In his address to the Class of 2024, President Michael A. Elliott urged Amherst’s class of 2024 to embrace two qualities that are embodied by the College: “unapologetic hope and unfettered curiosity.”
May 26, 2024
This has been a hard year, and I know that many of you on this quad are deeply concerned about the thousands of lives being lost, about hostages being held, in Gaza — and I know that some of you here are angry at Amherst College, at the Board, and maybe even with me personally. I want to acknowledge all of the different emotions and commitments that we bring to this quad, and that our celebration of this class does not in any way diminish the real pain that we are feeling right now. All of us, in our own ways, are seeking to find balance in the tumult of the world, and peace in the midst of conflict and violence.
As I have been thinking about this day, I’ve been thinking about how we can try to find hope in a time of turbulence. And I have been thinking about another day, seven weeks ago, when I saw many of you from the class of 2024 gathered out here, in this very same place, to witness the eclipse of the sun. Instead of graduation robes, we were all wearing dark, disposable eclipse glasses (thank you, department of Physics!), looking up at the sky, peering down at the strange shadows, and most of all, gazing at each other — people sprawled on blankets, playing games, laughing, and pointing up at the celestial event. For a college that prides itself on activity and action, where everyone seems to be “doing” some 30 hours a day, it was a rare moment where we could all pause and find delight in the way that the natural world could reveal its wonder to us with such simple grandeur, and in the sheer pleasure of just seeing each other – our fellow Mammoths – take it all in.
It was a moment that felt very far away from where we all were just four years ago, in the spring of 2020, when this campus was nearly empty, when we retreated into cautious, even fearful, isolation, away from each other, seeking protection from another natural phenomenon, COVID-19. Some of you were already students at Amherst at the onset of the pandemic, and those of you who were -- you were largely sent away from here to your homes. Even more of you – most of you – were high school seniors, finishing out the last weeks of twelfth grade with Zoom classes, canceled proms, and drive-through graduations.
The pandemic shutdown was almost a perfect inversion of the recent eclipse. In the fall of 2020, instead of turning our attention upward and out into the magnificence of the heavens, the shutdown made our world smaller – squeezing us into rooms not built to contain the whole of our lives, shrinking our interactions into the small boxes of our laptop screens, reducing our human contact to trying to read the eyes above the mask as we scrupulously observed a six-foot distance between us.
For many of you, that is how you began your time here, at college, in this place, this Amherst. You came here uncertain of what it would mean to live and learn together under such conditions, you came here because you sought the kind of connection and knowledge that only a campus like Amherst’s can afford, you came here when the universe must have felt that it was working against you.
At a moment when so many were pessimistic and anxious about the future, you chose hope by dedicating yourself to education. At a moment when so many people were withdrawing and becoming suspicious of one another, you chose curiosity by coming to study here, with each other, in a community devoted to close colloquy. Hope and curiosity. Hope and curiosity — these are qualities that are the foundation of what Amherst College means, of everything that we do here. Curiosity is at the core of a liberal arts education — a spirit of inquiry that shapes not only what our students do in the classroom, but also how they learn from and about each other.
Hope and curiosity seem to be in too short supply in this country right now. This last year has offered evidence, time and again, that trust in American institutions – including institutions of higher education – is in sharp decline. And we know that young people report suffering from clinical depression and acute anxiety in record numbers, blunting their sense of curiosity about one another and the sense of purpose and connection that a community of learners requires.
Hope, the kind of hope that propels Amherst, is not an empty, naïve optimism. It’s not blind to the challenges that we face – as individuals, as a society. It’s not an empty expectation that the world’s problems will ameliorate without long and difficult effort. Hope instead girds us for those struggles. Hope orients us to possible futures with confidence, with evidence – it permits us the opportunity for both sorrow and joy, even in what can seem like dire circumstances. As the philosopher John Lysaker puts it, hope swings and syncopates – it finds rhyme and rhythm even as it embraces what is unknown and what is unknowable.
Hope requires action – even if it's not always certain of the results. What does that kind of hope look like? You’ve all just seen one version of it, in our student speaker Taha Ahmed.
Taha, you should all know, is someone who attended protests and lifted his voice to argue with me about how Amherst College should respond to the horrific violence being suffered by Palestinians in Gaza; he has sat with Trustees in the President’s house and argued with them about the endowment; and here we all are together – not agreeing with one another – but listening to one another, genuinely curious about what each other has to say. After a year in which too many campuses have seen expressions of hatred – against Jews, against Muslims – in which too many peaceful protests have culminated in police action or violence – the fact that we are all here on this stage and in this quad may only be a small thing, or maybe it is not.
Taha is just one example of what hope can look like. In just a few minutes, his classmates, 460-some members of the class of 2024 will cross the stage, and as they do so, look at them, look at them all, because they each are a different embodiment of hope – the kind of hope that begins in the dark silence of a pandemic and ends in the spectacular light of a partial eclipse.
And so, to the class of 2024, I want to thank you for the hope that you have given me. I have found hope in your stories of perseverance through the pandemic – finding friends and mentors in the most difficult of circumstances, in the stories of your tented classes and not-so-secret parties in the woods. I have found hope in your curiosity about the world – in the ways that it comes to life on the stage, in the classroom, in your devotion to theses and research projects, in the probing questions that you ask me at every turn. And in your relentless pursuit of the Sabrina statue, which is making an appearance at an Amherst Commencement for the first time in many decades.
I find hope in your devotion to democracy and your call for us all to own up to our civic responsibility. I find hope in your activism and advocacy for others – whether they are the most vulnerable members of our own community or those who are suffering far across the world. We have not always agreed about the actions that we should take at Amherst – and I find hope in that as well, that we can be a community where we disagree with one another, sometimes passionately, while still recognizing one another with respect.
It is hard to choose hope and curiosity when the world is asking us to elect neither. We live in an environment that amplifies negative emotions, that feeds us the most strident sentiments in slogans and memes devoid of any nuance. Whether it is war in the Middle East or an election in our own country, we are told to choose a side and proclaim our allegiance loudly. Our community here is not immune from those pressures. However, I have also seen students do something different on this campus – things that will never be reported in the New York Times or serve as the subject of a congressional hearing. I’ve seen them talk and listen to one another – attend lectures by people with whom they disagree – come together in concerts and celebrations, games and meals. I’ve heard them advocate for the needs of undocumented students, for the victims of war, for action on climate change.
The hope of Amherst College is not a set of empty wishes; it’s rooted in hard work, grounded in the pursuit of knowledge.
A liberal arts college is a special place, a place where we give free rein to curiosity no matter what the subject – a place where we are not only open to, but actually invite, the criticism and challenge of every idea. It is a place where no orthodoxy can escape skepticism, and where we must offer protection and support for our own critics. And because of this relentless belief in the power of inquiry – and in the capacity of thinking to transform our students and the world – a liberal arts college is also a fragile place. To preserve it requires constant vigilance and institutional introspection. Amherst College is a campus, yes, a set of buildings, a body of wonderful people – but it is nothing if it is not first an idea, a commitment to the power of thinking, to a conviction that we should come together and learn together with passion, with openness, alive to possibility.
Over its 200-year history, Amherst College has changed in profound ways, and it will continue to evolve and adapt, but it must, above all else, continue to be a place of unapologetic hope and unfettered curiosity — a place where we seek truth and knowledge without restraint, where we believe in our capacity to grow, a place where we can be a community of learners that finds joy in our common purpose. That doesn’t mean that it will be a place of quiet harmony and it doesn’t mean that it will always be easy. Amherst should be as raucous and loud as the Class of 2024. It should be a place where students can debate each other in the classroom or the president on the quad. It should be a place where the faculty can innovate and push new ideas wherever they may lead. It should be a place where we can walk from the cacophony of Val to the still quiet of Frost’s C-level to the shouts and cheers of athletic playing fields.
There are people, including some of our own alumni, who don’t see this Amherst – who think that we have lost our way, that we have sacrificed our values and our pursuit of academic excellence in the name of some empty piety or political position. There are others who do not value the idea of a space where curiosity and inquiry are given free rein, and are only too happy to engage in public ridicule when we fall short of our own high aspirations. During the last six months, the media, and the U.S. Congress, have reminded us repeatedly how little public trust there is in colleges and universities. I wish that our critics – whether on capitol hill or in the press -- could witness what I get to witness at Amherst – I wish that they were here today to meet the class of 2024, to see what academic excellence looks like. I wish they could have been in the audience with me to watch Caspian Rabaia’s stunning reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Electra, or sat with me on stage while the Amherst Symphony Orchestra played Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. I wish they could have come with me to hear thesis presentations on everything from the social life of birds to school nutrition programs in El Salvador to a new play about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
And I wish, I truly do wish, they could have come to sit with me and with the students in the many events that we have held on campus to hear perspectives on the war in Gaza — where we have heard hard questions from our students and opinions as diverse as anything you will hear in Congress. If they had done those things, they would have a very different perspective on how we pursue academic excellence; they would have seen and heard the power of curiosity. They would have seen how in this place, this Amherst, to borrow a sentence from James Baldwin, “Hope is invented every day.”
But since we cannot bring our critics to Amherst, we will have to send Amherst to them. And that is what we are doing today – we are graduating you, the class of 2024, into a complex world that needs what you can bring to it. Just as there is no single path through Amherst, there is no single path after the time you spent here. But wherever you go, whatever you do, do not allow the world to blunt your curiosity; do not let cynicism and mistrust diminish your sense of hope. And if all else fails, remember the simple lessons of our recent eclipse: take time for the unexpected delights, find joy in the company of others, and always be ready with your sunglasses.