Before You Preach About Democracy, Do It

In the last three years, Amherst College has seen two political events of note. The first came in 2024, when the student body and faculty demanded to divest from Israeli war crimes in Palestine. This movement culminated in an Association of Amherst Students (AAS) resolution and a faculty resolution demanding that the trustees stop investing in the country. After the faculty voted, Professor of Anthropology Chris Dole remarked: “I’ve been at the college for 20 years, and this vote was an incredible, historic moment.” The trustees rejected both resolutions, and everyone just moved on.

The second came last year, when Amherst College faculty members voted 102-26 in favor of a resolution that calls out the Trump Administration’s threats to American democracy, arguing that the federal government’s attacks “endanger our educational mission.” William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science Austin Sarat led the charge and later remarked, “When Amherst’s part in this period [of history] is written, somebody’s going to be able to read that and say this little liberal arts college in western Massachusetts did not sit idly by.” Since the resolution passed, Amherst has held lectures and meetings about democracy, students have sporadically protested national political developments on the Amherst town green, but for the most part, everyone has moved on.

The sign of a successful symbolic resolution is that its passing noticeably changes the college’s discourse. Instead of setting new institutional norms or inspiring policy changes, however, the Israeli divestment demand failed outright, and because the Trump Administration has so far decided to wage its war on higher education elsewhere, the democracy resolution has already been forgotten. It’s easy to rag on this form of political (in)action as a method by which professors can exonerate their conscience and the college can avoid stepping into a political fray, and more worthwhile to suggest possible alternative reactions. When the political science professors’ most radical course of action is writing a resolution, then there are clearly institutional limits circumscribing political action to only that which requires the least possible risk. The crisis behind all other crises isn’t fascism or artificial intelligence, diversity or tuition prices, but a crisis of political imagination. 

Amherst College inherited its model of governance from Harvard College, the first institution of higher learning to split control of its university between an off-campus board of trustees and an on-campus president in 1650. This governance model has proven itself remarkably resilient; it has withstood the American Revolution, the invention of capitalism, the end of slavery, two world wars, and the internet, making it one of the world’s oldest, enduring political structures alongside the Catholic Church and the British monarchy. But while the pope has lost the power to launch crusades and the king has lost his empire, trustees and presidents still stand at the helm of colleges and universities. 

Since this institutional model was established, there have been two significant reforms to the trustee-based model of governance. First, faculty have been given much more control over the governance of their own departments and curriculum, a change inaugurated at Amherst by President Alexander Meiklejohn (who served from 1912-1924). Second, and more importantly, in the latter half of the twentieth century, colleges and universities entered “the golden age of higher education” when they started charging higher tuition and offering more substantial financial aid packages, a practice heavily financed by federal student loans. Beginning in the 1980s, these wealthy institutions began copying the modern portfolio management strategies of the most successful Wall Street firms, leading to these already wealthy institutions growing their endowments tenfold. This immense explosion of wealth hasn’t made tuition cheaper, but has had the opposite effect. During Meiklejohn’s tenure as president in the 1920s, tuition was set at around $150 ($5,000 when adjusted for inflation), a substantial but manageable investment. Americans now pay more for their education than any nation in world history. This year Amherst’s tuition fee once again crept up higher, now reaching $96,360. 

In this year’s email announcing the tuition increase, President Michael Elliott once again skirted the line between empathy and justification in explaining the trustees’ decision. For the parents, he has to come across as a compassionate person who understands that $96,360 is an overwhelming amount of money to pay for a single year of education, and for the trustees, he has to make it clear that the fee is generous considering that the school is offering an education worth $140,000. For the rest of his tenure as president, Elliott will have to find new approaches to writing this email, until one day, he’ll have to let the student body know that they will be charged $100,000. It’s time to look past the references to inflation, the expiring permit on Valentine Dining Hall that necessitated a new student center, and the necessity of funding financial aid, and seek to understand the underlying ideology behind concomitant endowment and tuition growth, as well as the structure of administrative power built to service that growth.

If you’re looking for an elaboration of the particular portfolio management strategies that ballooned elite endowments, and consequently led to ever-increasing operating costs and tuition prices, I would recommend a saliva-wickingly dry book by David Swensen, “Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment,” whose endowment management work at Yale University has become the standard model to which all other elite schools aspire, and is scripture for Amherst’s Endowment Management Office investment strategy in Boston. Swensen’s work is so lauded that Amherst's Endowment Office representatives will often keep the book visible when they make public appearances on YouTube. 

Amherst’s endowment office is transparent about its strategic influences, even if their particular investments remain private to the college. But what should interest students more than the particular Wall Street firms with which Amherst partners or the investments those firms make, is the reason the college has decided to pursue infinite endowment growth while annually raising tuition. Why does the college need to become wealthier than sovereign nations while charging more tuition per year than what it would cost to buy three Toyota Camry’s? It’s not the Endowment Office’s job, or seemingly anyone at Amherst’s responsibility to answer such questions. 

Part of the appeal of outsourcing investments to Wall Street firms was that the promised yield would offer Amherst College more freedom to do as it pleases. The proposed equation is simple: More money equals more freedom. This equation is the reason Chief Investment Officer Letitia Johnson is paid the most of any Amherst College employee; it’s why Sarat, who raises millions of dollars for the school through alumni outreach each year, is paid more than any professor. But what this ideology of endless growth misses is that behind any dramatic change in the flow of money is always a change in the dynamics of power. The 17th-century trustee-president model of college governance had to absorb a 21st-century financial apparatus without compromising either the long-term growth of the endowment or the trustees’ administrative authority. The current illiberal arrangement of power can be attributed in large part to this unhappy marriage.

Before the endowment explosion of the late 20th century, colleges and universities’ careful conservatism could be attributed to a delicate balance of power between the unpaid trustees, who mostly function to check any dramatic changes at the college, and the president, who is paid to follow the trustees’ script for a public audience. When colleges and universities began outsourcing their investments to Wall Street, whatever allowance college trustees and presidents made for experimental pedagogy and education-centered policy was replaced by an ever-present financial anxiety. The result is a cycle in which the college makes more money in order to expand its operations, then they find that with expanded operations, the college is forced to raise tuition. This is how education transformed from a public good to a luxury product.

Since students protested college investments in the military industrial complex and the Vietnam War, campus discourse surrounding the college’s investment profile has almost exclusively focused on who the college is investing in. In 2024, the question Amherst faced was whether the college should divest from Israel’s defense industry. The movement culminated in the faculty offering a performative resolution. Faculty voted 123-69 in favor of divesting from Israeli weapons companies, though the trustees voted unanimously “not to pursue the divestment actions requested in the faculty and AAS resolutions.” 

Where the protest at Amherst failed — like it failed at nearly every college and university around the country — was where it assumed that colleges control their endowments. The protest movement imagined that if it could just rally enough support, if it could just pass enough resolutions, if it could just interrupt enough public events, then it would force the trustees to liquidate certain investments. The fundamental mistake here is in the belief that Amherst College is analogous with a government, and that our tuition is analogous to taxation. Student movements will continue to fail to make an impact as long as they take the tactics of national political movements as inspiration. If you wish to disrupt the workings of the college machine, it’s best to understand how it works. 

The trustees’ response to the student and faculty resolutions of 2024 should have inflamed further protests, not because they were insufficiently concerned with genocide, but because it made certain anti-democratic, unjust facts of institutional governance more explicit than college representatives usually are. Consider the following two statements. The first is a sentence from the Endowment Office’s public page on “Sustainability Investments”: 

“Amherst currently partners with 42 active investment managers, spanning a range of asset classes. The Investment Office and Investment Committee are committed to meaningfully engaging with our current and prospective managers around the issue of sustainability.”

The next is an excerpt from the Board’s letter written in response to the faculty vote for divestment from Israel: 

“In accordance with the contemporary structure of endowments and responsible investment practices in higher education, approximately 95% of the [c]ollege’s endowment capital is invested by outside managers whose decisions and strategy we do not control.”

When it’s an issue of environmental sustainability, Amherst is “meaningfully engaged” with outside fund managers. When it’s an issue of Israeli weapons development, Amherst has no control of its outside fund managers. The truth is likely closer to the latter statement: A core tenet of modern endowment management is that fund managers should be given the autonomy and authority to make decisions without direct administrative oversight. At best, the college can partner with managers whose investments they believe to be ethical, but when the identities of these fund managers and information regarding their investments are both private, there’s no public accountability enforcing ethical decisionmaking. Ethical decisionmaking is besides the point of modern portfolio management.

When 95% of the College’s endowment capital is invested by outside managers, the college compromises its ability to regulate its investments according to a basic code of ethics. Future student activists who will once again demand divestment and once again fail to achieve their ends would benefit from the realization that the college isn’t unwilling to listen to their demands, but structurally unable to do anything but reject them. So while activist movements are organized on the premise of divestment from the Vietnam-era military industrial complex, South African apartheid, and the Israeli defense industry, they would benefit from a larger, more materialist scope. The problem isn’t the kinds of investments Amherst College is willing to make, but that the Endowment Office and its interests take precedence over the popular will of the college’s faculty and students. And even if those employed by the Endowment Office sided with the college’s popular will, they have no control over the kinds of investments its partners make.

The institutional equation which justified the decision to balloon endowments — more money equals more freedom — has proven false. Institutional freedom — the ability of a college to develop the idea of the liberal arts by way of pedagogical experimentation — requires the college to center its students and faculty. When liberal arts colleges chose to deputize their endowment offices to act as Wall Street’s intermediary, they constrained themselves to a tight administrative script which sees experimentation as fiscally irresponsible. The reason liberal arts colleges feel identical to one another is because they’ve all bought into an ideal of institutional success only made possible by enormous endowments. Politically speaking, these colleges have sold their souls to hedge funds beyond their control. The result at each institution is the same: liberal arts colleges eviscerate students’ political imagination. 

While student activists may brand themselves as radicals and idealize radical protest movements of history, their primary goals — student and faculty diversification, curricular expansion, divestment from systems of oppression, apologies from administrators — are fundamentally conservative. These are not demands, they are polite requests veiled in the performance of a political demand. These requests have accepted certain peculiarities of the college institution as inevitable facts, and they have contributed to validating the reproduction of an institutional model that predates American democracy. Whenever these protests succeed, they succeed because their requests don’t threaten the present arrangement of power; whenever they fail, they fail because the present arrangement cannot allow them to succeed. 

To take the next step, to challenge the trustee-Wall Street partnership that defines Amherst’s institutional logic, would require a spark of democratic imagination now discouraged by the current political conditions. While Amherst College shares with the U.S. government a rhetorical commitment to civic engagement and endowed rights — even going so far as to draft a supposed list of student rights and construct a simulacrum of political organization through AAS – students are not endowed with democratic privileges as long as they have no democratic authority. Contrary to the ideals of a liberal arts education, students at Amherst are not participants in a community, co-creators of their education, builders of an enlightened institution, but consumers of a product. How then can such an institution as Amherst College call itself a bastion of democratic ideals? We might as well ask the Walmart Corporation to weigh in on the importance of labor law. 

The key question becomes how such an institution can earnestly purport to be democratic while denying its students any opportunity to meaningfully participate in administrative governance. One of the key achievements of the illiberal administration at Amherst is that it has thoroughly convinced its students and faculty that democracy is something that happens elsewhere; college is the time to study democracy, not practice it. This attitude is what happens when generations accept the institutional structures they’ve inherited from their elders. It’s why a place that celebrates the value of critical thinking has kept the same structure of power throughout its gradual transformation from a seminary prep-school to a training program for future agents of global capital in finance, technology, and consulting. 

Two months ago, Managing Arts & Living Editor Jayda Ma ’28 listed a series of complaints she and her peers had about the school in an article titled “Loving Amherst Enough to Demand Better.” While love for the institution may be the correct basis for policy requests, it cannot be the foundation for future democratic political action. For now, there is no reason to love Amherst College for the same reason there is no reason to love one’s landlord or creditor. Amherst College stands in relation to its students as a depository of resources they’ve bought for too high a price, and this arrangement has depoliticized its students to the extent that rather than demand power, students request administrators to more effectively spend their tuition money.

I’ve called the current illiberal configuration of power at Amherst College the crisis behind all crises, not because administrators make particularly bad decisions per se, but because of the damage an anti-democratic administration does to every student’s political imagination. Nobody, not even political science majors or representatives of AAS, leave Amherst with any meaningful engagement with democracy, because no Amherst student is entrusted with any meaningful political responsibility. 

What if we imagined an alternative college, not a utopia by any stretch, but the one which Meiklejohn was fired for even suggesting when he said, “I think Trustees should be abolished, and I think they should be when the Faculty is ready to take their place. I believe the college should be controlled by its Faculty with the President an officer of the Faculty.” If Meiklejohn were given an opportunity, I believe he would have gone even further. As long as Amherst holds him up as a martyr, its students should not ask for policy changes and apologies, but demand real power. The first step? Elect students and faculty to serve on the Board of Trustees.

If the college isn’t willing to integrate democratic politics into its administrative structure, then the school should not hope that future historians will exonerate the college on the basis of the 2025 faculty resolution for democracy. Democracy isn’t saved by professors writing statements, but institutions becoming more democratic. In times of national political crisis, the academic instinct is to use one’s position at the college to survey the outside world and declare what’s wrong with it. Such a response can only be effective if that college practices what it preaches. The most powerful endorsement Amherst College could offer to democracy would be integrating democratic governance into its institutional design. 

Those who benefit from the current power structure at Amherst College would consider calls for a democratic arrangement charming. They would say that students are too immature to govern themselves, that the college is too complicated and there’s too much at stake to leave it to anyone but the experts. But they forget that when it comes to the liberal arts, there are no experts, only participants, and to say that students are not ready to take on political responsibility is the same thing as saying that they’re not ready for an education. Amherst College is pro-democracy or against it. Pick a side.