- Welcome home. Avery, the last time I saw you, you looked different. A little bit more hair, yeah. You look wonderful, thank you for that generous introduction. So, good morning. How beautiful is it today? Very, very, very beautiful and I'm so happy for you that it is. It's been a glorious fall, as I said to some of you last night, absolutely glorious and sweet on this campus. One of the most enjoyable falls I've spent here in my ninth year now. We have with us the most senior member of our alumni, Bill Whiston here in the balcony, class of 43, is that right? It's wonderful to have someone so youthful and dedicated as Bill. The world needs its Amherst's. That's my line and I'm sticking to it. The world needs educational institutions that value intellectual rigor, not just for its own sake, but in pursuit of understanding the world. It needs colleges and universities dedicated to freedom and integrity in the pursuit of truth. It needs colleges devoted to opportunity for academically talented youth, regardless of their circumstances and college is dedicated to their success once they arrive. We need forms of education that can be scaled, that can serve large numbers of people, we need large research universities, we need better funding for our great public flagships and our regional public institutions, we need online education to reach people all over the world without access to the education that we have here, but we also need colleges that operate at a scale of the sort Amherst operates on that allow for what at Amherst we call, closed colloquy between faculty and students. Institutions with a culture that promotes the flourishing of each individual student, each individual student. That offers the kind of education that engages the whole person, the mind, the heart, the spirit. That promotes friendship and civic responsibility. The world needs colleges like Amherst that expose us to the fact and the benefits of human difference and teach us how to embrace these differences without fear or hatred. I don't know what college means anymore than I know what America means if it doesn't mean opportunity, openness, integrity, equality and individual responsibility. Negotiating the tensions that can arise among those terms requires the ability to think in complex ways. Seemingly, a losing art, but not here. Complexity is a beautiful thing, that's what our minds are made for and at Amherst, we aim to educate students who can think with great complexity, who can embrace it, who can foster it and promote it, who can use it to change the world. A great education fosters the belief that other people's views are valid and valuable, as long as the views are based on evidence and have integrity. Amherst combines the identification of talent with the nurturing of talent and a commitment to opportunity. Those are our values, those have been Amherst values, those are still Amherst values and they matter. I believe after my eight plus years here, that it's safe to say Amherst graduates have an impact on the world that's disproportionate to our size and to the number of graduates in the world and I think that that is owed in large measure to the quality of our faculty, the quality of our students, the intensity of their interactions with each other, a commitment to individual students and it's also indebted to the environment in which all of this education occurs. Place matters, natural beauty matters, architectural beauty matters. This place impresses upon us, I think you'll agree, a respect and a love of a natural environment in which we are just a small part, just a small part. It builds a sense of humility. This fall has been the best in years when it comes to the profusion of colors in our leaves. I've been waiting for another fall like this, it makes it exciting to walk around the campus. It feels like a celebration every step I take. This year walking around the campus, the difference that the Science Center and the new landscaping of the Eastern campus have come into view, now that we're in our second year with the new building and also with the new landscaping. We actually have an Eastern part of the campus now that doesn't feel just like a hill that some buildings tumbled down, but instead, like a planned kind of landscaping that complements the iconic first-year quad, but doesn't compete with it or take away from it in any way. Some of you probably went to panels on the Science Center in one year out and heard our faculty speak about what it does to help them in their pursuits which are research as well as education, I hope some of you did. Some of you probably went to here Adam Sites and Marissa Parem talk about how they teach and why they are the winners of the first ever Jeffrey Ferguson teaching prize at Amherst. Did any of you make it to that session at 10 a.m.? Were you impressed? Yeah, I'm impressed by them too and Jeffrey Ferguson, does everyone know who Jeffrey Ferguson was? No, Jeffrey Ferguson was a faculty member here. He was in Black Studies. He chaired Black Studies for a while, but what he did that has lasting significance for Amherst was to build a curriculum in Black Studies that attracted students from all over the campus, why? Because he used fundamental rhetoric textbooks and built a curriculum on the basis of levels beginning with critical reading, making arguments and doing research for undergraduates and every part of the Black Studies curriculum had as its foundation the intellectual skills that students need and that lie below the content of a course. He was a wonderful human being and we lost him a couple of years ago to cancer and in his honor, we now honor Amherst faculty members who are doing extraordinary jobs, not only of teaching in the classroom, but of thinking about what teaching can be going forward. It's a little bit controversial to have a teaching prize at Amherst. So committed are we to the notion and actually the reality that we have so many outstanding teachers that it might make no sense to single people out. In my view, celebrating anything is a celebration of its significance to everyone and so the prize, I think will over time come to mean a lot to the campus. So thank you all for attending that event. The campus events all fall have been extraordinary. Some of you may have read my fall update. Did anyone read it? Okay, well I'm going to take responsibility for how few of you read it because we sent it out late on a Friday afternoon and I think it was buried in your inboxes, otherwise I know you would have read every word, but the fact that not everyone read it gives me an opportunity just to say a few things about what goes on on this campus and why it's been such a wonderful fall. First of all, in honor of the incredible Professor Benjamin DeMott, we had a lecture for new students given by author Min-Jin Lee whose novels are Prize winners and whose most recent novel, Pachinko I hope many of you will have read. It's an extraordinary novel in which a family's history is embedded in the histories of Korea and Japan and in particular, Japan's colonization of Korea. It's quite an extraordinary book. We asked all new students to read it over the summer. I invited two groups of students to my house for dinner to discuss the book. It was way over subscribed, the dinners, but not because I was there, but because Min-Jin Lee agreed to attend both dinners and to interact with the students, you'll have to forgive me, I can't believe that's happening. I'm not so good with the electronics, that was my watch. Min-Jin Lee gave a talk that managed to embed facts about the history of Amherst that I think none of us knew into a talk about the history of her family and its embeddedness in the histories of Japan and Korea. She got two standing ovations from our students right here in this Chapel, it was an extraordinary talk. The fact that students share a reading of that sort and that so many students, but I would wager, not every single one read this 600 page novel is part of our effort to build more shared intellectual experiences into the campus. We had a point-counterpoint event which is part of our first-year seminars and which some of you in this audience are probably part of having funded and this is our effort to bring to campus, people with differing perspectives and different political views to talk on a theme. The theme this year is the question of progress. What constitutes progress from different points of view? Have we made progress over the past 50 years based on that point of view? Will we make progress over the next 50 years? And the two speakers were Jill Lepore who is a Harvard historian, an author of a book I wanna recommend to you all if you haven't read it, it's called These Truths and this is one of the first efforts on the part of an historian in a long time to write a history of the United States in one-volume. It's an incredible book and she interacted, I moderated a discussion between Jill Lepore and Ross Douthat who is also an author and a columnist. I made time to read Ross's book, Bad Religion which asks a question about how much modernity can we tolerate and by we, he means in his book Catholics in particular without losing the fundamentals of a religion and it's a very interesting set of questions that he asks. He's been here before, he gave a lecture two or three years ago on the history of conservative thought in the U.S. which is one of the best lectures I've heard here in a long time. He got up without notes and gave a 40 minute lecture that was captivating, rich. So the two of them interacted on the question of progress. It was a wonderful event, packed audience of students, faculty, staff and then Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg arrived on campus and she was here from 3 p.m. in the afternoon until 10 p.m. at night and I can tell you honestly, because I was with her every step of the way except when the federal marshals put her in a car and drove her to my house without me, she from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. answered questions, talked about cases from the last session and explained her perspective in the way that we've grown accustomed to hearing her, that is in the sparest, strictest, most thoughtful, conceivable English. Austin Sarat whom you know I hope, he's here, he's always here when I speak just to make sure I don't go off the rails. Austin hosted Justice Ginsburg in the afternoon with a 130 students who got to submit questions for her. She gave them a 35 minute lecture on the last sessions cases and then professor Sarat who's also associate provost and associate dean of the faculty posed questions. She then, she was then interviewed by Biddy Martin in Coolidge Cage. She allowed that event to go on for an hour and a half including students, staff and faculty questions and then over dinner, she offered to continue answering questions. The level of energy was astonishing and the thing that was beautiful about the event was not just Justice Ginsburg, but the way that our community came together to make it possible. It was a huge event, there were what, 1,600 people in Coolidge Cage, a lot of other people listening in Fross library, livestream was hosted there with snacks and swag and a lot of you at home, I imagine. What really moved me was the community effort. So I had written to the music department and specifically to Professor or David Schneider who teaches opera this year and I had said, you probably know that Justice Ginsberg loves opera, what do you think might be a good way to celebrate her and he came up with three ideas. We could have the choral society sing an aria from her favorite opera, we could have one of our students who has the most beautiful operatic voice sing after dinner an aria, a Mozart aria or we could have a professional singer sing an aria from the opera that was composed by our own Eric Sawyer in the music department, The Scarlet Letter. So I looked at the three options and said, let's do all three. And I must say that the choral society was extraordinary, as were the singers who paid tribute to her and her interests at the dinner. Our carpentry shop was asked whether they might make a gift for her, a memento and they did their brilliant work. They carved a gavel out of wood from Johnson Chapel, so wood from 1827, it was beautiful and they put it in a walnut box, the wood from Fross library from the 60s and they did a surface carving of a mammoth in the pedestal of the gavel. They were pleased to be involved, they did an extraordinary job, it was beautiful. Our event team in communications is the best I've ever seen at any university and it might be better anywhere. What they did to make Coolidge Cage an appropriate place with the right acoustics was amazing and they did it in a matter of two weeks. Now, why did we move it to Coolidge Cage? Because it was gonna be in Johnson Chapel and that would have held a fraction of the number of people who wanted to attend and a student wrote to me, his name is Hunter Lampson, I think he's a sophomore and I got an email from him one day and he said, dear Biddy I think it was, this is too big an event to have in Johnson Chapel, too many people are not going to get in. Why don't we have an in Coolidge Cage? I noticed that former President of the United States once spoke in Coolidge Cage and I thought, why didn't I think of that. We had part of the gym, but the gym cannot be made appropriate from the point of view of acoustics. In two weeks, I went to the event team, I went to the facilities team and I said could we do this in Coolidge Cage and what did they say? They said we think we can, they looked into it, they got outside help, it was an amazing event and everyone got to feel good about how talented, how willing, how effective our campus community is and I'll just mention one other office and officer, literally, John Carter, our Chief of Police. He has to be the best chief of police at any college or university and certainly among many outside of it. He loves the place, he loves the students, he's incredibly effective and he's highly regarded by everyone on campus. Anyway, the visit of RBG was wonderful because we had RBG and it was wonderful because our community saw one another and saw how incredibly talented and effective the people at this college are. In that way, it was just a beautiful moment and one that we'll all treasure for a long time. The only other update I wanna give you quickly before you ask questions because I know that's what this is supposed to be is that we, as you know I hope, have a climate action plan, we've had a climate action plan that will make us climb carbon neutral by 2030 and it involves converting from fossil fuels to geothermal and we have just hired the engineers who will do the plan, the campus plan on the basis of which we will then make the conversions and do the work that's necessary. The other big-ticket item on our list of things to do over the next few years is to build a campus center, an actual student center. Not a Keeffe which is broken up into small bits and which, because of financial difficulties was pulled back in the midst of the project, so was always too small and not appropriate. We need a center where students can gather, where they can run into each other both on purpose and accidentally. We need a place where the community can gather, we need party space for our students, we need club and organization space for our students, but more than anything else, we need more spaces in which our sense of community can grow given the size of the campus as it is now. That's gonna be exciting, that's gonna be fun, that's gonna involve a lot of student input and a lot of hard work. Our campaign is going well, it's going very well thanks to you all. So our goal is as you know, 625 million dollars and we are now at 457 million and we're only a year and a half into a five-year public phase. So we are now in the part of a campaign that can tend to get a little slow, but we can't afford to be slow and the reason is our bicentennial is coming up and we want our bicentennial year which will get launched next October at homecoming and in the following October, 2021. We want our bicentennial year to be the year that we're able to celebrate the history of this college and ensure its future by getting all of us together on multiple occasions and by ensuring that all of you and many more alumni are happily engaged with Amherst in every conceivable way. So I look forward to celebrating with you next year and I hope you will all be here, not only for homecoming, but for multiple celebratory events and festivities and now I'm going to stop and take your questions. I'll end where it began, with all the attacks on higher education, some of which are warranted and many of which are not. I remain steadfast in the belief that the world needs its Amherst's, it needs the sense of community that college and university alumni bodies and institutions provide and I thank you for being part of preserving what has made this place great and what will make it great going forward, thank you. Now the fun part. I have a whole senior team here and Professor Sara in the back to help me answer your questions. Yes?
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