Most reasonable lowercase-L liberal Amherst students, regardless of whether they lean socially right or left, prefer a tolerant, pluralist democracy to the alternatives. And politically-correct McCarthyism aside, I have no doubt that as an institution, Amherst supports liberal tolerance and the individual expressive freedoms of its students and faculty. An epistemic, economic, and geopolitical liberalism is pervasive; there are institution-wide campaigns for the preservation of democratic practices, the Economics Department presupposes the inevitability and merit of a free market, and Political Science and LJST are normatively oriented in favor of liberal democracy. All evidence points to the institution’s tacit endorsement of liberal democratic mechanisms, but advancing pluralist tolerance and majoritarian rule is not actually a substantive political platform. Amherst limits itself to nonpartisan endorsements and condemnations, as it likely ought to.

When I separate a ‘substantive political platform’ from ‘nonpartisan endorsements and condemnations,’ I refer to the difference between a political form and a substantive, political morality. Take marriage for example: liberalism as a political form protects marriage as a contract and an individual freedom. But it takes no position on whether or not marriage is essential to a well-lived life—or a well-formed polity. Individual politicians can take a substantive stance on marriage, committing themselves to strengthening marriage as a social institution that plays an important role in our country’s general welfare. During his 2020 bid for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, Andrew Yang included marriage counseling in his healthcare plan, citing the social benefit of happy marriages.

What is the point of the liberal form without these kinds of substantive commitments? What is the point of setting general welfare as an ultimate goal if the political agents operating within this form have no substantive position about what that welfare consists of? Political liberalism guided by nothing except the invisible hand creates a culture of excessive individualism and excessive choice. Instead of acting in accordance with moral frameworks rooted in our communities’ histories and traditions, we are given moral relativism’s go-ahead on any behavior that does not violate liberalism’s sole normative stipulation, the Hippocratic Oath, do no harm.

Amherst College would have to violate its commitment to nonpartisanship in order to advance a particular moral tradition, but students and faculty could still organize themselves around such a project. And historically they have: between 2000 and 2014, Amherst College had The Committee of the American Founding. For 14 years, CAF had “the purpose of preserving at Amherst the teaching of the American Founders and Lincoln on ‘natural rights.’” The Committee was founded by Hadley Arkes, a current Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute who held the Edward N. Ney Professorship in American Institutions at Amherst until 2016. The Committee held symposiums in D.C. and Amherst for over a decade, hosting lectures on jurisprudence, theology, and contemporary political debates.

A complete archive of the CAF symposium lectures is hosted on Amherst’s website, but generally, the symposiums hosted scholars of Classical and Biblical natural law. Generally, they argued that morality and law are not relative forms but immutable truths that we can excavate through the study of the classic texts of theology and political theory. The lectures also featured “updates from Capitol Hill” and other right-of-center partisan initiatives, covering all bases of the neo-conservative fusionist project: traditional social values, libertarian economics, and aggressive foreign intervention.

Arkes’ project was undoubtedly conservative, and while I don’t feel strongly one way or another about a GOP-friendly lecture series, I admire the founding vision of Arkes’ project. A student of Leo Strauss, Arkes’ scholarship challenges the moral relativism of a pluralist liberalism void of substantive moral commitments. He advocates for a return to the morality and natural reason found in “the tradition of biblical revelation, and…the tradition of classical political philosophy.” His project with CAF was to challenge the “strands of modern ‘skepticism’ [that] deny the existence of moral truths that hold their truth in all places.” I’d argue that Arkes’ commitment to offering students a substantive, moral education is valuable even if one disagrees with his politics. Most people, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, would agree that virtue, reason, and general welfare are desirable political outcomes. In this light, the foundations of Arkes’ project seem unobjectionable, so what happened to Arkes and to CAF?

Arkes retired and gained emeritus status from Amherst in 2016, two years after CAF’s final symposium. Notably, Arkes left Amherst following the year of Trump’s first election. According to a 2016 New York Times piece on Trump supporters on college campuses, Arkes broke out a bottle of champagne the Wednesday morning after Trump’s election, recited the Kaddish for those mourning Clinton’s loss and quoted Churchill for those celebrating: “In Victory, Magnanimity.” The Amherst Student e-board condemned this behavior in an editorial, asking the college to hold Arkes accountable for “bring[ing] alcohol to class in celebration of our new president-elect.” In the Times piece, Arkes denies serving alcohol to students, clarifying that the champagne was a “comic gesture.” Arkes has not taught at Amherst since 2016; CAF was succeeded by the James Wilson Institute, a think tank founded by Arkes in 2013. But the departure of the Committee and of Arkes leaves something missing at Amherst.

Just as we have programs that advance liberal mechanisms, so too could we have programs that engage students with substantive political morality. Professor Sarat’s Democracy Fellows program is a great opportunity for students to involve themselves in the advancement of the liberal democratic mechanisms that are instrumental to the country’s general welfare. I submit that students should have the supplemental opportunity to learn the systems of virtue and reason at the origins of their politics. Since CAF’s last symposium, there has been a gap in intellectual and political life at Amherst. What would it look like to reinvigorate a scholarly pursuit of substantive, moral truths anchored in tradition and reason? Could it be a 2024 reimagining of Arkes’ project? ■

— Anonymous