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rdiehl — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 15:16:31 +0000

Transcript Roberta L. Diehl Thursday, 9/14/2023, at 11:16 AM

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- I'm Kathy Chia from the class of 1988, and a parent of Deven Desai, class of 2022. I'm also the president of the Amherst College Society of the Alumni. It's my great pleasure to welcome you today to the conversation with the president. The conversationalist joining newly inaugurated President Michael A. Elliott, class of '92, this morning will be Amherst College Trustee, Chantal Kordula, from the class of 1994. After Chantal and Michael start things off, we'll turn to your questions for President Elliott. College staff members will spread out in the chapel, and bring a wireless mic to those raising their hands to ask a question. Since we are all family here, I thought I'd dispense with the usual formalities when it comes to introducing today's speakers. Instead, I'd like to share a little bit about the experiences and activities that shaped Michael and Chantal's experience as students at Amherst. Michael double majored in English and Russian. Why Russian? Because it was hard, he has been known to say. He wrote and edited on "The Student," and had a brief foray as a DJ at WAMH. His first year hall was the fourth floor of Pratt. He reports that he had a terrible room draw every single year, but this year he finally won the lottery with a room in the president's house across the street. While still a student, he wrote about the 1992 takeover of Converse Hall for "The New York Times." His first campus job was in the Map Room of Frost Library, but after that his campus job was washing dishes in Valentine. Chantal played rugby, as did I, and is missing two ribs as a result. Thankfully, not my fate. She lived in Stearns 308 her first year. We are Stearns alums. Like Michael, she worked in Valentine, however, she also had a job in what was then known as security, ticketing illegally parked cars. She reports that she did not make friends with that job. Chantal studied abroad in Spain her junior year, and got a great room draw number for her senior year. She lived on the top floor of Garman in a room larger than any bedroom she had for her first few years living in New York City. Please join me in welcoming President Elliott, and Chantal Kordula.

- Well, thank you, Kathy. That was a very fun way to start things. So, welcome Michael.

- Thank you.

- We're super excited, I'm super excited to do this. So we, Kathy and I, we're both part of the search committee that found Michael, and we had many really fun conversations over the course of many months, really thoughtful, engaging conversations. And so I'm really excited to do this with Michael because I think you're going to have a treat. So I want to start with one of the first things that we heard when we were on the search committee, which was that you told us that this was your dream job, and as a result of that anybody who knew you would really appreciate what a dream job this was for you, and that at any point in the search we could ask anybody who had ever worked with you for a reference. So maybe start by telling us why is this a dream that in your case has actually come true.

- Yeah, so that comes up because during a search process like this, the recruiter tries to assure you this will be very, very confidential. And I sort of said, don't bother because everybody at Emory University who knows me, knows that I went to Amherst College. It's like one of the first three things you learn about me. And that's because of my enormous pride of being an Amherst graduate, and because Amherst for me, has been the touchstone of what I aspire to as a professional in higher education in terms of the kind of education and relationship between faculty and students that I think an undergraduate education requires. That's only part of what makes this my dream job, though. There are lots of great things that higher education does, and Amherst has chosen a particular path in that landscape. And that is to focus on a very special form of undergraduate education, a liberal arts education, which prizes a certain spirit of inquiry, a certain philosophy of close relationships between faculty and students. And I think that that form of education is precisely what is necessary to train people to be leaders in the broadest sense in a democratic society. And I don't just mean political leaders, or leaders in government, although, we need those, obviously, but in myriad professional sectors, private sectors, public sectors, churches, civic associations, right? A civic society needs leadership. And we are uniquely positioned because we've invested, and stayed true to this form of education to be able to provide that kind of leadership, and to be a leader within higher education in terms of showing what that is, and what that impact will be. So to be part of an institution like this that can play that role is just something very, very special. And then to return to this campus, and I love living in this community, it really is a dream. And so I could not be more thrilled to be here.

- So let's go back to the beginning way beginning, right? So you grew up in Arizona.

- Yes.

- How did you end up at Amherst all the way across the country?

- Yeah, so I had a lot of romantic ideas about New England, and about what it would be to be in a very intellectual climate. There's also some part of it, sorry, mom, my wanting to go away from home. And I got very lucky in the process. Actually, I was at a college fair, and followed somebody into a room where somebody was making a presentation about Amherst College. And just even from that first exposure, it felt like kind of the platonic ideal of what this New England environment could be. And then as I discovered more it turned out it really was that. And I didn't actually have a chance to visit until after I'd applied, after I'd been admitted. And I came here for an admitted student's weekend. And it was exactly what I was hoping for.

- So let me ask, you were here for four years, and now you're back, literally 30 years to the date of your graduation. I want to ask you what your roommates thought when they heard that you became president, but what has changed, right? What were your first impressions? What has changed, and what is really just still the same Amherst?

- So there's obviously lots that's changed, and there are easy things to point to. The campus is physically very different in lots of ways. The Science Center is a magnificent facility. If you haven't had a chance to go down and see it, it's really worth walking through. It's the kind of facility that makes Amherst special because it facilitates a certain kind of relationship between teaching, research, and faculty and students, and the dorms, and things like that. And you can talk about that. And, of course, you can talk about the student body, and the kinds of places we recruit students from, the socioeconomic diversity that I think Amherst is, and should be very proud of, but, actually, a lot of what has changed is not specific to Amherst. It is that the experience of being a student in college has changed, right? I was here before the internet was widely known. I know somebody will raise their hand and say, well, we had the VAX. Yes, there were a few intrepid souls who were doing something. I was not one of them, right? I never emailed a single professor. In fact, I was walking across campus one of my very first weeks with a current student and said, "Let's go in Johnson Chapel." Walked in, and I said, "Well, that's the spot that there used to be a bench where I would sit and wait for hours for Barry O'Connell to stop talking to the other students, so I could get my 15 to 20 minutes with him." Right? Students don't have that experience anymore. Their communication with each other is entirely different. Their communication with their families, with their friends from high school, with the world, and their relationship to news, and the 24/7 social media cycle, that has all changed what it means to be a college student. And we could argue about whether it's good or it's bad, but it is, and so that's, I think, actually, the real difference between Amherst in 2022, and Amherst in 1988. The things that have remained the same, it is really about that relationship between faculty and students. Students on this campus still talk about their faculty exactly the same way as when I was a student. The names are different, some of them, not all of them, which is interesting, but there's still these larger than life characters. They still have almost novelistic characters sometimes in their minds. They still have these intense relationships with them. They still kind of gossip about them. And the faculty here really care deeply about the students. And one of the things I was very curious to learn when I came is I knew that Amherst had done a lot of hiring over the last 10 years as faculty. One generation of faculty, really, the faculty who educated me were in the process of retiring. And I was curious to see, do these more recently arrived faculty fully buy into the Amherst, the mission, that intensity of relationships, and they absolutely do. And they are inspiring, and they are changing how we are going to do things, and how we have done things because they're bringing new ideas, but they get the mission, and they're inspired by the mission, and they love this place. And that's been really fun to watch and to learn.

- So you'd spend about three months?

- Yes.

- Okay, you've been walking, talking to people.

- Yes, I fixed it all.

- Right, so that's where I was going to go. So do you have a sense of an agenda, or maybe not agenda, but things you expect to spend a lot of time on?

- Yeah, yeah. I like the way you put that. As I've been going around, and I meet with different campus groups, one of the things I try to assure them is I don't come in with a fixed set of initiatives, and agendas. I've been part of too many campuses where a leader comes from the outside with a kind of list of things that are going to be done, and inflicted upon the campus. And those initiatives never last for more than five years. And sometimes a leader doesn't last for more than five years because that's not the way you get things done on a campus, right? Leadership requires being top-down in your signaling, and in your approach, but also bottom-up building on organic energy that's really there. That said, there are clearly things that I know I'm going to be spending time on and concerns that I have. One thing that we talked a lot about during the search process, and that I've since learned more about is the need to do more to build a sense of community on campus, right? Amherst has done this amazing work of recruiting an incredibly diverse student body, and it still has work to do in terms of building a cohesive student experience that extends beyond the classroom into the entire campus. And what that looks like will not be the same as what it looks like on any other campus. It's probably always going to be in progress, but, especially, we'll probably talk more about this in the aftermath of COVID there's a lot of work to do there. There's obviously always work to do in terms of imagining how our facilities support our student body. We have some projects in the short term in mind, and in the long term, there are lots of things that we could be focusing on. And then I am very concerned with this question of how do we demonstrate the value of an Amherst education not to those individuals that we have as students, although, that's obviously important and essential, but to the world in which they inhabit, right? How do we make sure that everybody understands that the impact of an Amherst education is broader than the private gains that students acquire for having been Amherst students. And that means thinking about measuring our social impact in a broader way. It means how would we tell our stories. It also means maybe thinking about our relationship to the communities, the town of Amherst, and other communities that surround Amherst. And one of the things I've really been heartened by is that there seems to be a lot of interest among current students in having greater involvement in the communities around here, and wanting that to be a bigger part of their educational experience. So before I dive into that, I'm trying to learn a little bit more about what we're already doing, because I suspect there's actually a lot of great work on the ground that hasn't yet surfaced, and I want to figure out how I can learn about that, and support that, and then maybe expand on it.

- So let me pick up on one of the things you said, which is the value of a liberal arts education. You said yesterday in your inaugural speech, or remarks, which I highly recommend to anybody who did not get a chance to see them, very thought-provoking, but I'm going to pick on one thing that you said which was, we think of the liberal arts as sort of static like a noun, and it really should be thought of as a verb, really action, right? So I'd love to hear you expand a little bit on that.

- Yeah, the liberal arts are often defined as a set of subjects, and often pretty narrowly as a set of subjects, and many times when people say the liberal arts, they actually are referring to what we think of as the humanities classics, philosophy, literature, and obviously liberal arts does encompass those fields, but first of all, it's broader as a set of disciplines. It certainly includes the natural sciences, and the social sciences and mathematics, and the performing arts because it is much more of a spirit of inquiry, right? In the liberal arts, we are as much about asking great questions as we are about finding answers. We are about constantly thinking and reframing, and understanding subjects from multiple perspectives, learning about culture and history, and the way that informs even the work that we do in labs, and vice versa, understanding how science helps us to decipher the human experience in different ways. That kind of multidisciplinary thinking, and that kind of relentless self-questioning, humble curiosity is at the core of a liberal education. And what I think if Amherst does its job well, and it certainly did its job well for me, one of the important things is that doesn't just animate your four years on campus, that actually animates the four years after you leave, and the four years after that, and the 40 years. I've never stopped learning. I don't think most Amherst graduates ever stop learning. And we're constantly humbled by the world around us. And what we have, though, because of our Amherst education, is the capacity to learn new things, and the humility to know that we need to keep engaging in that process. That's the core of a liberal arts education. It's not just about your major. And, unfortunately, in higher education, we focus way too much on what students major in, and we think way too much in terms of content area. And we should think much more about approach and style as we do about subject.

- So let me ask I'm going to pick up on that because you mentioned that the liberal arts is really a series of various different classes, but as we are increasingly seeing more students focused, and sort of going towards the STEM fields where do you see the role of humanities, and how do you explain to students kind of the benefit of that combination of classes, if you will, to really have that liberal arts education?

- Yeah, it's a great question. So certainly this growth of sciences is one of the big stories of Amherst College over the last 10 to 12 years. And part of that is about the larger world in which we live, right? Students are getting the message very early on that studying science has a certain kind of value. It also has something to do with the changing composition of our student body. If you're a low income, or first generation student, you understand the vocational value of a science education in a way that you may not understand the humanities, or the social sciences, or the arts. What I think is important is that science at Amherst is going to be very different in terms of its education than science at a research university, and certainly at a technical, Georgia Tech, an MIT, because it will be about asking deep questions. And in order to answer what those deep questions are, you are going to need the humanities. One of the great things about the open curriculum, and I am a supporter of the open curriculum, although, we can talk about that, it's a subject of perpetual debate, including the subject of perpetual debate among the faculty, which is good because that's part of the liberal arts to constantly debate, but one of the things about the open curriculum, right? Is that we are kind of running a natural experiment here, and it forces our faculty to think about what students need, and how to bring them into their classrooms. And so our humanists here, and humanities enrollments remain very strong at Amherst. Do not believe what you might hear about the decline of humanities at colleges like Amherst, they're quite robust. And it's because our humanists here have thought about what it means to educate students who might be majoring in other subjects. And I think that will actually give our students a strategic advantage. And to me, one of the great examples of this is the pandemic that we have all been living through. If you think about what's happened over the last two and a half years, our science and technology as a society performed beautifully, right? Thanks to years of basic and applied scientific research, underappreciated by the way, basic science research, we were able as a society to develop and manufacture vaccines that I don't want to say are miracles because, in fact, they are the product of science, but at any other age in human history, would've taken many more years to develop, and certainly many more years to distribute. So as a society, we have incredible scientific knowledge, we have incredible technological knowledge, we have incredible knowledge about our industrial capacity to develop that science. Where did we not do so great as a society over the last two and a half years? It's in our politics and in our civic society. And I mean, politics with a small "p" not necessarily partisan politics, although, that wasn't necessarily great either, right? We had places where masks were required, and places where we were burning masks. We had places where people were lined up out the door to get vaccines, and places where people couldn't get vaccines, and places where people said that you shouldn't get a vaccine. We couldn't agree as a society in a public health crisis on the appropriate balance between personal liberty, and the social good, which is something we're still working on here on this campus. That requires something more than scientific knowledge. So science exists in a society, we've just learned that through the pandemic. And I'd like to think at Amherst we're educating the kind of scientists who will understand that when they're in leadership positions wherever they may be.

- So one of the things you touched on just now is the power of debate, right? And being able to have an open debate, and disagree with people, right? And one of the things you hear from alumni often is that it used to be that you could, there were more diverging viewpoints here on campus, right? The classic example is you could take a class with Hadley Arkes, you could take a class with Austin Sarat.

- Which I did.

- Wildly different perspectives, but you would grow and learn from debating in both of those classes. So do you think that still exists now? And maybe more broadly, do you think that there's any merit to the criticism that sort of colleges and universities get that they are uniformly leftist organizations?

- Right, both leftist organizations.

- Right.

- It's a great question. So first of all, I always start with a kind of reflexive, and this came up yesterday also in the inauguration speech, be careful of nostalgia, right? It was never quite as free and open as we might remember. I say that as somebody who did take both Hadley Arkes, and Austin Sarat, and many others in the course of my education. Be careful of your own memories, and be a little suspicious of them. That said, I think groupthink is always a danger in any kind of academic institution, right? We do have a tendency, and there's a human tendency, we don't have any psychologists here today, at least on stage, but to migrate toward opinions, right? Confirmation bias is very strong. Group dynamics are very strong. And on an academic campus, we should be guarding against that. And if you look at the history of higher education, you see that that is a constant struggle. It's not always, I think one of the things that's sometimes a little shortsighted about the debate that question or that perspective is that it's translated into, well, we need more Republicans on campus, or we need a certain political partisan viewpoint on campus. I actually think about this much more differently as an academic, right? We need disciplines where people are approaching problems from multiple perspectives. And there's always a fine balance that you have to find because you also want to build a community of people who can speak with each other. So in a psychology department, you'll have people who approach psychology from very different perspectives, but you also want a little critical mass of different fields so that they can build a community of research, and teaching scholars, so finding that balance is always a challenge. I do worry, I think all of us worry about the state of discourse in higher education right now. It is not the same as what you would think if you only read "The New York Times" or "The Wall Street Journal." This campus is not filled with people who will shut down any divergent viewpoint. And I do think that Amherst has tried to keep that going, but we are going to have to continue to lean in if we are going to model for these students what that looks like, what respectful disagreement looks like, what real discourse looks like across some kind of divide. And we're going to have to do that because they're not getting it anywhere else in the culture and in the media. And this is where I think talking about the changes, the fact that they are all plugged into an internet culture that values negativity, that values going to extreme opinions very quickly, to labeling people very, very quickly. That's the world that they come from. And we can't simply pretend that doesn't exist, and we can't shut that out. So we have to model something different, and it's going to take work, and it's not something that we're going to fix all at once, or probably ever get perfect. I am interested in bringing to campus speakers from a variety of different viewpoints. I'm not interested, just to be clear, there is a group of speakers from a variety of viewpoints who like to come to college campuses precisely so they can be shut down because it makes, no, seriously, it makes great press, right? There are literally people who are dining off of this, right? They say things that they know will outrage students. And what they're really hoping for is that they'll come up, they'll sit up here, students will get so angry, that we have to usher out of the room, and it will be a great segment for them on whatever morning news shows that they. And like I said, there are multiple perspectives on that. I'm not interested in those kinds of speakers. I'm interested in genuine discussion, and it can come from a variety of different places. I'm very happy with some of the work that faculty are already doing to provoke that. Lawrence Douglas, for instance, and a group of faculty that he's working with, is bringing George Packer, the journalist to campus in the coming week. If any of you have read Packer's most recent book, he's very critical of the progressive left in that book. And so I'm really interested in what he's going to say on this campus and how students will respond to that. It's not always necessarily a debate of two people. In fact, sometimes that's not necessarily the best event. One area where we have some real work to do that does divide this campus that we've been talking about in the last couple of weeks, is around the question of the relationship of Israel to Palestine and Palestinians. That's a very divisive topic on this campus. In some ways one of the most divisive political topics on this campus. I've heard directly from students that they need better modeling of how to have a responsible dialogue across their different perspectives. And so we're going to work with them on how to do that, but if I take a silver lining from this, and I know I've gone on quite a bit. This is why my children don't let me have a microphone. It is that there are students on this campus who also know that they need this. They know that they're missing something. They don't necessarily know what it is, or how to get there, but we're an educational institution. If they came here already knowing how to do this, how to have great dialogue across differences, I'm not sure we'd be out of business, but what would the point of all of this be, right? We're here to teach 'em some things, which also means that they're going to make some mistakes.

- So I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about some topics that have been on the forefront of the discussion here at Amherst. So I'll start with one, which is during the presidential search process in the middle of it, the college announced that it would no longer take legacy status into consideration admissions. So you're obviously an alum. You have children, college-aged children. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on what was your response to that? How did you think about it?

- Yeah, so that was, of course, a really important and interesting moment. And I do belong to the class of 1992 Facebook group, which is not terribly active, which is fine, by the way. I'm not a huge Facebooker myself. And, of course, I think what happened there mirrored what probably happened in a lot of different alumni discussion groups, which was an incredibly divided set of reactions. People who felt a real sense of betrayal from the college, that something had been taken from them, and that the college didn't value alumni properly. And at the same time, there were people who wrote in and said, "I feel a real sense of pride in the college. Legacy admissions is a set of privileges that we should be talking seriously about. And it's amazing to see my institution take a leadership role in that." And I understand both of those perspectives. And it is true that in higher education, right? In the world of deans and provosts and people like that, people look to Amherst and what it's done around admissions. And this was a leadership moment for the college. Of course, I want alumni to feel valued, and I also want students who are currently here to feel valued. One of the things that I've learned since being on campus is that there is a lot of mythology around legacy students, too much mythology around legacy students. And that in some ways this decision will actually help those students who are here as children of alumni, grandchildren of alumni, related to other alumni, in emphasizing what we've always known to be true, which is that those students deserve to be here just as much as anybody else. There is so much stress around the admissions process, and that stress has grown. It's another change that's happened all across higher education since I was a student that how you got here, your pathway here is a source of identity in a way that's really challenging, and there are other ways that it's challenging as well. And removing that set of practices, and naming the fact of removing that set of practices, I think will actually in the long run make it much easier for those children, grandchildren of alumni to be here on this campus. I always expect us to be enrolling children of alumni, and grandchildren, nieces, nephews. We want the best students here. And Amherst College alumni have wonderful children. And so they will continue to be, I hope, part of our student body for a long time.

- That's good. So there seems to be increasing pressure on institutions to come out and make statements about events that are taking place outside the institution, right? Outside the context of the institution. So whether it's protests in Iran, whether it's hurricanes in Florida, whether it's the Dobbs decision and reversal Roe v. Wade, and the students seem to feel like the president should come out and say something, right? And you could be saying something every day. So how do you go about thinking about that, and where do you draw the line?

- I literally joke that we're going to have to reinstitute daily chapel so that I can come up here, and denounce all the ills in the world. And it is interesting. And I've watched this creep, and this is also part of internet culture, right? This was not possible. Maybe it was possible in daily chapel time for the president to remark on the news of the day, but certainly when I was here, the idea that the president would issue a statement to the student body when anything terrible happened in the world was impossible because how would that happen? We didn't read anything he wrote. I'm looking at his portrait over there, Peter Pouncey. By where you stuff letters in the mailbox, or under your door, but as internet culture arose, and really over the last 10 years, it's something I experienced at Emory. Presidents have been called upon, and there's been a kind of creep, and this is something presidents, deans, provosts talk about a lot. It's something my leadership team and I talk about a lot, which is how to start dialing this back, and how to start setting the bar a little bit differently for when the institution speaks. So the first piece is and this is really worth knowing, when something terrible does happen in the world, and something terrible is happening in the world, whether it's a natural disaster, or a war virtually every week. We have a terrific dean of students office, Dean Agosto is over here. Student Affairs Office that does work to identify those students that we believe will be personally affected, and reach out to them, right? So that there's a level of care and support that's going on that people don't always recognize because it is individually tailored. And, again, because of who we are as an institution, now, virtually every worldwide catastrophe touches somebody on this campus, and so it's changed that work. I am trying to move us away from the presidential statement about an ill in the world in which the president says, I disapprove, to those things where we can point to actions that we're taking. So, for instance, a couple of weeks ago I started to hear from students and some alumni that I needed to denounce the violence in Iran, especially the attack against universities. And, of course, I denounce violence in Iran, and I denounce any attack against universities, and protestors. I believe in free speech, but what was really important to me was, well, what are we doing on this campus? How does this tie into our mission? And so working with our wonderful Provost and Dean of Faculty, Catherine Epstein, we reached out to faculty here of expertise in Iran, and set up an event involving a remote speaker from Washington, that we could then open up to the community. And then we advertised that event. And as part of that event, I was able to say, I think it's important to come and listen to this because there's an attack going on against free speech on university campuses, which, of course, is exactly counter to our values. That's how I would like to approach things in the future. I will speak directly on national events that do, I think, impinge on our ability to perform our mission. So I do have strong feelings that, for instance, restrictions on immigration make it hard for us to do our job, which is to recruit the best minds for our faculty, staff and students. That's my job to recruit the best people, and get them to this campus. Anything that makes doing that job harder makes Amherst less. We can talk about the impending Supreme Court decision as well. I have fears that the Supreme Court in the coming year is going to make a decision about admissions that will make it harder to do our job, which is to recruit the best student body that we can, and support them for the educational experience.

- So maybe let me go back to one thing you mentioned, which was COVID and the toll that COVID has taken, right? So we're coming back.

- [Michael] I'm against COVID.

- So we're slowly coming back together socially as a community, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how that process has been. Like what's the toll that COVID has taken on the community, and the students, the staff, the faculty, and maybe tied to that we've been hearing a lot about sort of the mental health challenges of students on our campuses these days. And I don't want to limit that to students because I really think that faculty and staff have had a very heavy burden to bear over the past couple of years. And so I would love to sort of hear how you're thinking about that. And how the college is helping.

- It's a great question. COVID hit every campus hard, every residential campus hard because it cut directly at the thing that we are designed to do, which is to bring people together to learn. It's interesting when COVID hit, I don't know how many of you paid attention to this, there were a lot of op-eds and kind of hot takes in March and April of 2020 that this would be the death now of residential colleges and universities. Finally, we would shed these expensive campuses, and go into our brave new online future. And then about six weeks later, every parent in the country said, "Would you please get our kids out of the house?" We realized kind of what we always knew, which is that the learning of a college experience is about so much more than what can go on in the classroom, even a very well run virtual classroom. And, actually, I suspect the same is true at Amherst. Most universities did an excellent job of translating the academic instruction to an online format. Again, we're very lucky in terms of this coming along at the right technological and cultural moment for us to be able to do that. I was astonished, actually, at how well we were able to do that, but everything else that goes into the learning, we could not perform. Amherst took the COVID pandemic very seriously, and as a college, as a town, and as a region, and that means the road back to building a sense of community after COVID is a little bit steeper. And so we're still on that pathway. It really, I think, on a small college, I think hit this campus even harder. It's one of the perspectives I do bring as an outsider. It feels like it's taken even more of a toll here than what I experienced on the campus that I was coming from Emory University in Atlanta, because coming together in small numbers and in groups is an essential piece of the DNA. And not to be able to do that in a regular way, the fear about doing it in a way beyond what's absolutely required is something that we're still working through. It, also, to get to the last piece of the mental health challenge, it took a tremendous toll on everybody involved, and I especially here want to call out the staff of Amherst who had done just tremendous work to keep the enterprise going, and had to go far beyond their usual job descriptions. And the faculty really because they are so devoted to their students, went above and beyond in terms of learning how to teach again in a whole new way, devising new syllabi. We had faculty here, I don't know how many of you are aware of this, who developed whole new courses to be taught in January for the first time for credit, which is an incredible undertaking to figure out how you compress a semester's worth of learning into four or five weeks. And their devotion to the students really shone through. And so there is a sense of depletion right now. And so we have to be careful as we are coming back, we want to both celebrate coming together, but we also want to be aware that it's going to have to take place in stages, and that we have to be cautious about what we roll out coming together. One of the signs of this is interterm, what used to be called interterm, started to become J-term at some point. I'm actually not clear what we're calling it right now. And like I said, for the last couple of years we've been running courses, and last spring a group of people came together, students, faculty and staff to try to figure out what the future of that should be post pandemic. And they put together this beautiful report. I'm sure you can find it somewhere online. Amherst does seem to specialize on making reports, but they do put them all online so you can read them all. The staff know what I'm talking about. They're laughing over there. It doesn't mean you have to, but you can read them all. And, basically, the short version of this report is we're too tired to think about this right now. We just need to take a break, and take a deep breath before we start planning something new. And so that's another piece of the challenge for me coming in, in terms of supporting the community, and trying to roll out a new presidential agenda is making sure that we have the capacity in terms of the time and energy of our staff and faculty to be able to do it. The mental health challenges of our students are real. I suspect that all of you have read at least one story in the news at some point about the mental health challenges of young adults today. The broader story is about the mental health challenges of adults in American society, but, of course, that hits young adults and teens harder because they are people in information. We have taken real steps in the college, and I really can't take any credit for this because it was in process before I arrived. I probably should because I got blamed for other things. In terms of investing in counseling, and mental health services, but in order to support our students, it's going to take much more than that. It really is going to take a reorientation around thinking about the well-being of our students, and faculty and staff, right? You can't take care of somebody else's wellbeing unless you can take care of your own. And that work extends into the classroom, outside of the classroom. One of the things we're trying to work on in the leadership right now is pulling together many of the initiatives that we actually have in progress so that we're all speaking from the same vocabulary, and all pulling in the same direction in terms of thinking about this as a campus that prizes wellbeing. If you want to be bored again, and watch another address of mine, you can go back and look at the convocation address that I gave to the new students where I sort of threw out the question, what does it mean to be a healthy community? And I think after the pandemic, our students are interested in that question, and they have very different answers, and that's part of the point. At Amherst College, we will debate what it means to be a healthy community, and we will have different answers. In fact, that debate might be part of the health of the community.

- Right, right. So I could go on for a really long time, but I think we should open up, and see if people in the audience have questions. And maybe while people are thinking, oh, there we go right there.

- There. We're going to ask you to use mics for the questions because we are being broadcast and live streamed, and beamed all around the world.

- Good morning, my name is Jim Pates. I'm in the class of '72, and a loyal alum who likes to come back to homecoming as frequently as possible, but you probably haven't had a chance much to think about this yet, but I would hope that you would, and that is, how can we bring alums and students closer together? I think that there's a lot that they can share, and contribute to each other. This weekend is one that I'm sorry to see that not many of my classmates are attending, and they haven't in the past that's nothing new, but I personally think that homecoming is a great lost opportunity at Amherst, that it's a great time, excuse me. It's a great time to be here. Not only is it a pretty time of year, but for alums you get to see how the college is really operating, and to participate in that. Anyway, any thoughts that you might have?

- It's great. First of all, I really appreciate the question, Jim, and, of course, I'm literally preaching to the choir here since you're all here. Look at the camera, why aren't you here? It is an excellent question. And I should should point out, we have Andy Nussbaum here, chair of the board of trustees, and we were just talking the other day about how much it matters to get alumni back on campus. It is so easy to get to some of the questions you were asking if you think you know what's going on college campuses just through the media, you have a very different impression, right? You would think we are doing nothing but debating, having free speech debates, and mental health challenges. Instead, you come here and you meet the students, and you realize these are incredibly interesting, vibrant, curious people, who are struggling to find their way in the world just as you were so many years ago. Similarly, there is a mythology among students about alumni. The alumni are mysterious to many of them. I certainly sort of felt that as a student, who are these people? They show up, they wear a lot of purple, they have different songs, and, of course, they have different names for things. One of the things that is really wonderful about belonging to Amherst College, certainly something that I have felt is that after you graduate your ties to college actually becomes stronger over time because you continue to connect with, and meet alumni in your various walks of life. If I can just take one personal thing, one of my guests yesterday for the inauguration is a colleague of mine from Emory with whom my team taught. He was my mentor at Emory, and he's an Amherst College graduate. We never met each other at Amherst College. I became very good friends with her husband, also, an Amherst College graduate. Never met him at Amherst College, but having that in common gave us a lingua franca that made us closer together than we would've ever been otherwise. I suspect you all have stories like that yourselves out there in the world. And we want students to experience that before they even leave campus. There's some concrete things that we are trying to do, and that we can lean into further. The Loeb Center, one of the nice surprises, actually, you mentioned surprises earlier. I didn't know as much about the Loeb Center for career development and exploration as I do now. And the Loeb Center is doing an excellent job of involving alumni in helping students to understand different professional pathways, and is ambitious to try to do more. So that's one entry point that can bring alumni, and students together in a really productive way. I do think we can do more using technology to connect alumni and current students together. It's easier to bring in a guest speaker now from the alumni, right? Who can be projected onto a screen, or even around around a Zoom Room. And vice versa, it's easier for you to meet with a student that might be interested in something to do. And then maybe we need to do more regionally to try to celebrate the different regional communities, but your real impulse let's get more people back on campus. I would love to work on that. Unfortunately, I can only throw one inauguration, so I've now played that card, but we will continue to work on making this a destination for alumni. I have to say, if you're watching this at home, you are missing a spectacular New England weekend. The hills could not be prettier, nor could the people in the audience. Got a question back here, and then over here.

- Alan Kovacs, class of '69.

- [Michael] Hey Alan.

- I realize my question implicates both financial, and philosophical issues, but I will ask nevertheless.

- [Michael] That is kind of the job of the administrator is to bridge that financial philosophical gap.

- My question touches both on the mental health of students, and on the issue of increasing the enrollment of students from a wide variety of backgrounds when you mentioned immigration. Well, we know that one of the stress points for children before they get to college is the fact that it's become so much harder to get into, let's say the top 100 colleges and universities in the United States. Population wise, when I entered, I think our population was 180 million, and now it's 320. So there's a lot more children out there trying to get into college. Doesn't a place like Amherst have an obligation at this point to try and increase the number of students it's bringing in and educating?

- It's a really good question. I already heard some dissenting opinions in the room. It's a question we should always be asking, right? What is the right size of the student body? First of all, let me just say something about the competitive admissions environment. It is much harder to get into any one college, let's say the top 50 colleges, pick one and get in, than it was when I was a student. It's actually not that much harder though to get into one of the top 50 colleges. Part of the way the admissions environment has become much more competitive is that students are applying to more colleges. And so to be able to say this is the one that I want has become a harder path to follow, but if you are willing to say, well, I'm interested in this range of schools, and I have the set of credentials, it's actually not quite as difficult, but I take very seriously your point that that perception is out there, and that there is incredible stress on the college decision, much more so than when I was a student. And certainly more so than when you were. And that stress influences everything we do. We could fill, I'm looking at Matt McGann, dean of admissions and financial aid. We could fill two or three size of our admitted class. It does have financial implications in terms of the physical plant, the size of the faculty, the size of the staff. We can't just wave our hands and do that, but moreover, I don't think that by increasing the size of the student body that we are necessarily ever going to fulfill the need for the kind of education we provide. Instead, I want us to be showing why this form of education matters, why it's successful, and experimenting with things so that when we hit on things that are successful for our students, we can broadcast them to the world. So some of the things that Amherst has been doing on this campus around say, here's a great example, math education. We have an incredibly successful math department in terms of reaching students who come in with different levels of preparation. Math departments around the country are paying attention to what Amherst has done, and trying to learn about how they can restructure their own curriculum because of what Amherst has developed. That's the kind of leadership role that we can play. So we will continue to think about this question of whether we have the right size of a student body. I'm probably more interested in thinking about it less in terms of reducing stress on admissions because I don't think we can ever reduce stress on admissions unilaterally, and more about do we have the right size of student body for our educational goals, both inside and outside the classroom. And then if any change in enrollment has huge resource implications, already we feel a little stretched because the campus has grown in terms of its student body. And so we're not where we would like to be in terms of bed count per students. We're not quite where we'd like to be in terms of classroom size per students. It's not simply a matter of flipping a switch. It is one of the things that's different than other universities where because we're so devoted to residential form of education we feel a different obligation to our students than a university that can grow their enrollment by increasing off-campus housing. There was a question here and then we'll go.

- Thanks. Rob Gordon, class of '66. I wanted to go back to alumni engagement. One of my favorite things to do at homecoming is to go to class because if you really want to feel reengaged with Amherst, and you realize that Amherst is still Amherst, go to class. I went to four classes. One was a physics class. I was lost, I needed to go back to physics one. A computer programming class, they were doing Java. I know what Java is, I don't know how to do it. but it was really fun watching the interaction between the professor and the students, and talking to the students afterwards. I went to a poli sci class, which was about media bias. And there I got really engaged, and the professor welcomed me to get engaged with the class, to take the same quizzes that they were taking about the media, and to give my responses, and it was great. A lot of the bigger schools are able to have formal educational programs for alumni. Like during the summer they'll have weeks. That would be a little tough for Amherst given its size and its seasonal nature. And also the faculty needs some breathing time to do their own academic work and other things, but I would try to think of more ways to get the faculty to engage with the alumni during times like homecoming when we're actually on campus they could be more involved. I was kind of disappointed that I was the only alumnus in the classes I went to that nobody else was there. So I think this is some way that you can really bring people back, and make them reengage with the college.

- Thank you for that. That's terrific to hear you had a successful day. I'll get your report card later, and we'll talk a little bit, but I love the idea. Yeah, gentleman B-minus. How about Kelly in the back.

- Oh, thank you so much. Kelly Close, class of '90. It's amazing to hear you and Chantal speak together. This is a question I'd love to hear Chantal's view on also, but you're really well-known, President Elliott, for what you've done in undergraduate research, your support of it in many different ways in Emory, how would you like to see this evolve even further, maybe at Amherst? What would you like to see in research across both the sciences as well as the humanities, and how would you like to see alums stretch to help make that happen? Thank you.

- That's a great question. It's another place where I'm measuring what we're actually doing before starting to leap in. And it's another place I'm really impressed with where Amherst is in terms of. One of my pleasures, again, another small surprise is I arrived on campus, my first day was, like, August 2nd. I think I started August 1st. I got here a day late, all right. Already behind the curve ball, but I arrived on August 2nd. I was pleasantly surprised at how vibrant the campus was, right? How many students are here over the summer engaged in research relationships with professors. And the reason for that for those of you who maybe haven't thought about this as much, is not simply that we want to be training, and educating students to go on, and pursue careers in research, although if they're interested in that, obviously, we want them to be able to do so, is that there's a lot of research out there that shows that if you have that kind of intense research experience with a professor you're much more likely to not just be successful in college, but then to look back later, and say that your college experience had a positive impact on your life. All of this social science research on success in college boils down to this idea, if you have intense relationships with faculty, you will be successful. So I want to make sure that we're sustaining that. It's not cheap to be able to support students, support faculty in doing those things. One question I do have is, 'cause I know we're doing some of this as well, are we making enough opportunities available to students, and helping students maybe pursue research with faculty on other campuses? Our faculty are almost tapped out in terms of their capacity to take on students during the summer. Interestingly, I have a strange, not that strange, I have a family connection to this. My sister-in-law, hi Kathy, is a chemist at MIT, and she had an Amherst College student in her lab this summer. And so when she came here for the inauguration, they went and held office hours, which was fabulous to be able to facilitate. So we are already doing some work to do that. So I want to make sure that we do that, continue to do that. One of the things that I think is also really important is that the college has leaned into the idea that we are a research college, right? That we will get the best faculty for our students if we support scholars who are active in their research. And that was a mission I think the college always had, especially around the humanities. The English Department is a famous research department. The Political Science Department has had famous researchers over the time. I'm not so sure it's always been as true in the sciences as it is now, and that does require a different level of infrastructure and support. And I think the college has been working hard on that, but we probably have more steps that we need to take. Thank you for the question. Do we have time for a couple more.

- [Chantal] Maybe two more.

- Two more?

- [Chantal] Yeah.

- [Michael] There's one over here.

- President Elliott, about two weeks ago or so, there was a demonstration in China for democracy, a dissident hung a banner. And that banner has gone viral in the United States, and particular in college campuses where there are Chinese students. Apparently there's been also an attempt by the Chinese government to tap down on protests among Chinese students in the United States. Well, interestingly enough, yesterday I saw that here on Amherst, that same banner has shown up on bulletin boards. And so my question is, are you aware of any attempt here on the campus to somehow monitor Chinese students? And what is the university doing on that front? There's also a concern about espionage on the other hand by the Chinese government at research institutions. So I just was curious if you're dealing with that issue?

- So it's a great question. We're not aware yet of any efforts to monitor, or suppress our Chinese students. We have had an incident recently where one of our Chinese students seems to have been caught up in some phishing through a Chinese-based agency or organization, but we don't think it's necessarily related to the Chinese government. Unfortunately, it seems to have been financial in motive, and not political motive. It is something that we're continuing to watch, and because we're not the same kind of research institution as a larger university, we don't have those research relationships with China that have come under so much scrutiny. The talent programs and things like that, that I am familiar with from my time at Emory. The students that we have from China, though, they're involved in a very vibrant conversation about democracy, about the nature of a democratic society, and about their home country. And they're tremendously interesting. If you were at the inauguration yesterday, you heard the poem from Haoran, who is an amazing student in every way. He is from Beijing, and because of the pandemic, he has been on campus literally for the entire four years. He is also responsible for a lot of the photography that you see under the Amherst College social media. And then he's a poet, and yet his major is, like, political science, or LJST, or something like that.

- [Chantal] And he sings.

- And he sings, right. He was going back and forth. Enough, Haoran, you're making us look lazy. I think Chinese students, and, frankly, all of our students from different parts of the world, we have a significant number of Ukrainian students are very aware that democracy is under attack in different nations. That's the kind of thing that you hope makes the college richer as we talk about democracy, is that it shouldn't be a myopic discussion of just the United States. It should be a discussion of what democratic societies can look like around the globe, but we have not seen the kinds of things here because in part, we don't have as large a Chinese student population as some of those other universities. There's been a question over here for a while, so maybe this will be. Can we wait 'til the microphone comes over so other folks can, thank you.

- My name is Tony Hom, I'm the class of '71, and I think I was the only Chinese student, Chinese American or Asian American student in my class at that time. And now I see that there's a larger number of Asian Americans. I want to know about the status of Asian American studies, whether or not you plan to have a major in that, or the department. I know that that has been going on in a number of campuses.

- Yeah, it's a great question, and that's also an interesting question for me because it's something that we were talking about as students when I was here as a student, is the desire for more Asian American studies courses. First of all, we already do have a number of faculty offering Asian American studies courses, even though we just lost a beloved member of our faculty who had retired, Franklin Odo, which was a truly sad moment for many people on the campus because he was a pivotal figure in terms of building that cohort of faculty, and that curriculum here. We are now in the process of hiring what's called a cluster hire, which is when you try to hire in multiple disciplines with faculty who are working on a common area. So we're engaged in a cluster hire where we're trying to hire three new faculty who work in Asian American studies, economics, psychology, and English. And the goal is to hire those three faculty. Then we feel like we will then have the critical mass of faculty and courses to be able to move toward a major. Of course, the faculty, the way the curriculum works, and this is important, if there are any faculty listening out there, administrators don't design the curriculum, right? So the faculty will obviously need to engage, and work together to design that curriculum. It'll have to go through a review process. That's important from an accreditation standpoint, but it's very much not just in the long term plans, but in really the short term plans of the college. It's something our students have been voting with their feet in terms of desire for, in terms of the kinds of courses that they seek. And we think it'll be a terrific complement to the curriculum that we have.

- So I think we probably need to wrap up. There's a lot of games being played. There's football, women's, men's soccer, field hockey.

- We have three NESCAC Tournament games, in addition to the football games. Just to make sure that everybody gets in active steps, they all seem to be scheduled at exactly the same time. Unfortunately, as good as our physics department is, they have not bent the space time continuum to make it possible to extend all the games simultaneously, but it is a terrific day at Amherst College. And I want to thank you all for being here. I want to thank you for being involved. I want to thank you for coming back. We've asked the question a couple of different ways. How do we get more alumni involved? There are lots of things that we can do in the college, but the most powerful thing is for you to reach out to your friends, your classmates, your enemies, and get them to be involved, engaged, back on campus. People come back on campus when they know that other people they care about are going to be here as well. And I want to put in a final word again for the Loeb Center, which I do think is doing terrific work for our students, right? Which is the goal, but as part of that work is very interested in engaging with alumni who can be the kind of mentors to our students that we can't necessarily be ourselves. So thank you for considering that as a possibility. In addition, of course, to all of the financial support that we know alumni make possible to the college. Literally, we could not be the college that we are without the philanthropic support of alumni. I am truly proud to be here, to be engaged in this kind of work at the very highest level. And that is only because of the generosity of generations of alumni. And I'm proud to continue that forward. Thank you.

- [Chantal] Thank you.

Amherst College: 2022 Homecoming Multimedia Archive

Conversation with President Michael A. Elliott ’92

Transcript