- Okay. Good morning, everybody.
- [Audience Members] Good morning.
- Good morning. Welcome. Welcome to Johnson Chapel. My name is Shane Dillon. I'm a member of the Class of 2026 and I also serve as the Vice President of the Association of Amherst Students, which is the student government equivalent on our campus. I'm delighted to welcome you to a conversation with Amherst's president, Michael A. Elliott, Class of 1992, and trustee of Amherst College, Chantal Kordula, Class of 1994 and parent of the Class of 2027. As a student, President Elliot double-majored in English and Russian. He wrote and edited for the Amherst student newspaper and had a brief foray as a DJ at WAMH, which is the radio station in our Campus Center. He also worked in the Map Room of Frost Library and washed dishes in Valentine Dining Hall. President Elliot is a distinguished scholar of American literature and culture of the 19th and early 20th centuries. He has published widely on American and Native American literature and practices of public history. Before coming to Amherst a little over a year ago, President Elliot was a faculty member and administrator at Emory University in Atlanta for more than two decades. Trustee Kordula is a partner at the law firm of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, and a member of the firm's Executive Committee. At Amherst, she was a member of the women's rugby team and was active in the French House and Students for Educational Equality. She graduated cum laude with a bachelor's in political science and went on to earn a JD cum laude from Harvard Law School. Thank you all for being here despite the rain. I have gotten to work with both of these two individuals, and I can say you're in good hands. Thank you.
- Thank you. Thank you Shane, for that. And welcome, everybody. I'm glad everybody was able to brave the rain and make it out here. We're just gonna have to create some sunshine right in here. So we're gonna, actually, I will engage with Michael in a conversation for about 40 minutes or so, and then we'll open it up for questions from all of you at the end for about 20 minutes. So maybe we'll just jump right in, because there's a lot to talk about.
- Sure. There is a lot to talk about.
- So, maybe at a high level, do you wanna maybe just describe for us what's the vibe on campus right now? How are people feeling?
- Yeah, well, it's, you know, and all of you're in the room because you're family members of a current student, except for a few interlopers, I've just learned, and, you know, so you have some perspective on this yourself, and some of you are current students and you have perspectives on this yourself. And, you know, in some ways it's a tale of two moods.
- [Chantal] Right.
- You know, up until about two weeks ago, I really felt that there was a lot of positive energy on campus and a lot of excitement and engagement. In some ways, the campus is still enjoying, I think, a real post-COVID bounce. The classes that are coming in are just thrilled to be able a full college in-person experience, which, of course, was not their high school experience necessarily. And I'd say one of the really terrific things for me about move-in this year at orientation, which I know many of you in this room experienced, is a lot of the students who are helping move in the first-year students were seniors who never had that experience themselves, right? Many of the seniors who are graduating came here in the semester where you dropped your stuff at Alumni House and you never got to see your student, and certainly never had the fanfare and the camaraderie of move-in. And it was just great to see these seniors wanting their newest, you know, peers to have a very different experience than what they could get themselves. So there's a lot of positive energy on campus, and, like every place else in the world, we're struggling and grappling with and grieving for the violence that is unfolding in Israel and Gaza. You know, we're on the two-week mark of that horrific set of terrorist attacks from Hamas, and I'll say just a few things about that and how the campus is responding to it. And I'll say, first of all, one of the things I'm really proud of at Amherst is that we have an excellent student newspaper, and if you want one sense of the campus, I encourage you to go read it. I thought they did a terrific job in the issue that came out on Wednesday. It's actually, I think, much better than a lot of the national press about what's going on on college campuses, and at least on this campus, and it gives you a wide range of opinions and emotions, which I think is what a responsible piece should do, and actually wrote an excellent editorial about the responsibilities of journalism in this moment like this, which I would love to clip out and send to every major national media outlet right now if I had time. So, but there's obviously a lot of fear and anxiety and sadness among our students right now. And what I've been trying to do is have as many informal conversations as possible with students, and you hear different things, but there are some important themes, right? You hear from students who are Jewish and maybe have a strong identification with the state of Israel who are concerned about antisemitism, especially the proliferation of antisemitism on social media, especially an anonymous social media platform that many of our students are using. You have students who are Jewish who maybe are more critical of the state of Israel, who also are afraid of how they're speaking out in a way that will not garner criticism from their peers. And then, you know, I've also talked to students who are Muslim or who are pro-Palestinian, and those are not the same things, who are worried about their ability to express their anxiety about what is happening to Palestinians at this moment, and certainly do not want to be seen as supporters of Hamas, and how do they make that political case, a humanitarian case, without being lumped in with really some of the very hateful rhetoric that's around the world. And then they're also incredibly anxious because they're hearing stories at another university in Massachusetts of pro-Palestinian students being doxxed and identified and having job offers rescinded because of political stances that they've received. So it is a moment of fear for many of our students, and fear of speaking out and engaging with each other around an issue in which many of them have, many, but not all, and that's important, have personal investments, political investments, and I imagine that in this room we have people who have family ties to the region or personal connections to the region, and it's incredibly painful, and it also divides our campus in some ways. It's actually one of the few major national/international issues that really does divide our campus. So what are we doing in the face of all of that? We have been really working, and the "we" here includes the Student Affairs Office, the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, really trying to reach out to students to understand their experiences, provide them with spaces to process their own emotions, sometimes in smaller groups that might be Jewish or Muslim. We are trying to think about programs that will allow them to become better educated about what's happening and to help them speak to one another about what they're feeling and how they're understanding that. So for instance, next Thursday we're bringing in an expert on the region who will do an event where it'll be very factually-based questions and answers about the war between Israel and Hamas, and students will come and be able to submit questions, but we're gonna have them write them down on cards so it does not become a public debate. It does not become something where students are nervous about being able to ask a question, and even nervous, we also know we have a lot of students who really don't know much about this.
- Right.
- And so our goal is to educate, and that means bringing in a lot of different voices. And this is just the beginning, I think, of what we're doing. It's a moment where the size of our campus both presents a challenge and what I hope is also an opportunity. It's a challenge insofar as there is a real intimacy to this campus. I mean, just think about this space, right, where we are. This is not a large space. This is one of the largest speaking spaces we have on campus. And what that intimacy means is that you very well may have somebody sitting next to you in class or lives down the hall from you that holds an opinion or expresses an opinion that you feel is truly wrongheaded, and then you may see that person sitting next to you in the dining hall, or sitting next to you in your next class, and you can't remove yourself entirely. And that's very, very uncomfortable for students, for anybody, and it's not something that I think the contemporary world has trained them very well for. And at the same time, our size should also give us an opportunity, right? If I hear something from you, Chantal, that I think is really out of left field, I should be able to say, "Well, listen, I know Chantal. I know she likes, you know, acid rock and rugby, you know, and tells really, really funny jokes, and so shouldn't I be able to talk to her somehow about this thing? Like, how could she be so wrongheaded about this?" And so those are the kinds of conversations we have to figure out how to foster. And it's something I've been concerned about and trying to think about with many other people on campus long before, you know, this series of events in the last two weeks, but it certainly creates an additional set of pressures on that.
- Do you think students feel comfortable asking that question that you just suggested they might ask, or do they need to get to a place with it?
- No, I do not think most students, and again, one doesn't want to generalize too much. We have an incredibly, we have a whole range of students who feel and act in a bunch of different ways. But no, I think students at this point are largely fearful of asking the wrong question and saying the wrong thing that will get them labeled or ostracized in a certain way. Again, so something I hear from some of the leaders, Jewish student leaders I talk to is a fear that if they say something or put something even on social media, which is, you know, something we could spend a long time talking about, that they will be ostracized by friends who feel very differently. And so I do think that there's real fear, and I also think it's our job to help them figure out how to negotiate that and how to hopefully move beyond it.
- Right, so it's now been over a year, you know, that you've been here with us, and I think you've spent a lot of time talking, listening, hearing what people have to say.
- Yeah.
- And I think you mentioned that you have some priorities that have emerged and things you're focusing on over the next couple of years. So maybe you can talk a little bit about those.
- You know, I'll talk about sort of two big buckets of priorities, and in some ways they're directly related, both of them, to what we were just talking about, because they are a kind of Venn diagram that intersect. You know, the first priority is really about strengthening a sense of community and belonging on the campus for all of our students. I think we offer our students a marvelous and really, you know, world-class liberal arts education, very proud of where we are in terms of the academic programs. I think many of our students have terrific experiences as students on campus, but the way that our students organize themselves are often around smaller groups and smaller activities, and they don't always have spaces to really come together and experience the value of the diversity of our student body. And so we're working on several things that, I think, will help us to do that. It includes doing more work through Student Affairs on leadership. It means working with our colleagues in the student government on more campus-wide activities, including just social activities. It also includes planning more events that deliberately bring a broader range of students together. So for instance, this January we are going to pilot something. I think we're still calling it the Sophomore Summit, which will be a three-day, put an asterisk next to that, that name will change at some point, it'll be a three-day program open to all sophomores really focused on not just career preparation but kind of life design. How do you think about your future beyond Amherst? What kind of resources are available to you here? We'll bring in a lot of alumni. We actually opened this up... We thought it would be really good to start small in the first year, so we opened it up to 100 students. It immediately filled up, so we've opened it up to 50 more. Immediately filled up. We're gonna stop there because we do know that however great it is the first year, we didn't get it right the first time. So we're gonna stop there, you know, learn from it, and then hopefully by next year, we'll be able to open it up to all sophomores. So that's essential. And of course, we are, as part of this, really working toward a vision that we'll be able to make full use of one of the construction projects that we have going across the quad, a student center that will really bring the entire student body together. At the same time, and I think these are, again, intersecting priorities, I think that this is a moment for Amherst College to rededicate itself to its mission to serve the greater good. And what I mean by that is that the goal of our work here is not simply to provide a marvelous education for our 1,850 students so that they can have wonderful individual lives, although we want that, but so that through them and through other work that we do here, we impact the society beyond us. This is not a new priority for Amherst College. It's been a priority for Amherst College throughout its history, and it's meant different things to different generations. We are, in the next 10 days, going to be welcoming Governor Healey of Massachusetts back to this very stage, I believe, to mark the 60th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's visit to campus, and we'll use that occasion to talk about what that means. Just to give you a little preview, it means developing more courses where students think about what it means to be a democratic citizen. A citizen of democracy means to be a leader in democracy, to take on real-world problems. It means getting more students involved in courses where they work on real community issues, out into the neighboring communities in the town of Amherst and other towns that are around us. It means being a good partner to those places. It means reckoning with our history in an honest way. And it also means really making sure that we provide opportunities for all of our students to see themselves as contributing to society after they leave, including pursuing careers in public service, nonprofit, government, social impact. And we also have a really terrific panel tomorrow night, Monday night, with some recent alumni who've taken up those career paths so that students can see some examples of what that can look like.
- Right, so, and, you know, one of the things that you hear students talking about is that, you know, this is hard here, right? Like, the classes are hard. The library is pretty packed, you know, Sunday through Thursday night. So I guess, how do you balance kind of what you're talking about, about the greater good and thinking about things, thinking in a way that you're impacting your society, with sort of, "I need to just do well here in order to get, you know, that job when I leave here."
- So I think it's a great, and, you know, it's hard by design. That's a feature, not a bug. And I think the goal has to be not to give students more to do, but to give them more opportunities to reflect on what they're doing and also on why they're doing it, right? You know, I'm sure many of you have experienced this with your children or, if you're students in the room, you've experienced this yourselves, we live in a very credential-driven, hyper-anxious moment where everybody's worried about getting credentials for the next thing. And, you know, we were talking about this recently with some students at a board meeting, right? They've been on that hamster wheel during their entire experience of high school, and even for some of them probably going back to middle school, maybe even elementary school, right, building that resume that would get them to a place like Amherst. And what we don't want is Amherst to be a continuation of all of that, right, simply accumulating credentials because they're worried about simply that first thing after they graduate.
- Right.
- We want them to feel confident that they have opportunities. We want them to know what they're going to be, but we also want them to reflect on why they're going to be doing it and what kind of person they want to be. So that's what we're aiming for, is building in more moments of structured reflection that actually gives students a chance to pause and think about the value of what they're doing. I think it's going to be even more essential in a perverse way for their success in the workplace after they graduate in an age in which professions and the workplace are about to evolve very rapidly if even 25% of what we read about artificial intelligence is correct, right? We know that virtually every knowledge-based job is going to be changing quite quickly in the decades to come, and the people who are going to not just survive that environment but actually be empowered to thrive in that environment and to lead in that environment for a better society are people who are gonna be able to pull back and think about the broader questions critically.
- Okay, so maybe thinking a little bit about some of the challenges that students are facing today. One of the things that you said during your talk on Orientation Day was that you, too, have a child who's in college, and so you're seeing the experience not only through the eyes of all the Amherst students but through his eyes. And so do you think that there are different challenges that students of that age are going through now, if you compare it to, for example, when we were in college?
- Absolutely. I do have a sophomore at another fine liberal arts institution, rhymes with Rothmoore, and I don't hear from him very much, so if you have any contacts there, I would be delighted to know what the hell is going on. He says "Good" to whatever question I write to him. But yeah, you know, but I do have a different perspective. I do have that vantage point as well, you know, thinking about this generation of students. Listen, you know, another way that I get this question all the time is like, "What's changed about Amherst, right, since you were a student?" And, you know, what I think is really, and this gets to the political questions we were talking about earlier, it gets to mental health questions, right, what is really different is the environment of technology and communication and the way that they swim in it, and that has profoundly changed what it means to be a young person today, including being a college student. Education is fundamentally a communications business and the entire infrastructure of... Right, when I was a student, if I wanna see my professor, I went downstairs and I sat on the bench for an hour, an hour and a half, and I met really interesting people who were also waiting for him down there, whereas our students don't do that now, and they don't wait. They don't have that sense of delayed gratification. They want answers immediately. They want to rush to judgment on issues, which is really, again, coloring the political questions that we're talking about. And, you know, whether technology is the cause or one of the causes or the only cause we could argue about, but there is certainly a greater degree of anxiety in the world right now. I would say the other thing that I think is really important as I think about this particular moment in history and educating students is that if you read any public opinion poll of Americans at this moment, and I'm gonna guess that this is true of Europeans as well, the overriding mood of the country is pessimism. Every opinion poll shows a straight, you know, a gradual slope going down, or this way, I guess, from this side, right, in questions like, "Do you believe the country's on the right track? Do you think you will lead a life better than your parents? Do you think your kids will lead a life better?" You know, it's all sloped down. And one of the reasons, first of all, it's a challenging environment in which to be a young person. Education is all about optimism and it's all about hope, right? We invest our time and intellect into these young people because we believe in them and we believe that they can lead extraordinary lives, and again, improve the society around them. And so at this particular moment, it does feel like institutions like Amherst and Swarthmore and others are cutting against the grain of American culture, and I think our students feel that profoundly, even though I'm sure none of them would articulate it exactly that way.
- Right. So I wanna pick up on sort of the mental health that you mentioned, right? So we've heard a lot about, you know, the mental health challenges that this particular generation is facing and the fact that COVID really exacerbated that. So, I guess, two questions, and one, you alluded to the seniors now were first years when we were in COVID. So one question is, do you think we're sort of, you mentioned we're in the post-COVID sort of bounce,
- Bounce, bounce.
- bounce, bounce, bounce, right. Are we really past that in terms of thinking about, like, having come back together as a community? Are we still feeling the lingering effects of COVID, whether it's in classes and the like, and maybe how do you think about the mental health issues and what are we doing to sort of help there?
- We're definitely still feeling the effects of COVID, and you can, you know, again, think about our seniors who are here. They've had a very different Amherst experience, different relationship with the institution. The institution was a police force in a way that was different for them than for others. And then you think about the fact that our students who are entering now or are sophomores missed really key parts of high school being in-person, and that has both social effects and academic effects, and those were unevenly distributed, because we all know high schools across the country and the world had different levels of resources and handled the pandemic differently. One of the very particular ways that I've been hearing from faculty, and I heard this last year, and I'm hearing that this year as well, is the challenge of teaching especially kind of introductory classes for students who have very different levels of academic preparation based on how much material the high school classes were able to cover during the pandemic. And, you know, that's not a judgment at all about the intelligence or the capacity of those students, but, you know, one faculty member described to me that he's almost running a shadow second class for students who didn't cover as much material in high school to try to get them up to speed with the rest of the class. And that's obviously a challenge for those students and also a real challenge for the faculty member. That's a lot of work to do. It's also a moment where, you know, I get to express my extraordinary pride at having these colleagues at Amherst who care so deeply about students that they do that without even thinking about it and only sort of tell me over coffee or something like that, rather than storming into my office to complain. So, you know, I think the after-effects of COVID will be with us for quite some time. I'm not enough of a child psychologist to know how long, but I have to think that missing key parts of middle school also has lingering social and academic effects as well, and, you know, who knows beyond that? So those are some of the effects. You know, the mental health challenges, you know, there are things that we've done on this campus that I think probably some of you're aware of. We have really beefed up what the Counseling and Mental Health Center can do. We've invested in that. But I think the other, the really important thing that we are trying to do over the last year has been to pool together the resources of the college, all of the people who are thinking about questions of mental health and wellbeing, to make sure that, A, we're sharing data that we have, that we are sharing information about what we're doing, and that we're creating a college where the mental health and wellbeing of our students is in fact everybody's responsibility and is seen as something that everybody who works with students directly and sometimes even indirectly understands that they play a role in. So one of the things we've done, this is gonna seem like a very small thing but I think it will be helpful, is we've created a one-sheet resource called The Purple Folder that will, I think, by when, the end of the semester, be on everybody's desk. That will be, in fact, a purple folder. We stole this from another university where it's a red folder. We're not above borrowing good ideas at Amherst College. We borrowed the books from Williams one day and we'll give them back, or not, but, you know, literally it's a website, it's a one-pager, so that if you are sitting across from a student in distress of different kinds, you know how to triage. Where can you go for resources? What kind of signs should we be looking for that might suggest going to the Counseling Center or signs they should be going to the class dean? What are the other kinds? So we're leaning into that mission. In the long run, though, you know, what most of the research suggests about the things that we can do to help our students become resilient and overcome anxiety and depression really are about building social relationships, right? Those are what offer you resilience when you're faced with challenge, right? When you get that first B, and you will get a B at Amherst College, right, and you have somebody to talk to, when you're trying to figure out what to major in. Obviously that shouldn't be your only set of resources. You should be able to talk to advisors, you should be able to talk to your class dean. But building those relationships are everything, and so that's why community and belonging is such an important priority for me.
- What about fun? What do students do for fun?
- [President Elliott] Let's get Shane up here.
- Okay, yeah. And I mean, I know the library's packed Sunday through Thursday. What does Friday and Saturday look like? And maybe not all the details, but at a high level.
- We do get reports, you know, and I will say in some ways the most opaque hours for me of the college calendar are like the Saturday night. I do not go creeping around at 11 o'clock. Nobody really wants to see their president at midnight on a Saturday night. So first of all, I will say, some people ask me, and, you know, I don't think your parents or family members who are in the room probably have this impression, but I do occasionally hear from alumni who really haven't been on a college campus, like, "It's not fun anymore. You don't hear about fun anymore." Students are having fun, right? I go around. I go to the dining halls. I do pop into different events. Students are having fun. Some of it's organized and some of it is they do, you know, I was just at the amateur theater performance last night for The Green Room. You know, there are musical groups. They sing. They play club sports. There's something in this generation, I think, and Shane may... Shane Dillon will be offering a rebuttal afterwards. They do seem to like structured fun. So one of the things, for instance, AS, the student senate, organized over orientation this last year was a massive game of Capture the Flag on the quad that I heard got quite heated and competitive. So, you know, they are always fun. Do they dance and drink and all those things? Of course, they do, sometimes to excess. Yes. Unfortunately, sometimes they do. And we are always working on that and trying to keep their fun within a certain kind of boundaries, because our safety is obviously a concern as well. But it's important that they do have fun with each other, and this is a place where on a Saturday night there will be a certain number of students who are still studying. This is also a place, you know, I hate to disabuse any parents who might have been laboring under a different presumption, your kids got here because they're nerds at heart and they may not admit it. They maybe not wanna tell you that, but these are also kids, you know, many of them for whom, like, you know, sometimes digging into their academic work is also a form of pleasure, too.
- Okay, okay. We'll take your word for that. That was not my experience, but anyway.
- [President Elliott] Women's rugby was tough. You guys were a tough group.
- So maybe two more questions before we open it up. So one, I do wanna touch on, one of the things that Amherst just really stands out in terms of sort of peer institutions, it's sort of the diversity of its student body and its faculty. And, you know, with the recent decision on affirmative action, just want to kind of get your thoughts, if you can share, as to sort of how are you thinking about that? How are we planning to continue with the mission of maintaining a diversity of ideas and perspectives and backgrounds and all that.
- So I think you said something really important at the end there, which is that one of the things that's essential is that that part of our mission continues, right? The Supreme Court decision affects one way that we pursue that mission, which is it affects the moment of decision in admissions, and that's a big lever that will change the composition of the student body, but it is not the only way that we pursue that mission. In admissions, we have to do a lot of work immediately, and we have been doing it, and we have some people from Admissions who have been really working hard since that decision was handed down to make sure that we are in compliance with the law, which we have to do. We do believe in the rule of law, even when we don't agree with the court. To pursue that mission, though, means we are going to have to, first of all, double down on some of the strategies that we've already found successful in terms of recruiting a very diverse and talented applicant pool. That means working with partner organizations like QuestBridge, Prep for Prep, some of you might be familiar with. It means working with particular schools where we've had success and making sure that they know about Amherst. It may mean expanding that network. One of the things we're talking about is what could some more formal partnerships look like with some of the public school systems in western Massachusetts and maybe elsewhere that could be a commitment from us to help those students not only consider Amherst, and colleges like Amherst, but also improve their rates of sending their students to college more generally? And we also have to make sure that we have a good story to tell those students, that one of the great things about Amherst is not just the diversity of the student body that we've been able to recruit over the last 10 years, but that over the last 10 years we have closed all of the achievement gaps among different demographics in our student body, right? Our graduation rate, our retention rate, all of what's called student success in my business, all those measures look identical, whether you're looking at students of color, white students, first generation students, full-pay students, students on financial need, and that's something that we should be tremendously proud of, and I think we probably haven't touted actually enough, 'cause it's kind of inside baseball, but it's important. I wanna say upfront that if you are a parent here in the audience, first of all, thank you for choosing Amherst, or at least allowing your child to choose Amherst. I know how that negotiation works. But also I wanna say your voice in helping us to pursue this mission of diversity is probably one of the most important voices that we can enlist. I think you all know this, and certainly some of the students in the room can attest to this, you know, and no brochure that we can produce, no website that we can produce, no social media that we can produce equals the voice of somebody trusted within a community, in a school network, in a friend network, and to the extent that you can inform people about the commitment of Amherst to having a diverse student body, to being a place where every student feels supported, where diverse students do things that are exciting together and that feel different because of that composition of the student body, which, I think, is actually the most important part, right, a campus that's committed to the idea that learning from one another is essential to creating the leaders that our democracy needs, you can help us to recruit the students who might have otherwise said, "Why should I bother applying after the Supreme Court decision?" And that is the thing that most worries me, is that students who are talented may think that Amherst is now out of their reach. We will obviously continue to learn from this first admission cycle post the Supreme Court decision and have to evolve our practices. I don't think we're going to get it all right at once. We didn't get to where we are by knowing exactly what to do right away either. And it's gonna take multiple admission cycles to know all of our strategies. So we're in this for the long haul. Amherst has been in this for the long haul and our sleeves are rolled up and we're just as committed as ever.
- Excellent. So I'm gonna ask the last question while maybe the team can start getting the microphones ready for people who might have questions in the room. So you're an alum, Class of '92, you experienced Amherst as a student, and now you're experiencing it as, you know, the president. Are there experiences from when you were here that inform how you think about your leadership as a president?
- That's a good question. Yeah, of course there are. I mean, there are experiences that I've had here that, you know, have, first of all, obviously enabled me to get to where I am. You know, as somebody who was a professor and then became an administrator, I still have a faculty appointment, but I don't get to teach very much anymore, and I have to say probably one of the most formative experiences was in editing "The Amherst Student," which taught me, it's the only management training I've ever actually had, and taught me certainly about the value of working in teams on a deadline, negotiating very different viewpoints. I worked with an extraordinary group of students, one of whom now is leading civil rights in the Department of Education, one of whom writes a personal finance column for the "New York Times," and all of whom have gone on to do kind of amazing things in their lives. So that experience was formative. And I say that the other thing that I bring from that back to this campus is an appreciation for the fact that those small things matter, and it's something that I'm so proud of Amherst for never losing track of. It would be so easy at this moment in history, when there's a lot of hand-wringing about the future of higher education, very glitzy initiatives that different campuses are rolling out, to lose the fact that the secret to an Amherst education is what we sometimes call in our mission statement close colloquy, being in small groups of people, learning from one another, whether that's in a class, around a lab, seminar table, in the library, or out of class on the rugby pitch. Is that rugby pitch?
- [Chantal] Yeah.
- Right, the rugby pitch, you know, the basement of Pratt, which is where "The Amherst Student" once was, organizing the radio station, like, these small things, they don't get a lot of headlines, right, they will never get as many front page stories as legacy admissions or protests on campus, but that's actually where education happens. That's where purpose is formed. That's where leadership is developed. And it's exciting to be at a place that has remained laser-focused on that mission for decade and decade during a period where there have been so many other distractions that could have led the institution in a different way. And the main thing that I learned from being on this campus for four years, bringing it back to my presidency, is I'm gonna enjoy the heck out of it, because it's just such a pleasure to watch and to see unfold, and, you know, when I was here for four years as a student, my biggest regret was that I didn't get four more, and now I do. So I'm really pleased to be back.
- Excellent. All right, so do we have questions? Let's see, there's one over there, and then there's one up in the gallery, too.
- Thank you, President. I wanted to follow up on a comment you made about closing the achievement gaps across various data in your diverse student body. There are some indications now that because of the COVID experience, some of these gaps may have opened up in terms of the level of preparation students are coming back with into college, because probably more privileged students had a better experience in high school during COVID versus others. Do you have plans to address that?
- The different levels of preparation for... So some of it will be curricular, but we've also, one of the things we've done is that we have increased what we call kind of our academic support services, our Quantitative Center, Writing Center. We now have what's called a Center for Strategic Learning so that students have resources outside of their classrooms to be able to learn how to learn better. And, you know, this is something that is, again, one of the ways that we get information in real time about where students are and what the needs are that they have, and that group has been very, very helpful in addressing this so far, and I think they will continue to be so over the coming years. It's another advantage of being in a small place, is that as we learn things about where the student needs are, we're able to fill in fairly quickly. And like I said, I don't think this is something we're going to be done with this year. I think it's gonna be something that we're gonna continue to see. You know, and frankly, it's something that Amherst has already seen even before the pandemic as high schools have moved away from less and less of a prescribed curriculum. You know, there was a time probably at Amherst when if you were teaching a first-year class, you had a pretty good idea of what your students studied in high school. And given the range of schools that we now recruit from, but also kind of how high school curricula have developed across the country and across the world, and the world is really now where we recruit our students, that's less true. So in some ways we've been already preparing for this, but it's certainly much more acute in the post pandemic-moment.
- [Chantal] Yeah, a hand up there.
- [Audience Member] Many colleges and universities are increasing their enrollment
- Oh, there you are.
- every year with ever-larger freshman classes, and they're also having trouble keeping up with on-campus housing, building enough dorms, that kind of thing. What is Amherst's plan for the size of the student body and for on-campus housing in the future?
- So at this stage, so why are they doing that? You know, just to be clear, they're doing that because they need to increase tuition revenue. And we're fortunate, although there are challenges with this, that we're less reliant on tuition revenue than virtually any other school in the country. There are a handful that are a little bit less, but we are in a very privileged position. So the questions for us, if we were to increase the student body, are less likely to be about tuition revenue and more about the composition of the student body and the nature of the student experience. Right now, there are not plans to increase the student body. That said, in the next probably two years, we'll enter into a more comprehensive strategic planning process, and that, I think, will be one of the questions that's on the table. The college has made shifts in enrollment over time. When I was here, it was about 1,600. Now it's about 1,850. And so that, I think, is something that we should be asking. Are we the right size? Where will it be? Obviously that has incredible, you know, downstream effects, not just from housing, because we are committed at this point to continuing to be a residential campus, but also for faculty-student ratio, office space, all the other things that go with this. I will say the student center and dining hall that we are currently constructing, and if you have not seen the construction site, I invite you to go over, it's fun to watch, it's actually mostly a destruction site at this point, 'cause we're still taking the old building down, which is fairly dramatic, is built with a capacity for us to increase the student body, so that if we want to do so, we'll have that ability. We do have... We are not, I think, where we want to be in terms of our housing stock, even with this number of students, and so we're looking at ways that we can expand the housing stock without necessarily engaging in a lot of additional construction at this time. In the long term, if we were to expand the student body, we would probably need to, almost certainly need to build more housing. Luckily we have land to do that. We are relatively land-rich compared to some other institutions. So then it's a matter of the financials of how we actually get that done. But we are still committed to being a fully residential campus. Short version, we're gonna stay residential. We're not planning to increase, but it's certainly on the table for the future.
- [Chantal] I think here's one there and maybe one over there.
- All right, so thank you, President, taking the time, to talk to the parents of those nerds.
- [President Elliot] Thank you for the nerds.
- Yeah. So I have two questions, but both of them related to you talking about the pessimism, right?
- [President Elliott] I'm sorry, the?
- [Chantal] Pessimism.
- Pessimism.
- [President Elliott] Oh, pessimism.
- Yes, so you're talking about the whole society, the country here, or the parents, even around the world, the pessimism, right, it goes like that. So do you know any particular thing about the students on the campus, what are their pessimisms are? So for example, have you done any student survey? What are those things they are pessimistic about? Is it because of the, you know, studies too hard, professors are so mean, or there's no fun, right, on the campus? So that's my first question, so if you could share some thoughts.
- So I don't think we have great student data on our own students regarding sort of pessimism about the future, nor do I necessarily think we have great data that says how our students line up versus the general population. But if you look at other surveys of young people, one great survey that comes out regularly is of 12th graders, graduating 12th graders, which is a good indication of what the college-age population is, another is a Gallup survey, what you'll find is they're pessimistic about institutions, the ability of institutions to change and eradicate issues about which they care, racism, income inequality. They're very concerned about climate change. Now, that said, some people posit that, actually, it's not the gravity of those problems that's driving the pessimism, because, in fact, there have been grave issues facing every generation of college students, but in fact the way that they're bombarded by those issues because of the technology that they carry with them and the way they interact with the media that's on that technology. Again, I'm happy to refer you to people who make those arguments. I'm not sure I know enough to know whether that's the right diagnosis or not, but it's certainly something that I feel rings true as I talk to students. We actually do not have the student survey data that we want, and so one of the things we're working on is developing a new survey instrument to get better data on the student experience. The challenge is, we've been relying on a survey that we use as part of a consortium of schools and that it's become so long and unwieldy that the response rate is low, and so we are gonna start working on a shorter pulse survey that will get us better data on what students are experiencing.
- Yeah, I think that would be a good idea. You maybe have some very short, sweet, precise, you know, questionnaires to understand what's happening for the students on the campus.
- [President Elliott] Yes.
- So second thing also relates to the pessimism. So I think Americans tend to be more pessimistic for the country, at least compared to where I come from. Now, but if you look at the history, America and Americans always thrive, always thrive from those pessimisms. So maybe there is some value to teaching those students about this, about to deal with pessimism, how to turn them into optimism, as you said, right? So maybe this is something I just also want to hear your thoughts.
- I completely agree. You know, we bring students here to face the challenges of the world. We just want them to be optimistic about their abilities to ameliorate them and to contribute to them. So last week we had, I think it was just last week, we had Carol Anderson here who's a scholar who works on voter suppression and especially the intersection of race and voter suppression in this country. And she came and gave this wonderful talk where she talked about the history of efforts to restrict the franchise, but did so in the most optimistic and upbeat way possible, because she wants to inspire and empower students to go out and organize and create a different trend in terms of voter engagement. And I agree, that that is our role, right, is not to have them... Right, we are not trying to create false hope. We're not trying to create empty optimism. We're trying to create critical thinkers who understand the world, but if they leave here feeling despair about their ability to engage and improve the world, then I don't think we've done our job.
- [Chantal] I think we have time for maybe two more questions. There was one over here. A gentleman here had raised his hand.
- Hello, so you seem like a very confident guy. We get that. How do you look at the challenge of comparing yourself to 200 years of presidents in this university?
- [President Elliott] I'm sorry, how do I prepare myself for...
- How do you look at the challenges, comparing yourself to 200 years of presidents at this university?
- I try not to think about 200 years. I think the most important thing, and I have to say, the worst moment in some ways is when I get up here and I start looking at the portraits of all of my predecessors right on the wall. But, you know, on the other hand, I also take solace. First of all, I actually talk to Biddy Martin quite often, who's become a wonderful friend and resource and colleague. And, you know, to the point of the question earlier, I remind myself the previous generations of presidents have faced their own challenges. My president was Peter Pouncey, who's over there in the blue robe. We just had a memorial service for Peter because he passed away at the end of the spring. And, you know, one of the things I remember is that his last semester, or my last semester, which was not his last semester, but my last semester, his office was occupied by students who were angry about the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles and wanted the college to take stronger action in response to racial inequality. I think about Bill Ward. Where's Bill Ward? He's back there in the corner. Bill Ward was one of our Vietnam presidents, and he was president during the end of Vietnam, and came into this chapel in 1974 after the bombing of Cambodia and told the students that he was going to go down to Westover Air Force Base and be arrested, and he was. So there's a lot of solace there, a lot of courage that I can draw on. And, you know, I try not to be daunted by everything that they've done. And, you know, I take inspiration from the place. This is a great place and, you know, the most important thing for me is not that I will let Amherst down but Amherst will not let me down. This is a place that lets its president succeed and I think it's gonna give me a fair shot to do so as well.
- [Chantal] All right, we have one last question there.
- President Elliot, in addition to it's tremendous diversity, it's commitment to trying to teach students to go out into the greater world and do good, one of the things Amherst College is so well known for is its commitment to not having a core curriculum. There are rumors, rumblings that the faculty and the administration are considering introducing a core curriculum or asking students to take more classes outside of their chosen majors. I've also heard that, contrary to what was the case 10, 20, 30 years ago when we had a vast majority of students majoring in English, history, American studies, we now have many, many students majoring in math, computer science, and economics, and that part of that is driven by their worries about gaining, you know, employment, something many parents worry about, too. So anyway, I'm really curious to hear what you think of this, what you think, you know, based on your own experience and your experience as an educator and now as an administrator and president of a college, what do you think are the arguments for asking Amherst College students to take more of these classes? And I just wanna mention one quick thing. There's a very, very well-known writer who was actually in the Class of '89, who I'm pretty sure took 30 English classes during her time in Amherst College. Now, it's kind of an interesting case study, because she went on to do graduate work, she went on to become a video game designer, then she's a very popular writer, and she's now a business person too, who's starting a very interesting company that's employing some Amherst College students. So it's interesting to look at these cases of alums who have gone on to do really meaningful things in their area, and they really did not in any way pursue, you know, courses across the vast...
- So how much time do we have? So first of all, since I think this is being streamed or recorded, or somebody might have a phone out, let me say the most important thing that any college president, talking about my predecessors, they would've all have done this too, can say about the curriculum, the faculty own the curriculum, right? Any decision about the curriculum has to come from the faculty, and, you know, presidents who try to move too quickly without that faculty support do so at their peril, and that certainly would be a dangerous road to go down here at Amherst College. To start with, you know, the open curriculum, first of all, was an attraction for me as a student. It's one of the reasons I chose Amherst over some other options, and I also agree that it served Amherst very well for about 50 years now, and I don't think it's on the verge of radically changing. And at the same time I have heard an increasing number of faculty, or at least what feels like an increasing number of faculty to me, start to ask, "Is it really the right curriculum for this moment?" And I would say, in a larger sense, I think the faculty should always be asking whether the set of requirements, or, in our case, the lack of requirements, are the right thing to promote the education that they want to do. That's a question the faculty absolutely should be looking at on a regular basis and considering. And I do think that there's a sense that there are some people in the faculty who wanna spend some time considering that and perhaps arguing for a different system. That will be a multi-year process. I went through general education reform at Emory. It took us three and a half years and ended up in some very modest changes. Moving away from the open curriculum, I think, would be a bigger shift. But anything we've been doing for 50 years, we should be looking at periodically. Just like the size of the student body, we should be looking at it periodically. I think that, as well, one of the interesting things about, you mentioned, you know, sort of where students are studying and what might be affecting this set of questions, so here's an interesting fact that I did not realize until I became president, and Melissa's Class of '91, I'm Class of '92, we were here at a moment when the sciences were at a 100-year low in terms of the percentage of students who were majoring in the sciences. I didn't realize that at the time. So in fact, we were here at a moment when fewer percentage of students were majoring in the sciences than really ever before, or at least ever since we started majors seriously. And since then, the move has slowly been toward the sciences. We have not experienced, let me say this, you didn't ask, but I think this is important to know, we have not experienced the dramatic drop-off in either students studying or majoring in the humanities that some other institutions have experienced. We still have a large number of students. I think the last number I saw was over 40% of our students have at least one major in the humanities, and the enrollments in the humanities continue to be very, very strong. The humanities are strong here. At the same time, and, we do have more students who are interested in the sciences. And one of the other things that shifted since you were a student and I was a student, is that when we were here, I think the perception was that there were students who only took classes in the humanities because of the open curriculum and never ventured out, like your person you mentioned from the Class of '89. Now it's the reverse. The concern is actually about students who are only taking classes in the lab sciences or mathematics and not venturing out in the humanities. And I think some of our faculty are asking, "Are they really getting an Amherst education if they do that?" And like I said, I don't think that's a bad question to ask, but it will take several years to unfold. And certainly, if you're really worried about this, if you're a student in the room who's worried about this, one of the things you should also know is that we, I don't know if it's legal or contractual, but whenever there's a change in graduation requirements, you graduate under the requirements with which you entered. So if you're worried, like, "Oh my gosh, I'm gonna go have to fulfill a new core curriculum," no, you will not. Moreover, I actually suspect, knowing the way that faculty governance works around these kinds of issues, that it probably will not actually be resolved in the next two or three years, and nor should it actually ever be resolved. Again, this is the kind of thing that faculty should always be discussing and thinking about and evaluating.
- All right. Well, thank you. I don't know if you have any last few words.
- I just wanna say thank you for parents. Students, close your ears for a minute. I am really just delighted to get to know the students. They are upstanding people, they're thoughtful, they're ethical, they're ambitious, they're funny, they are very nice to me, which, of course, is the real litmus test. And, you know, I know what it means to raise a kid and to send them off to a strange place. I know for some of you, you're sending them across the country. For some of you, you are just sending them across town. But I'm just grateful for the trust that you've placed in the institution and I'm thrilled that you're here, even on a rainy day. I'll also just report the soccer game schedule has been changed, at least since yesterday. They are now, the women's game is at 1:00, the men's game is at 2:30. I'm looking at Don who's gonna shake... Is that right?
- And they're on the turf field.
- [Speaker] 12:00, 2:30.
- 12:00 and 2:30, and they're on the turf field.
- Turf fields, yeah. Oh, that way, yeah.
- They're that way, which means you can also bounce from the soccer games to the football games, and you can get some steps in, some soggy steps in, which I think is also a goal. So thank you all for being here. I'm thrilled to welcome you all.
- Thank you.