Homecoming 2020 Homecoming Multimedia Archive

- Good morning and welcome back to all of the alumni. My name is Nicole Panico Krensky, class of 2011 and I serve as the vice chair of the executive committee of the Society of the Alumni. I'm here today to make a brief announcement on behalf of the committee. As you may know, distinguished service awards are presented each year to recognize individual, excuse me, to recognize exceptional volunteer service to the college by a group or individual. We have two awardees to recognize today. It's my pleasure to announce that Gidran Jeffer from the class of 2008 is recognized with an individual award for her work as class secretary. Through their work on class notes, class secretaries keep their classmates informed, engaged and connected as a community. It is frequently unseen work that takes a significant amount of time, outreach and thought. Since graduating from Amherst in 2008, Gidran has consistently crafted class notes that are engaging, interesting and reflective of the diversity achievements of her classmates. Just this past year, Amherst magazine won a 2019 Gold Award from the council for the advancement and support of Education and in the judges report, frequent lines from Gidran's class notes earned special recognition. In addition to her work as class secretary, Gidran has also successfully orchestrated the fifth and 10th reunion celebrations as reunion co-chair. She helps strengthen engagement throughout her class, developing excellent programs and entertainment and generating enthusiasm through friendly outreach and communication. A consistent donor to the Amherst fund, Gidran is an exemplary member of her class and the Amherst alumni community. Our next award is a group award to the class of 1969 which has distinguished itself over the past 50 years for its steadfast pursuit of engagement with Amherst across a variety of areas. Over 25 years, class agent, Allen Kovacs has worked creatively to lead the effort with his collaborating associate agents to achieve long-standing participation in the Amherst fund. For example, 52 members of the class, that's 20% have 50 years of consecutive giving and in its 50th year with the untiring efforts of Michael Kramer, the class successfully created and funded the 69 student research fund. For their extraordinary planning of a memorable 50th reunion, we recognize all class officers, Peter Snedeker, William E. Hart, Ralph Tait, Robert Simpson, Robert Klugman, Theodore Fowler, David Michael-Moore, Robert E. Bergland and Alan Kovacs. A unique achievement when reunion planning is the reprisal of the Dream Engine, a rock and roll musical conceived, written and scored by Jim Steinman in his senior year at Amherst as fulfillment of an independent studies project. First staged in Kirby Theatre in 1969, the Dream Engine was reprised on May 30th, 2019 in that same location thanks to years of planning by Fred Hoxie, Richard McCombs, Robert Fine, Fred Baron, Larry Dilge and Barry Keating who first directed and performed alongside Jim Steinman in the original version. 375 people were in attendance for the 50th reunion production of the Dream Engine and 44% of the class attended reunion. Overall, the classes to be congratulated for superior Amherst fun participation, reunion planning and an extraordinary 50th reunion program. I'll ask all of the award recipients please stand for recognition and everybody please join me in congratulating our awardees. Next, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Avery Farmer, the president of the Association of Amherst Students. Avery is a senior Black Studies and English major, currently working on an honors thesis about African immigrant experiences in pickup soccer. He is a winner of the Laura Aires Snyder poetry prize and represented Amherst College at the 2017 five-college poetry festival, welcome Avery.

- I am delighted to introduce the 19th president of Amherst College, Biddy Martin. Raised outside of Lynchburg, Virginia, President Martin studied English Literature at the College of William and Mary. She holds a master's degree in German literature from Middlebury College's program in Mainz, Germany and a PhD in German literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. President Martin arrived at Amherst having been a professor of German Studies and women's studies and eventually Provost at Cornell University and Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since her 2011 arrival at Amherst, President Martin's vision and leadership have guided every aspect of the college's thriving. She is committed to the highest standards of intellectual excellence and to making our beautiful campus a place where all students can express themselves, grow as critical thinkers and reach their fullest potential. Biddy holds office hours for students and can often be found to cheering on our athletic teams or attending events and student presentations around campus. She has a tremendous intellect, a sparkling sense of humor and a real way with words. It is an honor to introduce her to you, welcome president Martin.

- Welcome home. Avery, the last time I saw you, you looked different. A little bit more hair, yeah. You look wonderful, thank you for that generous introduction. So, good morning. How beautiful is it today? Very, very, very beautiful and I'm so happy for you that it is. It's been a glorious fall, as I said to some of you last night, absolutely glorious and sweet on this campus. One of the most enjoyable falls I've spent here in my ninth year now. We have with us the most senior member of our alumni, Bill Whiston here in the balcony, class of 43, is that right? It's wonderful to have someone so youthful and dedicated as Bill. The world needs its Amherst's. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. The world needs educational institutions that value intellectual rigor, not just for its own sake, but in pursuit of understanding the world. It needs colleges and universities dedicated to freedom and integrity in the pursuit of truth. It needs colleges devoted to opportunity for academically talented youth, regardless of their circumstances and college is dedicated to their success once they arrive. We need forms of education that can be scaled, that can serve large numbers of people, we need large research universities, we need better funding for our great public flagships and our regional public institutions, we need online education to reach people all over the world without access to the education that we have here, but we also need colleges that operate at a scale of the sort Amherst operates on that allow for what at Amherst we call, closed colloquy between faculty and students. Institutions with a culture that promotes the flourishing of each individual student, each individual student. That offers the kind of education that engages the whole person, the mind, the heart, the spirit. That promotes friendship and civic responsibility. The world needs colleges like Amherst that expose us to the fact and the benefits of human difference and teach us how to embrace these differences without fear or hatred. I don't know what college means anymore than I know what America means if it doesn't mean opportunity, openness, integrity, equality and individual responsibility. Negotiating the tensions that can arise among those terms requires the ability to think in complex ways. Seemingly, a losing art, but not here. Complexity is a beautiful thing, that's what our minds are made for and at Amherst, we aim to educate students who can think with great complexity, who can embrace it, who can foster it and promote it, who can use it to change the world. A great education fosters the belief that other people's views are valid and valuable, as long as the views are based on evidence and have integrity. Amherst combines the identification of talent with the nurturing of talent and a commitment to opportunity. Those are our values, those have been Amherst values, those are still Amherst values and they matter. I believe after my eight plus years here, that it's safe to say Amherst graduates have an impact on the world that's disproportionate to our size and to the number of graduates in the world and I think that that is owed in large measure to the quality of our faculty, the quality of our students, the intensity of their interactions with each other, a commitment to individual students and it's also indebted to the environment in which all of this education occurs. Place matters, natural beauty matters, architectural beauty matters. This place impresses upon us, I think you'll agree, a respect and a love of a natural environment in which we are just a small part, just a small part. It builds a sense of humility. This fall has been the best in years when it comes to the profusion of colors in our leaves. I've been waiting for another fall like this, it makes it exciting to walk around the campus. It feels like a celebration every step I take. This year walking around the campus, the difference that the Science Center and the new landscaping of the Eastern campus have come into view, now that we're in our second year with the new building and also with the new landscaping. We actually have an Eastern part of the campus now that doesn't feel just like a hill that some buildings tumbled down, but instead, like a planned kind of landscaping that complements the iconic first-year quad, but doesn't compete with it or take away from it in any way. Some of you probably went to panels on the Science Center in one year out and heard our faculty speak about what it does to help them in their pursuits which are research as well as education, I hope some of you did. Some of you probably went to here Adam Sites and Marissa Parem talk about how they teach and why they are the winners of the first ever Jeffrey Ferguson teaching prize at Amherst. Did any of you make it to that session at 10 a.m.? Were you impressed? Yeah, I'm impressed by them too and Jeffrey Ferguson, does everyone know who Jeffrey Ferguson was? No, Jeffrey Ferguson was a faculty member here. He was in Black Studies. He chaired Black Studies for a while, but what he did that has lasting significance for Amherst was to build a curriculum in Black Studies that attracted students from all over the campus, why? Because he used fundamental rhetoric textbooks and built a curriculum on the basis of levels beginning with critical reading, making arguments and doing research for undergraduates and every part of the Black Studies curriculum had as its foundation the intellectual skills that students need and that lie below the content of a course. He was a wonderful human being and we lost him a couple of years ago to cancer and in his honor, we now honor Amherst faculty members who are doing extraordinary jobs, not only of teaching in the classroom, but of thinking about what teaching can be going forward. It's a little bit controversial to have a teaching prize at Amherst. So committed are we to the notion and actually the reality that we have so many outstanding teachers that it might make no sense to single people out. In my view, celebrating anything is a celebration of its significance to everyone and so the prize, I think will over time come to mean a lot to the campus. So thank you all for attending that event. The campus events all fall have been extraordinary. Some of you may have read my fall update. Did anyone read it? Okay, well I'm going to take responsibility for how few of you read it because we sent it out late on a Friday afternoon and I think it was buried in your inboxes, otherwise I know you would have read every word, but the fact that not everyone read it gives me an opportunity just to say a few things about what goes on on this campus and why it's been such a wonderful fall. First of all, in honor of the incredible Professor Benjamin DeMott, we had a lecture for new students given by author Min-Jin Lee whose novels are Prize winners and whose most recent novel, Pachinko I hope many of you will have read. It's an extraordinary novel in which a family's history is embedded in the histories of Korea and Japan and in particular, Japan's colonization of Korea. It's quite an extraordinary book. We asked all new students to read it over the summer. I invited two groups of students to my house for dinner to discuss the book. It was way over subscribed, the dinners, but not because I was there, but because Min-Jin Lee agreed to attend both dinners and to interact with the students, you'll have to forgive me, I can't believe that's happening. I'm not so good with the electronics, that was my watch. Min-Jin Lee gave a talk that managed to embed facts about the history of Amherst that I think none of us knew into a talk about the history of her family and its embeddedness in the histories of Japan and Korea. She got two standing ovations from our students right here in this Chapel, it was an extraordinary talk. The fact that students share a reading of that sort and that so many students, but I would wager, not every single one read this 600 page novel is part of our effort to build more shared intellectual experiences into the campus. We had a point-counterpoint event which is part of our first-year seminars and which some of you in this audience are probably part of having funded and this is our effort to bring to campus, people with differing perspectives and different political views to talk on a theme. The theme this year is the question of progress. What constitutes progress from different points of view? Have we made progress over the past 50 years based on that point of view? Will we make progress over the next 50 years? And the two speakers were Jill Lepore who is a Harvard historian, an author of a book I wanna recommend to you all if you haven't read it, it's called These Truths and this is one of the first efforts on the part of an historian in a long time to write a history of the United States in one-volume. It's an incredible book and she interacted, I moderated a discussion between Jill Lepore and Ross Douthat who is also an author and a columnist. I made time to read Ross's book, Bad Religion which asks a question about how much modernity can we tolerate and by we, he means in his book Catholics in particular without losing the fundamentals of a religion and it's a very interesting set of questions that he asks. He's been here before, he gave a lecture two or three years ago on the history of conservative thought in the U.S. which is one of the best lectures I've heard here in a long time. He got up without notes and gave a 40 minute lecture that was captivating, rich. So the two of them interacted on the question of progress. It was a wonderful event, packed audience of students, faculty, staff and then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived on campus and she was here from 3 p.m. in the afternoon until 10 p.m. at night and I can tell you honestly, because I was with her every step of the way except when the federal marshals put her in a car and drove her to my house without me, she from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. answered questions, talked about cases from the last session and explained her perspective in the way that we've grown accustomed to hearing her, that is in the sparest, strictest, most thoughtful, conceivable English. Austin Sarat whom you know I hope, he's here, he's always here when I speak just to make sure I don't go off the rails. Austin hosted Justice Ginsburg in the afternoon with a 130 students who got to submit questions for her. She gave them a 35 minute lecture on the last sessions cases and then professor Sarat who's also associate provost and associate dean of the faculty posed questions. She then, she was then interviewed by Biddy Martin in Coolidge Cage. She allowed that event to go on for an hour and a half including students, staff and faculty questions and then over dinner, she offered to continue answering questions. The level of energy was astonishing and the thing that was beautiful about the event was not just Justice Ginsburg, but the way that our community came together to make it possible. It was a huge event, there were what, 1,600 people in Coolidge Cage, a lot of other people listening in Fross library, livestream was hosted there with snacks and swag and a lot of you at home, I imagine. What really moved me was the community effort. So I had written to the music department and specifically to Professor or David Schneider who teaches opera this year and I had said, you probably know that Justice Ginsberg loves opera, what do you think might be a good way to celebrate her and he came up with three ideas. We could have the choral society sing an aria from her favorite opera, we could have one of our students who has the most beautiful operatic voice sing after dinner an aria, a Mozart aria or we could have a professional singer sing an aria from the opera that was composed by our own Eric Sawyer in the music department, The Scarlet Letter. So I looked at the three options and said, let's do all three. And I must say that the choral society was extraordinary, as were the singers who paid tribute to her and her interests at the dinner. Our carpentry shop was asked whether they might make a gift for her, a memento and they did their brilliant work. They carved a gavel out of wood from Johnson Chapel, so wood from 1827, it was beautiful and they put it in a walnut box, the wood from Fross library from the 60s and they did a surface carving of a mammoth in the pedestal of the gavel. They were pleased to be involved, they did an extraordinary job, it was beautiful. Our event team in communications is the best I've ever seen at any university and it might be better anywhere. What they did to make Coolidge Cage an appropriate place with the right acoustics was amazing and they did it in a matter of two weeks. Now, why did we move it to Coolidge Cage? Because it was gonna be in Johnson Chapel and that would have held a fraction of the number of people who wanted to attend and a student wrote to me, his name is Hunter Lampson, I think he's a sophomore and I got an email from him one day and he said, dear Biddy I think it was, this is too big an event to have in Johnson Chapel, too many people are not going to get in. Why don't we have an in Coolidge Cage? I noticed that former President of the United States once spoke in Coolidge Cage and I thought, why didn't I think of that. We had part of the gym, but the gym cannot be made appropriate from the point of view of acoustics. In two weeks, I went to the event team, I went to the facilities team and I said could we do this in Coolidge Cage and what did they say? They said we think we can, they looked into it, they got outside help, it was an amazing event and everyone got to feel good about how talented, how willing, how effective our campus community is and I'll just mention one other office and officer, literally, John Carter, our Chief of Police. He has to be the best chief of police at any college or university and certainly among many outside of it. He loves the place, he loves the students, he's incredibly effective and he's highly regarded by everyone on campus. Anyway, the visit of RBG was wonderful because we had RBG and it was wonderful because our community saw one another and saw how incredibly talented and effective the people at this college are. In that way, it was just a beautiful moment and one that we'll all treasure for a long time. The only other update I wanna give you quickly before you ask questions because I know that's what this is supposed to be is that we, as you know I hope, have a climate action plan, we've had a climate action plan that will make us climb carbon neutral by 2030 and it involves converting from fossil fuels to geothermal and we have just hired the engineers who will do the plan, the campus plan on the basis of which we will then make the conversions and do the work that's necessary. The other big-ticket item on our list of things to do over the next few years is to build a campus center, an actual student center. Not a Keeffe which is broken up into small bits and which, because of financial difficulties was pulled back in the midst of the project, so was always too small and not appropriate. We need a center where students can gather, where they can run into each other both on purpose and accidentally. We need a place where the community can gather, we need party space for our students, we need club and organization space for our students, but more than anything else, we need more spaces in which our sense of community can grow given the size of the campus as it is now. That's gonna be exciting, that's gonna be fun, that's gonna involve a lot of student input and a lot of hard work. Our campaign is going well, it's going very well thanks to you all. So our goal is as you know, 625 million dollars and we are now at 457 million and we're only a year and a half into a five-year public phase. So we are now in the part of a campaign that can tend to get a little slow, but we can't afford to be slow and the reason is our bicentennial is coming up and we want our bicentennial year which will get launched next October at homecoming and in the following October, 2021. We want our bicentennial year to be the year that we're able to celebrate the history of this college and ensure its future by getting all of us together on multiple occasions and by ensuring that all of you and many more alumni are happily engaged with Amherst in every conceivable way. So I look forward to celebrating with you next year and I hope you will all be here, not only for homecoming, but for multiple celebratory events and festivities and now I'm going to stop and take your questions. I'll end where it began, with all the attacks on higher education, some of which are warranted and many of which are not. I remain steadfast in the belief that the world needs its Amherst's, it needs the sense of community that college and university alumni bodies and institutions provide and I thank you for being part of preserving what has made this place great and what will make it great going forward, thank you. Now the fun part. I have a whole senior team here and Professor Sara in the back to help me answer your questions. Yes?

- [Audience Member] It's amazing as an alum to be able to be in community with Amherst so much more by being able to watch so much on webcast. So thank you for whoever at Amherst is making that possible, it makes us felt closer to students, it makes us feel closer to the community, to staff, to faculty, all of that. It was so cool to hear you talk about the after party with Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Jin Lee and I was wondering if you could give us a few more details about what that was like, the dinners with the students and the after dinner with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, please.

- Well, the dinners with students were wonderful. I mean there's nothing that I love more than having students over. So there's that, in any case, they had read the book carefully, they had great questions. They were the kinds of questions that really sparked conversation among them and that is partly a result of the kind of book that Pachinko is. So they seized on different characters in the book and asked questions about the moral choices that these characters had been faced with. They were asking themselves and one another and also Min, the author, about specific characters. Their tendency may be to find a particular character a bad person, to simplify and a desire to have Min-Jin Lee explain what she had in mind with particular characters. The most moving moment was when a couple of students asked her why she had one of the young characters in the novel commit suicide and it was moving because of the way they asked her. They were generally, they weren't happy that she had gone in that direction and so there were probing questions, but why that was a necessary part of the plot, the narrative form and she gave wonderful responses to them, but so they were searching. Is there anything more rewarding than seeing really smart, earnest students grapple with a text, with a character in a text with a narrative structure and where it leads and they're creative. They could imagine other ways the narrative could have gone without losing coherence. Our students are remarkable. I mean you were they, so that's a kind of flattery to you too, but they are really remarkable. So that's how those two dinners went. It was also fun. We now have a Korean restaurant from which we can get food, we had Korean food. The students were happy to have something you know different from valve food not because they complain about valve food anymore so much, but because it was different and it's just wonderful. There's nothing better. The dinner with Justice Ginsburg was beautiful, it was beautiful, I don't know what else to say. She finished in Coolidge Cage, she was driven to the house, she sat in the library where we thought she might need to rest. Oh, let me say that one of the, I think keys to having managed to get her here was the fact that our board chair, Andy Nussbaum clerked for her. He clerked for Scalia and for Ginsburg and the loyalty of the justices, not just Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but apparently all of the justices to their clerks is renowned and that's one of the ways we got her. So when she came, she went to the library, the president's house. I walked in and she said to, and Andy was in there and Andy said to me, Justice Ginsburg is wondering when she's going to meet your spouse. I could cry right now about that. She had heard that my spouse Gaby was there and she wanted to know when she was going to meet her and we thanked her for the fact that I can have a spouse. So she's you know, what we call a real mensch and so this mensch sat there and, but never stopped working, that was the amazing thing. Gabby went in, sat on the little sofa, talked to her about what they each thought about Fiddler on the Roof and Yiddish which we'd all just seen, but the whole time she's signing, she's autographing posters for people and then the dinner was was beautiful, you know. All the staff who had a role in planning the dinner. Our chief of staff, Bet Schumacher, the President's House staff. Everybody who played a role in planning it did a beautiful job. It was beautiful, there were 31 people there because I cannot have a dinner ever without a lot of students, without faculty and then we had our performers and what a treat for the students and we were not far into dinner before she said she would, to Catherine Epsilon, our provost and Dean of the faculty that she would be happy to answer questions through dinner. So from 3:00 until 10:00, let's say 45 minutes of non-speaking, that's what she offered and Austin, do you or Catherine, wanna add anything about the dinner that you think I'm missing?

- So one of the privileges--

- Come up Austin because people can't see you or not everybody can and seeing you is such a treat. Professor Seric.

- One of the privileges of having tenure at Amherst--

- Tell them.

- I'm telling you. Is to tell the president when she's wrong.

- Yes, what was I wrong about?

- I come to these events, not because I'm afraid you're gonna go off the rails, but because I find you to be the best representative of the values of Amherst that I love. Now take that.

- But that's not as funny as what I said, so.

- That is true, so the only other thing to say about the Ruth Bader Ginsburg event which I think was true for all of us and it was certainly true for the students was to be in the presence of someone who was for them, not just a role model and a hero because of all the great substantive work that she's done, but to be in the presence of someone with such integrity and belief in the values that the country stands for and I think that's what the event was and that certainly was the experience that all of us had at that dinner and by the way, the food was good too.

- Yeah, the food was good. Thank you, Austin. Katherine, come up and add something. Have you all had a chance to hear from our provost and Dean of the faculty? Come up here.

- So the real reason why I opened the dinner to conversation with the entire table is that RPG doesn't have a very loud voice and I was having a very hard time hearing her. I was sitting next to her, so I did ask her a question which I thought was great and it was actually inspired by my colleague on senior staff, Lisa Rutherford, our general counsel and both of us had noticed this ring on Ruth Bader Ginsburg's hand that there was something, I couldn't figure out was it a really big diamond or what was this thing and I looked at it because I was sitting next to her and what it is is a whole series of little charms, evil eye, warter offers, I don't know the exact title, but you see this often in Turkey or Egypt so I asked her about this ring and that in turn led to a very long description about how she'd visited at various crats people in an Egyptian fair and the whole story about how this ring came to be and how she wears it all the time. That in turn led me to bring out my evil eye and put it on the desk in my, in the table in my office where I meet with every one to ward off evil to, so it re-inspired me for that, but what was really remarkable was her ability to talk for so long and answer questions from everyone in the room and for about two hours, it was completely silent. Once I went ding ding, ding, ding, ding on the wineglass, that was it, people were just so interested in what she was saying and she is an amazing multitasker because she not only answered these questions, but she ate dinner all the way through, it was amazing. So it was really one of these remarkable immersed moments where we just felt so good to be part of this community and everything that it stands for and it's a tough act to beat, but we would love to have more RBG's at Amherst. I don't know how we're gonna do that, but it would great.

- Well, we'll just invite them, yeah. Okay, other questions? Yes, I think.

- I must say it's always a thrill to be in Johnson Chapel, it's very uplifting. It has this real sense of community where we're coming together and I must say my wife and I really enjoyed watching TV with RBG. It was really a great experience. One of the things I was pleased to hear you talk about was going carbon-neutral. I think that's very important, but I also think an important aspect for students and students yet to come and all of us is you know, what's happening to the environment and climate change and I just wondered if what your thoughts were and where we were going with let's say the endowment here at the college to try to make things go in a direction that I think we all can can live with and benefit from in the future and as I say, I think this is especially important for our generations yet to come. So I'd like to hear your thoughts about that and any things that you hear on campus about students thoughts on this.

- Well, first let me say you may not all know this, but we have a relatively recently established Environmental Studies major and that's already a very popular choice for students which is extremely important. We also have as part of the climate action plan, opportunities for students to be involved very, very closely, not just in the more intellectual side of things, but to watch and take part and Jim Brassard, our facilities head could talk about this, take part to the extent they want in learning what needs to happen and how it occurs in the engineering itself. As for the endowment, here's what I am confident I can say with integrity. Within just a few years, the endowment will be more, will be more invested, wanna get my English right, in renewables than fossil fuels and I know that our investment committee and our board of trustees is keen to get us to a place where that's not only, it's not only true that we're better invested, more fully invested in renewables than fossil fuels, but that we are eventually out of fossil fuels. It will take time. The fact that the world needs its Amherst's and that we want to be able to provide financial aid to as many students as we do means that it won't happen in the next two years or three years, but it's on a path to change over time and I don't mean over time like in 50 years, but in a reasonable amount of time. That's all I can tell you. The college and the board have not made any open statements. There are colleges that have that they will divest by 2035 or 2040 or we're on a path and doing the right things and because it's Amherst, you're not likely to see any big kind of raggedly statements about it. Everyone knows that climate change is real. Everyone's worried about it. Well, not everybody, I'm sorry. I think everybody who graduated from Amherst. And you know, people can disagree about the best way to get where we need to go and they should because it's not easy, but I don't know any Amherst alum who has claimed that climate change is not real and doesn't need to be addressed and certainly, our board feels that way.

- Hi, thanks so much for joining us in conversation this morning. My name is Carrie L. Brown, I'm class of 2015.

- [Biddy] Oh I'm sorry

- Sorry, I'm way up here in the balcony, in the back because I was late

- [Biddy] Okay, hi.

- Apologies for that. I really like what you're saying about the world needs it's Amherst and I think that we you know, I'm a proud alum of a lot of the initiatives were doing like the things that you just mentioned, but I'm curious in this time when higher ed sort of is under attack and in some ways as you mentioned, some of it is somewhat called for, if Amherst has any plans to be a little bit more out there in the press, in the media as a leader for small you know, New England small colleges, small liberal arts colleges everywhere across the country and just the kind of education system that we all love and we share in our own lives, but if institutionally, there's a plan to try to be kind of at the forefront of getting the narrative right on higher ed, especially for institutions like ours.

- That is a great question and we're aware that we need to be out there more. It's a matter of given the environment we're in, it's a matter of finding the right way to deliver the message and the right moment to deliver it. Amherst has a wonderful culture of, well, it's humility. I mean Amherst is not always humble, but there is a kind of New England understatedness that is characteristic of the culture and that's mostly a good thing, but I think you're right that in a moment of the sort we're in, we need to find effective ways to be a little out there. Sometimes it's hard because what Amherst is doing is something we think other like institutions should be doing too and it can be hard to find a way of making a point about higher ed that doesn't seem inappropriately to distinguish Amherst from our peers. I really do think that the Williams's and Swarthmore's and some of our other friends could be doing more when it comes to financial aid and access and hopefully they will over time, but you're right is my answer and we're in conversation about it. I don't know who was next. I have to rely on those of you with microphones. Over here, okay.

- I'm interested in the impact that you might have observed in the advent of the mammoth's having come into being as the mascot of the college.

- Well, you see mammoths everywhere. Where's Avery? Avery you tell me if I'm right or wrong or you tell the group. I think students love the mammoths and you know, it has worked extremely well on the campus and I think a lot of alums who didn't like the idea and you know, didn't like the idea of changing the mascot and then didn't necessarily think the mammoth was the best choice have, once the mammoth was designed, the logo was designed started to wear the button and think that the mammoth is pretty cool. I mean to have a mammoth skeleton in your museum and then to have a mammoth logo that actually appeals to athletes because it's fierce enough and to everyone else because it's aesthetically pleasing in other ways is a good thing. So I would say it's worked well, what do you think Avery? You wanna say anything about it? Yeah good, come and say something about it.

- No, I think the only concern as a student who was on campus when the mascot changed or introduction happened was that it would feel artificial that we just you know, came in and had an unofficial mascot and then overnight we changed our whole school identity, but that wasn't the case. For me I think what sealed the deal was the actual visual logo that we chose. So the concept of mammoth was all well and good, but once we saw what had been drawn and then slowly appearing on school apparel, yeah, it was just clear that it was a good fit for the school. It had both an air of you know historicity, but also aggression, so we got to feel, you know, like I think one of the other options that I think I voted for was fighting poets and everybody got mad at me for voting for that. I feel like the mammoth has the spirit of the fighting poets with a little bit more you know, of the qualities that you would want in a school mascot. So yeah, students love it, nobody really dislikes it and I think from all the alumni I've talked to, if students well-being is the chief concern, we're all happy with it.

- Yes.

- Another mammoth in the room is the recent change in tax policy that seems to discriminate against institutions like Amherst and other piles of money that somebody seems to think we should attack. Can you comment on that change?

- [Biddy] The endowment tax?

- [Audience Member] Endowment tax.

- Everybody aware of the endowment tax? Well I, what can I say. I think it's, I think it's absurd. I'm trying to think of the right word. I think it's absurd to tax tax exempt institutions and educational institutions. On the other hand, that's where we are. I mean when speaking with people in Washington, a lot of people in Congress and in the Senate will say, you know, it wasn't really a thing for a lot of people, but it got made its way into the bill and now there are people like our own alum, senator Coons of Delaware whom I admire greatly who I think would like to modify it so that the tax remains, but that there are carve outs for schools that are doing what the Amherst's of the world are doing. So not just a mercy, but in other words the amount of financial aid and the extent of access that institutions are offering would be a way of either eliminating or reducing the tax for those institutions. That's not a horrible idea. I mean I think part of the motivation for it is the degree to which our public officials worry about access and affordability for the young people in the country and they're not wrong to worry about that. It's just that the public, our public officials can't both worry about access and withdraw public funds from our great universities at the same time and think it's gonna work out, that's my line on that. I mean the states because of 2008, but even before 2008 have had to withdrawal funding from everything virtually, so that makes sense. It's come back some in many states or at least some states, I'm not gonna say many, some states, but you know, having been Chancellor of the great flagship, I mean really one of the great universities in the world, UW-Madison. Greater for research than for undergraduate education, though immensely popular among undergraduates, but it's a real shame for the state of Wisconsin to have a great university of that sort underfunded and that's true across the country. I think we're in a moment where we're just divided on what matters most. Tax cuts are good for many people and yet, everybody wants our young people to have a great education and it just doesn't work that way.

- [Woman] We have time for one more question.

- One more, okay, I'm sorry. I don't know if I fully answered your question. I don't you know, I work with, I'm a member of the Harvard Corporation now. I work closely there and and see what's going on there. Their payment for the endowment tax is 50 million dollars. Cost them 50 million dollars and by the way, the majority I think of the institutions who are eligible for the tax are in the state of Massachusetts. So you would think the Massachusetts senators and congresspeople would be stronger advocates against an endowment tax, but you know, some of them are busy calling for free college. So that's not going to lead them necessarily to advocate for getting rid of the tax. So it's a mess, maybe that's the best way to say it, it's a mess. It's a mess and we have to live with it for now, yes.

- Hi, in this time of obvious political turmoil, I'm curious about the politics on campus. What percentage are ultra liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, which way is the wind blowing on campus? I'm pretty short blows toward the liberal, but how does it break down in some way?

- Here's an answer that came to my mind which I think is a is a good answer and that is I don't know and you don't want me to. I mean, I really don't know. I mean I do know this, I don't know and you don't want me to. That is you don't want me to try to figure out what the politics of an individual faculty member are or where students are on particular issues. That would be the death knell of academic freedom and freedom of expression for an administration to try to figure out where people stand. I know what you're asking though, you're asking how does the wind blow. The wind does not blow the way you would think it does when you read about higher ed in the papers and I am not going to go on a rant against the press, a free press is vital, but what's happening unfortunately, and this has to do with the fate of the news media, so not entirely their fault, but they're taking the part for the whole and there is, as the classical reiterations told us, a real problem with that, although it's also a great device. They see a particular incident on this or that campus and then they generalize as though these rare, if you're thinking about what happens on campuses day to day, year in year out, these are outlier incidents and they're taken to be the whole of what students not only think, but do. We've never had a speaker shouted down here. There was a protest last year when former attorney General Sessions was on campus. The protest was a silent walking out by some students who came to the event and then walked out. There was a protest out on the quad of his presence by some totally peaceful, quiet and a lot of our students, especially I would say among student groups who really did not like the idea of Sessions being here because they believe that he has said racist things and may represent racist views. They had their own event which was a party in Keith. So do you read about that, no, because that doesn't make the news. When it goes well, which is most of the time, you don't read about it. So I am a little bit on a rant because I'm really sick and tired of the way college students are being represented and the way college faculty are being represented. The truth is day-in, day-out, students are in classes with faculty whose livelihoods and passion is research, evidence, critical thinking and helping our students learn how to do all of the above, not telling them what to think, not preaching to them from the left or the right, it just isn't like that. Now, our campus is on the hole more liberal than conservative, yes, because we have 18 to 22 year olds and it's been true for a really long time that they are more liberal than conservative. That's not new and what do they do when they leave here? I think the same percentage who have historically through this past 50 years gone into finance and consulting still do and you know what, a whole bunch of them become conservatives. Not immediately, its age it's, I mean so it just isn't the way it's being portrayed. That does not mean there aren't problems on some campuses more than others and even on our own, there are students in the Republican Club who will tell me that they feel worried about saying X or Y, but there are also students in the Democrats Club who feel worried about saying the wrong thing. Some worry about saying offensive things is not bad, it's called civility, it's called respect, but they should not be afraid of articulating views that are at odds with the majority. We're here to protect the minority as well as the majority and we have a Republican Club, how many members? I don't know, last year was 120. I don't know how many it is this year, but I've met with the president of the Republican Club and my goal is to meet with the whole group to make sure they're doing okay. It's really difficult. Now, also bear in mind for these young folks, the sense of anxiety and worry, anxiety and worry, anxiety and even depression that a lot of people feel about the chaos in the country and the demise of certain values or the apparent demise of certain values affects them deeply. They're young, they are full of hope, it's the world they're going to inherit and I'm sure they're thinking about all of us, what are we doing to ensure that there will be a world and a Democratic Society for them to inherit? So if they sometimes get angry about some of what's happening, God bless them, that's what I say. Anyway, we're doing fine and that doesn't mean that maybe tomorrow something will happen that'll make the paper and you'll go, oh, she's so full of it, no, I'm not. It will just mean that in this very difficult time, an event or two didn't go as well as some of the ones we've already had. Just have faith in the youth. I'm telling you they're smart, they're decent, they're avid and I love them. I love this place, thank you.