‘Advancing a free and just society lies with us all’
Elliott began his remarks by referencing a photo from fall 2020 of the College’s Symphony Orchestra performing under a tent, the musicians spaced 6 feet apart. He wondered what the graduates would remember, forget and discard about their experience during the pandemic. “As we celebrate your success—and appreciate all of the obstacles that you overcame—it is important that neither you nor Amherst College forget all that you have done in your time here. You deserve the honor of that memory.”
Elliott suggested that the core of the class of 2023’s Amherst experience—learning both separately and together—brought to mind the ideals of one of his predecessors, Alexander Meiklejohn, who served as president of Amherst from 1912 to 1923. Meiklejohn was a renowned advocate of free speech and ardent defender of the First Amendment and academic freedom.
Meiklejohn, explained Elliott, believed that “it is in the freedom of our faculty and our students to pursue truth—and to disagree with one another freely and openly about how to pursue truth—that we serve society. What makes academic freedom—the freedom of colleges to determine what they teach, how they teach and who they teach—so important is that it is through its exercise that we serve a larger, public purpose.”
Photo by Hantong Wu ’23 referenced in President Elliott's remarks.
It is particularly important to reaffirm Meiklejohn’s–and Amherst’s–commitment to academic freedom at this point in history, said Elliott, given that the principle is under attack, and “powerfully so,” by many state legislatures and even the federal judiciary. “A campus that is less open in its inquiry, that constrains the range of its debate, or that is prohibited by the government from selecting the students it deems best suited to advance its mission is also a campus that will be less capable of taking on the hard questions that you have asked of Amherst College.”
Commending all of the year’s seven honorary degree recipients (see below) for using their intellectual freedom to “fearlessly and uncompromisingly investigate our past and look to the future,” he highlighted Matviichuk’s long defense of human rights in Ukraine, including the “urgent and difficult work” of documenting war crimes and instances of political persecution in her native country since Russia’s occupation of Crimea in 2014 and invasion of other Ukrainian territories during the past 16 months.
Matviichuk’s career serves as a reminder that “so much of what we take for granted every day–a civil society, the rule of law, human freedom–must be remade and fought for by every generation,” said Elliott. As Matviichuk argued in her Nobel Prize speech, he continued, “the responsibility for advancing a free and just society lies not only with politicians, but with us all. Ordinary people, she said, have much more influence than they realize.”
“You, who are sitting here today, will be among those, I hope, who will help us come closer to discerning, finally, what a democracy is—and what it should be,” concluded Elliott. “As we go our own way, let us keep honest toward one another, class of 2023, by committing to both remembering the past with fidelity and working together with intelligence, with deliberation and with empathy to create a shared future that better serves us all.”
