Dear Faculty, Staff, Students, Alumni, and Families,
As of late Friday evening, I had not yet found a single theme for my weekly message to you. There is a lot on my mind. Classes are done and reading period ends tomorrow. Faculty members are reading thesis work and papers; they will soon be grading the exams for which students are preparing. I always look forward to reading students’ thesis work and hope to find time for it in the next couple of weeks.
Ordinarily, we would be looking forward to senior assembly, senior week, and Commencement, but there is nothing ordinary about the circumstances that have robbed our seniors of those experiences. I feel terrible about the activities and events seniors are having to forgo. I’ve been finding it difficult to rise above my sadness at the many kinds of loss we are seeing and experiencing. It is difficult to comprehend the magnitude of the lives and livelihoods that have been lost to this pandemic and those that will still be lost. How are we to take this in without feeling despair? How can we feel a sense of despair and know that it is part, but not all, of what’s available to us? There is the inspiration that keeps coming from frontline workers in every field. There is the beauty of this campus and the region with those soft Appalachian Mountains that remind me of my native Virginia.
Yesterday was a somewhat typical day for these times. I met with the presidents of the independent colleges and universities in Massachusetts to discuss possible guidelines for opening up in the fall. I met with my counterpart presidents in the Five College consortium about the possibilities for collaboration, and then with the senior staff about our own efforts to prepare for several possible scenarios for the fall. I had fun working with our events team on a virtual senior celebration and with our Bicentennial planning committee about new and adaptable ideas for the College’s celebration, starting this fall and extending through fall 2021. I was delighted to receive the names of students willing to serve as an advisory group to us on decisions for fall. And, in the minutes between meetings, I read and replied to emails.
In the back of my mind, all through the day, was distress over a loss that is unrelated to COVID-19, one that I imagine has troubled us all—the killing of Ahmaud Arbery over two months ago in Georgia and the video that has only now brought it to the nation’s attention and led to an investigation. How horrifying it is, how infuriating. The racism in our country that persists and is displayed out in the open could not be more troubling. I grew up in the midst of hatred and bigotry: the violent rhetoric, the threats, warnings in articles about the rape of white girls by black men left at my place at the kitchen table, chain gangs of black men on rural roads, minstrel shows, and physical violence. I am lucky, only in retrospect, to have been considered early on as an outsider, somehow wrong by virtue of who I seemed to be. It forced me to create a distance for myself and to be “overly sensitive” to what I heard and saw. From Charlottesville to COVID-19, we are experiencing ample evidence of what the long history of racism has wrought and how much of it persists. Those of us who are white have got to take stronger, braver, and more concerted stands against the increasingly overt displays of white supremacy and racism. We have work to do here in our own college community, and a great deal more that urgently needs to be done beyond. Seeing both sides as “good” is to take the wrong side.
I had thought of writing to you this week about the importance of public universities and the high stakes in current decisions about federal funding for states and localities. Far too many institutions—public and private—face untenable financial circumstances as a result of COVID-19. Even our wealthier institutions will not escape the damaging effects of this pandemic and will need the continued support of alumni. I hope for federal funds for states and localities because we cannot afford, as a country, to have our public institutions of higher education weakened and, some, even decimated. Sometimes I wish everyone had a realistic view of a United States without a flourishing and diverse higher education sector, a country and a world without the teaching and research, the inventiveness and economic impact for which higher education in this country is known. We need all kinds of post-secondary opportunities, not one at the expense of others. The diversity of post-secondary education has long been our great strength. I lived it in my own family. My younger brother was placed in a “slow” track in school because of learning problems that were nameless back then. In a fifth-grade science experiment with a homemade wooden maze and two hamsters, I thought I had proven that his anti-seizure medication, not his lack of intelligence, had made him “slow.” But he never got off the “slow” track and I am obviously still angry about it. Had it not been for the local community college he attended as a fireman, he would not have had access to any education after high school. My older brother went to a nearby junior college on a football scholarship. He played in a junior college national championship that we drove to Savannah, Georgia, to watch. If not for football, he may not have advanced beyond high school, either. And had his football not helped support his education, I may not have made it to college, a public college that charged only $1200 a year in tuition.
Because of my background, I have an allergy to the forms of snobbery that can run rampant among those who think only the big or little Ivies provide a decent education or a worthwhile career credential. Even at William and Mary, I had wonderful professors who nevertheless repeatedly referred to people who came from the rural part of Virginia where I grew up as “a bunch of ignorant rednecks.” I knew people who may have seemed to fit the description, but I was also offended by it and it contributed to a sense that I was an outsider at college, too. I got a truly great education at the University of Wisconsin, one I’d put up against any other I could have gotten. When I arrived at Cornell to begin my career as a faculty member, people would sometimes struggle to remember where I got my degree. “You got your Ph.D. at, was it Michigan or Minnesota?” they’d say. I was surprised at their inability to distinguish among institutions west of New York. I’d make a joke out of it, but I genuinely found it strange. Our great midwestern public research universities are quite different, one from another, though together with other publics, they teach by far the greatest number of students and produce a very significant proportion of the important research that is done.
Unfortunately, there is also the populist sport of tearing down elite colleges and universities, no less and, at this moment, possibly more destructive than the elitism people believe they’re fighting. Some of this comes with the human tendency to compete. Some of it arises out of a legitimate worry about prestige, warranted or not, and the advantages it confers. Too much of it results from cynical political efforts to undermine the authority of science, the efforts at cross-cultural understanding, the benefits of bringing together talented people from every region and group in this country and also around the world, and respect for data, evidence, and expertise.
I wish more institutions of higher learning had the student-to-faculty ratios that Amherst can afford. Students flourish as a result of those ratios. The intensity of intellectual exchange gives rise to surprising and important connections that push knowledge and understanding in new directions. It also gives rise to lifelong friendships and bonds between students and professors, students and staff. The world needs its Amhersts. I often find myself wishing I could have been a student here.
Elite institutions can do more to create greater access, success, and equity in the world—but without their particular contributions, the world would be a poorer place. The world needs its Amhersts, but not only its Amhersts. To lose the gift of our great public universities will make us all poorer. I urge those of you who are so inclined to advocate actively for federal funding for the states and localities; this need, like so much else, has been turned into a partisan political issue, but its outcome has the potential either to help protect or greatly to weaken, and even to break, some of our great public institutions, which are the economic, social, and cultural engines of so many states and the nation as a whole. I owe the great gifts of my life to my education. I know the difference it can make.
Thank you for listening. Those are my thoughts today.
Biddy