I Arrived in 1965 to an Amherst That Was, in Many Important Ways, a Very Different Place

Since leaving Amherst in 1969, (and after a brief stint in graduate school), I have spent my professional career in the investment management business, helping pension plans and endowments manage their financial reserves. First in Hartford and then in Boston, I have served a nearly 40-year apprenticeship trying to understand the workings of our financial markets. In retrospect, I think I was drawn to economics at Amherst because it offered a framework for understanding the order behind the complexity of real world interactions. Although little in the economics curriculum of the late 1960s would qualify as “practical” (certainly no finance or accounting courses), the habit of skepticism toward the common wisdom and an appreciation of the value of clarity of expression have been important residuals from my time at Amherst.

I attended an Amherst that was, in many important ways, very different from today’s college. At the most obvious level, Amherst in the late 1960s was entirely male and lacked significant ethnic or socio-economic diversity. On another level, it was a place that believed rather confidently that it had things to teach and was willing to be demanding in very specific ways. Some of the demands were, for me at least, a positive part of my experience. First-year students collided with a core curriculum that required math majors to write and English majors to try to grasp the nuances of Newtonian physics. Distribution and language requirements were, by today’s standards, strict. Some of the structure was silly. Attendance was taken at morning chapel and there was a PE requirement. And some of the “boot camp” aspects of the Core Curriculum were unnecessarily harsh. In retrospect, however, most important demand was that students treat learning as a process with value of its own. The college was not seen as a part of a progression to graduate school or Goldman Sachs or Georgetown Law.

Since 2000, I have lived in South Amherst on a small farm where I manage a few apple trees and a small investment management practice. As I watch the college from this vantage point, I am impressed by its continued commitment to teaching and direct interaction with its students. At the same time, I am sometimes troubled by what seems to be the professionalization of Amherst – success defined by specialized excellence (whether in biology or basketball) rather than as an experience of growth that can only be created by pushing people to reach beyond their comfort zones in a range of undertakings. I hope that this is a superficial reading and that the college is still demanding that its students push their personal boundaries in many directions. The ultimate definition of success for the college should not be as a high-powered credential but as a place that has institutionalized a focus on undergraduates beginning to build their lifelong education. I remain grateful for the education the college helped me start in 1965.