Encyclopedia
Amherst College is an independent
liberal arts college in
Amherst,
Massachusetts,
USA. It is the third oldest college in
Massachusetts. It has been coeducational since 1975.
History
Founded in 1821. Amherst College was intended to be a successor to
Williams College, which was then struggling to stay open; and Amherst Academy, a secondary school which educated, among others,
Emily Dickinson.
Noah Webster, an attorney who had moved to the town of Amherst to escape the high cost of living in Connecticut, was recruited for the college's first board of trustees -- he is perhaps more famous for having published the first dictionary of American English with printer William Merriam of Springfield, Massachusetts.
Origin of name
Amherst Academy and Amherst College were both named for the town of Amherst, which in turn was named for
Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst, commanding general of
British forces in
North America during the
French and Indian War. Lord Amherst is now notorious for his comments, in a letter to a peer, about spreading
smallpox-infected blankets among
Native Americans.
Because the college takes its name from the town, it also inherits the local pronunciation, in which the "h" is silent.
Amherst Academy
"Amherst Academy was the mother of Amherst College," according to William S. Tyler, who wrote two comprehensive histories of Amherst College. Funds were raised for the Academy in 1812, and the Academy went into operation in December 1814.
On November 18, 1817, a project was adopted at the Academy to raise funds for the free instruction of "indigent young men of promising talents and hopeful piety, who shall manifest a desire to obtain a liberal education with a sole view to the Christian ministry." This required a substantial investment from benefactors.
During the fundraising for the project, it became clear that without larger designs, it would be impossible to raise sufficient funds. This led the committee overseeing the project to conclude that a new institution should be created. On August 18, 1818, the Amherst Academy board of trustees accepted this conclusion and began building a new college.
Williams College
According to Tyler:
As early as 1815, six years before the opening of Amherst College, the question of removing Williams College to some more central part of Massachusetts was agitated among its friends and in its board of trustees. At that time Williams College had two buildings and fifty-eight students, with two professors and two tutors. The library contained fourteen hundred volumes. The funds were reduced and the income fell short of the expenditures. Many of the friends and supporters of the college were fully persuaded that it could not be sustained in its present location. The chief ground of this persuasion was the extreme difficulty of the access to it.
At the same meeting of the board of trustees at which Professor Moore was elected president of Williams College, May 2 1815, Dr. Packard of Shelburne introduced the following motion: "That a committee of six persons be appointed to take into consideration the removal of the college to some other part of the Commonwealth, to make all necessary inquiries which have a bearing on the subject, and report at the next meeting." The motion was adopted, and at the next meeting of the board in September, the committee reported that "a removal of Williams College from Williamstown is inexpedient at the present time, and under existing circumstances."
But the question of removal thus raised in the board of trustees and thus negatived only "at the present time and under existing circumstances," continued to be agitated. And at a meeting on the 10th of November, 1818, influenced more or less doubtless by the action of the Franklin County Association of Congregational Ministers, and the Convention of Congregational and Presbyterian Ministers in Amherst, the board of trustees resolved that it was expedient to remove the college on certain conditions. President Moore advocated the removal, and even expressed his purpose to resign the office of president unless it could be effected, inasmuch as when he accepted the presidency he had no idea that the college was to remain at Williamstown, but was authorized to expect that it would be removed to Hampshire County. Nine out of twelve of the trustees voted for the resolutions, which were as follows:
"Resolved, that it is expedient to remove Williams College to some more central part of the State whenever sufficient funds can be obtained to defray the necessary expenses incurred and the losses sustained by removal, and to secure the prosperity of the college, and when a fair prospect shall be presented of obtaining for the institution the united support and patronage of the friends of literature and religion in the western part of the Commonwealth, and when the General Court shall give their assent to the measure."
In November, 1819, the trustees of Williams College voted to petition the Legislature for permission to remove the college to Northampton [near to the town of Amherst]. To this application, Mr. Webster says, "the trustees of Amherst Academy made no opposition and took no measures to defeat it." In February, 1820, the petition was laid before the Legislature. The committee from both houses, to whom it was referred, after a careful examination of the whole subject, reported that it was neither lawful nor expedient to remove the college, and the Legislature, taking the same view, rejected the petition. ... Thus the long and exciting discussion touching the removal of Williams College and the location of a college in some more central town of old Hampshire County at length came to an end, and the contending parties now directed all their energies to building up the institutions of their choice.
Moore, however, still believed that
Williamstown was an unsuitable location for a college, and with the advent of Amherst College, was elected its first president on May 8, 1821.
At its opening, Amherst had forty-seven students. Fifteen of these had followed Moore from Williams College. Those fifteen represented about one-third of the whole number at Amherst, and about one-fifth of the whole number in the three classes to which they belonged in Williams College. President Moore died on June 29, 1823, and was replaced with a Williams College trustee, Heman Humphrey.
For two years in the mid-1830's, Amherst was the second largest college in the United States, second only to
Yale. In 1835, Amherst attempted to create a course of study parallel to the classical liberal arts education. This parallel course focused less on Greek and
Latin, instead focusing on English,
French,
Spanish,
chemistry,
economics, etc. The parallel course did not take hold, however, until the next century.
Williams alumni are fond of an apocryphal story ascribing the removal of books from the Williams College library to Amherst College, but there is no contemporaneous evidence to verify the story. In 1995, Williams president Harry C. Payne declared the story false, but the legend is still nurtured by many.
Academic hoods in the United States are traditionally lined with the official colors of the school, in theory so watchers can tell where the hood wearer earned his or her degree. Amherst's hoods are purple with a white stripe or chevron, said to signify that Amherst was in some way born of Williams.
Presidents of the College
- Zephaniah Swift Moore, 1821-1823
- Heman Humphrey, 1823-1845
- Edward Hitchcock, 1845-1854
- William Augustus Stearns, 1854-1876
- Julius Hawley Seelye, 1876-1890
- Merrill Edward Gates, 1890-1899
- George Harris, 1899-1912
- Alexander Meiklejohn, 1912-1924
- George Daniel Olds, 1924-1927
- Arthur Stanley Pease, 1927-1932
- Stanley King, 1932-1946
- Charles W. Cole, 1946-1960
- Calvin Plimpton, 1960-1971
- John William Ward, 1971-1979
- Julian Gibbs, 1979-1983
- Peter R. Pouncey, 1984-1994
- Tom Gerety, 1994-2003
- Anthony Marx, 2003-
Academics and Resources
Admission to Amherst College is among the most competitive in the country. Notable faculty members include modern literature and poetry critic William H. Pritchard,
Beowulf translator Howell Chickering, Jewish and Latino studies scholar
Ilan Stavans,
Pulitzer Prize winning
Khruschev biographer William Taubman, African art specialist Rowland Abiodun, Natural Law expert Hadley Arkes, and law and society expert Austin Sarat. Amherst is distinguished by one of the most open curriculums in the United States. Accepted students are only required to take a First Year Seminar of their choosing in the first semester of their freshman year at the college. Although the Freshman Seminars have similar structures, focusing on critical analysis and development of argument in writing and class discussion, there are usually about sixteen different topics from which to choose. The 31 other courses that must be completed in order to receive a degree from Amherst College can be elected by the individual student. However, students must adhere to departmental course requirements to complete their major.
Amherst is a member of the Five Colleges consortium, which allows its students to attend classes at four other
Pioneer Valley institutions. These include
Mount Holyoke College,
Smith College,
Hampshire College, and the
University of Massachusetts. The Five Colleges are geographically close to one another and are linked by buses which run between the campuses. The Five Colleges share resources and develop common programs, including the Museums10 program.
Among the notable resources at Amherst College are the Mead Art Museum, the Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Robert Frost Library, and the Amherst College Natural History Museum. Amherst maintains a relationship with
Doshisha University in
Japan, which was founded by Amherst alumnus Joseph Hardy Neesima.
Tuition
Amherst's total tuition, fees, room, and board for the '06-07 academic year was $43,360. About half of the student body receives some sort of financial aid.
Athletics
Amherst's athletic program is the oldest in the nation. The school's sports teams are known as the Lord Jeffs; women's teams are sometimes referred to as "Lady Jeffs", though the official title covers all teams. The school participates in the
NCAA's Division III, the Eastern College Athletic Conference, and the New England Small College Athletic Conference, which includes
Bates,
Bowdoin,
Colby,
Connecticut College,
Hamilton,
Middlebury, Trinity,
Tufts,
Wesleyan, and
Williams.
Amherst is also one of the "Little Three", along with Williams and
Wesleyan. This rivalry, over one hundred years old, can be considered the oldest athletic conference in the nation. A Little Three champion is informally recognized by most teams based on the head-to-head records of the three schools, but three-way competitions are held in some of the sports.
The College is also often referred to as one of the "
Little Ivies."
Amherst has placed in the top ten of the NACDA Director's Cup in the NCAA Division III in five of the last ten years.
- The first intercollegiate baseball game was played between Williams and Amherst on July 1, 1859. Amherst won, 73-32.
- The first Harvard College loss on Soldiers Field was in 1903. They lost 6-0 to Amherst.
- The last tie in an NCAA football game was on November 11, 1995, when Amherst and Williams tied 0-0 on Weston Field in Williamstown.
- In 2003, the Amherst Women's Lacrosse team won the Division III National Championship, by a score of 11-9, over NESCAC rival Middlebury College. It was the second National Championship for Amherst .
Amherst Trivia
- The first black student to attend Amherst College, Edward Jones, was in the class of 1826. He was later a missionary to Sierra Leone.
- The Amherst Alumni Society was founded in July 1842.
- Amherst records one of the first uses of Latin honors of any American college, dating back to 1881. Contemporaneous writings stated that the system was new.
- An asteroid, 516 Amherstia, is named after Amherst College. The name was given by its discoverer, Raymond Smith Dugan in honor of his alma mater.
- Nicknamed "the singing college," Amherst has many a capella and singing groups, some of them affiliated with the college music department, such as the Glee Club, the oldest singing group on the campus. Some of the a capella groups are the Zumbyes, the Bluestockings, , the Sabrinas, DQ.
Notable Alumni
For a list of notable people affiliated with Amherst College see: List of Amherst College people.
External links
- The Indicator - Amherst College's Journal of Social and Political Thought
- by William S. Tyler
- Contains Amherst undergraduate theses
- - The Unofficial Fan Site for the NESCAC Fans, Alums, and Current Students
