September 7, 2021
Dear Amherst Students, Staff, Faculty, Alumni, and Families,
I am pleased to send you my annual Fall update, which I hope you will enjoy. I have divided the material into sections with headings that will allow you quickly to identify the areas that are included. There is so much more than this sampling. Small wonder, given the vibrancy of this place!
Student Arrival
Over the past two weeks, we have welcomed nearly 2,000 students to campus in this, our Bicentennial year. It has been pure joy to have the campus populated in a way it has not been since March 2020. We have 532 new students on campus this Fall, a record high. The 470 newly admitted members of the class of 2025, admitted from a pool of nearly 14,000 applicants, are joined by 44 students who deferred admission last year and 18 who transferred from other institutions. Eleven of our transfer students have come from community colleges and five are veterans. For the first time, the majority (51 percent) of domestic students in our incoming class self-identify as people of color. Twelve percent of our new students come to us from abroad and 18 percent will be the first in their family to graduate from college. Thirty-two percent speak a language other than English at home (with over 40 different first languages represented). Fifty-seven percent of the incoming class are receiving Amherst grant funds, with an average aid grant of more than $60,000. Also new to campus this Fall are those members of the class of 2024 who studied remotely last year. Taken as a whole, our new students are extraordinarily accomplished academically, musically, artistically, athletically, in debate, civic engagement, and in many other ways. I have loved interacting with them, witnessing their excitement at being together, and hearing their enthusiasm about their classes. It has been wonderful to see them drifting across campus between classes in animated groups.
Our communications team has created a video to give you a glimpse of their arrival, which included Bicentennial-themed goodies and copies of some of our Bicentennial books.
COVID-19 Preparations
We prepared for the 2021-22 academic year knowing we would have to continue the necessary work of limiting the spread of COVID-19. Back in June, we thought a new normalcy would be possible, and then the delta variant began its spread in the United States. We want our students to have the opportunities a residential liberal arts education typically offers, while also providing for the safety of all our students, staff, and faculty. The tension between these two goals will continue to challenge us for some time, but we expect to relax some of our start-up protocols as of September 13, assuming conditions allow. We continue to track available data and forecasts, watch what occurs at other institutions, get advice from scientists and public health experts, and consult directly with faculty, staff, and students (including our COVID-19 student advisory group). Please check the College's regularly updated COVID-19 Dashboard for more information about the situation on campus.
Fall Rituals
Before classes started this past week, we enjoyed our traditional rituals for the beginning of a new academic year, including orientation activities, the DeMott Lecture, and Convocation. At the DeMott Lecture for New Students during Orientation, Assistant Professor of English Shayla Lawson encouraged the newest members of our community to enjoy their experiences without allowing perfectionism, self-doubt, or fear of failure to inhibit their learning. Her talk was candid and wise. I hope you will watch and enjoy the lecture, including the audience participation.
Both the DeMott Lecture and Convocation were held outdoors, where our staff had arranged for a stage and a first-rate sound system. A few fellow presidents at other institutions reported some envy about the number of faculty members who took part in Convocation, processing in their academic regalia and welcoming our new students.
In my remarks, I drew on the first line of an Emily Dickinson poem, "Hope is the thing with feathers," emphasizing how important community, friendship, and humility are to hopefulness and how urgently we need to make the changes on which hope depends. Community, friendship, and humility stood out in the word cloud that students created in response to my welcome remarks on their arrival.
The Start of Classes
Last Monday, classes started—in person. The "close colloquy" between faculty and students at Amherst has long distinguished academic life at the College. I marvel still at the intensity of exchange and the pleasure that faculty and students take in teaching and learning together.
I am always eager to see how students distribute themselves across the disciplinary spectrum, given our open curriculum. This semester, in keeping with past semesters, around 40 percent of course enrollments are in humanities and arts classes, 30 percent in science and math, 20 percent in social sciences, and 10 percent in interdisciplinary classes, including our first-year seminars, which are often interdisciplinary.
Every year, we add new courses to our catalog. Here are some of this year’s new course offerings: "Love (a Panoramic, Interdisciplinary Survey)," "Christianity and Evolution," "Ring of Fire: Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and Devastation," "Making Place in Kwenitekw, the Connecticut River Valley," "The Crowd," "Looking at the World Through Jazz-Colored Lenses," "Thinking Body, Dancing Mind," "Asian American History: 1800-Present," “The Rule of Law," "Systems Thinking for Creating Change," "Science and Music," "Drugs in History," "Being Human In Philosophy," "From Lynch Mobs to the Killing State: Race and Punishment in the United States," "Power, Politics, and the Middle East," " Public Discussion and Liberal Democracy," "Understanding 9/11 (and preparing for the next 9/11)," "Russian and Soviet Film," "History of Asian American Women: Migration and Labor."
The Strength of Our Faculty
We are delighted to welcome 11 new faculty members, spanning a wide range of disciplines in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. I hope you will take the time to read about each of them and their work. Over the past eight years, we have hired 91 new faculty members to replace retiring faculty. My experience of tenure reviews has provided ample evidence of the extraordinary quality of the faculty—in their teaching and their scholarship. These new colleagues, too, will uphold Amherst's history of scholarly and teaching excellence.
Professor of Computer Science Lee Spector's primary research area is artificial intelligence, with a focus on computational methods that incorporate ideas from evolutionary biology. His work has applications in areas ranging from pure mathematics and quantum computer programming to wind turbine modeling and music composition. He also works on " Artificial Life" investigations into the emergence of behavior within ecosystems, including human/machine collaboration on creative tasks, DNA computing, the modeling of dog and wolf behavior, the game theory of altruism and cooperation, the developmental neuroscience of human planning, knowledge representation for web agents, and the philosophy of computational theories of mind. He has a distinguished record of publication in disciplines including psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, animal behavior, physics, mathematics, and engineering.
Together with Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Amy Wagaman, Professor Spector recently received a Major Research Instrumentation Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to acquire a high-performance computing system that will be used by faculty and student researchers in eight academic departments, enabling Amherst faculty to introduce students to applications of machine learning technology and artificial intelligence. Additionally, Professor Spector has launched Artificial Intelligence in the Liberal Arts at the College, an initiative that aims to engage a broad, interdisciplinary community of participants in discussions and activities related to artificial intelligence, exploring and facilitating multi-way interactions between work in artificial intelligence and work across the liberal arts.
The scholarship of Associate Professor of Black Studies and History Elizabeth Herbin-Triant's focuses on the long history of white supremacy and African-American opposition to it, combining the fields of African-American history and the history of capitalism. Her 2019 book, Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods, investigates efforts to segregate cities and the countryside by race in early twentieth-century North Carolina. Her new book project, "Lords of the Lash and Loom: Abolitionists, Anti-Abolitionists, and the Business of Manufacturing Slave-Grown Cotton," tells the story of antebellum Lowell, Massachusetts—a place deeply tied to the South's "peculiar institution" and shaped by competing currents of antislavery activism and anti-abolitionism.
With Mike Kelly, Head of Archives & Special Collections at Frost Library, Professor Herbin-Triant is already supervising student research assistants in the creation of an online Racial History of Amherst, part of our Anti-Racism Plan. This site will grow as new information about links between the College and the slave trade is found. Professor Herbin-Triant's courses at Amherst include "Slavery in U.S. History & Culture," "The Age of Jim Crow," "African-American History from Reconstruction to the Present," “The History of the U.S. South," and "Research in Black Studies."
The achievements of the faculty who have been hired over the past two or three years are truly exceptional. Early career faculty in the sciences have won a number of research awards just this past summer:
Assistant Professor of Biology Marc Edwards and Assistant Professor of Biology Sally Kim were awarded a Major Research Instrumentation grant from the NSF for the acquisition of an integrated Zeiss 980 microscope with Airyscan 2 and FCS to create an advanced microscopy center. The advanced imaging capabilities of this instrument are expected to transform life science research at Amherst, opening new opportunities for student research and promoting interdisciplinary exploration of the microscopic world. Professor Edwards was also awarded an R15 grant from the National Institutes of Health for his research investigating the mechanism of the role of the P2 regulator in cell migration. This research will advance understanding of the role of cell migration in the development of diseases. Newly hired Assistant Professor of Geology Rachel Bernard received an NSF EAGER award to fund a conference that convenes stakeholders in Washington, D.C., for the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark First National Conference on Minority Participation in Earth Science and Mineral Engineering.
Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Cohen was selected as a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar and given an award to support his project, " What is the bandwidth of perceptual experience?" Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Karamatou Yacoubou Djima was awarded an NSF LEAPS-MPS grant for "Uncovering and Exploiting Multiscale Structures in Data Using Diffusion-based Representation and Optimal Sampling." In addition to funding her research, the award will support Professor Djima's work training and mentoring undergraduate research students, particularly students from underrepresented groups with less exposure to careers in science and technology. Assistant Professor of Geology Professor Victor Guevara received two NSF Collaborative Research awards for "Understanding the Tectonic and Petrological Processes Controlling Iron Oxide-Apatite Mineralization in a Mesoproterozoic Collisional Orogen" and "Probing feedbacks between thermal structure, petrologic transformation, and rheologic evolution within dynamically evolving subduction zones."
It’s been another big year for Sonya Clark ’89, Winifred L. Arms Professor in the Arts and Humanities and Professor of Art and the History of Art. Her solo show, "Tattle, Bristle, and Mend" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. was met with international acclaim. The show featured work from throughout her 25-year career, including sculptures made from combs, human hair, and thread, as well as works created from flags, currency, beads, cotton plants, pencils, books, a typewriter, and a hair salon chair. In this BBC video interview, she discusses art from the show and her approach to art-making. Professor Clark received honorary degrees from the Maine College of Art and Franklin & Marshall College and, here at the College, led the Bicentennial Solidarity Book Project, a communal monument to solidarity with Black and Indigenous communities and to the transformative power of books.
Student Activities
Student activities are ramping up. Our fall-sport varsity athletes have been practicing hard and getting ready for games. Intramural and club teams are up and running, as well. Our fitness center and gyms are buzzing. Gabi, Oscar, and I have loved greeting students on Memorial Hill as they return from their workouts.
Choral Society auditions are underway as I write. This year, our singers will be premiering works by notable and award-winning composers such as Reena Esmail, Shawn Kirchner, Brandon Waddles, and Saunder Choi and, if COVID-19 permits, will travel abroad on tour. Our a cappella groups are no doubt busy with auditions and event planning, as I imagine the orchestra, jazz ensemble, and other musical groups are as well.
During the pandemic, students have developed a new appreciation for the beauty and expanse of the campus, which affords wonderful opportunities for unstructured exercise, play, and relaxation. Book & Plow Farm has been a popular gathering spot. Students have spent more time on the bike path and the trails. As part of a Bicentennial project, the hiking trails in the College Wildlife Sanctuary have been cleaned up and refreshed by staff and student volunteers (including Beneski Museum interns and members of the Amherst Outing Club). The project was jointly proposed and co-managed by Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies Katharine Sims and Supervisor of Landscape and Grounds Kenneth Lauzier; it has brought new life to much-loved trails, some of which were first created by students in the 1930s. The Bicentennial trail renewal includes the enhancements of greatly increased accessibility, new signage, programming to introduce the trails to the community, and integration with our interactive online maps, all of which make this wonderful resource more familiar and available to our entire community.
I hope the beauty of the campus will continue to be a balm for our students at a time when mental health has become a serious challenge here and nationwide. Already colleges and universities are seeing an increase in the number of students seeking help from our counseling centers. This growing demand is a sign of increased stress, greater awareness of the importance of seeking support, and a decrease in the stigma associated with therapy. We have added positions in our Counseling Center and restructured appointments so students can be seen without a long wait. We are also taking preventive measures, such as skills-building classes and a range of support groups, knowing that social support is one of the most protective measures against anxiety and depression. The Office of Student Affairs has designed a roster of recurring events that bring students together in positive, stress-relieving ways, including a weekly Thursday late-night food truck event, an outdoor SL100 stage on the Greenway Amphitheater for student performances that can feature bands and DJs during the weekends. AC After Dark continues to offer Friday night events featuring live entertainment, film screenings, arts and crafts nights, and many other activities. Perhaps most importantly, Dean of Students and Interim Chief Student Affairs Officer Liz Agosto has focused the entire office on community-building and student well-being. And, of course, students also know how to create their own fun and are busy doing just that.
Student Awards and Honors
In 2021, Amherst students and recent graduates won a number of prestigious national awards and fellowships. Ten were offered Fulbright Awards, two for research and eight to teach English abroad. Black Studies and Asian Languages & Civilizations double major Djelimory Diabate '21, a Mellon Mays Fellow at Amherst, was offered a Fulbright for research in Morocco to extend his senior honors thesis work on the classical Arabic texts of 19th-century West African scholars. He decided, in the end, to decline in favor of a Ph.D. program at Harvard. Geology major Olivia Moehl '20 won a Fulbright to Svalbard, Norway, a remote archipelago between Norway and the North Pole, to study how digital tools such as Google Earth can and cannot be used to make geological fieldwork more accessible. The pandemic has delayed travel for many of our award recipients, but four of our Fulbright language teaching grant recipients will eventually be making their way to Taiwan, two to South Korea, and one each to France and Lithuania.
Astronomy and Physics double major Helena Treiber '23E and Computer Science major Hyery Yoo '22 won Goldwater Scholarships to support their pursuit of research careers in the fields of the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics.
Jeremy Thomas '21, an English and Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought double major, was awarded both a Marshall and a Rhodes Scholarship. He accepted the Rhodes and will be studying at Oxford starting this fall.
Economics major Elaine Jeon '17 won a Schwarzman Scholarship to earn a master's degree at Tsinghua University in Beijing. Biology and Statistics double major Stephany Flores Ramos'17 won a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship to support her graduate work towards a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences at the University of California, San Diego.
And we had two Watson Fellows: English and Computer Science double major Eniola Ajao '21 will study non-verbal communication in Ghana, France, and Bhutan; Environmental Studies major Margot Lurie '21 will study human and environmental recovery in post-extractive communities in the U.K., Spain, Australia, the Philippines, and South Africa.
Math major and diver Lindsey Ruderman '21 is among the top 30 All-American nominees for 2021 NCAA Woman of the Year and is in contention for the NCAA Woman of the Year award.
All these awards are indicative of our students' talent and the value of the education they receive at the College.
Our Outstanding Staff
Members of our staff are also receiving recognition for their incredible accomplishments. Just a few examples:
Curator of American Art and Arts of the Americas Lisa Crossman and the Mead Art Museum received two awards in support of the exhibition, "Never Settled: American Art from Indigenous Perspectives": a Reimagining Permanent Exhibitions Grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art and, in partnership with Amherst's NAIS faculty, a Five College Mellon Native American and Indigenous Studies mini-grant. And, at Book & Plow Farm, Manager of Farm Education and Operations Maida Ives won a Food Security Infrastructure grant from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to support the farm's local distribution of food, while Assistant Farm Manager Kaylee Brow won a Local Farmer Award from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation, which helped fund the purchase of an electric Allis Chalmers G tractor.
For still other impressive examples, please have a look at all the other awards and grants won by our faculty and staff members in the last year.
We have depended even more than usual during the pandemic on the work of a dedicated and talented staff. Everyone has gained a greater appreciation for the full range of jobs and different kinds of work that are required for an institution to operate well and to manage through a crisis.
After a year and a half of remote work, many staff members who were not on campus were eager to get back. Others found that there were advantages to working remotely. We believe that our ability to be flexible, nimble, and adaptive is part of Amherst's continuing strength. We have designed a Remote Work Pilot Program to see whether and how we might incorporate remote or hybrid work arrangements for some staff members going forward. During the pilot, to the extent it can be run in the midst of the delta surge, we will evaluate how this opportunity serves the operational needs of the College and advances our educational mission, while taking the needs of staff into account.
Key Commitments
Excellence and Innovation in Teaching and Learning
We emerge from the last 18 months with pride in the faculty's successes in online teaching and appreciation for the in-person teaching and learning that the pandemic interrupted. Great teaching doesn't happen by accident, and we have added resources over time to support our faculty in the ongoing development of their expertise as teachers. Last year, our faculty's facility with technology for remote instruction grew by leaps and bounds as did the priority we place on the human dimension of the teacher-student connection. Building on that experience and drawing on the resources in our Center for Teaching and Learning, this August's fifth annual Provost's Retreat on Teaching and Learning focused on metacognitive equity, with a keynote by Dr. Saundra McGuire. Throughout this academic year, the Center for Teaching and Learning's programs and resources will build on the ideas from the Provost Retreat keynote in order to support faculty in helping all students develop strategies that will enhance their approaches to studying and learning.
This summer, the Center for Teaching and Learning partnered with Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Sheila Jaswal and Professor of Latinx and Latin American Studies Sony Coráñez Bolton to co-facilitate a five-day intensive Being Human at Amherst Institute. Building on the Being Human in STEM (HSTEM) initiative, faculty and staff participants have developed a project proposal that they will put into practice during this academic year to enhance inclusivity at the College.
The Jeffrey B. Ferguson Memorial Teaching Prize was awarded in the spring to Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Danielle Benedetto. A first-generation college graduate, Benedetto is credited by her faculty colleagues with the increase in the number of students who major in math, which is the fastest-growing major at the College across all demographics. It is well known by students and faculty that Benedetto offers 20 office hours a week and checks in regularly with her hundred or so students each semester. She has a remarkable talent for building confidence in students who come in thinking they don't like or can't succeed at math. Since she joined the department in 2009, the number of math majors has tripled at the College, and the number of first-generation students and women who major in math has nearly quadrupled. Today, about 80 percent of Amherst students take at least one math class, which Benedetto finds remarkable, "especially in a place with no math requirement." In addition to teaching introductory calculus courses to first-year students, she also teaches in the Summer Bridge program. Of herself, she says: "I'm best suited to get my hands on these students who don't think they belong in math or STEM classes. Everybody belongs in my classroom. And if you don't have the same preparation, I'll give it to you and show you how to succeed." And she does.
Climate Action Plan
We start this academic year with evidence of the increasing impact of global warming on the country and across the world—unprecedented heatwaves, fires, drought, and storms so intense that they have wreaked havoc on scores of communities and taken too many lives. Over the last year, we have made tremendous progress on the goals of our comprehensive Climate Action Plan. An engineering team has completed the design for the first phase of the modernization of our energy system from fossil fuels to renewable electricity. Construction of this first phase, which establishes a hot water piping network for the eastern side of campus, will begin this spring. The second phase of the project will involve the installation of the heat pumps and the first array of geothermal wells under the Hitchcock Athletic fields. Based on the progress to date, we remain confident that campus operations will be carbon neutral by 2030, without offsets. At roughly that same time, the College’s endowment will no longer have any direct investments in fossil fuels and will have worked actively with investment managers on the necessary shift in the portfolio’s indirect investments.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and Anti-Racism
We have also made steady progress on our goals for diversity, equity, and inclusion and the measures we laid out in our Anti-Racism Plan.
I am pleased to announce the launch of the Amherst Presidential Scholars series. For the next two academic years, prominent scholars in the area of anti-racist scholarship and policy will be in residence at the College to visit classes, hold office hours, and deliver a keynote address. I thank Associate Professor of Music and Director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry Darryl Harper ’90 and his steering committee in the Center for their excellent work arranging to bring writer and medical ethicist Harriet Washington to Amherst this September, philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in October, and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen and cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein in the spring. Details of these speakers' schedules and the 2022-23 slate will be announced soon.
Inspired by the book Black Women of Amherst College by the late Professor Emerita of History, Mavis C. Campbell, Nichelle Carr ’97 and Jason Gill ’98 are spearheading Black Women of Amherst, a multimedia Bicentennial update telling the stories of Black women of Amherst College—alumnae, students, faculty, and staff—from the first days of Amherst to today. The stories and experiences shared in the project will be preserved in the Amherst College Archives, and some will be featured in a podcast and digital series. Sign up to share your story!
I mentioned above the work that is underway on a racial history of Amherst. In our next comprehensive update on the anti-racism plan, we will provide information about progress on other critical elements of the plan, including the curriculum, restorative practices, and campus iconography and representation.
The Accessibility of Our Campus
Although the pandemic limited our ability to perform interior renovation and building upgrades, we have made considerable progress on exterior projects, such as our long-planned work on campus-wide pedestrian accessibility. We have installed sidewalks and ramps in key campus locations that allow continuous accessibility from the lowest point of campus to the highest. Planning for the next phase of accessibility-focused campus building renovations will begin this fall. Please remember to report any physical barriers you encounter, using the Accessibility Barrier Reporting Form.
Progress on Two Exciting Projects!
We have two major projects underway, one that will enhance intellectual life and the other student community and well-being at the College. We will break ground this spring on the Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank Lyceum, a home for humanistic exploration that will house the Center for Humanistic Inquiry and the Department of History and include classrooms, spaces for informal study, and multipurpose rooms. Inspired by the Lyceum of ancient Athens, interior and exterior spaces are designed to encourage interaction, collaboration, and conversation for faculty and students. An historically significant Greek Revival house owned by the College will be renovated and serve as the core for the new facility, its footprint augmented by an addition to the south and west.
We are also very excited to have completed the conceptual design for the new Student Center and Dining Commons. Architects Herzog & de Meuron were responsive to our desire for a welcoming and inclusive multipurpose space in this pivotal site between the historic quads and the new Greenway. The building will be a crossroads where students can encounter and connect with one another within and across interests and affinities; a multi-faceted space for student life activities; and a place that will support well-being by offering ways to balance the rigors of an Amherst education with enjoyment and fun. This fall we will convene a student group for input as we develop a more detailed sense of specific spaces and their functionality. Envisioned programmatic features include: informal gathering spaces, a cafe, a pub, a games room, a winter garden, a theater, dedicated spaces for student meetings, events, and rehearsals, space for music practice, and physical and digital makers spaces.
We are delighted that a new dining commons will be included in the space. Valentine has outlived its design life, and we will realize significant cost savings and sustainability gains by incorporating the two projects into one. Even more importantly, this allows us to magnify the vibrancy of each of these two campus-life hubs.
Our sustainability targets for both projects are industry-leading. The buildings will operate with minimal energy input, yielding a high-efficiency structure with a very low operational carbon footprint. Equally important, our strategy of reusing the foundation of Merrill for the Student Center will help keep greenhouse gas emissions associated with construction low and yield a low embodied carbon footprint for the new building. We are pleased to be enhancing the building's total sustainability in this way, in addition to demanding maximal operational efficiency.
Gratitude for Your Support
I wrote last year about the collective impact of your giving to the College, including the support you provided for essential student transport, technology, and living needs during the move to remote learning in March 2020. Our students are pursuing their Amherst education at a time of unprecedented challenge, and support from alumni, family, and friends is more critical than ever. Your gifts not only sustain the rigor and excellence on which an Amherst education is built, but also let our students know that they have an extended Amherst community behind them, making a meaningful difference materially and emotionally.
The 2020-21 Amherst Fund closed on a high note on June 30, with $11,904,056 raised from 9,976 alumni donors and 829 families. That's both more dollars and more donors than in 2019-20, a testament to the generosity of this community and the enduring strength of your connections to Amherst. Thank you to all our donors for making such a difference for our students and faculty during a challenging year!
The Promise Campaign is going strong. We have now reached $556.8 million, nearly 90 percent of our goal of $625 million. We look to you to help accelerate our progress over the course of this year and meet our goals early.
When you give to the Amherst Fund, you both preserve and reinvent liberal arts education so that our students can find meaning and purpose in what they learn here, in the classrooms, studios, and laboratories; on the playing fields and in the residence halls; and through internships and mentorships. Your generosity will make an immediate impact. Thank you for making a gift to the Amherst Fund today.
For those of you who celebrate Rosh Hashanah, shana tovah. May we all have a good year.
Warmly,
Biddy
