We’re no longer, as a student body, committed to the idea of the liberal arts. Not in a substantial way. We appear to care in class. We talk a lot. We try to take courses from a variety of departments. But the moment we’re out of the legitimizing view of the professors, amongst ourselves, we stop. There are the ideas in the classroom, but they don’t stay with us outside the classroom. Learning is a game, and we are interested in our classes in so far as the game should be fun for these four years. But what do we carry with us, after the classes, after we graduate? The name: Amherst College. The grades, a GPA. Some friends.

We’re not committed to learning. To commit to learning would be to commit to being wrong; to throwing away old conceptions of the world and adopting new ones. Committing to learning means taking the study we do here seriously; as a profound step in our development as human beings. Committing to learning means grappling with what we’re learning, constantly — when we talk to each other, in the activities we pursue, and in the ways we organize. Our education should suffuse and define the four years we spend here, not simply by taking up most of our time, but by providing the order and orientation of our lives while here, socially and academically. Our primary task should be learning, and the goal of that task should be figuring out what’s correct to believe about the world and answering essential questions about our lives. Both by ourselves and with others. But, we don’t view ourselves or the college this way. We don’t view ourselves as being in conversation with each other, as learning from each other. Amherst, for us, is a quirky kind of vocational school.

Our campus culture was not always this way. Before the pandemic, we had Amherst Uprising, where students protested the college’s treatment of racial minorities; we debated the introduction of the Common Language Document, which the Office of Diversity and Inclusion released, defining certain terms in controversial ways; and when the Amherst Republicans invited Jeff Sessions, students protested the talk, and walked out. All of these things caused students to organize and debate, to confront each other. Nothing like that happens on campus now.

Of course, the culture of Amherst substantially changed through the pandemic. The lockdown left its mark. The traditions we had have mostly been forgotten. Clubs have died and faded away. We are habituated to administrative power interceding and obstructing student life. We take for granted the increasingly bloated bureaucracy surrounding clubs and student spaces. People wander the campus, looking as if they’re waiting to be let out. There’s a sense that something is lacking. But we’re too tired, too lazy, too cagey, to do anything. The administration tries; opening up new pastures to let us into — closing the McCaffrey room to open a “Wellbeing Makerspace,” replacing the Schwemm’s cafe, which used to be a hub for late night activity, with a sad merchandise store. So, we do very little. We don’t talk to each other.

But what would we even talk about or organize around? The lack of a common core at Amherst means there is no set of texts that we can assume we’ve all read, so there’s no unifying experiences or ideas with which to ground conversation and discussion. But the college is committed to the open curriculum, abdicating their responsibility to impose any vision of what our education should be onto us. Instead, we invent our own visions of what our education should be. Many of them are reasonable; somewhat exploratory. But often, we come up with visions of our education that are naval gazing and incurious — triple majors, or students who never take humanities, or science, courses. In failing to provide us with a vision of what an education should be, Amherst fails to give us a vision of what a student should be. And we refuse to construct our own. But it’s not hard to imagine our ideal student; vaguely liberal, curious in class, driven, and ambitious. We want other students to have the right beliefs — beliefs that conform with our own, in the big areas of life. But an ideal student isn’t one that has the right beliefs, but someone who has the right attitudes, who is curious, willing to stake claims, be proven wrong and change their mind.

The college refuses to stake a definite claim about what the liberal arts should be here, and what the liberal arts should mean for its student body. In refusing to articulate a specific vision, they’ve made Amherst generic. Any culture that we had was a quirk of institutional memory; what each class had created and passed down. We’ve lost most of that institutional memory. Now, we’re left with the Amherst that was underneath all that — the words “liberal arts,” an invocation of light, “Terras Irradient,” a gesture at our history. Like light, insubstantial and featureless.

I do see things changing. A new culture is forming at Amherst, but it’s not a culture I like. It’s a culture which is ironic, removed, which snickers at the silliness of taking ideas and books, of taking the liberal arts, seriously. It’s a culture which loves, and loves to resent, its own privileged place at Amherst, and uses Amherst all the same. It’s a culture focused on career above learning, that views everything we do here as a line on a resume, building up towards something else. It’s a culture which views the liberal arts as a largely irrelevant bauble next to the name, the insignia, the prestige of the college. It’s a culture which is the product of Amherst’s institutional failures, an Amherst which has become a multi-billion dollar brand. And the liberal arts are incompatible with what is profitable. The liberal arts are directed at curiosity, at learning, at a life which is contemplative, serious, and slow. But for Amherst to grow, the college needs a rich base of alumni, not who are devoted to learning, but devoted to money and power; alumni who find ultimate meaning in a life on Wall Street as an investment banker or as a consultant.

I hope, somehow, this culture won’t be the one to take hold. I hope we’ll begin to care about the liberal arts. At the very least, I hope that some things at this college, emblematic of the liberal arts, will survive — things which serve no other purpose than to get people to talk, to think. Things like Contra. That was my original goal, when I started the publication two years ago. It has, partly, failed in these goals. Still, I hope it keeps going. I think it’s essential that there is something on campus like it — something small, pointless, rough. Something hard to put on a resume. Something which causes the college, and all the students, trouble. Contra has done that. I hope it keeps doing that. Again and again. ■

—Ross Kilpatrick