus to take part in an All Star Alumni panel sponsored by the Journalism Program on Wednesday.

Born and raised in Lawrence, Mass., Sacchetti studied economics and Spanish at UMass Amherst before going on to graduate school at the University of Texas. Though she said she feels well-educated, Sacchetti said that she feels UMass fell second-rate to the University of Texas as far as facilities go and the number of books and journals available.

At first, Sacchetti was rejected from all of the graduate schools she applied to. “University of Texas said no, and as crazy as it sounds I appealed it. Never be afraid to do that,” Sacchetti said, “because I ended up getting wait-listed, and then they let me in. You just have to keep pushing past the barriers.”

In addition to putting in many hours at UMass’ Daily Collegian newspaper, Sacchetti worked with several interning programs, including some that she said she wasn’t very fond of. “Once you accept an internship, then you see if you like it. Writing is what gets you into it, but I love reporting. You have to do some things you don’t really want to do to get to where you want to be.”

Sacchetti was persistent in her hopes to become a journalist. She attended job fairs and recommended to students that, “you cannot miss the Unity Job Fair. If there is one job fair you don’t want to miss, this is it, even if you don’t want to go.” The Unity Job Fair is a yearly convention that allows both aspiring and established journalists to engage with one another and connect with the media.

While on attending a job fair in California, Sacchetti gave her information to one of the Boston Globe’s editors. She said, “I didn’t even want to be there, I wasn’t dressed in a suit…but I gave him my information and the next thing I knew, I was on a plane!” This is when Sacchetti returned to the East Coast to pursue a job at the Globe.

In 2010 Sacchetti was offered an opportunity to travel to Haiti and report on the earthquake.  Sacchetti was sent with an intern and a translator from the Boston Globe and said they were able to take very minimal. “We brought bread and peanut butter. You can survive on just that…so I’ve been told.”

When asked what her friends and parents thought about her traveling to report on the disaster in Haiti, Sacchetti said, “I think of them and that’s why I don’t take huge risks. My father would say, ‘you know, you don’t have to go, they aren’t making you.’ But it is about you, your priorities…it can be a very unpredictable career.”

Sacchetti said that her experience in Haiti was by far the most terrifying of all her travel reporting. “There were dead bodies lined on the streets. People thought those taking the bodies away were doing something suspicious, but it was really just a huge health risk.”

When asked for her advice for future journalists, Sacchetti said, “Don’t be afraid to mess up. I made mistakes while working at the Collegian but I learned from those mistakes. College is the time to do that.”

-Lindsay

A Day At The Polls

November 7, 2012

 UMass junior Jake Crowley was found holding a Romney/Ryan poster in his hands at the Lutheran church in Amherst, Mass. shouting to the crowd, “Am I the only Republican in this state? I’m from New York and I thought that was a liberal state.”

Many young voters turned out in large numbers at the Lutheran church to express their right to vote in this year’s election.

One after another, citizens joined the line of voters. Students in the Amherst area lined up at voting booths while many students waited at the Hagis Mall PVTA bus stop at UMass waiting for a bus to bring them to their correct precinct.

These lines surprised some students but didn’t stop them from voting. UMass sophomore Dean Cote said, “Voting is important to me, and as annoying as these lines for the buses are and now the polls, it is great to see so many students voting this year.”

            Cote, who said he was excited to vote for the first time, was mostly interested in the presidential race. He said,  “My vote is for Obama, because I am a gay and the Republicans aren’t in favor of gay marriage.”  

            Students seemed to be interested in the State Senate race. Nick Mangini, a junior at UMass, said “I’m more interested in the presidential race because it has more national coverage, although I did vote for Warren because I believe in her stance on taxes.”

            Mangini said that he has a strong opinion about this election’s candidates. The student, who voted for Obama, said that he thinks Romney’s plan would ruin the country.

In terms of question three, which opts for the legalization of medical marijuana, sophomore Zack Brown said, “ I am a big supporter of the legalization of marijuana so I felt like I should come out and vote yes to question three. To me that is more important than the candidates.”

Dan Leavitt, a UMass junior, said, “The economy is what I base my vote on. I’m not a fan of what Obama has done, but I just find it hard to believe that Romney can do better.”

            The student went on to say, “Foreign policy is important to research before voting because if there was another terrorist threat I would like to know what action would be taken.” Leavitt said his vote is for Obama because he feels Obama is a better man for the job compared to Romney.

            According to Cote “People don’t really care too much about the local elections, I haven’t even heard of some of the people on the ballot and it’s not like I live in Amherst so it doesn’t really affect me.”

            When asked what it was like to vote for the first time, senior Gwen Crosby said, “I thought it would be a little stricter when it came to walking in. They didn’t even ask for my ID or my proof of my address in Amherst. All they asked for was my name and let me in. I was very surprised.”  

            Amherst voted strongly in favor of president Obama who received 83 percent of the vote. The senate race was the same with Warren receiving 80 percent of the votes in Amherst.

Welcome!

This is our class blog for Journalism 300, a course at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Over the course of the fall 2012 semester, Lindsay and Sophie hope to attract viewers looking for a good read and fun activities and events in the Amherst area. Our goal is to become a resource for students and visitors of UMass.