CUNY Academic Commons

I believe it's because she's configured her homepage to be her About page http://cynthiatobar.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/options-reading.php. When switching this back to "Your latest posts", the slider is enabled.

A quick look at the theme code suggests that it won't be possible to put the slider on the About page without creating a custom child theme. This suggests to me that Cynthia may want to do one of the following things:

1. use one of our other slider plugins instead of the native Simplicity feature. The Codex has some suggestions http://codex.commons.gc.cuny.edu/?s=slider&submit=Search. At a glance, the options look like EasyRotator for WordPress, Revolution Slider, Smoothness Slider Shortcode
2. switch to using the default "Your latest posts" for her front page

Great -- thanks, Boone.