Office of the Provost and Dean of the FacultyAbout the Provost and Dean of the Faculty

Transcript of 2016 Senior Assembly Speech

Good afternoon, welcome class of 2016 to Senior Assembly. You should all sit down. We're here to mark the official start of a season of celebration. We're celebrating you, class of 2016, and rightly so. Are you going to say anything about class of 2016?

[applause and cheers]

All right. I'm Catherine Epstein. I'm Dean of the Faculty and a professor of history. Do you happen to remember four years ago when you were first-year students, you came to Johnson Chapel on labor day for convocation? As you filed into the Chapel, the faculty sat in the middle section where many of you are seated now. You sat all around the faculty and on the edges of the faculty. But this afternoon, the seating is reversed. You are in the middle and the faculty surrounds you, or at least on the upper, the front rows here, we surround you. After four years of lecture and discussion, questioning and doubting, we envelop you and you are now at the core, at the heart of the College. I asked you to think about what made this transition possible. What all have you learned? What all have you experienced? As a residential college, much of what you learned and experienced happened outside the classroom.

But today I want to reflect just a bit on Amherst's formal curriculum. How many of you majored in STEM fields? Please raise your hands. All right. You did the right thing. How many of you majored in the social sciences majors such as economics, psychology, political science? Raise your hands. Okay. You did the right thing. How many of you majored in the humanities? All right. You did the right thing. How many of you majored in the arts? Good. Okay. I think how many of you can raise your hands twice for those? All right. You too did the right thing. So why am I saying this? Why did you all do the right thing? You all, I hope, pursued interests that were truly meaningful to you in a liberal arts education. At some level, it doesn't matter which courses you took or which major you chose.

The premise of liberal arts education is that it provides you with fundamental capacities to approach all of life's challenges. In every course and every major, you learn to think. In every course and every major you acquired habits of mind that will allow you to be a lifelong learner, to solve problems effectively. In every course and every major, you learn to use evidence and to formulate persuasive arguments. In many courses, you learn to write, in others, you learn quantitative reasoning. Along the way, you received an Amherst education. It should have been challenging, even sometimes frustrating. Indeed, it is academic excellence and rigor that distinguishes an Amherst education. By now, Amherst has a long history of famous curricular experiments designed to maintain academic excellence. All depend on three vital components: an intense demanding curriculum that makes demands on terrific students and that relies on a very dedicated faculty.

Bear with me as the historian that I am comes to the fore. Around 1900, Amherst was perceived to be in decline. In the words of a Boston journalist, Amherst College was quote an agreeable, leisurely, semi-educational country club, whereby doing a modicum of work, you could spend four pleasant years and come away with a college degree. But in 1912, Amherst appointed a well known educational reformer, Alexander Meiklejohn, as president. Meiklejohn lost little time in revitalizing the intellectual climate of Amherst College. In his view, making minds was the purpose of the liberal arts college. He thought that students should have a general education focused on big ideas and making connections as Meiklejohn declared quote, "the college is called liberal because the instruction is dominated by no special interest, is limited to no single human task, but it's intended to take human activity as a whole to understand human endeavors, not in their isolation, but in their relations to one another."

And to the total experience which we call the life of the people." To him, the elective system of the time was a quote kind of intellectual bankruptcy. Meiklejohn imposed curricular revisions that included required courses in philosophy, the study of social institutions, natural sciences, history, and artistic expression, especially literature. He established a famous year-long course for freshmen, social and economic institutions in which students were exposed to deep analysis of contemporary affairs. At the same time, Meiklejohn insisted on hiring faculty members who were extraordinary teachers. And he took the unusual step of firing some who were not good teachers. He had a strong commitment to exposing students to divergent views, all this and more raised hackles raised the hackles of alumni and trustees and Meiklejohn, as a result, was ousted in 1923. But as the new Republic noted that year, for several years, it has been generally assumed that a recent Amherst graduate might be expected to display an unusual measure of intellectual vigor of personal and moral distinction.

Meiklejohn's curriculum continued for some decades, but during World War II, a faculty committee decided that change was needed. In the committee's view, the real danger is that it, the College, will survive merely as another good college. The faculty wanted something more for Amherst and in the process, it placed more responsibility on both faculty and students. This was the new curriculum introduced in 1947. During the freshman and sophomore years, all students were required to take a particular set of courses. The focus was on interdisciplinary courses, taught by teams of faculty. These students were not about the passive acquisition of knowledge. Instead, students learned how to learn often using the case method. The new curriculum was in place until 1966 and many older alumni today still swear by it. But times changed and virtually all requirements were dropped in 1971, although it was not called such then, this was the open curriculum.

It too was designed with academic excellence and rigor in mind. The premise of the open curriculum is that if students have the freedom to choose their course of study, they will have unusual motivation and engagement with their academic programs. With that students take control of their studies and in the process develop independence self-confidence and decision-making skills. The open curriculum presupposes high levels of responsibility for both students and faculty. Students must choose their courses with intellectual honesty. Faculty must take the time and effort to advise students responsibly. I've just outlined three different Amherst curricula. Each of which in their own ways had academic excellence and rigor at their heart. An Amherst education is not a fixed product, but a process, an activity in the words of a 1978 curriculum report, it is, quote, a critical engagement with life. A willingness to examine the given and to question dogma and ability to entertain novel ways of thinking. Today, we face new challenges with our curriculum, with our changing student body.

We must ensure that our curriculum, every part of it is accessible to all students. We must ensure that all students derive maximum benefit from it, that all students are able to experience personal transformation through it. The current curriculum committee is concerned with how we teach, with pedagogical practices that will allow all students to learn at the same time. The committee hopes that the faculty will reaffirm its dedication to broad liberal arts education. It hopes that our curriculum will serve to build community through shared intellectual experiences. Just how we will do this remains under discussion. So please stay tuned. So now you're wondering what is all of this mean for you? Graduating students you're about to leave. Why would you care what Amherst does next? Because you are a part of a terrific tradition that has evolved with the times. Amherst's desire to maintain academics, excellence and rigor. You will shortly be branded an Amherst alum and you will always be distinguished by your Amherst education. As I end now, I wish you all the best as you draw on your terrific Amherst education. So let's get on with the celebration. And first and foremost, we're going to award many, many prizes.

Transcript of 2015 Senior Assembly Speech

Good afternoon, welcome class of 2015 to Senior Assembly. Did I leave out a word? Welcome to the great class of 2015 this afternoon? Actually, you should all sit down. I'm sorry.

This afternoon marks the official start of a season of celebration, a season rich with ceremony, tradition, and community. As a historian, I can't help but note the tradition of this event. Four years ago, you came to campus in the midst of Hurricane Irene with trees down. You came to Johnson Chapel at the end of orientation. As you filed into the chapel, the faculty sat in the middle section, where many of you are now seated. You sat all around the faculty on the sides, on the edges of the faculty. But this afternoon, the seating is reversed. You are in the middle and the faculty surrounds you. After four years of lectures and discussion, questioning and doubting, the faculty now envelops you, and you now are at the core, at the heart of this College. As you know, this afternoon, we will award prizes for academic achievement.

Many of you will win prizes for the extraordinary academic work that you have accomplished here. But this assembly is not just about honoring individual achievement. It is about honoring the community behind those academic achievements. There's the cliche of the solitary scholar, but for every thesis student who wins a prize, a community stands behind that student, not just the faculty thesis advisor, not just the faculty thesis readers, but you. You supported your classmates all year long. You listened to their arguments. You asked them more questions, not for you, but for them. You listened to their complaints and you commiserated, maybe because you too wrote a thesis or simply because you knew it was important to your friend. You may have told a joke or engaged in a random act of kindness. Still, you stood by your roommates, teammates, and friends. So, as we celebrate the achievements of individuals, we are celebrating you too. Without you, their achievements would not have been possible.

While we celebrate you as a community and as individuals, we are also celebrating a common endeavor. That common endeavor is scholarship, creative expression. What sort of a crazy world is it when some, like me, spend seven years writing the biography of a single Nazi perpetrator? How does that contribute to society? It certainly produces more words, more words for you and others to read, but that of course is not the point. Perhaps scholarship is important because of Amherst's motto, terras irradient, spreading light, and thus knowledge to the world. But as we know too well, knowledge in one era may be viewed as colonial, racial, sexist, or some other oppression in another era. Amherst is well known for sending its missionaries abroad. But what was their mission? And what light did they spread? Terras irradient, I would suggest, is not unimportant, but what else is there about producing and spreading knowledge here?

Some faculty and their students produce foundational knowledge that has applications that will help to better our world in very concrete ways that will allow us to help children with ADHD become more socially integrated, that will help us discover new genes and their role in countering infectious diseases, that will allow us to design more efficient solar cells and LEDs that are key to renewable energy sources. These are great examples of the terrific work done by our faculty in conjunction with our students. Is this why scholarship is important? Yes, absolutely. But let me try another tack. Over spring break, I visited four colleges and universities with my 17-year-old son. Amherst was not one of the colleges that we visited. Each one of those institutions claims to be unique. Each insisted that it married research with the liberal arts. Why is research so important? The schools didn't explain that very well, and certainly not why research is integral to liberal arts education, but I'm going to try. And the general argument goes like this. A liberal arts education inculcates habits of mind necessary for future success in every field of endeavor. Research, though, takes those habits of mind to the nth degree, critical thinking, reasoning, questioning persevering, articulating, creating. Since research questions are open-ended, you are not spoonfed results. You have to ask questions, the right ones. You have to design how you will get valuable answers. You have to push on, even if the results, do not appear promising. You have to be flexible. Maybe the first research design wasn't right. You have to be collaborative. Research, after all, often involves a team effort. And when you get results, you have to present them in a compelling manner. Employers want nothing more than to hire individuals with these habits of mind.

Now, when we think about scholarship and its importance, the habits of mind argument is a very good one. Indeed, it is an excellent argument for the value of the liberal arts education. But I actually think something else, something even more fundamental is going on. Scholarship is important for an entirely different reason. We do scholarship because we are obsessed with learning more. We do it because we delight in thinking through contradictions. We do it because we are curious, often insatiably. So we do it because we cannot but pursue a most basic human endeavor, seeking meaning in our lives through discovery. What would a world be like without such individuals? Think of empty laboratories, empty libraries, empty bookstores. Think of empty museums, theaters, cinemas, concert venues. You may decide that a life devoted to scholarship is your destiny. And if so, I applaud you for that.

But most of you will decide that that is not the life for you. And rightly so. Still, your life is greatly enhanced by others' practice of scholarship, not because knowledge in and of itself is a good thing, although it is, not because scholarship may tangibly improve your life, although it will, not because scholarship inculcates habits of mind valuable to future employers, although it does, but because you want to live in a world in which individuals seek understanding scholars are often engaged in questions that may seem arcane, but the very fact that they care and care so deeply about their pursuits means that you will lead a better life because individuals are bent, unknowing more on seeking truth means that you will encounter the fruits of their scholarship and creativity in books and other media that you will read, see or hear in the products that surround you in the architecture, in which you live and work.

Those encounters offer you opportunities to consider the most basic and fundamental questions. What is right? What is good? They allow you to consider meaning, why we do what we do when we do, how we do. And this, I think, more than any reason is why research and artistic creativity are so important. So it's time to celebrate at senior assembly. But remember what we are celebrating. We're celebrating individual accomplishment. We're celebrating the endeavor of scholarship. But most of all, we are celebrating you, you as a member of a community that values passionate inquiry, you as a member of a community that supports the search for discovery, the search for meaning, and you as a member of a community that will not stop seeking truth and understanding. And that, among other things, is what makes you the class of 2015, such a great class. I'm going to stop my welcoming remarks here. And we are going to start to award prizes.