200 years of learning: Amherst College history marked by growth and change

By STEVE PFARRER

Staff Writer

Published: 09-04-2021 7:35 PM

AMHERST — It began as a one-building school, with a few dozen students, a tiny handful of faculty, and a curriculum based around math, Latin, oratory, philosophy and, above all, piety. The school’s founders wanted to provide a classical education for young men of limited means who planned to become Christian ministers.

Two hundred years later, Amherst College is scarcely recognizable as the tiny school that opened in the small farming community of the same name in September 1821.

Today there are about 2,000 students on a campus that consistently tops the list of America’s top liberal arts colleges; the names of notable graduates can be found in virtually every walk of life; and a school once known as a bastion of wealthy, white (and for over 150 years, male) students has an incoming class this year in which about 51% of the U.S. students identity as people of color.

Trying to assess 200 years of history and put it in perspective has been a daunting task, one that’s been complicated in the past 18 months by the pandemic. But over the last few years, various Amherst staff, alumni and other contributors have compiled a broad array of information — a range of online resources, three separate books, and more — to mark the college’s bicentennial.

Some related events, unfortunately, have been canceled due to COVID-19. Biddy Martin, Amherst’s president, said with a laugh that the school had hoped to restage the arrival of the college’s first president, Zephaniah Swift Moore, who rode into town on horseback in 1821 from Williamstown, where he had overseen equally tiny Williams College.

Mike Kelly, Amherst’s head of archives and special collections, has been in the thick of the bicentennial work, which has included digitizing thousands of items: college yearbooks and publications, presidential correspondence and school records, photographs, catalogs and more. He estimates that “easily dozens” of people have been involved in the project in some fashion, including Provost and Dean of Faculty Catherine Epstein, who he says let him hire additional contract staff for research and digitizing work.

“Catherine’s been great,” Kelly said. “She recognized the scope of what we needed to do and got us the funding to do it.”

In an email, Epstein, who specializes in modern German and Central European history, said she viewed digitizing the college’s archival collection as the most important goal of the bicentennial, so as to make those records available to researchers around the globe.

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“My goal is to have the history of Amherst College written into the history of American higher education,” Epstein said. “It’s an extraordinary story, but people can’t write about it unless they have access to the documents.”

As Epstein, Kelly and others see it, changes at the college over time have reflected many of those in American society as a whole. Its Christian ethos of the 1820s was connected to the Great Second Awakening, the Protestant religious revival of the early 19th century. By the early 20th century, though, Amherst’s curriculum had embraced more liberal arts and science, a reflection of the nation’s increasingly modern outlook.

And in the past two decades, there’s been a push to make the college more diverse, as well as more affordable for students of lesser means; many students have become the first in their families to go to college.

Kelly says his research indicates Amherst has long been a place for experimentation and for student activism. The school introduced a physical education program in 1859 — something almost unheard of at the time — and also built one of the first college gyms in the country, he says. Kelly also points to students who formed an anti-slavery group in the early 1830s; when college officials ordered the group to disband, members actively protested, then met in secret.

Referring to the student occupation of Frost Library in 2015 to protest what many said was the marginalization of students of color on campus, Kelly said, “I think that was very much in the spirit of what students have done here for a long time. They’re not afraid to speak up about injustice or to challenge” school officials.

Just in the past week, students objected to what they said were overly stringent COVID-19 protocols on campus, especially compared with what other local colleges have in place, with more than 400 signing a petition calling for changes. School administrators have since begun relaxing some of the restrictions.

Telling the story

Nancy Pick jokes that she has “Amherst coming out of my ears.” A writer and historian in Sunderland, Pick is a 1983 graduate of Amherst, her father is an alum, and she’s written about various aspects of the school’s history. She’s also married to Lawrence Douglas, a longtime Amherst College professor of law, jurisprudence and social thought.

Pick’s most recent book is part of the college’s bicentennial project. “Eye Mind Heart: A View of Amherst College at 200” offers a broad and often humorous view of the school’s history, in which Pick has highlighted important developments, notable students and school staff, unusual stories, and aspects of college lore and tradition, such as the regular student theft of a small bronze statue, named Sabrina, that began in 1860 (Sabrina was last seen on campus in 2013, Pick writes).

In an email, Pick said she divided the school’s history into 50-year increments because she wanted to “investigate what the college was actually like for students in earlier eras. I tried to take a snapshot every 50 years. It was a fascinating challenge to imagine my way into an all-male school for fundamentalist Christian farmboys longing to become missionaries,” as the school had begun.

Pick also calls the school’s transition from a religious institution to a secular college a “profound” one, even if it took place somewhat gradually. By the late 19th century, Epstein adds, Amherst “had more electives in (its) curriculum than any other college besides Harvard.” Academics also became more rigorous beginning in 1912 under a new president, Alexander Meiklejohn.

Changes over time

The college changed perhaps most dramatically in the last 50-plus years. Students actively protested the Vietnam War and demanded more of a say in how the school operated. Black student enrollment began increasing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and many of those students demanded more related courses and faculty (math professor James Denton, hired in 1964, was the school’s first full-time African American faculty member).

Amherst also went co-ed in 1975, to the dismay of some alumni and trustees. Fraternities, for over a century a central part of campus social life — which included heavy drinking and the requisite drunken escapades — were abolished in 1984. And finally, the curriculum was significantly revamped, from one based on rigorous “core courses” to a much broader selection.

When he became Amherst’s 18th president in 2003, Anthony Marx initiated the most recent change, pushing to broaden the student body’s racial and ethnic makeup, especially through increasing financial aid for students of limited means. For a school where tuition, room and board is nearly $77,000 a year, many indeed have needed financial assistance.

Martin, Amherst’s first female president, has since her arrival in 2011 continued that effort, and she and other officials have more recently drawn up a broad “anti-racism” plan designed to diversify staff and faculty, make attention to the history of race and racism more prominent in the curriculum, and take other steps to address racial issues.

Martin said the college has not maintained a specific numerical figure in terms of diversifying the student body. The goal, rather, has been “to identify talented and avid learners wherever they are and make Amherst better known to them.”

Over the last few years, she noted, the college has made a number of new faculty hires to increase its diversity — again by looking more broadly for possible candidates — and this semester incoming students will attend seminars that have a specific anti-racism component developed in the past year by faculty.

The push for diversity and racial harmony continues to face some challenges. A few years ago, the Amherst lacrosse team was put on probation following racist and homophobic remarks and actions by some team members; the coach, Jon Thompson, was fired.

Amherst then hired a Black coach, Rashad Davoe, to try and turn around the team’s culture, but Davoe was fired earlier this year for allegedly not cooperating with the college’s investigation of the racist episodes. Last month he filed a federal lawsuit against the school in U.S. District Court in Springfield, alleging racial discrimination, a charge Amherst officials have denied.

‘The right direction’

Diversity “is still an issue the college is working on,” said Kelly, who notes that he’s been researching whether any of Amherst’s founders were slaveowners or had links to slaveowners, or to businesses or industries that made use of slave labor. “But I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

“What’s interesting to me is that Amherst has in some ways come full circle,” Pick said. “The college has moved away from being a place mainly for the privileged, and moved closer to its founding ethos: a place dedicated to providing an excellent education to students of limited means.”

She also reflects on her own days there as a student — the late 1970s and early 1980s still had something of an “Animal House” vibe, she notes — and says that as the college has evolved, she and other grads “have needed to embrace change.”

“Yet on a deeper level, the college remains dedicated to fostering intellectual curiosity, creativity and the life of the mind,” Pick said. “In those touchstones, the place is wonderfully familiar.”

More information on Amherst College’s bicentennial can be found at amherst.edu/amherst-story/bicentennial.

Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.]]>