Amherst College was shocked in its Ivory Tower last past weekend. Marcus Smith,’ a student from the University of Massachusetts, and’ Isaac Cameron,’ from AmherstCollege, were involved in an on-campus altercation that left both wounded, according to police documents. The fight was at a party and was said to be over a girl. Nothing fresh there, but the reaction was anything but.
The UMass student allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed the Amherst College student between six and seven times in the abdomen and back. Some eye witnesses said they came together in an embrace, as if calming each other down. Others said the knife was out from the start and what looked like a hug was actually one student repeatedly stabbing the other.
Students answered television reporters’ questions with shock and disbelief.
‘I absolutely feel safe in my dorm and I always have before. I’m sure the school will react accordingly and make us all feel safer,’ said Tyler Tory-Murphy to Channel 22 News. Freshman Jesse Fried of Milburne, N.J., told The Amherst Bulletin that he regarded the stabbing as a ‘freak occurrence.’
‘I was definitely surprised. I didn’t think that was something that could happen here. I don’t feel any less safe, though,’ he said.
‘ But their surprise is to mine. The title of this article ‘Et in arcadia ego’ is Latin for ‘even in arcadia, I exist,’ and the statement is historically said by a personification of death. In a painting by Nicolas Poussin, several people surround a headstone with the phrase engraved into it. They look more somber than surprised.
Similarly, Samuel Johnson wrote a novella, ‘Rasselas’, set in a ‘happy valley’ that sounds much like the one local college students have created. Johnson’s valley is a place free of problems, where desires are quickly satiated. The characters kept there, however, are not happy and wish to escape to the outside world ‘- one they find is filled with human suffering. But once they witness and experience this, they elect to stay there rather than returning.
In the land of ‘philosopher kings’ that Amherst is jokingly said to be, it’s troubling that students never thought this could happen to them, or near them, or at a school at which they are enrolled. It is as if, when embarking for the progressive Pioneer Valley, they imagined a utopia where people do not fight over women and where men don’t bring knives to parties.
Students to whom I’ve spoken often say that a bubble exists around their campuses ‘- one that restricts the flow of information, ideas and the creation personal relationships with others outside of it. The seclusion is voluntary, in a way, as 98 percent of AmherstCollege‘s students live on campus. But as this weekend proved, the bubble is not literal. The admissions department may keep incoming grade point average high and a fresh stock of eager students coming in, but it does not protect against the problem of off-campus reality.
‘ The sense of security they have created for themselves is not immune to a world’s reality they have forgotten to consider their own.
William McGuinness is a Collegian columnist. He can be reached at wmcguinn@student.umass.edu.
William McGuinness 