Presidential Perspectives:
President Anthony Marx
Anthony Marx is the 18th president of Amherst College and has held this position since 2003. Prior to his tenure at Amherst, he was a professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies of Political Science at Columbia University for 13 years. In addition, he helped found Khanya College in South Africa and has authored three books.
Q: How would you describe the College’s financial situation, and what changes or further cuts do you foresee?
A: The College continues to be privileged to have tremendous resources. These include human resources, such as the faculty, students, staff and alumni, but also an endowment that remains well north of a billion dollars. For a relatively small institution, this provides us with great cushion, which we need at this point. At the same time, the endowment has lost a third of its value (or thereabouts), bringing it back down to roughly where it was in 2003. The budget of the College has grown by roughly 50 percent since then, and we have come to rely on returns from the endowment for something like 35 to 40 percent of our operating costs. These costs are built into our budget and mostly cover people: faculty, staff and financial aid. We’ve worked together to reduce the projected budget for next year by about ten percent by freezing salary pools, slowing down on hiring both faculty and staff, asking every department to take a ten or fifteen percent reduction in non-salary expenses and increasing the size of the student body over the next four years. We need to make sure that, in five or ten years, we’re not assuming a rate of spending from the endowment that cannot be sustained.
When we say, “all possible reductions in the budget are on the table for consideration,” we mean reductions that we really hope won’t be necessary. However, students need to understand that these reductions are being seriously considered, whether in financial aid, in the number of College employees or in the amount we pay our employees. I would hope not to make any of these cutbacks, but they all have to be part of the conversation. It may not be possible to avoid every awful possibility and we may have to make some hard choices. We have to weigh the effects of different cuts in terms of our values; weigh reduced food options against the threat to a staff member’s job and livelihood. I think the students need to—and do—understand that this is our reality. The bubble of the economy has burst, and in some sense Amherst’s bubble burst with it. We can’t just ignore the problem; we’ve lost $500 million, or something in that vicinity, and it’s not coming back any time soon.
Q: What are your thoughts on the student gift? Did you have any preference between financial aid and a visiting professorship?
A: I think the gift is magnificent, both in terms of the resources it provides and also the symbolic statement it makes about the values of the student body. This sentiment would be true no matter what the students decided to spend those resources on. I think, in this particular instance, financial aid, salaries—particularly for those most vulnerable amongst us on the staff—and maintaining our quality of education through the faculty are all core commitments for us; by choosing within them, the students made a decision on what statement they wanted to make. The students have made a clear, loud statement that they value financial aid, not just for themselves but also for future students, and I think the alumni will hear that. I also think the statement that the students do not take the work of the staff here for granted is very powerful for our colleagues. There have been moments when I think members of the staff have thought students take them for granted, so I thought that was very important. Of course, we will continue to fight to find the resources to maintain our quality of education, including hiring additional faculty, even in these difficult economic moments. In that sense, it’s not like we lost some piece because the gift didn’t get directed in that way.
The student body vote was also reassuring in the sense that its collective expression of values said to me that we’re attracting the right kinds of students and those students are figuring out what their own values are in a way that I think the College takes pride in. When we spend $85,000 per student per year it’s nice to see that our investment is paying off.
Q: To get away from the College’s finances for a moment, can you talk about the difference between an undergraduate experience at a school like Yale, like you had, and an experience we’re getting at a school like Amherst?
A: Well, keep in mind I went to Wesleyan and Yale. I split my undergraduate education, so I have a pretty direct comparison in my head. I’m still amazed at the attention that I got from faculty members, especially in my first two years; I really benefited from the intense and personal engagement of faculty in getting my brain to start working when I was 18 years old. That interaction probably changed my life in a way that I know doesn’t happen in the same way at a great research university. I spent 13 years as a faculty member in the Political Science department at Columbia. We never devoted an entire faculty meeting of the department to the undergraduate curriculum. It just never happened. That tells you something about the difference of values. I know the faculty here work hard to maintain our commitment to undergraduate education and the undergraduates here benefit from this greatly.
Q: You’ve been a student, faculty member and now an administrator at undergraduate institutions. How has that shaped your vision of education as a whole?
A: I certainly don’t think I could be an effective administrator at Amherst without having been a faculty member and understanding and valuing that life and perspective. I would say that my student experiences also shaped how I think about what I do now, whether it was in terms of my experiences in the classroom or my involvement in South African divestment issues. Through this work I had some interactions with the administration, which I think of painfully when I reflect on how the students view me. Being an administrator is very different from being a faculty member in the sense that as a faculty member I focused on, in addition to my students, one big idea for five years at a time as I was writing the next book. Now I have 63 issues to handle in one day.
But I had another experience that was probably just as pivotal for me. I spent most of 1984 in South Africa in the middle of a state of emergency and apartheid, helping to set up a college in the country at a time when black students couldn’t legally get into university. I fell in love with South Africa and went back for years thereafter and wrote about it, but that first formative experience was crucial to me for two reasons. First, in some small way I felt like I made a difference in people’s lives—a thousand kids having the chance to go to university who wouldn’t have otherwise. That’s something that I’m very proud of and that inspired me to want to make a difference as much as I could. Second, I saw that a year of intense, high-quality education could reverse the purposeful damage of apartheid education that students had lived through for fifteen years before. That was an important lesson for me about the power of education to not only change people’s lives but also to change society, and that’s really stuck with me.
Q: Financial aid is something that’s clearly important to you, as well as most of the student body. Would you say that it’s equally important to most of the alumni you’ve met who may have gone to the College when financial aid was not so extensive and accessibility may not have been so central to the College’s mission?
A: I think the alumni have actually been very excited to see Amherst’s leading commitment and national reputation for insisting on the best students regardless of their ability to pay. We’ve pushed that envelope in a way that our peer institutions have followed; people are realizing that the kind of economy we live in has increased the need for that kind of support. There is growing economic inequality in society that we don’t believe correlates with the distribution of talent. Most of the alums I’ve met are eager to be supportive, and I think the Capital Campaign has already shown evidence that the emphasis on accessibility has helped inspire a level of giving that’s greater than we’ve seen before, even for a college that’s seen tremendous giving over almost two centuries.
I would say that among the alumni, and I would guess among the students, faculty and staff as well, everyone agrees that there are two absolutely main priorities that should guide us in budgetary decisions. One is the quality of the education we provide. If you dilute that quality, then you can have all the access in the world, but what are you actually giving people access to? The second thing is ensuring that access so we can continue to be the most selective and the most diverse college in America, because we know that both of those attributes contribute to the quality of interaction on this campus and therefore the education that you all have here. I think everyone’s hoping to not have to choose between those two priorities because this place is sort of unthinkable without both of them. If the Amherst education was suddenly entirely provided in 100-person lecture halls or was only available to the wealthiest folks in society, we’d wonder what the point is of what we’re doing here.
So yes, I think the alumni have embraced the College’s emphasis on accessibility. My guess is that in the years ahead we’re going to see alumni giving replace the returns on the endowment as the largest external form of support, just because the endowment is smaller and the returns on the endowment will probably be smaller. That makes my communication with the alumni all the more important.
Q: Can you talk about where you see the College in ten years and where you see yourself in ten years?
A: I don’t think, in ten years, Amherst will look remarkably different than it does now. The College today hasn’t changed fundamentally and I don’t think it will. I think it will still have great students, great faculty and the setting for intimate intellectual contact, as well as an amazing staff and fantastic facilities. Everyone will continue to feel incredibly privileged to be a part of this place. Even as we adjust to the economy, the virtuous tradition of attracting the best faculty, staff and students will continue into the next generations of the best faculty, staff and students wanting to be here together. Of course, we may have to trim our sails by more than a little bit, understanding that we can’t spend money to address all issues or problems. I think we will continue to have conversations about how we can plan together and make collective decisions that maintain the quality but might be more frugal or efficient. My guess, and my hope, in a sense, is that the actual impact of those on the place will be relatively marginal. We may need budget changes that aren’t marginal, but we need to do those in a way that doesn’t attack the fundamentals of the place.
As for me, I’m now in year six, past the average tenure of college presidents in America. I’m no longer the “new, young president.” I’m incredibly lucky to have my job, to be associated with this place and to help it in any way that I can. I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon. I hope that my actions at Amherst and anywhere else will live up to the vision that goes back to my days in South Africa, if not before, which is the notion of how to ensure high-quality, life-changing education that will make society better. That’s what I’m passionate about and that’s why I’m here. That’s what gets me through the hard days as well as the great ones.
Karl Teo Molin ’11 and David Vaimberg ’11 are Editors-in-Chief for The Indicator.