News & Events 200 Years of Celebrating Seniors

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The first commencement program, August 28, 1822

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1822 was a year of many notable firsts in U.S. history. Among them: The first African American ship captain led the first all-Black whaling crew. The first Hispanic American member of Congress took office. Construction of the first fireproof building began. The first patent for artificial teeth was granted.

And, closer to home, the first Amherst College Commencement took place.

Titled “The First Anniversary of the Collegiate Charity Institution,” the Aug. 28 event celebrated the two lone members of the College’s class of 1822 — whose teeth we can assume were their own (though we cannot vouch for their quality) — in a full day of exercises that drew many members of the Western Massachusetts community. The ceremony included more than a dozen presentations, with orations in Latin, Greek and English on topics ranging from “The Diversity of Human Character” to “The Gospel Carried to India” to a “Comparative View of the Intellectual Power of the Sexes.” There were also dialogues, prayers, a poem and a colloquy. 

In contrast, this year’s event, the College’s Bicentennial Commencement, will feature the awarding of degrees to 219 times as many seniors. President Biddy Martin and Jordan Andrews ’21 will address the class, the Amherst College Choral Society will sing and approximately a thousand family members and friends will cheer on the new graduates in person, along with another several thousand who will watch a livestream. Per Amherst tradition, the graduates will receive Conway Canes in addition to their degrees, and, given that the College was founded in 1821, special Bicentennial Class medallions.

Here’s a “Then and Now” comparison between the 1822 and 2021 occasions and a look at the accomplishments of this year’s extraordinary seniors.

1822

The Ceremony

• Location: Inside the old Meeting House building, a church that once stood where the Octagon is now located.
• Number of graduating seniors: Two, Pindar Field and Ebenezer Strong Snell. Field and Snell did not technically receive degrees from Amherst that summer day in 1822, because the College had not yet received its charter from the Massachusetts legislature, and thus had no legal authority to grant degrees. As such, they were awarded degrees from Union College “on suitable certificates from Amherst.”
• Speakers: 10, including the two seniors themselves, President Zephaniah Swift Moore and poet Emily Dickinson’s father Edward Dickinson, then a junior at Amherst (and later a transfer student to Yale). Dickinson went on to serve as treasurer of the College.
• Meals served: One, a midday dinner during a break in the exercises.
• Canes distributed: None were given to students. Moore did use one himself, however.

The Seniors

• States they represented: One — Massachusetts. Field was from Hawley and Snell from North Brookfield.
• Transfers: Two. Both Field and Snell had attended Williams College before enrolling at Amherst.
• Most-declared majors: None. According to Mike Kelly, head of Archives & Special Collections at Amherst, there were no majors and students had absolutely no academic choices. There weren’t even courses, exactly. The course of study was just a list of books students had to master.
• Athletic accomplishments: Well, nothing official, as there were no organized sports at the College at that time. It was impossible to field teams with so few players!

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Commencement in 2017 (photo by Maria Stenzel)

2021

The Ceremony

• Location: Pratt Field. This location represents a break from tradition. Commencement is typically held on the Main Quad, but COVID-19 safety protocols made Pratt Field the only spot that could safely accommodate the graduates and guests.
• Number of students who will receive their degrees: 438. 14% of the members of the Bicentennial Class are first-generation college students and 44% self-identify as domestic students of color. 10% are international students.
• Speakers: Two, Martin and Andrews.
• Meals served: Two, a breakfast and a lunch. The first will consist of fresh fruit, yogurt, coffee, tea and pastries. The second will feature sandwiches, beverages, the ever-popular Mammoth cookies and other delicious options. Per the College’s COVID-19 protocols, all of the items will be packaged in to-go boxes for distribution.
• Conway Canes to be distributed: 438.

The Seniors

• States represented: 38. Also represented are Washington D.C., Puerto Rico and 30 nations. International students are citizens of Brazil, Canada, Iran, Japan, Mongolia, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, Vietnam and Zimbabwe, among others.
• Transfer students: 22.
• Most-declared majors: Math, economics, political science, psychology and computer science. 48% of graduating seniors are double majors and 1% are triple majors.

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One of those triple majors is Benjamin Aliaga ’21, of Vienna, Va. He says that Professor Nusrat Chowdhury’s intro course to anthropology “really opened the door for me.” He opted to major in that and Asian languages and civilizations (ASLA). A Mandarin-immersion semester in Shanghai helped him finish ASLA requirements early, and then, this year, he added Latinx and Latin American studies: “I made a whole spreadsheet to see if I could pull off this third major,” he says. Aliaga now has a Fulbright Grant to teach English in Taiwan and hopes to go into global development “on the social impact side,” he says, “which combines anthropology and my language skills so I can talk with, and learn about, many communities.” — KW

• Number of courses taken: Collectively, the seniors took 14,175 courses, of which 1,493 were delivered online during the 2020-21 academic year.

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“Everyone in the physics department knows about the ‘Alice creature,’” says Margit Liu ’21. Alice is the daughter of physics professor David Hall ’91. And the computer graphic he cooked up, based on her likeness, is featured in multiple instructional videos he’s made for his students on theorems, calculation methods and more. The videos helped connect the dozen students, half on campus, half off, last year, in “Electromagnetic Theory I.” Said Liu: “It’s just funny, these special effects, the Alice creature tumbling in and out of the video. And because of the videos, because of how close everyone was, it was always really a good time.” As Liu — a double major in physics and math from Taiwan — reflects on her experience at Amherst, she is grateful for her teachers’ creativity and commitment, and not just in STEM: she also mentioned an informal, several-year email exchange about literature with Russian professor Boris Wolfson, who taught her first-year seminar on War and Peace. Liu is headed to Carnegie Mellon after graduation, to do a Ph.D. in physics. — KW

• Theses completed: 44% of graduating seniors completed a senior thesis.

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When Obed Amissah ’21 was a young child in church in Takoradi, Ghana, he stood right next to the electric keyboard player, trying to see how he made those sounds. Amissah, too, learned to play, but his dream was to play a massive pipe organ. Thanks to organist Larry Schipull at Mount Holyoke, who teaches all organ players in the Five Colleges, he did just that. But when COVID hit, Amissah could no longer play the organ, because the buildings that housed them were closed. Amissah is a double major. His computer science major helped him get a job at Bank of America after graduation. As for his music major thesis performance, he was in a fix: Where could he rehearse? Enter music professor David Schneider, who tracked down a Hammond organ, the kind that usually rents for rock concert arenas. The College took out a 10-month lease, and wedged the organ into Amissah’s dorm room; Schneider would stop by to listen outside the window. It was a trying time: Amissah couldn’t return to his family in Ghana for two years and couldn’t play music outside his room, but his faith sustained him. “Suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character,” he wrote in his thesis program, quoting Saint Paul. Indeed, his thesis title was “To Survive,” and featured works themed on hardship by Bach, Mendelsohn and Hindemith. The latter couldn’t go home to his country, either, yet also created and persevered. — KW

• National award winners: 11 as of May 20, including eight Fulbright Scholars (one to conduct independent research and seven to teach English abroad), two Watson Fellows and one Rhodes Scholar.
• Athletic accomplishments: Members of the Bicentennial Class individually won or were parts of teams that won eight New England Small College Athletics Conference titles (baseball in 2018 and 2021, women’s basketball in 2018, men’s basketball in 2019, men’s cross country in 2017 and 2018, women’s hockey in 2020 and women’s soccer in 2019), a Walker Cup (women’s squash in 2020), a Division III NCAA title (women’s basketball in 2018) and two NCAA diving titles (Lindsey Ruderman ’21 in 2019 for one-meter and three-meter diving).

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Growing up, Lindsey Ruderman ’21 was a gymnast in Durham, N.C., until a series of injuries forced her off the mat. But that end produced new beginnings: she was so appreciative of the doctors who treated her that she resolved to become one herself. This summer she starts a two-year research assistant stint in the sports medicine department at a New York hospital. Then it’s on to med school. Ruderman was pre-med at Amherst and a math major: “The department has a really good sense of community,” she says. And she re-routed her gymnastic skills to diving, where the water is more forgiving than the floor. In 2019, she became the first woman in Division III history to complete a reverse two-and-a-half dive on the one-meter board, and became a two-time Division III National Champion. What does she like best about diving? “I really like the feeling of doing a new dive that you were scared of, doing it successfully, and then especially doing it in a meet, under pressure.” — KW

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Further Bicentennial Reading

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• In These Times
• Brief Interview with a Five Draft Man

Amherst College Bicentennial Website

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